The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  As critic Douglas E. Winter has said: ‘Great horror fiction has never really been about monsters, but about mankind. It shows us something about ourselves, something dark, occasionally monstrous ... Its writers literally drag our terrors from the shadows and force us to look upon them with despair - or relief . . .’

  Proof that horror could perhaps be therapeutic was evidenced when Stephen King and Peter Straub’s collaborative novel Black House, initially released the week of the terrorist attack, finally reached the top of the American bestseller lists, despite an initial postponing of print advertising.

  ‘The current context makes these things more relevant, more important,’ Straub was quoted as saying. ‘You say, yes, the world is really like this. The writing my colleagues and I do is to awaken people to the fragility of existence and the possibility of extremity.’

  For the foreseeable future the world has new monsters to fear, new bogeymen to keep us awake at night. It may not mean much in the greater scheme of things, but horror fiction also has a role to play in our recovery.

  The world as we knew it before that fateful day will never be the same again. Yet horror fiction, as it has always done, can help us move towards confronting our fears and, by allowing us to recognize them for what they really are, we can use it to hopefully lessen the hold they have over us.

  The Editor

  May, 2002

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  * * * *

  CHICO KIDD

  Mark of the Beast

  Chico kidd has been writing ghost stories since 1979 under the name of A.F. Kidd. They have been published (mostly illustrated by the author) in such small-press magazines as Ghosts & Scholars, Dark Dreams, Peeping Tom, Enigmatic Tales, All Hallows and the author’s own series of chapbooks.

  Others have appeared in anthologies such as Vampire Stories, The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories 2, The Year’s Best Horror Stories X, XVI and XVIII, and the hardcoverGhosts & Scholars. She remains, apparently, the only non-Antipodean author to appear in the Australian magazine of SF and fantasy, Aurealis.

  ‘In September 2000,’ recalls Kidd, ‘a Portuguese sea-captain called Luis Da Silva barged into a tale called “Cats and Architecture” and demanded to have his story told. Since then he has appeared in nine more short stories and two-and-three-quarter novels - Demon Weather, The Werewolf of Lisbon and Resurrection - which are currently under consideration by a publisher.’

  ‘Cats and Architecture’ (which is also reprinted in this volume) first appeared in Supernatural Tales 2, and the next four Da Silva stories in a chapbook entitled Second Sight. More recently, ‘Handwriting of the God’ was published in Dark Terrors 6 and another of the tales, ‘Ze and the Amulet’ (featuring two characters who also appear in ‘Mark of the Beast’), is scheduled for Supernatural Tales 4.

  ‘ “Mark of the Beast” has more than a nod in Kipling’s direction,’ continues the author, ‘both in its setting and its title. It came from trying to find a new angle on the werewolf story, and it introduces Harris the Werewolf, who seems to have taken on a life of his own. I had no idea, when he first appeared, that he was going to be an important character in the series. Other characters reappear, some quite frequently, but haven’t yet graduated to “Scooby Gang” status. For anyone interested, this story takes place about two and a half years after the “Death in Venice” section of “Cats and Architecture”.’

  * * * *

  B

  lood in the night.

  In the warm moist darkness, the town was a cacophony of smells - vivid, exciting, thrilling, delicious. Each one told a story, each held a promise. Hunger writhed in his belly, but the odoriferous stew was so seductive that he could almost ignore the gnawing compulsion, almost push it to one side in order to explore the exhilarating possibilities opening up to him in every direction. Secrets. Secrets.

  He sniffed the air with delight, drinking in the rich brew, and let his scent-sense wander over the profusion of smells, much as a shopper might scan the goods on view in a bazaar. Here a pi-dog bitch in heat had urinated, and she would already be mated; there an ailing beggar had lain for a while, and he would die soon of his sickness.

  Yet in the end hunger became the imperative, and he filtered out, not without a little regret, the odours that did not promise food and focused on one particular, juicy, blood-rich odour. It led him along a maze of streets and finally down an alleyway that, to human eyes, would have been impenetrably dark. But to him, to whom scent both marked his way and told him the history of every place he passed, it was as bright as a gaslit street. To a man’s nose, too, it would have smelled foul, at least to one that was unused to its stink.

  Human debris lived in this place along with the rats and other scavengers - families crowded in makeshift shacks of cardboard and corrugated iron, picking over the rubbish of those just a little more fortunate. Here lived beggars, cripples, lepers, the weak and the poverty-stricken: here were rich pickings for a creature hungry for an easy meal.

  Small children were the easiest to take, and, he had found, the sweetest meat, especially the little males, whose mothers pampered them as best they could despite poverty: their flesh soft and buttery, their bones crunchy and filled with the most delicious fatty marrow. He salivated at the thought, if he could be said strictly to have thoughts. They were more like olfactory pictures, impressions, memories.

  Now that one particular scent was very strong, so tempting, so mouth-watering. Licking his lips, he peered carefully round the corner, yellow eyes glinting, and sensed the prey, a sleeping toddler of no more than two years. It slumbered just a few feet away, just on the other side of a makeshift wall of splintered plywood, and he padded up to this barrier that was no barrier and nosed under it. Inside, a little fire of dried cow-dung sent up a pungent smoke that almost made him sneeze, and something cooked on it in a rusty iron pot - it was an unappetizing concoction of rice, he registered, thinly flavoured with a chicken bone. His meal, that slept plumply just by the fire, was far more appetizing, with plenty of meat on its bones.

