The Year's Best Horror Stories 21 Read online

  This was apparently meant for the photographers, since the man from the publishers beckoned them forward. The reporters were moving their chairs aside when Enid Stone raised one bony hand to halt the advance of the cameras. “Where’s the one who takes the dirty pictures? Have you let him in?”

  Even when several reporters and photographers turned to look at Sid, he couldn’t believe she meant him. “Is that Mr Muck? Show him the air,” she ordered. “No pictures till he goes.”

  The line of photographers took a step forward and closed in front of Sid. As he stared at their backs, his face and ears throbbing as if from blows, the man from the publishers took hold of his arm. “I’m afraid that if Miss Stone won’t have you I must ask you to leave.”

  Sid trudged downstairs, unable to hear his footsteps for the extravagant carpet. He felt as if he weren’t quite there. Outside, the fog was so thick that the buses had stopped running. It filled his eyes, his mind. However fast he walked, there was always as much of it waiting beyond it. Its passiveness infuriated him. He wanted to feel he was overcoming something, and by God, he would once he was home.

  He grabbed the copy of the story he’d written for Toby Hale and threw it on the table. He found the photograph beside the bed and propped it against a packet of salt in front of him. The picture had grown dull with so much handling, but he hadn’t the patience to develop a fresh copy just now. “My name’s Mister Sidney and don’t you forget it,” he informed the photograph.

  There was no response. His penis was as still as the fingerprinted glossy piece of card. The scene at the bookshop had angered him too much, that was all. He only had to relax and let his imagination take hold. “You’re here to learn discipline,” he said soft and slow.

  The figure composed of dots seemed to shift, but it was only Sid’s vision; his eyes were smarting. He imagined the figure in front of him changing, and suddenly he was afraid of seeing her as she had looked beneath the streetlamp. The memory distressed him, but why should he think of it now? He ought to be in control of how she appeared to him. Perhaps his anger at losing control would give him the power to take hold of her. “My name’s Mr. Sidney,” he repeated, and heard a mocking echo in his brain.

  His eyes were stinging when it should be her bottom that was. He closed his eyes and saw her floating helplessly toward him. “Come here if you know what’s good for you,” he said quickly, and then he thought he knew how to catch her. “Please,” he said in a high panicky voice, “please don’t hurt me.”

  It worked. All at once she was sprawling across his lap. “What’s my name?” he demanded, and raised his voice almost to a squeak. “Mr. Sidney,” he said.

  “Mr. Sidney sir,” he shouted, and dealt her a hefty slap. He was about to give the kind of squeal he would have loved her to emit when he heard her do so—faintly, across the road.

  He blinked at the curtains as if he had wakened from a dream. It couldn’t have been the girl, and if it had been, she was distracting him. He closed his eyes again and gripped them with his left hand as if that would help him trap his image of her. “What’s my name?” he shouted, and slapped her again. This time there was no mistaking the cry which penetrated the fog.

  Sid knocked his chair over backward in his haste to reach the window. When he threw the curtains open, he could see nothing but the deserted road boxed in by fog. The circle of lit pavement where he’d last seen the girl was bare and stark. He was staring at the fog, feeling as though it was even closer to him than it looked, when he heard a door slam. It was the front door of the building across the road. In a moment the girl appeared at the edge of the fog. She glanced up at him, and then she fled toward the park.

  It was as if he’d released her by relinquishing his image of her and going to the window. He felt as though he was on the brink of realizing the extent of his secret power. Suppose there really was something to this sex magic? Suppose he had made her experience at least some of his fantasies? He couldn’t believe he had reached her physically, but what would it be like for her to have her thoughts invaded by his fantasies about her? He had to know the truth, though he didn’t know what he would do with it. He grabbed his coat and ran downstairs, into the fog.

  Once on the pavement he stood still and held his breath. He heard his heartbeat, the cackling of ducks, the girl’s heels running away from him. He advanced into the fog, trying to ensure that she didn’t hear him. The bookshop window drifted by, crowded with posed figures and their victims. Ahead of him the fog parted for a moment, and the girl looked back as if she’d sensed his gaze closing around her. She saw him illuminated harshly by the fluorescent tube in the bookshop window, and at once she ran for her life.

