Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  There’s a part of town where five roads converge. People call it a square, though it isn’t really. It’s disordered and accidental, the same as most people who pass through from midnight onwards. That night it was a wilder place, and as I approached along the main street I had to stop and stare. The square seemed primeval. Great cliffs of brick, stone and glass rose up on all sides, channelling torrents of wind and rain that met in the middle as if in battle. A tornado of litter and rain twisted back and forth, throwing off its contents and sucking more in. The sound was staggering, the effect intimidating. I could see shop windows flexing beneath the onslaught, as if the buildings themselves were breathing great, slow, considered breaths.

  I stood there for a while just watching, and then as if carried like shreds of refuse on the storm, memories of Nigel came in.

  We cross the square, arms around each other’s shoulders. It’s a Saturday afternoon and we’ve been in the pub all day, ostensibly to watch a big rugby match, though neither of us is really into sport. The atmosphere was electric, the pub a sea of shirts of two colours, good-natured banter fuelled by beer turning into hearty singing, and much friendly mockery of the losing team. It’s been refreshing and upbeat, and Nigel has said that tribal warfare has never been so much fun. We’re going to buy food. We head down one of the narrower streets—

  —and Nigel reels from the blow, staggering back into a doorway as the big, thick thug storms after him. I’ve never been so afraid in my life. But that’s Nigel getting picked on for no reason. We simply walked the wrong way and met the wrong nutter. He’s drunk, that’s obvious, and though I’m not one to judge by first appearances, he looks like he likes a fight.

  He launches another punch at Nigel, then I’m piling into the bastard from behind, shoving him forwards as hard as I can into the shop window. Glass cracks. He half-turns to glare at me, murder in his eyes and blood running from a cut in his forehead. Nigel lands a punch on his nose, a pile-driving crunch that we’ll talk about for years to come—

  —we’re following two girls who have been smiling at us all afternoon. We’re too old to stay at home, too young to hit the pubs, so town is our afternoon playground, and today feels special. Nigel is the good-looking one, and both girls have been eyeing him. I’ll become used to playing second fiddle to my friend.

  I sighed, and my breath was lost to the storm like so many memories. His death still hit me like this, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever grow used to it.

  Buffeted by high winds, soaked to the skin, I decided to make my way home.

  The shape started across the square just as I took my first step. It was a man, perhaps late fifties, long grey hair swirling around his head and coat flapping in the wind. Yet none of his movements seemed quite right. His hair moved a little too slowly, like flexing wire on a stop-motion mannequin instead of real hair. His coat seemed to shift and wave in slow motion. He paced across the square with a definite destination in mind.

  He looked just like the woman I’d seen the night before. Out of place, removed from his turbulent surroundings, walking his own path through a city that seemed unable to contain him.

  I followed.

  Walking across the square, emerging from the shelter of the buildings, I submitted myself to the full force of the storm. It was as if with every step I took, the storm focussed all of its attention on me, driving along streets and roads and smashing together at that violent junction. I staggered left and right, arms spread for balance, the hood of my coat alternately filling with wind and acting like a sail, then flattening against my scalp like a second skin. I forged on, head down, thinking of arctic explorers fighting against harsh gales to reach their goal. Rain stung my face. I could hardly see anything, squinting at the ground just ahead of me to see where I was going. I crossed the paved area, then a road, and then finally I felt the storm lessen as I neared another building. Hugging myself to its shelter, I looked ahead and saw the man. He was barely visible, a hundred metres ahead and already passing into the night. Winds whipped around him. Rain hammered down, dancing sworls in weak streetlights.

  Between one blink and the next, the man was gone.

  I strode ahead, moving fast to try and catch up. The storm screamed at me, threatening or warning. I paid no heed. I needed to see the man again, follow him, try to talk with him. I walked back and forth along the street, passing closed shops and cafés, and saw nothing. I ventured into doorways in case he had fallen and was hidden beneath piles of wind-blown litter. When I faced a narrow arcade, I pressed against the metal grille securing its entrance and tried to see deeper.

  The night seemed even darker in there, and more still. The shadows were heavy. Watching, I also felt watched.

  I took a couple of steps back. My breath was stolen by the wind. Glass smashed in the distance. A car alarm erupted somewhere out of sight, and part of a large advertising hoarding bounced along the road towards the square, shedding parts of itself as it went.

  Even if the arcade was not locked up, I would not have wanted to go that way.

  I hurried back through the square and started towards home. I saw a couple of other people, and they avoided me as surely as I avoided them.

  I slept for three hours that night, naked and cold in my bed with wet clothes piled beside me. Dawn woke me. The man haunted my dreams even as I lay in bed awake, still walking, grey hair and coat shifting to some force other than the storm.

  Morning brought relative calm. As I ate breakfast I watched the news, and saw that the storm had wreaked havoc across the country. Damage was in the millions. Miraculously, no one had died.

  I chewed cereal that tasted like cardboard and thought about that.

  No one had died.

  It was a Saturday, and as I followed my previous night’s route into town, the streets soon started to bustle with cheerful shoppers, gangs of kids laughing and joking, and people all with somewhere to go.

