The Best new Horror 4

by Stephen Jones

  Tania stood up quickly and hooked her thumbs inside the waist of her denims and her panties, slipping them off. Before I’d had time to blink she was naked. She was breathing hard. Then she was fumbling at my jeans.

  “Bloody fucking hell!” Joy shouted. “Bloody fucking hell!”

  The lines overhead thrummed again. Tania had twice my strength. I had this crazy idea she was drawing it from the pylon. She had my pants halfway down my legs.

  Then everything was interrupted by a high-pitched screaming.

  At first I thought it was Tania, but it was coming from behind her. The screaming brought Tania to her senses. It was Olive, the Nantwiches’ deranged daughter. Her head had appeared over the fence and she was screaming and pointing at something. What she pointed at was my semi-erect penis; half-erect from Tania’s brutal stimulation; half-flaccid from terror at her ferocious strength.

  Olive continued to point and shriek. Then she was joined at the fence by Mrs Nantwich. “Filthy buggers,” said the old woman. “Get on with yer! Filthy buggers!”

  A third head appeared. Red-faced Mr Nantwich. He was just laughing. “Look at that!” he shouted. “Look at that!”

  Tania wasn’t laughing. She looked at me with disgust. “Bastard,” she spat, climbing quickly back into her clothes. “Bastard!”

  I ran after her. “You can’t make anyone do what they don’t want to,” I tried. She shrugged me off tearfully. I let her go.

  “Filthy buggers!” Mrs Nantwich muttered.

  “You can’t make anyone!” I screamed at her.

  “Look at that!” laughed Joe Nantwich.

  Olive was still shrieking. The power lines were still throbbing. Clive was trying to tell me something, but I wasn’t listening. “It wasn’t you,” he was saying. He was pointing up at the pylon. “It were that.”

  I never spoke another word to Tania, and she never came near the pylon again. I was terrified the story would get back to my folks. I didn’t see why exactly, but I had the feeling I’d reap all the blame. But a few days later something happened which overshadowed the entire incident.

  And it happened to Clive.

  One afternoon he and I had been sharing a bottle of Woodpecker. He’d been listening again.

  “Old man Astley’s found out.”

  “Eh? How do you know?”

  He looked up at the overhead wires. “She’s been on the phone to the Dog and Trumpet.”

  He was always reporting what he’d “heard” on the wires. We all knew he was completely cracked, but it was best to ignore him. I changed the subject. I started regaling him with some nonsense I’d heard about a burglar’s fingers bitten clean off by an Alsatian, when Clive took it into his head to start climbing the pylon. I didn’t think it was a sensible thing to do but it was pointless saying anything.

  “Not a good idea, that.”

  “Why?”

  Climbing the pylon wasn’t easy. The inspection ladder didn’t start until a height of nine feet—obviously with schoolboys in mind—but that didn’t stop Clive. He lifted the door we used as a bench and leaned it against the struts of one of the pylon’s legs. Climbing on the struts, he pulled himself to the top of the door, and standing on its top edge he was able to haul himself up to the inspection ladder. He ascended a few rungs and seemed happy to hang there for a while. I got bored watching him.

  It was late afternoon and the sky had gone a dark, cobalt shade of blue. I finished off the cider, unzipped my trousers and stuck my dick outside the curtains to empty my bladder. A kind of spasm shot through me before I’d finished, stronger even than those I’d felt before. I ignored it. “So the burglar,” I was telling Clive, “knew the key was on a string inside the letter box. So when the owners came home they got into the hallway and found,” I finished pissing, zipped up and turned to complete the story. But my words tailed off, “two fingers still holding the string . . .”

  I looked up the inspection ladder to the top of the pylon. I looked at the grey metal struts. I looked everywhere. Clive had vanished.

  “Clive?”

  I checked all around. Then I went outside. I thought he might have jumped down, or fallen. He wasn’t there. I went back inside. Then I went outside again.

  Spots of rain started to appear. I looked up at the wires and they seemed to hum contentedly. I waited for a while until the rain came more heavily, and went home.

