The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, volume 18

As a result, around seventy people (including myself and other previous and multiple IHG winners) put our names to an “Open Letter” to the administrators condemning their decision and pointing out that their failure to acknowledge any anthology titles was not only blinkered, but sent entirely the wrong message to not only readers of the genre, but also to publishers.

The anthologies market is already depressed enough. Why should any publisher support future anthology projects if one of the major awards in the field could not find anything even worthwhile to nominate out of a year’s worth of titles? Arguably, 2005 may not have been the best of years, but it was certainly far from the worst . . .

As we had intended, our open letter stirred up discussion within the field. However, what none of us who put our names to the statement expected was the vehemence that it would provoke.

Within hours of its posting, message boards were buzzing with people discussing the pros and cons of the letter. I soon started receiving e-mails attacking me personally. Over the following weeks I was threatened and insulted, and I know that others received similar treatment.

However, I’m delighted to say that these kinds of bullying tactics ultimately failed. Only one person who signed the letter subsequently asked to have his name removed. Many more contacted us and asked if they could have their names added.

In the end, the IHG judges claimed that they didn’t really consider “reprint” anthologies (an odd statement, given that such information appears nowhere in their rules and, in the past, I have won the IHG Award for this very anthology series). Perhaps even more telling was the excuse by another judge that the panel did not receive enough free copies of anthologies to make an informed decision.

What the IHG judges and administrator had failed to take into account was that it is the job of the panel to track down individual titles and then discuss the subjective merits of those books amongst themselves.

Even more importantly, it is not in the judges’ remit to compare one year’s output of books with that of any earlier years. In this particular case, they should have nominated whichever anthology titles they collectively felt were the best of those published in 2005. If they then decided that none of these titles ultimately deserved the final award, then so be it. But to simply say that not one single book – and the genuine contributions made by the authors, editors and publishers involved – was worth acknowledging not only harmed people’s perception of the genre, but it is also diminished an award that is supposed to be all about recognising “achievement” in the field of horror and dark fantasy.

At the very least, our protest raised some important issues, and I hope that such a decision will not be taken so lightly again.

For me, personally, it was a nasty, spiteful and disheartening time that exposed the dark and malicious underbelly of the genre I love and work in. Am I glad I got involved? Sure. Given the harassment that I had to put up with, would I do it again? You betcha!

The Editor

May, 2007

AL SARRANTONIO

Summer

AL SARRANTONIO IS THE AUTHOR of more than forty books. He is a winner of the Bram Stoker Award and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Locus Award and the Private Eye Writers of America Shamus Award.

His novels, spanning the horror, science fiction, fantasy, mystery and Western genres, include Moonbane, Skeletons, House Haunted, The Five Worlds Trilogy, Masters of Mars, West Texas Orangefield and Hallows Eve, the last two part of his Halloween cycle of stories. Hailed as “a master anthologist” by Booklist, he has edited such high-profile volumes as 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense, Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction and Flights: Extreme Visions of Fantasy.

The author’s short stories have appeared in magazines such as Heavy Metal, Twilight Zone, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Realms of Fantasy, Analog and Amazing, as well as in anthologies such as The Year’s Best Horror Stories, Visions of Fantasy: Tales from the Masters, Great Ghost Stories and The Best of Shadows.

Upcoming publications include a new horror collection, Halloween and Other Seasons, a limited edition of Moonbane, and a new “Orangefield” novel, Halloweenland, all from Cemetery Dance Publications, as well as a paperback edition of Halloweenland from Leisure Books. He currently lives in New York’s historic Hudson Valley region with his family.

“Unless I’m mistaken,” reveals Sarrantonio, “ ‘Summer’, an unabashed homage to Ray Bradbury, presents one of the very few ideas that Bradbury never covered in his Weird Tales and Thrilling Wonder Stories days: Namely, what if the glorious season of summer came but never ended?

“Not to say that he’s never touched on the season: His ‘Rocket Summer’ and ‘All Summer in a Day’ (you may notice my clumsy and roundabout paraphrase of that title in the first line of my story) are wonderful evocations of the warm months.

“Regardless, I’d like to think there’s a little salt and pepper of the Old Master in my tale. Perhaps if Ray had had that idea before me, it would have looked a little bit like my story.”

IT WAS A SUMMER DAY that was all of summer. Dry heat rose from the cracks in the sidewalks, brushing the brown grass that grew there as it shimmered by. There was a hush in the stilted air, high and hanging, the sun like a burnt coin frozen in the pale and cloudless sky, the trees still, green leaves dried and baked, panting for a breeze.

Rotating window fans moved hot air from outside to inside. Newspapers rustled on kitchen tables, their pages waving until the artificial breeze moved on, then settling hot and desultory back into unread place. The breakfast plates sat unstacked, forgotten; lunch plates with uneaten lunch – curling pumpernickel, wilted lettuce, an inkblot of mustard dry as paper – sat nearby. Morning coffee milled in two mugs, still tepid from the afternoon warmth.

“My Gosh, Mabel, has it ever been this hot before?” George Meadows said from his easy chair; he sat arranged like a man who had eaten a great meal, with his shirt and trousers loosened, but only against the heat.

His wife Mabel, prostrate on the nearby couch, the faded sunflowers of her house dress clashing and merging in a wilted riot with the worn daisies of the sofa print, tried to say something but failed. Her right hand continued to weakly fan herself with its magazine and she tried again.

“Hot as it’s . . . ever been,” she managed to get out in a croak, and then closed her eyes and ears, discouraging further comment.

“Yep,” George managed to answer before closing his own eyes. He couldn’t resist, he never could, getting the last word in. He rallied to add, even though Mabel was already perfectly aware: “Man on the radio said it might get hotter still.”

Three twelve-year-old boys hated Summer.

They hadn’t always. At one time, Summer had belonged to them. From the first day of school letting out, until the dreaded bell sounded again, they had ruled summer as if they owned it. There had been baseball and bad tennis, and miniature golf and marbles in the hot dust. There had been butterfly hunts with orange black monarchs big as pterodactyls and just as difficult to catch. Trips to the secret pond with jars, and pondwater drops under Lem’s microscope to watch the amoebas within. And their own swimming, from dawn to dusk some days, emerging at the end waterlogged beings, raisin boys, to dry and unwilt in the setting sun. And Monk’s telescope at night, the fat dry cold moon sliding across the eyepiece like a pockmarked balloon; Saturn hanging silent and majestic with its golden split ring. Backyard campouts, the walls of Shep’s pup tent lit from within not with fireflies but with the flashlights of boys with comic books, the smell of Sterno and pancake batter the next morning, the metal taste of warm water in boy scout canteens.

Summer had been their time – the time away from schoolbooks and parents’ waggling fingers, the time to be boys. And this year it had started the same – the banishment of black-and-white marble notebooks, pencils thrown under beds spearing dust bunnies, school clothes in the backs of closets.

And out with the baseball glove! Oiled, smelling like new wet leather, sneakers that smelled of dirt, short pants, the dewy morning giving way to a fresh hot feeling and late afternoon thunderstorms scattering the ballplayers with warm wet drops big as knuckles and the temperature dropping and making them shiver. And swimming, and more swimming, and more swimming still, and the cool-warm nights, the sharp cold taste of ice cream, of a bottle of cola drawn from an iced bucket, of a hot dog steaming, hiding under hot sauerkraut. A drive-in movie in Uncle Jed’s pickup truck: two hiding under the tarp until they were in.

Morning noon and night it was summer.

Real summer.

Until:

Something . . .

. . . began to change.

It was Shep who noticed it first: in the dangerous treehouse on a mid-August afternoon. They had finished trading baseball cards, arguing over how many cards (always doubles!) to attach to bicycle spokes to make them clack and were halfway through another argument about who was prettier, Margaret O’Hearn or Angie Bernstein, when Shep’s head went up and he sniffed, just like a hound dog might. His leg, swinging through one of the hut’s many floor holes, pendulumed to a frozen stop.

“What’s wrong?” Lem asked, and Monk looked up from his new copy of Vault of Horror with a frown.

“Turn off your brain, Shep,” Monk growled. “It’s summer.”

“Just because you don’t want to talk about girls or leg hair or B.O.—” Lem began, but he stopped dead at the look on Shep’s face.

“Something’s different,” Shep said, and he still held that pointer-at-a-bird look.

Lem tried to laugh, but stopped abruptly, a hiccup of seriousness at the look in Shep’s eyes.

A whisper: “What do you mean: different?”

Shep spoke without breaking his concentration. “Don’t you feel it?”

Monk shook his head with finality and went back to his comic, but Lem’s face had taken on a worried look.

Shep was never wrong about these kinds of things.

“I . . . don’t feel anything . . .” Lem offered mildly.

Idly, still scanning his Vault of Horror, Monk kicked out his sneaker and caught Lem on the shin. A scatter of orange infield dust, dislodged from the sculpted sole, trickled down the other boy’s bare leg.

“You feel that, Lemnick?”

“Be quiet—” Shep said abruptly, and it was not a request.

The other two boys were silent – and now Monk sat up, his butt easily finding the structure’s largest hole, which they inevitably called “the crapper.”

Something like a faint hiss, something like the eerie castanet sound cicadas make, passed by his ears and brushed him on one cheek, but there was not so much as a breeze in the early hot afternoon.

“What was—?”

“It’s getting hotter,” Shep said simply.

“Maybe it’s because of Hell’s Cave,” Monk laughed, but nobody joined him.

That afternoon it was too hot to swim. It stayed that way the next three days. They abandoned the treehouse, leaving its lopsided openwork collection of mismatched boards and tattooed, badly nailed orange crates, and moved into Monk’s cellar, which was damp but cool.

It had never been too hot to swim before:

Never.

They perused Monk’s comic book collection, which after banishment to the basement was on the verge of mold. Monk had built, from boards too useless even for the treehouse, a lab table in one corner, and they fiddled with the chemistry set, trying to make things that were yellow and then turned red, others that made smoke. They toyed with the rabbit-ear antenna on the ancient television, a huge wooden box with a tiny black and white screen the size of a TV dinner tin – for a while they brought in the monster movie channel, and watched, in a snowy and line-infested picture, the Man from Planet X rampage through the Scottish moors. Monk brought down a bowl of grapes, and they ate some of them, and spit the rest at each other out of their mouths, pressing their cheeks for cannonade.

But their eyes kept drifting to the cellar windows, and the heat and light outside.

“Maybe we should go swimming anyway,” Monk said, finally, on the second day.

They made it halfway to the secret pond, and turned around, dripping and panting.

Overhead, the sun looked hotter, if not larger.

They played darts in the cellar, and set up plastic army men and knocked them down with marbles and rubber bands.

Lem and Shep talked about body odor and shaving their upper lips while Monk scowled.

And always, for three days, they kept looking to the cellar windows, up high, filled with light, and closed against the summer heat.

That night they took Monk’s telescope to the secret pond, and Shep’s pup tent, and Lem’s dad’s battery radio.

The radio played music, and talked about the heat. The air was dry as the inside of an oven. There was a cloudless sky, and a smile of moon tilted at an amused angle, and, after a while, there were stars in the dark but they looked faraway and dim through the hot air. The telescope went unused. They swam for a while, but the water, over the last three days, had taken on the temperature and feel of warm tea. Inside the tent it was as hot as outside, and they shifted uncomfortably as they tried to sleep. When they tried to read comics by flashlight, the flashlights dimmed and then went out.

In the dark, Lem tried to talk again about Margaret O’Hearn and Amy Bernstein, and about Shep joining the track team when they all started Junior High in the fall, but Monk told them to shut up.

Later Shep said, out of the blue, “What do you think about Hell’s Cave?”

“What about it?” Monk sneered. “You think it leads down to Hell?”

“That’s what they say.”

Lem was silent, and then he said, “You think that’s why the heat won’t end . . . ?”

“I wonder,” Shep replied.

“You really think—?” Lem began.

“Go to sleep!” Monk demanded.

In the morning it was even hotter.

The sun came up over the trees the color of melted butter. Monk set up the griddle over two Sterno cans, but no one was hungry so he didn’t even start breakfast. They spit out the water in their canteens, which tasted like warm aluminum.

It was getting even hotter.

“Ninety-nine today,” the radio chirped, “and who knows how hot tomorrow. It only went down to eighty-nine last night, folks. Hope you’ve got those fans on high, or your head in the fridge!”

He went on to say the weather bureau had no idea why it was so hot.

“What does that mean?” Shep said. “Isn’t it their job to know?”

As if in answer the chirpy radio voice said, “Apparently, folks, this heat has little to do with the weather! According to meteorological indications, it should be in the middle eighties, with moderate humidity! Fancy that!”

“Fancy that!” Monk nearly spat, in mocking imitation.

The radio voice, again as if in answer, chirped just before a commercial came on: “Hey, folks! Maybe it’ll never be cool again!”

Shep looked at his friends, and there was a suddenly grim look on his face.

“Maybe he’s right,” he said.

It didn’t rain over the next ten days. Thunder heads would gather in the West, dark mushrooming promises of cool and wet, and then break apart as they came overhead, dissipating like pipe smoke into the blue high air. The grasses turned from moist green to brown; postage stamp lawns changed color overnight and died. In town, the few places with air conditioning – Ferber’s Department Store, the Five and Dime with its brand new machine perched over the front door, dripping warm condenser water from its badly installed drain onto entering customers – were packed with customers who didn’t buy anything, only wandered the isles like zombies seeking cool relief. The temperature rose into the low hundreds, dropping into the nineties at night. On the roads, automobiles like ancient reptiles sat deserted at angles against curbs, their hoods up, radiators hissing angrily. Buses, looking like brontosauruses, passengerless, stood unmoving, their front and middle doors accordianed open, yawning lazily at empty white bus stop benches.

Birds stopped singing in trees; the morning dawned as hot as midday. Dogs panted in their doghouses. There were no mosquitoes, and houseflies hung motionless to window screens. Spiders crawled into shadows and stayed there.

Cold water came out of taps almost steaming.

It was getting even hotter.

Three twelve-year-old boys made one more pilgrimage to the secret pond. They were sick of Monk’s cellar, had done every experiment in the chemistry manual, had recklessly mixed chemicals on their own until one produced in a beaker a roiling cloud of orange choking gas that drove them upstairs. It had become too hot in the cellar anyway, with the windows closed or open. In Monk’s kitchen the refrigerator whirred like an unhappy robot, its doors permanently open to provide a tiny measure of coolness to the kitchen. Milk had spoiled, its odor battling with the sour stench of rotting vegetables. Dishes, unwashed, were piled in the sink. The radio was on, a background insect buzz. Monk’s parents had gone to the five and dime for the air conditioning.

“And even hotter, with record temperatures reported now not only around the United States but in Europe and Asia as well, in a widening area . . .” the radio said, though the announcer sounded less chirpy, almost tired. “Locally, state authorities are warning anyone prone to heat stroke . . .”

Monk and Shep and Lem took whatever dry food was left, found Shep’s pup tent, inexpertly rolled and abandoned in a corner, and set out for the pond.

“. . . forty deaths reported in . . .” the radio voice reported unhappily as the screen door banged behind them.

It was like walking through a bakery oven. The heat was not only in the ground and in the air, but all around them. They felt it through their sneakers, on their knees, their eyelids. Their hair felt hot. The air was dry as a firecracker.

Shep looked up into the sun, and his eyes hurt.

“I don’t care how hot the water is,” Monk said, “it can’t be worse than this.”

It was. When they got to the pond and stripped, there was vapor rising from the surface of the water, and fish floated dead, like flat plastic toys.

“I don’t care,” Monk said, and stepped in, and yelped.

He looked back at his friends in awe, and showed his retracted foot, which was red.

“It’s actually hot!” Monk said.

Lem sat on the ground and put his head in his hands.

Monk was putting his clothes back on, his hands shaking.

Shep said with certainty, “Someone stole summer, and we’re going to Hell’s Cave to get it back.”

“Ungh?” a weak voice said from the kitchen table. George Meadows sat staring at his half empty coffee cup, watching the coffee in it steam. He had poured it an hour and a half ago, and it was still hot.

He lifted his hand toward it, looked at the sweat stain it left in the shape of a hand on the table and lowered it again.

“Mabel?” he called in a raspy, whispery voice. The sound of fanning had stopped and when George Meadows made the extreme effort to turn his head he saw that his wife’s house dress looked as if it was melting, with her in it, into the sofa. Her right hand, unmoving, still gripped her magazine and her eyes held a fixed, glazed look. Her chest barely moved up and down.

“Oh, Lord . . .” he breathed, closing his eyes, getting the last word in though she hadn’t said anything. “Gettin’ hotter still . . .”

Three twelve-year-old boys stood in front of a cave opening buttressed with rotting timbers. With them was Monk’s rusting Radio Flyer, bursting like a Conestoga wagon with their supplies: the battery radio, two new-batteried flashlights (one of them worked); three boxes of cereal; six comic books, no doubles; a large thermos of hot ice tea; four cans of warm cream soda; a length of clothesline pilfered from Lem’s mother’s backyard; a mousetrap, over which they had bantered incessantly (“What if we meet up with rats?” Lem debated; “Why not a gorilla?” Shep shot back; in the end Shep got tired of the argument and threw it on the pile), a B-B gun, a kitchen knife with a broken handle, a crucifix, a Bible. The last two had been added by Shep, because, he said, “We’re heading down there,” and would listen to no argument.

They headed in.

It was dim, and, compared to outside, almost cool in the cave. But as they moved farther in it got even dimmer and hot and stuffy. Their bodies were covered with sweat, but they didn’t notice. There was a twist to the left, and then a climb that disappointed them, and then a suddenly drop which brought them real darkness and a halt.

Lem, who was pulling the wagon, rummaged through the pile and pulled out the bad flashlight, and then the good one, which he handed to Shep.

Shep switched it on and played the light over their faces.

“You look scared,” he said.

“Can we stop here for the night?” Lem asked.

Shep consulted his watch with the light beam. “It’s two in the afternoon!”

Behind them, they saw how steeply the floor had dropped; there was a circle of light leading out that looked hot and far away.

“I’m hungry,” Monk said.

“Later,” Shep answered, and turned the flashlight beam ahead of them.

There was darkness, and a steep descent, and Monk and Lem followed as the beam pointed down into it.

After twenty minutes that seemed like a day, the black wagon handle slipped out of Lem’s sweaty hand and the wagon clattered past him.

“Look out!” he called, and Monk and Shep jumped aside as the wagon roared down the steep incline ahead of them.

They heard it rattle off into the bowels of the earth, then they heard nothing.

“Why did you tell us to get out of the way?” Shep asked angrily. “We could have stopped it!”

“We’ll catch up to it,” Monk shot back.

“Sorry . . .” Lem said.

“No matter. Monk’s right.” The flashlight beam pointed ahead, and down they went.

Two real hours went by. Lem was thirsty, and Monk wanted to stop, but Shep kept going. If anything it was hotter than above now, and Lem finally panted timidly, “You think we’re almost . . . there?”

“You mean Hell?” Shep replied, and then added, “If we are, we don’t have the crucifix anymore to protect us. It’s in the wagon.”

Monk snorted, and Shep spun angrily toward him with the flashlight, which at that exact moment went out.

“Ohhh,” Lem mewled.

“Be quiet,” Shep ordered, “it’s just stuck.” They heard him shaking the flashlight in the dark, but the beam didn’t come on.

“Maybe the cover’s loose—”

There was the rattle of loosened metal, a twang, and they heard flashlight parts hitting the floor of the cave.

