The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, volume 18

Even without his sight, his hand moved unerringly to the door knob, and this time, with barely a twist, the door opened. Meacher stepped inside and quietly closed it behind him. Remembering what the shop owner had said about locking himself in, his searching fingers found a key, which rewarded him with a satisfying click when he twisted it clockwise.

Turning to face the room, he realised that it was not as dark as he had first thought. The faint, brownish illumination was provided by a meagre spill of light through a small window coated in grime and dust. Though the light was barely managing to establish itself, Meacher could just make out a bed with rumpled bedclothes and a tall blocky wardrobe. He did not notice the child, however, until it started whispering.

His head twisted so sharply that a hot thread of pain flared in his neck. The child was standing so closely to the wall furthest away from the door that until he focused on it fully it resembled nothing so much as a particular fall of shadow on an uneven patch of plaster. Thinking that his fumblings at the door may have caused the child to scuttle across the room and press itself against the wall in fear, Meacher moved closer to reassure it, more out of fear that it would give him away than because of a genuine urge to offer it comfort. However he had taken no more than four steps towards it when he stopped.

He had assumed the whispering to be a prayer, or an attempt by the child to find its voice, but now that he was close enough to hear it clearly he realised it was neither. What the child was whispering were the words that it, or some other child, had wailed in abject terror down the phone in the square at him. “Nodaddynodaddynopleasedon’tpleasestopdaddynopleaseno.”

It was as though, by repeating the words, the child was giving them the power of an incantation, was mocking or damning him with them. Meacher felt anger, or more than anger, boiling inside him and he took two further steps across the room. It was only at this point, some six or eight feet from the child, that the scant light finally enabled him to make out particular details that had been denied him from further away. It was these details that caused the strength to drain from his legs so abruptly that he thumped forward on to his knees.

The child did not have its back to the wall at all; it was facing the wall, presenting its back, almost insolently, to him. Furthermore, like the mannequins, like his pursuers, like the statue in the square, it was wearing a bag over its head.

It was the sight of the bag – black plastic wound round with masking tape – that triggered the memories in Meacher’s mind. Now, finally, he was beginning to realise why he was here. He held out his hands in supplication.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry. Please. Have mercy.”

Slowly the child turned to face him. “Nodaddynodaddynoplease don’t – pleasestopdaddynopleaseno,” it whispered.

As though relishing the moment, the child raised its hands, its fingertips resting on the black plastic, making it crackle. Then, still whispering, it hooked its fingers into the plastic and began to tear the bag from its face.

LYNDA E. RUCKER

The Last Reel

LYNDA E. RUCKER WAS BORN in Birmingham, Alabama, and currently lives in Portland, Oregon, but will be packing it in shortly to go vagabonding around other parts of the world, for as long as those other parts of the world will have her.

In the last few years she has taken time off from writing fiction to pursue a graduate degree and, as an inexplicable result, has several stories scheduled to appear this year.

Her fiction has been, or will be, published in The Third Alternative, Black Static and Supernatural Tales, among other periodicals. This is her second appearance in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror.

“This story came from two places,” she reveals: “an imagined dialogue – which practically wrote itself – between a film lover and his girlfriend playing a silly game (and friends who read this commented that I seemed to have written a story in which my partner was the main character); and my grandmother’s house in rural Georgia, which I found spooky as a child.

“I once dreamed a witch lived behind that house – and to this day, as it falls further into dereliction and collapses into the woods surrounding it, it still feels like a terrifying, magical place to me.”

“WAIT A MINUTE,” Sophie said, “give me a clue, I know this one.”

“If you know it, you don’t need a clue, do you?” Kevin lit another cigarette and sank back against the seat.

She shot him a look. “Watch the road,” he cautioned, and she reached over to punch him in the shoulder.

“Smartass,” she said.

He sang softly, in a deep false bass. “Seven, seven, seven . . .”

“The Magnificent Seven,” she finished for him. “I said give me a clue, not give it away.”

“Well, if you didn’t get the Seven Samurai reference what could I—”

Sophie hit the brakes. The car slewed to the right and skidded to a stop.

“That was the turn back there,” she said. “Way to go, navigator.”

“I know that one. Kiwi film about Black Death victims who time-travel to modern-day New Zealand. And there was a Buster Keaton flick with the same name. Either way, I am trouncing your ass!”

“That wasn’t part of the game. Could you stop being a movie geek for five damn minutes?” Sophie asked rhetorically, dragging the gear stick into reverse.

“I’m a film critic. I know no other way.”

“Well, next time we’ll play some kind of – of cooking game or something and I will trounce your ass, as you so elegantly put it.”

“A cooking game? Food geek.”

“At least we eat well. You guys would live on popcorn and Junior Mints if it wasn’t for people like me.”

The missed turn was unsignposted and, he noted, not visible until you were upon it and saw the break in the trees and brush that grew right to the edge of the highway. He decided not to mount a self-defense at that particular moment.

“Great,” Sophie murmured moments later as they bumped up the narrow gravel lane, rocks popping ominously against the underside of the car, branches scraping at the sides. “I wonder if the rental company has a ‘back of beyond’ clause absolving us from damages incurred in the actual middle of nowhere . . .”

She trailed off as they rounded a bend and the house was before them, all at once. It lurked in a clearing where all the grass had died and been dug up by the six dogs Sophie’s Aunt Rose had kept. According to the animal control people they were all feral, and had to be destroyed.

The house itself was low and dark, all blank windows and weathered boards the color of old dishwater.

Kevin said, “It’s haunted, right? I mean, it would have to be. Jesus, what a dump.” He hated the way his voice went up at the end, losing control a little bit like the sight of the house had really shaken him. “Jesus,” he said again.

“Well. It’s not like we have to spend the night here or anything.” Sophie was brisk, the way she always got when something made her uneasy.

“House on Haunted Hill,” he said.

“What?”

“William Castle feature. Vincent Price offers ten thousand dollars to whoever will spend the entire night in a haunted house.”

“Ah, but ten thousand dollars doesn’t go nearly as far as it did back in those days, even if having Mr Vincent Price do the offering makes it a little more attractive. Did they up the going price in the remake?”

“In the what?”

“The remake.”

“Blasphemer!” he said.

“Race you!” she answered. She was out the door before he knew it, her sandals clattering on the steps when he was only halfway across the yard.

“No fair,” he said, “you tricked me.” They were both laughing until she turned round to face the house, when it suddenly seemed rude to display too much levity as they prepared to survey the meager estate of poor deceased Aunt Rose.

Sophie’s key stuck in the front door, and for a moment he hoped it wouldn’tworkatall, butthenthelockturnedeasily.Thedarkspilledout.

