The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories

by Stephen Jones

  It may have been that their vision was obscured by the trees, but the couple did not see him until he was almost upon them. They wanted to flee, he could see that, but knowing he had noticed them rooted them to the spot. That was surely not the way of thieves.

  “What do you want?” Adam shouted as he reached the screen of trees. He stood well back from the fence and spoke to them between the trunks, a hot sense of being family protector flooding his veins. He felt pumped up, ready for anything. He felt strong.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” the woman said, hands raised to her face as if holding in her embarrassment.

  “Well, what are you doing? Why are you staring at my house? I should call the police, perhaps?”

  “Oh Christ, no,” the man said, “don’t do that! We’re sorry, it’s just that … well, we love your house. We’ve been walking through the park on our way to work … we’ve moved into the new estate down the road … and we can’t help having a look now and then. Just to see … well, whether you’ve put it on the market.”

  “You love my house. It’s just a two-bed semi.”

  The woman nodded. “But it’s so perfect. The garden, the trees, the location. We’ve got a child on the way, we need a garden. We’d buy it the minute you decided to sell!”

  “Not a good way to present ourselves as potential house-buyers, I suppose,” the man said, mock-grim-faced.

  Adam shook his head. “Especially so keen. I could double the price,” he smiled. They seemed genuine. They were genuine, he could tell that, and wherever the certainty came from he trusted it. In fact, far from being angry or suspicious, he suddenly felt sorry for them.

  “Boy or girl?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Are you having a boy or a girl?”

  “Oh,” the woman said, still holding her face, “we haven’t a clue. We want it to be a surprise. We just think ourselves lucky we can have children.”

  “Yes, they’re precious,” Adam said. He could hear Jamie faintly, giggling as Alison wiped breakfast from his mouth, hands, and face.

  “Sorry to have troubled you,” the man said. “Really, this is very embarrassing. I hope we haven’t upset you, scared you? Here,” he fished in his pocket for his wallet and brought out a business card. He offered it through the fence.

  Adam stepped forward and took the card. He looked at both of them—just long enough to make them divert their eyes—and thought of his looming trip to London, what it might bring if things went well. He pictured his fantasized country house with the rooftop art studio and the big car and the gym.

  “It just so happens,” he said, “your dream may come sooner than you think.”

  “Really?” the woman asked. She was cute. She had big eyes and a trim, athletic figure. Adam suddenly knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that she would screw him if he asked. Not because she wanted his house, or thought it may help her in the future. Just because he was who he was.

  He shrugged, pocketed the card and bid them farewell. As he turned and walked across the lawn to the back door, he could sense them simmering behind him. They wanted to ask more. They wanted to find out what he had meant by his last comment.

  Let them stew. That way, perhaps they would be even more eager if and when the time came.

  Saying goodbye at the train station was harder than he had imagined. It was the first trip he had been on without his family since the disastrous plane journey several weeks ago, and that final hug on the platform felt laden with dread. For Adam it was a distant fear, however, as if experienced for someone else in another life, not a disquiet he could truly attribute to himself. However hard he tried, he could not worry. Things were going too well for that.

  Amaranth would look after him.

  On the way to the station he had seen the things three times: once, a face staring from the back of a bus several cars in front; once, a shape hurrying across the road behind them, seen briefly and fleetingly in the rearview mirror; and finally in the station itself, a misplaced shadow hiding behind the high-level TV monitors that displayed departure and arrival times. Each time he had thought to show Alison, tell her why everything would be all right, that these beings were here to watch over him and bless him—

  demon, angel, fairy, god

  —but then he thought of her mother lying in a coma. How could he tell her that now? How could he tell her that everything was fine?

  So the final hug, the final sweet kiss, and he could hardly look at her face without crying.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said.

  “Last time you told me that, ten hours later you were bobbing about in the Atlantic.”

  “The train’s fully equipped with life-jackets and non-flammables.”

  “Fool.” She hugged him again and Jamie snickered from his buggy.

  Adam bent down and gave his son a kiss on the nose. He giggled, twisting Adam’s heart around his childish finger one more time.

  “And you, you little rascal. When your Daddy comes home, he’s going to be a living, breathing, working artist.”

  “Don’t get too optimistic and you won’t be disappointed,” Alison whispered in his ear.

  “I won’t be disappointed,” he whispered back. “I know it.”

  He boarded the train and waved as it drifted from the station. His wife and son waved back.

  The journey was quiet but exciting, not because anything happened, but because Adam felt as though he was approaching some fantastic junction in his life. One road led the way he had been heading for years, and it was littered with stalled dreams and burned-out ambition. The other road—the new road, offered to him since the plane crash and all the strangeness that had followed it—was alight with exciting possibilities and new vistas. He had been given a chance at another life, a newer, better life. It was something most people never had.

  He would take that road. This trip was simply the first step to get there.

  Howards had been offered the same chance, had taken it, and look at him now! Rich, well-traveled, mad perhaps, but harmless with it. Lonely. No family or friends. Look at him now …

  But he would not think of that.

