The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  It scared Flipper. As soon as he saw the RV, he knew that something far more powerful than a few drug dealers had taken his friends. He puked as the knowledge struck him. Because even if he told everyone what the plan had been, there was nothing they could do to get his friends back. And worse – if it possibly could get any worse – was the growing feeling that he’d somehow let them down. That they’d needed him and he hadn’t been there.

  JANUARY TO MAY held the clearest skies. Gone were the winter rains. The summer rains hadn’t yet come. There wasn’t a cloud in sight for a hundred miles. The Milky Way was so clear he thought he could reach out and touch it.

  If he only could.

  Another reason for the structure around the RV was to hide the bones he’d used to adorn it. He’d gotten hold of the police reports and the crime scene photographs and had recreated the pattern of bones just as his friends had placed them, using bones he’d stolen from a cemetery in Naco. They couldn’t be more exact had Frank Just Frank himself been here to guide his hands.

  But that didn’t explain why he was never taken.

  Why he was all alone.

  Why his friends never came for him.

  In the wee hours of the morning, when the bottle was almost empty and his tears so toxic from the alcohol that they burned his skin, he’d begin to hear things. Sometimes it would be him giggling. He’d catch himself doing it in the side mirror. But other times it would be something else, someone else, the giggle going on like he’d been talking about boob sweat again and Chicken George couldn’t help but laugh even though he wasn’t really there. Like a supernatural game of Marco Polo where someone would almost say something and he’d almost respond – it was in those moments that he knew he was close. He was almost there. He just needed a little more… something.

  Then one morning he awoke from a stupor and realized what it was.

  Bones. And not just the bones of some nameless Mexican from an old Naco grave, but the bones of his friends. The bones were a connective tissue, as if they were a single being pieced together from the sums of their wholes. Only their bodies were never found, so how was he to use their bones? He needed a replacement and as he looked at the prominent bones of his fingers and wrists he understood what that was.

  It took him three days and thirteen thousand dollars to find a doctor in Nogales willing to remove his left arm at the shoulder. Another four thousand dollars bought two weeks in a private room with a series of bewildered nurses who couldn’t believe that his procedure was elective. But he ignored their unasked questions, and once he’d recovered, he crossed the border back into America with a long box.

  He spent cathartic hours cleansing the building housing the RV. The evidence of his years conducting drunken séances lay scattered about the floor. He filled seventeen garbage bags with bottles, food scraps, and broken glass, including the case of cheap vodka he’d poured out. He might have lost an arm, but in the intervening weeks, he’d regained his sobriety and with it came a clear focus of vision.

  It wasn’t until the building and the RV had been cleaned, the writing refreshed on the ceiling doors, the bones bleached, and everything aired out that he opened the long box. Sitting on the cushion-covered bench in the RV, he stared at what lay across his lap. With his right hand he reached out and traced the length of what had once been attached to his left shoulder. They’d boiled the arm, leaving the bone brown and pitted, free of flesh, muscle and tendon. He considered bleaching it like he had the other bones, but disregarded it. His arm had an aged look, as if he’d lost it the same time he’d lost his friends. There was a sad synchronicity about it.

  He’d figured out where to put it while recovering in Mexico. He used a length of pipe, a few bolts, a roll of bailing wire and a soldering gun to complete the project. When he was done, his arm was affixed to the center of the dash, rose at a forty-five degree angle, and held the rearview mirror in the grip of his skeletal hand. He adjusted the mirror so that he could clearly see the interior of the RV.

  That night he drove sober for the first time in years. Singing Apache songs for the dead, he saluted the Milky Way. He heralded Yolkai Nalin. His voice rang strong. His tone was true. When he wasn’t staring into the sky, he was looking into the rearview mirror. And sometime between two and three in the morning, Frank Just Frank appeared, his ghostly figure standing in the middle of the RV. Sam didn’t dare look away from the mirror to check and see if it was real. He just drove on. The ghost didn’t speak. It didn’t move, other than to nod its head. And in that nod came decades of acknowledgement that Sam was on the right path. They stared into each other’s eyes for a long time, until Frank Just Frank vanished. Sam looked immediately to the sky and noticed a shooting star. Funny, he’d always thought they were things falling to the Earth. What if it was the other way around? What if they were things returning to the sky?