  As if sensing danger, the child opened its eyes. But it was too late to cry out.

  * * * *

  The shipping agent was a diminutive babu with slicked-down hair and an oleaginous manner. He spoke rather rancid Portuguese and insisted on calling Luis Da Silvachefe. After an hour in his office, the captain felt as if he had been deep-fried.

  It was also damnably hot and humid. The stickiness of the atmosphere was not at all alleviated by a sail-like fan that a boy in the corner was desultorily operating with a string tied to his toe. It barely stirred the air, except perhaps for a foot or so in front of it.

  His shirt was wringing wet as if he had been swimming in the ocean - admittedly a rather unlikely occurrence, since the water around the port differed from an open sewer in name only: at low tide, the harbour smelled like a midden. But even that was a minor discomfort compared with wearing an eye-patch in this hellish climate.

  Captain Da Silva lit what was probably his sixth cheroot - after that many, his mouth felt like old carpets - and regarded the other man with irritation. He was almost at the end of his patience, and badly in need of a drink. The agent, whose name was Gomes, had offered him tea. The captain was of the opinion that only the English could possibly enjoy tea, despite the fact that it had come to them via Portugal in the first place, but he thought he would probably have melted away into a little puddle on the floor without it and had accepted a cup of the sweet, revolting stuff.

  But whether under the jurisdiction of the Portuguese or the English, as he knew from experience, the subcontinent moved at its own pace. You just had to let events roll along. Until in the end they would gather so much momentum they were in danger of becoming a juggernaut. The trick was to catch them just before they reached that stage - to catch the tide, as it were, at precisely the right time. Which was easy enough to do with a ship, but damnably difficult when it was a tide in the affairs of men.

  Outside, palm leaves
rattled with a noise like rain. Beneath them, a pair of crows were brawling raucously. Da Silva eyed them sourly through the open window, thinking, come to the tropics and you expect exotic birds, jewel colours, sweet trilling songs. And what do you get? Crows.

  Money changed hands and the next level of wheels was lubricated. That done, the agent leaned back and smiled, displaying an alarming set of false teeth that appeared to have been rifled from a corpse, and saying with patent insincerity, ‘We are being sorry for all the delays,’ in a way that made Da Silva want to hit him. ‘It is the fault of the damn superstitious peasants in this town,’ he explained.

  At the word superstitious the captain became attentive, although he made no outward show of the fact. ‘Indeed?’ he said in a disinterested tone, blowing smoke in Gomes’s direction.

  ‘Oh yes,’ replied the agent, leaning over the desk to impart information and treating Da Silva to a gust of truly horrific breath, perhaps in retaliation. ‘All bloody ignorant peasants. They are saying there is a wolf stealing children from their homes, you know? As if damn wolf would come into the town! And not normal wolf, oh no, that is not good enough, they must have it that it is some kind of supernatural. Well,chefe, what do you expect, they are all low-caste heathens and untouchables, not even Christians like you and me.’

  A number of comments rushed through Da Silva’s mind at that remark. But all he did was shrug his shoulders. ‘And this affects our business how?’ he asked, fighting the urge to stick a finger under his eyepatch and somehow dispose of the sweat accumulating there.

  ‘Oh, you are knowing what the people are like here, chefe, no?’ said the agent, apparently unaware of any irony. ‘Too damn ignorant to know any better. Werewolves and nagas and ghosts, pah,’ he added - thus neatly encompassing East and West in one contemptuous phrase - and appeared to be preparing to spit until he caught sight of Da Silva’s expression and thought better of it, turning the aborted expectoration into a cough.

  Da Silva, who had no objection at all to spitting as an expression of contempt, wondered with some amusement what Gomes would say if the agent knew that he saw ghosts all the time. Including the faint shade of a long-forgotten bureaucrat - who had presumably, therefore, died in harness - in this very office. Not only that, but the captain had encountered far more dangerous creatures. More dangerous than wolves in many ways.

  It was curious, though, the way the subject had come up. Or maybe not so curious. I ought to be getting used to it by now, he thought resignedly, feeling a little like spitting himself. You’d think I was some kind of lodestone. So wouldn’t thatjust be a surprise if it does turn out to be a werewolf or something of the sort, just waiting for Da Silva to put into port.

  Gomes, unaware of the captain’s thoughts, prattled on. ‘But I have good news! I can do you a favour! I am hearing of a sailor who is looking for a ship, a man with the mate’s chitty, right here in town.’

  Da Silva grunted non-committally. Though he had not met Gomes before, he recognized the type. There were Gomeses in every port in every country in the world, and somehow they made the wheels of commerce go round and kept him in business. But, like all the others, this man was more likely to tailor his reportage to what a listener wanted to hear rather than anything that resembled the truth. Probably some decrepit old pirate who spends his days so drunk on palm whisky he can’t find his arse without a map, he thought. ‘Really.’