“Uh oh,” Monk said.

“Help me find them—” Shep ordered, but now there was a note of desperation in his voice.

“I hear rats!” Lem cried, and they all went silent.

Something was skittering in the dark ahead of them.

“Get down and help me find the parts!” Shep said, and for a few minutes there was only the sound of frightened breathing and the pat and slide of hands on the floor of the cave.

“I’ve got the lens!” Shep cried suddenly.

“And here’s the reflector!” Monk added.

“What if there are rats on the floor!” Lem said, but Shep ignored him.

“All we need is the cover, and one of the batteries. The other one is still in the body.”

“I’ve got the battery!” Monk exulted a moment later.

“I can’t find the cover!” Shep said desperately.

“I’m telling you there are rats!” Lem whimpered.

“I can’t find the cover either!” Monk.

There was fumbling in the dark, heavy breathing.

A bolt of light blinded them, went out, blinded them.

“I don’t need the cover – I’ll hold it on,” Shep said.

He pointed the flashlight, clutched together by the pressure of his hand, at his friends, Monk on the cave floor, still probing, Lem with his back against the wall, eyes closed.

The beam shot to the floor, moved crazily this way and that, then froze on a round red piece of plastic.

“The cover!” Monk yelled, and pounced on it.

“Give it to me!” Shep said.

There was more fumbling, darkness, then bright light again.

They stood huffing and puffing at their exertion.

Their breaths quieted.

The scrabbling sound was still ahead of them.

“Rats!” Lem cried, and then let out a wail.

The flashlight beam swung down and ahead of them, and caught the crashed remains of the red wagon on its side, a chewed-open box of cereal, and the long fat grey-brown length of a rat as it put its whiskered, sniffing nose into the mouse trap.

There was a loud snap! which made the light beam shiver, and then, in the darkness behind Shep, he heard Lem laugh nervously and say, “See?”

They stopped two hours later for the night. By Shep’s watch it was ten o’clock. The flashlight had gone out again, and this time it was the batteries but Shep took the batteries from the other unworking one. They were tired and hungry, thirsty and hot. The wagon was serviceable but now made a loud squeak with each turn of the front wheels. The handle had been bent, but Lem forced it back into shape. They’d found everything but one can of pop, which Monk promptly stepped on when they set out. He smelled like cream soda, and his friends didn’t let him forget it.

“We’ll need the batteries for tomorrow,” Shep said solemnly. He had found a flat wide place to stop, a kind of hitch in the slope. Ahead of them was only darkness.

It was hot and close and sticky, and they felt a vague heat drifting up at them from below.

“What happens when the batteries run out?” Lem asked.

“We’ll have to conserve them,” Shep said.

“But what happens—?”

“Be quiet,” Shep said, at the same moment Monk snapped, “Shut up, Lem.”

They ate in darkness, and drank warm soda and un-iced tea, and listened, but there was nothing to hear. No rats, no nearby roasting fires, no dripping water, no sound of any kind. Just the silent sound of heat getting hotter.

“I hope we’re close,” Lem said. “I want to go home.”

“Home to what?” Shep answered. “If we don’t find something down here . . .”

The rest went unsaid.

They sat in a circle, and moved closer, the flashlight in the midst of them like a doused campfire.

Shep laughed and said, “We never finished talking about Angle Bernstein, did we?”

Lem laughed too. “Or how your pits smell!”

“Or your mustache!” Shep shot back.

Monk was silent.

“Hey, Monk,” Shep said, “you shaving your lip yet?”

“And using ‘B-Oderant’? You smell like cream soda, but do you also smell like a horse?”

Monk feigned snoring.

“Hey Monk—”

The snoring ceased. “Leave me alone.”

Lem hooted: “Cream soda boy!”

“Horse pit boy!” Shep laughed.

Monk said nothing, and soon he was snoring for real.

Shep woke them up at seven o’clock by his watch.

At first he couldn’t move; it was hard to breathe and so hot he felt as if he was under a steam iron. He knew it was growing impossibly warmer. He could feel and smell and taste it, just like he had in the tree house.

“We have to find the end today,” he said, grimly.

They ate and drank in the dark, just like the night before. Now there was no talking. Lem was having trouble breathing, taking shallow ragged huffs at the air.

“Feels . . . like . . . we’re . . . in a . . . barbecue . . .” he rasped. “Hard . . . to . . . breathe . . .”

They turned on the battery radio and there was hiss up and down the dial until the one strong local channel came on. It was the same announcer, only now all of the chirp had gone out of his voice.

“. . . hundred and ten here this morning, folks,” he said. “And it’s September first! Local ponds are steamed dry, and the electricity was out for three hours yesterday. Same all over, now. Ice caps are melting, and in Australia, where it’s the end of wintertime, the temperature hit ninety-nine yesterday . . .”

They snapped off the radio.

“Let’s go,” Shep said.

Lem began to cry after a half-hour.

“I can’t do this!” he said. “Let’s go home! I want to swim in the pond, and get ready for school, and look at the fall catalogs and feel it get chilly at night!”

“It’s not much farther,” Shep said evenly. He was having trouble breathing himself. “This is something we’ve got to do, Lem. If we do it maybe we can have all that again.”

Shep pointed the flashlight at Monk, who was trudging silently, straight ahead.

The flashlight began to fail as they reached a wall of fallen rocks. Ignoring the impediment for the moment, Shep used the remaining light to rip the battery cover off the back of the radio and pull the batteries out.

They were a different size, so he put the radio on and let it stay on, a droning buzz in the background.

The flashlight went out, then flickered on again.

“Quick!” Shep shouted. “Check to either side and see if there’s a way around!”

Lem shuffled off to the left, and Monk stood unmoving where he was.

Shep pushed impatiently past him, flicking the flash on and off to pull precious weak yellow beams out of it.

“There’s no way around here,” Lem called out laconically from the left.

Shep blinked the light on, off, punched desperately around the edge of the barrier, looking for a hole, a rift, a way through.

“Nothing . . .” he huffed weakly.

He turned with a last thought, flaring the flash into life so that the beam played across Monk.

“Maybe there’s a crack! Maybe we can pull the wall down!”

“There is no crack,” Monk said dully, “and we can’t pull it down.” His legs abruptly folded underneath him and he sat on the cave floor.

Shep turned the light off, on again; the beam was dull, pumpkin colored but he played it all over the rock barrier.

“Got to be—”

“There is no ‘Hell’s Cave’,” Monk said dully. “It’s just a myth. My father told me about it when I was seven. This is just an old mine that played out and then caved in.”

“But—”

“I made it all happen,” Monk said hoarsely, without energy. “The heat, the endless summer. It was me.”

“What?” Shep said, moving closer. On the other side, Lem sank to the floor.

“It was me . . .” Monk repeated.

Lem began to cry, mewling like a hurt kitten, and the flashlight beam died again. In the dark, Shep flicked it on, off, on, off.

“Me,” Monk said fiercely.

Shep hit the button one more time on the flashlight, and it flared like a dying candle, haloing Monk’s haunted face, and then faded out again.

“I didn’t want it to end.” In the darkness Monk spoke in a whispered, monotone. “I didn’t want it ever to end.”

“Didn’t want what to end?” Shep asked, confused.

“This summer,” Monk answered, sighing. “The three of us. I wanted it to last forever. I didn’t want us to . . . change. Which is what we were doing. Talking about girls instead of baseball cards, hairy legs instead of monster comics, body odor instead of swimming and telescopes. We used to do everything together and now that was going to change. When we went to Junior High Lem was going to try to date Angie Bernstein and you were going out for track. Then you would go out with Margaret O’Hearn, and the baseball cards and comics would go in the back of the closet, along with the marbles and the pup tent and the canteen and butterfly net. The chemistry set would collect dust in the corner of the basement. I could see it coming. It was all changing, and I didn’t want it to.”

“But how . . . ?” Shep asked.

In the dark, he could almost hear Monk shrug and heard him hitch a sob. “I don’t know how I did it. I just wanted it, I fell asleep crying for it at night, I prayed for it every day. Every time you and Lem started talking about girls and body hair and growing up, I prayed for it louder. And then, suddenly, it happened. And then I couldn’t make it go away . . .”

Lem cried out hoarsely, then settled into low rasping sobs.

It had become even hotter, and then hotter still. The radio, still on, blurted out a stifled cry of static and then was silent.

In the sweaty, close, unbearably hot cave, the flashlight went on with one final smudge of sick light, illuminating Monk’s crying face.

“I’m so sorry . . .” he whispered.

“Mabel?” George Meadows croaked. He could barely talk, his words fighting through the heat, which had intensified. His wife lay unmoving on the sofa, her desiccated arm hanging over the side, fingers brushing her dropped magazine. Her house dress was now completely part of the couch’s pattern, melded into it like an iron transfer. The window fan had given up. The sky was very bright. Puffs of steam rose from the floor, up from the cellar, from the ground below. Somewhere in the back of his nostrils, George smelled smoke, and fire.

“Mabel?” he called again, although now he could not feel the easy chair beneath him. He felt light as a flake of ash rising from a campfire.

His eyes were so hot he could no longer see.

He took in one final, rasping, burning breath as the world turned to fire and roaring flame around him.

And, even now, he could not resist getting in the last word, letting his final breath out in a cracked whisper even though there was no one to listen: “Yep. Hottest ever.”

RAMSEY CAMPBELL

Digging Deep

RAMSEY CAMPBELL’S LATEST NOVEL is titled Thieving Fear, and that will be followed by The Creatures of the Pool.

Along with his columns in Video Watchdog and All Hallows magazines, Campbell also now writes a column for the critical magazine Dead Reckonings as well.

“The following story came out of the air or rather the airwaves,” explains the author. “BBC Radio 4 reported that a significant number of people do indeed take their mobiles with them as my protagonist does.

“It seems to prove that one of the seminal images of horror fiction has yet to be driven underground by technology. Sometimes the old ideas are best, eh? But I hope I’ve brought it up to date.”

IT MUST HAVE BEEN QUITE a nightmare. It was apparently enough to make Coe drag the quilt around him, since he feels more than a sheeted mattress beneath him, and to leave a sense of suffocating helplessness, of being worse than alone in the dark. He isn’t helpless. Even if his fit of rage blotted out his senses, it must have persuaded the family. They’ve brought him home. There wasn’t a quilt on his hospital bed.

Who’s in the house with him? Perhaps they all are, to impress on him how much they care about him, but he knows how recently they started. There was barely space for all of them around his bed in the private room. Whenever they thought he was asleep some of them would begin whispering. He’s sure he overheard plans for his funeral. Now they appear to have left him by himself, and yet he feels hemmed in. Is the dark oppressing him? He has never seen it so dark.

It doesn’t feel like his bedroom. He has always been able to distinguish the familiar surroundings when any of his fears jerked him awake. He could think that someone – his daughter Simone or son Daniel, most likely – has denied him light to pay him back for having spent too much of their legacy on the private room. However much he widens his eyes, they remain coated with blackness. He parts his dry lips to call someone to open the curtains, and then his tongue retreats behind his teeth. He should deal with the bedclothes first. Nobody ought to see him laid out as if he’s awaiting examination. In the throes of the nightmare he has pulled the entire quilt under him.

He grasps a handful and plants his other hand against the padded headboard to lift his body while he snatches the quilt from beneath him. That’s the plan, but he’s unable to take hold of the material. It’s more slippery than it ought to be, and doesn’t budge. Did his last bout of rage leave him so enfeebled, or is his weight pinning down the quilt? He stretches out his arms to find the edges, and his knuckles bump into cushions on both sides of him. But they aren’t cushions, they’re walls.

He’s in some kind of outsize cot. The walls must be cutting off the light. Presumably the idea is to prevent him from rolling out of bed. He’s furious at being treated like this, especially when he wasn’t consulted. He flings up his hands to grab the tops of the walls and heave himself up to shout for whoever’s in the house, and his fingertips collide with a padded surface.

The sides of the cot must bend inwards at the top, that’s all. His trembling hands have flinched and bruised his sunken cheeks, but he lifts them. His elbows are still pressed against the bottom of the container when his hands blunder against an obstruction above his face. It’s plump and slippery, and scrabbling at it only loosens his nails from the quick. His knees rear up, knocking together before they bump into the obstacle, and then his feet deal it a few shaky kicks. Far too soon his fury is exhausted, and he lies inert as though the blackness is earth that’s weighing on him. It isn’t far removed. His family cared about him even less than he suspected. They’ve consigned him to his last and worst fear.

Can’t this be another nightmare? How can it make sense? However prematurely eager Simone’s husband may have been to sign the death certificate, Daniel would have had to be less than professional too. Could he have saved on the embalming and had the funeral at once? At least he has dressed his father in a suit, but the pockets feel empty as death.

Coe can’t be sure until he tries them all. His quivering fists are clenched next to his face, but he forces them open and gropes over his ribs. His inside breast pocket is flat as a card, and so are the others in the jacket. When he fumbles at his trousers pockets he’s dismayed to find how thin he is – so scrawny that he’s afraid the protrusion on his right hip is a broken bone. But it’s in the pocket, and in his haste to carry it to his face he almost shies it out of reach. Somebody cared after all. He pokes at the keypad, and before his heart has time to beat, the mobile phone lights up.

He could almost wish the glow it sheds were dimmer. It shows him how closely he’s boxed in by the quilted surface. It’s less than a hand’s breadth from his shoulders, and when he tilts his face up to judge the extent of his prison the pudgy lid bumps his forehead. Around the phone the silky padding glimmers green, while farther down the box it’s whitish like another species of mould, and beyond his feet it’s black as soil. He lets his head sink onto the pillow that’s the entire floor and does his desperate best to be aware of nothing but the mobile. It’s his lifeline, and he needn’t panic because he can’t remember a single number. The phone will remember for him.

His knuckles dig into the underside of the lid as he holds the mobile away from his face. It’s still too close; the digits merge into a watery blur. He only has to locate the key for the stored numbers, and he jabs it hard enough to bruise his fingertip. The symbol that appears in the illuminated window looks shapeless as a blob of mud, but he knows it represents an address book. He pokes the topmost left-hand key of the numeric pad, although he has begun to regret making Daniel number one, and holds the mobile against his ear.

There’s silence except for a hiss of static that sounds too much like a trickle of earth. Though his prison seems oppressively hot, he shivers at the possibility that he may be too far underground for the phone to work. He wriggles onto his side to bring the mobile a few inches closer to the surface, but before his shoulder is anything like vertical it thumps the lid. As he strives to maintain his position, the distant phone starts to ring.

It continues when he risks sinking back, but that’s all. He’s close to pleading, although he doesn’t know with whom, by the time the shrill insistent pulse is interrupted. The voice isn’t Daniel’s. It’s entirely anonymous, and informs Coe that the person he’s calling isn’t available. It confirms Daniel’s number in a different voice that sounds less than human, an assemblage of digits pronounced by a computer, and invites him to leave a message.

“It’s your father. That’s right, I’m alive. You’ve buried me alive. Are you there? Can you hear me? Answer the phone, you – Just answer. Tell me that you’re coming. Ring when you get this. Come and let me out. Come now.”

Was it his breath that made the glow flicker? He’s desperately tempted to keep talking until this chivvies out a response, but he mustn’t waste the battery. He ends the call and thumbs the key next to Daniel’s. It’s supposed to contact Simone, but it triggers the same recorded voice.

He could almost imagine that it’s a cruel joke, even when the voice composed of fragments reads out her number. At first he doesn’t speak when the message concludes with a beep, and then he’s afraid of losing the connection. “It’s me,” he babbles. “Yes, your father. Someone was a bit too happy to see me off. Aren’t you there either, or are you scared to speak up? Are you all out celebrating? Don’t let me spoil the party. Just send someone who can dig me up.”

He’s growing hysterical. These aren’t the sorts of comments he should leave; he can’t afford to antagonise his family just now. His unwieldy fingers have already terminated the call – surely the mobile hasn’t lost contact by itself. Should he ring his son and daughter back? Alternatively there are friends he could phone, if he can remember their numbers – and then he realises there’s only one call he should make. Why did he spend so long in trying to reach his family? He uses a finger to count down the blurred keypad and jabs the ninth key thrice.

He has scarcely lowered the phone to his ear when an operator cuts off the bell. “Emergency,” she declares.

Coe can be as fast as that. “Police,” he says while she’s enquiring which service he requires, but she carries on with her script. “Police,” he says louder and harsher.

This earns him a silence that feels stuffed with padding. She can’t expect callers who are in danger to be polite, but he’s anxious to apologise in case she can hear. Before he can take a breath a male voice says “Gloucestershire Constabulary.”

“Can you help me? You may have trouble believing this, but I’m buried alive.”

He sounds altogether too contrite. He nearly emits a wild laugh at the idea of seeking the appropriate tone for the situation, but the policeman is asking “What is your name, sir?”

“Alan Coe,” says Coe and is pinioned by realising that it must be carved on a stone at least six feet above him.

“And where are you calling from?”

The question seems to emphasise the sickly greenish glimmer of the fattened walls and lid. Does the policeman want the mobile number? That’s the answer Coe gives him. “And what is your location, sir?” the voice crackles in his ear.

Coe has the sudden ghastly notion that his children haven’t simply rushed the funeral – that for reasons he’s afraid to contemplate, they’ve laid him to rest somewhere other than with his wife. Surely some of the family would have opposed them. “Mercy Hill,” he has to believe.

“I didn’t catch that, sir.”

Is the mobile running out of power? “Mercy Hill,” he shouts so loud that the dim glow appears to quiver.

“Whereabouts on Mercy Hill?”

Every question renders his surroundings more substantial, and the replies he has to give are worse. “Down in front of the church,” he’s barely able to acknowledge. “Eighth row, no, ninth, I think. Left of the avenue.”

There’s no audible response. The policeman must be typing the details, unless he’s writing them down. “How long will you be?” Coe is more than concerned to learn. “I don’t know how much air I’ve got. Not much.”

“You’re telling us you’re buried alive in a graveyard.”

Has the policeman raised his voice because the connection is weak? “That’s what I said,” Coe says as loud.

“I suggest you get off the phone now, sir.”

“You haven’t told me how soon you can be here.”

“You’d better hope we haven’t time to be. We’ve had enough Halloween pranks for one year.”

Coe feels faint and breathless, which is dismayingly like suffocation, but he manages to articulate “You think I’m playing a joke.”

“I’d use another word for it. I advise you to give it up immediately, and that voice you’re putting on as well.”

“I’m putting nothing on. Can’t you hear I’m deadly serious? You’re using up my air, you – Just do your job or let me speak to your superior.”

“I warn you, sir, we can trace this call.”

“Do so. Come and get me,” Coe almost screams, but his voice grows flat. He’s haranguing nobody except himself.

Has the connection failed, or did the policeman cut him off? Did he say enough to make them trace him? Perhaps he should switch off the mobile to conserve the battery, but he has no idea whether this would leave the phone impossible to trace. The thought of waiting in the dark without knowing whether help is on the way brings the walls and lid closer to rob him of breath. As he holds the phone at a cramped arm’s length to poke the redial button, he sees the greenish light appear to tug the swollen ceiling down. When he snatches the mobile back to his ear the action seems to draw the lid closer still.

An operator responds at once. “Police,” he begs as she finishes her first word. “Police.”

Has she recognised him? The silence isn’t telling. It emits a burst of static so fragmented that he’s afraid the connection is breaking up, and then a voice says “Gloucestershire Constabulary.”

