Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  I turned to ask the monk the significance of this astonishing effect, but he merely put his finger to his lips and, with the gentlest push in the small of my back, propelled me towards one of the mirrors which were of the finest Venetian make, curious possessions for a house of prayer and penitence. When I was within five feet of the glass, he indicated that I should stop and observe what was before me.

  I saw myself framed by the mirror; behind me another image of myself, behind that another, and so on in an infinite regression, each one dimmer and gloomier than the last, until I faded into a grey-green obscurity. It was, of course, as I saw it first, a purely natural phenomenon, while at the same time being wholly illusory. I was staring not into infinity, but at a piece of glass backed by a mercury and tin amalgam. The contemplation of this spectacle so absorbed me for some moments that I forgot entirely about the monk, until I noticed that his image could not be seen in the glass. I turned around, and saw that he was standing directly behind me, so that I had obscured any reflection of him.

  I was about to make some remark, when he put a finger to his lips again and pointed at the mirror. I turned back and once more, this time with strong inner misgivings, gazed at myself multiplied in the mirror.

  The sight I beheld was different from my last encounter with it, though at first I could not discern where the difference lay. By slightly shifting my position in relation to the mirror, I could see more clearly the second image of myself behind the first, and it was then that I received a shock. The second image was the difference. Not only was it dimmer, but it seemed older. At first I tried to dismiss it as a passing illusion, but there were lines on the face which were not present in my most immediate reflection. The hair, moreover was more disordered and had the taint of grey in it. I looked at the third image, which seemed older still. Deep grooves of disappointed hopes curved around my lips and darkened my eyes. My hair was not only greyer but had begun to thin. I blinked, passed my hand over my face, but the illusion—if it was an illusion—remained. Down the endless corridor I stared as each succeeding reflection of myself diminished and decayed until, far in the unreal distance, I could see, faint and small, but still discernible, a grinning skull and skeleton to which a few rags of decayed flesh still adhered. I cried out in horror, and the echo shrieked back at me a thousand times. When I turned from the mirror, I saw that the monk was gone. I was alone.

  I ran, and found that I was running towards my infinite self in the opposite direction. This filled me with such terror that it confounded my senses for a while, and some time elapsed before I recovered my wits sufficiently to find the exit from the endless corridor. The monastery had become a labyrinth to my wounded mind, and for a long while I blundered through decaying passages and chambers, and through vast ruined halls, until at last I found my way out into the open air where, to my astonishment, the sun was already beginning to decline into a cloudy and ensanguined west.

  I untethered and mounted Salamanca, who seemed to welcome my arrival, and we set off at once on the long ride to Guadalajara. I truly believe that it was my faithful horse, rather than I, who found the way back to our Franciscan sanctuary. We arrived before its gates in starlight, and under a moon without whose guiding illumination Salamanca and I would have been utterly lost.

  There is more in this journal, but it is mostly fragmentary. Some of it shows evidence of a deeply troubled mind, but I don’t need to quote further. I had taken scans of these and other pages. It was evening, and I had not eaten all day. Needless to say, my hosts offered no refreshment. When I took my leave of Lord Glimham and the skeletal blonde whom I took to be Serena, Lady Glimham, they looked at me searchingly, almost in a concerned way. Glimham asked if the Sotheran papers were “worth selling” and I replied, again ambiguously, that they were of great value.

  As I drove my car down towards the entrance gates, the evening sun was low and shone almost directly in my face, masked only by a belt of spidery trees. The protesters were still at the gates, sitting on camp-stools and regaling themselves with sandwiches and Thermos tea. I felt a pang of hunger and, in a momentary loss of concentration, swerved towards them, almost hitting an elderly lady who fell off her stool. The rest shook their fists and yelled at me. To them it had been a deliberate attack on their righteous cause. I felt dazed and confused. It was as if someone or something had taken momentary possession of the steering wheel.

