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

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  Everything went back to that. His life began in a foreign country when he was a murderous twenty-two.

  ‘Well, you seemed so…intent. What is it? Animal research? You filming squirrels, or something?’

  ‘I’m waiting for a murder.’

  ‘Murder.’ Ed felt cold, his balls shrivelled and an icy, accusing finger drew a line down his back, nail cutting to the bone. Murder. One day he feared they’d come visiting, the fellow soldiers who’d brought him back and let him go, letting the incident fade into the shadows of war, honour amongst thieves, that sort of thing. There’s always been that fear … but it was a yearning as well. He could not bring himself to account for what he had done because he was a coward. It would take someone else to do it for him. Murder.

  ‘There’ll be one here soon. That’s why I’m here. I’m … sort of an early warning system, I suppose. Dark, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ He’d noticed. The woman turned the torch off and for a moment, an instant, it was pitch black. Then his night vision moved in and he could see the shadows forming around them. The woman seemed nearer than she had been. And when she spoke again he was sure he could smell her breath.

  ‘They call me Queenie.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Avoidance Queen. I avoid most of the important things in my life.’

  ‘Like what?’ Ed saw her shadow shrug but she offered no response. ‘So what’s your real name?’

  ‘You can call me Queenie, too.’

  ‘So what are you avoiding here? Searching for a murderer, you say?’

  ‘That’s not what I said. I’m looking for a murder, not a murderer.’

  Ed felt that she was playing games, but perhaps it was simply that most of his conversations were with himself. He stepped back a couple of paces, shoes whispering across the soft carpet of pine needles. The air felt thick. Movement was difficult ‘You can’t have one without the other.’

  ‘Well…’ She giggled quietly, little more than a heavy breath through her nose. ‘Sometimes a murder is just a death brought on too soon.’

  This was too close. Ed felt memories tapping the inside of his skull like little insects, flying around and seeking escape, trying to force themselves upon him once again. They often used devious means, these memories … jumping out of doorways and the TV screen, emerging fully-fledged from single phrases, smells and sounds and sights inspiring their own dark memory cousins. He lived that time enough without actively bringing it on.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said. The instant he spoke everything went quiet, a deathly silence, the air swallowing movement and sound and seemingly solidifying around him. Even the shadow of the woman became solid and still, from living to statue in an instant. He turned to leave. She touched him.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said. Her fingers bit into his arm, but in desperation rather than anger. ‘Please … I don’t get to talk about this much. It’ll go dark, it always goes dark, and in the blackness there’s murder. Please! People just don’t listen, they say I’m mad and walk away. Don’t walk away.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ Ed said. Was she playing with him again?

  ‘I’ve put light meters on the trees. And time-lapse cameras. I hope they aren’t stolen. I’m waiting for it to go dark.’

  Ed almost stayed. She’d piqued his interest, demanded his attention. Some of those things she was saying … Sometimes a murder is just a death brought on too soon … He wanted to become involved.

  But he could not allow that. He was nothing, no one, and he did not deserve anything like this.

  ‘It is dark,’ he said. And as he walked away, trying not to hear her muttering behind him, he whispered to himself: ‘It’s always dark.’

  She offered for him to taste her. Maybe that’s why he’s killing her, but he thinks not. Her underwear is still tangled around her ankles, and as if to taunt him the taste of women comes out from behind his teeth, dripping from the roof of his mouth like ghost memories burrowing down from his brain, laying tangy caresses on his tongue. Perhaps if he’d accepted her invitation his rage would have been subsumed. Maybe she would still be alive. But time could not be reversed. Drowning out that sweet taste of love is the bloody taste of death. Her blood is in the air, misting when the knife comes out and permeating the dank atmosphere of the alley, more spilled blood in this bloody land, soon the air itself will taste of blood if the killing goes on, the hate and murder born of the differences passed down from father to daughter, mother to son. He wonders whether their respective gods find it all amusing. And he tastes a bitter, furious anger swimming there in the blood, black spots of rage camouflaged in the very physical taint of the woman’s death. He swallows, rubs his tongue against the roof of his mouth in an effort to distil the taste …because it scares him. It scares him because he knows it cannot be his own, his anger is false because he does not truly know what these people are going through, why, what they really feel … his is a tourist’s rage at something that offends him, and it could never taste this bad. He spits and it lands on the woman. The taste grows worse. Hands lay on his shoulders, heavy and invisible, but for now they do little but help him thrust the knife in again. There is no one else here but him and the woman, but those hands have the feel of him, and the bitter tang of dread floods his mouth as blood arcs across his chin and teeth.

  This time, he knows the dread is his own.

  And he sees what he has done

  Ed woke up from dark-soaked dreams to a dawn barely any lighter. He glanced at the clock blinking beside his bed. Must be wrong. It should have been daylight by now. Even through the hangover, die searing pain behind his eyes and in his throat that was testament to his binge the previous night, he knew he should be seeing more than this.

  He rubbed his eyes but it did not help.

  Queenie. She sprang into his mind and ambushed his thoughts, turning them away from the urge to vomit and then drink some more. If he went back to the park today she’d still be there. Sitting beneath the trees perhaps, or adjusting the equipment she’d placed around the little copse, replacing batteries, examining film and data tapes. Light meters? Strange.

