‘You killed Rathke’s wife,’ I said. ‘After all this time, you had to have revenge? How does that work? How can you feel good about that? You’ve stewed in your sad little juices all this time and forgotten to live your life because of it.’
He couldn’t hear a word.
‘I did her too,’ he slurred. In the blood that streamed from his mouth were splinters of bone. ‘The bitch. All that time she thought she got away with it. Well I got her too. This…’ he thrust the tattoo under my nose, but it was obscured by blood. ‘This was a reminder to me over the years. I got her too. I got her too.’
‘But she killed herself,’ I said. He didn’t hear that either.
He died at the moment his strength seemed at its greatest. He was gripping me so hard that he was lifting himself off the floor.
Me. Korff. The gun.
Sunlight streaming through the front window. No sounds. Not even traffic. Or maybe there was, but I couldn’t hear it. The vibrant colours that had flooded my senses a few minutes before had been bleached. I was fading everything out. Soon it was just me and Korff. And then a little while later it was just me.
And the manila envelope sticking out of Korff’s pocket.
I was hoping that the blood on the corner had been splashed there just now, rather than seeping through from inside. I stared at it until I wasn’t sure that I was in the room any more.
I did her too.
I picked up the envelope and tore it open, shook it to dislodge its contents, which slithered on to the table. And as I reared away, shock swelling in my heart to the point where I was sure it must burst, my first reflex, as always, was to smile back.
Conrad Williams’s debut novel Head Injuries was published to widespread acclaim in 1998 by The Do-Not Press and was optioned by Revolution Films. A novella, Nearly People, with an introduction by Michael Marshall Smith, was published in 2001 and has subsequently been nominated for the International Horror Guild Award. Over the past fifteen years, Williams’s work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, most recently The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Phantoms of Venice, The Museum of Horrors, Cemetery Dance and The Spook. He has also been published in three other volumes of Dark Terrors and is a past winner of the British Fantasy Award. ‘This story popped into my head one day while I was at work,’ the author remembers. ‘I looked out of the window and saw this poor old man in a wheelchair, trying to get up the kerb on to the footpath. Nobody stopped to help. I suddenly imagined this frail soul as a refugee from history, someone who had once been strong, ambitious, dangerous, and who might still possess the capacity to commit terrible acts. That idea dovetailed sweetly with a website I stumbled upon that detailed a novel way in which the German U-boat crews put off their Allied pursuers. I haven’t been able to find the website since, so maybe it’s been pulled. Or perhaps I’m kidding myself, and it never existed outside my own head…’
<
The Road of Pins
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN
I
May
Without a doubt, Mr Perrault’s paintings are some of the most hideous things that Alex has ever seen and if her head didn’t hurt so much, if it hadn’t been hurting all day long, she might have kept her opinions to herself, might have made it all the way through the evening without pissing Margot off again. The first Thursday of the month so another opening night at ARTIFICE, another long evening of forced smiles for the aesthete zombies, the shaking of hands and digging about for dusty scraps of congeniality when all she wants is to be home soaking in a hot, soapy bath or lying facedown on the cool, hardwood floor of their bedroom while Margot massages her neck. Maybe something quiet playing on the stereo, something soothing, and the volume so low there’s almost no sound at all, and then her headache would slowly begin to pull its steelburr fingers out of the soft places behind her eyes and she could breathe again.
‘You shouldn’t have even come tonight,’ Margot whispers, sips cheap white wine from a plastic cup and stares glumly at the floor. ‘If you were going to be like this, I wish you’d gone home instead.’
‘You and me both, baby,’ and Alex frowns and looks past her lover at the smartly dressed crowd milling about the little gallery like a wary flock of pigeons.
‘So why don’t you leave? I can get a taxi home, or Paul will be happy to give me a ride,’ and now Alex thinks that Margot’s starting to sound even more impatient with her than usual, probably afraid that someone might have overheard the things she said about the paintings.
‘I’m here now,’ Alex says. ‘I suppose I might as well stick it out,’ and she rubs roughly at the aching space between her eyebrows, squints across the room at the high, white walls decorated with Perrault’s canvases, the track lights to fix each murky scene in its own warm, incandescent pool.