  “Don’t run away,” Sid called. “I won’t hurt you, I only want to talk to you.” Surely any other thoughts that were lurking in his mind were only words. It occurred to him that he had never heard her speak. In that case, whose sobs had he heard in his fantasies? There wasn’t time for him to wonder now. She had vanished into the fog, but a change in the sound of her footsteps told him where she had taken refuge: in the park.

  He ran to the nearest entrance, the one she would have used, and peered along the path. Thickly swirling rays of light from a streetlamp splayed through the railings and stubbed themselves against the fog. He held his breath, which tasted like a head cold, and heard her gravelly footsteps fleeing along the path. “We’ll have to meet sooner or later, love,” he called, and ran into the park.

  Trees gleamed dully, wet black pillars upholding the fog. The grass on either side of the path looked weighed down by the slow passage of the murk which Sid seemed to be following. Once he heard a cry and a loud splash—a bird landing on the lake which was somewhere ahead, he supposed. He halted again, but all he could hear was the dripping of branches laden with fog.

  “I told you I don’t want to hurt you,” he muttered. “Better wait for me, or I’ll—” The chase was beginning to excite and frustrate and anger him. He left the gravel path and padded across the grass alongside it, straining his ears. When the fog solidified a hundred yards or so to his right, at first he didn’t notice. Belatedly he realized that the dim pale hump was a bridge which led the path over the lake, and was just in time to stop himself from striding into the water.

  It wasn’t deep, but the thought that the girl could have made him wet himself enraged him. He glared about, his eyes beginning to sting. “I can see you,” he whispered as if the words would make it true, and then his gaze was drawn from the bridge to the shadows beneath.

  At first he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. He seemed to be watching an image developing in the dark water, growing clearer and more undeniable. It had sunk, and now it was rising, floating under the bridge from the opposite side. Its eyes were open, but they looked like the water. Its arms and legs were trailing limply, and so was its blonde hair.

  Sid shivered and stared, unable to look away. Had she jumped or fallen? The splash he’d heard a few minutes ago must have been her plunging into the lake, and yet there had been no sounds of her trying to save herself. She must have struck her head on something as she fell. She couldn’t just have lain there willing herself to drown, Sid reassured himself, but if she had, how could anyone blame him? There was nobody to see him except her, and she couldn’t, not with eyes like those she had now. A spasm of horror and guilt set him staggering away from the lake.

  The slippery grass almost sent him sprawling more than once. When he skidded onto the path the gravel ground like teeth, and yet he felt insubstantial, at the mercy of the blurred night, unable to control his thoughts. He fled panting through the gateway, willing himself not to slow down until he was safe in his rooms; he had to destroy the photographs before anyone saw them. But fog was gathering in his lungs, and he had a stitch in his side. He stumbled to a halt in front of the bookshop.

  The light from the fluorescent tubes seemed to reach for him. He saw his face staring out from among the women bearing whips. If they or anyone else
knew what he secretly imagined he’d caused ... His buttocks clenched and unclenched at the thought he was struggling not to think. He gripped his knees and bent almost double to rid himself of the pain in his side so that he could catch his breath, and then he saw his face fit over the face of a bound victim.

  It was only the stitch that had paralyzed him, he told himself, near to panic. It was only the fog which was making the photograph of the victim appear to stir, to align its position with his. “Please, please,” he said wildly, his voice rising, and at once tried to take the words back. They were echoing in his mind, they wouldn’t stop. He felt as if they were about to unlock a deeper aspect of himself, a power which would overwhelm him.

  He didn’t want this, it was contrary to everything he knew about himself. “My name is—” he began, but his pleading thoughts were louder than his voice, almost as loud as the sharp swishing which filled his ears. He was falling forward helplessly, into himself or into the window, wherever the women and pain were waiting. For a moment he managed to cling to the knowledge that the images were nothing but the covers of magazines, and then he realized fully that they were more than that, far more. They were euphemisms for what waited beyond them.