  Ed managed to haul himself upright without puking, but then he stood and swayed as his senses spun and swapped places, and he vomited down the wall. Standing there, leaning against the woodchip wallpaper as he heaved gushes of liquid poison from his guts, he noticed how each splinter of wood in the wallpaper had its own definite shadow. Most of them were small, little more than smudges, but one or two of them seemed far too large. As he gasped in air and tasted foulness, he picked at one of these wood chippings and felt it crumble between his fingernails like a desiccated fly. He dropped the dust to land on the puddle of puke, and seconds later the shadows faded away.

  Ed rubbed his eyes and sat heavily onto his bed. He was used to waking like this, even welcomed it sometimes, but it often lowered whatever defences he’d managed to erect against the memories plaguing him. Trying to rub the ache from his eyes he saw her face as she realised what he was about to do, her eyes widening and filling with something that would have scared him had he not had the upper hand. Pinching his nose and snorting to force out the damp remnants of vomit, he smelled insides other than his own, parts of her that should never have been touched by daylight. And the ringing in his ears, the rapid pumping of his heart as it struggled to purify his system, both could have belonged to her, a fearful whine and her heart galloping with fear.

  It’ll go dark, it always goes dark, and in the blackness there’s murder.

  Ed tried to revive himself because he needed to think, and like this it hurt. He drank a pint of water and washed down three aspirins, opened the windows to his dank flat and leaned out to let the fresh air do its worst. He could just about make out the park from here, its oldest and tallest trees peering over rooftops. The sky was clear, but the streets were shaded, not shadowed but unclear nonetheless. The brightness of the day had been turned down. Some cars had their sidelights on. A young couple were
standing on the street corner, whispering like lovers, but Ed thought not.

  There was a knock at the flat door.

  He spun around and leaned back against the window sill to steady himself. The knock came again and he nodded, yes, he hadn’t imagined it. No one had come to his front door for years other than to collect monies due. He usually had it to give them, but still he resented their intrusion into his own private world. They looked at him like voyeurs, their eyes cameras to record and incriminate … or perhaps he just imagined it.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It’s happening,’ a voice said. Queenie. So much mystery in that one statement, so many possibilities (you’re caught, they know, you’re a murderer, time to run, run again).

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘It’s growing dark. The light’s losing out, no one has noticed yet but all the readings hold up. Let me in. The landing light’s bust.’

  Ed stepped to the door, drew the bolts and swung it open. Queenie entered without an invite, wafting cheap perfume and the smell of cleaned clothes. If she had slept in the park, she’d made an effort to be presentable before coming here this morning.

  ‘Nice place,’ she said, looking around at the scarred walls and the refuse littering the floor and tables, and Ed hated the sarcasm, really hated it, his resentment running deep.

  ‘I live like I live.’

  Queenie’s eyes widened

  her eyes widened and filled with something fearful, frightening

  and she started talking excitedly. ‘The murder’s soon, it has to be,

  the darkness is here and soon it’ll be black, black as night without stars or moon, blacker than last night, but in the day.’ It sounded like she was looking forward to it.

  ‘Eclipse?’

  She shook her head. ‘No, not eclipses. Every time it’s happened before it’s been localised and has gone unreported, even from the authorities. I’ve followed the places it’s happened, always got there after the event, been trying to narrow down future locations … find a pattern.’ She looked pensive for a moment, glanced around his flat at the mess of Ed’s life, then back at him. ‘Maybe I’ve found it,’ she whispered. Then she became animated once more, excited. ‘There’s been no film of it, little talk about it in the media. Well, Fortean Times picks it up sometimes, of course, and other folks like that.’ She looked at him and, as if knowing how all but his worst memories were lost, she smiled. ‘Blackouts.’

  Ed frowned at this strange woman who seemed to have some sort of claim to him. He’d seen her twice but already she was confiding in him, passing on something she was obviously passionate about, letting him in. ‘I really don’t want any part of this,’ he said, and even as he spoke it was a lie.

  She looked at him, eyebrows raised and lips pressed together. ‘You’ll see it soon enough,’ she said, and still he could not read her.

  ‘Why should I see blackouts?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t you? You live here and this is where it’s going to—’

  ‘But why do you think I of all people should see it? Why … pick on me?’

  Queenie was silent for a while. She seemed confused. ‘Well, I didn’t. You came looking for me.’

  Ed could only stare at her, standing in the middle of the room he had yet to invite her into. And suddenly, amazingly, there was a stirring in his groin, a hardening so uncommon in all the years since his time in Eastern Europe, another use for the blood he now thought of as impure and tainted with the murder, the murderous attack it had fuelled.

  That made up his mind. ‘Out.’ he said.

  ‘But I have to tell you. Don’t you want to know? Don’t you understand what I’m saying here?’

  ‘No I don’t, it’s a load of shit you’re trying to feed me, I don’t know what’s wrong with you and I really, really don’t want to know. Out!’ He did want to know …

  ‘But I’ve been told I can give you a chance.’