They crossed the threshold into a foyer smelling of mold, and stale with the heat of a hot September day. Just a few feet ahead he could make out monstrous shapes that were revealed, once Sophie touched the light switch, to be a coat-rack bearing numerous heavy coats, and a hulking wardrobe. The hallway was short, a few steps across the worn grey carpet carrying him to the end.

Sophie had shown him photos late last night at her mother’s condo back in Atlanta, the mutilated snapshots with sister Rose snipped from every one. It struck him as cruel and excessive, the way family interactions so often do to anyone on the outside, the story behind it all – for there always is one – too convoluted and painful to ever be properly recalled or recounted by the perceived injured party. You have no idea what she did to me, you can’t understand, you see she always.

Already the estrangement made more sense, though, now that he’d seen the house. He tried to imagine two sisters more different than Sophie’s bright, intimidating mother, vice-president of something-or-other at a big Atlanta bank, and this weird reclusive woman lost like a fairy tale witch in her spooky house in the woods. “Can you remember her at all?” he’d asked.

“Once,” Sophie had told him; she’d been very young – she couldn’t say for sure how young, but once, at some family gathering, maybe a funeral. “She scared me.”

No, that wasn’t right, her mother had insisted. Sophie and her Aunt Rose had never met. “I can’t fathom any circumstance under which that would occur,” her mother had told Kevin with a brittle laugh.

Sophie just shrugged. “She’s lying. Aunt Rose taught me a weird little dance, like a jig or something, but then Mother made me stop doing it when she found out who I learned it from. So I used to do it in secret, in my bedroom.” It was all, she said, that she did remember, and now scary Aunt Rose was dead and she was doing the responsible grown-up thing where her mother could not. I’ll go out there. I’ll look the place over, for crazy scary Aunt Rose had left the dump to Sophie in her will.

Sophie’s mother had been opposed.

“I’m telling you, you don’t even need to deal with it, honey. You stay right where you are. I’ll have people take care of it – get some appraisers out there, get the place sold, have the money deposited straight into your account.”

The harder her mother pushed, the more Sophie’s resolve grew to handle matters her own way. Kevin stayed silent and stayed out of it.

The doors to either side of them leading out of the foyer were closed. “Well,” Sophie said, and reached for the one on her right. Kevin had a moment of uneasiness as she passed into a darkness that swallowed her up. “Good God.” A dim light went on and he joined her just at the doorway of the kitchen, where the rancid smell of spoiled food hit him full on. “Will you look at that,” Sophie said, and he did. All three windows – one over the sink, and two at the front of the house – were covered with cardboard and held in place with black duct tape.

The rest of the room was unremarkable, old but standard appliances, rough wooden cabinets. The refrigerator door stood open, the bulb burned out, and unidentifiable bundles – perhaps packages of meat – littered the floor before it, some of them leaking thin rivulets of dark fluid. Scattered across the counter, lumps that had presumably been fruit or vegetables were grey and furry.

“I’ve worked in kitchens that were almost this unsanitary,” Sophie said, but neither one of them smiled.

He wanted to tell her to stop then, not to go into any more rooms ahead of him. She’d laugh at him, or get annoyed. This place is creepy enough, don’t freak me out.

“Enough seen,” she said, pinching her nose, backing out, pulling the door shut after them. “How I hate to say this, but maybe my mother was right.”

The other door, now. Blackness, but this time he was prepared for it. In the second before Sophie found the switch he heard her finger scrabbling along the wall. It reminded him of something dried out and dead.

“Well,” said Sophie, “what have we here?”

“Wow,” he said, struck stupid.

Even without the contrast of the squalid kitchen, the suffocating opulence of the living room would have been striking. Oriental rugs covered every inch of wall space, including, presumably, the windows. His knowledge of old furniture was confined to an occasional stroll through an antique mall back in Seattle, idly wondering what would possess people to pay hundreds of dollars for old Coca-Cola merchandise. But even his unpracticed eye spotted some value in the chaos of clashing eras and continents. A Chinese lacquer cabinet was wedged against one wall, next to it a couple of heavy ornate chairs, and a sleek Art Deco lamp. A mostly clear path meandered through the clutter to the opposite door, but you still had to make yourself compact to get through.

Sophie had already done so, fighting her way past a roll-top desk and tugging at an unremarkable looking occasional table that blocked the next door. He had a passing irrational urge to beg her not to open it. Too late anyway, as miraculous afternoon sunshine fell across her path.

“Auntie’s bedroom,” she said as she stepped through the doorway, and he hurried to join her with a growing anxiety that the first two rooms had left in him, a sense of being lost, buried alive.

The unblocked windows helped him to breathe easier. “I wish you’d stop going ahead of me,” he said. Auntie’s bedroom was as neat and bare as a nun’s cell. A single iron bed, white pillows, white coverlet pulled up tight. One wooden nightstand, empty save for an overflowing ashtray and a crumpled cigarette package. The cigarette butts were ringed with bright red lipstick. They reminded him of how badly he wanted to smoke, and he fumbled for his lighter before remembering he’d left his pack in the car. He crossed to one of the windows.

“I can’t see our car,” he said.

“Of course not. You’re looking out the back of the house.”

But that was nonsense. He ought to be seeing the driveway, and the ruined front yard, but there was only a stretch of bare ground and then a line of trees thickening into forest. He had a sense then that they moved, like curtains fluttering when something stirred on the other side.

“Look,” Sophie said. She lifted a shoebox from the other side of the bed and set it on the night table. He saw her flinch and jump back. The back of her hand caught the ashtray, and it smashed to the floor.

“Shit!” Sophie yelled.

“Are you okay?”

“I thought a spider ran out of the box. What an idiot.”

He came round the side of the bed and saw beads of blood welling up on her legs and sandaled feet where the shattered glass had pierced her skin. “I’m okay,” she said, “it just scared me. There’s probably Band Aids in the bathroom.” She pushed past him and opened the last door. He caught sight of a heavy porcelain sink and a bathtub on feet, then Sophie said, “Ew” and he went in after her. Brown water sputtered from the faucet.

“It’s just because it hasn’t been turned on in a while,” he said, “it’ll clear in a few minutes.”

“No Band-Aids,” she said, “no medicine cabinet, nothing. Apparently Aunt Rose didn’t even use soap. Doesn’t matter. They’re shallow.” Working in a kitchen had left her inured to minor cuts and burns. “Let’s see what’s in the box.”

Let’s not, he wanted to say, but what came out when he followed her back to the bed was, “Three movies featuring a head-in-a-box. Name them.”

“God,” she said, “do you have to be so morbid? Se7en.” She lifted the lid.

“That’s one,” he said, so he wouldn’t shout something stupid and hysterical like Don’t look inside!

“It’s filled with photographs,” she said. “Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia.”

