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

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  The street was quiet and still, but Ed saw that things were wrong. The dark, he thought, it’s the dark come before the murder, but he was thinking in Queenie’s voice.

  He needed to go and find her. He needed to know what she knew of the dark. The dark, and the rage he sensed was drawing near again.

  He left his flat as he had so many times before - without hope.

  Outside, night was forcing daylight into hiding. House windows no longer reflected the cloud-smeared sky, the cars and people travelling through the streets or the facades of buildings standing opposite. Now they were black, as if the light had already been sucked from the buildings’ innards, leaving only a void to press against the glass on the inside. Ed sensed a pressure behind these windows - he could almost see the glass bowing outwards - and he walked closer to them. Moving away from the road towards a more noticeable danger felt good. Once or twice he thought he saw himself reflected in there, but the light was fading fast now and he could just have been a shadow. Perhaps it was even someone walking behind him, keeping step, but when he glanced over his shoulder he was alone.

  The animals knew that something was amiss. Pigeons huddled together on window sills, heads tucked beneath wings but looking up frequently, unable to sleep. Occasionally some of them would take flight, as if touched by nothing that could be seen. Cats sat behind several windows observing the street, watching the pigeons roost and panic, their heads turning here and there, none of them licking their paws, none outside in the street. There were no dogs sniffing along the gutter or pissing against garden walls, no magpies or crows or sparrows fighting over the remains of burgers trodden into pavements, no bees buzzing between gardens, no flies aiming for nostrils or eyes.

  Another flock of pigeons lifted from a garage roof, their wings applauding the strange silence that had fallen over the streets. Even though cars travelled back and forth and people walked the pavements, sounds did not seem to echo, and Ed constantly brushed at his ears as if expecting some deadening material to be draped there. A car passed ten feet away, but its motor could have been coming from the next street. He coughed and felt it thrum through his head and chest, but its sound was dull and muted. He saw other people acting in the same bemused manner: rubbing their ears; watching cars drift quietly by; stamping feet or making some other noise to test their perceived deafness. It was as if the air was thickening, damping sound and diluting echoes into dull mumbles of what they should have been.

  Cars approaching from the direction of the park had their headlights on full. Those moving the other way soon turned theirs on as well. The traffic was moving even slower than the usual rush-hour crawl.

  Ed left the residential street and walked past the first of the shops. A man was busy pulling down a shutter and padlocking it into place, glancing warily over his shoulder as Ed approached.

  ‘Who are you?’ the man asked.

  ‘No one.’

  ‘Something’s going to happen,’ the man said, eyes dancing in their sockets like loose ball-bearings. He couldn’t keep his gaze in one place. ‘Something soon, and something bad. Maybe there’ll be a riot. Do you think there’s going to be a riot?’

  Ed looked along the shopping street at the cars wending their way home, the people minding their own business even more than usual as they hurried, heads down, inexplicably trying not to bring attention to themselves. ‘I quite doubt it,’ he said, but the man was already hurrying away.

  A motorcycle passed by accompanied by an explosion of shadows. They buzzed the bike like the dregs of a bad dream, black butterflies, negative snow, but totally without form. The motorcyclist was waving his left hand around his head, flicking his hand at the air as if trying to sign to someone behind him. Ed watched his hand and wondered what he meant.

  The shards of shadow darted at the rider’s helmet … and disappeared.

  Ed saw what was about to happen, but he could do nothing to help it. He tried to draw breath but it was like breathing in the middle of a thick fog. His lungs felt heavy and fall, but not with air. And then the bike flipped sideways, the rider left his mount, the machine hurtled up onto the pavement and through a shop window - the smashing of glass sounding like wind-chimes in the distance - and the street came to a standstill.