  I had somewhere to go as well. The square was a very different place from just a few hours before, full of people and life, none of them aware of the shattering storm that had existed there so recently. The storm was a dangerous animal, come and gone again, and it had visited with almost no one knowing.

  Across the square and along the street where the man had disappeared, I expected to see his discarded coat slowly being buried in a litter bin or draped over the back of a bench. There was nothing.

  The arcade was open. Home to a café, a clothes shop, a candle shop and a second-hand bookseller, it wasn’t somewhere I ventured frequently. In daylight, it looked less threatening. I stepped inside. A waft of perfumed air hit me from the candle shop, followed by the scent of frying bacon. It felt safe and warm.

  I tripped, stumbled, almost fell, and a youth reached out and grabbed my arm to stop me hitting the ground.

  “You all right, mate?”

  “Yes,” I said, startled. “Thanks.”

  “No worries. They should fix that.” He nodded vaguely at my feet then went on his way, headphones in and thumb stroking his phone.

  I looked down. The mosaic floor covering was humped as if pushed up by something from below. Yellow paint had been sprayed across the area some time ago, either a warning to beware or an indication of somewhere that needed to be fixed. No one had fixed it. The paint was faded and chipped, worn away by thousands of feet.

  “Hey!” I called after the kid. “You know what happened here?” But he had his headphones in and was already leaving the arcade.

  I frowned and moved sideways, shifting my perspective of the raised area. The mosaic tiles weren’t only pushed up a little from below, forming the dangerous swelling that I’d tripped on. There was something in their clay shapes.

  It looked like a face.

  I gasped, closed my eyes, turned away and leaned against a wall. When I opened my eyes again I was looking through a window at an old man sitting inside the café, nursing a mug of tea. He stared at me, and past me, then looked down at his phone.

  I gla
nced down at the ground again.

  It might have been a face. The curve of one cheek, forehead, the hollow of an eye-socket, and splayed out behind it was a flow of irregularities in the old tiles that resembled long, grey hair.

  “Oh, God,” I said. I wanted to grab someone and ask them if they saw what I saw. But if they didn’t, what then? What could I say, ask, believe?

  I took a photo of the raised area then hurried away, because there was someone I could ask. Ash was my leveller. She would hear me out.

  As it turned out, Ash had already phoned that morning and left a message on my landline.

  “Hey. Give me a call. Got some news.”

  I made some coffee first. Every step towards home had calmed my panic, and I was feeling more and more foolish over what I thought I’d seen. As I waited for the coffee to brew, every second that passed seemed to bring me closer to normality once more. Looking at my phone helped. The photo I’d taken showed nothing amiss, other than a slightly misshapen area in the arcade floor. However I viewed it, whether I zoomed in or not, there was no face.

  But that’s right, I thought. Because it’s daytime. They only come out at night.

  The idea came from nowhere, and was chilling.

  The phone rang as I was pouring coffee. I jumped and spilled some, cursed, snapped up the phone.

  “Hey, it’s me,” Ash said. “Fancy a coffee?”

  “I just made one.”

  “Right. Can I come over?”

  “Er…why?” It wasn’t often that Ash and I saw each other on the weekends. She was usually doing stuff with Max, and I was busy with the football club, or meeting friends, or travelling down to Devon to visit my family. Dad would grumble and talk about politics. Mum would ask if I’d met a nice girl yet.

  “Max and I are moving away. I got that job in Wales. I heard yesterday.”

  “Oh. Wow.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah, sure. Of course. Delighted for you!”

  Ash was silent for a while. “You go walking last night?”

  “No.” Once uttered, I couldn’t take back the lie. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe because Ash had already started to move away, and to include her in my troubles would be selfish. She’d wanted this for a long time. That didn’t mean I had to be happy, but I could still be pleased for her.

  “So I can come over, tell you all about it?”

  “Come on over.”

  “I’ll bring cake.”

  “You know me so well.”

  “The city eats people,” she said. She took a bite of cake as if to illustrate the fact. “We’re communal animals, but we’re not meant to be somewhere with so many other people. Why do you think places like London feel so impersonal? Live in a small village, a hamlet, know almost everyone there, that’s when you’re happiest. Here…it’s like we’ve created a monster and we’re feeding it every day.”

  Her comments hit me hard. They sounded like her trying to defend her decision to leave for somewhere more rural, and that wasn’t like Ash—she was always headstrong and positive. Maybe she was worried about me.

  “You think that’s why Nigel did what he did?”

  Ash raised her eyebrows, as if she’d never even considered it.

  “I think Nigel was a sensitive soul. Life was too much for him, and living in the city didn’t help at all. But no, he had his own real problems, only aggravated by being here. What I mean is…people disappear. One day they’re here, the next they’re gone, and it’s as if they’ve vanished into nothing. Know what I mean? The city eats them, spits nothing out, and eventually they’re just forgotten.”

  “That’s pretty depressing.”

  “I don’t want to disappear,” she said.