‘Then will you please try to stop sulking. Talk to someone. I have to get back to work.’
Alex shrugs noncommittally and Margot turns and walks away, threading herself effortlessly into the murmuring crowd. Almost at once, a man in a banana-yellow turtleneck sweater and tight black jeans stops her and he points at one of the paintings. Margot nods her head and smiles for him, already wearing her pleasant face again, annoyance tucked safe behind the mask, and the man smiles back at her and nods his head too.
Five minutes later and Alex has made her way across the gallery, another cup of the dry, slightly bitter Chardonnay in her hand, her fourth in half an hour, but it hasn’t helped her head at all and she wishes she had a gin and tonic instead. She’s been eavesdropping, listening in on an elderly German couple, even though she doesn’t speak a word of German. The man and woman are standing close together before one of the larger paintings, the same sooty blur of oils as all the rest, at least a thousand shades of grey, faint rumours of green and alabaster, and a single crimson smudge floating near the centre. The small, printed card on the wall beside the canvas reads Fecunda ratis, no date, no price, and Alex wonders if the old man and woman understand Latin any better than she understands German.
The man takes a sudden, deep breath then, hitching breath almost like the space between sobs, and holds one hand out, as if he intends to touch the canvas, to press his thick fingertips to the whirling chaos of charcoal brush strokes. But the woman stops him, her nervous hand at his elbow, hushed words passed between them, and in a moment they’ve wandered away and Alex is left standing alone in front of the painting.
She takes a swallow of wine, grimaces at the taste and tries to concentrate on the painting, tries to see whatever all the others seem to see; the red smudge for a still point, nexus or fulcrum, and she thinks maybe it’s supposed to be a cap or a hat, crimson wool cap stuck on the head of the nude girl down on her hands and knees, head bowed so that her face is hidden, only a wild snarl of hair and the cruel, incongruent red cap. There are dark, hulking forms surrounding the girl and at first glance Alex thought they were only stones, some crude, megalithic ring, standing stones, but now she sees that they’re meant to be beasts of some sort. Great, shaggy things squatting on their haunches, watching the girl, protective or imprisoning captors and perhaps this is the final, lingering moment before the kill.
‘Amazing, isn’t it,’ and Alex hadn’t realised that the girl was standing there beside her until she spoke. Pretty black girl with four silver rings in each earlobe and she has blue eyes.
‘No, actually,’ Alex says. ‘I think it’s horrible,’ never mind what Margot would want her to say because her head hurts too much to lie and she doesn’t like the way the painting is making her feel. Her stomach is sour from the migraine and the bitter Chardonnay.
‘Yes, it is, isn’t it,’ the black girl says, undaunted, and she leans closer to the canvas. ‘We saw this one in San Francisco last year. Sometimes I dream about it. I’ve written two poems about this piece.’
‘No kidding,’ Alex replies, not trying very hard to hide her sarcasm, and she scans the room, but there’s no sign of Margot anywhere. She catches
a glimpse of the artist, though, a tall, scarecrow-thin and rumpled man in a shiny black suit that looks too big for him. He’s talking with the German couple. Or he’s only listening to them talk to him, or pretending to, standing with his long arms crossed and no particular expression on his sallow face. Then the crowd shifts and she can’t see him any more.
‘You’re Alex Marlowe, aren’t you? Margot’s girlfriend?’ the black girl asks and ‘Yeah,’ Alex says. ‘That’s me,’ and the girl smiles and laughs a musical, calculated sort of a laugh.
‘I liked your novel a lot,’ she says. ‘Aren’t you ever going to write another one?’
‘Well, my agent doesn’t think so,’ and maybe the girl can see how much Alex would rather talk about almost anything else in the world and she laughs again.
‘I’m Jude Sinclair. I’m writing a review of the show for Artforum. You don’t care very much for Perrault’s work, I take it.’