  At last, Ed could shout. ‘Watch out!’ he croaked, realising how foolish it sounded now. Realising too that he had allowed someone else to die. If only he had shouted … if only he had been able to warn … The man lay half-beneath a parked car, his helmet askew on his head, the car body dented where he had impacted. Someone was kneeling beside him and reaching for the helmet and lifting the visor, tugging, taking it off…

  Ed ran across the street, not wanting to see what gushed out when the man’s head was released. He dodged between the stalled cars and the drivers staring in blatant fascination at the scene unfolding in the gutter behind him. He did not look at any of them. He knew what they were feeling because he felt it himself sometimes, a revelling in the pain of others that helped him live with his own agonies. It was necessary, he supposed, and it kept him going however much he had no desire to carry on. They were shocked and excited, and pleased that their own troubles had been unloaded - for however long - on someone else. Something strange was happening right here and now, but a man was dying in the road. For a while, that would obsess these people and give them an escape.

  Looking down, Ed saw shadows writhing across his legs as he ran through the beams of car headlights. They seemed to be stitched into his trousers, swathes of dark fluttering behind him like loose cloth. He ran on without looking down again.

  ‘Oh God!’ he thought he heard from behind him, but it might as well have been a cry from hidden memory.

  He had to find Queenie. Night was falling too early. And try as he might, Ed could not shake the ever-increasing certainty that he had seen it all before.

  He can feel blood on his hands. The hard haft of the knife in his right hand counterpoints the warm wet thing he holds in his left, his palm pressed flat to the body’s chest to hold it against the wall as he drives the blade home, again and again. A few moments ago he could still feel its heart beating, but that gave out with a spasm, as if the big muscle was trying to force the knife back out with its own violence. The blood from there seemed warmer than the rest, more sticky, like sweet treacle instead of runny syrup. The body is sliding down the wall so he pushes harder, trying to keep it upright, his blows striking its shoulders and neck as it moves down, then its chin and face. His finger slips inside a cut as he pushes and he turns it around in there. He can’t help comparing the feeling with one more loving and sensuous. Something scratches his finger - a bone splintered by the heavy knife - and he moves away, letting the body slump to the ground. His face is dripping with sweat, cool where sprayed blood dries there, soon to be a crust, cracking and flaking away like red autumn leaves. Something else settles around him. Heavy and dark and intimate, it reaches out formless hands to steady him, or perhaps to push him down. It enters his throat and makes it hard to breathe. For a second he feels a sudden, total rush of antagonism, fear and hate … unbridled hate … and then he is running. His feet slap on the pavement, rain taps patient fingers on his forehead and scalp, there’s plenty of time, it says, and his clothes catch and scrape where he is sweating. He is running. Again.

  As he reached the park the dark had already won.

  The streetlamps were still on but their light was weak. Car headlights struggled to part the air, their beams all but ineffectual now. Since running from the crashed motorcycle Ed had seen two cars hugging lampposts, and another one burning where it had come to rest on its roof. Burning, blazing, the stench of roasting meat bringing back dreadful memories, the sight of flames … but the flames looked weak and far away, as if he was viewing them on a videotape, a copy of a copy of a copy. They appeared weaker than they should, too. Perhaps the fuel was trying its best not to burn today.

  The normal had changed. People were not coping.

&nbs
p; And then he wondered why he was running. He was searching for Queenie because she’d told him about this, and deep inside beneath those noxious memories he thought he knew much more than he’d like to believe. But he’d just seen someone die, smelled more people burning in their crashed car, and even then he could hear the muffled sound of smashing glass and a scream, penetrating the darkness as effectively as a sigh into a pillow. He sought danger, felt more comfortable in its presence, so why was he running? Why not stand still and let it come? He would not fight. He would accept whatever the darkness had chosen for him because he knew it, he had seen it

  (and smelled it and tasted it)

  and although he could not accurately recall when and where, he knew it must have been at the murder. When he was killing that woman, subsumed by his own rage and impotence and anger, the darkness must have touched him.

  But a greater rage had been with him as well, something far beyond his own.

  And that curse in her eyes.

