The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories

by Stephen Jones

  Someone rolled from a doorway into their path. Adam stopped, caught his breath, ready for the gleam of metal and the demand for money.

  Amaranth paused as well. Were they scared?

  And then he realized something else. People had seen him and Amaranth, he had noticed them looking—looking and smiling—and they were not out of place.

  “This isn’t real,” he said, and a shape stood before him.

  The man wore a long coat. His hair was an explosion of dirt and fleas and other insects, his shoes had burst and his toes stuck out, as if seeking escape from the wretched body they belonged to.

  He looked up.

  “My friend!” he said, although Adam had never seen him before. “My friend, how are you? Welcome here, welcome everywhere, I’m sure. Oh, so I see they’ve found you too?” He nodded at the shapes around Adam and they shifted slightly, as if embarrassed at being noticed. “They’re angels, you know,” the man said quietly. “Look at me. Down-and-out, you’d guess? Ready to blow you or stab you for the money to buy a bottle of paint-stripper.”

  “The thought had crossed my mind,” Adam said, but only because he knew, already, that he was wrong. There was something far stranger, far more wonderful at work here.

  “Maybe years ago,” the man nodded, “but not anymore. See, I’m one of the lucky ones. Take a look!” He opened up his coat to display a glimmering, golden suit. It looked ridiculous, but comfortable. The man himself looked comfortable. In fact, Adam had rarely seen anyone looking so contented with their lot, so at home with where and what they were.

  “It’s … nice,” Adam said.

  “It’s fucking awful! Garish and grotesque, but if that’s what I want to be sometimes, hey, who’s to deny me that? Nobody, right? In the perfect world, nobody. In the perfect world, I can do and be what I want to do and be, whenever I want. Yesterday I was making love with a princess, tomorrow I may decide to crash a car. Today … today I’m just reliving how I used to be. I hated it, of course; who wouldn’t? Today, here … in the perfect world, it’s not so bad.”

  “But just where are we?” Adam asked, hoping—realizing—that perhaps this man could tell him what Amaranth would not. “I was in a plane crash, I was sinking, I was dying—”

  “Right,” the man said, nodding and blinking slowly. “And then you were rescued. And they brought you here for a look around. Well … you’re one of the lucky ones. We’re all lucky ones here.”

  There was the sound of something moving quickly down the alley, still hidden by shadows but approaching rapidly. For an instant Adam thought it could be gunfire and he prepared to dive for cover, but then he saw the magnificent shape emerge into the sunlight.

  “Hold up!” the man said with a distinctly Cockney accent, “’ere comes my ride.”

  Adam and Amaranth stood aside, and Adam watched aghast as the unicorn galloped along the alley. It did not slow down—did not even seem to notice the man—but he grasped onto its mane as it ran, swung himself easily up onto its back and rode it out into the street. It paused for a moment and reared up, and Adam was certain it was a show just for him. The man in the golden suit waved an imaginary hat back at Adam, then he nudged the unicorn with his knees and they disappeared out of sight along the street.

  He heard the staccato beat of hooves for a long time.

  For the first time he wondered whether it was all a display put on for him, and him alone. The red-haired man … the jumper … the down-and-out. They had all looked at him. Somehow, it was all too perfect.

  He pressed his sore tongue against the roof of his mouth.

  “Do you get the idea?” Amaranth asked.

  “What idea?”

  The things milled around him, touching him, and now their touch was more pleasant than repulsive. His skin jumped wherever they made contact. He found himself aroused and he went with the feeling. It did not feel shameful or inappropriate. It felt just right. While he was here, why not enjoy it?

  “The idea that good luck is a gift,” Amaranth said.

  A talent or a present? Adam wanted to ask, but already they were pulling him farther along the alley toward whatever lay beyond its far end.

  He smelled the water before he saw it, rich and cloying, heavy with effluent and rubbish. As they emerged from the mouth of the alley and turned a corner, the lake came into view. It was huge, not just a city lake, more like a sea. Adam was reminded briefly of Venice, but there were no Gondoliers here, and the waters were rougher and more violent than Venice ever experienced. And there were things among the waves, far out from the shore, shiny gray things breaking the surface and screeching before heading back down to whatever depths they came from.

  A woman walked past them whistling, nodded a hello, indicated the lake with a nod of her head and looked skyward, as if to say: oh dear, that lake, huh?

  She wore so much jewelry on her fingers and wrists that Adam was sure she would sink, were she to enter the waters. But she never would, no one in their right mind would, because to go in there would be to die.

  Things are in there, Adam thought. Shattered aircraft, perhaps? Bodies of passengers I chatted with being ripped and torn and eaten? Where am I now? Where, really, am I?

  “We stand on the shore of bad luck,” Amaranth said. “Out there … the island, do you see? … there live the unlucky ones.”

  Now that it had been pointed out to him, Adam could see the island, although he was sure it had not been there before. You never notice a damn thing until it’s pointed out to you, Alison would say to him, and she was right, he was not very observant. But this island was huge—growing larger—and eventually, even though nothing seemed to have actually changed, the lake was a moat and the island filled most of his field of vision.