  Frank Just Frank’s appearance and the shooting star filled him with a powerful sense of hope. The bones of his arm and hand had proven that he’d been right all along. It didn’t get him where he wanted to go, but it was a start. And as he glanced up and down his body at his web-toed feet, his legs, his other arm and the ribs that held his torso together, he knew that he’d figured out how to join his friends. He didn’t know how much of himself he’d have to give, but he’d do whatever it took to join them in the afterlife of the Milky Way.

  Until then, he had an RV, the rest of his bones, a clear view of the night sky, and a desperate desire to become a shooting star.

  It was enough for now.

  THE WINDMILL

  REBECCA LEVENE

  I’ve always thought that old adage, ‘Write What You Know,’ isn’t the truism that those giving advice to writers purport it to be, especially when it comes to genre fiction. But here it really does apply, because Rebecca has indeed worked in prisons and with those incarcerated within. This, then, is a story very much grounded in reality, but it is also a ghost story and that supernatural element, rather than detracting from the realism of the piece, adds all the more to its emotional core. This is supernatural fiction at its very best.

  LEE COULD SEE the windmill from the small, barred window in his cell. It sat, incongruous, near the peak of Brixton Hill, its vanes broken and helpless to catch the wind shaking the stunted trees around it.

  He’d lived off Coldharbour Lane for five years and never once visited the place, but now that he couldn’t, he felt drawn to it. Its unreachability was like a symbol of his confinement. Possession with intent, four year sentence almost certainly. He was on remand right now, but no brief was getting him out of this. He’d be behind the door for nearly two years.

  His cell mate lay curled on the bottom bunk, his hand tucked under his chin so that it looked like he was sucking his thumb. Maybe he was. They didn’t let you in here until you were twenty-one, but Arif could have passed for a schoolboy with his gawky, rail-thin body and hairless face. He smelled bad, a fuggy cloud of BO and old smoke around him in the confines of the eight-foot-by-ten cell. When he’d taken a shit earlier, a shower curtain pulled around him for an illusion of privacy, the stench had felt like a physical presence, an unwelcome third cell mate.

  Arif hadn’t seemed to care or even notice. He was shivering – detoxing. The pus-filled track marks on his arms said he’d been using smack for a good long time. He was probably clucking for crack, too. Crack to pick you up from the smack and smack to calm you down from the crack. That nice little symmetry kept the customers coming.

  “I’ll sort you out,” Lee said. “Got something coming in tomorrow.”

  Arif was shivering so hard, when he shook his head it looked like just another involuntary convulsion. “Nah, I’m getting clean, innit? Girl from NACRO said she could get me in a hostel. I only use ’cause I’m homeless.”

  “Whatever you say.” Lee knew the mantra: I offend because I use, I use because I’m homeless. Get me a home, I’ll stay clean and straight. It’s what those fucking do-gooders crawling around the p
rison said to people like Arif, all comforting and understanding, and the users had learnt to parrot it back at them every time they landed inside.

  “I mean it,” Arif said. “I’m going on C-Wing. Drug free.”

  Lee grinned. “Me too. Guess I’ll be seeing you around.”

  There was a shuffle of footsteps below, the screws unlocking the cells on the twos. They’d be up to the threes in a minute and then he could go down and get his breakfast, make contact with a few friends he knew were also on G-Wing. He took a last look through the bars at the windmill as he heard the key turning in the lock. He could see vague, dark forms flitting around it, probably kids who’d climbed the fence, enjoying their freedom.

  Fuck ’em. They’d got problems of their own. Maybe they’d be buying off him once he was out.

