Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  The movie of his story ‘Pay the Ghost’, starring Nicolas Cage, was released Halloween 2015. The Silence, starring Stanley Tucci and Kiernan Shipka, is due for release early 2019, and screenplays Playtime (with Stephen Volk) and My Haunted House are currently in development.

  Lebbon has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award and a Scribe Award, and has been a finalist for World Fantasy, International Horror Guild and Shirley Jackson Awards. His work has appeared in numerous “Year’s Best” anthologies.

  “This story was probably seeded years ago,” says the author, “when I used to live, and go out drinking with friends, in Newport. I’d often end up walking home alone, and even when I was in my late teens my imagination often went into overdrive.

  “It wasn’t the safest town late at night, with dozens of pubs and clubs kicking out at the same time, and I think that heightened state of alert probably meant that the alleys and short-cuts I took on the way home held an even heavier sense of dread and, sometimes, wrongness.

  “There were also a few familiar ‘characters’ who became known to us—people who we did our best to avoid, especially when it was dark and late, the streets were quieter and more mysterious, and their true natures were difficult to perceive.”

  SEVERAL WEEKS FOLLOWING the death of a close friend, I started walking alone at night. I was having trouble sleeping, and I think it was a way of trying to reclaim that time for myself. Instead of lying in the darkness remembering Nigel, feeling regret that we’d let the time between meetings stretch further each year, I took to the streets. There was nothing worse than staring at the ceiling and seeing all the bad parts of my life mapped there in cracks, spider-webs and the trails of a paint brush. I thought perhaps walking in the dark might help me really think.

  On the fifth night of wandering the streets, I saw the woman.

  I was close to the centre of town. It was raining, and the few working streetlights cast speckled, splashed patterns across the pavement, giving the impression that nothing was still in the silent night. Over the past hour I’d seen several people. One was a night worker—a nurse or fireman, perhaps—hurrying along the street wearing a backpack and with a definite destination in mind. A couple were youths, so drunk that they could barely walk or talk. One was a homeless woman I’d seen before. Two dogs accompanied her like shadows, and she muttered to herself too quietly for me to hear.

  They all saw me. The worker veered around me slightly, the youths muttered and giggled, and the homeless woman’s dogs paused and sniffed in my direction.

  But the new woman didn’t look or act like everyone else. At three or four in the morning, anyone left out in the streets wanted to be alone. Closeness was avoided, and other than perhaps a curt nod, no contact was made. It was as if darkness brought out mysteries and hidden stories in people and made them solid, and that suited me just fine. I wasn’t out there to speak to anyone else; I was attempting to talk to myself.

  There was something about her that immediately caught my attention. Walking in a world of her own, she followed no obvious route through the heavy rain, moving back and forth across the silent main street, sometimes walking on the sidewalk and sometimes the road. The weather did not appear to concern her. Even though it was summer, the rain was cool and the night cooler, but she walked without a coat or jacket of any kind. She wore loose trousers and a vest top, and I really shouldn’t have followed her.

  But Nigel told me to. It was his voice I heard in my head saying, Wonder what she’s up to? He had always been curious and interested in other people, the one most likely to get chatting to strangers if we went for a drink. Last time I’d seen him he’d been more garrulous than ever, and I wondered if that was a way of hiding his deeper problems and fears. He could say so much, but still didn’t know how to ask for help.

  The woman drifted from the main street to a narrower road between shops, and I followed. I held back a little—I had no wish to frighten or trouble her—but tried to make sure I kept her in sight. The rain was falling heavier now, and I had to throw up my hood to shield my eyes and face. The side street was not lit. Rain blanketed the night, making everything even darker and giving a constant shimmer to reality. Her movements were nebulous and fluid, slipping in and out of the darkness like a porpoise dancing through waves.

  To my left and right, large spaces opened up. These were the service yards of big shops, covered delivery and storage areas that I barely noticed if walking these streets during the day. Now, they were pitch-black burrows where anything might exist, and I was pleased when the woman passed them by.