“That’s head-in-a-bag, not head-in-a-box,” he said desperately.

“Oh, for God’s sake. Picky, aren’t we?” Her voice changed. “That’s weird.”

“What?”

“I don’t know how she got hold of these. It’s all pictures of me.”

So. What’s the story with your mom and your Aunt Rose? he’d asked.

Mom always said she was a witch.

A witch . . . Like a Wicca-witch? New Agey, blessed be and white magic and all that? Like Teresa? Teresa was their neighbor back in Seattle.

No, I mean a bad old witch. Yeah, hard to believe, isn’t it? It’s the one subject guaranteed to make my rational mom completely irrational.

Then she said, Also, something about my dad.

Your dad . . . Sophie never talked about her father.

When they were young. I don’t know; they fought over him. He was Rose’s boyfriend and Mom stole him, I think. I don’t remember him at all.

She said it so cleanly, so matter-of-factly, that he couldn’t believe she wasn’t masking her pain.

He disappeared before I was three. Who are you when you’re that young? You’re not even through becoming a person yet – you don’t have memories, even, just bright flashes of moments here and there, and what people remember for you, what they’ve told you so many times you start to think it belongs to you. He went away before I could have any part of him to myself.

“Barton Fink,” she said. She was pulling out handfuls of photos and tossing them on the bed. Sophie as toddler in a birthday hat, Sophie grinning to expose missing teeth for an elementary school photo, Sophie wearing a strapless blue dress and holding hands with a skinny dark-haired boy at a high school dance.

“Check. That’s two.”

She grinned, waved snapshots at him in a less than menacing manner. “I’ll show you the life of the mind!”

“You don’t look a bit like John Goodman.”

But she wasn’t listening anymore. “What’s this?”

He had a sinking feeling of inevitability, like the second or third time you watch a movie in which something terrible is going to happen, and even as you know it’s coming, some part of you is hoping against hope that this time the film will magically find its path to a different fate. But this was not a movie, and it was nothing he’d seen before, so there was no reason for this sick feeling to engulf him when Sophie pulled a key out of the box.

“This is freaking me out,” she said. “Where did she get all these pictures of me? And why’d she keep them?”

“Maybe your mom sent them to her.” Families did weird stuff like that, mingling devotion and resentment, like his cousin Shelby who wouldn’t speak to her dad but made her son write him a letter once a month.

“Sent a whole shoebox full of pictures?” she asked. He shrugged. “It looks like a door key,” she went on. “I wonder . . . Kevin, do you have any idea how much that stuff in the other room is worth? What if this is the key to something even more valuable? Imagine if I came out of this with enough money to open my own restaurant?” Her eyes were shining when she looked at him. He wanted to take her hand and insist that they leave immediately, tell her that her mother was right and they should let other people deal with this.

Instead he said again, “This window ought to look out at the front yard. Why can’t I see the car?”

“There’s nothing out there.” She was back at the doorway to the living room, tense and impatient. “There must be another room. Maybe she hung a rug over the doorway like she hid all the windows.”

He lingered, not wanting to go back to the stuffy closed-in part of the house. On a whim he tried one of the windows; it seemed important to have another route of escape besides the front door, and anyway he was noticing a heavy flowery scent hanging about, the kind of sickly sweetness used to disguise the odor of something foul. He took a deep breath, but could find no hint to the source of the rottenness underneath. It was not the same as the spoiled food in the kitchen; this was something earthier and more intense.

Fresh air would do him good. He tugged at the window, and it did not budge. It appeared to be painted shut.

When he walked back into the living room, Sophie had vanished. A woman stood with her back to him, shoulders rigid, black-haired, wearing Sophie’s sweater. She turned and smiled at him, Sophie’s smile, Sophie’s eyes.

“Check out this funky wig,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be great for Halloween? What do you think my batty old aunt was doing with something like this?”

“Take it off,” he pleaded, but he must not have sounded serious at all because she laughed and flounced past him. “Head in a box,” she said. “Are you sure it’s not Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia?”

“Of course I’m sure, it’s my clue. I made it up,” he said, but he could no longer remember what he’d had in mind for the third head-in-a-box film or why he’d started them on such a gruesome tack in the first place.

“Torso-in-a-box,” she said. “Boxing Helena, ugh. You’ve got me. I need another clue.” She had her back to him again, and her voice coming from the black-haired figure unnerved him. “Did I ever tell you what my Aunt Rose looked like?” she said. “She was beautiful once. Way more attractive than my mom. Mom got the brains, Rose got the beauty.”

“How do you know that? That she was beautiful?”

“You know what?” She laughed. “I hid some pictures of her when I was little, before my mom got hold of all the rest and cut them to pieces. I still have them somewhere, I guess. When I was a kid and I’d get mad at my mom, I’d make up a story that an evil witch had taken her over, my real mom was actually Aunt Rose and that she and my dad were coming to rescue me. Isn’t that stupid?”

“We should get going,” he said. “There’s nothing else out here, and it’s a long drive back.”

“That dance she taught me,” Sophie said. “She called it the something reel. The witches’ reel? Oh, I can’t remember. Anyway, I just want to look around a little more. I want to see if we can find out what this key goes to.”

He wanted to say that if it was truly concealing something so valuable, surely Aunt Rose would not make it so difficult to find and identify. Then again, Aunt Rose was at least a little bit crazy. Someone like Aunt Rose might think I have to hide it, so no one finds it and steals it before she gets here.

“I know,” Sophie said. He followed her into the hallway, where she was tugging at the wardrobe.

“Be careful,” he said, “you’ll bring it down on yourself.” He went forward to help her. “Take hold at the bottom here. We don’t want to overbalance it.” He had not noticed, when they first walked in, how much worse the smell was here. This place was sealed up so tightly, could the air go bad, like you heard about in caving collapses, mining disasters?

Between the two of them they heaved the wardrobe a couple of feet away from the wall. Sophie said, “Kevin, look. Come round on my side.” She’d been right, after all; it had concealed a door, and she could twist the key in the lock and open the door just far enough to allow her to slip inside.

“Don’t,” he said, while she still stood on his side of the doorway, her hand on the knob.

She grinned at him. “Let’s make a deal. You tell me the other head-in-a-box movie and I won’t open it.”

“I can’t remember,” he said. “I guess it was Bring Me the Head. Anyway, it wasn’t even my turn just then.”

“Not good enough,” she said, and slipped into the darkness.

Long moments later she spoke. “I can’t find a light switch. Maybe there’s a string I can pull or something. Do you have your lighter?” She sounded as though she were speaking to him from the bottom of a well.

“It’s in the car,” he said. “Sophie, come out of there.”

“Can’t you just run out and get it for me? Come on, Kevin, five minutes and then we’re gone.”