  Nothing, except a faint but persistent sense of unease, could restrain the feeling of exhilaration I felt over the next few weeks. I wrote some chapters and a synopsis, then approached a publisher who showed enthusiasm for the project. All was going well, or seemed to be. It was Julia who alerted me to the fact that I was working too hard, lecturing and giving tutorials during the day, writing in the evenings, sparing no thought for myself or others. My work on Sotheran had almost finished before I paid her any attention.

  One evening, on returning from a seminar on Byron, I took a bath. I had begun to pay conscious attention to my exhaustion, but still denied it to the world. A bath, I thought, would dissolve anxieties. I am still young enough to believe in simple remedies.

  The area of the bath is surrounded on three sides by mirrors, an idea of Julia’s. I have never cared much for the sight of myself naked, and I have always had an aversion to the endless reflection that Sotheran writes about in his memoir. Indeed, the image had preyed upon me rather, and this may explain what appeared to happen next.

  The bath had done me good. Cares from the day had dissolved. I rose out of the water and, without giving it much thought, cleared the steam from the mirrors that surrounded me. Before taking my towel, I studied myself in the glass. I had lost weight recently, and was preparing to be pleasantly surprised by what had become of my figure.

  The heat of the water had made my skin pinker than usual, and I looked with interest at the infinite recessions of my body in the glass. I found it hard to focus my eyes on the grey-green distance. It was my partner Julia who had put the mirrors up. She liked the paradox of the mirror world, which was at once entirely real and completely false. It was, she said, the simplest and most profound of art installations.

  I seemed to be looking at a stranger. It was me, of course, the features were recognisable, but I could claim no ownership over my reflection. The eyes were cold and lustreless—their weariness was ancient. And each succeeding image in the infinitely long line was increasingly strange until, at the apex of the endless vista, I saw something shadowy and utterly alien, with two points of darkness for eyes. Then that thing began to advance, and all sense of perspective collapsed. It was not me at all, but a dark man in a rusty black suit, with a white stock around his throat. He was running down the endless corridor towards me, lank hair waving in a mythical breeze, while my own image shuddered in the vaporous heat. His lugubrious eyes were hungry to possess me, while I was beginning to lose all that I was. I could barely see myself; in a moment I might not exist at all.

  A hand on my shoulder; arms around me as I collapsed—it was Julia. She was by me as I recovered, slowly, as far as I am able. I still am, but do not know if I will be. I cannot be what I was: that is certain.

  Now I have achieved my “impact”. My book, The Endless Corridor: William Sotheran, Doomed Romantic, has been published by Bloomsbury, and John Carey has reviewed it favourably in the Sunday Times. I have presented a Radio 3 documentary about Sotheran, and my lectureship at Wessex University has been renewed. But Julia walked out on me two days ago, giving no reason, though maybe I can guess. I am chained to a madman. I owe Sotheran, and he is not about to forget my obligation to him. He beckons to me from the Endless Corridor where Fame and Oblivion are one.

  STEVE RASNIC TEM

  WHATEVER YOU WANT

  STEVE RASNIC TEM’s latest titles include Figures Unseen: Selected Stories, from Valancourt Books, and a middle-grade novel about Halloween, The Mask Shop of Doctor Blaack, from Hex Publishers. Forthcoming are two new collections: Everything is Fine Now, a collection of
his young-adult horror from Omnium Gatherum, and The Night Doctor & Others from Centipede Press, collecting the best of his recent horror stories.

  “Holidays are complicated emotionally for most of us,” Tem says, “and Christmas may be the most complicated holiday of them all. It’s a season that promises much, while burdened with a lifetime of regrets and disappointments.

  “As children we made our wish-lists of the things we wanted most in the world. As we grew older, we discovered that deciding what you really wanted wasn’t as easy as it seemed. Even worse are the wants we can’t bring ourselves to admit to, but which always seem to leak out just the same.”