  CHINA ROSE by Ron Weighell

  It was the French detective Vidocq, I think, who used to say that every act of evil had its own distinctive odor; that in a crowd of a thousand persons he could tell transgressors of the moral law by the sense of smell alone. What would a man of such singular olfactory accomplishments have made of Nicholas Hallam and Rose Seaford, I wonder? Nothing redolent of brimstone or corruption: rather a subtle whiff of something clinical masked by a sweet incense. And about Rose, of course, always the troubling fragrance of hibiscus.

  It began one golden autumn morning in 1923, when I, young, poor and happier than I knew, walked over Parliament Hill Fields to deliver a belated birthday present to my cousin, Diane Harewood. An attack of asthma had prevented me from attending her fancy-dress party the night before, robbing me of the chance to appear as a swashbuckling pirate. The Theda Baras and Nell Gwynns would never know what they had missed. I remember worrying as I rang the bell in case I woke Diane, which shows how little I knew then of her riotous life style. Coming from the poorer side of the family, I had no experience of life among the Hampstead set. So I was surprised to find the door answered by Napoleon Bonaparte, who let me into a scene of chaos.

  It appeared that some colossus had lifted the lid off the house and buried the floor under a ton of streamers, balloons and unconscious bodies. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and the fumes of alcohol, the lounge curtains still drawn, so all was seen in an unearthly half-light. The clouds of noxious smoke and the notorious historical figures lying around in postures of pain and despair made it all a bit like Hades, but at the far end of the room a Lalique lamp cast a golden glow across armchairs drawn up around a coffee table laden with empty bottles. There sat Diane, transformed by white silk pajamas, bathing cap and greasepaint into a fetchingly malevolent Pierrot. She was deep in conversation with a 90s dandy in the Des Esseintes style.

  I edged past two exhausted females shuffling together beside a gramophone. The rasping voice was exhorting them to “Charleston, Charleston!” but I could see they didn’t have it in them.

  Diane accepted my carefully chosen gift with no interest whatsoever and after a kiss and a gushing greeting, proceeded to ignore me. The dandy was telling her of an encounter he had had on a plateau in the Himalayas with a two-hundred-year-old man who lived in an underground chamber, guarding an enormous book with clasps of horn. He claimed to have won the old man’s confidence by some yogic trick of sitting naked in the ice fields and melting the snow by generating bodily heat. (I commented that two-hundred-year-old men were notoriously easy to impress, but no one took any notice of me.) He learned that the book contained the whole history of the human race, and the old man had inherited the job of turning over a page each day until his successor should come. The dandy had had a devil of a job convincing the old sage that he was not the man, but he had got a sneaky glimpse of our future! The earth was soon to be destroyed by fire. It seemed that we were only here to prepare the way for another species!

  It was while I was listening to this account that I first saw the strange couple seated in a corner of the room. One was a tousle-headed, handsome and athletic youth with the look of one of Aubrey Beardsley’s more sinister satyrs. It seemed the trousers and shoes he wore were only there to hide his shaggy legs and cloven hooves. The other was the most unhealthy-looking woman I have ever seen. The wrist of the hand that supported her chin looked so thin, so horribly fragile, that it seemed the grip of anger or an accidental blow would have broken it like a twig. She drew on a cigarette held lightly between the first and second fingers of the other hand, flapping the wrist back limply after each inhalation and pouting a lazy gray cloud toward the ceiling. I noticed a curious silver ring on her index finger. It showed a homed serpent coiling back and forth inside the oval collet.

  Her features were angular and ordinary, her skin was positively yellow, like old ivory jaundiced by years. Her teeth, which would become visible as she pouted out the smoke, were finely shaped but faintly tinged with blue and jagged along the edges.

  She had about her a strange, sickly charm such as Poe might have delighted in, or Rossetti taken for an image of deathly elegance; another Beatrice. As I looked at her wide, dead eyes shadowed beneath the lower lashes by restless nights, I could almost see a ghostly pillow hovering behind her head. That was the first of two very perceptive fancies.