He hesitated, then threw up his hands. “Fine.” It was easier to get angry with her. He must have imagined the way the front door resisted him when he turned the knob; it was swollen from exposure, maybe, and that made it stick when he tugged at it. Then he was out on the porch again, where the day was still warm and sunny and their car waited just where he’d parked it. Halfway back to it he turned and searched for the bedroom windows he’d looked out from.

A movement on the roof caught his eye. Something scampered across the peak and out of his sight down the other side. Something blackened and low. Just a squirrel.

He snatched the lighter up from where he’d left it in the well between seats and sprinted back to the house. He called her name as he burst through the front door, and her voice came back to him, muffled.

“Oh, shit, Sophie, why’d you shut the door?” He slumped against the wardrobe, rattled the knob. “It’s locked. Did you lock it?”

She sounded close – she must have been just on the other side of the door, but she might have been whispering against his ear. “There’s nothing in here.”

“Well, stay where you are. Don’t go moving around in there when you can’t see.” But she was doing just that; he could hear her, thumping about. “Are you dancing in there?” The something reel. The witches’ reel.

He’d once read somewhere that the best way to go about breaking down a door was to direct a blow near the lock.

“What are you doing?” Sophie said, as his foot smashed against it. His second kick splintered the wood; it was old and cheap and not made to keep anyone out. More than anything, he did not want to walk into that inky blackness. But he got the lighter out and struck at it once, twice, with the ball of his thumb. Third time’s the charm.

As he stepped over the threshold, he was surprised at how much of the room it illuminated when he held it high over his head. He felt his shoulders sag, tension draining out of them as he asked himself what he’d been expecting to find in there; Sophie’s father’s head in a box, perhaps? She was right, it was a small, bare, perfectly square room, perhaps ten feet by ten.

Then he noticed the walls. He stepped forward, one, two paces. “Get up,” he said. Sophie sat cross-legged in the middle of the room. The flame nipped at his thumb and he let the light go out.

He hoped that she had not seen what he had: every inch of wall space covered in thick black cursive writing or tattered pages torn from books, punctuated with photographs of Sophie. He thought that some of them had been hung upside down, perhaps defaced. He didn’t want to look again to confirm it.

Sophie was silent. Then, “There’s something painted on the floor here.” She sounded different in the dark. They had been together for years; how could any nuance be unknown to him? He took a few more steps in. He felt swallowed by the blackness. “Bring the light over here.”

His thumb was raw as he spun it against the wheel of the lighter. “Sophie,” he said, and the little flame spewed; the room flickered once more in shades of grey. He squatted, and held the lighter down low and close between them. “Sophie, will you please take off that wig?”

She giggled, and that sounded wrong too. “If it’s such a big deal to you,” she said, and snatched it off, tossed it in a corner. He wished she hadn’t done that, and almost asked her to pick it up. He hated the idea of it lying there like some furry dead thing, and he let the light go out once more.

“Your mother’s going to get worried if we don’t head back soon,” he said.

“I wonder what’s in the wardrobe?” she said.

“Your father’s head?”

Silence again. Then, “That’s not funny. Anyway, wouldn’t be much left of it, would there?”

“I’m sorry. I was kidding. It was stupid.” He could feel his shirt damp and stuck to his back, sweat trickling down his sides from his armpits. He became aware that his mouth hung open and he was breathing like he’d been running, heavy and ragged. “Night Must Fall.”

“What?”

“Night Must Fall. That’s the other movie with a head in it. I just remembered.”

“Oh. I never heard of it.”

“Albert Finney with an axe and a yen for decapitation.”

“Oh,” she said again. “That was kind of a cheat, then, if you knew I couldn’t possibly get it.” The boards creaked beneath her feet as she made her way over to him. He resisted the urge to recoil, but jumped anyway when she touched him. Her hand was icy through the cloth of his shirt, her fingernails sharp and hard. “It’s so dark in here. Like there never was any light.” Her breath was on his cheek, warm and moist and stale-smelling. “You know?” she said, and then she pressed against him and fixed her mouth on his. Her tongue invaded, prying his lips apart.

He stumbled back away from her. “We have to go.”

She coughed, a phlegmy sound like she was a longtime smoker. “You’re right,” she said. “There’s nothing here anyway.”

He was relieved when she pushed past him and continued down the hall. The wig had left her hair matted and stuck to the crown of her head. When she opened the front door and he saw how the light had changed he realized how much later it was than he’d thought. She commented that it seemed to be growing dark so early these days, it was hard to believe that it wasn’t yet fall.

“Sophie, those cuts look terrible,” he said, noticing her legs. They’d gone dry and puckered-looking, like tiny gaping mouths. But she was already crawling in on the passenger side, and didn’t seem to hear him.

The engine failed to turn over the first time, then again and again, and sweat was dripping into his eyes. Sophie sat placid beside him, unmoved by the useless revving of the motor.

“What’s the number for Triple A?” he said. “Where’s your phone?”

“It’s dead. I forgot to recharge it last night.” She went on, “It’s not such a bad place, really. I bet we could do something with it.”

“I forgot my lighter,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said, already willing to forget that for a split second he’d thought of sending her back inside on the pretense of fetching something, then driving away – no, running away, a mile or more back up to the highway where he’d flag down a car. It wasn’t Sophie that stopped him—rather, the certainty that he might run as far as he could and would never find the highway, because it would no longer be there.

“Poor thing,” she said, “you must be tired. You probably shouldn’t drive anyway. There’s a bed inside, you know, if you need to rest.”

He steadied his foot on the accelerator and gunned the engine. He would feel better if only he would look at her, and she’d laugh, propose some calm and sensible plan for getting them out of this predicament. Someone will stop for us up on the highway, she’d say in a moment, out here in the country people still help you like that. But he could not do it. He found that a sort of numbness had taken him, rather than grief or any sense of loss, and he kept turning the key and pressing the gas long after it produced only a series of dry dead clicks, and still he could not bring himself to look into her eyes.

JAY LAKE

The American Dead

JAY LAKE LIVES IN PORTLAND, Oregon with his books and two inept cats, where he works on numerous writing and editing projects.

His current novels are Trial of Flowers from Night Shade Books and Mainspring from Tor Books, with sequels to both volumes due in 2008. His short fiction appears in numerous markets world-wide, most recently The Mammoth Book of Monsters and Logorrhea.

He is the winner of the 2004 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and a multiple nominee for the Hugo and World Fantasy Awards.

“There are little markers that tells us things about the world,” Lake explains, “so-called telling details. The airliner in the river in this story tells us the world has ended, because in our world we don’t leave downed airliners where they fell. The policeman’s notebook tells its own story. But the story that lasts the longest is the story of our dead.

“Someday the American dead will be the stuff of history. This is a story of one way that might have happened, and what it means to the people who remain standing puzzled in the ruins.”