  That night while I was lying in bed, I heard the telephone ring. I knew what time it was because I could hear the television signature blaring from the lounge. It was the end of the late night news. Then my mother came upstairs. Had I seen Clive? His mother had phoned. She was worried.

  The next day I was interviewed by a policewoman. I explained we were playing under the pylon, I turned my back and he’d disappeared. She made a note and left.

  A few days later the police were out like blackberries in September. Half the neighbourhood joined in the fine-toothcomb search of the waste ground and the nearby fields. They found nothing. Not a hair from his head.

  While the searches went on, I started to have a recurring nightmare. I’d be back under the pylon, pissing and happily talking away to Clive. Only it wasn’t urine coming out, it was painful fat blue and white sparks of electricity. I’d turn to Clive in surprise, who would be descending the inspection ladder wearing fluorescent blue overalls, his face out of view. And his entire body would be rippling with eels of electricity, gold sparks arcing wildly. Then slowly his head would begin to rotate towards me and I’d start screaming; but before I ever got to see his awful face I’d wake up.

  We stopped playing under the pylon after that. No one had to say anything, we just stopped going there. I did go back once, to satisfy my own curiosity. The screens had been ripped away in the failed search, but the nettles bashed down by the police were already springing up again.

  I looked up into the tower of the pylon, and although there was nothing to see, I felt a terrible sense of dread. Then a face appeared over the Nantwiches’ fence. It was Olive. She’d seen me looking.

  “Gone,” she said. It was the only word I ever heard her say. “Gone.”

  Summer came to an end and we went off to our respective schools. I saw Tania once or twice in her straw boater, but she passed me with her nose in the air. Eventually she married a Tory MP. I often wonder if she’s happy.

  Inevitably Kev and I stopped hanging around together, but not before there was a murder in the district. The landlord of the Dog and Trumpet was stabbed to death. They never found who did it. Joy moved out of the area when her parents split up. She went to live with her mother.

  Joy went on to become a rock and roll singer. A star. Well, not a star exactly, but I did once see her on Top of the Pops. She had a kind of trade mark, turning her back on the cameras to wiggle her bottom. I felt pleased for her that she’d managed to put the habit to good use.

  Just occasionally I bump into Kev in this pub or that but we never really know what to say to each other. After a while Kev always says, “Do you remember the time you hypnotised Tania Brown and . . .” and I always say “Yes” before he gets to the end of the story. Then we look at the floor for a while until one of us says, “Anyway, good to see you, all the best.” It’s that anyway that gets me.

  Clive Mann is never mentioned.

  Occasionally I make myself walk past the old place. A new group of kids has started playing there, including Kev Duffy’s oldest girl. Yesterday as I passed by that way there were no children around because an Electricity Board operative was servicing the pylon. He was halfway up the inspection ladder, and he wore blue overalls exactly like Clive in my dream. It stopped me with a jolt. I had to stare, even though I could sense the man’s irritation at being watched.

  Then came that singular, familiar thrum of energy. The maintenance man let his arm drop and turned to face me, challenging me to go away. But I was transfixed. Because it was Clive’s face I saw in that man’s body. He smiled at me, but tiny white sparks of elec
tricity were leaking from his eyes like tears. Then he made to speak, but all I heard or saw was a fizz of electricity arcing across the metal brace on his teeth. Then he was the maintenance man again, meeting my desolate gaze with an expression of contempt.

  I left hurriedly, and I resolved, after all, not to pass by the pylon again.

  THOMAS LIGOTTI

  The Glamour

  NOCTUARY, THOMAS LIGOTTI’s third collection of supernatural fiction (following the acclaimed Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe: His Lives and Works) will be published in 1994 and contains several previously unpublished stories and a novella written especially for the book.

  The Washington Post described him as “the most startling and unexpected discovery since Clive Barker,” and his atmospheric ghost stories can be found in such anthologies as The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales, Prime Evil, Fine Frights, A Whisper of Blood, The Dedalus Book of Femmes Fatales, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and all three previous volumes of Best New Horror. The fourth issue of the small press magazine Tekeli-li! Journal of Terror (Winter/Spring 1992) included a special Ligotti section, with stories, an interview and bibliography.

