Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  McIndoe lunged, but he was too late. Broward had shoved the scissors as hard as he could into that itchy spot, right under his sternum. He was already good as dead. All the orderly could do was help him lie back, as the blood blackened the old man’s chest and his eyes became dull. Curiously, his face continued to hold an expression McIndoe had never seen before. The attendant had seen plenty of men die. He’d never seen one look relieved before.

  The orderly sat down in the chair next to the bed. The screaming was fainter. He could hardly hear it now. Just isolated, fading wails and cries under the constant up and down whooping of the fire alarm, and the sharp, frantic beeping of the monitors that had detected the absence of Broward’s pulse and blood pressure.

  Air moved in the corridor outside, a wind whistling through, though there were never windows open here, no way for a breeze to get in. The door creaked and moved a few inches. McIndoe tensed, trying to remember the words of a prayer he hadn’t said since he was a very young man, lying wounded in the mud. It had been hot and very humid then. Now it was cold, air-conditioned cold, but he was sweating and he wanted to move but he couldn’t.

  There was a red glint in the air, the hint of dust carried on the wind, or a flight of tiny red insects flying all together like a little cloud, coming straight at McIndoe, straight at his chest…

  McIndoe screamed as a white-hot wire thrust through his heart and out his back. He clutched at his chest, frantically lifted his tracksuit top and the T-shirt beneath. But there was no wound, and the pain was gone as quickly as it had come.

  He stared at his breastbone. It looked no different than before. His skin was wrinkled and old, a few remaining hairs wiry and white. McIndoe thought it looked like someone else’s chest, but he’d always thought that, at least since he was sixty.

  Now it didn’t just look different. His skin felt different. Like there was something there, something just under the skin, though it was not visible.

  It was a little itchy. Just in the middle. Only a little bit now, but it was bad enough. Hard to imagine how much worse it would be in seventeen years…

  McIndoe automatically moved to scratch, but stopped himself. His face set hard, and he sat for a while, thinking. Then he got up and found the tool bag where he’d dropped it on the floor.

  There was a big screwdriver in there, would serve as a chisel, broad enough to sever a finger at the joint. And he had a hammer. The floor would be his workbench, and there were plenty of bandages close by he could use to stem the blood.

  Painkillers too, but he didn’t think he’d use them.

  The pain would be a good distraction.

  A distraction from the itch.

  THANA NIVEAU

  TO DROWN THE WORLD

  THANA NIVEAU was born to the wail of the Wendigo and the whisper of warp engines. So it is no surprise that her literary aspirations have combined both the mythic and the speculative, gaining her publication in Black Static, Interzone and numerous anthologies. Her fiction has been reprinted in Best New Horror many times.

  She has also been twice short-listed for the British Fantasy Award, for her debut collection From Hell to Eternity and her story ‘Death Walks en pointe’.

  Niveau is a Halloween bride, sharing her life with fellow writer John Llewellyn Probert in a crumbling Gothic tower filled with arcane books and curiosities. And toy dinosaurs.

  “I had just written a story called ‘Octoberland’, set in Houston, where I grew up,” explains the author. “It reawakened so many memories and feelings and, while dark, was an extremely nostalgic writing experience. I wanted to explore those feelings again with another place from my childhood—Galveston. I was reminiscing about it with my brother, and he told me about a recurring nightmare he used to have about the causeway. It became Evan’s nightmare in the story.

  “Horror is a great medium for exploring worst-case ‘what if?’ scenarios, and I’ve always been a huge fan of eco-horror. Toxic waste, pollution and nuclear power have created everything from Godzilla to man-eating worms and giant bunnies. But humans are ultimately the real monsters, and we’re engineering our own downfall. The idea that there are still climate change deniers out there, in spite of all the scientific proof of what we’ve done to the planet, is bewildering.

  “I confess I’m a little obsessed with the idea of a drowned Earth, and my darkest self sees something poetic in that being our ultimate fate.”

  EVAN HAD NEVER liked the causeway. He didn’t like the water, and he certainly didn’t like driving this close to it. It was only two miles from the mainland to Galveston Island, but it felt much longer. As a child, the drive had seemed endless to him. But then, all journeys had seemed endless when he was trapped in the back seat with his twin sister, Lea.

  He always tried to see it through her eyes—the causeway, the water, even the island itself. And he always failed. The bay was a dull greenish-grey, matching the colour of the polluted Houston sky. But somehow Lea saw beauty in it. The sea and its creatures had fascinated her since their very first trip to the beach.

  Evan still remembered it vividly, every detail. The huge ships gliding by out in the Gulf of Mexico, the seagulls wheeling overhead, occasionally diving down to snatch food from family picnics or steal fishermen’s bait. There was the staccato whirrrr of fishing lines being cast, and the sloshing of waves where the water met the land. And there were the smells. Fish, sea air, barbecue and coconut suntan lotion.

  Evan had been sitting on a pile of soft sand, using a plastic spade and bucket to build a castle. In his mind he could see exactly how he wanted it to look, but reality fell some considerable way short of fantasy. The disappointment was crushing. When his clumsy fingers refused to sculpt the delicately crenellated parapet exactly how it should be, he stood up and kicked the whole mess over, deciding it was more fun to be a giant destroying it instead.