AMERICANS ARE ALL RICH, even their dead. Pobrecito knows this because he spends the hottest parts of the days in the old Cementerio Americano down by the river. The water is fat and lazy while the pipes in the colonia drip only rust brown as the eyes Santa Marguerite. Their graves are of the finest marble, carved with photographs in some manner he does not understand, or wrought with sculpted angels that put the churches up the hill to shame. Some of the American dead even have little houses, tight boxes with broken doors that must have once contained great riches.

He sits within a drooping tree which fights with life and watches the flies make dark, wiggling rafts out on the water. There are dogs which live in the broken-backed jet out in the middle of the current, eyes glowing from behind the dozens of little shattered oval windows. At night the dogs swim across the slow current and run the river banks, hunting in the colonia and up toward the city walls.

They are why he never sleeps in the Cementerio. That some of the dogs walk on two legs only makes them worse.

When he was very young, Pobrecito found a case of magazines, old ones with bright color pictures of men and women without their clothes. Whoever had made the magazines had an astonishing imagination, because in Pobrecito’s experience most people who fucked seemed to do it either with booze or after a lot of screaming and fighting and being held down. There weren’t very many ways he’d ever seen it gone after. The people in these pictures were smiling, mostly, and arranged themselves more carefully than priests arranging a corpse. And they lived in the most astonishing places.

Pobrecito clips or tears the pictures out a few at a time and sells them on the streets of the colonia. He knows the magazines themselves would just be taken from him, before or after a beating, but a kid with a few slips of paper clutched in his hand is nothing. As long as no one looks too closely. But even if he had a pass for the gates, he dares not take them within the walls, for the priests would hang him in the square.

What he loves most about the magazines is not the nudity or the fucking or the strange combinations and arrangements these people found themselves in. No, what he loves is that these are Americans. Beautiful people in beautiful places doing beautiful things together.

“I will be an American some day,” he tells his friend Lucia. They are in the branches of the dying tree, sharing a bottle of pulque and a greasy bowl of fried plantains in the midday heat. Pobrecito has a secret place up there, a hollow in the trunk where he hides most of his treasures.

The magazines are stored elsewhere, in a place he has never even shown to Lucia.

“You are an idiot,” she declares, glancing out at the airplane in the river. The American flag can still be seen on its tall tail, small and weathered. No one has gone out to paint it over, for fear of the dogs. “All Americans are dead,” she adds with prim authority.

Lucia is smaller than Pobrecito, though older. She is one of the menoriítas, born to be little. Though she is of an age to have breasts and make her bleedings, her body is smooth and slick as any young child’s. Pobrecito knows this because they often curl together to sleep, and she likes him to touch her as if she were a baby, rubbing his hand over her sides and back and pulling her to his chest. He has tried to use his fingers to do a few of the things seen in his pictures, but she is too small down there both before and behind, and complains of the hurt.

She has never offered to touch him.

Pobrecito shakes off that thought. “What is dead can be reborn. This is what the priests are always telling us.” He grins, mottled teeth flashing even in shadow. “I shall bleach my skin and hair like they did, and have a fine house filled with swimming pools and bright furniture. My automobiles would be colorful and shiny and actually have petrol.”

She laughs then and sets her shoulder against his chest, tucking her head into his neck, sucking on the pulque bottle in a way which makes him both warm and uncomfortable. He strokes her hair and dreams of distant, lost cities such as Los Angeles and Omaha.

That evening the folk of the colonia are upset. They surge through the muddy streets, even the day workers who should already be sleeping, and there is an angry mutter like bottle wasps swarming. He even sees some weapons, knives dangling from hands, a few pistols tucked into belts. These are offences of the worst order, to keep or carry weapons.

Pobrecito dodges booted feet and moves with the crowd, listening. He already knows he will sell no pictures tonight. Selling no pictures, he will not eat tomorrow. But he wants to understand what is wrong.

The crowd is speaking of priests.

“Girls, indeed.”

“. . . a scandal. And they use God’s name!”

“They wear those black dresses. Let them lie with one another.”

“Called them up there from a list. I tell you, I won’t allow my . . .”

“Hush! Do you want to hang?”

“A tax. How is this a tax?”

“Their time is coming. Soon.”

Pobrecito comes to understand. Girls are being taken away by the priests. To be used, he supposes, like the Americans in his pictures use each other. Will the girls of the colonia smile beneath the lusts of the priests? Surely they will be cleaned and fed and cared for. It is the priests in their walled city that hold all wealth, all power.

But eventually the anger melts into fatigue, and word comes that the guardia are on their way down to the colonia, and so the knives and pistols vanish and people trudge home, some of them weeping more than usual.

Over the weeks, a few more girls are called every few days, always the hale ones with good curves to their breasts. The guardia comes to collect them now, as the people are no longer willing to send their sisters and daughters up the hill simply because a summons has come. There are beatings and a few quiet murders in which no priest-advocate will take any interest.

None of the girls come back.

In a few month’s time, some older women are called, and younger girls as well. They do not return, either. The colonia remains restless, but the crystallizing anger of the first night never quite reappears. There is always food to worry about, and the dogs from the river, and the clouds of flies and wasps which can strip a man’s skin in minutes, and the sicknesses which prowl just as deadly if less visible.

And the heat.

It is always a little hotter. This has been the way of things all of Pobrecito’s life.

The vanishing girls and women are good for Pobrecito’s little business. Sad men and wild-eyed boys buy from him, paying him in dented cans of dog food or little bundles of yams or onions. Even a few of the old women seek him out, clucking and tutting like senile chickens draped in funeral black, wanting pictures “of a girl alone, none of your despicable filth, just something to remember her by.”

But he is becoming too well known, too rich. He has more food than he and Lucia can eat in a day, and even a few metal tools and some old bits of gold, which he hides in his tree by the river.

Is he rich enough to be an American yet, Pobrecito wonders?

One day he makes his way into the Cementerio Americano carrying two books and an old bottle of wine he has been paid for a handful of pictures of three thin, yellow-haired women kissing each other. By habit Pobrecito keeps to the shadows, the edges of fences and tumbled walls, but also by habit he has made a path in and out of this place. He steps around the edge of a rotting shed which contains a flat-tired tractor and some large metal implements to find three of the guardia.

“Ah,” says Pobrecito, and reflexively offers them the wine. Perhaps it will save him from whatever is next. He doubts that, though.

The leader, for he has more decoration on his buttoned shoulder tabs, strokes the bright leather of his pistol belt for a moment, then smiles. It is a horrid sort of smile, something a man remembering an old photo he is trying to imitate might offer up. The other two do not bother. Instead they merely cradle a machete each, staring corpse-eyed at Pobrecito. All three of them are fat, their bellies bigger than their hips, unlike anyone in the colonia, except a few who are dying of growths in their guts.

