Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  Then I talked to the young woman who’d thrown the jars. She was only nineteen, a hard-faced AG girl with china-white skin and hair tied back. She chain-smoked throughout the interview, flicking ash over the table between us. Her answers were mostly monosyllables, but a few times she interrupted me with sudden outbursts. ‘She wouldn’t let go of her little girl. That means she was using her as a human shield.’ And later, ‘Are you a copper or a fucking social worker? Wake up and join the real world.’ I don’t think she really heard a word I was saying.

  A couple of days later, a tiny padded envelope was sent to the Acock’s Green station. It was full of crushed stink bombs. The smell lingered in the building for days. Groups of neo-fascists took to patrolling the streets in combat jackets, led by dogs on steel chains. Meanwhile, the thefts continued. In desperation, all the local police stations joined forces in a massive raid on the homes of suspects. We found next to nothing. But local racists used the operation as a cover for their own little Kristallnacht. Asian shops were broken into and smashed up, and a few homes were set on fire. We were caught off balance, too busy hunting for stolen goods to stop the violence. I still wonder if our superiors knew what was going to happen and turned a blind eye.

  November was unexpectedly cold. It never seemed to become full daylight. The frost made everything slippery or tacky, difficult to handle. Car fumes made a smoky haze above the streets. I spent the days and nights rushing from one crime scene to another, from thefts to fights to arson attacks, my hands and face numb with cold and depression. It felt like the meaning was being sucked out of everything.

  Julia’s boyfriend moved to Coventry to start a new job. She started moving her own stuff over there in batches, a suitcase at a time. It was strange to find things missing - pictures, books, ornaments - that I’d come to take for granted as part of the house. Maybe Elaine was letting Julia take some things that weren’t strictly hers, just to avoid arguments. I felt too tired to mediate between them; all I wanted to do at home was sleep. Without Julia there, filling the house with her scent and music, I was reminded of how things had been before she was born. When Elaine and I had first set up home together. Maybe we could get some of that back.

  It was maudlin retreat into the past that sent me to the allotments in Tyseley, near the street where I’d lived as a child. The allotments occupied a strip of land between an industrial estate and a local railway line that carried only freight trains. There was a patch of waste ground at one end, with some derelict railway shacks and a heap of rusting car bodies. It was overgrown with fireweed and pale, straggly grass. I’d spent a lot of time there at the age of ten or eleven, getting into fights and spying on couples. Somehow I remembered the place as having a kind of mystery about it, a promise that was never fulfilled.

  It was my day off - either Monday or Tuesday, I’m not sure. Another chilly, overcast day. I’d been walking around Tyseley all afternoon, trying to make sense of things. How quickly it had all changed, once the fear had taken hold. I wasn’t immune either. How easy it was to blame. How hard it was to know. In some way I couldn’t understand, the police were being used. Not to find the truth, but to cover it up. There was a time, I thought, before I was caught up in this. There must be a part of me that can stand outside it. The light was draining away through the cracks in the world. By the time I reached the alley at the back of the allotments, a red-tinged moon was staring through the ragged trees.

  I was so far up my own arse by then that the first time I saw the child, I thought he was one of my own memories. The light was fading anyway; his face was indistinct. He was reaching through the chain-link fence from the railway side. I remember his fingers were unusually thin and pale; they looked too long for his hands. He glanced at me without making eye contact. His eyes were large and very dark, but his skin was so white it seemed translucent. His brand-new ski jacket made him look bulkier than he probably was. Something about his posture suggested need. I wondered what he was looking for.

  A flicker in the half-light distracted me. Another child, ducking behind the derelict shacks. Then a third, somewhere beyond the fence. I realised I was surrounded. But I felt more tired than scared. There was a smell in the air like ash and burnt plastic; probably there’d been a bonfire nearby on the fifth. The evening light felt dry and brittle, like old cellophane. There was no colour anywhere in this world. I could see a double exposure of my own hands as I moved from side to side, trying to catch one of the paper-faced children. The way they jittered and grabbed and hid reminded me of silent films. I wondered how far they’d go to become what they appeared to be.