  The army men he’d placed inside (he’d decided they were time travellers) were helpless against the onslaught of his stomping feet. The largest tower collapsed, burying them in an avalanche of sand. One soldier managed to escape, crawling bravely towards the moat before the rest of the castle met a similar fate. It was fun playing the villain, but after a while Evan began to feel bad for his victims. He hurriedly rescued them from the sand and sent them back to their time machine so they could go home.

  Behind him Lea was laughing brightly, and when he turned he saw her running towards the lapping waves. They pawed restlessly at the shore, foaming and frothing like boiled, sour milk. Lea tripped and went sprawling in the wet sand, staring around her in amazement. After a while she sat up. Then she reached down and plucked something from the sand. She held it up with a kind of hushed reverence, as though she’d found a sacred artefact.

  Evan didn’t want to go close to the water, but he was too curious about what she’d found. What if it was part of some pirate’s treasure? A gold doubloon or pieces of eight?

  But something seemed bent on thwarting all his wishes that day. It was only a seashell.

  Lea looked up as he drew near, her eyes wide with excitement. “Look, Evan,” she whispered. “It’s alive!”

  He peered closer and saw that she was right. A mass of wriggling legs emerged from the mouth of the shell. But there wasn’t anything special about that.

  “It’s just a hermit crab,” he said with a shrug, all wisdom and experience at the grand age of seven. Seven and nine minutes, he always told grown-ups. Those nine minutes were important.

  The shell was almost as large as Lea’s hand, and the reddish legs of the creature stretched out, waving in the air inches from her nose. Evan watched, curiously unnerved by the sight. A sudden strange image came to him of her popping the crab into her mouth, shell and all. In his mind he could even hear the sound it would make as she crunched it up, could practically taste it. He shuddered, banishing the unwelcome thought.

  “It was something else once,” Lea said in a strange voice.

  “Huh?”

  “Som
ebody threw it away, threw it in the sea. And it became this.”

  Now she was really creeping him out. She was holding the crab so close to her eyes she was in danger of being blinded by the squirming legs. There was a keenness to her scrutiny that disturbed him, something in her gaze that seemed old and knowing. She was suddenly like another person.

  After a while she set the crab down and watched as it scuttled away, vanishing into the white foam of the waves. Lea looked up at Evan, her expression serious. He had the unpleasant sense that some kind of exchange had taken place, some silent communication.

  Then the water surged, splashing and soaking her, and she erupted into delighted squeals and giggles as she flung herself into the surf. His sister was back, and whatever had replaced her for a moment was gone.

  Evan had never forgotten that strange encounter, and the memory returned with every trip he made to Galveston to see her. They’d both been weird kids, and weird kids grew up to be weird adults. But lately her e-mails and texts had reached a new level of what could only charitably be called eccentric.

  Lea was a field ecologist, buried deep in research on global warming. She’d developed a sudden interest in fossils, asking Evan to go to the Natural Science Museum and photograph all the Cambrian arthropods he could find there. Such arbitrary requests were nothing new, and he didn’t really think anything of it. He’d dutifully done as she asked, and found himself enjoying the little excursion as he imagined her there with him. It felt like the old days, when she still lived in Houston, and they got to see each other more often.

  He’d e-mailed her the pictures, but never heard back. That wasn’t unusual either. She was easily distracted and she often got lost in work, especially when intriguing tangents presented themselves.

  However, when he’d texted her a few days later to ask if she was happy with his photos, the response was baffling.

  Thought Anomalocaris or Marrella but not. Archaean Era?? Before?? Maybe from protoplanets. Must show—come see!

  He recognised the first name. It was one of the fossils he’d seen at the museum. Other than that, the message might as well have been in Klingon. They never bothered with full sentences when texting, but this was even more pared-down than usual. He’d called her back, but wasn’t able to get a straight answer about what she wanted to show him. Just that it was incredible and he had to come.

  He was at the highest point of the span now, the stretch of road furthest from the water. Ironically, it was the part that made him the most nervous. He could never banish from his mind the intrusive image of the bridge collapsing, of his car plummeting into the churning grey water, gravity pulling him down, down, down.

  “It’s only about ten feet deep there,” Lea had once reassured him. “You could easily swim to the surface and get to the shore.”

  Easy for her to say. She was more at home in the water than on land. For Evan the very idea of his head being submerged was enough to trigger a sense of panic.

  But he knew exactly what to do if his car ever did go in the water. He’d rehearsed it in his mind countless times to drill it in. First he’d unlatch the seatbelt, then try the electric window. If it worked, he’d lower it an inch and let the water slowly trickle in. If the electric window didn’t work, he’d climb over the seat and use one of the old-fashioned cranks on the back windows. As the water filled the car, he would stay calm and focus his mind, and as soon as the level reached his chin, he’d take a deep breath, crank the window down the rest of the way and swim out. He could hold his nose and kick his way ten feet to the surface, he was sure of that. Once there he could float or dog-paddle to the pillars of the causeway and wait to be rescued.

