‘Alex, no. Wait, please—’
‘I promise. I’ll call you back as soon as I can,’ and she opens her eyes, hangs up the phone quickly so she doesn’t have to hear the confusion in Margot’s voice, the anger, and the young woman on the television gazes at her blind reflection in the window of her father’s house. Her reflection and the less certain reflection of the hunched, dark figure crouched close behind her.
‘The road of pins,’ she says. ‘Isn’t it much easier to fasten things with pins, than to have to sew them together with needles—-’
Then the film cuts to a shot of the door of the house - unpainted, weathered boards, the bent and rusted heads of nails, a cross painted on the wood with something white; slow pan left and now the window is in frame, the clean glint of morning sunlight off glass and the round face of the peasant’s daughter, the indistinct shape bending over her, and the camera zooms out until the house is very small, a lonely, rundown speck in a desolate, windswept valley.
Alex hits the stop button and the VCR whirs and thunks and is silent, the screen filled with nothing now but shoddy, Saturday-morning animation, four hippie teenagers and a Great Dane bouncing along a swampy back road in their psychedelic van, the cartoon sliver moon hung high in the painted sky, and she sits down on the floor in front of the television. When she presses eject, the tape slides smoothly, obediently out of the cassette compartment and Alex reaches for it, holds it in trembling, sweatslick hands while her heart races and the pain behind her eyes fades to a dull, bearable ache.
A few minutes more and the phone begins to ring again and this time she doesn’t wait for the answering machine.
Incommensurable, impalpable,
Yet latent in it are forms;
Impalpable, incommensurable,
Yet within it are entities.
Shadowy it is and dim.
Lao-tzu, Tao Teh Ching
Caitlin R. Kiernan’s short fiction has been collected in Candles for Elizabeth, Tales of Pain and Wonder, From Weird and Distant Shores and Wrong Times (the latter with Poppy Z. Brite), and has been selected for both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her first novel, Silk, received the Barnes & Noble Maiden Voyage and International Horror Guild awards, and her second, Threshold, appeared in 2001. More recent publications include In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers, a novella illustrated by Dame Darcy, and Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold, both from Subterranean Press. She divides her time unevenly between writing and her work as a vertebrate palaeontologist, with the lion’s share going to the former. She has not yet been to Greece. ‘In early 2001,’ recalls Kiernan, ‘I experienced the first true bout of writer’s block in my career. I was a hundred pages into a novel, a sequel to Silk called Murder of Angels, and, suddenly, a few pages into Chapter Three, the words just stopped coming. From late January to mid-April I wrote almost nothing, and certainly nothing of any merit. It was terrifying. Finally, I shelved Murder of Angels and wrote this story, “The Road of Pins”, which is, at least in part, about writer’s block. The novel remains shelved to this day, a reminder of those awful two and a half months; I think I’m actually afraid of that manuscript at this point, as though it somehow caused the writer’s block. Anyway, “The Road of Pins” has a number of other inspirations: Charles Fort, “Little Red Riding Hood”, and the Beast of Gevaudan. It also draws on my fascination with “lost” films, a subject that I’d explored earlier in the stories “Salmagundi” and “.. . Between the Gargoyle Trees”.’
<
Black
TIM LEBBON
She only screams for the first two minutes. Some of the screams may be words in her own language, but if so, they are a curse. She still makes noises after that but they are unconscious and dead, not echoes of life. He hears the knife going in, whispering through skin and flesh, grating on bone, its serrated edge sucking like a jelly shaken from its mould as he pulls it out. He is changing this mould radically. She sighs, but it is gas escaping her rent body. She coughs, but it may be blood bubbling in her throat. Still he stabs, slashes and gouges, just to make sure. He tries to concentrate on the white-hot anger and rage he feels, propagating them in the hope that they might camouflage the worrying excitement. The pleasure. He’s enjoying this. She begins to drip from the edges of the table, more solid scraps of her following soon after, and a steady rain of fluid patters down onto the flagstone floor. He closes his eyes and listens, trying to distinguish the cleansing rain outside from that within. He’s still shaking with fury, fear and dread, and even though he knows that what he’s doing is so wrong, he cannot take it back. He will not take it back. It’s her fault, it’s the fault of her kin and kind, and this is his release. At least he can smell the truth of that.
Ed carved another niche into the damp plasterboard wall. As the knife penetrated and pink plaster squeezed out he expected blood to well from within, the wall to quiver and scream and smell of insides. He expected this every time, and every time it did not happen. Yet the fear was always just as fresh. Sometimes he believed that every memory he had was made up, pulled together hurriedly by his still-waking mind before he could become fully conscious and realise that he was actually no one at all.
The only real memory he could never doubt was of the murder that had changed his life.
‘Thousands,’ he said, standing back from the wall and surveying the damage he had wrought. The bare painted partition was scarred across its surface with a mark for every day he had been here. They started in the left bottom corner as inch-high, delicately cut indicators, the tender slices of a surgeon operating on his own child. But now, the latest was the hacking of a murderer. Tracing them from left to right did not tell his story, because at some point he had decided to mix in the marks, make them disordered and confused. Not his story, no, but perhaps his state of mind.