  Ed shook his head, loosening those strange words from where they had stuck. Denying them. It was just too complicated. ‘Get out of my flat!’ he hissed.

  Queenie made to move towards him, faltered, took a step forwards. Ed really thought that she was coming for him, her hands would come up and she would hold him or hit him or something equally inexplicable. But after standing there for a few seconds, glancing out the window over Ed’s shoulder, looking into his eyes and searching for something in there, she turned and left.

  The door snicked shut and Ed looked at the clock. Not even midday.

  He picked up his knife from the bedside table, looked for an unmarked spread of wall and carved in his mark for today.

  And kept carving. Silent, his breathing even, his eyes open but unseeing, hands clenched around the haft but unfeeling, the scratch, scratch, scratch going unheard, Ed carved days that never were into his wall, spanning midnights and middays without blinking, weeks passing with only a spot of blood where he’d nicked his finger, the wall filling faster and faster as months sliced by.

  Fooling himself, an ironic deception, with cuts.

  By one o’clock, when he opened his first bottle of wine and stared at the sun hanging weakly in the clear blue sky and the shadows hunkering unreasonably around doorways and beneath cars in the street down below, Ed had been in the flat for another six months.

  Four o’clock came. Ed had consumed two bottles of wine and was slowly working his way into a third. Bad Hungarian red. There’d been a scare a while back about anti-freeze in the wine, poisonous, bad for you, and Ed had been concerned and worried. That was before he’d been sent to Eastern Europe. Now he wished it were true. Not brave enough to take his own life, he often thought that a freak death like that would be rather poetic.

  As usual when he got drunk it was not the shimmering loss-of-control felt by most other people. His limbs went numb, yes, and his voice would undoubtedly slur had he cause to use it, but the main effects were more insidious. He felt the light leaving him. Both metaphorically and literally his light was fleeing, bleeding from organs pickled and ruined by bad alcohol: metaphorically, because he was losing the last dregs of hope, decency and guilt that still held out against the dark cancer of his soul; and literally, because on occasion he saw the dark.

  He could never have mentioned that to Queenie. He rarely even remembered because it happened so infrequently.

  He saw the dark.

  Shades of grey where there should be colour. Light bulbs fading and flickering as if gauze was being waved before them, the black gauze of mourning, not wedding-white. Shadows sitting in the sun. And just as soon as he became sober the next day he forgot about it, cast it back into the depths of his mind where other memories dwelt like monstrous sea creatures, cruising the darkness and rising only occasionally to assault the small barren island his life had become.

  Strangely enough, he did not feel under siege. Sometimes it was the exact opposite; sometimes, he thought he was a threat to everyone else.

  He can see her. Obviously he can, he’s murdering her after all, but he can really see her. Not the composite image of a human being our brains usually perceive - that face, those grey-green eyes, two arms, birthmark on the neck … all go together to make someone we know and whom we never really see - but the actuality of her as a person made up of many, many things. He’s destroying those things, slicing them asunder as if working on an item in a biology class, and perhaps this is why he sees her as she really is. Because her eyes are wide open and filled with something he hates, hates and fears, while she is still alive they are filled with anger and rage and something that can only be curse, a horrible look that he wants to slice out, the look of someone who has won, someone who knows that victory is not hers now but will be in the future. So he slashes at her eyes and it takes several stabs before they both go. Her right arm begins to twitch, jumping on the concrete paving slabs, blood is pulsing from several cuts down near her hand where she’d initially tried fending him off, and every now and then her limbs enter his per
ipheral vision like curious ghosts watching over his shoulder. He feels the rage rising, something so basic and pure that he fears it more than he can understand, because it is not his own. He can almost see it. Black spots dance before his eyes, speckling in and out of existence like flies popping in and out of the dying woman’s flesh. At first he thinks they are in his eyes, because he’s in a white-hot panic as he keeps stabbing, slashing, gouging. But then he blinks and wipes blood from his face with his left hand, and the spots are still there. He moves his head from side to side and they do not move with him. They are separate from him, more of the woman than him, and her rage must be far, far more powerful than his own. He realises then how pathetic and self-obsessed his murdering this woman is. As if he could possibly solve anything by taking one more life, a life he had come here to protect at that. But he sees the knife rise and fall, rise and fall, sees flesh opening up, sees parts of the woman that should never have been seen, ever. When he was young he’d peel a banana and think I’m the first and last human to ever lay eyes on this piece of fruit flesh. Now he is the first and last to see a different flesh. He feels the warm dampness of it on his skin. And the rage rages on.

  Ed surfaced slowly from another drunken, dream-filled slumber to find that it was early evening. And at the window in his flat’s messy living room, something was fluttering against the glass.

  He sat up quickly, trying to shake the fuzziness from his eyes, and he listened for the scraping across the glass. There was nothing. He stood, pulled the net curtain aside and thought he saw a bird. It took a few seconds to realise that whatever was out there was not solid. It was like a breeze given form, physical yet with nothing firm enough to be seen, stalking across the glass, trying to gain access.

  ‘Get lost,’ Ed said, opening the window. The thing dissipated when there was no longer glass between them. Perhaps it had been a shadow cast from somewhere far off.