  Lea had laughed at his escape plan, but only until she realised he was serious. Then her expression had changed to one of pity.

  “I could teach you to swim,” she’d told him more than once. “Then you wouldn’t be so afraid of the water.”

  “I’m not afraid of the water. I’m afraid of what’s in the water.”

  “But there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  “Oh right, let me guess—the sharks are more afraid of me than I am of them?”

  “You’re statistically more likely to be struck by lightning than attacked by a shark.”

  “Fat lot of good those statistics will do me if I’m the unlucky bastard who gets the shark instead of the lightning.”

  It was a conversation they’d had so many times they could have recited each other’s dialogue. He had never even told her the full truth—that it wasn’t sharks he was really afraid of. What he saw waiting for him in the water was something else entirely, something with long, clutching arms that would pull him under. Something that would claim him.

  Galveston was no pristine Caribbean resort with crystal-clear lagoons where you could see everything swimming around your feet. In the dark, briny water of the Gulf of Mexico, there was no way of knowing what had just brushed against your leg, or what you might step on down there.

  Lea loved to dive beneath the surface, and those momentary disappearances when they were little had caused Evan intense distress. Quite apart from the irrational fear that she would never surface again, he lived in dread of her grabbing his ankles and dragging him down. She’d done it once in a motel swimming pool, and that was bad enough. But the idea of vanishing beneath those umber waves himself filled him with horror.

  At the top of the span he looked to his left to see the railway line that ran parallel with the modern road. It was the original causeway, over a century old and apparently still used by trains, although Evan had never seen one there. In fact, he’d never even seen the drawbridge lowered. As kids he and Lea had always hoped to race a train to the island, but it was not to be.

  The raised drawbridge was another thing Evan didn’t like, although he couldn’t have said why. Perhaps it was the way the two halves resembled a gaping mouth, like an alligator made of concrete and steel. The new causeway had no drawbridge; the arch was high enough for boats to pass underneath. But that didn’t stop him imagining the road suddenly lifting up in front of him, all the traffic smashing headlong into the unyielding wall. It was only once he had finally crested the hill that he could relax.

  One night he dreamed he saw a train. The two causeways were much closer together, and the new one was only wide enough for his car. The guard rails were missing. He heard the whistle of the approaching locomotive and looked up to see it racing along the tracks. Coming straight towards him. It was going too fast and he was going too slow. There was nowhere for him to go as the train jumped the tracks, its line of cars buckling as it twisted in the air. It came down on the narrow causeway and smashed through, plunging into the water like a sea serpent. Evan tried to brake, but the road followed the train’s trajectory, slanting down towards the waves. He woke up just before he fell in.

  It had all felt so real, so horribly inevitable, and he couldn’t help reliving the nightmare every time he passed the drawbridge. Once he reached the island, his heart rate would go back to normal. He could see whatever it was Lea wanted to show him and they could have a nice lunch. Before that, though, he had to pass one final landmark: the sunken boat.

  It had been there for as long as he and Lea could remember. The little fishing boat lay off to the right, among the reeds in the shallows at the edge of the shore. Only a piece of the hull remained now, and the masts jutted from the water like bones. In time there would be nothing left of it at all, and Evan felt an inexplicable pang of sadness at the thought. It was probably an eyesore for most, detritus that had never been cleared away. But, as eerie as it was, it was a fixture of the island for him and Lea.

  At last he could see palm trees, and the bay gave way to wetlands as he neared the end of the causeway. A heron was stalking through the saltgrass of the marsh. He was safe on dry land once more and he made his way along the main road, catching glimpses of the Gulf down the streets to his right. As he passed the iconic mansion known as Bishop’s Palace, it suddenl
y struck him that, in all the years their family had been visiting Galveston, they had never taken the tour inside.

  He reached Lea’s street and parked outside the little beach house she called home. She’d paid far too much for it, using most of the money from their inheritance. Then she’d squandered even more painting it a vibrant emerald green, only for the colour to fade within a couple of years. Sand, salt and sun were no friend to little wooden boxes. Now the house looked sickly, as did so many others around it. They were like film sets, places built to look like houses, but never actually meant to be lived in.

  Still, he had to concede that it had a sort of charm. A slender palm tree grew in front, its trunk curved in a graceful arc. And the vibrant pink bougainvillea that swamped the porch was in full bloom, almost obscuring the little sign that said MERMAID CROSSING. Evan had bought it for her as a joke in one of the tourist shops along the Strand, never imagining she’d hang it up. But he liked that she had.

  He’d driven all the way with the car’s AC cranked up high, wishing it was actually possible to make himself cold enough that the stifling heat might be tolerable. He shut off the engine and braced himself, then stepped out into the steam bath of the island. It was only May and it was already over 100 degrees.

  Before he had even closed the car door, Lea was pelting down the wooden stairs and running towards him, arms outstretched. He couldn’t help but smile at her exuberance as she flung herself at him in a fierce embrace, the impact causing him to swing her around. One of her flip-flops came off and landed on the hood of his car and they both laughed.

  “Wow, it hasn’t been that long, has it?”

  “It’s been ages!” she lamented.

  “Yeah, well, you could come see me, you know.”

  She didn’t reply.