For a distracted moment he thinks she’s the operator. Surely a policewoman will be more sympathetic than her colleague. “It’s Alan Coe again,” Coe says with all the authority he can summon up. “I promise you this is no joke. They’ve buried me because they must have thought I’d passed on. I’ve already called you once but I wasn’t informed what’s happening. May I assume somebody is on their way?”

How much air has all that taken? He’s holding his breath as if this may compensate, although it makes the walls and lid appear to bulge towards him, when the policewoman says in the distance “He’s back. I see what you meant about the voice.”

“What’s wrong with it?” Coe says through his bared teeth, then tries a shout, which sounds flattened by padding. “What’s the matter with my voice?”

“He wants to know what’s wrong with his voice.”

“So you heard me the first time.” Perhaps he shouldn’t address her as if she’s a child, but he’s unable to moderate his tone. “What are you saying about my voice?”

“I don’t know how old you’re trying to sound, but nobody’s that old and still alive.”

“I’m old enough to be your father, so do as you’re told.” She either doesn’t hear this or ignores it, but he ensures she hears “I’m old enough for them to pass me off as dead.”

“And bury you.”

“That’s what I’ve already told you and your colleague.”

“In a grave.”

“On Mercy Hill below the church. Halfway along the ninth row down, to the left of the avenue.”

He can almost see the trench and his own hand dropping a fistful of earth into the depths that harboured his wife’s coffin. All at once he’s intensely aware that it must be under him. He might have wanted to be reunited with her at the end – at least, with her as she was before she stopped recognising him and grew unrecognisable, little more than a skeleton with an infant’s mind – but not like this. He remembers the spadefuls of earth piling up on her coffin and realises that now they’re on top of him. “And you’re expecting us to have it dug up,” the policewoman says.

“Can’t you do it yourselves?” Since this is hardly the best time to criticise their methods, he adds “Have you got someone?”

“How long do you plan to carry on with this? Do you honestly think you’re taking us in?”

“I’m not trying to. For the love of God, it’s the truth.” Coe’s free hand claws at the wall as if this may communicate his plight somehow, and his fingers wince as though they’ve scratched a blackboard. “Why won’t you believe me?” he pleads.

“You really expect us to believe a phone would work down there.”

“Yes, because it is.”

“I an’t hea ou.”

The connection is faltering. He nearly accuses her of having wished this on him. “I said it is,” he cries.

“Very unny.” Yet more distantly she says “Now he’s aking it ound a if it’s aking up.”

Is the light growing unreliable too? For a blink the darkness seems to surge at him – just darkness, not soil spilling into his prison. Or has his consciousness begun to gutter for lack of air? “It is,” he gasps. “Tell me they’re coming to find me.”

“You won’t like it if they do.”

At least her voice is whole again, and surely his must be. “You still think I’m joking. Why would I joke about something like this at my age, for God’s sake? I didn’t even know it was Halloween.”

“You’re saying you don’t know what you just said you know.”

“Because your colleague told me. I don’t know how long I’ve been here,” he realises aloud, and the light dims as if to suggest how much air he may have unconsciously used up.

“Long enough. We’d have to give you full marks for persistence. Are you in a cupboard, by the way? It sounds like one. Your trick nearly worked.”

“It’s a coffin, God help me. Can’t you hear that?” Coe cries and scrapes his nails across the underside of the lid.

Perhaps the squealing is more tangible than audible. He’s holding the mobile towards it, but when he returns the phone to his ear the policewoman says “I’ve heard all I want to, I think.”

“Are you still calling me a liar?” He should have demanded to speak to whoever’s in charge. He’s about to do so when a thought ambushes him. “If you really think I am,” he blurts, “why are you talking to me?”

At once he knows. However demeaning it is to be taken for a criminal, that’s unimportant if they’re locating him. He’ll talk for as long as she needs to keep him talking. He’s opening his mouth to rant when he hears a man say “No joy, I’m afraid. Can’t trace it.”

If Coe is too far underground, how is he able to phone? The policewoman brings him to the edge of panic. “Count yourself lucky,” she tells him, “and don’t dare play a trick like this again. Don’t you realise you may be tying up a line while someone genuinely needs our help?”

He mustn’t let her go. He’s terrified that if she rings off they won’t accept his calls. It doesn’t matter what he says so long as it makes the police come for him. Before she has finished lecturing him he shouts “Don’t you speak to me like that, you stupid cow.”

“I’m war ing ou, ir—”

“Do the work we’re paying you to do, and that means the whole shiftless lot of you. You’re too fond of finding excuses not to help the public, you damned lazy swine.” He’s no longer shouting just to be heard. “You weren’t much help with my wife, were you? You were worse than useless when she was wandering the streets not knowing where she was. And you were a joke when she started chasing me round the house because she’d forgotten who I was and thought I’d broken in. That’s right, you’re the bloody joke, not me. She nearly killed me with a kitchen knife. Now get on with your job for a change, you pathetic wretched—”

Without bothering to flicker the light goes out, and he hears nothing but death in his ear. He clutches the mobile and shakes it and pokes blindly at the keys, none of which brings him a sound except for the lifeless clacking of plastic or provides the least relief from the unutterable blackness. At last he’s overcome by exhaustion or despair or both. His arms drop to his sides, and the phone slips out of his hand.

Perhaps it’s the lack of air, but he feels as if he may soon be resigned to lying where he is. Shutting his eyes takes him closer to sleep. The surface beneath him is comfortable enough, after all. He could fancy he’s in bed, or is that mere fancy? Can’t he have dreamed he wakened in his coffin and everything that followed? Why, he has managed to drag the quilt under himself, which is how the nightmare began. He’s vowing that it won’t recur when a huge buzzing insect crawls against his hand.

He jerks away from it, and his scalp collides with the headboard, which is too plump. The insect isn’t only buzzing, it’s glowing feebly. It’s the mobile, which has regained sufficient energy to vibrate. As he grabs it, the decaying light seems to fatten the interior of the coffin. He jabs the key to take the call and fumbles the mobile against his ear. “Hello?” he pleads.

“Coming.”

It’s barely a voice. It sounds as unnatural as the numbers in the answering messages did, and at least as close to falling to bits. Surely that’s the fault of the connection. Before he can speak again the darkness caves in on him, and he’s holding an inert lump of plastic against his ear.

There’s a sound, however. It’s muffled but growing more audible. He prays that he’s recognising it, and then he’s sure he does. Someone is digging towards him.

“I’m here,” he cries and claps a bony hand against his withered lips. He shouldn’t waste whatever air is left, especially when he’s beginning to feel it’s as scarce as light down here. It seems unlikely that he would even have been heard. Why is he wishing he’d kept silent? He listens breathlessly to the scraping in the earth. How did the rescuers manage to dig down so far without his noticing? The activity inches closer – the sound of the shifting of earth – and all at once he’s frantically jabbing at the keypad in the blackness. Any response from the world overhead might be welcome, any voice other than the one that called him. The digging is beneath him.

JOHN GORDON

The Night Watch

JOHN GORDON WAS BORN in Jarrow-on-Tyne and now lives in Norwich with his wife, Sylvia. As a child he moved with his family to Wisbech in the Fens of Cambridgeshire, where he went to school. After serving in the Royal Navy on minesweepers and destroyers during World War II he became a journalist on various local newspapers.

His first book for young adults, The Giant Under the Snow, was published by Hutchinson in 1968 and gained praise from Alan Garner, among others. It was reissued in 2006 by Orion, with editions in Italy and Lithuania and as a talking book. Since then Gordon has published a number of fantasy and horror novels including The House on the Brink, The Ghost on the Hill, The Quelling Eye, The Grasshopper, Ride the Wind, Blood Brothers, Gilray’s Ghost, The Flesh Eater, The Midwinter Watch, Skinners and The Ghosts of Blacklode.

Gordon’s short stories are collected in The Spitfire Grave and Other Stories, Catch Your Death and Other Stories, The Burning Baby and Other Stories and Left in the Dark. He was one of five authors who contributed to the Oxrun Station “mosaic novel” Horror at Halloween, edited by Jo Fletcher, and his autobiography Ordinary Seaman appeared from Walker Books in 1992.

“Museums are potent places for storytellers,” reveals the author, “none more so than Norwich Castle, which is the setting for ‘The Night Watch’. It stands on Castle Mound overlooking the heart of the city as it has done for eight centuries, but internally its bright and intriguing exhibits and showcases disguise a dark period of its history.

“It was once a prison, and I was standing in the corner of a picture gallery one day when one of the attendants told me that I had my feet on the spot where felons were hanged. Where once a trapdoor had let go under the feet of quite minor wrongdoers there was now smooth parquet flooring.

“There is also a deep well at the centre of the Castle’s main hall where children drop coins and count the seconds before the ripples spread. It is all so innocent . . .”

IT HAD BEEN A HARD DAY in the dungeons. Now, as the summer sun dipped to the horizon, Martin Glover stood on the Castle battlements and gazed out over the city. The golden cockerel at the tip of the of the Cathedral’s thin spire glinted in the setting sun and urged him to lean out through the crenellations as if he was about to fly to it across the rooftops. He tested the notion by opening his mouth as if to feel the rush of air.

“We want none of that, young sir.” There was a harsh rasp to the voice that made him start and look over his shoulder. “We wouldn’t want to have to scrape you up off of the street, would we, son?”

Dr Martin Glover, the scholar, was amused to be addressed as son. He was young, but not young enough for that. But he was aware he had just been spotted leaning too far over the parapet like a schoolboy showing off to a girl. “I was just enjoying the view,” he said.

“They all say that, son – but they go for the long drop just the same.”

“Do they, indeed?” Martin had not been aware that any suicides had chosen to leap from the battlements. He said so.

The man merely grinned. “There’s several been for the high jump hereabouts.”

“But surely not recently?” Martin had not seen the man before but he was obviously an attendant at the Castle. He had an air of authority, and at this hour all visitors had long since gone.

“Maybe not recently, but we do keep a record of all of them who come here to end it all.”

“That’s bizarre . . . I had no idea.”

“We keep a book.” The man was thin and his shaved head and hollow cheeks were frosted with a grey stubble. “We make a note of the names, and someone has to sign to say it happened. It’s our duty, Mister Glover.” The emphasis was deliberate and his smile seemed to invite Dr Glover, the scholar, to correct him, but Martin merely smiled back. It was too late in the day to stand on his dignity, and maybe he did look too young to hold a doctorate.

As a historian, he had been granted the freedom of the records kept in the Castle museum and he had been given space to work in what must have been the dungeons long ago. He had climbed to the battlements for a breath of fresh air before leaving. Now he glanced at his watch. It was later than he thought. “The Castle must have closed long ago!” he exclaimed.

“Locked and bolted some time back. Maybe you didn’t want to hear us making the last rounds . . . had your hands over your ears, maybe.” The man’s smile was watchful.

“Why should I not want to hear?”

“Matter of opinion, son. Some don’t want to hear me coming.”

Martin laughed. “People like me, you mean – too busy with their lives to want to stop work.”

“If that’s the way you want to think of it, son.”

The man’s dark clothes were slightly shabby, and not what Martin expected of a museum attendant, particularly the loose leather jacket, sleeveless and rubbed smooth with wear. Dress regulations were plainly relaxed for night staff.

Martin, suddenly embarrassed by his own silence as he studied the man’s clothes, said, “I have to apologise. You must have stayed on late to let me out.”

The attendant was amused. “That’s no problem at all, son. We keep a night watch hereabouts.”

“Nevertheless . . .” Martin began, then changed his tack. “Well I must be on my way and let you get on with your night’s work . . . your patrols, or whatever you have to do.” He nodded towards the large bunch of keys in the man’s hand, “Locking up, and that sort of thing.”

“Locking up . . .” The thin smile pushed up wrinkles that turned his eyes into watery slits that glinted in the last of the sun. “Plenty of that, oh yes.”

Martin grinned a shade uncomfortably with the golden glint of the eyes on him. “I hope you can unlock doors as well as lock them or I shan’t get home tonight.”

“Enjoy the fresh air while you have the chance, Mr Glover.” The man still mocked his name, as if to deprive him of his title.

Martin made a mild attempt to correct him. “You haven’t chased me off the roof,” he said, “so I imagine my name is on a list of people allowed behind the scenes.”

It had no effect. “There’s always a list, Mr Glover, always a list.”

“Well I’m very pleased to be on the right one.” Suicides were still on Martin’s mind. “But I’m afraid I don’t know your name, Mr . . .”

“Me name is Jack, but that don’t matter . . . you won’t be around when I’m here next.”

That could be true. Martin, the historian, had almost finished his work among the records kept in the old dungeons, but it rankled that the nightwatchman was dismissing him so curtly.

The man had turned away and the sunlight no longer showed his face. “We’ve had our glimpse of daylight,” he said, “so now it’s time to go.” Another order, but Martin had no reason to disobey. He had had a profitable day and his laptop held many files that would fill out the detail of his research.

He crossed the roof and began descending the stair into the heart of the Castle. Above him keys rattled as the door to the roof was locked. It seemed an unnecessary precaution. No thief could possibly scale the Castle walls to make an entry, but perhaps locking up was a measure to prevent people coming out onto the roof from below . . .

“Suicide . . .” The nightwatchman’s voice broke into his thoughts. “You’d be surprised at how often it’s in their minds when I bring ’em up here.”

Martin turned and looked up. A skylight at the top of the steep stair framed the foreshortened figure of the nightwatchman as he came down. He was as squat as a frog.

“As you work nights,” said Martin, “you don’t take tour parties up here so I suppose it’s only the odd person like me who is allowed on the roof alone.”

“That’s right. People just like you . . . but the ones you’ve got to watch is them who’ve got out of the habit of daylight, if you know what I mean.” No, Martin did not understand him, but the descending figure was pressing him and he had to turn and continue going down. “I take ’em up as a kindness, so as they can see the world spread out on every side, but it’s then I’ve got to watch ’em most of all . . . talk about trying to cheat the hangman!”

The nightwatchman was laughing as they came down to the open floor that had once been the Great Hall of the Castle. Martin pushed thoughts of suicide out of his mind, but for a moment he trembled and felt very small at the edge of the huge emptiness. Without its daytime visitors the Castle brooded on too many secrets, and even though the museum exhibits in their glass cases were still illuminated and shed a familiar and friendly glow, the ceiling high overhead was a shroud of darkness.

He turned to the watchman. “I wouldn’t blame you if you kept these lights on all night.”

“Not up to me, son. They go off all by theirselves.”

“Then I imagine you are pretty lonely, Jack.” It was the first time he had used the man’s name, but it sounded ingratiating as if he sought companionship in facing a childish fear of the dark.

“I wouldn’t say lonely. I’ve always enjoyed my work.”

“I mean there are so many strange things here to work on the imagination.” Martin turned and marched swiftly to where an iron grating was set in the centre of the floor. “Take this, for example.”

They stood on each side of the grating and looked down. A vertical shaft had been cut through the rock and they gazed down through the long funnel that had been rigged with lights but nevertheless ended in darkness far below.

“I know it’s only a well, but it’s dark down there at the bottom. Gives me the creeps.” Martin shuddered. The well had always made him uneasy even when, feeling like a child himself, he had stood among crowds of children kneeling on the grating to let pennies fall into the darkness. He stepped back. “Too big a drop for me,” he said.

The watchman did not appear to have heard him. He stood with head bent, contemplating the depth of the pit, and the light from below emphasised his heavy brow, the spread of his nostrils, and the severe line of his mouth as he concentrated. “Yes,” he said, and blew out his breath in a grim chuckle. “I’ve seen men sprung apart in a drop not half so big as that.”

“Sprung apart? What does that mean?”

“Don’t ask . . . or I might tell you.” The watchman lifted his head and the shadows flung up from the light below distorted his smile. He was gloating at the thoughts he had put into Martin’s mind. “It’s not something a young feller would want to know about – not in your situation.”

“What situation is that?” Martin was angry and expected an answer, but none came. Instead, the watchman motioned him to step ahead and lead the way across the Great Hall. Martin, on the verge of defying him, hesitated. And then it was too late. There was a hint of malice in the watchman’s steady stare that persuaded him to swallow his pride and obey. He went ahead, but it was a mistake. He felt like a schoolboy . . . or worse. The faint jangle of keys at his back compelled him to think of the watchman as his jailer which, in effect, he was. There was no way out of the Castle without him.

The lights in the exhibition cases suddenly went out and he stumbled. It betrayed his nervousness, and he felt foolish because there was enough pale greyness in the air from the arrow slits in the Castle wall to show him the way to the next chamber. He apologised for the stumble.

“And they call me clumsy!” There was a bitter edge to the watchman’s voice. “Some of ’em reckon I’m a bungler, but not one of ’em would do the job I do. Never. They haven’t the nerve.”

“I suppose it’s the night work they don’t like.” Martin was sympathetic, but the response was a laugh so harsh he felt the back of his neck crawl.

“It’s not the night they don’t like – it’s the morning! It’s what has to be done when the sun comes up – that’s what makes ’em go all lily-white.”

Martin manoeuvred so that the watchman was no longer completely behind him but alongside. “What is it they have to do . . . in the morning?”

“They have to open up the place, don’t they? But there’s one door in particular they don’t want to open, ain’t there?” The bristled head turned towards him. “And you know what door that is, I reckon.”

Martin did know. It was suddenly obvious what was happening. The nightwatchman had detected his anxiety and was putting him through something that happened several times every day. The old Castle, in more recent times, had been a prison and parties were conducted through what little remained intact of those brutal days. It was an entertainment. The guides made the prison tour as gruesome as they could, and there was one place in particular where to be told of the unlocking of a door at dawn gave tourists a ghastly thrill.

“It’s the door of the execution chamber,” said Martin.

“You got nerve, son. A lot of people in your shoes don’t want to know about it.”

“In my shoes?”

“You’re standing there talking about it when you know what’s coming.”

Martin was ignorant of what came next. It was his guide who knew what would happen.

“I can open that door and I don’t feel a thing,” said the watchman, “but some o’ them others always jib at it.”

The man loved his work. His grim pleasure was to make people fear him. Dread at being alone in the Castle with such a man must have shown in Martin’s face. Jack the watchman detected it.

“There’s nothing to worry about, son,” he said. “I’m good at me job.” His chuckle was a rasp as if he was clearing phlegm. “None of me clients ever complained . . . yet.”

Too much talk of death. Martin was caught up in the night-watchman’s world. He was losing himself, as if he was a scared child.

Too much like a child. He wanted to be safe at home . . . with his mother and father, as if they were still alive.

He and the watchman had entered part of the Castle where each room led into others in a confusing honeycomb. “It’s very late.” His mouth was dry and, like the terrified boy he had become, he had to lick his lips before he went on. “I don’t need to fetch my papers from down below, I’ll just leave straight away.”

He had begun to cross the room before he realised he did not know which way to go. The honeycomb was a maze and he was not sure which archway led to the foyer and the outer door. To take the wrong one would make confusion even worse.

He paused, and turned. The watchman had not budged.

“Lost your way, son?”

“If you could just point me in the right direction . . .”

“And even then you wouldn’t get far without these.” The watchman, smiling, held up his bunch of keys and jangled them softly.

The room was a picture gallery lit only by the blue glow of the emergency lights close to the floor. Martin felt its dimness close around him. He was trapped. Then the watchman spoke.

“Nothing to worry about, son. You’ll be out and away in just a few minutes. I can guarantee you that.”

