The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  The next boy looked slightly older, maybe early twenties. He was at an angle perpendicular to the verge. He was wearing a tee shirt that bulged at his throat with everything his torso had contained. The car had driven over him and forced his guts and ribcage up into his gullet. His pelvis had been pulverised and his legs lay bandy like a spatchcocked chicken.

  The third boy lay half on, half off the verge. His arms were twisted behind his back and his legs were tangled together in an unseemly knot. Everything was smashed. His expression was one of absolute surprise. What’s this? He might have thought. A brief insight as everything within was destroyed and he was flung forwards into oblivion. How quick had it been for him; for all of them? Had there been a moment, as life had been slapped from them, when they’d thought about where they were going next? Not around the next moonlit bend in the road. Not the next town. Not home. But nowhere. Forever.

  I reached for my phone, but remembered that it was still strapped to my dashboard. I was about to return to the car, but then something stopped me.

  Something I’d noticed. Not a conscious observation, but somewhere my back brain was still processing information freely and jolted a signal through the narrow adrenaline focus I was applying to the immediate situation. It was something to do with the bikes.

  I looked at the tangled wreckage. They had been forced together and driven over. Frames were distorted, wheels buckled, handlebars twisted. The wheels no longer turning; all eight wheels were still. All eight wheels.

  Four bikes.

  INDECISION GRIPPED ME like a sudden sickness. There must be a fourth body. No. Maybe not a body. Maybe the rider of that fourth bike was still alive. I should go to the car and call an ambulance. My head was thudding. The adrenaline was gone, a lousy fix. My legs began to shake. I squatted down and hung my head, breathing as deeply as I could – the night smelt of the cold earth of the fields the road cut through, and the bitter green scent of the wet trees and bushes that lined them.

  There were deep drainage cuttings behind the bushes. They were pitch dark, streams of sodden shadow filled with a sediment of leaves and sludge. I looked up as something moved beyond the tangled line of hawthorns beyond the verge.

  I stood up. The hairs on the backs of my arms began to rise. Why did I feel afraid? The lane was deserted and I had three dead boys for company, all staring furiously up into the night. Three separate getaways into eternity. They now know everything, I thought. Everything there is to truly know. If there’s a God, they know. If there isn’t, they know. It was no privilege; just a right bestowed by the passing bulk of a murderous vehicle.

  I walked around the wreckage of bikes and stepped up onto the verge. My shoes sank into the soft earth. There was a half moon high in the clear sky above the fields, and it gave enough light to make the dark red earth of the ploughed fields shine like a broken Martian beach from which the sea had long receded.

  And from out of the cutting crawled the fourth rider.

  I COULD SEE that there was nothing I could do for him. I stumbled backwards and my hip struck against the pile of bikes. The wreckage rocked in the headlights, its complicated shadow flexing beneath it like a hellish web, and worse, as the fourth rider made it to the top of the cutting and began to push through the dense, thorny stands of the hawthorn bush, a bell clipped to the handlebars of one of the bikes began to ring in horrid elfin counterpoint to the boy’s wretched progress through the barbs.

  The fourth rider was as dead as the rest of them.

  I turned, filled with a sudden and clear urge to run. I don’t think I’d ever experienced such an autonomic command with the same lucid imperative before. I’ve read about atavistic horror, often in bad novels in an attempt to tell rather than show the repulsion a situation provokes, but I’d never expected to feel the animal uplift of fear that gave me wings that night.

  The last thing I saw before I turned and ran for my car was the fourth rider pressing his shoulders through the lean and twisted limbs of the hawthorn bush, grabbing fistfuls of weeds from the verge as he reached for the open road, as he reached for me, with a face that must have turned and taken the full impact of the collision against the grille of that vehicle, blazing with gruesome, white hot dismay.

  I ran, and took twelve steps. And stopped.

  My car was gone.

  DISORIENTATION FROZE ME. I staggered, skidded to a stop on the bend of the road. And then I became aware of headlights behind me, and turned.