  As she neared a smaller street, she paused. I also stopped, tucking in close to a wall. I suddenly felt uncomfortable following her. I was no threat, but no one else would believe that. If people saw me stalking the woman, they might think the worst. If she saw me, I might frighten her.

  I was about to turn and walk back the way I’d come when something gave me pause.

  The street ahead was a place I knew well, home to a series of smaller, independent shops, a couple of nice pubs, and a few restaurants. Nigel and I had eaten and drunk there, and I’d walked that way more times than I could recall. In the stormy night, it glowed with reflected neon from shop windows. A rush of memories washed over me, and I gasped.

  The woman seemed to hear. She tilted her head slightly, then walked out into this narrower road. I followed. I had the sudden sense that I was witnessing something secret. I felt like an intruder, emerging from my safe, warm home to stroll dark streets I knew nothing about.

  During the day, this place was a bustling centre of commerce and fun. Now it was a whole new world.

  By the time I moved out onto the street, the woman had paused beside a series of bronze sculptures on plinths. They’d been placed fifteen years before as part of the millennium celebrations, and I hardly ever noticed them. Seeing them at night, flowing with water that shimmered and reflected weak light, gave them a strange form of life.

  The woman was staring past the sculptures and into the mouth of a narrow alley. I knew the place. It was a dead-end passageway between a fast-food joint and a newsagents. I’d stumbled down there once years ago, drunk, a young woman holding onto my arm as if I could be more stable than her. I had vague memories of what we’d done. Shambolic, clumsy sex amongst split bags of refuse and broken bottles did not make me particularly proud, and I’d only ever spoken of that moment with Nigel.

  As I wondered what her interest might be in that grubby place, and just what it was about her that troubled me, she began to take off her clothes.

  I caught my breath and pulled back around the corner. I felt unaccountably guilty witnessing the woman’s shedding of clothing, even though she was doing it in the middle of the street. Her shoes came off first, then her vest and trousers. Naked, she stretched her arms to the air and let the rain run across her body. She might have been beautiful.

  Rain flowed into my eyes. I wiped them and looked again. There was something wrong.

  The woman was moving past the bronze statues and heading towards the entrance to the alley. Her motion seemed strange. She drifted rather than walked, limbs swinging slightly out of time, her movements not quite human. Her pale skin grew darker. Her hair became a more solid cap around her head. She slowed before the alley—hesitant, or relishing the moment—then stepped into its shadows.

  As she passed out of sight, I had the very real sense that she was no longer there.

  I ran into the night.

  “And you ran all the way home?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dude. You. Running.”

  I laughed. “Who’d have thunk it?”

  Ashley licked her finger and used it to pick up cake crumbs from her plate. Finger still in her mouth, she caught my attention and raised an eyebrow. I rolled my eyes. Ash had been my best friend since we were both babies, and although I couldn’t help but acknowledge her beauty, I’d never been drawn to her in that way.

  “Still not sleep
ing?” she asked.

  “No. Not well at all.”

  “Hence the walking at night.”

  I nodded.

  “You’re very, very weird.”

  We both sipped at our coffees, comfortable in our silence. The café around was filled with conversation and soft music, merging into a background noise that kept our own chat private.

  “Maybe she was a prostitute.”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  I nodded.

  “So you’d recognise one?” She had that cheeky glint in her eyes, and I couldn’t help but smile. Ashley called herself shallow, but I knew that wasn’t true at all. She was simply someone who knew how to regulate her depths. She’d been a levelling force in my life forever, and never more than since Nigel stepped from that ledge.

  “It’s only around the corner,” I said. “Will you come with me?”

  “And search for the mysterious vanishing woman? You bet!”

  We left the café. It had stopped raining and the town was alive with lunchtime buzz. Ash and I met for lunch at least once each week, working within ten minutes of each other making it easy. I dreaded her leaving to work elsewhere. She’d mentioned it once or twice, and I knew that she’d had a couple of interviews. It was only a matter of time. Ash was not someone that life held back, and the world was calling.