‘Thousands of days.’ He’d counted to begin with. Each mark added to the number he kept in his head, the length of time he’d been here, and because back then his memory still was not too bad he would wake in the morning and remember the number from the night before. Then he’d started to forget, and it had become necessary to recount the marks several times each week. This he did not mind, essentially - he had nothing better to do - but it was tedious and, as the violence of the knife strokes grew, all but impossible.
So now he left it at this: thousands. With what he could remember of his life, that was as good as for ever.
The flat was sparse and dirty. He ate takeout food mostly, and old boxes and bags and sachets were piled on the kitchen surfaces, plates in the sink waiting to be washed when all the clean ones were used. The bin stank of mould and rotting meat. Ed liked that. It reminded him of what he had done, and he only wished he had the conscience to view it as a punishment rather than simply an annoying smell. He paid for his food with a debit card from a bank account that seemed always to honour the transaction. He had an idea that he’d had a good job once. Perhaps he was still being paid. He didn’t deserve it - he felt that he was deserving of very little, and he knew the dead woman would agree - but it was there, and he needed to eat, and his scruples hardly went that deep. If he’d once had morals, they’d been slaughtered by that knife as well.
The same knife he now used to mark the passing of his own life.
He’d have laughed at the irony if he hadn’t sickened himself so much.
Ed put down the knife and went for a walk. He did this most days, wandering past the greasy takeaway food bars, the tacky cheap jewellery shops, money lenders and video emporiums and dingy pubs, their closed doors and smoky interiors almost begging potential customers not to enter. Passing faces he did not know, he acknowledged no one and, in turn, was ignored. He was certain that sometimes they did not even see him. He’d read somewhere that the human mind filters out everything not required from its surroundings, otherwise the information input would be far too massive. He liked not being a part of anybody else’s life.
Ed preferred living in the city because he could be just another mystery, even to himself. He deserved no less. As happened every day, flashes of what he had done haunted him; tastes, sounds, feelings, smells of his crime assailed him at every step, either reflected in shop windows, carried on the air or manufactured inside his head. Trying to ignore them was like trying not to breathe. Accepting them, suffering, was all he could do to make amends.
He certainly did not deserve to meet Queenie.
On that hot July afternoon when he first saw her, he simply watched. He hadn’t had sex since the war, rarely even masturbated, but seeing the woman in the park stirred feelings that surprised him with their intensity. He wanted her, yes, but he was also interested by her. The strange things she did went some way to explaining that, but also the way she moved, the clothes she wore, the way she flicked her long hair back over her shoulder quickly and impatiently, as if it were merely an annoyance.
Ed sat on a bench by the pond and tried to blend into the background. He hated being noticed at the best of times, but now, watching this woman, he craved invisibility. The more fascinated he became with her and her actions, the less he wanted to meet her.
She must be planning something, he thought. Scouting the area for a filming. Or perhaps she was an artist. She was lurking beneath a clump of trees at the edge of the park, holding something up to the sky - a light meter, Ed guessed - taking photographs, scratching around at the foot of the trees with a small trowel as if looking for buried treasure. She kept out of the sun. If she did emerge from beneath one group of trees, she would quickly cross the sunlit grass to another area of shadow. Her skin was dark and weathered - she obviously spent a lot of time outdoors - but she seemed to much prefer the comfort of shadows to the hot caress of the sun. Ed could relate to that. He wondered what crime she was trying to hide from.
It took over an hour for her to notice him. In that time he sat motionless on the bench, the sun slowly burning his bald pate, hardly even twitching as a group of teenagers cycled by so close that one of them touched his shoe with his wheels. He watched her set a camera on a tripod and take one photograph every five minutes, fix small boxes to several trees with nails, sweep leaves away from the bole of a lightning-struck tree as if to reveal its skeletal underside. She finally sat down and took a bottle of water from a rucksack … and that was when she saw him.
Ed held his breath, startled, as she froze and stared across at him. She was too far away for him to see her expression clearly, but she put her bottle down and stood without looking away from him.
His heart began to race, sweat popped out on his skin, his sunburned scalp tightened. She was not only standing, she was walking, coming out into the sun and seemingly oblivious of it for the first time, striding across the grass and glancing away now and then, though infrequently and not for long.
He felt her attention upon him, like fresh sunbeams cooking his skin.
Ed stood, turned his back on the woman and walked quickly away. He aimed through the kids’ playground, dodging toddlers as they darted around his legs and hoping that he could lose her through there if she chose to follow. But when he looked back over his shoulder he saw her standing by his bench, hands on hips, staring after him. She shielded her eyes as he looked and he thought perhaps she smiled. But it could have been a shadow pulling at her lips, making him see something that was not really there.
He left the park without looking back again.