  It was getting too dark to see anything much. I stumbled to the end of the line of shacks, where three old brick garages backed onto an alley. I’d once stood here and watched an Asian kid getting beaten up by skinheads. There was a smell of mould and cat piss. No one was around. I glimpsed two of the film children in a garage doorway, pretending to be a courting couple. I lunged at them, but caught only a rusty metal screen. One of them touched my wrist with soft fingers. It took me a few seconds to realise that he’d taken my watch. My mind kept asking me what was wrong with the garages. I looked around the alley in the unreal glow of city lights reflected off the clouds. Three garages. When I’d been here as a child, there’d only been two.

  I hardly said a word at home that evening. Near midnight, I came back with a torch and a spade. The children were gone. The third garage had been clumsily knocked together with bricks of different sizes, mortar slapped on to cover the gaps. It was a faux building, made from stolen materials. I prised the metal door loose and stepped inside. The ground was soft under my feet.

  Between the uneven walls, every kind of stuff was heaped up: clothes, food, cushions, magazines, all of it beginning to moulder. There was a pane of glass attached to the inside of the brick wall. Beetles stirred in the waning light of my torch. I saw bags of pet food that had been torn open by rats, flesh gleaming from the damp cases of porn videos, soft pizzas rotting in an open freezer that couldn’t be plugged in here. My foot slipped on dead leaves, and I put my weight on the spade.

  Have you ever dug into a cat litter tray and realised what was buried under the wafer of soil? The blade sank inches into the ground, then lifted a sticky wedge that smelled like a museum of disease. I pushed my left hand against my mouth and bit down. My torch fell and stuck, its light reflecting from pale spots in the exposed slime. Metal glittered. A face swam into view on a scrap of paper, then vanished.

  I dug for a while. The ground was full of cash: crumpled fivers and tenners, verdigris-covered coins, all slippery from the layer of nearly liquid excrement they’d been buried in. I gagged and retched any number of times, but I hadn’t eaten since lunchtime. Daylight seemed a long time ago. Eventually I got down far enough to reach a number of yellowish, brittle sticks wrapped in dark cloth. There was nothing left of his flesh. I did as much damage as I could with the spade, then covered up the fragments with the strange earth I’d removed from them. The contents of the garage had drained my torch; I doubted it would ever work again. Heft it there with the other rubbish.

  The moon’s small, bloodshot face peered at me as I stood in the allotments, wiping my shoes with dead leaves. I thought about the power of damaged lives. How a corrupt politician might try to come back, feeding on money like a vampire on blood. How he could attract followers desperate for an illusion of normality. No wonder the police couldn’t make a difference.

  Money talks. But you wouldn’t want to hear its accent.

  As I walked home, the streets around me were deserted. The sodium light gave the pavement a faint tinge of gold. There were no thieves, no vigilantes, no children, no beggars. If anyone had got in my way, I’d have killed them. I needed someone to blame. We all do. But there was nothing except a smell of shit, and an icy chill in the air.

  Joel Lane lives in Birmingham. His tales of horror and the supernatural have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, including Darklands, Fantas
y Tales, Little Deaths, Twists of the Tale, The Third Alternative, The Ex Files, White of the Moon, The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Swords against the Millennium, Hideous Progeny, The Museum of Horrors, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and Dark Terrors 4 and 5. He is the author of a collection of short stories, The Earth Wire, a collection of poems, The Edge of the Screen, and a novel set in the world of post-punk rock music, From Blue to Black. His second novel, The Blue Mash, was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2002. Lane has also edited Beneath the Ground, an anthology of subterranean horror stories from Alchemy Press, and with Steve Bishop he edited Birmingham Noir, an anthology of tales of crime and psychological suspense set in the West Midlands, published by Tidal Street Press. ‘ “The Receivers” is one of an ongoing series of supernatural crime stories I’ve been working on for a while,’ explains the author. ‘They aim to combine traditional weird elements with modern social and political themes. This story was written last year, and its theme hopefully needs no explanation.’