No one takes the wine.

“You are the guardian of Lucia Sandoz, is it not true?” the leader asks.

This is not what Pobrecito expected. “Ah . . . no. She comes here sometimes.”

The leader consults a thin notebook, ragged with handling, pages nearly black with ink. “You are Pobrecito the street merchant, no address, of the colonia.”

“Yes.”

“Then you are the guardian of Lucia Sandoz. It says so here in my book, and so this must be a true thing.” His smile asserts itself again. “We have a summons for her.” All three guardia peer around, as if expecting her to fall from the sky. Pobrecito realizes this has become an old game for them already.

“She is not mine,” he says to his feet. Not Lucia. “And besides,” he adds, “she is a menoriita. She cannot be used in the manner of a woman.” Will this help?

They laugh, his tormentors, before one of the machete-carriers says, “How would you know if you hadn’t had her?”

The leader leans close. “She is clean, boy. That is enough these days.”

Then they beat him, using the flat of the machete blades and the rough toes of their boots. Pobrecito loses most of his left ear when a blade slips, and the palm of his hand is cut to the bone, but they stop before staving in his ribs or breaking any large bones.

“Find her,” says the leader. Pobrecito can barely hear him through the pain and blood in his ear. The guardia tears the pages of the books from their bindings, unzips, and urinates on the paper. Taking the wine bottle, he turns to leave. “Before tomorrow.”

Pobrecito does not waste time on crying. He stumbles to his tree, knowing there are some extra clothes there that he can use to bind his ear and his hand. There are so many sicknesses that come in through bloody cuts and sores – black rot, green rot, the red crust – and he fears them all.

Stumbling, eyes dark and head ringing, Pobrecito can barely climb his tree because his arms and legs hurt so much. When he reaches the branch, he sees that someone has been at his cache of riches and food. Guardia, dogs, it does not matter. The hollow in the trunk has been hacked open, made wide and ragged with an axe or a machete, and everything that is not gone is smashed or torn or broken. His riches are nothing but trash now.

“I will never be an American,” Pobrecito whispers. He lays his mutilated ear against the slashed palm of his hand, pressing them together to slow the bleeding and protect the wounds from insects. Despite the pain, he lays that side of his head against the branch and stretches out to surrender to the ringing darkness.

“Wake up, fool!” It is Lucia’s voice. She is slapping him.

Pobrecito feels strange. His skin is itchy, crawly, prickly.

More slaps.

“Stop it this instant!” Her voice is rising toward a frightening break.

He opens his mouth to answer her and flies tumble in.

He is covered in flies.

“Gaaah!” Pobrecito screams.

“Get them off before they bite,” she says, her voice more under control.

Pobrecito stumbles to his feet, runs down the branch where it overhangs the water.

“Not the river . . .” she says behind him, but it is too late. The old branch narrows, is rotten, his legs are weak, his eyes not clear. In a crackling shower of wood, flies and blood, Pobrecito tumbles the five or six meters downward to slam into the slow, brown water, knocking the air from his body.

The river is blood warm, shocking him awake. He is under the surface, eyes open to a uniform brown with no way up. The water is sticky, strange, clinging to him, trying to draw him further down. Pobrecito kicks his legs, trying to come out, but there is still no up.

At least the flies are gone.

He begins to wonder if he could open his mouth and find something besides the burning in his empty lungs.

Something scrapes his legs. Something long, slow and powerful. Pobrecito throws his hands out and finds a stick. He pulls on it, but it does not come, so he pulls himself toward it.

A moment later he is gasping and muddy, clinging to a root sticking out from the river bank. Air is in his lungs, blessed air. Behind him the water burbles as the long, slow, powerful thing circles back to test him again. Out in the middle of the river, the dogs are barking.

Lucia is scrambling down the tree trunk, sobbing. “Fool! Idiot!”

She helps him pull himself out before his legs are taken. He lies on the bank gasping and crying, blessedly free of flies. He does not want to think about what the river water might have done to his wounds. “They . . . they came . . . they came for you . . .” he spits out.

“No one wants me,” she says fiercely.

“They said you were clean. That clean was enough for them these days.”

She is quiet for a moment. “Fire-piss is killing the rich men up in the city, the old women say. The priests have heard from god that to fuck a clean woman takes the fire-piss from the man and gives it to her.”

“How do you know? No one comes back.”

“Some people pass in and out of the walls. Servants. Farmers. The word comes. And the cemetery is overflowing, up on the hill. With rich city men.” She stares at him for a moment. “The colonia girls they dump down the old wells with some quicklime and gravel, and a prayer if they’re feeling generous.”

“Ahhh . . .” He weeps, eyes filling with hot tears as they hadn’t for the beating, or for anything in his memory, really. “And they want you now.”

“The cure does not work, but it does not stop them from trying over and over. The priests say it is so, that they are not faithful enough. Up in the city, they believe they can make the world however they want it.” She stares at him for a while. “And perhaps they have a taste for new girls all the time.”

Pobrecito thinks about his American pictures. Obviously many people had a taste for new girls all the time. Has he somehow been feeding this evil? But he doesn’t sell his pictures in the city, or even to city men. Not directly. He has always wondered if some of his buyers did.

And if he could make the world the way he wanted it, he would wish away the heat and the insects and the sicknesses. He would make them all Americans like in his pictures, naked, happy, pale-skinned blondes with big houses and tables full of food and more water than any sane person could ever use. He would not wish for more girls to kill. Not even if God told him to.

“I want to show you something,” he says.

“Show me soon. I think the dogs are coming over.”

“In the day?”

“You got their attention, my friend.”

Out at the airplane, dogs were gathering on the wing, their feet in the slow water. Some of them were casting sticks and stones out into the river, looking for that great predator that had touched Pobrecito for a moment. Others growl through pointed teeth, eyes glowing at him. Smoke curls from some of the shattered oval windows. Great red and blue letters, faded and worn as the tail’s flag, loom along the rounded top of the airplane in some American prayer for the coming assault.

“It is over anyway,” he says. “Come.” He leads her deeper into the Cementerio Americano. Here Pobrecito has always been careful to hop from stone to stone, scramble along mortared kerbs, step on open ground, never making a path.

Here among the houses of the American dead is his greatest treasure.

He shows Lucia a squared-off vault, door wedged tightly shut. Grabbing a cornice, Pobrecito pulls himself to the roof though his body strains with the pain of the beating and the curious ache of his fall into the river. He then dangles his arm over to help her up. There are two windows in the roof, and he knows the secret of loosening one.

