Mad Stacks: Story Collection Box Set

by Scott Nicholson

  As he reached the park the dark had already won.

  The street lamps were still on but their light was weak. Car headlights struggled to part the air, their beams all but ineffectual now. Since running from the crashed motorcycle Ed had seen two cars hugging lampposts, and another one burning where it had come to rest on its roof. Burning, blazing, the stench of roasting meat bringing back dreadful memories, the sight of flames … but the flames looked weak and far away as if he was viewing them on a video tape, a copy of a copy of a copy. They appeared weaker than they should, too. Perhaps the fuel was trying its best not to burn today.

  The normal had changed. People were not coping.

  And then he wondered why he was running. He was searching for Queenie because she’d told him about this, and deep inside beneath those noxious memories he thought he knew much more than he’d like to believe. But he’d just seen someone die, smelled more people burning in their crashed car, and even then he could hear the muffled sound of smashing glass and a scream, penetrating the darkness as effectively as a sigh into a pillow. He sought danger, felt more comfortable in its presence, so why was he running? Why not stand still and let it come? He would not fight. He would accept whatever the darkness had chosen for him because he knew it, he had seen it

  (and smelled it and tasted it)

  and although he could not accurately recall when and where, he knew it must have been at the murder. When he was killing that woman, subsumed by his own rage and impotence and anger, the darkness must have touched him.

  But a greater rage had been with him as well, something far beyond his own.

  And that curse in her eyes.

  He climbed the wall. The park was much darker than he had ever seen it. No stars peered through the cloud cover, no street light bled through the railings, but Ed knew where to go. He’d been there before and she would be there now. He would find his way in the dark.

  “Can you feel it?” Queenie said as he neared the copse of trees. “Can you feel the rage?”

  Ed stopped and tried to locate the voice. It had come from his left, he thought, over where the trees gave way to the shrubbery bordering the stream. He paused, held his breath and waited for her to talk again.

  She whispered in his right ear. “I’ve never known it so powerful.” She touched his shoulder and walked behind him, drawing her hand across the back of his neck and scratching him with her nails. It was not sexual, he knew that right away, because it hurt. She was trying to hurt him and he didn’t know why.

  “What’s happening?” he asked. If felt like a foolish thing to say. He should know. But right now, standing here in total darkness, a strange woman threatening him and turning him on, he was more confused than ever.

  “I’ve always arrived afterwards.” He could smell her breath, garlic and staleness, no vanity there. “After the event, watched them clean up the bodies and take them away, seen them put it down to just another murder.” Her voice sounded stronger than it had before, and the more excited she became the accent. He’d not noticed it before now, perhaps because it brought back way too many memories. She was foreign but her grasp of English was perfect. Ed wondered if she knew that she was letting it slip. “But with each one the blackouts lasted longer, because they were searching … searching for you, Ed.”

  “Me?” He could taste her hate. “Me?” He felt her breath caress his ear and neck. She was standing so close that her heat touched him in waves.

  “You fuck.” She spoke quietly but her voice was loud with venom and anger, and rage. And her accent, far from distorting her words, made them all the more clear to him.

  “You’ve tracked me down,” he said, wondering if Queenie was a daughter or a niece to the woman he had killed. In a way, he was glad. He waited for the attack.

  “I didn’t. They did. My mother and the other dead. You’re not as invisible as you think. Every time you kill she sees, and she knows your mark, and together…they track you again. It takes time. But they find you.”

  They?

  “Their hate for you blocks out the sun.”

  Ed stared up into the blackness and wondered just what he was looking at. “I don’t understand.”

  “Murderer.”

  “Yes …. But I still don’t understand. Was she your mother? I can’t see you. I’m so sorry, whoever she was I’m so sorry, but I’ve lived with it … really, it’s destroyed me, you don’t know how much.” He should have been crying, but he felt nothing, no sympathy or regret. He thought of all the things that could have been, but he could not remember any of them.

  “Destroyed you?” Her voice was breaking now, rage giving way to tears and perhaps increasing because of that. “Destroyed you? I identified … I named my mother by looking at her jewellery. That’s why we knew it wasn’t just another ethnic killing in that bloody war: she still had her jewellery. Anyone else would have taken it. Destroyed? She was ruined. I couldn’t even look her in the face to say goodbye.” She sobbed as a memory came back. “It was gone.”

  Ed opened his mouth but there was nothing he could say. Darkness flooded in and sent searing pain into his teeth, dried his tongue. Why was she Queenie, the Avoidance Queen? Her life? All of it? Maybe she’d shunned her future just to do this, track him.

  “So now you’ve found me—”

  “They’ve found you. My greatest desire—my fantasy, my dream—is to see you in pain caused by me. It’s what I’ve given up everything to achieve. But I dare not argue with them. They have much more reason.”

  They, they, they?

  She touched him again, a calloused hand coming around his throat to hurt but not kill—there were others ready to do that, more in the dark than Queenie—and Ed reacted quickly. He grabbed her wrist and twisted, brought his other arm around to strike out at where he thought she should be. His fist connected with something, he didn’t know if it was hair or her woollen sweater, and then he was running through the park, the ground invisible but still there for now, and behind him he heard Queenie shouting something after him but, thankfully, her voice was lost.

