The Best New Horror 5

by Ramsay Campbell

  I don’t know what to say. I think she must have intended to say something else – made a mistake with her English – although she seems so grey and lifeless herself that the statement may well have been true.

  We sit on her balcony for half an hour looking out over the city and the volcano on the far side of the bay, during which time I formulate several lines with which to start a fresh conversation but each one remains unspoken. Something in her passivity frightens me. It seems at odds with the élan of the city in which she lives.

  But Flavia speaks first. “With this view,” she says slowly, “it is impossible not to watch the volcano, to become obsessed by it.”

  I nod.

  “My father was alive when it last erupted,” she continues, “in 1944. Now Vesuvius is dormant. Do you want to see Naples?” she asks, turning towards me.

  “Yes, very much.”

  We leave the apartment and Flavia leads the way to a beaten-up old Fiat Uno. Her driving is a revelation: once in the car and negotiating the hairpin, double-parked roads leading downtown Flavia is a completely different woman. Here is the lively, passionate girl I knew in London. She takes on other drivers with the determination and verve she showed in my room overlooking the hotel car park when we took it in turns to sit astride each other. She rode me then as she now drives the Fiat, throwing it into 180-degree corners and touching her foot to the floor on the straights. She’s not wearing her seat belt; I unclip mine, wind down my window and put my foot up on the plastic moulding in front of me. At one point – when I draw my elbow into the car quickly to avoid a bus coming up on the other side of the road – Flavia turns her head and smiles at me just as she did eight years earlier before falling asleep.

  We skid into a parking place and Flavia attacks the handbrake. Once out of the car she’s quiet again, gliding along beside me. “Where are we going?” I ask her. Beyond the city the summit of Vesuvius is draped in thick grey cloud. Out over the sea on our right a heavy wedge of darkest grey thunderheads is making its way landwards trailing skirts of rain. In the space of two minutes the island of Capri is rubbed out as the storm passes over it and into the bay.

  “She must want to be alone,” Flavia says and, when I look puzzled, continues: “They say that you can see a woman reclining in the outline of the island.”

  But Capri is lost behind layers of grey veils now and just as Flavia finishes speaking the first drops of rain explode on my bare arms. Within seconds we are soaked by a downpour of big fat sweet-smelling summer rain. My thin shirt is plastered to my back. The rain runs off Flavia’s still body in trickles. She seems impervious to the cleansing, refreshing effect that I’m enjoying. Dripping wet with rain bouncing off my forehead, I give her a smile but her expression doesn’t change. “Shall we walk?” I suggest, eyeing some trees in the distance that would give us some shelter. She just turns and starts walking without a word so I follow. The trees – which I realize I have seen previously from Flavia’s balcony – conceal the city aquarium, housed in the lower ground floor of a heavy stone building. I pay for two tickets and we pass in front of a succession of gloomy windows on to another world. It’s so damp down there I feel almost as if we’ve entered the element of the fishes. My shirt clings to my back, getting no drier under the dim lights. Flavia’s white blouse is stuck to her shoulders but there’s no tremor of life as far as I can see. She stares unseeing at the fish, the sinister skate and lugubrious octopus which regard us with an expression I feel but can’t put a name to. Because I’m beginning to feel quite anxious I hurry past the shrimps and seahorses – which I see only as a blur of commas and question marks – and I’m relieved to get back into the open air.

  Flavia takes me to a restaurant she knows and I eat cousins of the creatures we’ve just seen in the aquarium. Flavia orders mineral water and oysters but then hardly touches them. My teeth grind on tiny particles of grit or shell in my sauce but I don’t say anything because it seems to be a city-wide problem. The waiter’s black patent leather shoes are matt with a fine layer of dust.

  I watch Flavia as I eat and she stares out of the window at the teeming rain. When she moves it’s with an incredible slowness that sets up a tension in me. Her stillness makes me want to protect her. She must have suffered so much, like a tree that’s been buffeted by so many storms it’s been stripped of leaves and twigs, but still stands, proud and defiant. I want to reach across and touch her cheek in the hope she might soften and smile, but such a deliberate act seems reckless. The worst thing would be if she remained indifferent to my advance.