  “It will get easier,” she said, hooking her arm through mine as we walked.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “Wish I’d known him better.”

  I nodded. Felt a lump in my throat and swallowed it down. “Me too.”

  As we approached the place where I’d seen the woman earlier that morning, I heard the cheerful shouts and laughter of a group of school kids. They were maybe nine or ten, posing around the bronze statues as teachers took photos. They probably shouldn’t have been up on the plinths, but no one would tell them to get down. Who would intrude on such excitement and joy?

  I headed past the statues and children, aiming for the alley between newsagents and the fast-food joint, which was doing a busy trade. People queued out the door. A young woman emerged from the alley, wearing an apron with the takeaway’s name emblazoned across the front. She offered us a quick smile, then pushed past the queue and back into the shop. I felt a release of tension from my shoulders, a relaxing in my gut. Ash must have felt it too.

  “See?” she said. “No gruesome murders.”

  I turned to her and nodded, and then something caught my eye. A litter-bin stood beside a bench close to the statues, and splayed across its lip was a dirtied white vest.

  “Oh,” I said. I blinked, remembering the woman lifting the vest up over her head.

  “What?” Ash asked.

  I pointed at the vest. “Why wouldn’t she dress again afterwards?” After what, I did not say, or even wish to consider. She must have walked home naked. If she had walked home at all.

  I headed for the alley, and Ash came with me. It smelled of piss. No surprise there. But it also smelled of rain, fresh and sharp, even though it had stopped raining even before I’d finished running home eight hours before.

  “Delightful,” Ash said. She stepped over a pool of vomit on the ground.

  It was unremarkable, a narrow alley with a dead end thirty feet in, dirty rendered wall on one side, old bare brick on the other. A couple of metal doorways were set into the walls, without handles and looking as if they’d been locked for decades. There were a few black bin bags, one of them split and gnawed at by night creatures—cats, rats, foxes. A pile of dog crap held a smeared shoe print. A dead rat festered against the blank end wall.

  “She didn’t come out again,” I said.

  “Not while you were watching.”

  “But her clothes.”

  Ash shrugged.

  I walked the length of the alley, fearing what I might see, eager to make sure there was nothing there. I shifted a couple of rubbish bags with my foot, releasing a foul stink that made me gag.

  “Jesus, what a wonderful smell you’ve found!” Ash said.

  I covered my mouth with the collar of my coat and went in deeper, shoving bags aside with my feet. Old wrappers spilled, slick with rotting food. Things crawled in there, dark and wet, reminding me of the nude woman flowing with rainwater, silvery, flexing and shifting like something inhuman. I bent down to look closer and saw a nest of slugs, leaving trails like slow echoes and pulsing like something’s insides.

  “Weird,” Ash said. She was looking at a spread of brickwork close to the ground, a few feet from the end of the alley. I went to her and stood close, our coats brushing. She grabbed my hand.

  “What?”

  “Don’t know,” she said. She shivered. “Let’s go.”

  “Hang on.” I crouched, leaning in closer, trying not to block out precious light so that I could see what she’d seen.

  “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “What is that?” I asked. But neither of us could answer.

  The bricks were old and crumbling, covered with black moss, joints clotted with decades of filth. This wall had never seen sunlight, and perpetual shadow had driven darkness into the brick faces and the mortar in between. Across a spread of brickwork, something protruded. It looked like a swathe of dark pink pustules, solid-looking rather than soft, dry and dusty even though the brickwork around them was damp. I reached out to touch, but Ash grabbed my arm.

  “What if it’s poisonous?” she asked.

  “It’s just the bricks,” I said. “Frost-blown, maybe. They’ve deformed over time.” I reached out again, but didn’t quite touch. Something held me back. Something about the shape of the feature, the way it swept up from the ground and spanned several courses of bricks.

