Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  So I waited in the reception for an hour, browsing the display copies of new books by Margaret Atwood and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. They too were slickly produced.

  After a while I pulled out my beat-up copy of Strangers and Friends, a collection of short stories St. John had published in gentlemen’s magazines like Cavalier and Penthouse over the years. The book had never been one of St. John’s most popular but I’d been thumbing my way through it slowly for weeks. On the flight I had started a story called ‘The Survivalist’ in which a doctor finds himself trapped alone in a bunker after a nuclear blast. He lives there for years, decades, devouring canned peaches and Spam until finally he comes to the end of his stashed supplies. He knows he doesn’t have many options left. He can open up the door, risk contamination for a sight of the outside world—or he can continue to wait. The doctor stares at the door, wanting desperately to go out, but he can’t bring himself to open it. The story ends as, driven half-mad with hunger, he begins to contemplate how long he could survive eating first the flesh of his legs, his thighs, how much he could withstand. He is a doctor after all, and he thinks it could be quite some time…

  The story was gross, and it had all the macabre glee you would expect from a St. John chiller. But I didn’t feel scared by it. No, what upset me most was its sense of futility. The doctor had given up on hope. He wasn’t waiting for rescue. He didn’t believe anyone else in the world was alive. He was simply…persisting. If he was the last man on earth he wanted to last as long as possible. It was grotesque. Why didn’t he open the door? That’s what Luca had said when I tried to explain the plot him. But then Luca was the kind of man who would have opened the door. He couldn’t see another way of living.

  Another hour passed. Eventually the receptionist waved me over. Her manicured nails glinted dully in the light. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said, “but the records from those years haven’t been maintained. I didn’t even know we were the ones who published Barron St. John.” She gave a little laugh.

  I asked her what that meant for me.

  “No one’s free to meet you. We converted to digital years ago,” she said, barely sparing me a glance. “Whatever we had we dumped back then. Besides, who reads that trash anyway?”

  After that I found myself at loose ends so I called up a friend of mine, Benny Perry.

  Benny and I had gone to grad school together at the University of Toronto, both of us doing doctorates in medieval literature in those early days after the financial crash when we still thought the market would recover enough to give us jobs. I’d kept at it, spinning my work on the scribal culture that produced Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales into a postdoc in Oxford and then riding that into a full-time position in Publishing Studies of all things at a former polytechnic university. It wasn’t glamorous, not like Oxford had been, but I liked the students, I liked my colleagues and I liked the work itself: imagining how books moved through time and all the people who left their mark on them along the way.

  Benny had taken another route. He’d always had talent with photography and after he dropped out of the programme he’d moved to New York and taken a job with House & Garden before it closed. It’d paid well enough that he’d stuck with photography, jumping from one magazine to another until he had enough of a portfolio to go freelance. He’d taken one of those famous pictures of Trump, the one where his face seems to be receding into the folds of flesh around his neck. In the past couple of months I’d seen it on social media from time to time and reprinted in the papers.

  “It’s made things a bit hard for me,” Benny told me as we sat sipping margaritas in The Lantern’s Keep, a classy place near Times Square where the cocktails cost four times what they would at home. There had been a teary week before Luca and I made our decision when I’d given up alcohol, and even after we changed our minds I still hadn’t felt like touching the stuff. This was the first drink I’d had in eight months.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well it’s brought me lots of attention, sure, but not the good kind, you know? Trump supporters hate that picture. Trump does too, which is why it gets recycled so often.”

  Benny’s face looked strained and he fidgeted with his glass. He wasn’t quite how I remembered him. Benny was always a big man, a corn-fed Iowa type whose Baptist parents had taught him to shun dancing and drink. When I’d met him at orientation he’d been shy, a bit overwhelmed. But after those first awkward weeks he’d just thrown himself into everything. He had this irrepressible love of the new, and he’d taken to those things he’d missed out on most: booze, women—then men, dancing late into the night with this kind of unselfconscious clumsiness which made you want to join in.

  He was much thinner now, that kind of thinness that didn’t look healthy. “I’m worried about Emmanuel,” he said, “worried about…well. Anyway. People can be absolute shits, can’t they?”

  I agreed that they could.

  “But you’re looking good,” Benny said, and I caught his eyes skimming over my breasts. Even though it didn’t mean anything coming from him I still blushed and pulled at the cardigan. “But not…I don’t know, maybe not entirely good?” he was going on. “Hell. I don’t know what I’m trying to say.”

  I took his hand gently and told him not to worry about it.

  As The Lantern’s Keep started to fill up eventually we wandered out into the street. It was hot and swampy, that kind of early August weather that makes you feel as if you’ve been wrapped in a damp blanket and beaten. We headed south towards the West Village by foot so I could see the sights. North was Central Park and Trump Towers, which were all basically off limits now. New York hadn’t changed so much, not in terms of that strange and beautiful blend of architecture and anger, but there were bits that alarmed me. Like all the police cars all had stickers listing the reward for information on cop-killers with a number you could call.

  When I told Benny about the project I was working on, It turned out he’d read St. John as a kid, which surprised me, given his background.