And Martin’s head sagged with relief. Jack the watchman was playing a game with him. He was still acting out the daytime tour to give him an idea of what the Castle meant to those who were not allowed the privileges of scholars.

“I’m tired.” He yawned and his eyes were closed as he listened. The watchman was still playing his part. He had the voice for it; harsh and without pity.

“Some of them tell me they’ll be glad when it’s all over. After all that time down in them dark dungeons they come up here as quiet as lambs. They don’t even want to go for that little walk on the roof that we just had. Everyone knows I always offer – but some just don’t want me to take ’em.”

There was silence. Martin kept his eyes closed. The nightwatch-man would see that he was not afraid. The game was over.

“You know where you are, son.”

He did know. More than a hundred years ago this picture gallery had not existed. It had been part of the prison.

He felt a hand on his arm. Jack the watchman changed his tone. He gave orders. “You’ve had your walk, lad. Now it’s time to go.”

The grip tightened, and Martin opened his eyes.

The light in the room had changed, but that could only be the effect of having had his eyes closed. The light was yellow, like the pale glow of candles, and the walls were dull and seemed to have closed in. The ceiling, too, was lower, and in the centre of the room was something he had not noticed. At first he took it for an open doorway until he realised it was no more than a doorframe, freestanding in the middle of the floor.

He opened his mouth to ask a question when, from one side of the room, what seemed to be a group of people entered in single file, gliding silently until they stood behind the open doorway. It was then he saw that the framework was no door. It was a gallows. A noose hung from the centre beam.

It was all a trick. The figures were no more than a shadow show, a projection on the wall to entertain visitors. And only the nightwatch-man could have switched it on. Martin moved to tell him so, but before he could even look over his shoulder his arms were forced together behind his back and his wrists were bound.

He opened his mouth to cry out but the cord at his wrists was twisted and bit into his flesh with a spasm that arched him backwards.

“It’s no good, lad.” The watchman’s voice rasped in his ear. “You know you got to go through with it.”

He gritted his teeth. “Go through with what!”

“You should never have done what you done,” said Jack. “You knew this was coming.”

And in that moment Martin did know what lay ahead. Every sinew in his body tautened and he twisted. He felt his shirt sleeve rip, and he backed away. But he got no further than a single step. He stood against a stone wall. Cold stone. And the floor was stone. Except for the wooden flap of the trap in the centre, under the noose.

“It ain’t no use.” It was Jack’s voice.

There was no way out. He had slipped from century to century. Even his clothes were different. His prison shirt had been torn in his struggle. His feet were clammy in the cold leather of his shoes. The gallows were in front of him and there was nowhere to go.

“You know you got to go through with it, lad. You was a naughty boy, wasn’t you?”

Martin shrank from the voice. It spoke the truth. He was a boy. He was wicked. He had put his skinny fingers into a purse and pulled out a coin.

“You done it, so you knew this was coming. I give you a walk on the roof, didn’t I? Like I do to everyone I has to deal with. I give you a breath of fresh air and let you see the countryside, but then I bring you down here and you got to face it.”

There were tears on his face, but there was no chance to cry out. He was choked to silence by heavy fingers across his face.

“You don’t want to be gagged now, do you, son?”

The fingers relaxed and as they did so Martin ceased to struggle.

“That’s more like it, boy. Now I want you to step forward.”

He heard himself whimper. Then the voice of the hangman. “Three steps . . . that’s all it takes.”

He was gripped and pushed. He saw the outline of the trap in the floor, and his feet were kicked until he stood on it.

His legs were bound. The rope brushed his head, but there was no hood. He felt the knot of the noose tighten under his ear. The rope was rough on his neck. He struggled, silently, lithe as a cat, writhing like a dangling man but with his feet still scuffling the solid trapdoor. And now came the hood, and blackness. The cloth was against his mouth and his last breath was muffled as the trap fell away beneath him, and he dropped.

Then nothing . . .

blankness . . .

darkness . . .

Pain flashed white in his brain, and a voice was saying something.

The hangman had bungled. His neck was not broken. He struggled to free his arms from the cords. There were no cords.

The voice again: “Dr Glover . . . can you hear me? We’ve been looking for you. You weren’t in your office and we found you here . . .”

He lay on a hard floor. He moved an arm. He was not shackled. A flashlight blinded him, and he shielded his eyes.

“We thought you must’ve gone onto the roof for a breath of air, but there was no sign of you.”

Suddenly he was sitting up. There were two men. “Who are you!”

“Night staff. We’ve just found you.”

He looked around wildly. He was in the picture gallery. The light was dim except for the beam stabbing into his eyes. No gallows. He slid his hand over the polished floor. No sign of a trapdoor.

“Where is he?” he said

The men were crouched beside him. Who did he mean, they asked.

“Jack,” he said. He scrambled to his feet. “Where’s the one they call Jack?”

The men were silent for a moment. Then one of them said, “There’s only us two, Dr Glover – Maurice and Fred, we do the night watch together.”

Silence. He looked from one to the other. Maurice and Fred. He opened his mouth but no words came.

“You must have fainted, Doctor. Did you hurt yourself?”

“No . . . no, there’s nothing wrong with me.” He looked around the gallery. He got to his feet without help, and after a moment turned cautiously to face them. “Long ago,” he said, knowing that he spoke slyly, “I believe this room had another purpose. Is that so?”

Both men smiled. “You mean when it was a prison?” said Maurice, the leader. “Someone’s been telling you the old story.” He nodded towards the corner. “It’s true enough. The gallows used to be over there, in the execution chamber.”

Martin’s mouth was too dry to speak. He was unsteady, and Maurice noticed. “Let’s go down to your room, Dr Glover, and we’ll get you a drink.”

Sitting at his desk with the companionship of two others he began to recover. “I didn’t know anything about the gallows but I certainly felt strange in that room,” he said.

They both nodded. “Fred and I can tell you that something lingers in places like that, and if you weren’t feeling too good, well . . .” Maurice shrugged.

Martin had only hinted at his nightmare, but he had to test what had happened. “I was told . . .” he began and then corrected himself. “People say there have been a lot of suicides here . . . people leaping from the Castle walls.”

“I’ve never heard of any,” said Maurice, and Fred agreed.

“But there’s a list,” Martin insisted.

Both men looked blank and shook their heads and in his exasperation Martin suddenly burst out, “Jack told me the Castle kept a record!” Jack again, and there was no Jack. He looked away. “I’m sorry.”

It was Fred, the quieter of the two, who shuffled for a moment before he stood up and went to a filing cabinet in the corner of the tiny room that had at one time been a dungeon. He had to rummage before he took out what looked like an old account book and laid it on Martin’s desk. “I don’t know about suicides,” he said, “but I reckon this is a sort of register.”

Martin opened it. In fact it was an account book with columns marked in red ink. There was a list of dates and against each was a person’s name, and beneath that another name and then a sum of money. In each case the amount was one guinea.

Martin looked up. “They can’t be suicides.”

“No, Doctor. Not suicides, but they all died here in the Castle. They were executed here. Murderers mostly.”

He looked again at the columns. The names of hanged men, their age, and against each one the name of his trade. On the line beneath every one was written: Paid J. Ketch, one guinea.

“That was for a job well done, Doctor Glover.” Both watchmen were smiling. “Jack Ketch was the name this city used to give to the public hangman – so as no one knew who he really was.”

“And they do say that Jack made all his clients suffer,” said Maurice. “Kind of played with them before he turned them off. And he never got the drop right so they suffered a lot more than they had to – more strangled than hanged.”

Martin nodded. His eyes dipped again to the page, the column of names and, at the bottom of the list, one in particular: Martin Jones, aged twelve, thief, and then the trade he was apprenticed to glover.

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

The Luxury of Harm

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER HAS WRITTEN many award-winning novels and collections of short stories. His 2003 book Full Dark House won the British Fantasy “August Derleth” Award for Best Novel and was also a finalist for the Crime Writer Association’s Dagger Award. The Water Room was short-listed for the CWA’s People’s Choice Award in 2004, and he won British Fantasy Awards for his short story “American Waitress” the same year and for his novella “Breathe” in 2005.

When he’s not writing horror or dark comedy, he’s creating new adventures for Bryant & May, his elderly detectives of the sinister. He lives in King’s Cross, London, with a very nice view of St Paul’s Cathedral. His latest novel is White Corridor, and his upcoming collection of twenty-one new short stories is titled Old Devil Moon.

As Fowler admits: “ ‘The Luxury of Harm’ is a mean-spirited blend of real-life events that included being Best Man at an old friend’s wedding and going to a horror festival in an English coastal town. I don’t think I’ll be invited back after they read this.”

WHEN I WAS ELEVEN, I was warned to stay away from a new classmate with freckles and an insolent tie, so naturally we became inseparable partners in disruption, reducing our educators to tears of frustration.

For the next eight years our friendship proved mystifying to all. Simon horrified our teachers by illegally racing his Easy Rider motorbike across the football field. We took the deputy headmaster’s car to pieces, laying it out in the school car park as neatly as a stemmed Airfix kit. We produced a libellous school magazine with jokes filched from TV programmes, and created radio shows mocking everyone we knew. When you find yourself bullied, it’s best to team up with someone frightening. Simon perverted me from learning, and I made his soul appear salvageable whenever he super-glued the school cat or made prank phone-calls. I fretted that we would get into trouble, and he worked out how we could burn down the school without being caught.

Boys never tire of bad behaviour. Through the principals of economics and the theory of gravity, the Wars of the Roses and Shakespeare’s symbolism, we cut open golf balls and tied pupils up in the elastic, carved rocket-ships into desks and forged each others’ parental signatures on sick notes.

During puberty, Simon bought a mean leather jacket. I opted for an orange nylon polo-neck shirt with Velcro fastenings. He looked like James Dean. I looked like Simon Dee. In order to meet girls, we signed up for the school opera. Simon met a blue-eyed blonde backstage while I appeared as a dancing villager in a shrill, off-key production of The Bartered Bride. We double-dated. I got the blonde’s best friend, who had legs like a bentwood chair and a complexion like woodchip wallpaper, but her father owned a sweet shop so we got free chocolate. I rang Simon’s girlfriends for him because he was inarticulate, and hung around his house so much that his mother thought I’d been orphaned. Our friendship survived because he gave me visibility, confidence and a filtered charisma that reached me like secondary smoking. He stopped me from believing there was no one else in the world who understood me. And there he remained in my mind and heart, comfortable and constant, throughout the years, like Peter Pan’s shadow, ready to be reattached if ever I needed it, long after his wasteful, tragic death.

But before that end came, we shared a special moment. By the time this happened, we had gone our separate ways; he became the conformist, with a country home and family, and I turned into the strange one, living alone in town. Recontacting Simon, I persuaded him to come to a horror convention with me, in a tiny Somerset town called Silburton, where the narrow streets were steeped in mist that settled across the river estuary, and fishing boats lay on their sides in the mud like discarded toys. The place reeked of dead fish, tar and rotting shells, and the locals were so taciturn it seemed that conversation had been bred out of them.

The hotel, a modern brick block that looked like a caravan site outhouse, had no record of our booking, and was full because of the convention. In search of a guesthouse, we found a Bed & Breakfast place down beside the river ramps and lugged bags up three flights through narrow corridors, watching by the landlady in case we scratched her Indian-restaurant wallpaper. The beds felt wet and smelled of seaweed.

By the time we returned to the convention hotel, the opening night party was in full swing. A yellow-furred alien was hovering uncertainly in the reception area, struggling to hold a pint mug in his rubber claws, and a pair of local Goth girls clung to the counter, continually looking around as though they were afraid that their parents might wander in and spot them, raising their arms to point and scream like characters from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Every year the convention had a theme, and this year it was “Murderers on Page and Screen”, so there were a few Hannibal Lecters standing around, including a grinning lad with the top of his head sawn off. The bar staff took turns to stare at him through the serving hatch.

“Is this really what you do for fun?” Simon asked me, amazed that I could take pleasure from hanging out with guys dressed as Jason and Freddy, films no one even watched any more. “Who comes to these things?”

“Book people, lonely people,” I said simply, gesturing at the filling room. “Give it a chance,” I told him. “There’s no attitude here, and it gets to be fun around midnight, when everyone’s drunk. Come on, you said your life was very straight. This is something new.”

Simon looked unsure; he hardly ever read, so the dealers’ rooms, the panels and the literary conversation held no interest for him. He talked about his kids a lot, which was boring. I wanted him to be the kid I’d admired at school. He could relate to drinking, though, and relaxed after a couple of powerful local beers that swirled like dark sandstorms in their glasses. Simon could drink for England. “So,” he asked, “are they all writers looking for tips?”

“In a way. Take this year’s theme. We’re intrigued by motivation, method, character development. How do you create a realistic murderer? Who would make a good victim?” I tried to think of a way of involving Simon in my world. “Take the pair of us, for example. I’m on my home turf here. People know me. If I went missing, there would be questions asked. For once, you’re the outsider. You were once the tough guy, the bike-riding loner nobody knew, and you’re unknown here. That would make you the perfect victim.”

“Why?” Simon wasn’t the sort to let something beat him. His interest was piqued, and he wanted to understand.

“Because taking you out would require an act of bravery, and would be a show of strength. Killers seek notoriety to cover their inadequacies. But they also enjoy the remorse of loss.”

Simon snorted. “How the hell does that work?”

“There’s a strange pleasure to be taken in melancholy matters, don’t you think? A kind of tainted sweetness. Look at the Goths and their fascination with death and decay.”

“Okay, that’s the victim sorted, so who’s the killer?”

“Look around. Who would you choose?”

Simon scoped out the bar area. “Not the Jason or Freddy look-alikes. They’re geeks who would pass out at the sight of a paper cut. They’d be happy to watch, but they wouldn’t act.”

“Good, keep going.”

“And the Goths couldn’t kill, even though they’re professional mourners. They look tough but play gentle.”

“Excellent.”

“But him, over there.” He tapped his forefinger against the palm of his hand, indicating behind him. “He looks like he’s here to buy books about guys who murder their mothers. It wouldn’t be such a big step to committing a murder.”

“Yeah, we get a few of those at conventions. They sit in the front row at the Q&As, and are always the first to raise their hands with a question. There’s one guy, a retired doctor, who even gives me the creeps. Over there.” I pointed out the cadaverous Mr Henry, with his greasy comb-over and skin like the pages of a book left in the sun. He never missed a convention, even though he wasn’t a writer or publisher, or even a reader. “He once told me he owns one of the country’s largest collections of car crash photographs, and collects pictures of skin diseases.”

“That’s gross. I knew there would be freaks here.”

“Relax, he’s too obvious. If there’s one trick to serial killer stories, it’s making sure that the murderer is never someone you suspect. Have you noticed there are some very cute girls hanging around the bar?”

“You’re right about that,” Simon grudgingly admitted, watching two of them over the top of his glass.

“You should go and make their acquaintance,” I suggested. “I’ll just be here talking weird books with old friends, or the other way around.”

I got into a long discussion/argument about the merits of Psycho II and III, about Thomas M. Disch and William Hope Hodgson and what makes a good story, and lost all track of the time. I only checked my watch when the waiter started pulling shutters over the bar. Bidding farewell to my fellow conventioneers, I staggered off through the damp river air toward the guest-house.

Somehow I managed to overshoot the path, and ended up on the seaweed-slick ramp to the harbour. The only sounds were the lapping of the water and the tinging of masts. The tide was coming in, and the boats were being raised from their graves like reanimating corpses. Drunk and happy and suddenly tired, I sat down on the wet brown sand and allowed the sea-mist to slowly reveal its secrets. It formed a visible circle around me, like the kind of fog in a video game that always stays the same distance no matter how hard you run. A discarded shovel someone had used to dig for lugworms stood propped against the harbour wall. Orange nylon fishing nets, covered with stinking algae, were strung out like sirens’ shawls.

And through the mist I gradually discerned a slender figure, his head lolling slightly to one side, one arm lower than the other, like the skeleton in Aurora’s “Forgotten Prisoner” model kit, or the one that features on my cover of The Seventh Pan Book of Horror Stories. It was standing so still that it seemed to be more like the unearthed figurehead of a boat than a man.

There was a strong smell of ozone and rotting fish. The figure raised a ragged, dripping sleeve to its skull, rubbing skin to bone. It seemed as though it had ascended from the black bed of the sea.

“I fell off the fucking dock and tore my jacket. I am so incredibly slaughtered,” said Simon, before tipping over and landing on his back in the sand with a thump.

The next morning, screaming seagulls hovered so close to my bedroom window that I could see inside their mouths. Shafts of ocean sunlight bounced through the window, punching holes in my brain. My tongue tasted of old duvet. I needed air.

I knocked on Simon’s door, but there was no answer. Breakfast had finished, and the landlady had gone. The Easy Rider motorbike still stood in the car park behind the guest house.

The tide was out and the mist had blown away, leaving the foreshore covered in silvery razor-clams and arabesques of green weed. On the stone walkway above the harbour, an elderly lady in a tea-cosy hat marched past with a shopping bag. There was no one else about. The gulls shrieked and wheeled.

Carefully, I walked across the beach to the spot where Simon had fallen, and knelt down. It took a moment to locate the exact place. Rubbing gently at a patch of soft sand, I revealed his sand-filled mouth, his blocked nostrils, one open shell-scratched eye that stared bloodily up into the sky. I rose and stood hard on his face, rocking back and forth until I had forced his head deeper into the beach. I carefully covered him over with more sand, smoothing it flat and adding some curlicues of seaweed and a couple of cockleshells for effect. Finally I threw the shovel I had used on his neck as far as I could into the stagnant water of the harbour.

As I headed back to the convention hotel, ready to deliver my lecture on “Random Death: The Luxury of Harm”, a heartbreaking happiness descended upon me. I knew that there would be plenty of time to savour the full delicious loss of my old friend in the days, the months, the years to come.

MARK SAMUELS

Sentinels

MARK SAMUELS WAS BORN in Clapham, London. He is the author of two collections, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales and Black Altars, as well as the novella The Face of Twilight. His third collection of short stories is provisionally titled Glyphotech and Other Macabre Processes and is scheduled to be published by Midnight House.

His stories have appeared in both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series, along with such recent anthologies as Summer Chills, Inferno and Alone on the Darkside. He has been nominated twice for the British Fantasy Award.

“When my friend Adam Clayton brought out his non-fiction book Subterranean City in 2000,” Samuels recalls, “its publication reawakened in me an interest in the abandoned ‘ghost’ stations of the London Underground tube network, which I then began to research in more detail.

“This research somehow got mixed up in my imagination with a 1970s film called Deathline starring one of my favourite actors, Donald Pleasance. His portrayal of a seedy police inspector, in turn, got mixed up with ‘Death and the Compass’ by Jorge Luis Borges. This story is the final result.”

INSPECTOR GRAY’S INVOLVEMENT in the affair was due to a combination of ill fortune and the photographic cover of a London “urban legends” paperback called The Secret Underground. He should not really have been in that part of London at the time, but had been forced to stay late in the office and complete a batch of gruelling paperwork required by his superior the following morning. Had he driven past a matter of seconds before, he would have seen nothing. After all, he was off-duty and his main concern was to get back to his dingy flat in Tufnell Park, sink a few glasses of whiskey and forget about that day.

He planned to lose himself in some cheap and trashy horror paperback from his little collection. The TV had broken down months ago and instead of replacing it he found that he had got into the habit of reading musty book relics from the ’60s and ’70s, with their yellowing, brittle pages and lurid covers. Gray fancied himself something of a connoisseur when it came to the covers; in fact he felt himself in opposition with the old maxim about never judging a book by them. He harboured the conviction that those featuring a weird photographic composition were invariably superior to those that had artwork depicting the tired cliché-symbols of horror; skulls, snakes or gothic castles for example.