  And there was my car.

  In my terror, I had run off in the wrong direction. I glanced left, towards the sloping verge, and could hear the laboured sound of that dead thing dragging itself up out of the cutting. Clear thought was impossible. It was simply not something I could make sense of; the primal back-up program of denial was already kicking in, that old Trojan put there in the reptile brain to provide us with the ability to shun cold truth.

  There was still no sign of any other vehicles. Above the scratching sounds at the side of the road I could still hear the needling, irregular ting of the bicycle bell, as if its curved metal surface had been heated and was slowly cooling in the night air.

  As the flattened face of the boy rose above the crest of the verge, the shattered bones of his cheeks and jaw and brow, and his teeth like tiny white stones subsumed beneath rising red waters, all wet and gleaming in the headlights of my car, I ran.

  I ran past the three dead boys in the road, and their snarl of bikes, and reached my car. I scrabbled for the handle and pulled open the door.

  I got in, slammed the door, and drove off.

  BY THE TIME I pulled up outside the party, most of the crashers had melted away. They had done their damage, had trashed and robbed, drunk, beaten and terrorised to maximum effect. The door to the house – a spacious detached pile set back at the end of a long, curving drive somewhere in the wealthier part of town – stood open, and lights blazed in every room visible from the outside. I got out of the car and stood for a moment, listening. It was quiet, which I had not been expecting. There was no loud music, no shouts, no sounds of breaking objects or even the panicky post-party clank of bottles being cleared away in anticipation of a parent’s dreaded early return. I walked across the drive to the door.

  I could hear something now.

  Sobbing.

  The entrance hall was bigger than my lounge. To the right a stairway curved up to the first floor. Doors stood open everywhere. I went inside and crossed the marble floor. I walked into the kitchen. There was blood on the cream-coloured tiles. It had come from Carla.

  My daughter was slumped against a huge American style fridge-freezer. It loomed over her, more like the baleful entrance to a meat locker in an abattoir than the intended high-end designer convenience.

  I went over and knelt beside her. She was clutching her stomach, and white, very white, and unconscious.

  I remember feeling quite calm. It was detachment, I realise, brought on by overwhelming concern. I had not been expecting this, of course, and now my system was telling me it wasn’t really happening, that this was probably just a dream. It wasn’t an objectivity that prevented me from acting, though, and I scooped her up and carried her from the kitchen towards the front door.

  As I reached the threshold I heard the quiet, insistent sobbing again, and turned my head, and looked into the lounge.

  There was destruction in there. The room had been completely turned over. Furniture smashed and upended, mirrors and paintings torn from the walls. The carpet was slashed and burned. A girl was sitting on the floor. She was holding a twisted silver photo frame. She looked up at me and her expression was at once both utterly hateful and full of despair.

  “She let them in,” the girl hissed, and I knew she meant Carla. “We told her not to, but she still let them in.”

  I didn’t want to ask, but my momentum was still carrying me out of the door, and Carla was breathing in my arms and her bleeding had stopped, so what I asked was: “Let who in?”

  An
d the girl said, without looking up this time – which saved me seeing the affect it had on her expression – something that enclosed my soul in a sudden mantle of dread.

  I carried Carla to the car and placed her on the back seat. I lifted her top and exposed her stomach. There were three long gashes cut into her flesh. They were nasty but not too deep. I found a box of tissues in the glove compartment and wadded them up and placed them on the wound and pulled her top back down. Then I got into the driver’s seat and pulled out, wanting to get Carla to the hospital.

  As I drove, my speed increased as I thought about the last thing the girl had said, the very last thing – almost missed as I carried Carla off the porch – and it was this that made me speed, because I really wanted to get away from that house and the influence of whatever Carla had allowed in.

  “The black-eyed kids,” she had said. “I begged her not to let them in.”