  “Horror fiction serves as a reflecting surface in which we may glimpse a blurry image of this infinite and eternal medusa in whose arms are held our whole lives and from whom, one hopes, we are finally released at death,” explains the author. “At certain angles and from the proper distance, the medusa seems to be quite a looker. Weird tales provide these angles and this distance, and they do so without flinching toward the hell of happy endings.”

  With “The Glamour”, we are delighted to welcome back to these pages one of the most original writers in modern horror fiction with another unnerving tale seen from his unique perspective.

  IT HAD LONG BEEN MY PRACTICE to wander late at night and often to attend movie theatres at this time. But something else was involved on the night I went to that theatre in a part of town I had never visited before. A new tendency, a mood or penchant formerly unknown to me, seemed to lead the way. It is difficult to say anything precise about this mood that overcame me, because it seemed to belong to my surroundings as much as to myself. As I advanced further into the part of town I had never visited before, my attention was drawn to a certain aspect of things—a fine aura of fantasy radiating from the most common sights, places and objects that were both blurred and brightened as they projected themselves into my vision.

  Despite the lateness of the hour, there was an active glow cast through so many of the shop windows in that part of town. Along one particular avenue, the starless evening was glazed by these lights, these diamonds of plate glass set within old buildings of dark brick. I paused before the display window of a toy store and was entranced by a chaotic tableau of preposterous excitation. My eyes followed several things at once: the fated antics of mechanized monkeys that clapped tiny cymbals or somersaulted uncontrollably; the destined pirouettes of a music box ballerina; the grotesque wobbling of a newly sprung jack-in-the-box. The inside of the store was a Christmas-tree clutter of merchandise receding into a background that looked shadowed and empty. An old man with a smooth pate and angular eyebrows stepped forward to the front window and began rewinding some of the toys to keep them in ceaseless gyration. While performing this task he suddenly looked up at me, his face expressionless.

  I moved down the street, where other windows framed little worlds so strangely picturesque and so dreamily illuminated in the shabby darkness of that part of town. One of them was a bakery whose window display was a gallery of sculptured frosting, a winter landscape of swirling, drifting whiteness, of snowy rosettes and layers of icy glitter. At the centre of the glacial kingdom was a pair of miniature people frozen atop a many-tiered wedding cake, but beyond the brilliant arctic scene I saw only the deep blackness of an establishment that kept short hours. Standing outside another window nearby, I was uncertain if the place was open for business or not. A few figures were positioned here and there within faded lighting reminiscent of an old photograph, though it seemed they were beings of the same kind as the window dummies of this store, which apparently trafficked in dated styles of clothing. Even the faces of the mannikins, as a glossy light fell upon them, wore the placidly enigmatic expressions of a different time.

  Actually, there were several places doing business at that hour of the night and in that part of town, however scarce potential customers appeared to be on this particular street. I saw no one enter or exit the many doors along the sidewalk; a canvas awning that some proprietor had neglected to roll up for the night was flapping in the wind. Nevertheless, I did sense a certain vitality around me and felt the kind of acute anticipation that a child might experience at a carnival, where each lurid attraction incites fantastic speculations, while unexpected desires arise for something which has no specific qualities in the imagination yet seems to be only a few steps away. My mood had not abandoned me but only grew stronger, a possessing impulse without object.

  Then I saw the marquee for a movie theatre. It was something I might easily have passed by, for the letters spelling out the name of the theatre were broken and unreadable. The title on the marquee was similarly damaged, as though stones had been thrown at it and a series of attempts made to efface the words that I finally deciphered.

  The feature being advertised that night was called “The Glamour.”