  TWO DAYS LATER they told Lee he was moving to C-Wing. That meant random piss tests, but who cared? He didn’t use himself. He pushed his belongings into a clear plastic bag – boxers, packet of biscuits, spare shirt, radio, no Playstation yet, not while he was still on basic – then clanged down two flights of stairs to hover round the meds hatch, waiting for someone to escort him over.

  The screw, some fat cunt bulging out of her white shirt, led him through the exercise yard. The cracked concrete skirted the side of grim old F-Wing, Fraggle Rock, where they sent the mental cases too far gone to survive on the main wings. C-Wing was against the far wall, newer and cleaner than the others. He remembered it from last time, painted a brighter yellow colour than the rest of the nick, the paint not yet faded enough to make the attempt at cheerfulness just pitiful.

  The screw at the front desk kept him waiting for ten minutes, writing in his log book when he knew Lee was there. Sweat stood out in drops among the ginger stubble on his head. “Curtis,” he said when he finally looked up. “You’re in 329. Go on, get a fucking move on. We’re locking down in a minute.”

  Lee stared at him, just stared long and hard, and the other man wriggled like a worm on a hook. But when he saw the screw’s hand crawling towards his baton, he turned and walked away. No point ending up in seg.

  The cell was two floors up. On the first landing there was a table tennis table, two men playing and others hanging at the margins waiting their turn. He recognised three he’d sold to on the street and nodded at them as he passed, knowing at least one of them would seek him out later, asking what he could get them. The two men at the end of the landing were customers too, one sitting as the other stood behind him, cutting his hair.

  Up another level and it was quieter, only two ragged white men standing near the top of the stairs. They were drinkers rather than users, to judge by the broken veins on their noses and the bellies hanging over the top of their prison-issue grey sweatpants. They didn’t interest him – they could brew their own hooch if they wanted it, using mouldy bread and socks and orange squash, fermented in the bog. Disgusting, but then that’s what addicts were. They gave up all self-respect to the drug.

  His new cell was a little bigger than the last, and cleaner too. He’d asked for non-smoking and by some kind of miracle he seemed to have got it. The only smell was the throat-burning odour of industrial bleach. The window was bigger as well. He peered through it and was surprised to see the windmill, nearer here than it had been on G-Wing. That wasn’t right, was it? He reckoned it should have been on the opposite side of the prison, but maybe he’d got turned around. It was there, anyway, a black blot against the storm-heavy sky. He could hear the faint sound of the wind slapping against its broken vanes.

  “Creepy, innit?” Arif said behind him.

  Lee jumped, then clenched his teeth and turned round. “What the fuck are you doing here, Hussein? I can’t sort you out ’til tomorrow. Fuck off and come back then.”

  The other man blinked, slow and stupid. He wasn’t sweating or shivering any more, but the bones standing out sharply beneath his skin made him look halfway dead already. “Told you, didn’t I? I’m clean. I’m in here with you.” He nodded over at the bunks and Lee noticed for the first time that he’d spread his meagre belongings over the upper bed.

  At least he knew his place. Lee dumped his plastic bag on the more desirable lower bunk and shifted the TV so he could see it better when he was lying back. He flicked it on and leaned back. It was showing snooker, the world championship maybe, but the colour had leached from the picture and everyone sounded like they were shouting underwater.

  “I’ve gotta get clean,” Arif said. His hot, rank breath wafted against Lee’s cheek. He was crouched beside the bunk, wobbling on his toes.

  Lee grunted.

  “It’s different this time. My girlfriend’s pregnant – I’m gonna be a dad.”

  “Lucky you,” Lee said. “Now shut the fuck up.”

  But Arif didn’t seem to be listening. The useless little shit was crying, big fat drops rolling down his cheeks as his bloodshot eyes gazed into some inner space. “Started drinking when I was eleven. Then I started using when I was fourteen. Stupid, innit?”

  Lee propped himself up on an elbow to look at him. “Why don’t you save it for someone who cares? Tell it to the chaplain. She likes sob stories. Probably flicks herself off to them at night.”