In fact, he had come in for some jokes at his expense back at the Yard over his choice of reading matter. Most of his colleagues talked about little except what they watched on TV the night before, often sleazy porn videos that they’d “loaned” from the Obscene Publications division. They’d taken to calling him “The Weird Detective” behind his back and on one occasion he’d turned around sharply to find a group of constables miming having vampire fangs by putting their index fingers at the corners of their mouths. Gray made sure thereafter that he wasn’t seen reading any of his books during the little time he had for lunch. Instead he read one of the broadsheet papers as he consumed his sandwiches at his desk. His alienation from his colleagues caused him pain and he suspected that the department would run more smoothly were he not there.

What Gray saw as he passed by in his car appeared to be some sort of stunted, emaciated creature peering through the trellis gates of Kentish Town Underground Station. The thing was only around four or five feet tall and dressed in black ragged overalls. Its face was obscured by a mass of dusty shoulder-length hair.

It was gone 1:00 a.m. when Gray passed the Underground Station, and it had been closed for only a short time. He had pulled over to the side of the road and looked back in order to see whether the apparition was still there, but there was no sign of it at all. Doubtless, he thought, his colleagues back at the Yard would have laughed at what he thought he saw; too many of those damn books he read. But Gray felt his heart racing in his chest. He could not dismiss the thing that easily from his mind. What he’d seen was no product of the imagination. It had really been there.

Although the station was closed, it might not yet be deserted. Once the train service finished there were still staff working on the platforms and in the tunnels. An army of cleaners called “Fluffers” made their way along the lines and scoured them for debris. All manner of litter had to be cleared away, beer-cans, half-eaten junk food, newspapers, even tumbleweeds composed of skin and human hair. There was also the “Gangers”; the engineers who checked track safety. Perhaps Gray had simply glimpsed one of those overnight workers having a break, one whose similarity to the uncanny thing on the front cover of The Secret Underground was nothing more than a trick of the light.

Nevertheless, what he had observed remained in his thoughts, causing uneasy dreams when he finally slept: dreams of endless subterranean tunnels and of a gaunt silence punctuated by a distant rustling or whispering noise. Had he not seen whatever it was at the station (or whatever he thought it was) the case that came to his attention afterwards might not have seemed significant and worth pursuit.

As he sat at his desk the next morning, sipping at a cup of vile instant coffee, Gray flicked through the case files in his in-box. He had a feeling that had become increasingly commonplace during the course of the last few months. It was that the investigations to which he had been assigned were effectively a waste of effort. The assault that he’d suffered months ago during the arrest of Montrose the serial rapist had left him hospitalised for weeks and resulted in internal ruptures that would, he had been advised by the surgeon, require a much more sedate lifestyle. The Yard had done the best they could under the circumstances and found him a role, albeit desk bound, but although his initial assignments had been current Gray discovered that as time passed he was being asked to examine cases that had little chance of being solved. The bulk of these were missing persons.

Scarcely sociable before, Gray had turned further inwards after the beating. It had affected his mind just as much as his body. Somehow he had allowed his old friends to drift away and found excuses not to keep in touch with them. He felt himself to be little more than an empty shell and contact with others only served to reinforce the impression. The Yard offered Gray counselling to help him come to terms with the trauma caused by the Montrose incident, but he found the idea even more repellent than his doctor’s suggestion that he take a course of anti-depressants. When fate worked upon him he intended to adapt to it and not resist. Even so, he felt like a missing person who had himself been assigned to trace other missing persons.

Gray ran his tongue over his scalded lips, again cursing the too-hot and foul-tasting coffee, when his attention was taken up by a communiqué that had come in only a few hours earlier. Although a missing persons report is not usually filed until some days after a disappearance (except where children are involved), this one had been “fast-tracked” due to there being no question of the subject having absented himself deliberately. The missing individual was a tube train driver (or “operator” as they were now called). His name was Adam Drayton. The curious thing was this: he had abandoned his train between the Camden Town and Kentish Town stations on the Northern Line. It had been the very last service of the night, due to terminate at High Barnet at 1:30 a m. Moreover, if there had been any passengers in the carriages then they too had vanished.

Early in the morning a replacement driver had shunted the train into a siding. On the front of the case file a joker in the office had scrawled the words “Mary Celeste Tube? A Case for the Weird Detective?” with a marker pen.

But Inspector Gray, through some bizarre coincidence, was one of the few people who would recognise the name “Adam Drayton” in another connection. For it was also the name of the author/editor of that outré book of urban legends published under the title The Secret Underground, whose cover preyed upon his mind.

Gray spent the afternoon interviewing Drayton’s colleagues in the staff mess room of the train depot just outside Finchley Central Station. This was where the tube drivers spent their time between shifts, sitting around drinking coffee, smoking their cigarettes and reading newspapers. They were a talkative bunch although the inspector could not help noticing their mistrust and fear of him as a representative from an outside authority. Some of them even seemed to believe that Drayton’s disappearance was an internal matter and should be left to the union to investigate. Outside interference, whether from the law or elsewhere, was certainly not welcome. Still, there were one or two who retained a sense of individuality and were able to realise that Gray had not come in order to apportion any blame, merely to discover what may have led Drayton to act in the manner that he did.

One of the drivers, Carlos Miguel, a Castilian, was particularly communicative. He had settled in this country after leaving Madrid in the early 1990s. He had been almost alone in befriending Drayton, who had been regarded by the others as an oddball whose political views were not sufficiently radical. Miguel was a tall, distinguished man in his forties with a shock of jet-black hair and a neatly trimmed moustache. He had shared Drayton’s enthusiasm for the recondite and whilst the others talked of union activities or the football results, the two men had retreated to a corner and held their own discussions.

Had Gray not been aware of Drayton’s editorship of that paperback The Secret Underground he doubted that he would have achieved quite the same rapport with Carlos Miguel.

“So,” the Spaniard declared, “you know of el libro de Drayton?”

“Yes,” Gray replied, “I think it’s a bit garish but the cover’s particularly . . .”

Miguel cut in.

“Señor, you know that Drayton only applied to become a train operator so that he could travel the tunnels of the Northern Line and examine their mysteries?”

Gray looked blank and shook his head.

“Well,” Miguel went on, “you must understand that it would not be mistaken to say that he was obsessed with them. Drayton told me that the Northern Line has the longest continuous Yerkes tunnel on the network, over seventeen miles long. The stretch between East Finchley and Morden. Also it has the deepest. At Hampstead 900 feet below ground. He had numerous theories about what was down there; fantástico, ¿no?”

“Speculations, rumour, hearsay,” Gray responded, “amounting to nothing more than fiction. He was just an editor of a horrible series of urban legends. I confess that the parallel between his disappearance and obsession is striking but . . .”

“Perdón, señor, but it is more than that simple fact. Drayton was my friend; it was in me that he felt he could confide. Las estaciónes fantasmas, you know of them? In English: the ghost stations? North End, City Road, South Kentish Town and King William Street? These were what obsessed Drayton.”

“The abandoned stations?”

“Sí, abandoned. Pero in Drayton’s eyes, no. Taken over he would have replied. No longer safe to use. Señor, if you are operating the last train on the line it is easier to slow down when you wish, no? Perhaps while travelling through one of those stations and even bringing trains to a complete stop. There are not so many passengers and they are too drunk or sleepy to complain at that time of night, ¿tú comprendes?”

“Are you suggesting that Adam Drayton stopped his train and got out at one of these ghost stations?”

“Como una palomilla atraída por la llama . . .”

“I don’t understand.”

“. . . like a moth drawn to a flame.”

That evening, once Gray had got back to his cramped flat in Tufnell Park, he sat down in his easy chair with his copy of The Secret Underground. He flicked back and forth through its yellowed brittle pages, glancing at them over and over again. The book was divided into several chapters, each specialising in a subterranean urban legend: (1) Cases of Posthumous Mutation in London Cemeteries (2) Derelict reverse Skyscrapers 1936–57 (3) Mass disappearance of Persons sheltering in the Underground during the Blitz (4) Graffiti or Occult Symbolism? (5) Suppressed Eyewitness accounts during the Construction of the Underground Railways 1860–1976 (6) The Fleet Line extension to Fenchurch Street must be Halted (7) Secret Bunkers or Extermination Centres? (8) The deep level Platforms of the proposed Express Tube: Why they caused Insanity (9) The Hidden Shafts that connect Subterranean London.

There was one paragraph in the final chapter that seemed to be the inspiration for the uneasy dreams Gray had experienced. It ran as follows:

“Most of the city is now underground and not above the surface, and I scarcely need list its innumerable tunnels, subterranean car parks, cellars, crypts, bunkers, basements, vaults, passageways, and sewers. Every building in London has an underside buried deep in the earth. Beneath our feet are the ruins of Anglo-Saxon Lundenwic and of Roman Londinium. The contemporary city will, in time, be swallowed up. This neon and concrete labyrinth will become an Atlantis of catacombs. The higher we build up, the deeper it is necessary to build down in order to support the structures above. All the nightmare sewage that we pump into the depths, all the foulness and corruption, the abortions, the faeces and scum, the blood and diseased mucus, but mostly the hair: what a feast for those underground beings that exist in darkness, and shun the sunlight! Those things below hate us and have every reason to do so.”

His attention kept jumping from the text to the series of bizarre black and white photographs throughout the book. Quite where Drayton had obtained them from was not made clear; they were not credited. They may even have come from his personal collection. What they showed was this:

(Front cover) A blurred humanoid figure seen from a passing tube train whose face is almost completely covered by its hair. Between the strands there seems to be a mouth lined with shark-like fangs. The haggard creature is backing into a siding, away from the light.

(pg.18) A photographic record of a series of exhumed graves with empty coffins whose bases had been torn apart.

(pg.33) A blueprint of a subterranean reverse-tower with forty-five storeys and access shafts radiating from it in all directions, some leading to burial grounds, others to sewers etc. bearing the legend “North End (Hampstead)”.

(pg.49) What appears to be a series of bloody, smeared handprints on the white wall tiles of British Museum Station during its use as an air-raid shelter circa 1941.

(pg.87) Human bones, including a skull, photographed lying alongside the tracks of an Underground tunnel.

(pg.102) Graffiti scrawled (in charcoal?) on the side of 1972 Mk. 1 train stock that reads “THE HUNGRY CANNOT SLEEP”, “WE CRAWL THROUGH GRAVES”, “THE DARKNESS BEHIND YOUR EYES” and “BELOW THERE IS ONLY PAIN”.

(pg.126) A sewer chamber choked by vast quantities of hair hanging from a curved ceiling of Victorian brickwork.

It was relatively easy for Gray to obtain a search warrant in order to enter the disused South Kentish Town station. Although above ground the building was now occupied by a massage parlour where once the ticket hall had been, all the subterranean shafts, corridors and other passageways were still owned by London Underground. Since their abandonment there had been no reason to maintain them and parts of the former station were unsafe. In order to gain access Gray had to agree to be accompanied by a track maintenance engineer who worked on that stretch of the Northern Line and who was familiar with the site.

This engineer, John Heath, arranged to meet Gray outside the massage parlour at the corner of Kentish Town Road and Castle Place. The inspector parked his car directly in front of the building and was struck by the fact that its exterior still had the appearance of an Underground Station, lacking only the familiar sign displayed outside. Hanging around in front of the entrance to the newsagents was a small man in a yellow safety helmet and boiler suit. He carried a heavy bag with a sub-contractors’ logo on it. His hands were entirely covered with a thick layer of soot. Doubtless it was the man who been assigned to assist Gray.

Heath looked just like a throwback to the 1960s. His hippie-length hair was brittle and grey as dust. Over his mouth and nose he wore a loose protective mask. He also wore a pair of John Lennon style glasses with thick lenses that made the eyes behind them look liquid. He was really quite horribly ridiculous.

After Gray had produced his police ID, the two went inside, and the Inspector explained their purpose to the owners of the massage parlour (who seemed relieved that the search was not connected with what went on at their premises). Then Heath, consulting a map of the structure, led Gray down into a storage cellar at the back of the establishment where access to the emergency stairs could be gained.

The old lift shafts were useless. Their cages and all the workings had been removed back when the station was closed in 1924, but the stairway to the upper lift landing and the emergency staircase to the lower lift landing were passable. The entry doors were padlocked and Heath sought and tried several keys drawn from his bag before he found the correct ones to use.

“They,” Heath said, his voice muffled by the baggy mask covering his mouth and nose, “told me why you want to get down here. Anyway it’s pointless. We already looked for Drayton. All you’re doing is putting yourself in danger.”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” replied Gray, “just get on with it. You do your job and I’ll do mine, okay?”

“Watch your step as we go. These old passageways are treacherous. Even if you don’t wind up falling into a ventilation shaft, you might stumble in front of a passing train. Hear the noise?”

As he unlocked the door there came from far below in the depths the sound of carriages rumbling along distant tracks, followed moments later by a powerful draught of musty air.

Heath chuckled. He turned on a powerful torch and aimed its beam along the stairway and around to the dark-green tiled walls at the turn ahead. The steps were littered with debris.

Gray was amazed at how familiar and yet how strange their surroundings appeared. Like any Londoner he had used the tube system on innumerable occasions and had passed through the subterranean mazes of many stations, though always when they were illuminated by overhead strip lighting, with hurried passengers making their way to or from a platform. But here the darkness was in control and every echoing footfall reinforced the grim feeling of total isolation. And yet it was only the withdrawal of light and of other people that created this feeling: actually it was just the same as any other tube station would be after the services had stopped running. Except that this was no temporary interruption to be resumed in the morning. This really was what Carlos Miguel called Una estación fantasma.

“Did you know Adam Drayton?” Gray asked in order to break the gaunt silence between the sound of passing trains.

He could only see the back of Heath. The engineer’s slightly hunched form crept downwards along the steps, apparently intent solely upon what he was doing. But he finally responded after what seemed to be a considered pause.

“Oh yes,” Heath said, “I knew of him all right. He was legendary on the Northern Line. Kept stopping his train at odd places and holding up the services. Only worked at night, when it didn’t matter so much. The union stepped in to stop him getting the sack, said he was worried about safety.”

“Safety?”

“The union said it was faulty signals that were to blame. And strange noises on the track. Made him cautious. Better to be safe than sorry. Go-slow is preferable to taking chances. That’s what the union said.”

They had reached the bottom of the stairway and emerged onto the upper lift landing. The tiles here were a grimy cream and red colour. In the circle of light cast by Heath’s torch, he caught glimpses of advertising posters from the early 1920s that had been left up on the tiled walls of the corridor ahead; LIFEBUOY, BOVRIL, OXO, WRIGLEY’S and GUINNESS. Another tube train roared through one of the tunnels below and the accompanying blast of air flapped the torn parts of the posters.

“What do you know about the disused stations here on the Northern Line? Have you seen the others for yourself?” Gray asked.

“I know something. I’ve been in them all at one time or another. They have a bad reputation. The most significant is North End or the ‘Bull & Bush’ as the train operators like to call it.” Heath responded.

“Why significant?”

“The floodgates, y’know,” said Heath. “Instead of the tube station that was going to be there in 1906 they developed it into a central command centre. Certain stations on the network have the gates, but they’re all controlled from North End. Reckon the building goes down more than a thousand feet, though only the higher levels were initially used. It was started in the 1940s so they could stop the entire Underground system being flooded. Most of the gates were individually controlled before then.”

“How could the whole system be flooded?”

“If the Nazis had dropped a bomb in the Thames the tunnels under the river could have collapsed. Within ten minutes the Underground system would have been completely filled with water and submerged, y’know. Well, that’s what they said. Later on, in the early 1970s, they built a second zone of gates just outside stations like Shepherds Bush, Aldgate East and Bounds Green, before where the tracks emerge overground.”

“What have they got to do with flooding?”

“Nothing. But they thought people would go mental when the three-minute warnings went off and try to run along the tracks into the train tunnels to escape from Soviet atom bombs. Well, you get the idea . . .”

By now they’d reached the emergency spiral stairway, which led much further downward to the lower lift landing. It was considerably steeper than the previous stairway and Gray kept a hand against the wall as the two men descended. Their footfalls echoed as if ghosts were following close behind.

“Talking of weird stuff like that, you know about the Sentinel Train?” Heath asked. He didn’t wait for an answer before continuing with his topic, “First stop King William Street station along the abandoned spur, runs down to Borough without halting, then reverses up the Bank branch of the Northern Line. Only stops at the ghost stations along the route; nowhere else, goes on to City Road, right here to South Kentish Town, then back via Camden, before terminating at the deepest of all: North End, under Hamp-stead Heath. Anyway, I told you about that one, didn’t I? The Sentinel lets the inspection crews examine the stuff the public never sees. Company doesn’t leave the traction current to the rails on overnight, so a diesel locomotive pulls the old F Stock carriages. The train has a free run on the deserted tracks. Happens once a week or thereabouts. Every tube line has its own Sentinel.”

“Are you pulling my leg?” Gray replied testily. “That’s straight out of Drayton’s book. It seems to me you must have read it.”

They’d reached the lower lift landing.

“This passageway leads to the north and southbound platforms,” Heath said, “but they’re long gone.”

Were the idea not totally ridiculous Gray could have mistaken his companion for something dressed up in a boiler suit in order to pass as human. His colleagues at the Yard would have laughed at his suspicion. But he could not shake off the impression that, in the darkness, Heath’s appearance was genuinely similar to the figure that Gray had glimpsed peering out of the trellised gates of Kentish Town Station. That was only a few nights ago and one stop along the Northern Line from this ghost station. He’d seen it with his own eyes and the experience was not drawn from the pages of a crazy book like The Secret Underground. Gray could easily believe that this character Heath had not just read the volume but had stepped out from its pages into life.

“You didn’t answer my question.” Gray said. From his coat pocket he drew a packet of Benson & Hedges cigarettes.

“What one was that again?” Heath snuffled.

“The one about having read The Secret Underground.” Gray responded as he jammed one of the smokes between his lips and touched the end with the flame from a battered old Zippo. A faint smell of petrol wafted from the lighter. He drew on the cigarette and exhaled, sending curling blue smoke across the beam of Heath’s torch.

“Oh, that . . . look, you can’t smoke down here. It’s dangerous.”

“Do you see any ‘No Smoking’ signs around? Anyway I’m sure your mask will protect you.”

Heath paused and regarded the glowing tip of Gray’s cigarette. He finally came back to the point.

“Yeah, I’ve read that book. I know it off by heart. It’s a favourite of mine.”

From further back along the passageways Gray thought he detected a rustling noise, like a pile of leaves dispersed by the wind. But, before he was able to tell from which direction it came, the racket of a passing northbound train drowned them out. Gray thought he heard Heath muttering.

It sounded like “. . . bigmouth . . . Miguel . . . he’s sorted . . .” but most of these words were also lost in the roar.

It was obvious that Heath knew something about Drayton’s disappearance and may even have had a hand in it. Perhaps he was also dangerously obsessed with all those ghost stations and had come to regard Drayton as his rival. In any case, the place to interview Heath was back at the Yard, not here and now. Gray’s back and stomach ached; the old ruptures were playing up again. It was time to get back to the surface. There was nothing down here that was of any use to his investigation. Besides, although Heath was small, Gray feared that he was dealing with a lunatic.

