The Best New Horror 5

by Ramsay Campbell

  And that’s all it would’ve been if I’d been sharp at all, if I hadn’t been muzzy from drinking. That’s all it should have been, a seat in my taxi and goodbye, no obligation.

  But where she was going, her flat was only one street down from mine, the other side of the cemetery; and the driver took us along the river and up, so we reached hers first. And I wasn’t thinking, I got out with her and paid the taxi off, saved myself twenty pence.

  Cost myself a whole lot more: a lifetime of paying, maybe. Unless I get lucky. Amnesia or senility, that’s what I’m looking for now, that’s where my hope is. I just want to get out of my head, I don’t like what’s in here, can’t live with it.

  Standing there in the night, in the dark, I still could’ve saved myself if I’d only simply walked away; but I didn’t. Too polite, too well-trained: blame my parents, my culture, blame whoever you like. I just blame myself.

  Anyway, I said something, something bland and inane, just making conversation. “My flat’s only just round the corner from here, surprised I haven’t seen you in the street,” it might have been that, or something like it. But whatever it was, it wasn’t, “Goodnight.”

  And she said, “Would you, I don’t suppose you would, I expect you want to get off now, don’t want to be troubled with me; but would you like to come in? For a coffee?”

  And God help me, because no one else can now; but I stood there and looked at her, saw the strangeness and overlooked it, and said yes. Couldn’t see any point in the alternative, being home and alone; so I said yes, OK, I’d have a coffee. Thanks, I said.

  She had three good locks on her front door, had to find three separate keys in her pockets before she could let us in.

  “Dodgy area, isn’t it?” I said. “You been burgled yet?”

  “No, but I mustn’t,” she said. “I can’t let that happen, I’ve got to keep my baby safe.”

  Baby. She’d mentioned the baby half a dozen times by now; but the flat was dark and felt empty, and the door had been so thoroughly, comprehensively locked . . .

  “Where’s your baby now, then?”

  “In her room, of course. She’ll be sleeping.”

  “No babysitter?”

  “Oh, no. I couldn’t, I couldn’t leave her with a stranger.”

  “You mean you’d rather leave her alone?” I was jolted enough, drunk enough just to say that, straight out.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, sounding slightly puzzled. “I always know when she’s going to wake up, when she’ll want me. I’m always here when she needs me.”

  That sounded like bullshit from where I stood; but, hell, it was none of my business. Let the social services sort it out, they’d get on to her sooner or later. Probably sooner, if she told other people what she’d just told me.

  I followed her up the stairs and into a living room strewn with baby-clothes, cluttered with toys. I didn’t know about the clothes, but some of those toys were twenty years old or more, jumble-sale pickings by the look of them, flaking paint and dents and the odd rough edge where something had broken off. Definitely not for babies, I’d have thought, but what did I know?

  She made coffee, then left me alone for a couple of minutes. I snooped shamelessly, drawn to the one real oddity in the room, the computer in the corner. There was a sheaf of handwritten pages by the keyboard, a doctoral thesis on anaerobic sewage treatment; and it didn’t take a Holmesian intellect to deduce that she took in other people’s typing.

  She came back with a photograph album, pictures of her baby; and she scrounged a cigarette and gave me an illustrated lecture. The kid’s name was Anne-Marie and she was six months old, never a day’s illness in her life and the sweetest baby any mother could wish for. And her mother’s name was Alice, I learned that too; and yes, Alice typed for a living. And I was a student, was I, yes, of course I was, she could see that, I was an intellectual, it showed in my face; and if I ever needed a dissertation typing up, or any of my student friends, if they did, she was cheaper than the agencies and just as quick . . .

  Forty-five minutes of this, and then there were soft wails coming through the wall, and that had to be the baby, bless her; so I used her as an excuse and left, with Alice’s business card in my pocket and nothing in my head except to get home, to get away.

  But you forget awkwardness and embarrassment, and only remember strangeness; and you get curious, you want to try things twice. Or I do, anyway. I did. And a few months later I did need some typing done, and I really couldn’t afford the agencies; so I went back to find Alice.