  It looked like an arm reaching from the ground, embedded in the wall and only just protruding. At its end, a clenched fist of brickwork protruded more than elsewhere, cracked and threatening to disintegrate at any moment.

  I wondered what that fist might hold.

  Ash grabbed my coat and pulled me upright, shoving me before her along the alley and back into the street. “It should be cleaned,” she said. But she didn’t enter the fast-food shop or the newsagents to share this opinion with them. Instead, she headed back to work.

  I stood there for a while looking at the discarded clothing in the litter-bin. It was slowly being buried beneath lunchtime refuse—coffee cups, crisp bags, sandwich wrappers. Soon it would be completely out of sight. Forgotten.

  I wondered where the woman had gone.

  “I’m sorry,” Ash said. She’d called me after work, on the way to her boyfriend’s place.

  “For what?” I was in the park, beyond which lay the old terraced house where I lived. It was raining again, and a few umbrellas and coats hid anonymous people as they took various paths home.

  “I just…that place at lunchtime felt a bit odd. Didn’t it?”

  “Yeah.” But I couldn’t quite verbalise how the alley had felt strange. Like somewhere else, I might have said. The idea crossed my mind that I’d seen a ghost, but I had never believed in them. I was a rationalist, an atheist, and until Nigel’s death I’d been happy and comfortable with that. Since he’d taken his own life, I had been struggling. Not for him, because he was gone now, flickering out from a wonderful, expansive consciousness to nothing in the space of a pavement impact. But for me. All that was left of Nigel was in my mind, and the minds of those who loved him. That didn’t seem much to leave behind.

  I thought of those weird shapes across the rotting brickwork, blown clay in the shape of a rising, clasping arm and hand.

  “Max says hi.”

  “Hi, Max.”

  “See you soon. And don’t go wandering tonight. Weather forecast is awful, and you need sleep.”

  “Damn right. Bottle of wine, then bed, like a good boy.”

  “Good boy.” Ash hung up, leaving me alone in the park with the rain, and the puddles, and the memory of a time me, Nigel and a few others came here
to play football when we were kids. I thought I heard his laugh. But it was someone else, and I started walking again before whoever was laughing caught up with me.

  Wind roared around my house and made the roof creak, rain hammered against the closed windows, and next door’s dog barked, waiting for them to come home. I tried to sleep for a while, but failed miserably. The brief buzz I’d had from the bottle of wine was gone, melted away into the darkness of my bedroom. I lay awake for a while staring into the shadows.

  Then I got up, dressed, slipped on my raincoat that was still wet from walking home from work, and went out into the night.

  It was almost two in the morning.

  I walked into the city. I lived in a suburb, but it was only fifteen minutes through the park, past the hospital and into town. All that time I saw no other pedestrians, and only a few cars. Some of them were police vehicles, and one slowed when it passed me, a pale face peering from the window obscured and made fluid by rain impacting the glass. I stared back, hiding nothing. The car moved on.

  I was heading along the main street, intending to visit that alley again. There had been something strange about the woman, but I found that I was not afraid. I had no idea why. Maybe it had been Ash’s strange, repulsed reaction to that feature on the wall, and my realisation that I was less troubled than her.

  The weather was atrocious. Wind howled along the town’s main thoroughfares like a beast unleashed, revelling in the fact that there was no one there to view its night-time cavortings. It whistled through the slats of fixed benches, rattled shutters on jewellers’ shops, and flung litter into piles in doorways and against wet walls. Rain lashed almost horizontally, spiking into my face and against my front, the coat hardly any barrier at all.

  I leaned into the wind and rain, working my way through the town, and the night was alive around me.

  I saw a few people. It was earlier than I usually chose to walk, and a couple of the later clubs had only kicked out an hour or so before. A few drunks huddled against the weather and tried to remember where they lived. Some were in pairs, more alone. I also saw the homeless woman with the dogs. The hounds looked my way, but I don’t think they growled, or if they did the wind carried the sound away. Maybe they were growing used to me.