Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

“I thought so, but Daniel has one with no date.”

  “He’d have had to delete the information himself, though I don’t know how.” Jane abandoned the delicate frown that had narrowed her keen eyes and said “How was he this week?”

  “I’m not sure he’s coping that well. He’s kept all the messages his wife left on the phone, but he seems to be convincing himself he can still hear from her.”

  “Maybe that’s how he’s coping. I don’t see the harm if it doesn’t put his patients at risk.”

  I couldn’t believe Daniel would let that happen. If he thought he was growing incompetent, surely he would take leave rather than risk botching an operation. Perhaps Jane was right, and his preoccupation was no worse than a comfort to him. However irrational it was, I came to accept it on his behalf as the week went on, until Samira stopped me as I returned from convincing a client to keep receipts for six years, not just one. “A Doctor Hargreaves was asking for you, Bill,” she said. “You aren’t sick, are you?”

  “No, he’s a friend.”

  “It was only that it sounded urgent. He says don’t call unless you have to, otherwise he’ll see you tonight as usual.”

  Friday was by no means usual, and if Jane hadn’t gone away overnight to deal with an office-wide computer crash I would have felt unreasonable for leaving her alone two nights in a week. I reached the pub earlier than normal, only to find Daniel already at a table. He’d been drinking fast or for a while, since his tankard was less than half full, and when he brought me a pint of Mohammed’s Prohibition he treated himself to its twin. “There’s another message,” he said.

  His smile looked determined not to yield but close to meaningless. When he brought out the phone I saw that the new message was undated and unidentified. “Jane doesn’t know how there can’t be a date,” I said and risked adding “Don’t you think that means it needn’t be new?”

  “It wasn’t there before. I’d have listened if it was.”

  “I’m saying it could have been delayed. Maybe there’s a glitch that left out the date as well.”

  His only response was to set the message off and turn the phone towards my ear, waving my hand away when I made to take the mobile. Even when I ducked towards it I could scarcely hear for the mass of unchecked conver-sations in the pub. The voice was feebler than before, barely recognisable as Dorothy’s. “I don’t like this. I don’t know where I am.” I could have thought it was as small as a child’s. “It’s dark and wet,” Dorothy protested. “I think it’s wriggling, or I am. Can’t you hear?”

  A hiss of static followed, which sounded as if some kind of collapse had overwhelmed the call. Once he’d pocketed the phone Daniel gazed expectantly if not beseechingly at me, but I was loath to share my first thought—that Dorothy had inherited her mother’s mental problem, which had overtaken her at her lowest ebb. I compromised by saying “Do you think that’s how she felt when she was waiting for you at the hospital? She wasn’t like that once you got there, was she?”

  “She was barely conscious. She hardly seemed to know I was there.”

  “I’m sure you must have made the feelings go away, so she couldn’t have had them at the end.”

  His smile had begun to look less studied. “You’re suggesting she made this call from the hospital.”

  “I’m sure that has to be it. I’ve had calls that got lost in the ether for days. I’ll ask Jane what’s the longest delay she knows about if you like.”

  “I’ve already spoken to the hospital. They say she wasn’t capable of phoning once they’d run the tests.”

  “That proves they’re wrong about this call then, doesn’t it? She’d already made the one asking you not to be late.”

  “I don’t believe she did say that, or from the hospital.” His smile was making itself plain now—amusement so wry it was more like regret. “I don’t think she was cut off,” he said. “She was saying someone wasn’t there, if you remember. I think she was telling them not to be.”

  “Come on, Daniel,” I said, perhaps too heartily. “Who could she have been talking to on your phone except you? And you’re the last person she would have wanted to put off.”

  Either this persuaded him to some extent or he preferred not to answer. Soon he was expounding on the merits of euthanasia and assisted suicide. I suspect that he sensed I was glad to be spared more of his obsession, because when we left the pub he said “I should think you’ve had enough of me for a week.”

  “I’d be less of a friend if I had. Let’s make it Monday as ever,” I said and was relieved not to see him take out his phone as he vanished into the dark.