  It took her a while to answer the door, but when she did it felt like I’d been gone only a few minutes, instead of months. The baby was crying – again, obviously, but I almost said still, because that’s how it felt, as if there’d been no break at all – and Alice was wearing the same strange clothes, and her hands and voice were imitating each other as before, tying words and fingers into soft knots.

  “Michael, you came, I didn’t expect, I thought, I don’t know why you should have bothered. But there, you’ve got work with you, you haven’t come to visit, have you, of course not, you want some typing done. Come in, come up, I’ll just, I’ll have to settle the baby . . .”

  Again she took me to the living room, and left me, and again I snooped among the toys and clothes, fascinated and repelled by both. There were dresses there that would fit a three-year-old, as well as nappies for a newborn; there was an old tin wheeled horse that even a three-year-old would be too small to ride. Alice’s buying for the baby looked as obsessive as her conversation, and as ill-planned.

  But the baby’s crying stopped abruptly, and a minute later Alice came back, privately smiling, practically oozing tender maternity. It ought to have been a performance, she laid it on so thick; but I believed her, I thought she really did feel that deeply towards little Anne-Marie, that deeply attached. Probably she was lonely, I couldn’t see her having many friends (or any friends, a more honest echo in the back of my head), and likely a single mother would turn more and more towards her child in a situation like that. I’d never asked, but Alice had to be a single mother.

  It couldn’t be good for the kid to be so needed, so possessed; but that was no concern of mine. NMP, that was: Not My Problem.

  I had to show some interest, though, I had to be polite before we got down to business; and asking about the baby was the easiest way to do that. Safe territory, I thought.

  I thought.

  “So how is Anne-Marie, then? Crawling all over by now, I imagine, is she?”

  “Oh, no,” and Alice laughed, high and shrill. “No, she’s not crawling yet, not yet. She’s only six months old, you know, not time for crawling yet. I can walk her, I can hold her hands and she’ll walk, she even dances for me sometimes; but she hasn’t started crawling yet, oh no.”

  And that’s when it all turned very bad indeed. That’s when I stood there and thought, get out, Mick, just get out of here, get moving. And if I’d been moving already it would’ve been easy, my feet would’ve done the job for me, no problem, they were itching for it. But I wasn’t moving, I was standing still and I couldn’t overcome that. I just got stiller, only the tingling in my fingers and my feet to say they were working at all.

  So I did the other thing, I lied to myself. I thought, It’s OK, it’s a misunderstanding, that’s all. Nothing to worry about. No problem.

  Or if there was a problem it wasn’t mine, NMP, I thought that too; but even that thought couldn’t stop me doing the stupid thing, the thing I did next.

  “Only six months?” I said, dragging questions out into the light, where they had to be answered. “But surely, she must be older than that, about eleven months by now, she was six months when I was here before. You showed me photos.”

  Alice smiled, when I mentioned the photos. I saw how her hands touched an imaginary album, how they smoothed its cover and turned the pages back; and my fingers weren’t tingling any more, they were starting to shake.

&n
bsp; “That’s right,” she said, “you’ve seen the photos, haven’t you? You’ve seen my lovely baby. Six months, one week, three days,” she said. “Exactly.”

  And she smiled another of those sweet smiles, and looked like a living china doll; and I was getting scared now, I was getting thoroughly spooked.

  “When,” I said, croaking the word out through a tight, tight throat, “when’s her birthday, Alice?”

  “Oh, we just had her birthday,” she said, “you’ve missed that. Her birthday’s in September. The seventeenth.”

  Which didn’t make her six months or eleven either, and oh, I was frightened, and I didn’t want to know.

  “What year was that, Alice? Seventeenth of September, which year?”

  “Year?” She shook her head vaguely. “I forget, it doesn’t matter, why would it matter?”

  I didn’t say anything, for a minute. And then, when I could talk, I said, “Can I see her? Please,” I said. “I’d like to see her. Very much.”

  “She’s sleeping.”

  “I don’t think so, Alice. I don’t think she is.”

  “Well, just for a minute, then. Just from the door. She should be sleeping now. She needs her sleep.”

