The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 24

by Stephen Jones

  This time there was a specific reason. The man standing a little way to my left, who in the fading light I’d taken for a colleague, was looking at me in a rather defensive way. He was aged seventy or so, with a ragged beard and shabby clothes, and his hands were trembling – which could have been due to drink or illness. I nodded to him and said: “Cold day to be out here.”

  “It is. You won’t find anything.”

  His comment surprised me. “Why’s that?”

  He smiled, glanced at the fence, then looked back at me. “You don’t remember me, do you?” I shook my head. “Morton. You’d recently joined the Birmingham force when I retired. Bad health. I had an accident.” He raised his gloved right hand: the fingers were bent in like the legs of a dead crab.

  “Good to see you.” I vaguely remembered his name, but not his face. “What brings you here?”

  “That’s a good question.” He cradled his right hand in his left without looking at it. “I suppose there’s not much else to do.”

  “Why won’t we find anything?”

  Morton shrugged; his inert hand made the gesture oddly puppet-like. “Because you can’t see it. There’s a lot I could tell you, but I don’t think you’d understand. The others didn’t.”

  He was mad, I realised. But my unanswered questions about the Wren’s Nest made me say: “Do you want to talk? I finish at six, we could have a chat then if you like.” Morton suggested the pub at the north end of the nature reserve. I watched him walk away slowly, bent over, his arms folded against his chest. Maybe he spent all his time here.

  Our search team walked down to the Wren’s Nest housing estate that bordered the nature reserve. It was a different world. Whole streets of pale terraces were marked for demolition, their windows covered by wire grids. The barking of dogs echoed from concrete walls. Groups of thin youths on street corners eyed us suspiciously as we approached, then turned away. I could see why the local police had needed some external support. Had the arsonists been driven by a hatred of the past, I wondered, or by an obscure need to connect with it?

  * * *

  The Crow’s Wing pub had originally been an office building of some kind, maybe the local job centre when there were still jobs. It had been refitted with dark red carpeting, the kind whose pattern is more easily felt than seen, and coal-effect gas fires. Morton was sitting at a small table in the corner, next to the silent jukebox. He was smoking a thin roll-up. An empty pint glass was by his living hand. “Like another?” I asked.

  “Cheers. Pint of Banks’.”

  There were a few other people in the pub: a man studying the racing page of a newspaper, a young couple talking with hushed voices, a white-haired drunk lost in his own world. I got Morton’s pint and a half for myself from the tired-looking barman and returned to his table.

  Morton took a deep swallow of beer and shuddered. “Did you tell your colleagues you were going to talk to me?” I said no. “They’d have told you not to bother. For once, it’s not a conspiracy. They think I’m a lunatic.” His accent was a blend of Scottish and Black Country.

  “You might be,” I said. “Doesn’t mean you’ve got nothing to say worth hearing.”

  “I can see a brilliant future awaits you.” He looked at me steadily, then rested his cigarette between the fingers of his dead hand. “Mad or not,” he said, “I’m going to tell you why they shut down the mines. People kept going down there and not coming out. They found a few of them in the tunnels, curled up tight, stiff like fossils. Then a tunnel collapsed, killed a whole shift of mine workers. The company said there’d been a fire. That was the only way to explain the state of the bodies.”

  Morton closed his eyes, reached across with his right hand to pick up the cigarette. His fingers trembled, and I noticed they were scarred with many small burns. The rollup glowed white in his mouth, then dull red. He coughed and drained his pint. “Another?” I asked.

  “Cheers.” A few more drinkers, all ageing men, were at the bar. When I returned with Morton’s drink, he was looking at a copy of the Express & Star he’d picked up from the next table. He pointed to a headline: THEY DON’T BELONG HERE. “What belongs here doesn’t belong in the world,” he said. “Know what I mean?”

  “Not really, no.”

  He rolled another cigarette, slowly. The air in the pub was becoming grainy with smoke. “In 1980, a teenage boy went missing from the estate. His friends said he spent a lot of time out here. We searched the whole area with dogs. On the second day, one of the team noticed that a sealed mine entrance had been damaged by subsidence. There was a narrow gap a boy could have squeezed through.