There was that damn rustling again, like leaves! It sounded closer this time. Heath seemed not to notice it though and coldly regarded Gray smoking his cigarette, glaring through narrowed eyes that swam behind the thick lenses of his glasses.

“Well,” said Gray, “I’ve seen everything I want to see here. Let’s get back to the surface.

“All right,” Heath replied, “but you ain’t looked yet. To come all this way and not look at it would be a waste of my time and yours.”

“Look at what exactly?”

“Over there in the corner. Thirty yards, right up against the wall.” Heath flashed the torch’s beam onto what appeared to be a large pile of rags. “Go and see. I already know what it is. I’ll stay where I am. In case you’re worried, like.”

As he got nearer, Gray glanced back to make sure that Heath made no attempt to creep up on him. What he believed was a pile of rags was in fact a body slumped in the angle between wall and floor, its face turned towards the tiles. The back of its skull was smashed in. Dried blood caked the matted hair. As he turned the body over, Gray guessed that its face would be unfamiliar; he expected it to be Drayton, whom he’d never seen. But it was the Spaniard, Carlos Miguel. Heath had not moved an inch whilst Gray examined the corpse, but something living dropped from the darkness of the ceiling onto him and the impact drove the police inspector crashing to the floor.

His head struck the concrete and he blacked out.

Gray awoke in a tube train carriage. He felt nauseous with pain as consciousness returned. He ran his fingers over his head and found half a dozen scratches and wounds around his face and on the back of his skull. There was a stabbing pain in his stomach and he was aware of feeling wet around the seat of his trousers. The fall had reopened some of his old internal ruptures and blood was leaking out of his lower intestine.

Although racked with pain, he forced himself to take in the details of his surroundings. He was on a moving train, one that hurtled through the tunnels at breakneck speed.

The floor was littered with prostrate bodies. Some were hanging by their necks from knotted leather straps attached to the ceiling rails. All had been recently murdered and bore signs of mutilation. There were dozens of the corpses packed into the carriage. Their limbs protruded at misshapen angles from the humps of flesh and clothing. Extreme terror and pain marked their facial expressions. The body of Carlos Miguel lay amongst the charnel crowds. Like the Castilian, Gray had been left for dead.

Somehow he’d come to be a passenger in a carriage that appeared to date from, he guessed, the 1920s. The carriage lights were single bulbs housed in Art-Deco glass oysters with a very wide aisle running between the longitudinal seating. It must have been antiquated rolling stock, for there were advertisements from that far-off decade above the windows and the Underground map showed routes such as the Hampstead and Highgate Line, the City and South London Railway and the Central London Railway. Back then the Victoria and Jubilee lines had not even been thought of, let alone built. Moreover, the map was like a complicated tangle of spaghetti and not modelled on the famous Beck circuit-board design.

Struggling to his feet and clutching the pole at the end of the seats, Gray stood in a daze for a moment, rocking with the motion of the train. His wristwatch showed 1:20 a.m. He’d been out cold for well over eight hours. His left trouser leg stuck to the inside of his thigh, where the stream of blood oozing from his rectum had partially dried. He picked his way through the corpses and found that he was trapped in the last carriage of the train and the connecting door to the penultimate carriage had been welded shut.

Gray crept back to a seat and peered through the window to the tunnels outside. Suddenly the train entered a platform, without slowing, and he pressed his face to the glass in order to try and make out the station name as it flashed past. The light from the interior of the carriages projected enough illumination for him to see a faded sign reading NORTH END. It also just made visible the stunted, faceless forms that haunted the shadows of passageways further back – forms that shunned the light, but which welcomed the arrival of the Sentinel with malefic glee, chattering deafeningly in the semi-darkness.

Gray had no doubt that the inner and outer gates were closed right the way across the Underground network, now that the Sentinel had completed its journey. He harboured the notion that these gates served a purpose quite different from the official one and were used to prevent escape along the tracks to the surface. Drayton had described many pieces of the jigsaw in his book The Secret Underground. Gray had not fitted them together until it was too late and would finally solve the mystery in the labyrinthine reaches of an industrial Sheol.

In his mind’s eye he saw a vision in which the disparate chapters of Drayton’s book merged to form a coherent explanation of what was happening. It was an explanation involving a series of derelict reverse skyscrapers, one of which was beneath North End, whose ultimate depth was probably over a thousand feet; a structure populated by beings who were sometimes bored with the repast foraged by using the smaller tunnels that led to the cemeteries and burial grounds across London. Could it be possible that the feasters had absorbed some of the characteristics of the corpses upon which they preyed, as in cannibalistic folklore?

He thought of an abandoned train and its driver . . . Como una palomilla . . . of a man called Heath with thick eyeglasses, his face obscured, and who knew as much as Drayton himself . . .

As he thought about the ghost stations on the Piccadilly Line, the Central Line, the Metropolitan Line and all the others, he guessed that each doubtless had its own Sentinel operating that night as well.

Suddenly, the lights in all the carriages went out.

Acting on the signal, as they’d done so many times in the past, they surged up from the edifice’s black abyss of corridors and debris-choked rooms in a ravenous tide.

As the stunted forms eagerly scrambled across the divide between them and the train, he finally realised that, in order to keep them down there in the dark, to prevent them overrunning London altogether, it was necessary for them to be fed.

Gray only had time to scream once in the darkness.

ELIZABETH HAND

The Saffron Gatherers

ELIZABETH HAND IS THE multiple-award-winning author of eight novels, including Generation Loss and Mortal Love, and three collections of short fiction, the most recent being Saffron & Brimstone: Strange Stories. She lives on the coast of Maine.

“ ‘The Saffron Gatherers’ is the last tale in a four-story sequence titled ‘The Lost Domain’,” the author reveals, “which deals with the themes of creative and erotic obsession.

“All four tales are set in a post-9/11 world resembling our own; in the case of ‘The Saffron Gatherers’, a dark world that is just now being born.”

HE HAD ALMOST BEEN as much a place to her as a person; the lost domain, the land of heart’s desire. Alone at night she would think of him as others might imagine an empty beach, blue water; for years she had done this, and fallen into sleep.

She flew to Seattle to attend a symposium on the Future. It was a welcome trip – on the East Coast, where she lived, it had rained without stopping for thirty-four days. A meteorological record, now a tired joke: only six more days to go! Even Seattle was drier than that.

She was part of a panel discussion on natural disasters and global warming. Her first three novels had presented near-future visions of apocalypse; she had stopped writing them when it became less like fiction and too much like reportage. Since then she had produced a series of time-travel books, wish-fulfilment fantasies about visiting the ancient world. Many of her friends and colleagues in the field had turned to similar themes, retro, nostalgic, historical. Her academic background was in classical archeology; the research was joyous, if exhausting. She hated to fly, the constant round of threats and delay. The weather and concomitant poverty, starvation, drought, flooding, riots – it had all become so bad that it was like an extreme sport now, to visit places that had once unfolded from one’s imagination in the brightly-colored panoramas of 1920s postal cards. Still she went, armed with eyeshade, earplugs, music and pills that put her to sleep. Behind her eyes, she saw Randall’s arm flung above his head, his face half-turned from hers on the pillow. Fifteen minutes after the panel had ended she was in a cab on her way to SeaTac. Several hours later she was in San Francisco.

He met her at the airport. After the weeks of rain back East and Seattle’s muted sheen, the sunlight felt like something alive, clawing at her eyes. They drove to her hotel, the same place she always stayed; like something from an old B-movie, the lobby with its ornate cast-iron stair-rail, the narrow front desk of polished walnut; clerks who all might have been played by the young Peter Lorre. The elevator with its illuminated dial like a clock that could never settle on the time; an espresso shop tucked into the back entrance, no bigger than a broom closet.

Randall always had to stoop to enter the elevator. He was very tall, not as thin as he had been when they first met, nearly twenty years earlier. His hair was still so straight and fine that it always felt wet, but the luster had faded from it: it was no longer dark-blonde but grey, a strange dusky color, almost blue in some lights, like pale damp slate. He had grey-blue eyes; a habit of looking up through downturned black lashes that at first had seemed coquettish. She had since learned it was part of a deep reticence, a detachment from the world that sometimes seemed to border on the pathological. You might call him an agoraphobe, if he had stayed indoors.

But he didn’t. They had grown up in neighboring towns in New York, though they only met years later, in DC. When the time came to choose allegiance to a place, she fled to Maine, with all those other writers and artists seeking a retreat into the past; he chose Northern California. He was a journalist, a staff writer for a glossy magazine that only came out four times a year, each issue costing as much as a bottle of decent sémillon. He interviewed scientists engaged in paradigm-breaking research, Nobel Prize-winning writers; poets who wrote on their own skin and had expensive addictions to drugs that subtly altered their personalities, the tenor of their words, so that each new book or online publication seemed to have been written by another person. Multiple Poets’ Disorder, Randall had tagged this, and the term stuck; he was the sort of writer who coined phrases. He had a curved mouth, beautiful long fingers. Each time he used a pen, she was surprised again to recall that he was left-handed. He collected incunabula – Ars oratoria, Jacobus Publicus’s disquisition on the art of memory; the Opera Philosophica of Seneca, containing the first written account of an earthquake; Pico della Mirandola’s Hetaplus – as well as manuscripts. His apartment was filled with quarter-sawn oaken barrister’s bookcases, glass fronts bright as mirrors, holding manuscript binders, typescripts, wads of foolscap bound in leather. By the window overlooking the Bay, a beautiful old mapchest of letters written by Neruda, Beckett, Asaré. There were signed broadsheets on the walls, and drawings, most of them inscribed to Randall. He was two years younger than she was. Like her, he had no children. In the years since his divorce, she had never heard him mention his former wife by name

The hotel room was small and stuffy. There was a wooden ceiling fan that turned slowly, barely stirring the white curtain that covered the single window. It overlooked an airshaft. Directly across was another old building, a window that showed a family sitting at a kitchen table, eating beneath a fluorescent bulb.

“Come here, Suzanne,” said Randall. “I have something for you.”

She turned. He was sitting on the bed – a nice bed, good mattress and expensive white linens and duvet – reaching for the leather mailbag he always carried to remove a flat parcel.

“Here,” he said. “For you.”

It was a book. With Randall it was always books. Or expensive tea: tiny, neon-colored foil packets that hissed when she opened them and exuded fragrances she could not describe, dried leaves that looked like mouse droppings, or flower petals, or fur; leaves that, once infused, tasted of old leather and made her dream of complicated sex.

“Thank you,” she said, unfolding the mauve tissue the book was wrapped in. Then, as she saw what it was, “Oh! Thank you!”

“Since you’re going back to Thera. Something to read on the plane.”

It was an oversized book in a slipcase: the classic edition of The Thera Frescoes, by Nicholas Spirotiadis, a volume that had been expensive when first published, twenty years earlier. Now it must be worth a fortune, with its glossy thick photographic paper and foldout pages depicting the larger murals. The slipcase art was a detail from the site’s most famous image, the painting known as “The Saffron Gatherers.” It showed the profile of a beautiful young woman dressed in elaborately-patterned tiered skirt and blouse, her head shaven save for a serpentine coil of dark hair, her brow tattooed. She wore hoop earrings and bracelets, two on her right hand, one on her left. Bell-like tassels hung from her sleeves. She was plucking the stigma from a crocus blossom. Her fingernails were painted red.

Suzanne had seen the original painting a decade ago, when it was easier for American researchers to gain access to the restored ruins and the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. After two years of paperwork and bureaucratic wheedling, she had just received permission to return.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. It still took her breath away, how modern the girl looked, not just her clothes and jewelry and body art but her expression, lips parted, her gaze at once imploring and vacant: the 15-year-old who had inherited the earth,

“Well, don’t drop it in the tub.” Randall leaned over to kiss her head. “That was the only copy I could find on the net. It’s become a very scarce book.”

“Of course,” said Suzanne, and smiled.

“Claude is going to meet us for dinner. But not till seven. Come here—”

They lay in the dark room. His skin tasted of salt and bitter lemon; his hair against her thighs felt warm, liquid. She shut her eyes and imagined him beside her, his long limbs and rueful mouth; opened her eyes and there he was, now, sleeping. She held her hand above his chest and felt heat radiating from him, a scent like honey. She began to cry silently.

His hands. That big rumpled bed. In two days she would be gone, the room would be cleaned. There would be nothing to show she had ever been here at all.

They drove to an Afghan restaurant in North Beach. Randall’s car was older, a second-generation hybrid; even with the grants and tax breaks, a far more expensive vehicle than she or anyone she knew back east could ever afford. She had never gotten used to how quiet it was.

Outside, the sidewalks were filled with people, the early evening light silvery-blue and gold, like a sun shower. Couples arm-in-arm, children, groups of students waving their hands as they spoke on their cell phones, a skateboarder hustling to keep up with a pack of parkeurs.

“Everyone just seems so much more absorbed here,” she said. Even the panhandlers were antic.

“It’s the light. It makes everyone happy. Also the drugs they put in our drinking water.” She laughed, and he put his arm around her.

Claude was sitting in the restaurant when they arrived. He was a poet who had gained notoriety and then prominence in the late 1980s with the “Hyacinthus Elegies,” his response to the AIDS epidemic. Randall first interviewed him after Claude received his MacArthur Fellowship. They subsequently became good friends. On the wall of his flat, Randall had a handwritten copy of the second elegy, with one of the poet’s signature drawings of a hyacinth at the bottom.

“Suzanne!” He jumped up to embrace her, shook hands with Randall then beckoned them both to sit. “I ordered some wine. A good cab I heard about from someone at the gym.”

Suzanne adored Claude. The day before she left for Seattle, he’d sent flowers to her, a half-dozen delicate narcissus serotinus, with long white narrow petals and tiny yellow throats. Their sweet scent perfumed her entire small house. She’d emailed him profuse but also wistful thanks – they were such an extravagance, and so lovely; and she had to leave before she could enjoy them fully. He was a few years younger than she was, thin and muscular, his face and skull hairless save for a wispy black beard. He had lost his eyebrows during a round of chemo and had feathery lines, like antenna, tattooed in their place and threaded with gold beads. His chest and arms were heavily tattooed with stylized flowers, dolphins, octopi, the same iconography Suzanne had seen in Akrotiri and Crete; and also with the names of lovers and friends and colleagues who had died. Along the inside of his arms you could still see the stippled marks left by hypodermic needles – they looked like tiny black beads worked into the pattern of waves and swallows – and the faint white traces of an adolescent suicide attempt. His expression was gentle and melancholy, the face of a tired ascetic, or a benign Antonin Artaud.

“I should have brought the book!” Suzanne sat beside him, shaking her head in dismay. “This beautiful book that Randall gave me – Spirotiadis’ Thera book?”

“No! I’ve heard of it, I could never find it. Is it wonderful?”

“It’s gorgeous. You would love it, Claude.”

They ate, and spoke of his collected poetry, forthcoming next winter; of Suzanne’s trip to Akrotiri. Of Randall’s next interview, with a woman on the House Committee on Bioethics who was rumored to be sympathetic to the pro-cloning lobby, but only in cases involving “only” children – no siblings, no twins or multiples – who died before age fourteen.

“Grim,” said Claude. He shook his head and reached for the second bottle of wine. “I can’t imagine it. Even pets . . .”

He shuddered, then turned to rest a hand on Suzanne’s shoulder. “So: back to Santorini. Are you excited?”

“I am. Just seeing that book, it made me excited again. It’s such an incredible place – you’re there, and you think, What could this have been? If it had survived, if it all hadn’t just gone bam, like that—”

“Well, then it would really have gone,” said Randall. “I mean, it would have been lost. There would have been no volcanic ash to preserve it. All your paintings, we would never have known them. Just like we don’t know anything else from back then.”

“We know some things,” said Suzanne. She tried not to sound annoyed – there was a lot of wine, and she was jet-lagged. “Plato. Homer . . .”

“Oh, them,” said Claude, and they all laughed. “But he’s right. It would all have turned to dust by now. All rotted away. All one with Baby Jesus, or Baby Zeus. Everything you love would be buried under a Tradewinds Resort. Or it would be like Athens, which would be even worse.”

“Would it?” She sipped her wine. “We don’t know that. We don’t know what it would have become. This—”

She gestured at the room, the couple sitting beneath twinkling rose-colored lights, playing with a digital toy that left little chattering faces in the air as the woman switched it on and off. Outside, dusk and neon. “It might have become like this. “

“This.” Randall leaned back in his chair, staring at her. “Is this so wonderful?”

“Oh yes,” she said, staring back at him, the two of them unsmiling. “This is all a miracle.”

He excused himself. Claude refilled his glass and turned back to Suzanne. “So. How are things?”

“With Randall?” She sighed. “It’s good. I dunno. Maybe it’s great. Tomorrow – we’re going to look at houses.”

Claude raised a tattooed eyebrow. “Really?”

She nodded. Randall had been looking at houses for three years now, ever since the divorce.

“Who knows?” she said. “Maybe this will be the charm. How hard can it be to buy a house?”

“In San Francisco? Doll, it’s easier to win the stem cell lottery. But yes, Randall is a very discerning buyer. He’s the last of the true idealists. He’s looking for the eidos of the house. Plato’s eidos; not Socrates’,” he added. “Is this the first time you’ve gone looking with him?”

“Yup.”

“Well. Maybe that is great,” he said. “Or not. Would you move out here?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. If he had a house. Probably not.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m looking for the eidos of something else. Out here, it’s just too . . .”

She opened her hands as though catching rain. Claude looked at her quizzically.

“Too sunny?” he said. “Too warm? Too beautiful?”

“I suppose. The land of the lotus-eaters. I love knowing it’s here, but.” She drank more wine. “Maybe if I had more job security.”

“You’re a writer. It’s against Nature for you to have job security.”

“Yeah, no kidding. What about you? You don’t ever worry about that?”

He gave her his sweet sad smile and shook his head. “Never. The world will always need poets. We’re like the lilies of the field.”

“What about journalists?” Randall appeared behind them, slipping his cell phone back into his pocket. “What are we?”

“Quackgrass,” said Claude.

“Cactus,” said Suzanne.

“Oh, gee. I get it,” said Randall. “Because we’re all hard and spiny and no one loves us.”

“Because you only bloom once a year,” said Suzanne.

“When it rains,” added Claude.

“That was my realtor.” Randall sat and downed the rest of his wine. “Sunday’s open house day. Two o’clock till four. Suzanne, we have a lot of ground to cover.”

He gestured for the waiter. Suzanne leaned over to kiss Claude’s cheek.

“When do you leave for Hydra?” she asked.

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow!” She looked crestfallen. “That’s so soon!”

“The beautiful life was brief,’ ” said Claude, and laughed. “You’re only here till Monday. I have a reservation on the ferry from Piraeus, I couldn’t change it.”

“How long will you be there? I’ll be in Athens Tuesday after next, then I go to Akrotiri.”

Claude smiled. “That might work. Here—”

He copied out a phone number in his careful, calligraphic hand. “This is Zali’s number on Hydra. A cell phone, I have no idea if it will even work. But I’ll see you soon. Like you said—”

He lifted his thin hands and gestured at the room around them, his dark eyes wide. “This is a miracle.”

Randall paid the check and they turned to go. At the door, Claude hugged Suzanne. “Don’t miss your plane,” he said.

“Don’t wind her up!” said Randall.

“Don’t miss yours,” said Suzanne. Her eyes filled with tears as she pressed her face against Claude’s. “It was so good to see you. If I miss you, have a wonderful time in Hydra.”