  FOR A FEW years I was a lay preacher in our local Baptist Church, before my divorce and before Carla’s incremental promiscuity became a problem. After that, my faith took a dive. Well, more of a slow yet uncontrollable tumble down a long, and seemingly endless slope. But I did reach the bottom, eventually, and found nothing there but a plain of indeterminate distance, mostly swamped by a grey mist, across which occasional brief, deceptive sails of sunlight might drift, towing a galleon of false hope on which I had no wish to embark.

  I remember my own childhood, which was happy, but my memories of it are tainted now when I found out as an adult, through my mother, how desperately miserable my father was. He hid it well, and I had no idea just how deep his sadness was, brought on by a lifetime of failure and loss not even my promising presence could moderate. I thought he was happy, yet throughout he grieved, so what am I to make of life? More denial?

  And is agnosticism just denial? I can’t reasonably be an atheist because I’ve seen too much of God’s authority to deny his existence, and felt his presence, but I can’t make any of it stick; I can’t make sense of the mind games.

  It still causes me sadness, and I still hope, maybe sooner or later, God might resume contact. I still take an interest in the supernatural, and I try to ensure that my interest doesn’t take a turn into the paranoid or delusional, but I watch, and I hope a little.

  So I still read stuff, and I keep up with things on the internet, and things do seem to be becoming stranger; or perhaps it’s just the increasing opportunity for people to expose their madness online that’s led to a supersaturation, but my instinct, my discernment, somehow rejects that. Something is burgeoning, gaining confidence. I think something is coming.

  It may be just an urban myth, or it may be more. It may be as real as people have reported it, but something is happening, and it’s worldwide. Many of the people who experience it do not report it, or want to be identified. They are too afraid.

  You see, they get visits at night, by black-eyed children. I don’t mean they’ve got bruising around their eye sockets, I mean their eyes are entirely black, with no whites, irises or pupils. They usually come in pairs and they are usually inadequately dressed for the weather.

  They visit houses, approach cars, hotel rooms, even boats. And they knock, and if you answer, they ask to come in. They don’t engage in conversation, in fact they seem to have a limited range of questions and responses, which they communicate in a demanding monotone. They are insistent and evasive, and appear vulnerable. You get an intense feeling of dread, and panic. These children terrify you. They want to come in. And sometimes they tell you they want to feed. And then you see their eyes and your mind can’t cope, because their eyes are entirely black.

  There is only one encounter recorded where one of these children was let in and people survived. A woman returning from a shop with her groceries got into her car, having left her young son in the back seat, and saw that a black-eyed child was sitting next to him. Her son said the boy had tapped on the window and asked to come in, so the boy had let him in hoping they could play. The woman grabbed her son and fled, leaving the car in the car park. Later, the boy became ill and fell into a coma. His condition remained untreatable until a member of the mother’s church rebuked the spirit afflicting the boy and bound it in Christ’s name. He remained weak and sickly for years. Later, the woman’s husband was driving the car they had recovered from the car park and he was involved in a near-fatal collision. Evidence seems to point to a spiritual, or interdimensional, element; nephilim hybrids, demons, fallen angels? These children can appear at, and disappear from, various windows and doors around a house in an instant. But they want in, and they seem to want to feed on your fear.

  They often appear to people in authority: policemen, nurses, firemen, and once to a soldier in a barracks. Or maybe these people draw on the inner resources available to them that have enabled them to gain such positions, their strength or their will, to resist the cunning presence of these children. It must be assumed they have less fortunate victims. As I said, people seem loath to report these experiences. Denial is, as they say, a wonderful thing.

  BUT CARLA HAD let them in.

  I drove fast, too fast. Carla was making noises on the back seat. I could hear her moaning. I could hear the sound of her legs moving against the fabric of the back seat. I glanced in my rear-view mirror as I approached a blind bend, just for a second.

  She was sitting up and looking at me.

  But it wasn’t Carla in the back.

  Dead black eyes looked back at me.