  As I continue eating, however, I’m filled with desire for her. I want to take her to bed and hold her and stroke away the years with her thin layers of clothing.

  The feeling grows throughout what remains of the day. We go to a couple of basement piano bars and a club where crowds of strikingly beautiful people spill out on to the street. The atmosphere of intoxication and sexual excitement does nothing to spark Flavia into life. She simply trails her fingers through the dust which seems to coat the tables in every bar we go in.

  Only in the car does she come alive as we race from one venue to another, bouncing down noisy cobbled escape routes and diving into alleys thin as crevices. The car’s headlamps startle cats and in one hidden piazza a huddle of unshaven men emerging from a flyposted door. “This is a dangerous quarter,” she says, pointing at streets I remember from my first night. “Camorro. Our Mafia. They kill you here as soon as look at you.”

  Way past midnight we end up in a park above the city on the same side as Flavia’s apartment but further round the bay. “This newspaper,” she indicates piles of discarded newsprint lining the side of the road. “People come here in their cars and put the newspaper up to cover the windows. Then they make love.”

  I look at the vast drifts of newspaper as we drive slowly around the perimeter of the park. “Why?” I ask. “Because they live at home? It’s their only chance?”

  She shrugs. “They do it in the cars then throw the newspaper out of the window.”

  “And what a view they have,” I say, looking across the bay at the brooding shadow of Vesuvius.

  Back home again she retreats inside her shell. The sudden change throws me. I want to touch her, sleep with her, but suddenly it’s as if we’re complete strangers. She sits on the balcony staring at Vesuvius and I bring her a drink. As I put it down I place my other hand on her arm and give it a brief squeeze. She doesn’t react so I pull one of the wicker chairs round to face hers and sit in the darkness just watching her watch the volcano. The moon paints her face with a pale wash. I can see the shape of her breasts under the white blouse and as I concentrate I can see the merest lift as she breathes. Otherwise I might have doubted she was still alive. “Do you want to go to bed?” I ask.

  She just looks at me. Inside me the tension is reaching bursting point. When Flavia gets up and walks to her bedroom I follow. She undresses in front of me. The moonlight makes her flesh look grey and very still. I undress and lie beside her. She doesn’t push me away but neither does she encourage me in any way.

  When I wake in the morning she’s gone. The pillow on her side is still indented and warm to the touch. I wish I’d done something the night before but her terrible passivity killed my desire. A night’s sleep, however, has returned it to me. If she were here now I’d force her to decide, whether to accept or reject me, either being preferable to indifference.

  I get dressed and step out on to the balcony. The top of Vesuvius is covered with cloud. The air over the city is hazy. On the little table there’s a note for me from Flavia. She’s had to go out for the day and can I entertain myself? I’m to help myself to whatever I want. She suggests I visit Pompeii.

  The Circumvesuviana railway trundles out of the east side of Naples and skirts the volcano, calling at St Giorgio and Ercolano, the sun beating down on the crumbling white apartment buildings. I avoid the modern town at Pompeii and head straight for the excavations. German tourists haggle ov
er the entrance fee, I pay and go through, detaching myself from the crowd as soon as I can. They saunter off down the prescribed route armed with guide books from which their self-elected leader will read out loud, peculiarly choosing the English-language section, as they pass by the monuments of particular note. The same man – he’s wearing a red shirt which bulges over the waistband of his creamy linen trousers – carries the camcorder and will listen impassively to anyone who suggests they operate it instead. They’re a distraction from my surroundings: a city preserved to a far greater degree than anything I had been expecting. I wander off into an area of recent excavations where I’m alone with the buzzing insects and basking lizards that dart away at my approach. The heat is overpowering and after a quarter of an hour threading my way through dug-out paved streets bordered with shoulder-high walls and great swathes of overflowing undergrowth I have to sit down for a rest. I look up at Vesuvius, a huge black shape jiggling from side to side behind the thickening haze.