He has swelled insides before, of course, but never like this. In the war he has seen more dead bodies than anyone ever should, two of them - the rebel unwilling to give up his guns, the government soldier angry and aggressive at his intrusion - the results of his own actions. He hates every single corpse because they remind him of why he is here, what these people are doing to each other, and each shot, shattered or gutted body seems to be one more mocking taunt aimed directly at him: we’re doing this, they say, and you can’t stop us. So he has smelled insides … but never this close up. Never this fresh. Blood mists the air as he strikes, copper tints overlying the rich tang of burning from-outside, strong and vital as he breathes it in, sticking inside his nostrils, embedding itself to remind him of this moment for ever. The smells change as his stabbing arm becomes heavier and the knife impact further down his victim’s body: sickly-sweet as the heart is punctured; acidic as the stomach is torn open; and shit. Underlying it all is the cloying stench of cheap perfume. It’s intended to remind him of roses and honey, he supposes, but in reality it’s the aroma of desperation. Any idea that a clean and scented body can superimpose itself over the horrors happening here must be desperate, and he wonders when she found the time or inclination to buy this. He imagines what he is doing as some sort of alternative perfume advert for TV and almost smiles … almost … because then the mouthwatering smell of roasting human hits his nose from outside. He wonders what he will eat tonight. He swallows a mouthful of saliva and tastes death.
He didn’t know he was going back until he opened the door of his flat and ventured out into the twilight.
The park closed at eight o’clock, but he knew plenty of ways in. He spent a lot of his time wandering, day and night, and the park was always a convenient and innocuous venue. No one would see him in there, if he so chose, and he could hide and watch and wonder just what he was missing. Sometimes he saw someone walking on their own, but their expression was always happier than his own. On other occasions he spotted couples sitting or strolling hand in hand, and they reminded him that he had forgotten so much. Once he’d seen two people making love on a park bench, trying to be secretive about it, but the woman’s increasingly frantic movements and gasps revealing their passion. He had stayed and watched until the end. The movements and sounds reminded him of the woman he had murdered, even though their cause had been much different. Perhaps he knew why it was called the little death.
They had all made him mad, every single one of them. Every word and gesture and smile that marked what they were doing to their country and kin as normal drove him into a frenzy. He’d been sent there to protect them from themselves - he’d killed for them - and yet they willingly went about their continuous self-destruction.
Sent there to protect them. Ironic.
He walked along darkened streets, moving quicker through pools of light thrown by streetlamps. He’d been here for a long time, the marks on his wall testified to that, but still he found his surroundings unfamiliar. It was as if the scenery was frequently rebuilt and reordered, mostly to resemble its former self but with a few vital differences that prevented him from recognising it totally. Stopped it from ever feeling like home.
He reached the park and climbed die wall at one of its lower stretches. He could hear kids playing around near the bandstand, glass smashing as they lobbed bottles down the concrete steps, so he turned the other way. The pond was just around the corner, and next to it the trees, and within their deeper evening shadows perhaps he would find the secret of why the woman had been there.
Ed looked up and saw the full moon, stars quivering with atmospheric distortion. He tried to appreciate the beauty of the view but, as ever, he could not realise any sense of wonder. It was long gone. The shadows pooled around the bench he’d sat on earlier seemed deeper than normal, thicker, untouched by moon-or starlight. He wondered whether someone had spilled something, but he had no wish to venture close enough to find out. The shadows seemed … there. Something, not nothing. A definite presence rather than an absence of light.
Ed moved his head to get a full view with his peripheral vision. He did not like what he saw, but then he rarely did. Someone - perhaps it was his mother, although she was swallowed up along with most of his early memories - had once told him that if he was stressed or woundup he should see the beauty in things. The movement of a tree, each leaf performing its own independent dance to create a wondrously pure choreography. Or the way light fell on a puddle, a reflection of the world in there, a whole universe in a splash of water. Roses s
waying in the breeze, waves of that same breeze rippling across a field of long grass, a flock of birds twisting and turning like one organism, not a thousand. All things of beauty, none of which Ed could see. Now he would see only a stump blown apart by shellfire, a porridge of blood and oil in a landmine crater, a hand clawed in the still air … and his knife stealing what little beauty he’d managed to find in that foreign country.
Before they sent him there, he’d never even heard of the place.
‘Look just to the side of what you want to see,’ a voice said. It was deep but evidently female, husky and knowledgeable.
Ed spun around, fearing an attack by the teenagers but knowing straight away that he’d found her. Or rather, she’d found him. He wished he’d stayed at home. ‘Who’s there?’ He was not used to talking with people, and the quaver in his voice embarrassed him. Scared of the dark, she’d think. Maybe she was right. Ed liked to exist in shadows, but perhaps it was his fear of them holding him there, a guilt-induced masochism.
‘You saw me earlier.’ She came from the night beneath the trees, stopped a few steps from him and switched on a torch. His vision was stolen for long seconds. ‘Come back for another look?’
‘I was wondering what you were doing.’ Ed could see the woman silhouetted before him. She pointed the torch at the ground behind her, throwing her face into deep shadow. He wondered whether she had two eyes, a nose, a mouth, or something wholly different.
‘Why?’
It was not a question he had expected, although he’d been asking it for hours. He was not used to interacting, and to find something of interest like this was a surprise. Anything of pleasure would be mocking the life he had taken. Sometimes, on the worst of days, even breathing felt bad.
Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 40