  Sounds reached him then, although they were dulled and weary with distance. Screams, shouts, cries, the rending crunch of buildings collapsing, an explosion, the roar of flames taking hold somewhere out of sight. Adam edged closer to the shore of the moat, straining to see through the hazy air, struggling to make out what was happening on the island. There were signs erected all along its shore. Some of them seemed to be moving. Some of them …

  They were not signs. They were crucifixes, and most of them were occupied. Heads lolled on shoulders, knees moved weakly as the victims tried to shift their weight, move the pain around their bodies so that it did not burn its way through their flesh.

  Beneath some of the crosses, fires had been set.

  “It’s Hell!” Adam gasped, turning around to glare at the four things with him.

  “No,” Amaranth said, “we have explained. Those over there are the unlucky ones, but they are not dead. Not yet. Many of them will be soon … unlucky ones always die … but first, there is pain and suffering.”

  Adam felt tears burning behind his eyes. He did not understand any of this. Sinking into the Atlantic, dying, being a nameless statistic on an airline’s list of victims, that he understood. Losing Alison and Jamie, even—never seeing them again—that he could understand.

  But not this.

  “I want my family,” he said. “If you’ve saved me like you say, I want my family. I don’t want to be here. I don’t know where here is.”

  “Do you ever, truly?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Adam gasped in despair, dropping to his knees and noticing as he did that the shore was scattered with pale white bones. Washed up from the island of the unlucky ones, no doubt.

  He closed his eyes.

  And tumbled into the moat.

  He had been expecting fresh water—polluted by refuse perhaps, rancid with death—but inland water nonetheless. His first mouthful was brine.

  Beneath him, the aircraft seat. Around his waist the seatbelt, which would ensure that he sank to his death. Above him, the wide blue sky he had fallen from.

  Under his arms and around his legs, hands lifting him to safety.

  “Here’s a live one!” a voice shouted, and it was gruff and excited, not like Amaranth or
the people he had heard back there in the land of the lucky. This one held a whole range of experience.

  “Unlucky,” Adam muttered, spitting out seawater and feeling a dozen pains bite into him at the same instant. “Bad luck …”

  “No, mate,” said a voice with an Irish lilt from somewhere far away. “You’re as lucky as fuck. Everyone else is dead.”

  Adam tried to speak, to ask for Alison and Jamie because he knew he was about to die, he had already visited Heaven and slipped back again for his final breath. But the bright sunlight faded to black and the voices receded. Already, he was leaving once more …

  As he passed out he fisted his hands so that no one or nothing could hold on to them.

  The next time he awakened, Alison was staring down at him. There had been no dreams, no feelings, no sensations. It felt as if a second had passed since he had been in the sea, but he knew instantly that it was much longer. There was a ceiling and fluorescent lights, and the cloying stench of antiseptic, and the metallic grumble of trolley wheels on vinyl flooring.

  And there was Alison leaning over him, hair haloed by a bright light.

  “Honey,” she said. She began to cry.

  Adam reached up to her and tried to talk, but his throat was dry and rough. He rasped instead, just making a noise, happy that he could do anything to let her know he was still alive.

  “Alive,” he croaked eventually. “You’re alive.”

  She looked down at him and frowned, but the tears were too powerful and her face took on the shine of relief once more. “Yes, you’re alive. Oh honey, I was so terrified, I saw the news and I knew you were dead, I just knew … and I came here. Mum didn’t want me to, but I just had to be here when they started … when they started bringing in the bodies. And the worst thing,” she whispered, touching his cheek, “… I wanted them to find your body. I couldn’t live knowing you were still out there, somewhere. In the sea.” She buried her face in the sheets covering him and swung her arm across his stomach, hugging him tight, a hug so tight that he would never forget it.

  This is what love is, he thought to himself. Never wanting to let go. He put his hand behind her head and reveled in the feel of her hair between his fingers.

  “Come on,” he said, “it’s all right now. We’re both all right now.” A terrible thought came out of nowhere. In seconds, it became a certainty. My leg!

  “I am all right, aren’t I? Alison, am I hurt? Am I damaged?”

  She looked up and grinned at him, red-rimmed eyes and snotty nose giving her a strange child-like quality. “You’re fine! They said it was a miracle, you’re hardly touched. Bruises here and there, a few scratches on your face and you bit your tongue quite badly. But you escaped … well, you’re on the front page of the papers. I kept them! Jamie, he’s got a scrapbook!”

  “Scrapbook? How long have I been here?”

  “Only two days,” Alison said. She sat down on the bed, never relinquishing contact with him, eye or hand. He wondered whether she’d ever let go again.

  “Two days.” He thought of where he had been and the things that had taken him there. As in all particularly vivid dreams, he retained some of the more unusual sensory data from the experience—he could smell the old back-alley, the piss and the refuse … he could hear the woman hitting the street, feel the jump in his chest as he realized what had happened. He could taste the strange fear he had experienced every second of that waking dream, even though Amaranth had professed benevolence.

  A nightmare, surely? A sleeping, verge-of-death nightmare.

  “Where’s Jamie?”