  THE CHRISTMAS SEASON was impossible to escape, gobbling up more of the calendar with each trip of the world around the sun. This year Trish was appalled to find Christmas aisles in the big box stores just days after the last “Trick or Treat!” of Halloween.

  Little Bean was all of three now, but thanks to television able to recognise the holiday for the first time. She’d chattered on and on about “Santy Claws,” one of the few clear phrases Trish was able to pick out of a stream of moist gibberish as Little B roamed their small apartment in unrepressed delight… and rage, if Trish ever said no. Anger or joy, Little Bean always seemed to be screaming.

  Every mother Trish knew said, “Mine did the same thing. They grow out of it.” Trish made an effort to believe them. “Don’t take it personally.” She tried to believe that too, even under a barrage of I hate you!s.

  “Well, you asked for this.” That’s what her mother told her. Actually, she hadn’t asked for this, not the deadening sameness of motherhood, the isolation of the single mom at the playground, the loss of a future she could now only imagine. Little Bean’s dad was supposed to be doing this with her, but he’d wised up, skipped town. She wondered what kind of Christmas he was having.

  It wasn’t that Trish hadn’t wanted a child. The truth was she just didn’t know. And then she had one. And that child would cry and cry as if desperately wanting something she wasn’t getting, but Trish had no idea what it was. Was it because Trish secretly hated breastfeeding? Found it painful and somewhat disgusting, her child chewing on her like that? Was it because she’d never wanted to do this, at least not by herself?

  Trish had a fleeting notion that one day Little Bean would suddenly start speaking, confessing that she could have told her mother what she had wanted at any time. She just hadn’t cared to.

  Little Bean wasn’t the only person Trish had to please. She had her mother and father, grandparents, friends (at least the few that were left—a bunch had bolted once they realised Trish with a kid was far less fun than Trish without). She had sworn she wasn’t going to wait until the last minute to shop, but here she was—Christmas Eve—frantically looking for a parking spot with her child screaming in the back seat.

  She drove past the big malls. Their parking lots were full, cars prowling the lanes opportunistically, following shoppers walking out of stores with their arms full. She remembered an old mall farther out, scheduled to be torn down, but remaining open until the end of the holiday. Maybe she’d find unusual things there for the people on her list. They’d be impressed, especially with her having a difficult kid to take care of. It was already late afternoon. Another heavy snow waited in the night. The streets were flooded in steel grey fog.

  The road out was poorly-lit, with few houses along the way. The last rays of the setting sun made the distant woods appear on fire. An arc of tree limbs protruding from a snowbank resembled a partially buried giant spider.

  Once past the worn-out welcome to the mall sign, construction barriers guided her through the main level of the old shopping complex. Orange cones and plastic webbing blocked everything. She descended a curved road to the basement level, parking crookedly between piles of debris, but so had everyone else. She got out and lifted B from her car seat. Her daughter thankfully was sound asleep. Trish remembered a vast amusement hall on this level. Now the windows were empty and greased.

  A dark furry shape in the middle of the sidewalk turned out to be the burnt remains of a Christmas tree, a few soot-blackened balls dangling from its skeletal limbs. She was already feeling discouraged about finding anything good here, but she was running out of time. Too late to shop anywhere else, she was on a mission to find and buy.

  Beneath broken concrete the ground moaned as if collapse were imminent. Some cracked exterior steps led to the main level. As darkness filled the risers the steps appeared to float in midair. B weighed almost nothing. When she got to the top she checked the blanket to make sure her daughter was still there. The child’s face was pale, but her lips moved, as if whispering secrets Trish was not meant to hear.

  Only a few weary-looking shoppers stared into the dimly-lit windows. An older man staggered past her, his overloaded bags hanging down and brushing the snowy sidewalk. His red Christmas sweater bore a giant white clown’s face—big googly eyes over the nipples and a misshapen red nose, a wide crooked smile like a rip across the belly. He didn’t appear to notice she was there.