  “What I remember about him was that my parents were reading him. They never read anything like that otherwise. Murder and cannibalism and demons and all that stuff. But Faction of Fire, you know, it was all about faith, wasn’t it? In that book there was no getting around it: The Devil was real. And I suppose that’s what my parents thought anyway. Good and evil weren’t abstract concepts to them. There were good folk and there were bad folk. And it wasn’t just that the bad folk made bad decisions. They were…bad. It was something more fundamental. Badness worked through them. It was something tangible, real. And St. John, well, his books were all about that, weren’t they?”

  Benny grinned at me and for a moment I could see his younger self peer-ing out, that kid who’d never touched a drop of liquor in his life before I met him.

  “How’re your parents doing?” I asked him because that was the kind of thing we were supposed to ask one another now that we weren’t kids any-more.

  “Dad had a stroke two years ago,” Benny said with a shrug. “I go back when I can to help her out. She’s lonely, I know, but whenever I do go we just end up fighting.”

  I didn’t ask him about Emmanuel, about whether his parents knew. I figured probably they did. There were enough profiles floating around about Benny’s photos so you could only avoid knowing if you really tried.

  “How are you and Luca doing?”

  “Good.”

  “He didn’t want to come with you?”

  “Couldn’t get away. You know how it is with these NGOs. Anytime he leaves he feels like he’s letting people down.”

  “It’s good what he’s doing,” Benny told me. “We need more people like him right now.” After a moment he stretched and I heard the joints in his shoulders pop. “It must be hard writing horror stories now, you know? It seems like that’s all we’ve got these days. I can’t bear to watch the news anymore.”

  I didn’t sleep well that night. When I’d glanced at the papers they
were filled with stories about tensions escalating, something to do with the South China Sea islands and whether the U.S. was being too aggressive. John McCain was trying to dial things back but you could tell he was getting tired of it. His eyes looked sharp and a little bit scared.

  I’d had panic attacks all throughout the October leading up to the election. There’d been Brexit, of course, our own particular mess. At a conference last summer an American colleague had told me, “What we’re seeing is radical politics. People stopped believing that they mattered to the system—but all that’s different now. It’s exciting, isn’t it? Anything could happen.” Trump had seemed funny back then, dangerous but still avoidable. They called it all a horror show but you could tell there was fascination underneath it all. How close could we come to disaster? But Hillary was ahead in the polls. Some of the Republicans were denouncing Trump, trying to put a little distance between themselves for when the eventual shellacking came on November 8th.

  But it didn’t come. For weeks after, all throughout the Christmas break, whenever I heard Trump’s name it was as if there was a loud gong echoing in my head. My feed was filled with anguish, betrayal, heartbreak. But I had seen all that already. I felt immured, resilient—and besides I still didn’t believe, not really, that it would happen. Then eventually the cold hard truth settled in when I watched the inauguration with Luca. As Trump walked to the podium I burst out laughing, I don’t know why, the sheer cognitive dissonance of the whole thing. I felt hysterical. My palms were sweating.

  Afterwards I learned St. John had written a novel about something similar, Answering the King, about a madman who cheats his way to becoming the President of the United States. Eventually it comes down to a fifteen-year-old girl tormented with visions of the past and the future to stop him. The question at the heart of it is: if you could go back in time to stop Hitler, would you? They had made a movie about it with Steve Buscemi. I don’t remember who played the girl, only how wide her eyes were, how she captured that world-weariness so well for someone so young. She was a Cassandra. No one would listen to her.

  That was the night when the whole thing with Luca happened. Normally we were very careful. I hadn’t been in my job for very long and he’d just moved across the country to live with me. We had talked about having kids one day but…We weren’t careful enough. Disaster crept in the way it always does.

  I called Argo the next day. It was the first time I’d spoken to her and her voice was thin and cagey with a flat Ohio accent. It sounded as if it were coming away from much further away than the Upper East Side.

  It felt strange to be listening to her voice and I thought about what Dylan Bone had told me. I’d read the obituary in fact, half as a joke and half because I knew Dylan didn’t make mistakes very often. He’d cut his teeth in the ’80s horror boom and still made most of his money by convincing writers like St. John and Clive Barker to give him new material. It might sound mercenary but it isn’t, not really: Bone was a believer, a horror fanatic. He loved the stuff and even when the market dropped out of it in the nineties he had kept at it, putting out anthology after anthology with cheesy hand-drawn skeletons or zombified hands reaching out of the grave. Argo had been part of that, someone who’d made the genre in its heyday.

  One the phone Argo was polite and she agreed to meet me for lunch the next day at a café. “It’ll have to be close to my apartment,” she told me, “I can’t move very well now.”

  I told her I understood, and could meet her wherever she wanted.

  “What’s this about then? Really?” Her tone wasn’t querulous, but wonder-ing. “You know I wrote a chapter about working with St. John for some anthology twenty years ago, Devilish Discussions or something like that.”