  He climbed the wall. The park was much darker than he had ever seen it. No stars peered through the cloud cover, no streetlight bled through the railings, but Ed knew where to go. He’d been there before and she would be there now. He would find his way in the dark.

  ‘Can you feel it?’ Queenie said as he neared the copse of trees. ‘Can you feel the rage?’

  Ed stopped and tried to locate the voice. It had come from his left, he thought, over where the trees gave way to the shrubbery bordering the stream. He paused, held his breath and waited for her to talk again.

  She whispered in his right ear, ‘I’ve never known it so powerful.’ She touched his shoulder and walked behind him, drawing her hand across the back of his neck and scratching him with her nails. It was not sexual, he knew that right away, because it hurt. She was trying to hurt him and he didn’t know why.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he asked. If felt like a foolish thing to say. He should know. But right now, standing here in total darkness, a strange woman threatening him and turning him on, he was more confused than ever.

  ‘I’ve always arrived afterwards.’ He could smell her breath, garlic and staleness, no vanity there. ‘After the event, watched them clean up the bodies and take them away, seen them put it down to just another murder.’ Her voice sounded stronger than it had before, and the more excited she became the heavier the accent. He’d not noticed it before now, perhaps because it brought back way too many memories. She was foreign, but her grasp of English was perfect. Ed wondered if she knew that she was letting it slip. ‘But with each one the blackouts lasted longer, because they were searching … searching for you, Ed.’

  ‘Me?’ He could taste her hate. ‘Me?’ He felt her breath caress his ear and neck. She was standing so close that her heat touched him in waves.

  ‘You fuck.’ She spoke quietly, but her voice was loud with venom and anger and rage. And her accent, far from distorting her words, made them all the more clear to him.

  ‘You’ve tracked me down,’ he said, wondering if Queenie was a daughter or a niece to the woman he had killed. In a way, he was glad. He waited for the attack.

  ‘I didn’t. They did. My mother and the other dead. You’re not as invisible as you think. Every time you kill she sees, and she knows your mark, and together … they track you again. It takes time. But they find you.’

  They?

  ‘Their hate for you blocks out the sun.’

  Ed stared up into the blackness and wondered just what he was looking at. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Murderer.’

  ‘Yes … But I still don’t understand. Was she your mother? I can’t see you. I’m so sorry, whoever she was I’m so sorry, but I’ve lived with it … really, it’s destroyed me, you don’t know how much.’ He should have been crying, but he felt nothing, no sympathy or regret. He thought of all the things that could have been, but he could not remember any of them.

  ‘Destroyed you?’ Her voice was breaking now, rage giving way to tears and perhaps increasing because of that. ‘Destroyed you? I identified … I named my mother by looking at her jewellery. That’s why we knew it wasn’t just another ethnic killing in that bloody war: she still had her jewellery. Anyone else would have taken it. Destroyed? She was ruined. I couldn’t even look her in the face to say goodbye.’ She sobbed as a memory came back. ‘It was gone.’

  Ed opened his mouth, but there was nothing he could say. Darkness flooded in and sent searing pain into his teeth, dried his tongue. Why was she Queenie, the Avoidance Queen? Her life? All of it? Maybe she’d shunned her future just to do this, track him.

  ‘So now you’ve found me—’

  ‘They’ve found you. My greatest desire - my fantasy, my dream - is to see you in pain caused by me. It’s what I’ve given up everything to achieve. But I dare not argue with them. They have much more reason.’

  They, they, they?

  She touched him again, a callused hand coming around his throat to hurt but not kill - there were others ready to do that, more in the dark than Queenie - and Ed reacted quickly. He grabbed her wrist and twisted, brought his other arm around to strike out at where he thought she should be. His fist connected with something, he didn’t know if it was hair or her woollen sweater, and then he was running through the park, the ground invisible but still there for now, and behind him he heard Queenie shouting something after him but, thankfully, her voice was lost.