  Alice led me out onto the landing, and made a great show of tiptoeing down to the furthest door, which stood slightly ajar. She pushed it a little wider and slipped inside, vanished into darkness.

  After a moment she reappeared, and beckoned to me. There was barely room for me to put my head in, with the door only half open and her standing there in the gap; and it was so dark in there, I could really see nothing but shadows. But there was a box-like shadow that resolved itself slowly into a cot, I could make out the bars of it and a bundle behind the bars; and the bundle stirred, I saw that. I saw an arm rise and fall, as though the baby were waving; and relief broke through my body like a wave on shingle. Just paranoia and confusion, then, and nothing to get worked up about. Nothing I had to do except be polite, back out of there, talk about typing.

  But the baby went on waving, the one arm going up and down, up and down; and the more my eyes adjusted to the dim light, the stranger it looked. And the room smelled strange, too, it smelled musty and unused, almost, surely, unlived-in; and Alice was standing with her back to me, still blocking my way in, and she was sort of chanting baby-talk under her breath in time with that stiff movement, and she sounded utterly mad.

  I pressed the light-switch by my shoulder.

  Nothing happened, though, except that Alice’s head jerked round, and, “No light,” she breathed, “you mustn’t. I took the bulb away. Mustn’t let the light in, baby doesn’t like the light, it isn’t good for her . . .”

  Even then I could just have walked away, and I wish I had. There’s always a last chance; that was mine, and I blew it.

  It wasn’t curiosity driving me now, nothing like it: closer to panic, perhaps, the certainty of horror lurking somewhere in this story, in this room. Waiting for the light. But panic or not, I still needed to resolve it. I still needed to know.

  So I pushed past Alice despite her sudden screeching and her clutching hands, I went to the window and I tried to draw the curtain back.

  It didn’t draw, though, because it wasn’t a curtain. It was a blanket, and it was nailed tight across the frame. But I had my own madness now; I stretched up, caught hold of the edge as high as I could reach, dug my fingers in between the nails and yanked hard.

  It held for a second, then started to rip. Three good tugs, and the sunlight was flooding into that room where no light had been for far too long.

  Now I could see; and now, already, too late already, I wished it all undone.

  “The light’s not good for baby,” Alice said, her voice twisting like her face was twisting, “the light makes baby cry, see? See?”

  And her finger stabbed down on a cassette player, and the room filled with the sounds of a baby crying. The sounds I’d heard as I arrived here, a few short minutes ago; the same sounds, the same tape that I’d heard five months back. She must have had it on a time switch then, to start it playing while she was in the other room with me.

  “Baby likes dancing,” Alice was saying, gasping rather, the words coming in hurried gulps while tears flowed down her porcelain cheeks. “Baby dance for Mama, look, see how she dances . . .”

  I could see already, how baby danced. Much the same way as she’d waved, earlier. There were strings, rising from the baby’s cot; they ran through loops across the ceiling, and came down the wall by the door, just where Alice was standing. And Alice held the strings in her twitching, fretful hands, and pulled them lovingly; and baby rose from her blankets and danced for me and Mama.

  At the inquest, the doctor told us that Anne-Marie had died at around six months, as near as he could tell. Six months, one week, three days, I thought, but didn’t say. She’d been dead a long time, he told us, he couldn’t say how long, with the body so strangely treated; but the birth certificate said she’d been born three years before, and yes, he said, that would fit with what medical evidence, what knowledge he had.

  The good news was that she might, she might have died of natural causes. Impossible to be sure, he said, but there were no signs of violence. Not before death, at least. Might have been a cot death, he said, just an inexplicable loss. And that might help to explain the mother, he said, what the mother had done.

  That’s what I try to remember now, that she might have died sweet and easy, no pain or fear and nothing to do with Alice. That maybe what Alice did after was no worse than a grieving mother trying to hold on to what was gone, no more than a child playing dolls.

  That’s what I try to remember. Mostly it doesn’t work, though. Mostly what I remember is Anne-Marie dancing that day, while her mother pulled the strings.