  “You never could. You’re too…wonderful.” I grinned, bashful at the compliment. But she saw how serious I was, because she didn’t take the piss.

  “You should leave too.” She tapped her engagement ring against her mug.

  “I’m…not sure I could.”

  “Really? You love this place so much?”

  I shook my head. No, I didn’t love the city at all. I just couldn’t imagine anywhere else feeling like home.

  We chatted some more, then talked about her leaving party which she’d be throwing in a couple of week’s time. She wanted me to DJ there. I said I was honoured, and I’d only do it if I could throw in some AC/DC. She hated them, but relented.

  As she finished her cake I thought of the city eating people, and the outline of a face in broken tiles, and the bubbled surface of blown bricks in the shape of an arm with clenched fist.

  Now that I had an idea of what to look for, I saw the city in a whole new light.

  That Sunday afternoon I walked. There were plenty of people around because many of the shops remained open, and the place felt relatively safe. But as time passed by, and I saw more, that sense of safety began to evaporate.

  By the end of the afternoon I felt like a meal in the jaws of a beast.

  I saw distortion in an old swimming pool’s caged-over window, and if I looked at just the right angle I could make out the shadow of a naked torso in the imperfect glass.

  At the base of an old hotel’s side-wall, where access chutes into the basement had been concreted over, two knotted protuberances might have been hands with fingers broken off. Clasping for air forever, the stumpy remains of digits pointing accusingly at everyone left alive.

  The stepped marble plinth of a war memorial had been damaged by vehicle impacts and the effects of frost, but there was another imperfection in its structure that became obvious to me now. The curve of a back, ribs plain to those who could see, one shoulder blade arched as if the buried subject were swimming against its solid surroundings.

  Finally I decided to go to the place where Nigel had died. I had only been there once since his death, and facing the reality of the scene had been too disturbing. Now, there was more I had to see.

  I would go at night. I dreaded what I might find.

  It was three in the morning, and the homeless woman was there with her dogs once more. The creatures glanced at me, then as I started to approach they pulled on their leashes, one whining, the other snarling.

  “I haven’t got anything!” the woman said. The fear in her voice was awful.

  “I’m no harm,” I said. “I just want to—”

  “What are you doing here at three in the morning, then?” she snapped.

  “What are you?”

  She didn’t answer this. Instead, she tugged on the leads and settled her dogs. We were outside a pub, long-since closed for the night, and she leaned against some hand-railing that delineated its outdoor smoking area.

  “I’m walking because someone I know died,” I said. “A friend. And I want to know…” Whether the city took him, I wanted to say, but I wasn’t sure how that might sound. “I’m going to see…”

  “Plenty wrong with the city at night,” the woman said. “During the day, people keep it alive. Probably best you go home.”

  “But I’ve seen you before. You’re always walking.”

  “I know where not to go.”

  “How?”

  “Experience.” She muttered something under her breath. I couldn’t see her face properly, and I didn’t want to go any closer in case that looked threatening. Perhaps she was talking to her dogs.

  “I’m going to the old station building,” I said. I hoped that might encourage some comment, positive or negative.

  “Hmm.”

  “Should I?” I asked.

  I saw her silhouette shrug. “You should just go home.” She started walking away and the dogs followed. When I tried to trail after her the animals turned and growled, both of them this time. I slowed, then stopped.

  “Why?” I asked, expecting no reply.

  “Make a habit of this and the city will notice you.” Then she was gone, keeping to the middle of the street and avoiding the deep shadows beside buildings.

  The night was quiet and
still, no storms, no rain, and on the way through town I saw several other walkers. I wasn’t sure who or what they were. I did not follow them. I was also careful to keep my distance, partly because they scared me, but also because they deserved their privacy and peace.

  I carried on towards the old station building. It was six storeys high, converted into an office block a decade before, and Nigel had worked in an advertising agency on the second floor. That morning he’d taken the stairs, walked past the door exiting the staircase into his studio, and continued to the top. The maintenance door into the plant room on the roof should have been locked, but he’d planned his morning enough to make sure he had a key.

  Once out on the roof, no one knew what he had seen, said or done. There was no note. Three people in the street below had seen him step up onto the parapet. Without hesitation he had walked out into nothing.

  Where he’d hit the ground there was a raised planting bed at the refurbished building’s entrance. He’d struck its wall, breaking his back. I went there now, a torch in my hand, dread in my heart.

  At every moment I expected to see Nigel walking somewhere ahead of me. The echo of a man taken by the city and clasped to its dark, concrete heart, out of place and no longer of this world. But I was alone.

  I searched for half an hour—the brick paved area around the entrance, the planter wall, the soil and shrubs of the planter itself. But I found no sign of Nigel. As every minute passed by my sense of apprehension lifted some more.

  He’s not here. The city didn’t get him. It didn’t eat him.

  People had seen him jump, and perhaps that made a difference. He hadn’t died alone with only the cold concrete for company. His body hadn’t lain there for hours or days afterwards, night crawling across him, darkness coalescing around him. Even dead, Nigel had remained in the human world, because his suicide was born of it.