  The most disturbing thing about her was her absolute lack of human response. She was not listening to the young man who sat beside her, she was watching him talk to her, observing him like some peculiar and only vaguely interesting phenomenon. The only sign of emotion I could discern was a fleeting twist to the corners of her mouth which suggested sarcastic amusement. I couldn’t help feeling, though, that she was too withdrawn to find direct humor in her surroundings. The real source, I felt, must be more secret than that. The second fancy came to me then, of an unseen companion, a familiar as it were, crouching at her shoulder, its mouth to her ear. It was this creature, and not she, who thought human beings were all bloody fools, and who twisted her mouth, despite herself, with a stream of evil, whispered observations.

  My attention was drawn back at that moment to the dandy, who had taken Diane to the window and drawn back the curtain. A wave of sunshine flooded the room, edging their forms in a shared aura of gold.

  “Awake!” he cried melodiously. “For Morning in the Bowl of Night has flung the stone that put the stars to flight, and lo! the Hunter of the East has caught St Pancras Station in a noose of light!”

  Diane turned her grotesquely made-up face to his and laughingly called him a fool, and something in the tone of her voice made me sorry that no woman had ever spoken to me in such a way.

  I found myself rising to join them, so we stood close together peering out into the bright world. Close to, the dandy smelled strongly of some musky perfume. Diane introduced us and I learned that his name was Nicholas Hallam. When he learned that I was a clerk, he looked at me with sympathy.

  “You’re always telling me that my life is too selfish, Diane”—the sarcastic twist that came to her mouth suggested that she had said no such thing—“I have decided to make Thomas my good cause. I will save this poor wretch from himself. If he’s still a clerk in one month, there is no hope for him. Be honest, young man. Do you really wish to spend this sequence of precious and unrepeatable sensations we call a day languishing in the dungeons of Messrs. Kneebone and Kneebone, or whatever they are called, pining for adventure while your life goes drifting away, along with the desks and the uncounted dirty ledgers, toward the grave?”

  “Not particularly,” I conceded, “but I have rent to pay, and lately I’ve developed some expensive habits like eating. So I’m afraid,” I finished checking my pocket watch, “I must push off, or the
desks and ledgers will be drifting toward the grave with my replacement at the helm.”

  “Yes, and we must leave too, Diane,” said Hallam, glancing across her to the woman in the corner who had so aroused my interest. “Our young friend has reminded us of our duty. Rose and I have a hard day too. It is our plan to walk away the morning, giving common people a chance to look at us and dream. Then a good lunch with fine wine in a little restaurant I know, and a trip to my bookbinders, where my volumes of Swinburne await me clad in a new raiment of leather, scarlet as the tongue of Sin.” He sighed deeply. “And if we have the strength after such a day of toil, a whole decanter of cognac remains at home to be disposed of unaided. I hardly think we shall have the energy left to invoke Ashtoreth tonight!” Bending forward he kissed Diane’s hand and whispered, “Goodbye for now, my sweet Pierrot.”

  Diane simpered and let go of his hand with reluctance.

  “Call in on us some time, Lenihan,” he added to me, holding out an expensive-looking calling card. The address was 13 Tamar Gardens, Hampstead.

  A couple of days later I took the umpteenth look at that black and gold card, pondered again the weird charm of Rose Seaford, for such apparently was her name, and decided to take Hallam up on his invitation. The evening wind was blowing fine rain down the streets, and my asthma had been playing up a little, but I had just bought a rather snappy trilby which, I thought, gave me a touch of style, so I said “what the hell” and took a taxi.

  Tamar Gardens sounded very plush. It turned out to be a rather rundown block of flats. Somewhat disillusioned, I rang the bell and waited; and waited. Just when I was about to give up and go home, Rose Seaford opened the door and stepped out, wearing a voluminous black raincoat and a black slouch hat. Drawing me in out of the lamplight, she whispered fearfully, “Did you see anyone watching the flat?”