  The train arrived at Paddington Station and Adam stepped out onto the platform.

  Someone screamed: “Look out!”

  He turned and his eyes widened, hands raised as if they would hold back the luggage cart careering toward him. It would break his legs at the very least, cast him aside and crumple him between the train and the concrete platform—

  Something shimmered in the air beside the panic-stricken driver, like heat haze but more defined, more solid.

  A second and the cart would hit him. He was frozen there, not only by the impending impact and the pain that would instantly follow, but also by what he saw.

  The driver, yanked to the side.

  The ambiguous shape thrusting its hand through the metallic chassis and straight into the vehicle’s electric engine.

  The cart, jerking suddenly at an impossible right-angle to crunch into the side of the train carriage mere inches from Adam’s hip.

  He gasped, finding it difficult to draw breath, winded by shock.

  The driver had been flung from the cart and now rolled on the platform, clutching his arm and leaving dark, glistening spots of blood on the concrete. People ran to his aid, some of them diverting to Adam to check whether he had been caught in the impact.

  “No, no, I’m fine,” he told them, waving them away. “The driver … he’s bleeding, he’ll need help. I’m fine, really.”

  The thing had vanished from the cart. High overhead pigeons took flight, their wings sounding like a pack of cards being thumbed. Game of luck, Adam thought, but he did not look up. He did not want to see the shapes hanging from the girders above him.

  He walked quickly away, unwilling to become involved in any discussion or dispute about the accident. He was fine. That was all that mattered. He just wanted to forget about it.

  “I saw,” a voice croaked b
ehind him as he descended the escalator to the tube station. And then the smell hit him. A grotesque merging of all bad stenches, a white-smell of desperation and decay and hopelessness. There was alcohol mixed in with urine, bad food blended with shit, fresh blood almost driven under by the rancid tang of rot. Adam gagged and bile rose into his mouth, but he grimaced and swallowed it back down.

  Then he turned around.

  He had seen people like her many times before, but mostly on television. He did not truly believe that a person like this existed, because she was so different from the norm, so unkempt, so wild, so unreal. Had she been a dog she would have been caught and put to sleep ages ago. And she knew it. In her eyes, the street person displayed a full knowledge of what had happened to her. And worse than that—they foretold of what would happen. There was no hope in her future. No rescue. No stroke of luck to save her.

  “I saw,” she said again, breathing sickness at his face. “I saw you when you were meant to be run over. I saw your eyes when it didn’t happen. I saw that you were looking at one of … them.” She spat the final word, as if expelling a lump of dog turd from her mouth.

  Adam reached the foot of the escalator and strode away. His legs felt weak, his vision wavered, his skin tingled with goosebumps. Howards talking about the things he had seen could have been fluke or coincidence. Now, here was someone else saying the same things. Here, for Adam, was confirmation.

  He knew the street person was following him; he could hear the shuffle of her disintegrating shoes. A hand fell on his shoulder. The sleeve of her old coat ended frayed and torn and bloodied, as if something had bitten it and dragged her by the arm.

  “I said, I saw. You want to talk about it? You want me to tell you what you’re doing? You lucky fuck.”

  Adam turned around and tried to stare the woman down, but he could not. She had nothing to lose, and so she held no fear. “Just leave me alone,” he said instead. “I don’t know what you’re on about. I’ll call the police if you don’t leave me alone.”

  The woman smiled, a black-toothed grimace that split her face in two and squeezed a vile, pinkish pus from cracks in her lips. “You know what they did to me? Huh? You want to hear? I’ll tell you that first, then I’ll let you know what they’ll do to you.”

  Adam turned and fled. There was nothing else to do. People moved out of his way, but none of them seemed willing to help. As confused and doubtful as he was about Amaranth, he still thought: where are you now? But maybe they were still watching. Maybe this was all part of their sport.

  “They took me from my family,” the woman continued. “I was fucking my husband when they came, we were conceiving, it was the time my son was conceived. They said they saved me, but I never knew what from. And they took me away, showed me what was to become of me. And you know what?”

  “Leave me alone!” Adam did not mean to shout, but he was unable to prevent the note of panic in his voice. Still, none of his fellow travelers came to his aid. Most looked away. Some watched, fascinated. But none of them intervened.

  “They crucified me!” the street person screamed. She grunted with each footstep, punctuating her speech with regular exclamations of pain. “They nailed me up and cut me open, fed my insides to the birds and the rats. Then they left me there for a while. And they let me see over the desert, across to the golden city where pricks like you were eating and screwing and being oh so bloody wonderful.”

  Adam put on a spurt of speed and sensed the woman falling behind.

  “In the end, they took me from my family for good!” she shouted after him. “They’re happy now, my family. They’re rich and content, and my husband’s fucked by an actress every night, and my son’s in private school. Happy!”

  He turned around; he could not help it. The woman was standing in the center of the wide access tunnel, people flowing by on both sides, giving her a wide berth. She had her hands held out as if feigning the crucifixion she claimed to have suffered. Her dark hair was speckled gray with bird shit. The string holding her skirt up was coming loose. Adam was sure he could see things crawling on the floor around her, tiny black shapes that could have been beetles or wood lice or large ants. They all moved away, spreading outward like living ripples from her death-stinking body.