‘I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to have opinions about painting, Jude. That’s strictly Margot’s department—’
‘But you don’t like it, do you?’ Jude says, pressing the point and her voice lower now and there’s something almost conspiratorial in the tone. A wry edge to her smile and she glances back at Fecunda ratis.
‘No,’ Alex says. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t.’
‘I’m not sure I did either, not at first. But he gets in your head. The first time I saw a Perrault I thought it was contrived, too selfconsciously retro. I thought, this guy wants to be Edvard Munch and Van Gogh and Albert Pinkham Ryder all rolled into one. I thought he was way too hung up on Romanticism.’
‘So are those things supposed to be bears?’ Alex asks, pointing at one of the looming objects that isn’t a megalith, and Jude Sinclair shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘They’re wolves.’
‘Well, they don’t look like wolves to me,’ and then Jude takes her hand and leads Alex to the next painting, this one barely half the size of the last. A sky the sickly colour of sage and olives, ochre and cheese draped above a withered landscape, a few stunted trees in the foreground and their bare and crooked branches claw vainly at an irrevocable Heaven. Between their trunks the figure of a woman is visible in the middle distance, lean and twisted as the blighted limbs of the trees and she’s looking apprehensively over her shoulder at something the artist has only hinted at, shadows of shadows crouched menacingly at the lower edges of the canvas. The card on the wall next to the painting is blank except for a date - 1893. Jude points out a yellowed strip of paper pasted an inch or so above the woman’s head, narrow strip not much larger than a fortune-cookie prognostication.
‘Read it,’ she says and Alex has to bend close because the words are very small and she isn’t wearing her glasses.
‘No. Read it out loud.’
Alex sighs, growing tired of this, but’ “A woman in a field”,’ she says. ‘“Something grabbed her”,’ and then she reads it over again to herself, just in case she missed the sense of it the first time. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’
‘It’s from a book by a man named Charles Fort. Have you ever heard of him?’
‘No,’ Alex says, ‘I haven’t.’ She looks back down at the woman standing in the wide and barren field beyond the trees, and the longer she stares the more frightened the woman seems to be. Not merely apprehensive, no, genuinely terrified, and she would run, Alex thinks, she would run away as fast as she could, but she’s too afraid to even move. Too afraid of whatever she sees waiting there in the shadows beneath the trees and the painter has trapped her in this moment for ever.
‘I hadn’t either, before Perrault. There are passages from Fort in most of these paintings. Sometimes they’re hard to find.’
Alex takes a step back from the wall, her mouth gone dry as dust and wishing she had more of the wine, wishing she had a cigarette, wondering if Judith Sinclair smokes.
‘His genius - Perrault’s, I mean - lies in what he suggests,’ the black girl says and her blue eyes sparkle like gems. ‘What he doesn’t have to show us. He understands that our worst fears come from the pictures that we make in our beads, not from anything he could ever paint.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Alex says, not exactly sure what she’s apologising for this time but it’s the only thing she can think to say, her head suddenly too full of the frightened woman and the writhing, threatful trees, the pain behind her eyes swelling, and she only knows for certain that she doesn’t want to look at any more of these ridiculous paintings. That they make her feel unclean, almost as if by simply seeing them she’s played some unwitting part in their creation.
‘There’s nothing to be sorry for,’ Jude says, ‘It’s pretty heady stuff. My boyfriend can’t stand Perrault, won’t even let me talk about him.’
And Alex says something polite then, nice to meet you, good luck with the review, see you around, something she doesn’t mean and won’t remember later, and she leaves the girl still gazing at the painting labelled 1893. On the far side of the gallery, Margot is busy smiling for the scarecrow in his baggy, black suit and Alex slips unnoticed through the crowd, past another dozen of Albert Perrault’s carefully hung grotesques, the ones she hasn’t examined and doesn’t ever want to; she keeps her eyes straight ahead until she’s made it through the front door and is finally standing alone on the sidewalk outside ARTIFICE, breathing in the safe and stagnant city smells of the warm Atlanta night.