  “It was a long shot, but we had to try. Three of us managed to force the opening a little wider and went down there with torches. It was cold down there, cold and damp – but somehow I felt a heat on my skin, like a fire was close by.

  “We found him in one of the side tunnels. Lying on his side, curled up, with his hands over his face. His wrists and ankles were tied up. Some other kids must have left him there. We couldn’t be sure it was the missing boy, because the face was terribly burnt. His clothes weren’t even scorched, but his head was charcoal.”

  Morton paused. His eyes were staring inward; I glimpsed confusion and fear in them. “What happened then, I’m still not sure. Two of us picked up the body. As we started back towards the mine entrance, the walls around us began to shake.” His hand mimicked the tremor, perhaps intentionally. “And then part of the tunnel roof collapsed behind us.

  “The shock, in a nearly enclosed space, was enough to make me and Finch drop the body. Some debris bouncing off the tunnel wall knocked the torch out of Sumner’s hand. He couldn’t see to pick it up. We were groping around in the dark when something came out of the tunnel. I thought it was a loose rock, glowing with some kind of luminous mould, but then I realised it was crawling over the rubble to get to us. Shimmering like a cold flame. Wasn’t human, but it had hands – and a kind of melting white face. It reached out to take the dead boy. I tried to pull him back. Felt something grab hold of my arm. A deep, terrible chill – it made me feel numb all over. I must have blacked out. A few minutes later, Finch was shining the torch in my face. The body had disappeared. There was no feeling in my left hand.

  “We didn’t know what to report. In the end Sumner told them there was some kind of toxic waste down there; it was too dangerous to explore further. I was in hospital by then. My left hand and forearm slowly changed, over two or three days.” Morton gulped his pint. He was looking pale. “The flesh turned dark like a bruise, then darker. It started to flake away. By the time they cut it off, it was more like charcoal.

  “The official report said I’d been affected by some toxic material that had leaked into the mine from the surrounding rock bed. They built higher fences round the derelict mines to keep people out. Later I tried to tell my superintendent what had happened. He said the poison had obviously affected my mind. I was invalided out of the force. Done fuck all since except come here and wait.”

  Morton started rolling another match-thin cigarette. I didn’t know what to say. His scarred fingers trembled as they placed the roll-up in his mouth. He thumbed the lighter twice. It didn’t catch. Silently, he passed it to me and I lit his cigarette. He closed his eyes and drew a breath, wincing with pain.

  “Don’t know why I keep coming back,” he said. “The local boys don’t know why they keep starting fires. It’s a ritual they don’t understand. But I’ll tell you one thing. Whatever we saw down there had no intention of getting out into the world. It was a misfit, an exile. It had come out of the fire.”

  When we left the pub, I offered Morton a lift. He shook his head, pointing to the footpath that led back into the nature reserve. There was a moon, so I expected he could see where he was going. Though perhaps he could find his way in the dark. I walked down into the estate, where my car was parked. The smell of smoke remained with me as I drove back to Birmingham.

  * * *

  A week la
ter, I heard that Morton had been found dead in the Wren’s Nest. A heart attack, apparently, with the cold finishing him off as he lay among the rusting ash trees. I went to his funeral, along with some of my older colleagues. He had little by way of family and friends left. A sense of chill made me leave as soon as the service was over.

  A few nights after that, I went back to the Wren’s Nest. I had some irrational notion of finding what he’d been looking for, or paying tribute to his search, or giving his spirit the chance to talk to me. People I know dying always knocks me off balance. You don’t get used to that.

  It was a bitterly cold night. Rain in the daytime had left the ground muddy, and stars of frost were glittering in the beam of my torch. I walked carefully up the wooded hillside to the limestone cliffs, and on past the blue-green water. The gullies on my right were featureless pits; they could have led to the depths of the earth. The chill soaked through my overcoat and gloves, made my skeleton want to curl up like a foetus.

  At last I reached the open area where the blackened warden’s office stood near the steel fence that enclosed the mines. People were scattered around the fence, alone or in groups. More were coming from the woods all around. The moon was glowing through a hazy scar tissue of cloud. I could hear voices, but not words.