  There was a manger scene in a display window. Someone had replaced the baby Jesus with a dirty doll’s head. The other figures were hunched with filth and looked less-than-human, their tiny faces dismayed. Skinny melting candles on either side leaned with dangerous possibility. A pile of rags on the sidewalk nearby stretched forth a hand clutching a can. The mouth splutter that followed might have been “please!” She gave the genderless arm a wide berth, sure it was a scam. She wanted to think the best of people, but she was never up to the task.

  A pile of dirty snow was studded with black stones, a water-logged scarf. It might have just been the remains of a good shovelling, but Trish thought she could make out a face. Dark figures hurried past the mall entrance. Some of them actually ran. “In a hurry for disappointment,” she’d often heard her father say.

  B stirred as they went through the doors. She thrust her blonde head out of the blanket looking startled. She began to cry, then stopped as she looked around.

  “Down,” she said, and Trish lowered her to the floor. She clutched three fingers of her mother’s hand. Trish felt relieved. Maybe the kid would behave—she needed at least one thing to go right today.

  “Toys?” B said weakly, as if afraid of the word.

  “No toys today, Bean,” Trish replied. “Santa will bring you some tomorrow. We can’t be selfish every day—today we shop for other people.”

  “Santy Claws!”

  “That’s right, Bean,” she replied, distracted. From this angle it was difficult to read the names of the stores. She had no choice but to go down each aisle and find some place still in business.

  “Santy!” B cried again, and broke away, running straight ahead into shadows and dim light.

  Trish stared for a moment, and then shouted, “Bean! Come back here!” She ran into the murkiness after her, furious. She had absolutely no control over the kid.

  They were in some kind of central space, poorly lit, and half of it was blocked off where demolition had already begun. Trish was vaguely aware of a few shoppers circling the area, going in and out of shop doors that opened onto this space. Some were blackened silhouettes, like ambulatory fire victims.

  Trish didn’t even see the line of children until she ran into the tail end of it, and Bean, waiting with the others. She grabbed onto her little girl and started to pull her away.

  “No, Santy!” Bean screamed, squirming.

  “Can I help?” The voice was nearby and below her. Trish looked around. A very short old woman in an elf’s cap much too big for her head stared up at her.

  “I—there’s not enough time.” Trish was flushed, angry. “There are presents I just have to get.”

  “Leave her here and you can shop. We’ll take care of her. She’ll visit Santa Claus, and you’ll get your shopping done unencumbered.”

  “Santa Claus?” Trish gazed up the line to its beginning. There was the big chair holding an old man swallow
ed up by a voluminous red suit. He appeared to be asleep as a small child chattered into his face. Santa’s beard was long, but not very full. Large patches appeared to be missing, and that child, leaning so close to the old man, was eating them?

  “But I can’t just leave her here. Can I?” She looked back up at Santa. The next child in line crawled up into his unpromising lap. The old man startled, straightening up so quickly the child almost fell. The large reindeer nearby suddenly came to life—someone in costume—and jumped forward, but Santa had already steadied the child with his knobby hands.

  “Don’t you just hate Christmas? I know I do,” the elf woman said. “People are terrible, and the little brats, aren’t they just the worst this time of year?” The old woman’s grin displayed many missing teeth.

  “I…well, yes, sometimes.” Trish looked down at B, whose eyes were fixed on Santa. “There’s just never enough time. And it’s not like I get to do anything fun, anything I want to do. It’s really not fair.”

  “Do you know what your little girl wants for Christmas?” A new voice, another woman’s. Trish turned and was appalled by the towering height of the figure. It was the costumed reindeer from Santa’s side—how did she get here so fast? The reindeer suit had brown arms and legs and an enormous white bib covering the torso, a large grotesquely friendly reindeer head with wide-set eyes staring at some distant point in space.

  “Everything, everything she sees on TV. She jumps up and down and goes crazy over every single toy commercial. She wants it all.” Trish hated the way she sounded, but it was the truth.

  “Don’t we all,” the little old woman said.