  Jane’s task was more complex than she’d anticipated, and she wasn’t home on Saturday until I’d gone to bed. On Monday morning I was ashamed to realise I’d forgotten to quiz her on Daniel’s behalf. “How long do you think a call to a mobile could be held up?” I said.

  “Quite some time,” Jane said and poured herself a coffee even blacker than the one she’d just had. “A client of mine had a call turn up months late.”

  “I knew it,” I said and thought of phoning Daniel at once. “Daniel keeps getting calls from his wife that he thinks are new. You’d say they’re delayed, wouldn’t you? I’ll tell him.”

  “I don’t know if you should do that.” Jane took a sip so black that sensing its harshness made me wince. “I’ve never heard of staggered delays, if that’s what you’re describing,” she said. “I wouldn’t think it’s possible.”

  I decided against phoning Daniel. By the time I saw him that night I might have worked out what to say. I hadn’t when I reached the office, and meetings with clients left me no chance. I was at my desk and working on an e-mail in which words were shorter and less abundant than numbers when the receptionist rang me. “There’s a gentleman to see you, Bill.”

  “Could you ask him what he’d like to drink? He isn’t due for half an hour.”

  “He isn’t your appointment. He says you’re a friend.” With a hint of doubt Jody said “Doctor Hargreaves.”

  For a moment I was tempted to declare myself unavailable, and then I felt worse than remorseful. I hurried into the lobby to find Daniel crouched on a chair. He was consulting his phone or guarding it, and his stance looked close to foetal. When he glanced up I thought he was struggling to remember how to smile. “Can we talk somewhere private?” he said almost too low to be heard.

  Six straight chairs faced six more across a bare table in the nearest conference room. Daniel slumped onto a chair while I shut the door, and as I sat opposite him he said “She’s there again, Bill.”

  “Jane says calls can be delayed for months.”

  “I don’t think they were calls in the first place.” He laid his phone between us on the table and rested his distressed gaze on the dormant screen. “I’m sure this one isn’t,” he said.

  “What else could it be?”

  “I believe I’ve made some kind of connection.” He planted his hands on either side of the phone, and moisture swelled under his fingers. “Maybe keeping her on the phone helped, and I’m sure trying to speak to her did,” he said. “I think we’re hearing her as she is now.”

  I might have preferred not to listen to the evidence, but I was determined to help if I could. “Let me hear then, Daniel.”

  The marks of his hands were still fading from the table when he brought up the latest entry on the list. This one was bereft of details too. Even though he’d switched the speaker on, the voice was almost inaudibly faint. “It’s dark because I’ve got no eyes. That’s why the dark is so big. Or it’s eating its way in because it’s made of worms. They’re all I’m going to be…”

  Daniel dabbed at the phone with a moist fingertip once the thin diminished voice fell silent. Though I was appalled by the way Dorothy’s terrors had reduced her to the state of a fearful child, I tried my best to reassure him. “It has to be an old call, Daniel. It’s sad, but it’s only more of the thoughts you cured her of by being with her at the end.”


  “You haven’t heard it all yet.” He raised a finger, and a qualm plucked at my guts as I realised he had only paused the message. “Tell me what you hear,” he said like some kind of plea.

  “That’s me. It’s only me, or it’s the dark. I can’t really feel it, it’s only dark. Like being asleep and dreaming. Just dark and my imagination.” The voice might have been drifting into a reminiscent stupor, but then it grew louder. “Who is that?” it cried, and a rush of static unpleasantly suggestive of moisture seemed to end by forming an answer. “Me.”

  Daniel clasped the phone protectively, to no effect I could imagine. “You heard, didn’t you? You heard the other voice.”

  “I heard Dorothy, Daniel.” However sharp and shrill the final word had been, surely that signified no more than impatience. “She was saying what she said before,” I insisted. “Don’t let it upset you, but she meant she was by herself. And then you came and stayed with her till the end.”