  Arif’s eyes latched onto his, the fever still lingering in their depths. “I’m just saying. It’s killing me. I’ll be dead, and for what? So I’m stopping, this time, for real.”

  Lee rolled over and turned his attention back to the TV, where grey balls rolled towards black pockets. “You’ll never stop,” he said. “It owns you, man.”

  LEE SAW TASHA across the length of the visitors’ room. She’d dressed up for him, a short black skirt and a top that sagged between her round tits. Aaron was cradled in her left arm, nuzzling at the material to get at the nipple beneath. Lee felt something clench inside him at the sight of his son. It was an odd, almost uncomfortable feeling, but he’d grown used to it in the five months since Aaron had been born.

  “How you doing, sweetheart?” She leaned forward to kiss him.

  He shrugged as he let himself enjoy the kiss for a moment, the moist heat of her mouth and the muscle of her tongue. Then his own tongue probed deeper and hooked the package tucked behind her teeth into his own mouth.

  He sat back and stroked the silk-soft hair on top of Aaron’s head, marvelling at the heat that came from his scalp, as if a fire burned beneath that delicate skin. “Don’t worry about me, babe. I’m doing fine.”

  SUPPLY AND DEMAND, Lee had learnt about that for his GCSEs. He had enough smack to sort his customers out and enough demand to keep prices right up. Freeflow let him go to the library, a chance to sell his product to users on other wings. He hung out among the neglected paperbacks and racked up the cash. By the time the bell rang again, he swaggered back to C-Wing with a bundle of cash owing. He’d come out richer than he went in after his last stretch, and he reckoned he’d do as well this time.

  Dinner meant going back to his cell with his chips and beans and shrivelled sausages on a tray. Arif was already there, but he rose from the only chair as soon as Lee came through the door, pulling himself up onto the top bunk to eat with his neck bent beneath the low ceiling.

  “Got some gear,” Lee said.

  Arif shrugged, hunched shoulders pressing against the concrete above him. “Don’t need it. I’m off that stuff.”

  Lee speared a bean on his plastic fork, studying it for a second before swallowing it. “I can get you methadone.”

  “Same thing, innit?” Arif said. “Same junk. I don’t need it no more.”

  Lee saw a new light in his eyes, brighter and less feverish. He scooped up another mouthful of beans, then realised his appetite had gone and let them dribble back on the plate. The chips were soggy with grease and the sausages looked grey, like they’d been made of ash. He threw the tray on the floor and walked the four paces to the window.

  The sun had passed to the far side of the prison, leaving the windmill in shadow. It seemed deserted at first, but
Lee could hear the sound of music and a squawk of laughter. Then, improbably, the sleek shape of a car drove into the gloom at its base. Someone spilled out of the door, their sex unknowable at this distance. Lee saw them tumble drunkenly to the ground before another figure pulled them up. There was a second burst of laughter as they circled the car.

  He didn’t see that it was on fire at first. It was only when the flames licked against the windscreen and the glass broke with a sharp crack that he realised what was going on. He laughed. Some cunt would be getting the bus to work tomorrow.

  “What’s going on?” Arif said, head bobbing as he tried to peer around Lee’s.

  “Nothing,” Lee said. “Fuck off.”

  The flames were burning high now. Their light made the day seem darker and Lee found himself tensing for the explosion as the petrol tank went up, only it never came. Was that just something he’d seen in films? If he’d been home he would have Googled it, but inside he was left to wonder.

  He was startled when he saw the first of the figures leap over the fire, a flash of white that could have been teeth or face and then they were down the other side and he could hear the cheers. They all started after that, running in circles round the burning car, faster and faster, then flinging themselves over it to yells whose meaning was lost to distance.

  It didn’t seem like a bunch of kids any more, bored of hanging out on Coldharbour Lane. It looked more primitive. The car was melting and warping in the heat, losing its industrial edges to become something more formless. The shouts could have been in any language, the faceless figures from any country.