  He had to get home. Back to the flat, to relative safety, before she found him again. Before they found him .. . whoever they were. Already he could sense faces pressing against his mind, demanding entrance, requiring acknowledgement. They were still too far away to recognise.

  Still running, he came to the park wall. The level of the ground was raised almost to the wall coping, but on the other side there was a five-foot drop into the street. Ed tripped over the head of the wall and fell out into space, arms pinwheeling, a frantic squeal escaping him for a second before he struck the pavement below. His head met with the kerb, and it was only as he faded into a stunned daze that light seemed to offer itself, a flash of white pain from inside. In that light, as if born of it, memories swam and enlarged, vicious memories of that time years ago when he had changed and destroyed his own life by taking someone else’s.

  But they were all wrong …

  The woman lying on the compacted mud floor, yes, the smell of burning outside, her eyes cursing him as the knife came down again—

  And the woman, already a corpse, pressed against a wall with one hand while the other carves in, her blood running down his arm beneath his sleeve, coating his teeth as it sprays—

  And blood staining the clean white sheets beneath her as it rains outside, the stink of the city rising up as the violent storm washes them from the gutters—

  And the knife grates as it slips from her outstretched hand and calls sparks from the pavement down by the river—

  And in the back of the car, thinking she was there for something else, his shoulder and head pressed awkwardly against the roof as he tries to swing his arm back and forth, back again …

  And others.

  One tastes of cinnamon, another smells of vanilla; one feels cool and calm even under his attack, another is hot and fevered; one goes quietly, another sounds like a steam-engine whistle as she screams …

  Others. Many others.

  And with all of them, the fury and rage.

  Ed came around, dizzy with the shock of memory and the impact of his skull on the pavement.

  What was he? What kind of animal, monster … he should stay where he was, wait for the sad heart of this darkness to find him and exact the revenge it had been seeking for years. Growing all the time, expanding, because every time it drew near he repeated his crime, fed it a fresh rage to find him with next time, more anger, and in a way he supposed he was providing for his own punishment.

  So he should wait and submit…

  But there was still time. It was looking for him, a deeper shadow in this bl
ackness, even now he could hear a scream as someone was picked up and tossed away when the dark realised it had the wrong person.

  I should submit … I’m an animal … all those people, all that life … there’s still time … I should die … I can escape … I’ll let her, let them kill me … I can find light again.

  Confused, crying, terrified, wretched, Ed felt his way along the boundary wall of the park, knowing he was going the right way. Cowardice and an instinct for survival - really for Ed they had become one and the same - drove him on. If Queenie was following, he did not hear her or sense her, and she would be as blind as him. He wondered what time it was and whether anyone was even doing anything about this, this weird darkness that had fallen, no stars no moon no lights, artificial light swallowed and beaten back like clouds of leaves before a hurricane. And he realised that he did not care. Because no one could do anything.

  This was all for him.

  He ran, letting go of the wall and launching himself into space. He tried to steer by sound and touch alone, but every mutter he heard became the scream of one of his victims, every thud of his foot on the road was a knife driving home. He ran through the landscape of his murders, remembering more than he ever thought he could have forgotten. And there were always more memories to come.

  Ed found his way home, read the house number by touch, kicked open the front door, ran up to his flat. He had no idea how. He wondered, as he fumbled the handle, how many times he had done this before.

  He flicked on his light, expecting nothing, and seeing only a ghost before him.

  ‘Mother!’ Queenie shouted, screamed. ‘Mother, he’s here, get him, get him!’

  ‘Shush!’ Ed hissed, almost laughing at how ridiculous that sounded.

  ‘Mother!’ She screamed again and again, the drastically weakened effect of the ceiling lights making her seem almost transparent, a smudge on his vision, nothing more.

  ‘Just stop!’ Ed shouted. He could hardly hear himself. Maybe the dark was eating at his ears, burrowing in to reach his brain because she, and they, had found him already. He wondered how many …