II
June
The stuffy little screening room on Peachtree Street reeks of ancient cigarette smoke and the sticky, fermenting ghosts of candy and spilled sodas, stale popcorn and the fainter, musky scent of human sweat. Probably worse things, too, this place a porn theatre for more than a decade before new management and the unprofitable transition from skin flicks to art-house cinema. Alex sits alone in the back row and there are only eleven or twelve other people in the theatre, pitiful Saturday night turn-out for a Bergman double-feature. She’s stopped wondering if Margot’s ever going to show, stopped wondering that halfway through the third reel of Wild Strawberries, and she knows that if she goes to the pay phone outside the lobby, if she stands in the rain and calls their apartment, she’ll only get the answering machine.
Later, of course, Margot will apologise for standing her up, will explain how she couldn’t get away from the gallery because the carpenters tore out a wall when they were only supposed to mark studs, or the security system is on the fritz again and she had to wait two hours for a service tech to show. Nothing that could possibly be helped, hut she’s sorry anyway, and these things wouldn’t happen, she’ll say, if Alex would carry a cell phone, or a least a pager.
Wild Strawberries has ended and after a ten-or fifteen-minute intermission, the house lights have gone down again, a long moment of darkness marred only by the bottle-green glow of an exit sign before the screen is washed in a flood of light so brilliant it hurts Alex’s eyes. She blinks at the countdown leader, five, four, three, the staccato beep at two, one, and then the grainy black-and-white picture. No front titles - a man carrying a wooden staff walks slowly across a scrubby, rock-strewn pasture and a dog trails close behind him. The man is dressed in peasant clothes, at least the way that European peasants dress in old Hollywood movies, and when he reaches the crest of a hill he stops and looks down at something out of frame, something hidden from the audience. His lips part and his eyes grow wide, an expression that is anger and surprise, disgust and horror all at the same time. There’s no sound but his dog barking and the wind.
‘Hey, what is this shit?’ someone shouts near the front of the theatre, a fat man, and he stands and glares up at the projection booth. Some of the others have started mumbling, confused or annoyed whispers, and Alex has no idea what the film is, only that it isn’t The Seventh Seal. On-screen, the camera cuts away from the peasant and now there’s a close-up of a dead animal instead, a ragged, woolly mass streaked with gore the colour of molasses; it takes her a second or two to realise that it’s a shee
p. Its throat has been ripped out and its tongue lolls from its mouth. The camera pulls back as the man kneels beside the dead animal, then cuts to a close-up of the dog. It’s stopped barking and licks at its lips.
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ the fat man growls and then he storms up the aisle, past Alex and out the swinging doors to the lobby. No one else leaves their seat, though a few heads have turned to watch the fat man’s exit. Someone laughs nervously and on-screen the peasant man has lifted the dead sheep in his arms, is walking quickly away from the camera and his dog follows close behind. The camera lingers as the man grows smaller and smaller in the distance, and the ground where the sheep lay glistens wetly.
A woman sitting a couple of seats in front of Alex turns around and ‘Do you have any idea at all what this is?’ she asks.
‘No,’ Alex replies. ‘No, I don’t.’
The woman frowns and sighs loudly. ‘The projectionist must have made a mistake,’ she says and turns back towards the screen before Alex can say anything else.
When the man and the dog have shrunk to bobbing specks, the camera finally cuts away, trades the stony pasture, the blood-soaked patch of grass, for a close-up of a church steeple and the cacophony of tolling bells spills out through tinny stereo speakers and fills the theatre.
‘Well, this isn’t what I paid six dollars to see,’ the woman two seats in front of Alex grumbles.
The fat man doesn’t come back and if the projectionist has made a mistake, no one seems to be in much of a hurry to correct it. The audience has grown quiet again, apparently more curious than perturbed, and the film moves from scene to scene, flickering progression of images and story, dialogue pared to little more than whispers and occasional, furtive glances between the actors. A mountain village and a wolf killing sheep somewhere that might be France or Italy, but impossible to tell because everyone speaks with British accents. The peasant man from the opening scene (if that truly was the opening scene) has a blind daughter who spends her days inside their little house gazing out of a window, as though she could see the mountains in the distance.
Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 38