In a moment they are in the cool darkness of the vault. There are two marble coffins here, carved with wreaths and flowers, and Pobrecito’s precious box of magazines at one end. He has left a few supplies, a can of drinkable water and some dried fruit, a homespun shirt without quite enough holes for it to disintegrate to ragged patches. And matches, his other great treasure.

“These people do not seem so wealthy,” Lucia whispers. “This is a fine little house for them, but the only riches here are yours.”

Pobrecito shrugs. “Perhaps they were robbed before I found them. Or perhaps their riches are within their coffins. This is a finer room than any you or I will ever live or die in.” As soon as he says that last, he wishes he hadn’t, as they may very well die in this room.

“So now what will you do?”

He pulls the magazines out of the their box, fans the pages open. Sleek American flesh in a hundred combinations flashes before his eyes, cocks, breasts, tongues, leather and plastic toys, sleek cars . . . all the world that was, once. The American world lost to the heat and the sicknesses. Pobrecito tosses the magazines into a pile, deliberately haphazard. After a few moments, Lucia begins to help, tearing a few apart, breaking their spines so they will lay flat. She ignores the pictures, though she is not so used to them as Pobrecito is.

Soon they have a glossy pile of images of the perfect past. Without another word, Pobrecito strikes a match and sets fire to a bright, curled edge. Cool faces, free of sweat and wounds, blacken and shrivel. He lights more matches, sets more edges of the pile on fire, until the flames take over.

The smoke stinks, filling the little vault, curling around the opening in the roof. He does not care, though Lucia is coughing. Pobrecito pulls off his wet, bloody clothes and pushes them into the base of the fire, then climbs atop one of the marble coffins. A few moments later, Lucia joins him.

She is naked as well.

They lie there on the bed of marble, smooth skinned as any Americans, kissing and touching, while the fire burns the pretty people in their pretty houses and the smoke rises through the roof. Outside dogs howl and guardia pistols crack.

When Lucia takes his cock in her mouth, Pobrecito knows he is as wealthy as any American. A while later he feels the hot rush of himself into her, even as the smoke makes him so dizzy his thoughts have spun off into the sky like so many airplanes rising from their river grave.

Soon he will be a true American, wealthy and dead.

PETER ATKINS

Between the Cold Moon and the Earth

PETER ATKINS IS A NATIVE of Liverpool, but has lived in Los Angeles for fifteen years with his wife Dana. He is the author of the novels Morningstar and Big Thunder and the collection Wishmaster and Other Stories.

His work has also appeared in Weird Tales, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Cemetery Dance and several award-winning anthologies. He has written for television and the stage, but is probably best known for his work in the cinema, where he has scripted three of the Hellraiser movies and created the Wishmaster franchise.

“Between the Cold Moon and the Earth” was written for the October 2006 tour of The Rolling Darkness Revue, the multi-media collective that Atkins founded with his friends and fellow-authors Glen Hirshberg and Dennis Etchison. It first appeared in At the Sign of the Snowman’s Skull, a chapbook produced for the tour by Paul Miller’s Earthling Publications.

“The story played very well on the reading tour,” recalls Atkins, “but my American audiences were confused by the fact that some of the 16-year-old characters had spent the earlier part of the evening in a pub.

“In fact, such flouting of the drinking laws was common in the 1970s Liverpool where I grew up. Other parts of the story are from life also, including its lovely and foul-mouthed heroine.”

THEY ONLY BRUSHED his cheek for a second or two, but her lips were fucking freezing.

“Christ, Carol,” he said. “Do you want my coat?”

She laughed. “What for?” she asked.

“Because it’s one in the morning,” he said. “And you’re cold.”

“It’s summer,” she pointed out, which was undeniably true but wasn’t really the issue. “Are you going to walk me home then?”

Michael had left the others about forty minutes earlier. Kirk had apparently copped off with the girl from Woolworth’s that they’d met inside the pub so Michael and Terry had tactfully peeled away before the bus stop and started walking the long way home around Sefton Park. He could’ve split a taxi fare with Terry but, given that they were still in the middle of their ongoing argument about the relative merits of T. Rex and Pink Floyd and that it was still a good six months before they’d find Roxy Music to agree on, they’d parted by unspoken consent and Michael had opted to cut across the park alone.

Carol had been standing on the path beside the huge park’s large boating lake. He’d practically shit himself when he first saw the shadowed figure there, assuming the worst – a midnight skinhead parked on watch ready to whistle his mates out of hiding to give this handy glam-rock faggot a good kicking – but Carol had been doing nothing more threatening than staring out at the center of the lake and the motionless full moon reflected there.

“All right, Michael,” she’d said, before he’d quite recognised her in the moonlight, and had kissed his cheek lightly in further greeting before he’d spoken her name. Now, he fell into step beside her and they began to walk the long slow curve around the lake.

“God, Carol. Where’ve you been?” he asked. “Nobody’s seen you for months.”

It was true. Her mum had remarried just before last Christmas and they’d moved. Not far away, still in the same city, but far enough for sixteen-year-olds to lose touch.

“I went to America,” Carol said.

Michael turned his head to see if she was kidding. “You went to America?” he said. “What d’you mean, you went to America? When? Who with?”

Her eyes narrowed for a moment as if she were re-checking her facts or her memory. “I think it was America,” she said.

“You think it was America?”

“It might have been an imaginary America,” she said, her voice a little impatient. “Do you want to hear the fucking story or not?”

Oh. Michael didn’t smile nor attempt to kiss her, but he felt like doing both. Telling stories – real, imagined, or some happy collision of the two – had been one of the bonds between them, one of the things he’d loved about her. Not the only thing of course. It’s not like he hadn’t shared Kirk and Terry’s enthusiastic affection for her astonishingly perfect breasts and for the teasingly challenging way she had about her that managed to suggest two things simultaneously: that, were circumstances to somehow become magically right, she might, you know, actually do it with you; and that you were probably and permanently incapable of ever conjuring such circumstances. But her stories, and her delight in telling them, were what he’d loved most and what, he now realised, he’d most missed. So yes, he said, he wanted to hear the story.

There was some quick confusion about whether she’d got there by plane or by ship – Carol had never been a big fan of preamble – but apparently what mattered was that, after a few days, she found herself in a roadside diner with a bunch of people she hardly knew.

They were on a road trip and had stopped for lunch in this back-of-beyond and unpretentious diner – a place which, while perfectly clean and respectable, looked like it hadn’t been painted or refurbished since about 1952. They were in a booth, eating pie and drinking coffee. Her companions were about her age – but could, you know, drive and everything. Turned out boys in America could be just as fucking rude as in Liverpool. One of them – Tommy, she thought his name was – was giving shit to the waitress. Hoisting his empty coffee mug, he was leaning out of the booth and looking pointedly down the length of the room.

“Yo! Still need a refill here!” he shouted to the counter.