  I hesitated because I didn’t really have an answer. Yes, I knew the story about how she’d been sent St. John’s first manuscript by mistake. It had been meant to go to her boss but he’d been on vacation. She’d liked it but her boss wouldn’t touch it, and she didn’t have enough support inside Doubleday to push it through, not then, a low-level assistant. But they’d kept in touch, writing letters when the mood took one or the other. Then when Rosie had come along it had been “a day of glory”—so she called it.

  I gave her the answer I gave most of my colleagues. St. John had changed the genre, really changed it. For one brief moment horror hadn’t been the red-haired stepchild of fiction. Horror had been king. And I wanted to know how that had happened. Part of my answer was true. I’d always been fascinated by the way books were made, the countless decisions that went into them. But if I were really honest it was simply because I’d become a fan, a real fan—maybe not Dylan Bone level—but my admiration for St. John was genuine.

  It was more than that though. The real reason was one I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but it had something to do with stories of chance—which St. John’s certainly was. And that underneath every story is a pivotal moment when things changed. I wanted to know what that looked like. I needed to know if Argo had understood when that manuscript crossed her desk what it would mean, if she’d felt a chill when he opened the envelop. Like someone had walked on her grave.

  That afternoon Benny took me out to the Cloisters for old time’s sake, and it was beautiful, just like he’d promised it would be. The place was a mishmash of architecture taken from a series of medieval abbeys in France, Catalan and the Occitan, simultaneously peaceful and surreal, liminal, a sliver of another world transplanted into New York.

  “I thought you’d like it,” Benny told me. We were staring at a tree that had been shaped to fit one of the alcoves in the garden. Its branches curved unnaturally like a menorah to fill the space. I couldn’t help but wonder how it had been manipulated, what sort of subtle violence had pressurised the wood to assume the shape it had.

  “I do,” I told him, shivering despite the mid-day heat.

  “So, tomorrow. The editor, what’s her name again?” He snapped his fingers. “Argo, right? Lily Argo. You’re going to interview her. What about St. John then? Any chance you’ll get to speak to him?”

  I didn’t think so. St. John lived in New Hampshire and I had no idea what kind of relationship the two of them still had. If they kept in touch. If Argo would even like me.

  “Of course she will. You’re—well, you’re the makeles quene, aren’t you?” He smiled. “You are without blot.”

  “Someone back home said she was dead,” I told him uneasily. I still didn’t like that part of the story. Why would Dylan have thought that?

  “Huh,” Benny said. “It sounds like the beginning of a ghost story, doesn’t it? Like she’ll bestow her wisdom on you, settle her unfinished business, and vanish into the night.”

  “It sounds exactly like that.”

  “But maybe you’re lucky, not seeing St. John.”

  I asked him what he meant.

  “You know. He’s bound to be pretty weird, isn’t he? I mean he’s been writing that stuff for more than forty years now. You can’t keep that close to the darkness without some of it sticking to you.”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard something like this. I was used to getting it myself sometimes at the university. But the horror writers I’d met were amongst the most well-adjusted people I knew, certainly they were much calmer than the other writers I tended to deal with. Some people said it was because there wasn’t much money in horror writing these days. But I thought it was something else: writers were good at channelling their anxieties into something productive. We all have those nasty thoughts, those worries that maybe we don’t love our partners as much as we should, or maybe they don’t love us. Fears that maybe something awful will happen tomorrow. The phone will ring and it will be the police. An accident somewhere. Or a fight escalated, a button pushed.

  “When I studied the Middle Ages,” I told him, “it always seemed like it must have been so difficult for those people. I mean, the Black Death wiped out 40% of the population. Imagine whole villages lost, your
family—everyone you’ve ever met—wiped out.”

  “I know,” he said, “I just couldn’t take living like that. I’d, I dunno. I’d go crazy, I guess.”

  I wondered if he really would go crazy. Or if he was going crazy right now, waiting for that call about Emmanuel. Waiting for Trump to finally get around to signing a new Executive Order. I had always liked Benny because he had a sense of outrage, a keen abhorrence of injustice. I knew he had marched in those early protests and knew that he wasn’t marching anymore. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself. Benny was strong but he was adaptable. He was finding ways to survive, to keep making his art—but doing it so it didn’t hurt Emmanuel.

  Luca was the same way. Most nights he didn’t come home until close to midnight. There was always more he felt he could be doing. For a while I’d felt really proud of him. And then when things got bad I’d just felt resentful, angry at him for spending so much time saving other people when what I really wanted was for him to save me.

  In the gift shop I chose a postcard for him, a picture of the Flemish tapestry called The Hunt for the Unicorn. It showed five young men in aristocratic clothing with their spears and their dogs. If it weren’t for the title you wouldn’t have been able to tell what they were doing there. I wanted to choose one with the unicorn but all of them looked too violent or depressing. Something about the unicorn in captivity, collared, in a fence that can barely hold her, reminded me of Answering the King, and how the girl had been taken to prison after she shot the president. There had been a coda at the end of the novel, the little girl twenty years later, grown up, in solitary confinement. They had thought she had gone mad because she wouldn’t stop hurting herself.

  But St. John showed the real reason. The girl had had another vision, one worse than what she’d stopped all those years ago. But this time there was nothing she could do about it.