  There were white-haired men with bottles, teenage boys and girls, and some rough-looking people in between – travellers maybe, or just off the estate. Some of them had built a mound of fuel: charcoal bricks, newspaper, rubbish soaked with lighter fluid. The crowd began to gather round it, and one of the old men lit a match. It flared up, died back down, then burned steadily. The crowd pressed in around it, warming their outstretched hands. I felt it was Morton’s funeral pyre. Maybe the others did too. Despite the heat, my hands were numb.

  The fumes were getting to me, or some of the youngsters were smoking weed. I could feel myself becoming detached from everything except the fire. My mind was floating like a curled-up flake of ash. The more I gazed into the red and gold heart of the flames, the more I could see. The faces of people I’d lost. A map of the place where I’d grown up, only ten miles from here. Letters and runes. Other people were pressing behind me, their breath stale with alcohol and decay, eager to be shown what to do. And then I saw it.

  Held in the flames like a reflection in water, a pale shape was forming. It had a thin, spineless body, but its hands were wide and reaching towards us with bloodless fingers. Its face was a swirl, a thumbprint, without eyes or mouth. I could hear its voice in my head like the roaring of a great fire. Wait. Do nothing. The land will burn. The time will come. And as we all stood watching, it showed us what would happen. Then, one by one, we turned away and walked back into the night.

  STEPHEN VOLK

  Celebrity Frankenstein

  STEPHEN VOLK is best known as the creator of the multiaward-winning drama series Afterlife and the notorious 1992 TV “Hallowe’en hoax” Ghostwatch which jammed the switchboards at the BBC, terrified the nation, and even caused questions to be raised in Parliament.

  He co-wrote the recent feature film The Awakening starring Rebecca Hall and Dominic West, and his other screenplay credits include Ken Russell’s Gothic starring Gabriel Byrne and Natasha Richardson, and The Guardian, directed by William Friedkin. He also scripted one of Channel Four’s Shockers and won a British Film Academy Award for his short film The Deadness of Dad starring Rhys Ifans.

  A collection of his stories, Dark Corners, appeared in 2006, and his short fiction has previously been selected for Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Best New Horror and Best British Mysteries. He has been a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, British Fantasy Award and Shirley Jackson Award, and is the author of the stand-alone novellas Vardøger and Whitstable, the latter published in May 2013 to coincide with the Peter Cushing Centenary. The author also writes a regular comment piece for Black Static magazine about the craft and business of making horror.

  As Volk explains: “Often I’ve heard the observation that pop stars these days are mere commodities, manufactured to the specifications of an industry hungry to create something or someone, thrust them in the limelight, then drop them just as quickly. People talk of ‘Svengalis’ and ‘puppetmasters’, but I thought of Dr Frankenstein’s rejection of his creature and the parallels struck me as delicious fun to play with. Even if the fun ends in tragedy.

  “The title was a given. Almost every TV show, here in Britain anyway, has Celebrity in the title (Celebrity Bitchslap News possibly taking the prize for the most inane and depressing of the bunch).

  “Unnecessary to point out, probably, is that my inspiration here came from Elvis, Britney, Michael Jackson’s antics, The X-Factor, American Idol, and Tom Cruise on the sofa, as well as Mary Shelley – who certainly knew a thing or two about fame in her lifetime, but to my knowledge never had her own chat show.”

  IN MY MIND the gap was non-existent between falling asleep and waking up, but of course weeks had gone by. Obviously. There were many procedures to be done and one had to be recovered from, and stabilised, groggily, still under, before the next began. I had no idea of the doctors taking over in shifts, or working in tandem, to achieve the programme-makers’ aims. I was out of it. Meanwhile the video footage of the surgery circled the world. Screen grabs jumping from cell to cell. I learned later that at the moment the titles began running on the final segment of the Results show, we’d already had the highest ratings the network had ever had. Any network ever had. This was history, if I but knew it. If I was awake. Then I was awake . . .

  Salvator’s eyes took a while to focus. Some filmy bits floated in the general opaqueness like rats’ tails, which troubled me for a few seconds. That and a certain lack of pain which came from being pumped with 100%-proof Christ-knows-what anaesthetic and various other chemicals swashed together in a cocktail to keep me stable. The new me, that is. If you could call it “me” at all.