  A bee the size of a fat cockroach lumbers towards me buzzing like a whole canful of blowflies and I have to duck to avoid it. Even when it’s gone I can still hear it, as if it hadn’t managed to get out of the way quick enough and somehow it got inside my head. The sun, even through the dust in the air, amplifies the noise and cooks my skull so that everything inside it rattles like loose beans. Off down a long straight street to my right I recognize the party of German tourists standing to attention as they listen to the man in the red shirt with the stomach, the camcorder and the guide book. His words are just a low hum to me amid the constant buzz in my ears. My limbs tingle as if electricity is being passed through them, then they go completely numb and the buzzing gets slower and even louder. At the far end of the long straight street the Germans have frozen in position. The man in the red shirt is in the act of raising the camcorder to his eye, a woman in a wraparound top and shorts is caught in the act of leaning backwards – not ungracefully – to correct the fit of her smart training shoe. The air between them and me is thick with shiny dust, glittering in the golden sunshine. The tiny particles are dancing but the figures remain petrified.

  Suddenly they’re moving but in a group rather than individually. They are shifted silently to one side like a collection of statues on an invisible moving platform. It’s as if they’re being shunted into another world while I’m left dodging the insects in this one and I want to go with them. Maybe wherever they’re going there won’t be this terrible grinding noise which is giving the inside of my skull such a relentless battering.

  By the time some feeling returns to my arms and legs the German tourists have completely disappeared. I stumble over the huge baking slabs, trying to escape the punishment. Pursuing the merest hint of a decrease in the noise level I turn in through an old stone doorway and begin a desperate chase after silence: over boulders, through tangles of nettles and vines where enormous butterflies make sluggish progress through the haze. As the pain levels out and then begins to abate I know I’m heading in the right direction. A couple more sharp turns past huge grass-covered mounds and collapsed walls where lizards the size of rats gulp at the gritty air; the noise fades right down, the pain ebbs and warm molten peaceful brassy sun flows into my bruised head. I fall to my knees with my hands covering my face and when I take them away I’m looking directly into the empty grey eyesockets of a petrified man. His face is contorted by the pain he felt as the lava flowed over him. I’m screaming because the man looks so much like me it’s like looking in a mirror and a lizard suddenly flits out of one of the eyes and slips into the gaping mouth. The pain is back and this time it doesn’t go away until I black out.

  I’m out for hours because when I come to, rubbing my forehead, the sun casts quite different shadows on the stony face. Dismayingly I have to admit he still looks like me. For several minutes I sit and watch the insects that use his cavities and passages as they would any similar rock formation.

  Later I tell Flavia how closely his volcanic features resembled mine.

  “It’s quite common to hallucinate after an eruption,” she says, applying a piece of sticky tape to the newspaper covering the driver’s window.

  That’s all very well, I think, but I’m 2000 years too late. Or did she mean him? But I don’t want to dwell on it because the faster the newspaper goes up the sooner I can have her.

  It clicked with me that I could make the most of Flavia’s carbound vivacity so that her passivity at home would not matter as much.

  Through a narrow gap at the top of the windscreen I can see Vesuvius rising and falling as Flavia and I punish the old Fiat’s suspension.

  In a few hours’ time I’ll be climbing Vesuvius herself. Flavia’s away somewhere – working, she said – so I’m to tackle the volcano alone and although I could have taken a cab to the tourist car park halfway up the mountain I decided to walk all the way from Ercolano which, as Herculaneum, was itself covered by the same lava flows that buried Pompeii. The road folds over on itself as I climb. The routine is soon automatic as I maintain a regular ascent and efficient breathing. My mind is rerunning the night before in Flavia’s car. Six times her emotions reached bursting point and boiled over. In the early hours the air in the car was so thick and cloying we had to wind down the window, which meant losing part of our newsprint screen, but the park had emptied hours before.