  He had to get home. Back to the flat, to relative safety, before she found him again. Before they found him … whoever they were. Already he could sense faces pressing against his mind, demanding entrance, requiring acknowledgement. They were still too far away to recognise.

  Still running, he came to the park wall. The level of the ground was raised almost to the wall coping, but on the other side there was a five foot drop into the street. Ed tripped over the head of the wall and fell out into space, arms pinwheeling, a frantic squeal escaping him for a second before he struck the pavement below. His head met with the kerb, and it was only as he faded into a stunned daze that light seemed to offer itself, a flash of white pain from inside. In that light, as if borne of it, memories swam and enlarged, vicious memories of that time years ago when he had changed and destroyed his own life by taking someone else’s.

  But they were all wrong…

  The woman lying on the compacted mud floor, yes, the smell of burning outside, her eyes cursing him as the knife came down again—

  And the woman, already a corpse, pressed against a wall with one hand while the other carves in, her blood running down his arm beneath his sleeve, coating his teeth as it sprays—

  And blood staining the clean white sheets beneath her as it rains outside, the stink of the city rising up as the violent storm washes them from the gutters—

  And the knife grates as it slips from her outstretched hand and calls sparks from the pavement down by the river¾

  And in the back of the car, thinking she was there for something else, his shoulder and head pressed awkwardly against the roof as he tries to swing his arm back and forth, back again…

  And others.

  One tastes of cinnamon, another smells of vanilla; one feels cool and calm even under his attack, another is hot and fevered; one goes quietly, another sounds like a steam engine whistle as she screams…

  Ot
hers. Many others.

  And with all of them, the fury and rage.

  Ed came around, dizzy with the shock of memory and the impact of this skull on the pavement.

  What was he? What kind of animal, monster … he should stay where he was, wait for the sad heart of this darkness to find him and exact the revenge it had been seeking for years. Growing all the time, expanding, because every time it drew near he repeated his crime, fed it a fresh rage to find him with next time, more anger, and in a way he supposed he was providing for his own punishment.

  So he should wait and submit…

  But there was still time. It was looking for him, a deeper shadow in this blackness, even now he could hear a scream as someone was picked up and tosses away when the dark realised it had the wrong person.

  I should submit ... I’m an animal ... all those people, all that life…there’s still time…I should die…I can escape…I’ll let her, let them kill me…I can find light again.

  Confused, crying, terrified, wretched, Ed felt his way along the boundary wall of the park, knowing he was going the right way. Cowardice and an instinct for survival—really for Ed they had become one and the same—drove him on. If Queenie was following he did not hear her or sense her, and she would be as blind as him. He wondered what time it was and whether anyone was even doing anything about this, this weird darkness that had fallen, no stars no moon no lights, artificial light swallowed and beaten back like clouds of leaves before a hurricane. And he realised that he did not care. Because no one could do anything.

  This was all for him.

  He ran, letting go of the wall and launching himself into space. He tried to steer by sound and touch alone, but every mutter he heard became the scream of one of his victims, every thud of his foot on the road was a knife driving home. He ran through the landscape of his murders, remembering more than he ever thought he could have forgotten. And there were always more memories to come.

  Ed found his way home, read the house number by touch, kicked open the front door, ran up to his flat. He had no idea how. He wondered, as he fumbled the handle, how many times he had done this before.

  He flicked on his light, expecting nothing, and seeing only a ghost before him.

  “Mother!” Queenie shouted, screamed. “Mother, he’s here, get him, get him!”

  “Shush!” Ed hissed, almost laughing at how ridiculous that sounded.

  “Mother!” She screamed again and again, the drastically weakened effect of the ceiling lights making her seem almost transparent, a smudge on his vision, nothing more.

  “Just stop!” Ed shouted. He could hardly hear himself. Maybe the dark was eating at his ears, burrowing in to reach his brain because she, and they, had found him already. He wondered how many…

  “How many?” he asked, but Queenie was screaming louder now, her own voice and rage seemingly able to penetrate the damping effects of this blackness, rattling the windows and setting his hair on end.

  “Mother, mother, mother!”

  He scrambled around, looking for the doorway and escape, hand alighting on something else entirely.

  “Mother, mother…”

  He lunged at her, the knife an extension of his fear.

  “Mother ...” And then Queenie was quiet.

  He worked for five minutes, reminded of all the smells and tastes and sounds that haunted his memory, and taking in some new ones. Once or twice, as Queenie slid further down, the knife went straight through to the wall, marking a few more bloody days in his life.

  He left the flat, feeling his way through the dark ,feeling it thicker around his neck and heavier on his eyes, wondering just when it would become too hard to push through, too there. But it never did.

  He felt the rage, old angers rising and a fresh, new hatred giving the blackness an electric edge. “Sorry Queenie,” he whispered, but really he wasn’t sorry at all.

  Perhaps soon, when the memories were lost again, he’d imagine that he was.