  The tape played, and baby danced to the sounds of her own crying, as if she danced to music. The little crocheted blankets fell away, and I saw a shrivelled brown husk of a thing in a white lace gown, strings sewn to her wrists and elbows, and to the back of her neck.

  She hung above her cot and moved in jerks, in a desperate parody. Her blind eyes were sewn shut, hush, baby’s sleeping, but there were crude blotches of blue painted on the dark dry lids, look, baby’s awake, blue eyes smiling for Mama. Lipstick was smeared clumsily across her gaping, toothless mouth, there, baby, don’t cry, Mama make you pretty.

  And, of course, Mama made her dance. Her head flopped, forward and back as she jiggled on the strings, and her hands dangled at the end of stick-thin arms; later I learned that Alice had broken every joint in her body, to make her move at the strings’ command. That didn’t help, but nothing could, much. Nothing can.

  Anne-Marie’s in the cemetery now, just down the road from my flat. Her mother’s in hospital, but I’m not concerned about Alice.

  I went to the funeral to see baby buried, to be certain it was done; and I’m trying to save money now, to pay for a headstone. Something good and heavy, to weigh her down.

  I wish to God they’d burned her, for surety’s sake, but they wouldn’t listen to me. Father’s wishes, they said, though God knows how they traced the father. Then they sent me to a psychiatrist, but he didn’t help either. I still see her dancing, every time I hear a baby cry; and I still get scared, every time I see a baby being taken down the hill to the cemetery. Sometimes I go running after, to be sure the baby’s sleeping. Don’t let it wake up, I tell them, don’t let it cry in that corner. Not in earshot of that corner, where the new graves are . . .

  KARL EDWARD WAGNER

  Passages

  KARL EDWARD WAGNER is another regular contributor to The Best New Horror. Since 1980 he has edited The Year’s Best Horror Stories series for DAW Books and is currently working on two new novels, The Fourth Seal and a book-length version of his disowned DC Comics graphic novel, Tell Me, Dark.

  He has also recently compiled two new collections of short stories, Exorcisms and Ecstasies and Silver Dagger, the latter a fourth book of tales
featuring his barbarian sorcerer, Kane. Other recent appearances include Elric: Tales of the White Wolf (a Kane-meets-Elric crossover), The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, The Ultimate Witch, Touch Wood and Phobias, from which the following story is taken.

  As the author explains: “The doctor character is mainly autobiographical. I did have a needle broken in my arm, as described, with subsequent needle phobia etc., as written. I became a psychiatrist rather than a heart surgeon. Think I never lost that light in my eyes (paraphrasing Pink Floyd’s ‘Poles Apart’ on their new album, The Decision Bell). I guess.”

  THERE WERE THE three of them, seated at one of the corner tables, somewhat away from the rest of the crowd in the rented banquet room at the Legion Hall. A paper banner painted in red and black school colors welcomed back the Pine Hill High School Class of 1963 to its 25th Class Reunion. A moderately bad local band was playing a medley of hits from the 1960s, and many of the middle-aged alumni were attempting to dance. In an eddy from the amplifiers, it was possible to carry on a conversation.

  They were Marcia Meadows (she had taken back her maiden name after the divorce), Fred Pruitt (once known as Freddie Pruitt and called so again tonight), and Grant McDade (now addressed as Dr McDade). The best of friends in high school, each had gone his separate way, and despite yearbook vows to remain the very closest of friends forever, they had been out of touch until this night. Marcia and Grant had been voted Most Intellectual for the senior class. Freddie and one Beth Markeson had been voted Most Likely to Succeed. These three were laughing over their senior photographs in the yearbook. Plastic cups of beer from the party keg were close at hand. Freddie had already drunk more than the other two together.

  Marcia sighed and shook her head. They all looked so young back then: pictures of strangers. “So why isn’t Beth here tonight?”

  “Off somewhere in California, I hear,” Freddie said. He was the only one of the three who had remained in Pine Hill. He owned the local Porsche-Audi-BMW dealership. “I think she’s supposed to be working in pictures. She always had a good . . .”