“Oh, I will,” said Claude. “I always do.”

Randall dropped her off at her hotel. She knew better than to ask him to stay; besides, she was tired, and the wine was starting to give her a headache.

“Tomorrow,” he said. “Nine o’clock. A leisurely breakfast, and then . . .”

He leaned over to open her door, then kissed her. “The exciting new world of California real estate.”

Outside, the evening had grown cool, but the hotel room still felt close: it smelled of sex, and the sweetish dusty scent of old books. She opened the window by the airshaft and went to take a shower. Afterwards she got into bed, but found herself unable to sleep.

The wine, she thought; always a mistake. She considered taking one of the anti-anxiety drugs she carried for flying, but decided against it. Instead she picked up the book Randall had given her.

She knew all the images, from other books and websites, and the island itself. Nearly four thousand years ago, now; much of it might have been built yesterday. Beneath fifteen feet of volcanic ash and pumice, homes with ocean views and indoor plumbing, pipes that might have channeled steam from underground vents fed by the volcano the city was built upon. Fragments of glass that might have been windows, or lenses. The great pithoi that still held food when they were opened millennia later. Great containers of honey for trade, for embalming the Egyptian dead. Yellow grains of pollen. Wine.

But no human remains. No bones, no grimacing tormented figures as were found beneath the sand at Herculaneum, where the fishermen had fled and died. Not even animal remains, save for the charred vertebrae of a single donkey. They had all known to leave. And when they did, their city was not abandoned in frantic haste or fear. All was orderly, the pithoi still sealed, no metal utensils or weapons strewn upon the floor, no bolts of silk or linen; no jewelry.

Only the paintings, and they were everywhere; so lovely and beautifully wrought that at first the excavators thought they had uncovered a temple complex.

But they weren’t temples: they were homes. Someone had paid an artist, or teams of artists, to paint frescoes on the walls of room after room after room. Sea daffodils, swallows; dolphins and pleasure boats, the boats themselves decorated with more dolphins and flying seabirds, golden nautilus on their prows. Wreaths of flowers. A shipwreck. Always you saw the same colors, ochre-yellow and ferrous red; a pigment made by grinding glaucophane, a vitreous mineral that produced a grey-blue shimmer; a bright pure French blue. But of course it wasn’t French blue but Egyptian blue – Pompeiian blue – one of the earliest pigments, used for thousands of years; you made it by combining a calcium compound with ground malachite and quartz, then heating it to extreme temperatures.

But no green. It was a blue and gold and red world. Not even the plants were green.

Otherwise, the paintings were so alive that, when she’d first seen them, she half-expected her finger would be wet if she touched them. The eyes of the boys who played at boxing were children’s eyes. The antelopes had the mad topaz glare of wild goats. The monkeys had blue fur and looked like dancing cats. There were people walking in the streets. You could see what their houses looked like, red brick and yellow shutters.

She turned towards the back of the book, to the section on Xeste 3. It was the most famous building at the site. It contained the most famous paintings – the woman known as the “Mistress of Animals.” “The Adorants,” who appeared to be striding down a fashion runway. “The Lustral Basin.”

The saffron gatherers.

She gazed at the image from the East Wall of Room Three, two women harvesting the stigma of the crocus blossoms. The flowers were like stylized yellow fireworks, growing from the rocks and also appearing in a repetitive motif on the wall above the figures, like the fleur-de-lis patterns on wallpaper. The fragments of painted plaster had been meticulously restored; there was no attempt to fill in what was missing, as had been done at Knossos under Sir Arthur Evans’ supervision to sometimes cartoonish effect.

None of that had not been necessary here. The fresco was nearly intact. You could see how the older woman’s eyebrow was slightly raised, with annoyance or perhaps just impatience, and count the number of stigmata the younger acolyte held in her outstretched palm.

How long would it have taken for them to fill those baskets? The crocuses bloomed only in autumn, and each small blossom contained just three tiny crimson threads, the female stigmata. It might take 100,000 flowers to produce a half-pound of the spice.

And what did they use the spice for? Cooking; painting; a pigment they traded to the Egyptians for dyeing mummy bandages.

She closed the book. She could hear distant sirens, and a soft hum from the ceiling fan. Tomorrow they would look at houses.

For breakfast they went to the Embarcadero, the huge indoor market inside the restored ferry building that had been damaged over a century before, in the 1906 earthquake. There was a shop with nothing but olive oil and infused vinegars; another that sold only mushrooms, great woven panniers and baskets filled with tree-ears, portobellos, fungus that looked like orange coral; black morels and matsutake and golden chanterelles.

They stuck with coffee and sweet rolls, and ate outside on a bench looking over the Bay. A man threw sticks into the water for a pair of black labs; another man swam along the embankment. The sunlight was strong and clear as gin, and nearly as potent: it made Suzanne feel lightheaded and slightly drowsy, even though she had just gotten up.

“Now,” said Randall. He took out the newspaper, opened it to the real estate section, and handed it to her. He had circled eight listings. “The first two are in Oakland; then we’ll hit Berkeley and Kensington. You ready?”

They drove in heavy traffic across the Oakland-Bay bridge. To either side, bronze water that looked as though it would be too hot to swim in; before them the Oakland Hills, where the houses were ranged in undulating lines like waves. Once in the city they began to climb in and out of pocket neighborhoods poised between the arid and the tropic. Bungalows nearly hidden beneath overhanging trees suddenly yielded to bright white stucco houses flanked by aloes and agaves. It looked at once wildly fanciful and comfortable, as though all urban planning had been left to Dr Seuss.

“They do something here called ‘staging’,” said Randall as they pulled behind a line of parked cars on a hillside. A phalanx of realtors’ signs rose from a grassy mound beside them. “Homeowners pay thousands and thousands of dollars for a decorator to come in and tart up their houses with rented furniture and art and stuff. So, you know, it looks like it’s worth three million dollars.”

They walked to the first house, a Craftsman bungalow tucked behind trees like prehistoric ferns. There was a fountain outside, filled with koi that stared up with engorged silvery eyes. Inside, exposed beams and dark hardwood floors so glossy they looked covered with maple syrup. There was a grand piano, and large framed posters from Parisian cafés – Suzanne was to note a lot of these as the afternoon wore on – and much heavy dark Mediterranean-style furniture, as well as a few early Mission pieces that might have been genuine. The kitchen floors were tiled. In the master bath, there were mosaics in the sink and sunken tub.

Randall barely glanced at these. He made a beeline for the deck. After wandering around for a few minutes, Suzanne followed him.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. Below, terraced gardens gave way to stepped hillsides, and then the city proper, and then the gilded expanse of San Francisco Bay, with sailboats like swans moving slowly beneath the bridge.

“For four million dollars, it better be,” said Randall.

She looked at him. His expression was avid, but it was also sad, his pale eyes melancholy in the brilliant sunlight. He drew her to him and gazed out above the treetops, then pointed across the blue water.

“That’s where we were. Your hotel, it’s right there, somewhere.” His voice grew soft. “At night it all looks like a fairy city. The lights, and the bridges . . . You can’t believe that anyone could have built it.”

He blinked, shading his eyes with his hand, then looked away. When he turned back his cheeks were damp.

“Come on,” he said. He bent to kiss her forehead. “Got to keep moving.”

They drove to the next house, and the next, and the one after that. The light and heat made her dizzy; and the scents of all the unfamiliar flowers, the play of water in fountains and a swimming pool like a great turquoise lozenge. She found herself wandering through expansive bedrooms with people she did not know, walking in and out of closets, bathrooms, a sauna. Every room seemed lavish, the air charged as though anticipating a wonderful party; tables set with beeswax candles and bottles of wine and crystal stemware. Counter-tops of hand-thrown Italian tiles; globular cobalt vases filled with sunflowers, another recurring motif.

But there was no sign of anyone who might actually live in one of these houses, only a series of well-dressed women with expensively restrained jewelry who would greet them, usually in the kitchen, and make sure they had a flyer listing the home’s attributes. There were plates of cookies, banana bread warm from the oven. Bottles of sparkling water and organic lemonade.

And, always, a view. They didn’t look at houses without views. To Suzanne, some were spectacular; others, merely glorious. All were more beautiful than anything she saw from her own windows or deck, where she looked out onto evergreens and grey rocks and, much of the year, snow.

It was all so dreamlike that it was nearly impossible for her to imagine real people living here. For her a house had always meant a refuge from the world; the place where you hid from whatever catastrophe was breaking that morning.

But now she saw that it could be different. She began to understand that, for Randall at least, a house wasn’t a retreat. It was a way of engaging with the world; of opening himself to it. The view wasn’t yours. You belonged to it, you were a tiny part of it, like the sailboats and the seagulls and the flowers in the garden; like the sunflowers on the highly polished tables.

You were part of what made it real. She had always thought it was the other way around.

“You ready?” Randall came up behind her and put his hand on her neck. “This is it. We’re done. Let’s go have a drink.”

On the way out the door he stopped to talk to the agent.

“They’ll be taking bids tomorrow,” she said. “We’ll let you know on Tuesday.”

“Tuesday?’ Suzanne said in amazement when they got back outside. “You can do all this in two days? Spend a million dollars on a house?”

“Four million,” said Randall. “This is how it works out here. The race is to the quick.”

She had assumed they would go to another restaurant for drinks and then dinner. Instead, to her surprise, he drove to his flat. He took a bottle of Pommery Louise from the refrigerator and opened it, and she wandered about examining his manuscripts as he made dinner. At the Embarcadero, without her knowing, he had bought chanterelles and morels, imported pasta colored like spring flowers, arugula and baby tatsoi. For dessert, orange-blossom custard. When they were finished, they remained out on the deck and looked at the Bay, the rented view. Lights shimmered through the dusk. In a flowering quince in the garden, dozens of hummingbirds droned and darted like bees, attacking each other with needle beaks.

“So.” Randall’s face was slightly flushed. They had finished the champagne, and he had poured them each some cognac. “If this happens – if I get the house. Will you move out here?”

She stared down at the hummingbirds. Her heart was racing. The quince had no smell, none that she could detect, anyway; yet still they swarmed around it. Because it was so large, and its thousands of blossoms were so red. She hesitated, then said, “Yes.”

He nodded and took a quick sip of cognac. “Why don’t you just stay, then? Till we find out on Tuesday? I have to go down to San Jose early tomorrow to interview this guy, you could come and we could go to that place for lunch.”

“I can’t.” She bit her lip, thinking. “No . . . I wish I could, but I have to finish that piece before I leave for Greece.”

“You can’t just leave from here?”

“No.” That would be impossible, to change her whole itinerary. “And I don’t have any of my things – I need to pack, and get my notes . . . I’m sorry.”

He took her hand and kissed it. “That’s okay. When you get back.”

That night she lay in his bed as Randall slept beside her, staring at the manuscripts on their shelves, the framed lines of poetry. His breathing was low, and she pressed her hand against his chest, feeling his ribs beneath the skin, his heartbeat. She thought of canceling her flight; of postponing the entire trip.

But it was impossible. She moved the pillow beneath her head, so that she could see past him, to the wide picture window. Even with the curtains drawn you could see the lights of the city, faraway as stars.

Very early next morning he drove her to the hotel to get her things and then to the airport.

“My cell will be on,” he said as he got her bag from the car. “Call me down in San Jose, once you get in.”

“I will.”

He kissed her and for a long moment they stood at curbside, arms around each other.

“Book your ticket back here,” he said at last, and drew away. “I’ll talk to you tonight.”

She watched him go, the nearly silent car lost among the taxis and limousines; then hurried to catch her flight. Once she had boarded she switched off her cell, then got out her eyemask, earplugs, book, water bottle; she took one of her pills. It took twenty minutes for the drug to kick in, but she had the timing down pat: the plane lifted into the air and she looked out her window, already feeling not so much calm as detached, mildly stoned. It was a beautiful day, cloudless; later it would be hot. As the plane banked above the city she looked down at the skein of roads, cars sliding along them like beads or raindrops on a string. The traffic crept along 280, the road Randall would take to San Jose. She turned her head to keep it in view as the plane leveled out and began to head inland.

Behind her a man gasped; then another. Someone shouted. Everyone turned to look out the windows.

Below, without a sound that she could hear above the jet’s roar, the city fell away. Where it met the sea the water turned brown then white then turgid green. A long line of smoke arose – no, not smoke, Suzanne thought, starting to rise from her seat; dust. No flames, none that she could see; more like a burning fuse, though there was no fire, nothing but white and brown and black dust, a pall of dust that ran in a straight line from the city’s tip north to south, roughly tracking along the interstate. The plane continued to pull away, she had to strain to see it now, a long green line in the water, the bridges trembling and shining like wires. One snapped then fell, another, miraculously, remained intact. She couldn’t see the third bridge. Then everything was green crumpled hillsides, vineyards; distant mountains.

People began to scream. The pilot’s voice came on, a blaze of static then silence. Then his voice again, not calm but ordering them to remain so. A few passengers tried to clamber into the aisles but flight attendants and other passengers pulled or pushed them back into their seats. She could hear someone getting sick in the front of the plane. A child crying. Weeping, the buzz and bleat of cell phones followed by repeated commands to put them all away.

Amazingly, everyone did. It wasn’t a terrorist attack. The plane, apparently would not plummet from the sky; but everyone was too afraid that it might to turn their phones back on.

She took another pill, frantic, fumbling at the bottle and barely getting the cap back on. She opened it again, put two, no three, pills into her palm and pocketed them. Then she flagged down one of the flight attendants as she rushed down the aisle.

“Here,” said Suzanne. The attendant’s mouth was wide, as though she were screaming; but she was silent. “You can give these to them—”

Suzanne gestured towards the back of the plane, where a man was repeating the same name over and over and a woman was keening. “You can take one if you want, the dosage is pretty low. Keep them. Keep them.”

The flight attendant stared at her. Finally she nodded as Suzanne pressed the pill bottle into her hand.

“Thank you,” she said in a low voice. “Thank you so much, I will.”

Suzanne watched her gulp one pink tablet, then walk to the rear of the plane. She continued to watch from her seat as the attendant went down the aisle, furtively doling out pills to those who seemed to need them most. After about twenty minutes, Suzanne took another pill. As she drifted into unconsciousness she heard the pilot’s voice over the intercom, informing the passengers of what he knew of the disaster. She slept.

The plane touched down in Boston, greatly delayed by the weather, the ripple affect on air traffic from the catastrophe. It had been raining for thirty-seven days. Outside, glass-green sky, the flooded runways and orange cones blown over by the wind. In the plane’s cabin the air chimed with the sound of countless cell phones. She called Randall, over and over again; his phone rang but she received no answer, not even his voicemail.

Inside the terminal, a crowd of reporters and television people awaited, shouting questions and turning cameras on them as they stumbled down the corridor. No one ran; everyone found a place to stand, alone, with a cell phone. Suzanne staggered past the news crews, striking at a man who tried to stop her. Inside the terminal there were crowds of people around the TV screens, covering their mouths at the destruction. A lingering smell of vomit, of disinfectant. She hurried past them all, lurching slightly, feeling as though she struggled through wet sand. She retrieved her car, joined the endless line of traffic and began the long drive back to that cold green place, trees with leaves that had yet to open though it was already almost June, apple and lilac blossoms rotted brown on their drooping branches.

It was past midnight when she arrived home. The answering machine was blinking. She scrolled through her messages, hands shaking. She listened to just a few words of each, until she reached the last one.

A blast of static, satellite interference; then a voice. It was unmistakably Randall’s.

She couldn’t make out what he was saying. Everything was garbled, the connection cut out then picked up again. She couldn’t tell when he’d called. She played it over again, once, twice, seven times, trying to discern a single word, something in his tone, background noise, other voices: anything to hint when he had called, from where.

It was hopeless. She tried his cell phone again. Nothing.

She stood, exhausted, and crossed the room, touching table, chairs, countertops, like someone on a listing ship. She turned on the kitchen faucet and splashed cold water onto her face. She would go online and begin the process of finding numbers for hospitals, the Red Cross. He could be alive.

She went to her desk to turn on her computer. Beside it, in a vase, were the flowers Claude had sent her, a half-dozen dead narcissus smelling of rank water and slime. Their white petals were wilted, and the color had drained from the pale yellow cups.

All save one. A stem with a furled bloom no bigger than her pinkie, it had not yet opened when she’d left. Now the petals had spread like feathers, revealing its tiny yellow throat, three long crimson threads. She extended her hand to stroke first one stigma, then the next, until she had touched all three; lifted her hand to gaze at her fingertips, golden with pollen, and then at the darkened window. The empty sky, starless. Beneath blue water, the lost world.

MARK MORRIS

What Nature Abhors

MARK MORRIS BECAME a full-time writer in 1988 on the British government’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme, and a year later saw the publication of his first novel, Toady.

His thirteenth novel, Doctor Who: Forever Autumn, was recently released, and his fourteenth, The Deluge, will be published by Leisure Books. The author’s short stories, novellas, articles and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and magazines, and he is editor of the HWA Bram Stoker Award-nominated Cinema Macabre, a book of fifty horror movie essays by genre luminaries.

Forthcoming titles includes a Hellboy novel, The All-Seeing Eye, and a novella entitled It Sustains, which will be published by Earthling in summer 2008.

“ ‘What Nature Abhors’ was inspired by an otherwise extremely pleasant visit to Hampton Court Palace with my wife, Nel,” Morris explains. “It was a sunny day, and we were strolling through the gardens when we came across the statue of a figure, the upper half of which was tightly draped in black plastic.

“A sign explained that the statue had been damaged by the elements and was awaiting restoration, but the sight of it, like an upright, partially concealed murder victim, was arresting, incongruous and deliciously eerie, and it stayed with me.”

WHEN MEACHER OPENED his eyes the train was empty, though he had thought it was the jolt of the brakes that had woken him. He stood up, the low-level anxiety of disorientation already beginning to grind in his belly. The carriage was old and grimy, and smelled musty, as if each threadbare seat had absorbed too much sweat over too many years. The upholstery and stained carpet was predominantly grey with overlapping flecks in two shades of bilious green that jittered like TV interference on the periphery of his vision.

Outside the window the stone walls of the station building looked smoke-blackened, except for pale oblongs where the station’s name-plates had been removed, probably by vandals. As far as Meacher could see, it was not only the train that was deserted but the platform too – and so profoundly, it seemed to him, that he suppressed the urge to call out, oddly fearful of how intrusive, or worse insignificant, his voice might sound in the enveloping silence.

Stepping into the aisle, he automatically reached towards the luggage rack above his head, but found it empty. Had he had a bag, or even a jacket, at the outset of his journey? It would have been unusual for him to have travelled with neither, but his brain felt so dulled by fatigue that he honestly couldn’t remember. He sat down again, intimidated by solitude and by his own aberrant memory. He had a notion that the merest glimpse of a guard or another passenger, or perhaps even the incomprehensible blare of a station announcer’s voice, would be all that he would need to restore his sense of himself and his surroundings.

However when he realised, ten minutes later, that he was actually holding his breath in anticipation of a hint of life besides his own, he decided he could be passive no longer. He stood up with a decisiveness that was for no one’s benefit but his and lurched along the length of the carriage, his arms pumping like a cross-country skier’s as he yanked at seats to maintain his momentum.

Once on the platform he paused only briefly, so that he would not have to consciously acknowledge the absence of life. The EXIT sign caused his spirits to flare with a disproportionate fierceness if only because, albeit impersonal, it was a form of communication, and hinted at more to come. He stumped through the arch beneath the sign and found himself in a ticket office containing back-to-back rows of red metal seats and an unmanned ticket window. From above this too a name-plate had been removed, and with such care that Meacher wondered whether the place was understaffed because it was on the verge of closure.