  When I reached the front of the theatre I found that the row of doors forming the entrance had been barricaded by crosswise planks with notices posted upon them warning that the building had been condemned. This action had apparently been taken some time ago, judging by the weathered condition of the boards that blocked my way and the dated appearance of the notices stuck upon them. In any case, the marquee was still illuminated, albeit rather poorly, so I was not surprised to see a double-faced sign propped up on the sidewalk, an inconspicuous little board that read: ENTRANCE TO THE THEATRE. Beneath these words was an arrow pointing into an alleyway which separated the theatre from the remaining buildings on the block. Peeking into the otherwise solid facade of that particular street, I saw only a long, narrow corridor with a single light set far into its depths. The light shone with a strange shade of purple, like that of a freshly exposed heart, and appeared to be positioned over a doorway leading into the theatre.

  It had long been my practice to attend movie theatres late at night, and I reminded myself of this. Whatever reservations I felt at the time were easily overcome by a new surge of the mood I was experiencing that night in a part of town I had never visited before.

  The purple lamp did indeed mark a way into the theatre, casting a kind of arterial light upon a door that reiterated the word “entrance.” Stepping inside, I entered a tight hallway where the walls glowed a deep pink, very similar in shade to that little beacon in the alley but reminding me more of a richly blooded brain than a beating heart. At the end of the hallway I could see my reflection in a ticket window, and on approaching it I noticed that those walls so close to me were veiled from floor to ceiling with what appeared to be cobwebs. Similar cobwebs were strewn upon the carpet leading to the ticket window: wispy shrouds that did not scatter as I walked over them. It was as if they had securely bound themselves to the carpet’s worn and shallow fibre, or were growing out of it like postmortem hairs on a corpse.

  There was no one behind the ticket window, no one I could see in that small space of darkness beyond the blur of purple-tinted glass in which my reflection was held. Nevertheless, a ticket was protruding from a slot beneath the semi-circular cutaway at the bottom of the window, sticking out like a paper tongue. A few hairs lay beside it.

  “Admission is free,” said a man who was now standing in the doorway beside the ticket booth. His suit was well-fitted and neat, but his face appeared somehow in a mess, bristled over all its contours. His tone was polite, even passive, when he said, “The theatre is under new ownership.”

  “Are you the manager?” I asked.

  “I was just
on my way to the rest room.”

  Without further comment he drifted off into the darkness of the theatre. For a moment something floated in the empty space he left in the doorway—a swarm of filaments like dust that scattered or settled before I stepped through. And in those first few seconds inside, the only thing I could see were the words “rest room” glowing above a door as it slowly closed.

  I manoeuvred with caution until my sight became sufficient to the dark and allowed me to find a door leading to the auditorium of the movie theatre. But once inside, as I stood at the summit of a sloping aisle, all previous orientation to my surroundings underwent a setback. The room was illuminated by an elaborate chandelier centered high above the floor, as well as a series of light fixtures along either of the side walls. I was not surprised by the dimness of the lighting, nor by its hue, which made shadows appear faintly bloodshot—a sickly, liverish shade that might be witnessed in an operating room where a torso lies open on the table, its entrails a palette of pinks and reds and purples . . . diseased viscera imitating all the shades of sunset.

  However, my perception of the theatre auditorium remained problematic—not because of any oddities of illumination but for another reason. I experienced no difficulty in mentally registering the elements around me—the separate aisles and rows of seats, the curtain-flanked movie screen, the well-noted chandelier and wall lights—but it seemed impossible to gain a sense of these objects, and the larger scene they comprised, in simple accord with their appearances. I saw nothing that I have not described, yet . . . the round-backed seats were at the same time rows of headstones in a graveyard; the aisles were endless filthy alleys, long desolate corridors in an old asylum, or the dripping passages of a sewer receding into the distance; the pale movie screen was a dust-blinded window in a dark unvisited cellar, a mirror gone rheumy with age in an abandoned house; the chandelier and smaller fixtures were the facets of murky crystals embedded in the sticky walls of an unknown cavern. In other words, this movie theatre was merely a virtual image, a veil upon a complex collage of other places, all of which shared certain qualities that were projected into my vision, as though the things I saw were possessed by something I could not see.