  “It’ll happen to you, too!” the bug lady screamed. “This will happen to you! The result is always the same, it’s just the route that’s different!”

  Adam turned a corner and gasped in relief. Straight ahead a tube train stood at a platform. He did not know which line it was on, which way it was going, where it would eventually take him. He slipped between the doors nevertheless, watched them slide shut, fell into a seat, and rested his head back against the glass. He read the poem facing straight down at him.

  Wise is he who heeds his foe,

  For what will come? You never know.

  The bug lady made it onto the platform just as the train pulled away, waving her hands, screaming, fisting the air as if to fight existence itself.

  “Bloody Bible bashers,” said a woman sitting across from Adam. And he began to laugh.

  He was still giggling three stations later. Nerves and fear and an overwhelming sense of unreality brought the laughter from him. His shoulders shook and people began to stare at him, and by the fourth station the laughter was more like sobbing.

  It was not the near-accident that had shaken him, nor the continuing sightings of Amaranth, not even the bug lady and what she had been saying. It was her eyes. Such black, hopeless pits of despondency, lacking even the wish to save herself, let alone the ability to try. He had never seen eyes like it before. Or if he had, they had been too distant to make out. Far across a polluted lake. Heat from fires obscuring any characteristics from view.

  In the tunnels faces flashed by, pressing out from the century-old brickwork, lit only by borrowed light from the tube train. They strained forward to look in at Adam, catching only the briefest glimpse of him but seeing all. They were Amaranth. Still watching him—still watching over him.

  And if Howards had been right—and Adam could no longer find any reason to doubt him—still viewing him as sport.

  The hotel was a smart four-star within a stone’s throw of Leicester Square. His room was spacious and tastefully decorated, with a direct outside telephone, a TV, a luxurious en suite and a minibar charging exorbitant prices for mere dribbles of alcohol. Adam opened three miniatures of whiskey, added some ice he had fetched from the dispenser in the corridor, and sat back on the bed, trying not to see those transparent faces in his mind’s eye. Surely they couldn’t be in there as well? On the backs of his eyelids, invading his self as they’d invaded his life? He’d never seen them there, at least …

  And really, even if he had, he could feel no anger toward them.

  After he had finished the whiskey and his nerves had settled, he picked up the phone and dialed home. His own voice shocked him for a moment, then he left a message for Alison on the answerphone telling her he had arrived safely, glancing at his watch as he did so. They were usually giving Jamie his dinner around this time. Maybe she was at the hospital with her mother.

  He opened a ridiculously priced can of beer from the fridge and went out to stand on the small balcony. Catching sight of the busy streets seemed to draw their noise to him, and he spent the next few minutes taking in the scenery, watching people go about their business unaware that they were being observed; cars snaking along the road as if bad driving could avoid congestion, paper bags floating on the breeze above all this, pigeons huddled on sills and rooftops, an aircraft passing silently high overhead. He wondered who was on the plane, and whether they had any inkling that they were being watched from the ground at that instant. He looked directly across the street into a third-story office window. A woman was kneeling in front of a photocopier, hands buried in its mechanical guts as she tried unsuccessfully to clear a paper jam. Did she know she was being watched, he wondered? Did the hairs on the nape of her neck prickle, her back
tingle? She smacked the machine with the palm of her hand, stood and started to delve into her left nostril with one toner-blackened finger. No, she didn’t know. None of these people knew, not really. A few of them saw him standing up here and walked on, a little more self-consciously than before, but many were in their own small world.

  Most of them did not even know that there was a bigger world out there at all. Much bigger. Way beyond the solid confines of earth, wind, fire, and water.

  He took another swig of beer and tried to change the way he was looking. He switched viewpoints from observer to observed, seeking to spy out whoever or whatever was watching him. Down in the street the pedestrians all had destinations in mind, and like most city-dwellers they rarely looked higher than their own eye-level. Nothing above that height was of interest to them. In the hive of the buildings opposite the hotel, office workers sat tapping at computers, stood by coffee machines, huddled around desks or tables, flirted, never imagining that there was anything worth looking at beyond the air-conditioned confines of their domains.

  He was being watched. He knew it. He could feel it. It was a feeling he had become more than used to since Howards had forced him, eventually, to entertain the truth of what was happening to him.

  The rooftops were populated by pigeons; no strange faces up there. The street down below was a battlefield of business, and if Amaranth were down there, Adam certainly could not pick them out. The small balconies to either side of him were unoccupied. He even turned around and stared back into his own room, fully expecting to find a face pressed through the wall like a waxwork corpse, or the wardrobe door hanging ajar. But he saw nothing. Wherever they were, they were keeping themselves well-hidden for now.

  A car hooted angrily and he looked back down over the railing—straight into the eyes of the bug lady. She was standing on the sidewalk outside the building opposite the hotel, staring up at Adam, her gaze unwavering. Even from this distance, Adam could see the hopelessness therein.