  “I wish I could believe that.” Although he was staring at me, he appeared to see a sight considerably less welcome than I hoped I was. “I’m afraid I didn’t just bring her by calling,” he said. “I think I attracted something else.”

  I could have argued but confined myself to saying “Do you mind if we discuss it tonight? I need to get ready for a meeting soon.”

  “I’ll give tonight a miss if you don’t mind. I have to be prepared as well.”

  I imagined him sitting alone at home with the phone in his hand while he waited for yet another tardy message. Should I have insisted he came out for a drink? All I said was “Next Monday, then.”

  “Monday,” Daniel said as though the prospect was irrelevant if not unimaginably remote.

  He scarcely seemed to hear me wish him well as I saw him out of the building. Interviews and official phone calls took up my afternoon, and a job kept Jane away overnight. Our empty house felt like an omen of a future in which one of us would be on our own, and I was more than glad when she called me at breakfast to say she was starting for home. “And here’s something to tell Daniel if you think you should,” she said. “I’ve found a case where somebody made several calls in an hour but the person they were calling kept receiving them for most of a week.”

  I thought this was worth passing on to Daniel, and as soon as I’d said good-bye to Jane I rang him. His phone was unresponsive, refusing even to accept messages. I blamed his interpretation of his wife’s calls for making the utter silence feel like darkness so complete it could engulf all sound. I phoned the hospital where he worked, only to learn that he’d cancelled all his operations. They had no idea how long he would be on leave, and wished they knew.

  My first meeting of the day was after lunch. As I drove to the suburb next to mine I tried to think what to say to Daniel. I was hoping to persuade him that he needed someone else’s help. His broad house—one of a conjoined pair—was emptily pregnant with a bay window and shaded by a sycamore that had strewn the front lawn with seeds. Sunlight muffled by unbroken cloud made the front room look dusty if not abandoned. I was ringing the bell a third time when Daniel’s neighbour emerged from her house, pointing a key at her car to wake it up. “He went out earlier,” she said. “He’ll be at work.”

  At once I knew where he might be. In five minutes I was at the graveyard where I’d attended Dorothy’s funeral. Her plot was in the newest section, where the turf wouldn’t have looked out of place in a garden centre and the headstones were so clean they could have advertised the stonemason’s shop. Once I’d parked the car a wind followed me across the grass, and I heard the discreet whispering of cypresses. My footfalls weren’t much louder. I was trying to be unobtrusive, having seen Daniel.

  He was kneeling on Dorothy’s grave with his back to me. He hadn’t reacted when I shut the car door, admittedly as quietly as I could. While I was reluctant to disturb him, I wanted to know what state he was in. I strained my ears but heard only the reticently restless trees. At least I wouldn’t interrupt Daniel at prayer or in attempted conversation, and as I approached he stirred as though he was about to greet me. No, a shadow was patting his shoulder, a faint ineffectual gesture on the part of a cypress. In fact he was so immobile that I couldn’t help clearing my throat to rouse him. This brought no visible response, and I’d grown nervous by the time I came close enough to see his face.

  He wasn’t merely kneeling. His chest rested against the headstone, and his chin was propped on the sharp edge. However uncomfortable that might have been, he showed no sign of pain. His fixed smile looked fiercely determined, and his eyes were stretched so wide that I could only wonder what he’d been striving to see. They saw nothing now, because nobody was using them. When I closed the lids I imagined shutting in the dark.

  His phone had fallen from one dangling hand and lay beside the headstone. I retrieved it, finding it chilly with dew, and wiped it on my sleeve. For a moment I was pitifully relieved that I wouldn’t be able to look for any messages, since the phone was activated by a passcode, and then I recalled seeing Daniel type his birthdate. Before I could panic I keyed in the digits and brought up the list of messages. All the latest ones were unnamed and dateless, and there were two more than I’d previously seen.

  I opened the first one and held my breath. The pleading voice wasn’t much louder than the cypresses, and I fancied that it sounded afraid to be heard or else acknowledged. “Leave me alone. You’re just the dark and worms. You’re just a dream and I want a different one.” At first I thought the noise that followed was just a loose mass of static, and then it began to form words. “Mother’s here now,” it said. “She’s what she promised she would be. There’s nobody for you to tell and nobody to see. She’ll be with you always like a mother should.”