  Alison started crying again because they were talking about their son, their son who still had his father after all. “He’s at home with Mum, waiting for you. Mum’s told him you fell out of the sky but were caught by angels. Bless him, he—”

  “What does she mean by that?” Adam whispered. His throat was burning and he craved a drink. He felt as if someone was strangling him slowly. Angels, demons, who can tell?

  Alison shrugged. “Well, you know Mum, she’s just telling Jamie stories. Trying to imbue him with her religion without us noticing.”

  “But she actually said angels?”

  His wife frowned and shrugged and nodded at the same time. This was obviously not how she had expected him to react after surviving crashing into the sea in a passenger jet. “Why, hon? You really see some?”

  What would you think if I said yes, he thought.

  Alison brought him some iced water. Then she kissed him.

  Three days later they let him go home.

  In the time he had been in hospital, several major newspapers and magazines had contacted Alison and offered her five-figure payments for Adam’s exclusive story. He was a star, a survivor among so much death, a miracle man who had lived through a thirty-nine-thousand-feet plunge into the North Atlantic and come out of it with hardly a scratch.

  Hardly. The three parallel lines on his cheek had scarred. You were lucky, the doctors had said. Very lucky.

  Lucky to be scarred for life? Adam had almost asked, but thankfully he had refrained. At least he hadn’t died.

  On his first full day back at home the telephone rang twice before breakfast. Alison answered and calmly but firmly told whoever was on the other end to go away and spend their time more productively. On the third ring she turned the telephone off altogether.

  “If anyone wants us badly enough, they can come to see us. And if it’s family, they have my cell number.”

  “Maybe I should do it,” Adam said, sipping from a cup of tea. Jamie was playing at his feet, building complex Lego constructions and then gleefully smashing them down again. A child’s appetite for creation and destruction never ceased to amaze Adam. His son had refused to move from his feet since they had risen from bed, even when tempted to the breakfast table with the promise of a yogurt. He loved that. He loved that his wife wanted to hold him all the time, he loved that Jamie wanted to be close in his personal space. Even though his son barely looked up at him—he was busy with blocks and cars and imaginary lands—Adam felt himself at the center of Jamie’s attention.

  “You sure you want to do that?” Alison asked. She sat down and leaned against him, snuggling her head onto his shoulder. He felt her breath on his neck as she spoke. “I mean, they’re after sensation, you know that. They’re after miracle escapes and white lights at the end of tunnels. They don’t want to hear … well, what happened to you. The plane fell. You passed out. You woke up in the fishing boat.”

  Adam shrugged. “Well, I could tell them … I could tell them more.”

  “What more is there?”

  He did not elaborate. How could he? I dreamed of angels. I dreamed of demons scratching my face when I did not believe in them, of a place where good luck and bad luck were distilled into very refined, pure qualities. I dreamed that I gave a pledge.

  “You need time at home. Here, with us. Time to get over it.”

  “To be honest, honey, I don’t feel too bad about it all.” And that was shockingly true. He was the sole survivor of a disaster that had killed over three hundred people, but all of the guilt and anger and frustration he thought he should feel were thankfully absent. Perhaps in time … but he thought not. After all, he was one of the lucky ones. “Besides,” he said quietly, “think of the money. Think what we could do with twenty grand.”

  Alison did not respond.

  He could hear her thinking about it all.

  They sat that way for half-an-hour, relishing the contact and loving every sound or motion Jamie made. He joined them on the sofa several times, hugging them and pointing at Adam’s ears and eyes, as if he knew what secrets lay within. Then he was back on the floor, back in make-believe. They both loved him dearly and he loved them too, and what more could a family ask? Really, Adam thought, what more?

  There was more. The ability to pay the mortgage each month without worrying about going overdrawn. The occasional holiday, here and there. Adam’s job as a
publishing representative paid reasonably well, and he did get to travel, but Alison’s previous marriage had damaged her financially, and they were both still paying for her mistakes. Money was not God, but there really was so much more they could ask for.

  After lunch, Adam took a look at the numbers and names Alison had been noting down over the past week. He chose a newspaper which he judged to be more serious than most, selling merely glorified news, not outright lies. He rang them, told them who he was, and arranged for a reporter to visit the house.

  That afternoon they decided to visit the park. It was only a short stroll from their home, so they held Jamie’s hands and let him walk. The buggy was easier, but Adam liked his son walking alongside him, glancing up every now and then to make sure his father was still there. Their neighbors said a friendly hello and greeted Adam with honest joy. Other people they did not know smiled and stared with frank fascination. On that first trip out, Adam truly came to realize just how much he had been the subject of news over the past week. The last time these people had seen him he had been on a television screen, a pixilated victim of a distant disaster, bloodied face stark against the white hospital pillows. Now that he was flesh and blood once more, they did not quite know how to react.

  Just before reaching the park, an old stone bridge crossed a stream. Adam loved to sit on the parapet and listen to the water gurgling underneath. Sometimes Alison and Jamie would go on to the park and leave Adam to catch up, but not today. Today Alison refused to leave his side, and she held their son in her arms as they both sat on the cold stone.

  “We’ll get moss on our arses,” she said, glancing over her shoulder.

  “I’ll lick it off when Jamie’s in bed.”