  He found his way to the back door of the block of flats. It was rarely used and he had to kick it open, but outside he ran straight into a car. He could barely breathe now, they were coming, and pure instinct drove him on even though he knew he was finished. Like a man putting his hands over his head to save himself from a falling building, Ed continued to fight and struggle on. To pause, to wait for the inevitable, was too much for him to do. He was too scared.

  He opened the car door, reached in and found a torch. And it was only when he clicked it on – shining it around the car at the other torches, batteries, gas lamps, flares, fireworks, cans of petrol – that he realised it was his own.

  Ed carved another niche in the timber panelling above his bed. There were over two thousand scratches there already. It still didn’t feel like home.

  He waited for the timber to bleed red sap, but there was none, it was dry. He expected this every time, and every time it did not happen. Yet the fear was always just as fresh. Sometimes he believed that every memory he had was made up, a whole lifetime manufactured in his sleep and given vent in his waking hours.

  The only real memory, the one he could taste and smell and feel, was of the murder that had changed his life.

  THE END

  Tim Lebbon is the award-winning British author of 30 books of fantasy and horror, including Echo City, The Island, and The Chamber of Ten (with Christopher Golden). Sveral of his works have been optioned for film. His e-book Until She Sleeps is available from Generation Next Publications.

  Gateway Drug Table of Contents

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  THE DEVIL'S DOORMEN

  By Scott Nicholson

  It was a laugh riot, that's what it was.

  Elliott threw his almost-empty beer can against the wall and watched with satisfaction as the liquid spattered over the sea-green wallpaper and trailed down the wainscoting to the oak floor. His mom had turned his bedroom into a guest room the day after he had shipped out to Athens to attend college. Another one of her bright ideas, pretending that he'd never be back, that she'd finally pushed him out of the nest for good, that the Devil's Doormen were barred and bolted out.

  Right, Mom, you old bitch.

  Elliott yelled at the walls, "Get rid of me, paper over my memory, slap on a fresh coat of paint, just wax me away like a fucking stain."

  He'd lasted until midterm in his first semester, then he discovered that the school administration, just like his mom, expected him to apply himself. Expected him to show results. Expected him to make the grade.

  A laugh riot, was what it was. He dug the college life, enjoyed the copious drugs that flowed through the campus like bad blood through a girdled vein, reveled in the endless supply of willing bedmates, and got off on the bustling and bristling music scene. The bands in Athens rocked. They had teeth.

  But free food was free food. And in the dormitory, nobody dropped in during the day to make up his bed and pick his crusted laundry off the floor. Sure, his roommate was a good and constant sex toy with a cute mustache, but he missed dear old Mom and her loyal maid service.

  "There's no place like home," he said, leaning back on the pillows. He reached his right hand into his underwear and fondled himself. With his left, he reached for another brew, twisting it free of the half-empty six-pack ring. He heard his mom vacuuming upstairs, probably humming some opera crap to herself while she kept the big house spotless. The house his old man had driven himself to a heart attack over, because he had to have the biggest, the best, the most expensive of everything.

  How the old man had hated his only son. He wanted a protégé, a well-scrubbed go-getter, a shining knight. And he'd gotten . . . Elliott. Over the years, Elliott had watched his father's face caving in, as hope soured into disappointment and then decayed into disgust. Elliott contributed to his stress, and his eventual fatal heart attack, and that knowledge gave Elliott no small amount of joy.

  Elliott reluctantly moved his hand from his crotch and popped th
e tab on his beer. He looked up at his Ozzy Osborne poster, at the bat-munching king of metal himself sweating and thrusting his arrogant crotch amidst the multi-colored manufactured fogs that swirled across the stage. That's what Elliott wanted to be, more than anything else in the world.

  A rock god, a paint-faced poster child for everything that was wrong with the world.

  His Gibson SG Special leaned against the night stand. The bitch of the business was that you had to practice. The fans and record producers and people who mattered actually expected you to know the notes. Just slapping at the strings with the amp cranked up to ten-and-a-half didn't seem to move them at all.

  Elliott grinned to himself. At least his music moved the potted plants off the kitchen windowsill, if nothing else. The kitchen was next to the garage, and the garage was loaded to the ceiling with amplifiers, speakers, racks, and sound gear, the best that Mommy's money could buy. Elliott had gotten his old group back together. They didn't need much convincing. All it took was the promise of free beer.

  He looked at his alarm clock. A quarter to two. The guys were late again. Practice was scheduled for one, but this was a particularly slack-assed bunch. They'd be straggling in sometime during the next half-hour

  Elliott raised off the bed and ran a hand over his buzz cut. His hair was finally starting to grow back. He had gone for the skinhead look just before leaving for college, complete with spiked tongue and skullbone earring. His mom had even paid for his haircut.

  Sometimes she was understanding, even if she was still a bitch. And sometimes she just turned his stomach. Especially when she tried to be cool, or, even worse, loving. She'd asked for a lock of his curly golden hair, to put in his "memory book," she said. She'd always been big on hanging his baby pictures above the mantel and that kind of motherly crap.