  <>

  The Death of Splatter

  LISA MORTON

  ‘Stumpfuckers?’

  Lee Denny looks up from his laptop and has to stop himself from gaping: the woman who has stopped by his coffee shop table and is commenting on his book title isn’t really beautiful, but with her dark crimson hair, lean curves and hint-of-husk voice she’s certainly striking. She glances from the paperback book beside the laptop and empty coffee cup, up to Lee’s face. Lee manages a smile.

  ‘It’s a horror novel.’

  She picks it up, scanning the cover art which shows a pen-and-ink drawing of a leering hunchback in overalls, and Lee’s name in a jagged font.

  ‘You’re reading this?’

  ‘I wrote it.’

  She cocks her head and arches one eyebrow, then reads his name out loud.

  ‘That’s me.’

  Her next question surprises him. ‘I’d like to read it.’

  He’s embarrassed to realise that he has simultaneously become hard (thankfully under the table) and has flushed, heat enveloping his face, making him stumble on his words. ‘It’s … uh … pretty rough stuff.’

  She glances at the book one last time, then sets it down. ‘Sounds good. I’ll pick one up.’

  He tears off a piece of slightly wadded paper napkin, pulls a pen from his laptop case and scribbles down a URL for her. ‘You won’t find it at your average chain bookstore, but you can buy it online direct from the publisher.’

  She takes the bit of napkin and starts to turn to leave. ‘Are you here a lot? At this coffee shop?’

  ‘Almost every day,’ he acknowledges.

  ‘Good. I’ll let you know what I think when I’ve read it.’

  With that she turns and strides off. He watches her go, liking the way her boots clink authoritatively on the asphalt and cause each hip to ride up with her steps, one side to the other. She finally turns a corner and is gone without a look back.

  Just then a waitress appears and asks if she can get him anything else. He actually jumps slightly, startled, and from her smirk he’s sure the waitress has seen his erection. He tells the waitress he’s leaving now, waits a few moments until he can walk upright again, then packs up the laptop and the paperback novel after laying a few ones on the table.

  He’s quite sure he won’t be doing any more writing today.

  When Jed Kunkel came down out of the Ozarks, he was twenty-four years old, seven feet tall, 400 pounds and hungry for pussy.

  At first he hadn’t liked the smell of the city - it smelled like garbage and puke and death. But then he’d gone into a supermarket, and had been surrounded by female odours. Now he’d decided to stay in the city for a while.

  He got a job as a bouncer at a trendy nightclub. He knew the owners and other employees and patrons all made fun of ‘the hick’, but he didn’t care, because the nightclub was one big fuck pen. Jed came up with that phrase one night while standing at the door, and was so pleased by it that he smiled for hours.

  The nightclub also made trolling easy. Up in the hills, back home, it’d been getting harder and harder to get women. Since the mines had closed, most folks had moved away; the few females left in the area who weren’t heavily guarded had long since fallen prey to Jed or some other predator.

  But here in the city, at the nightclub, pickings were easy. Jed started one night with a thirty-ish, very drunken woman who’d been thrown out alone at closing. She got in his truck with a giggle and burp. He hoped she wasn’t going to barf. He hated that.

  He drove her to the abandoned factory. He’d found it earlier that week, in a rundown industrial area. He’d located a side entrance where he could park his truck unseen. He’d sawed through one padlock and was in; he’d set the place up with what he would need.

  By the time he arrived at the factory, the woman had passed out. That was fine with him; in fact, it was better. It made it easier to carry her in, strap her down on the table, carefully cut away her clothes…

  … and then saw off her left leg just above the knee. While his nose went crazy with the delicious scents.