  ‘Oh, yes, chefe,’ the other said unctuously. ‘An American man,’ as if this negated anything the captain had been thinking. ‘I shall be arranging a meeting, yes?’

  It couldn’t do any harm to meet the man, Da Silva said to himself with a sigh, on the off chance that Gomes was actually correct. ‘Yes, go ahead, Senhor Gomes,’ he said.

  Which was why Captain Da Silva was currently awaiting the arrival of one Edward Harris, lately of Boston, Massachusetts, while sweating and soundly cursing each and every equatorial land for its vile climate. Formality be damned, he had decided, and had shed his coat. Now he was mopping moisture from the humid zone under his eyepatch in a vain attempt to make wearing the thing more comfortable. You could probably grow mushrooms under there, he thought irritably.

  However the captain was not thinking about the imminent Harris but was contemplating the ghosts that mingled with the breathing crowds at the quayside under the sullen monsoon sky. They were of little help, but that was no more than he expected. The damned things were only shades, after all, memories of the people they had been, haunting the place where they had died. Very few of them seemed to retain any kind of awareness for very long, yet today they seemed - restive, somehow. Disturbed. Sometimes he thought they were able to communicate with each other in a kind of dim, distant way, and now it was almost as if they were all infected with nervousness, odd though that sounded. What would make a ghost nervous?

  He knew a way to ask, but that involved summoning a real spirit, something he was reluctant to do. Even now he found the thought of necromancy repellent, and always would. It was a kind of slavery, and that purely disgusted him. Having been, for many years, as good as owned himself, he was reluctant to force another soul to his own will. Even if the body it had once inhabited was no longer living.

  The char-wallah who had supplied Gomes with tea, and whom he had collared on leaving the agent’s office, had not only confirmed the man’s story but had added a considerable amount of grisly detail of his own, presumably in the interests of artistic verisimilitude, in exchange for appropriate remuneration - not to mention offering to bring the hysterical mother of the latest victim for a small additional sum. Da Silva had turned this last down.

  I can’t just let it rest, he thought. Damn it. And was wondering what to do about it when the man he was waiting for arrived.

  Harris was unmistakable, especially in a crowd whose main racial mix, ghostly and living alike, consisted of Indian and Portuguese in various combinations. He was nearly six feet tall, heavily built, and as red-haired as Judas Iscariot.

  The captain hastily replaced his eyepatch. Informality was one thing, but he knew the scar that ran from eyebrow to cheekbone was not a sight to let loose on anyone at a first encounter. On the quayside, Harris caught his gaze and gave an odd little wave, one that might one day grow up to be a salute.

  ‘Captain Da Silva?’ he called.

  ‘Senhor Harris, I presume?’

  ‘That’s me, skipper. Permission to come aboard?’

  ‘Come along, Senhor Harris.’

  Twenty minutes later, theIsabella had a new third mate, and Da Silva was silently apologizing to the absent Gomes: Harris seemed both sober and competent. Which probably meant there was something wrong with him. But for the time being the captain was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, being a firm believer in letting people have enough rope to hang themselves rather than trying to do it for them.

  * * * *

  This captain seems like a regular sort, even if he does look like a pirate with that black eyepatch. I guess he’s been at sea since Pontius was a pilot, but I’d bet fifty dollars that he’s never come across a sailor with my particular problem before. I’ve gotten used enough to signing on for one trip and being given my papers when we tie up at the other end that it don’t bother me no more, but I don’t reckon I’ll ever get used to the change that comes over me every full moon, and neither will any skipper. Still, after kicking my heels in this godforsaken hole all this time I reckon I would have shipped out with the Flying Dutchman if he’d happened to put into port.

  I recall feeling pretty goddam down, watching theNimrod shrink into the distance. It wasn’t so much being without a berth again, like I said, I’m used to that - it was where I was stuck ashore. Places like these, they ain’t healthy. If the malaria don’t get you the yellow fever will, and if the typhoid don’t, the dysentery will, what ignorant fellows call the dire rear. Though I can’t say I’m prone to catching regular human-type diseases any more it don’t mean I couldn’t go down with distemper or
rabies, and I wasn’t fixing to put it to the test.

  Last month I’d gotten away with it by locking my door - my granma could have picked the lock but I pushed the bed against it - and tethering myself to the bedframe with my collar and chain. It’s what I aim to do every month, but on a ship there ain’t no privacy. I tell my messmates I’m going down sick, but when they see what sort of sick they can’t wait to leave me be. Since this thing happened to me, Mrs Harris’s little boy’s been worse than a pariah, but working the sea’s all I know how to do.

  * * * *

  Da Silva shook hands with Harris. The American’s hand was the size of a bear’s paw but his grip was merely firm, not bone-crushing. With hands that big, he had no need to prove anything. The captain lit a cheroot and offered one to Harris, who refused politely.

  ‘You needn’t be in any hurry to quit your lodgings, if you don’t want to,’ Da Silva said. ‘We’re mired down in seventeen levels of bureaucracy, as usual. If it weren’t for that we could be out of here tomorrow. Oh, and the fact that there seems to be a werewolf on the loose.’