  I struggled to believe the explanation I would have given Daniel—that it was yet another deferred call from Dorothy, which was why she was referring to her mother in the third person—but not only the usage made the voice seem inhuman. It no longer resembled static so much as the writhing of numerous worms, an image I tried to drive out of my head as I played the last message. I almost wish I’d left it unheard. An onslaught of slithering swelled out of the speaker in wordless triumph, and in its midst I seemed to hear a plea crushed almost beyond audibility but fighting to shape words. I couldn’t bear much of this, and I was reaching to turn it off when another voice went some way towards blotting out the relentless clamour. “I’m here as well.”

  It was unmistakably Daniel’s, though it sounded in need of regaining strength. In less than a second the message came to an end. I closed my fist around the phone and tried to tell myself that Daniel could have recorded his voice over the last part of an existing message. The idea he’d left in my mind days ago was stronger: that the phone, or the way he’d sought not just to preserve all its recordings of his wife but to contact her, had somehow caused the situation. Perhaps I was mistaken, but by the time I doubted my decision it was too late. I found the edit button for the messages and let out a protracted shaky breath as I hit ERASE ALL.

  I used Daniel’s phone to call the police. Weeks later the inquest confirmed that he’d poisoned himself. When the police finished questioning me I drove from the graveyard to work. Though I yearned to be home, I managed to deal with several clients. At last I was at our front door, and when Jane opened it she gasped as if my embrace had driven out all her breath. “No need to hang on so tight. I’m not going anywhere,” she said, and I wondered how I could even begin to explain.

  MICHAEL BAILEY

  UNDERWATER FERRIS WHEEL

  MICHAEL BAILEY is a freelance writer, editor and book designer, and the recipient of more than two dozen literary awards, including the Bram Stoker Award, Benjamin Franklin Award, Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Independent Publisher Book Award, International Book Award, and others.

  His novels include Palindrome Hannah, Phoenix Rose and the forthcoming Psychotropic Dragon, and he has published two short story and poetry collections, Scales and
Petals and Inkblots and Blood Spots. Bailey has also edited such anthologies as Pellucid Lunacy, Qualia Nous, The Library of the Dead, You Human, Adam’s Ladder, Prisms and four volumes of Chiral Mad (the latest composed entirely of collaborations). He is currently working on a science fiction thriller entitled Seen in Distant Stars, as well as Seven Minutes, a memoir on surviving the forever-burning wildfires of California.

  “This was one of the late Jack Ketchum’s favourite short stories of mine,” recalls Bailey. “It was originally an experiment in blending second- and third-person narratives.”

  THE LANKY GENTLEMAN in the pinstripe suit and moth-eaten neck ruffle staggers forwards. He holds a card for you to take:

  COME RIDE THE UNDERWATER FERRIS WHEEL

  There is a mixed scent of caramel corn, candied apples, corn dogs and spilled beer as Cate waits her turn in line with her son. The trailer has a sign lit with small yellowing bulbs, which works cordially with the other food trailers to light up the otherwise dark path of sweets, meats and deep-fried foods on sticks.

  She lets go of Ian long enough to dig in her purse for money.

  “Large cotton candy,” she says to the man leaning over the counter.

  “Stick or bagged?” he says, pointing to the pre-filled plastic bags of rainbow clouds lining the inside of the trailer.

  In back, a man wearing a hairnet spins pink silk onto a conical cone of white paper.

  She takes in the smells of hot sugar and oil.

  “Stick,” Cate says, and then adds a couple of corn dogs to the order.

  She turns to her son to see if he wants ketchup or mustard or both, but he’s gone. The couple standing in his place looks past her to the menu.

  “Ian?”

  She expects him at the ticket counter because he wanted more rides, not food, and he isn’t there, nor is he wandering around the carny games across the promenade.

  The others in line don’t seem bothered that he’s disappeared.