  Lee finishes out the week in a haze of anticipation mixed with a need to produce, to produce more words, more books. He finishes Slit Thing, the sequel to Stumpfuckers (although truthfully he’d had the novel sitting on the coffee shop table by his laptop for bait as much as anything else, a ploy that had apparently worked), and begins a new one.

  And all the while, the girl is never far from his mind.

  He goes to the coffee shop earlier every day, and stays later (to the great irritation of the wait help, but his attitude is fuck ‘em). He glances up often, even though he’s calculated a minimum of two weeks for her to get the book, read it and report to him. Still, he thinks she might be a fast reader, and the book, after all, is not that long a read.

  She’s suddenly standing at his table on day eight.

  She tosses down her own copy of Stumpfuckers, this one with a broken spine (so, Lee thinks, she’s one of those readers). He waits for her to tell him that it was disgusting, that it was sick, that he’s sick.

  Instead she tells him it was amusing.

  ‘Is that a compliment?’ he asks.

  She shrugs. ‘Good in parts, but too unrealistic.’

  ‘Unrealistic?’

  She picks up the book again and thumbs through it. ‘Like here, on page thirty-six - you have a man being stabbed through the chest by a dildo. Not possible.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asks with a slight smile, trying to sound provocative, flirting.

  Her answer, without hesitation: ‘Yes.’

  He feels as if he’s somehow losing an important game. He has no idea where to go now, so he falls back on a criticism that has been levelled at him by other women he’s known (usually briefly): ‘Did you think it was … uh … misogynistic?’

  She’s smiling now. ‘Of course. So what?’

  He’s at a loss again, when she adds, ‘I bought your other books, too. I’ve already read most of the sci-fi one …’

  ‘Wire Mistress?’

  ‘Right.’

  A long pause, which he finally breaks. ‘Well?’

  ‘Stumpfuckers is better. I don’t really like science fiction. And what’s more is … I don’t think you do, either.’

  ‘Well, uhhh

  She glances around his table, where a half-empty coffee cup is the only sign of an order once placed. ‘Do you ever stop writing long enough to eat?’

  ‘I really just like the coffee here—’

  She cuts him off: ‘I didn’t mean here.’

  Goddamn, he thinks, this woman is actually asking me out. ‘Oh. Yes, I do that at least once a day, usually at night.’

  She leans down over him, so close he can smell the musk of her shampoo. She types an address and a name onto the end of his document. ‘Meet me there at eight.’

  He glances at the address, and has no idea where it is, but nods vigorously. ‘Okay. Yeah.’

  She st
arts to turn to go, then catches herself. ‘Oh, by the way - you misspelled “Arkansas”.’ Then she smirks and exits sidewalk right.

  He watches her for a while, then looks down at the name she’s typed.

  Claudia.

  His head had never quite healed from the surgery to remove the prohibchip. Of course the operation had been done by a blarket doc, most of whom had probably never even heard of medical school; it had left him with a gaping scar above the right temple, and a large scabby patch where hair would probably never grow again.

  Of course the woman he’d had tonight hadn’t minded - especially not after he’d slapped the neuropatch on the back of her neck. It had worked just as the doc had promised, and the girl had dumbly followed him to the abandoned tech plant he’d already chosen. Once he’d had her wired to the old steel work bench, he’d removed the neuropatch so she was again aware. It made him even harder to watch her struggle, to hear her shrieks and gasps.

  After the first rape, he got hungry, so he put the neuropatch back on her. He reckoned he could have just finished killing her, but he thought he might come back for more later; after all, a man got hungry for more than just food. In fact, maybe he’d start a collection, a whole room full of his flesh toys. In the meantime, while he was gone it wouldn’t do to have anyone who happened to be wandering through this derelict part of the cityburb overhear screaming. So he patched her again, just to be safe. He went through her pockets and found her creddisk, and decided to eat at something better than his usual noodle takeout.