The station was certainly small enough for this theory to be feasible, or at least appeared too inconsequential to have been granted a car park, because a further exit door led down a flight of stone steps and thence to what appeared to be a town centre side-street. Even out here there was no indication of life, though Meacher felt optimistic that he would encounter some sooner rather than later. There were signs of human occupation – the stink of stale urine as he had descended the steps, discarded confectionery wrappers and food cartons emblazoned with comfortingly iconic logos: McDonalds, Kit Kat, KFC. On the far side of a pedestrian crossing a chalked sign in a pub window promised BIG SCREEN SKY SPORTS! Meacher might have ventured inside to freshen his dry mouth with something sweet and fizzy if the pub’s wooden doors, so hefty they put him in mind of a dungeon, had not been firmly shut.

The pub’s neighbours were equally inaccessible. Indeed, a grubby jeweller’s and a shop which contained second-hand musical instruments had reinforced their unwillingness to attract trade via the employment of metal shutters. Meacher wondered what time it was. If the shops were closed and the pub not yet open he guessed it must be somewhere between six and seven p.m. Looking up afforded him no clue, because the greyness between the rooftops more closely resembled a thick net stretched between the buildings than a portion of sky.

He started to walk, though had no real idea in which direction the town centre lay. The silence was so unnerving that even the tiny crackle of grit beneath his soles made him wince. The narrow streets with their shuttered store-fronts all looked the same, and after a while he began to wonder whether he was walking in circles. His mind still felt oddly inactive, as though unable to form thoughts of any substance. Every so often he didn’t so much stop to listen as stumble to a halt, as if he was a machine that periodically needed to conserve its energy to recharge. Unless his senses were as faulty as his memory, it seemed he was utterly alone. There was neither the distant rumble of traffic, nor even the faintest trill of birdsong.

Perhaps it was Sunday and everything was shut. The thought was less a comfort, and more an attempt to prevent his sense of disquiet escalating into fear. In truth he knew that no town centre was ever this devoid of life. Something had happened here, probably while he had been asleep on the train. The town had been abandoned or evacuated for some reason, and somehow he had been overlooked.

Blundering to yet another halt he nervously sniffed the air. The only reason he could think of for such a wide-scale evacuation was the presence of some kind of severe physical threat. Was the place about to be bombed by terrorists or could the attack already be underway? Perhaps he was wandering around, blithely inhaling toxic fumes; perhaps germ warfare had come to middle England and he was gulping down anthrax spores or worse. Or perhaps, he thought, as he examined his skin and tried to convince himself that the nausea and breathlessness he was feeling were psychosomatic, the attack had already happened. Perhaps a nuclear bomb had been dropped close by and the town’s population had been evacuated to protect them from the approaching cloud of radioactive dust.

There were flaws in his thinking, he knew that. But one thing was certain: he had to get to a phone, had to find out what was going on. He started to run, telling himself it was only stress that was making his lungs hurt and his legs feel leaden. But if so, what was it that was affecting his memory? He couldn’t even remember getting on the train, never mind where he had been going, or for what reason.

As if his desperation for answers had made it happen, he suddenly emerged from the stultifying maze of drab streets full of shuttered buildings and found himself in a pedestrianised precinct leading to what appeared to be a central square. There were comfortingly familiar chain-stores here – Woolworth, Gap, HMV – though they seemed to be more impoverished versions of the ones he was used to seeing back home.

Home. Where was that? The renewed surge of panic that accompanied his dawning realisation that he knew almost nothing about himself was so overwhelming that he stumbled and almost fell as the strength drained out of him. He staggered up to a Miss Selfridge’s and put an outspread palm on the display window to steady himself. His head was pounding, his body slick with sweat, and he was finding it difficult to breathe.

His mind, however, was in overdrive. He thought of the air teeming with germs and chemicals, thought of toxins rushing through his body, disrupting and destroying it. He expected to start coughing up blood at any moment, expected blisters to erupt on his skin. He waited for the first searing pain in his gut or head, and hoped that when it came it would be intense enough to render him quickly unconscious. He’d rather pass out and die unknowing than writhe in agony as his innards dissolved into soup.

He was heartened to discover, however, that several minutes later, rather than deteriorating, his condition had actually improved. He felt well enough, at least, to push himself away from the window and stand unaided. He even managed a wry grin. Panic attack, he thought, not gas attack. Now pull yourself together, Meacher. It was at this point that he noticed that all the mannequins in the clothes shop window had plastic bags over their heads.

At first he thought it was some kind of avant-garde display, thought the store was simply using shock tactics to grab attention. If so, he hoped it backfired on them. It was creepy, sick and irresponsible. He almost welcomed his sense of indignation. For the first time since waking up on the train he was responding emotionally to something that was not directly related to his own situation, and the respite, though brief, was welcoming. He looked around almost as if hoping to spot someone in authority he could complain to, as if momentarily forgetting he was alone. His eyes swept across the rows of shops, of which several more – River Island, Envy, Benetton – used mannequins to display the clothes they sold, and as he noticed each of them in turn his indignation gave way to a mounting unease.

There was not one mannequin he could see that did not have its face hidden in some way. Most had plastic bags over their heads, though in Envy they (whoever they were; the staff presumably) had simply draped articles of clothing over the figures. The sight put Meacher in mind of parrots whose cages are covered to simulate night and encourage them to sleep. He couldn’t for the life of him imagine what the motives of the staff might have been in this instance, unless the gesture was somehow symbolic or perhaps even a form of black joke.

Whatever the reason, the sight of all those smothered heads gave him the creeps. He shuddered and turned his gaze purposefully towards the central square. As he did so, noticing that it contained a statue of what appeared to be a figure on horseback, which he thought might be able to give him an indication of where he was, he heard the first sound behind him that he hadn’t made himself.

It was an odd sound, and brief, like someone liquidly clearing their throat or attempting to gargle with their own phlegm. It was also faint and muffled, as if he had heard it inside a house from several rooms away. He whirled round, but by the time he had spun ninety degrees all was quiet once more. Nevertheless, he hurried across to the door of River Island, which he had pinpointed in his mind as the source of the sound, and yanked the handle. Finding the door locked, he peered through one of its reinforced glass panels at the store interior.

The place was gloomy and apparently deserted. He was about to turn away when yet another mannequin caught his eye. This one was standing at the back of the shop, and like all the others had a plastic bag draped over its head. In this case, however, not only did the bag appear to be clinging tightly to the mannequin’s face, but there seemed to be an oval-shaped indentation in the plastic that to Meacher resembled a gaping mouth desperate for air.

Recoiling with a cry, Meacher turned away. There was a part of him that instantly wanted to go back, if only to reassure himself that what he had seen had been nothing but the result of shadow-play and his own imagination. However his revulsion was too great, and propelled him towards the statue that dominated the central square. As he drew closer to it he noticed two things almost in unison. One was the presence of a quartet of telephone boxes – all Perspex and cold grey steel – on the pavement outside a darkened café called Petra’s Pantry, and the other was that what appeared to be a hessian sack had been pulled down over the statue’s head.

At least they left the horse alone, Meacher thought, and felt a sudden urge to giggle. He clapped a hand over his mouth and rushed towards the telephone boxes like a drunken man looking for somewhere to throw up.

Wrenching open the door almost pulled his arm out of its socket. He fell inside, snatched up the receiver and rammed it against his ear. The familiar hum of the dialling tone filled him with such joy that he did laugh out loud, and was immediately alarmed at how hysterical he sounded. The display screen informed him there was a minimum call charge of twenty pence. Meacher shoved his left hand into his pocket and felt nothing but lining. Tilting his head to trap the phone between shoulder and ear, he rooted through all his pockets increasingly feverishly with both hands. At some point during his snooze on the train he must have been robbed because his pockets were empty. Not only did he have no money, he had no wallet, no train tickets, not even a handkerchief. Had he once had a mobile phone? If so, it had gone now.

He was on the verge of taking out his frustration by smashing the receiver against the smugly indifferent display screen when he remembered that emergency calls were free. Unable to prevent the escape of a triumphant whoop that he found hard to equate to himself, he jabbed thrice at the nine, and was only able to quell his eagerness to do it again by clenching his fist.

A phone burred once, then was interrupted by a barely audible click. Meacher was framing his lips to say hello into the expectant pause that followed when the screaming began.

It was a child’s voice, shrill and bubbling with terror. Its words were running together, to form a plea that it seemed would never end. “Nodaddynodaddynopleasedon’tpleasestopdaddynopleaseno—” Meacher slammed the phone into its cradle, then slid, as if boneless, to the floor. He wrapped his arms around his head and began to keen.

The child’s voice had had a devastating effect on him, not only because it had been distressing to hear, but because it had awakened what felt like a memory he couldn’t grasp. He knew the child, he was sure of that, but he couldn’t put a name or face to it. He clenched his hands into fists and began to pound the top of his head, punishing his brain for failing to yield its secrets. With each blow he grew angrier at himself and his situation, until his rage reached such a peak that he scrambled to his feet, shoved open the door of the telephone box and charged, teeth bared, towards the hooded statue.

The base of the statue was a rectangular block of stone six feet high and inset with panels, each of which contained an elaborate carving of interweaving vines. Meacher threw himself at it, scraping a layer of skin off his arms as he hauled himself up beside the horse and its rider. The statue was slightly larger than life-size, the rider’s covered head now eight or ten feet above him. As Meacher placed his left foot on the horse’s raised foreleg and grasped a loop of stone rein to heave himself closer to the sack which he intended to tear from the rider’s head in an act of manic defiance, he heard the rattling thump of a door opening on the opposite side of the square.

Excited, fearful, and even a little abashed at the prospect of being discovered in such an uncompromising position, Meacher strained to see which of the many doors had opened and who had opened it. However he hadn’t raised himself quite high enough to lift his gaze above the horse’s frozen mane, and so had to clamber down from his perch and peer between its motionlessly galloping legs, feeling not unlike a child engaged in a game of hide and seek.

What he saw bewildered him for no more than a second before cold, harsh fear stabbed at the base of his throat, then cascaded through his body, lodging in his stomach like broken glass. On the far side of the square, the door of a pub, the fleur-de-lis, had opened and four men had emerged from it. Dressed in jeans and shirts and boots, they looked perfectly normal except for one thing. Like the mannequins in the clothes stores and the stone rider atop its horse, each of them wore a sack-like hood over their head.

The two thoughts that sped through Meacher’s mind were more like sharp, bright flashes of despair than anything else. The first thought was an instinctive one that Meacher would have found curious had he had time to ponder it. He thought that if only he had removed the sack from the statue’s head and placed it over his own, he would have been safe. His second thought was perhaps equally intriguing, but more fundamental: he knew with absolute conviction that he had to get away before the men caught sight of him.

Even as he jumped sprawlingly from the statue’s plinth and tried to use its blocky mass to cover his retreat, however, he knew he was already too late. The men did not cry out, but even through their makeshift hoods it was obvious they were aware of his presence. They moved towards him with a purpose both remorseless and terrifying, and when he began to run, his terror making him feel as though he was wearing lead boots, their pursuit became more purposeful still.

The subsequent chase through the unknown town’s deserted streets was as surreally terrifying as any nightmare. Meacher’s terror made him stumble and stagger and skid. Within moments his body was greasy with sweat, which flowed from his hair and into his eyes, blinding him. His heart hammered, his lungs toiled, and his breath felt like a length of barbed wire that he couldn’t dislodge from his throat. Whenever he glanced back, his pursuers were the same distance behind him, which may have been encouraging if not for the fact that they appeared to be marching rather than running, their movements effortless, machine-like, full of deadly intent.

They were toying with him, Meacher knew. They were wearing him down prior to closing in for the kill. Meacher wished he could see their faces, and yet at the same time dreaded the disclosure of whatever might be concealed within those sack-cloth hoods. In fact, in some ways the prospect of finding out was what terrified him more than anything else.

The streets were getting narrower, danker. Sooner or later he would come to a dead end and then that would be that. If he couldn’t outrun his pursuers he had to escape them in some other way. The only viable alternative was to evade them for long enough to find a hiding place. At best that would be a short-term solution, but at least it would give him time to think, to plan his next move.

He rounded a corner, his hand slapping the brick to steady himself as he changed direction, and – as though he had willed it to appear – saw an aperture between two buildings on his right, so narrow it could barely even be termed an alleyway. He plunged down it, and was immediately doused in a gloom cold enough to make him feel he was underwater. Above him the tops of the buildings on either side of the rat-run appeared to be craning to touch one another. Certainly they gave the impression that they were squeezing the thin white stripe of sky that separated them still thinner. So dark did this make the alleyway that from his present position Meacher couldn’t see its end.

It was too late to change his mind, though. If he emerged from the alleyway now his pursuers would be on to him in an instant. He began to trot forward, stepping as lightly as he could in the hope that those behind him might plough straight past the slit-like entrance, oblivious. How much could they see through those hoods? How much could they hear? How much could they smell?

This last thought came unbidden, and disturbed him the most. He thought of sniffer dogs, attuned not to the scent of food or drugs, but to fear. He quickened his pace. Was the alleyway getting narrower still? If he stretched out both arms like a child pretending to fly, he reckoned he might just about be able to touch the buildings on either side.

As he passed them, he barely glanced at the individual establishments embedded within the grey stone edifices. On a subconscious level he registered that each of them was a cramped shop unit, comprising of a door and a narrow display window with a sign above it. However there was not one that wasn’t coated in a layer of dust and grime so thick that it both obscured the name on the sign and made it impossible to tell what the shop sold, or once had. This, combined with a deepening murk that felt like twilight’s closing fist, made him fail to notice that one of the shop doors was ajar until it creaked as it widened further.

Meacher’s senses were so attuned to danger that his instinctive leftward spring was balletic. His landing, however, was not so graceful. His ankle turned on the pitted tarmac and he all but shoulder-charged the door opposite the one which had opened. As he fought to regain his senses and his balance, he saw a grey-shrouded figure materialise from the gloom beyond the open door and extend a beckoning hand. The figure’s face was concealed within a triangle of shadow so black it seemed impenetrable, but its words were clear enough.

“In here, quickly, if you don’t want them to find you.”

Though Meacher hesitated, it still took him less than a second to make up his mind. The boom of his shoulder hitting the door was even now reverberating in the alleyway; in the otherwise total silence his pursuers would have to be deaf not to have heard it. Scrambling upright, he propelled himself towards the figure, that backed away at his approach.

Crossing the threshold felt like passing through a portal between this world and the next. The darkness into which Meacher plunged seemed so profound that for several seconds he was completely disorientated. Opening his eyes wide and finding nothing for his vision to latch on to, he flailed with his arms, and was rewarded or punished by a crack of pain across the knuckles of his left hand. Undeterred, he groped again for the hard surface he had encountered and found a thin ledge of some kind – possibly a shelf or the edge of a desk. He clung to it like a shipwrecked man might cling to driftwood until his eyes had adapted to the sudden absence of light.

It took perhaps a minute for the slowly emerging slatted shapes to gain sufficient definition to reveal themselves as books. As soon as they did, he acknowledged that the shop was full of them. Of course, he would have known sooner if he had focused on any sense other than his eyesight, because as soon as he saw the books he became aware of their musty odour. In any other circumstance he would have found the smell comforting, even homely, though he had hardly read a book since his childhood. Hearing a snick behind him he whirled, but it was only the sound of the catch sliding into place as the shop door closed. So dingy was it, and so effectively did the shop owner blend into his surroundings, that the cowled man’s movement from the door to the far side of the room seemed as soundless and insubstantial as a drift of smoke.

“Thank you,” Meacher said, his throat clogged by dust and exertion, but the man’s only response was a sharp upraising of his left hand.

Though it was hard to make him out in the gloom, Meacher could tell by his stance that he was listening. As though deferring to a greater authority, Meacher too remained as still as he could, even though his exhausted body longed to sag. He did his utmost to contain his breath despite the attempts his racing heart and toiling lungs were making to encourage him to pant and wheeze. The two of them stood there for so long that Meacher began to wonder whether the shop owner was once again waiting for him to speak, and he was gathering the courage to do so when the man murmured, “Alas.”

Before Meacher could ask him what was wrong, a pounding on the door invalidated his question. Meacher instinctively scuttled forward, then ducked, twisting his head to look wildly behind him. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the blows that seemed to be making the books shiver on their shelves was that they were not urgent but ponderous, relentless, evenly spaced. They sounded more like the pounding of some vast machine piston than human fists on wood. They suggested to Meacher that his pursuers would never give up, that they would hunt him down remorselessly, that in their eyes (if they had eyes beneath those hoods) the outcome of the chase was inevitable. Still cowering, he looked from the door to the shop owner, in the same way that a small child would look to a parent for guidance.

“Go up the stairs,” the man murmured, pointing to a shadowy patch of wall between two bookcases that on closer inspection Meacher realised was a door. “You’ll find an unlocked room there. Go inside and lock yourself in.”

Will I be safe? Meacher would have asked if fear had not denied him his voice, and if he had not been so terrified of the answer.

He blundered across the room, feeling as though the must and mould of ancient books was lining his lungs like silt, and scrabbled at the dark blot of shadow that was the handle to the door that led upstairs. It opened smoothly, devoid of the creak he was expecting. He caught a glimpse of the stairs – little more than bands of differently-hued shadow – before the door clicked shut behind him, taking the last vestige of light with it.

A part of him welcomed the blackness. He wished he could curl up and close his eyes and lose himself in its folds. It was almost with reluctance that he forced himself on, edging forward until his toe-end connected with the bottom stair. He began to climb, his body now incredibly weary, his joints grinding with glassy pain. He tried not to wonder where this would end, whether – by some miracle – he would escape the clutches of his pursuers, recover his memory and find his way home. Without knowing why, he had become a fugitive, and the purpose of a fugitive was to run, and to keep running until he either got away or was caught.

Maybe his new-found ally would help him. Maybe, when Mea-cher’s pursuers had gone, the two of them would sit down together and the shop owner would answer all his questions. Meacher couldn’t hear anything from downstairs, couldn’t even hear the pounding. Was the shop owner talking to his pursuers at this moment? Or had they simply moved on? Had they knocked on the shop door not because they had known he was inside, but because they were knocking on every door, hoping to either rouse and question the occupants or simply to frighten him into bolting from wherever he might have chosen to hide?

He knew he had reached the upper landing only when his raised right foot failed to encounter another stair. He settled it gently next to his left and used his arms as antennae to probe the way ahead. Encountering no resistance, he shuffled forward, the soles of his feet scraping along a surface that felt like rough, gritty wood. After a few steps he moved to his right, and within seconds encountered a wall of what seemed to be cold, uneven plaster.

Feeling his way along, it only took him several seconds more to locate a door. His hands slithered over it until one of them found the knob, which was twisted in both directions several times before Meacher concluded that it was locked.

What was it the shop owner had said? Go upstairs and into the unlocked room? Something like that. Which meant, presumably, that of several rooms up here, only one was unlocked. He simply had to find it, that was all, simply had to be methodical.

Rather than move across to the other side of the landing, he decided to feel his way to the next door on this side, then there would be no chance of missing one. Blinking into the darkness and finding it unchanging, he probed the way cautiously forward with his feet, and almost immediately his left palm, caressing the wall, bumped against the jutting side of a second door frame.