  I raised a hand to examine it front and back. It was Murphy’s hand, unmistakably. I’d know that blunt-ended thumb and slightly twisted pinkie anywhere. The tan ended at the stitches where it was attached to Vince Pybus’s tattooed arm. I revolved it slightly, feeling the pull in my forearm muscles – not that they were mine at all. Except they were. There was the tremendous urge to yell something obscene, but I remembered being counselled not to do that on live TV for legal and other reasons, not least being the show might get instantly pulled. But the word “Fuck” seemed appropriate, given a new entity had been given life, of a sort, with no actual “fucking” involved. As befits suitable family entertainment. Primetime.

  Anticipating my thoughts, some guardian angel out of my field of vision put an oxygen mask over my mouth – whose mouth? I felt a coldness not on my lips but on Finbar’s, wider and more feminine than mine, a Jim Morrison pout – and I drank the air greedily: it stopped the feeling of nausea that was rising up from my guts. Or somebody’s, anyway.

  I raised my other hand and it was trembling. It also happened to be African-American, muscled and smooth. My man Anthony’s. I flattened its palm and ran it over my chest, hairless, Hispanic, down to the hard, defined muscles of Rico’s stomach. Maybe alarmingly, I didn’t have to stifle a scream but a laugh. And almost as if it wanted to drown me out in case I did, up came the Toccata and Fugue, blasting loud enough to make the walls of Jericho crumble, and my hospital table tilted up, thirty, forty-five degrees, and shielding my eyes with Anthony’s hand from the army of studio lights, I blinked, trying to make out the sea of the audience beyond.

  “Are you ready for the mirror?” said a voice.

  It was Doctor Bob and I saw him now, brown eyes twinkling above the paper mask, curly hair neatly tucked under the lime green medical cap. I nodded. As I had to. It was in my contract, after all.

  I looked at Moritz’s face as the reflection looked back. Long, lean, pale – not un-handsome, but not Moritz either. Finbar’s lips, fat and engorged, maybe enhanced a little cosmetically while we were all under, gave him a sensuality
the real Moritz lacked. Moritz, who lay somewhere backstage with his face removed, waiting for a donor. Next to armless Vince and armless Anthony, a fond tear in their eyes no doubt to see a part of them taken away and made famous. I saw, below a brow irrigated with a railway-track of stitches where the skull had been lifted off like a lid and my brain had been put in, Salvator’s darkly Spanish eyes gazing back at me like no eyes in any mirror in Oblong, Illinois. Blind Salvator, now, who was sitting backstage, whose grandfather had been blind also, but had only eked a rotten existence as a beggar on the streets of Valladolid. Yet here was Salvator, his eyeless grandson, rich and American, and about be richer still from the story he now had to tell, and sell. Salvator could see nothing now – true, but he had seen a future, at least.

  “Wow,” I said.

  Doctor Bob and the other Judges were standing and applauding in front of me now, wearing their surgical scrubs and rubber gloves. Doctor Jude’s cut by some fashion house in Rodeo Drive, her hair stacked high and shining. The gloves made a shrill, popping sound. Doctor Bob’s facemask hung half off from one ear. I was still in a haze but I think they each said their bit praising us.

  “I always believed in you guys.”

  “You’re the real deal. That was fantastic.”

  “You know what’s great about you? You never complained and you never moaned in this whole process.”

  It was the Host speaking next. Hand on my shoulder. Sharp charcoal suit, sharp white grin: “Great comments from the Doctors. What do you think of that? Say something to the audience.”

  With Alfry Linquist’s voice, I said: “Awesome.”

  Soon the clip was on YouTube. Highest number of hits ever.

  I got out of the hospital bed and they handed me a microphone. I sang the single that was released that Christmas and went straight to number one: “Idolised”. One of the biggest downloads ever. Global.

  As soon as I could record it, my first album came out. Producer worked with Frank Zappa (not that I was real sure who Frank Zappa was). Born Winner, it was called. The Doctors decided that. Guess they decided way before I recorded it. Like they decided everything, Doctor Bob and his team, the Judges. Went triple platinum. Grammys. Mercury. You name it. Rolling Stone interview. Jets to London. Private jets courtesy of Doctor Bob. Tokyo. Sydney. Wherever. Madness. But good madness.