  In her apartment, where I swallowed glass after glass of fresh orange juice, Flavia was once more still and grey. I was thinking about getting her out in the car again but I knew I had to climb the volcano before I left: it had been calling me and this was my last day in the city.

  If the air were not so thick with dust, the view from halfway up the mountain would be spectacular. I can just make out a darker shadow which is the centre of Naples and a thin line separating the land from the sea. Only the island of Capri is clear in the distance but its profile is still no more like a woman than the trembling slope beneath my feet. Down here there are trees either side of the road but I can see that higher up the ground is bare. The sun still manages to break through the thickening air and once caught between the ground and the dust the heat cannot escape. I’ve taken off my shirt and tied it around my neck to soak up some of the sweat. The mountain seems to get no smaller even though I know I’m climbing. The road hugs the side and disappears some way round the back before twisting back on itself to reach the car park and refreshment stand. I have the sense, the higher I get, of the volcano as an egg, its exterior thin and brittle and cracked open at the top. I stop for breath, lean back and stretch. The summit and crater are covered by cloud.

  Beyond the empty car park the narrow path zig-zags into the clouds. I climb with the same sense of purpose that took hold of Flavia and me in the car and I sense that the prize is not so far removed from that sweet and fiery memory which even now stirs me. The earth and trees have been left behind and the slate-grey cloud thickens about me like hospital blankets. The mountain is loose cinders and disintegrated volcanic material, a uniform grey-brown, like a dying horse in a burnt field. I’m suddenly engulfed by a wave of sympathy for Flavia and the years of suffering. They have turned her into a brittle shell, but life lingers within her, a dormant energy that last night we fired up. She deserves longer-lasting happiness and yet I know she wouldn’t even flicker in some other city; Naples is her only home. Some things are rooted too deeply in the earth to shift.

  Never in my life have I felt so alone as I feel now, wrapped in cloud, buffeted by sea winds, following a path to a crater. I can’t see more than ten barren yards in any direction.

  When I hear the music I think I’ve died or am still asleep in Flavia’s bed and dreaming. Soft notes that gather a little power then fade quickly as the wind blows new ones slightly up or down the scale. I’ve already called Flavia’s name three times before I realize I’m doing it. The name is taken from my lips and wrapped in this soiled cotton wool that surrounds me. Her name rolls on with the cloud over the top of the mountain where the crater must be. I
t mustn’t fall in.

  The source of the music comes into view – an abandoned shack supported by an exoskeleton of tubular steel shafts. The wind plays them like panpipes. A sign still attached to the side of the shack advertises the sale of tickets to the crater. I begin to laugh at the absurdity of such an idea and wade on past the chiming tubes and up towards the edge. I know it’s up there somewhere although I can’t see it and I stumble blindly onwards, scuffing my shoes in coarse, loose material. Then suddenly the ground disappears beneath my feet and I’m clawing at space for a handhold. Somehow I manage to fall back rather than forward and I crouch in the harsh volcanic rubble peering over the edge of the crater. Below me the cloud twists in draughts of warm air. I’m muttering Flavia’s name to myself and thinking I should never have gone to look for her. Then I’m thinking maybe I never did go, but stayed in the insect-ridden hotel instead.

  As I watch the updraughts of ash and dust I see a recognizable group of shapes take vague form in the clouds. The German tourists – he with the red shirt, the camcorder, the stomach, she of the shorts and smart training shoes, still frozen as an exhibit of statuary – descend through the rising dust as if on a platform. The thicker swirls beneath me envelop them.

  They pass into the throat of the giant and are followed by a facsimile of Flavia, falling like a slow bomb. A cast of myself – whether from Pompeii or the hotel, I don’t know – is next, slipping in and out of focus behind curtains of clogging ash.

  The last thing I remember is the buffeting and turbulence the 737 went through as it passed over Vesuvius on its descent into Naples, and suddenly the whole crazy city with its strange visions and coating of fine dust – from a waiter’s shoes to the air rattling in lungs – makes perfect sense.

  POPPY Z. BRITE