  I LOST CONCENTRATION; I was no longer driving a car at sixty miles an hour, I was gone for an instant. My mind blanked. I heard something, and it was the monstrous whistling dismay of the eternal void. I had preached on Hell, on separation from God, and now I could hear what the damned hear, and for a moment I saw into the eyes of something released for a time from that unendurable vault. There was pressure and temperature in those eyes; what you might experience waking forever in the heart of a collapsed star. It was both cold and immeasurably hot, ever expanding and as massive as a neutron star. All physics was behind those eyes, all the grotesque complexities of imaginary numbers.

  And the car came around the bend and I snapped back and saw them, but too late.

  A convoy of boys in single file, riding home on their bikes, suddenly thrown into film-set relief in the headlights. And I hit them, and drove through them, driving one into the next and feeling the wheels bounce and smear through them. The noise was awful; like driving through scaffolding.

  I swerved, but I had already gone through them, past them. As my car drifted right, into the oncoming lane, another vehicle had to veer onto the verge to avoid me. Headlights dazzled me and then I was past. Moments later, in response to my recklessness, a horn blared from the darkness behind.

  I PULLED THE car over in a lay-by a hundred yards down the road. I swung around in my seat, my heart pounding, fists clenched. Whatever had been in the back seat was gone. Nothing. Apart from me, sweating, shaking, terrified, the car was empty. What had I carried from that house?

  I put my hazard lights on and in their intermittent orange flash, I got out of the car and stumbled back towards the scene of the accident. My shadow appeared, and then disappeared before me, growing shorter, losing assurance, until I was at the bend and in darkness. The moon was a mist-light behind a streak of delicate, nervous cloud.

  I approached the scene. My hands felt like numb weights at the ends of my arms. I flexed them but that just made it feel like more blood was flowing into my extremities, leaving my core cold and hollow.

  I stood, wavering, skin prickling, by a pile of broken, twisted bikes. Three boys lay across the surface of the road, dead, still warm; warmer, perhaps, than I felt. Their bikes were enmeshed. Six wheels and a confusion of turning shadows. My memory flickered, stuttered like old celluloid running through a disused projector. Three bikes?

  The fourth bike I had imagined; had it been just an adrenaline-enhanced perception? Had it been shadows of wheels I’d seen and miscounted
?

  I stepped nearer the edge of the road, towards where the verge sloped down into the field and the hawthorns that concealed them.

  And saw the wreck of the car.

  IT HAD GONE off the road and ploughed through the bushes. It was on its side, the chassis only just visible as the moon broke and reflected briefly off the exhaust. It was a new exhaust; fitted only last month.

  I stepped forward, and then I was turning, running in the wrong direction, disorientation blinding me, as I tried to escape the thing heaving itself up that bank, using fistfuls of weeds, labouring out of the cutting of dirt and clambering shadows.

  IF I COULD just get up the bank and reach the road...

  I could warn him...

  Is my daughter dead? Broken in the car wreck I have crawled from...

  Is she even there?

  If I could get to the top, with what life I still had I could warn him...

  But I can never make it...

  Footfalls behind me, slow, two pairs, now standing either side...

  My hands in the weeds...

  Voices, monotonous, insistent...

  A cycle I can never break...

  A pale face, like plastic in the moonlight, down near my ear...

  The last thing I hear before he speaks is the sound of my car, driving away again, at the top of the slope...

  And he speaks, and he tells me this won’t take long...

  But, of course, it goes on forever.

  LOCUSTS

  LAVIE TIDHAR

  Lavie’s take on history, real and imagined, is one of the many things that mark him out as a truly extraordinary writer. His alternative world SF novel, Osama, won the World Fantasy Award and he recently signed a two book deal with Hodder. Here Tidhar takes us on a journey in Palestine in 1915, with a piece that induces in the reader a waking dream state through its unusual and hypnotic form. The history here is real, rather than imagined, though this is as rich as any genre tale you’ll find within this anthology.