Carol stood up and, announcing she was going to the ladies’ room, slid her way out of the booth. Halfway down the room, she crossed paths with the waitress, who was hurrying toward their booth with a coffee pot. The woman’s name tag said Cindi, a spelling Carol had never seen before and hoped could possibly be short for Cinderella because that’d be, you know, great. Carol spoke softly to her, nodding back towards Tommy, who was impatiently shaking his empty coffee mug in the air.

“Don’t mind him, love,” Carol said. “He’s a bit of a prick, but I’ll make sure he leaves a nice tip.”

Cindi, who was harried-looking and appeared to be at least 30, gave her a quick smile of gratitude. “Little girls’ room’s out back, sweetheart,” she said.

Carol exited the main building of the diner and saw that a separate structure, little more than a shack really, housed the bathrooms. She started across the gravelled parking lot, surrounded by scrub-grass that was discoloured and overgrown, looking down the all-but-deserted country road – the type of road, she’d been informed by her new friends, which was known as a two-lane blacktop. The diner and its shithouse annex were the only buildings for as far as her eye could see, apart from a hulking grain silo a hundred yards or so down the road. As Carol looked in that desolate direction, a cloud drifted over the sun, dimming the summer daylight and shifting the atmosphere into a kind of pre-storm dreariness. Carol shivered and wondered, not without a certain pleasure in the mystery, just where the hell she was.

Done peeing and alone in the bathroom, Carol washed her hands and splashed her face at the pretty crappy single sink that was all the place had to offer. The sound of the ancient cistern laboriously and noisily re-filling after her flush played in the background. Carol turned off the tap and looked for a moment at her reflection in the pitted and stained mirror above the sink. As the cistern finally creaked and whistled to a halt, the mirror suddenly cracked noisily across its width as if it was just too tired to keep trying.

“Fuckin’ ’ell!” said Carol, because it had made her jump and because she didn’t like the newly mismatched halves of her reflected face. She turned around, ready to walk out of the bathroom, and discovered she was no longer alone.

A little girl – what, six, seven years old? – was standing, silent and perfectly still, outside one of the stall doors, looking up at her. Oddly, the little girl was holding the palm of one hand over her right eye.

“Oh, shit,” said Carol, remembering that she’d just said fucking hell in front of a kid. “I didn’t know you were –” She paused, smiled, started over. “Hello, pet. D’you live around here?”

The little girl just kept looking at her.

“What’s your name?” Carol asked her, still smiling but still getting no response. Registering the hand-over-the-eye thing, she tried a new tack. “Oh,” she said. “Are we playing a game and nobody told me the rules? All right then, here we go.”

Raising her hand, Carol covered her own right eye with her palm. The little girl remained still and silent. Carol lowered her hand from her face. “Peek-a-boo,” she said.

Finally, the little girl smiled shyly and lowered her own hand. She had no right eye at all, just a smooth indented bank of flesh.

Carol was really good. She hardly jumped at all and her gasp was as short-lived as could reasonably be expected.

The little girl’s voice was very matter-of-fact. “Momma lost my eye-patch,” she said.

“Oh. That’s a shame,” said Carol, trying to keep her own voice as equally everyday.

“She’s gonna get me another one. When she goes to town.”

“Oh, well, that’s good. Will she get a nice colour? Do you have a favourite colour?”

The little girl shrugged. “What are you, retarded?” she said. “It’s an eye-patch. Who cares what colour it is?”

Carol didn’t know whether to laugh or slap her.

“You can go now, if you like,” said the little girl. “I have to make water.”

“Oh. All right. Sure. Well, look after yourself,” Carol said and, raising her hand in a slightly awkward wave of farewell, headed for the exit door. The little girl called after her.

“You take care in those woods now, Carol,” she said.

“I hadn’t told her my name,” said Carol.

“Well, that was weird,” Michael said.

Carol smiled, pleased. “That wasn’t weird,” she said. “It got weird. Later. After I got lost in the woods.”

“You got lost in the woods?”

Carol nodded.

“Why’d they let you go wandering off on your own?”

“Who?”

“Your new American friends. The people you were in the café with.”

“Ha. Café. Diner, stupid. We were in America.”

“Whatever. How could they let you get lost?”

“Oh, yeah.” She thought about it for a second, looking out to their side at the boating lake and its ghost moon. “Well, p’raps they weren’t there to begin with. Doesn’t matter. Listen.”

Turned out Carol did get lost in the woods. Quite deep in the woods, actually. Heart of the forest, Hansel and Gretel shit, where the sunlight, through the thickening trees, was dappled and spotty and where the reassuring blue sky of what was left of the afternoon could be glimpsed only occasionally through the increasingly oppressive canopy of high leafy branches.

Carol was tramping her way among the trees and the undergrowth on the mossy and leaf-strewn ground when she heard the sound for the first time. Faint and plaintive and too distant to be truly identifiable, it was nevertheless suggestive of something, something that Carol couldn’t quite put her finger on. Only when it came again, a few moments later, did she place it. It was the sound of a lonely ship’s horn in a midnight ocean, melancholy and eerie. Not quite as eerie, though, as the fact that once the horn had sounded this second time, all the other sounds stopped, all the other sounds of which Carol hadn’t even been consciously aware until they disappeared: birdsong; the footsteps of unseen animals moving through the woods; the sigh of the breeze as it whistled through the branches.

The only sounds now were those she made herself: the rustle and sway of the living branches she was pushing her way through and the crackle and snap of the dead ones she was breaking beneath her. Carol began to wonder if moving on in the same direction she’d been going was that great of an idea. She turned around and started heading back and, within a few yards, stepping out from between two particularly close trees, she found herself in a small grove-like clearing that she didn’t remember passing through earlier.

There was a downed and decaying tree-trunk lying in the leafy undergrowth that momentarily and ridiculously put Carol in mind of a park bench. But she really wasn’t in the mood to sit and relax and it wasn’t like there was, you know, a boating lake to look at the moon in or anything. So she kept moving, across the clearing, past the downed trunk, and stopped only when the voice spoke from behind her.

“What’s your rush, sweetheart?”

Carol turned back. Sitting perched on the bench-like trunk was a sailor. He was dressed in a square-neck deck-shirt and bell-bottomed pants and Carol might have taken a moment to wonder if sailors still dressed like that if she hadn’t been too busy being surprised just to see him at all. He was sitting in profile to her, one leg on the ground, the other arched up on the trunk and he didn’t turn to face her fully, perhaps because he was concentrating on rolling a cigarette.

“Ready-mades are easier,” the sailor said. “But I like the ritual – opening the paper, laying in the tobacco, rolling it up. Know what I mean?”

“I don’t smoke,” said Carol, which wasn’t strictly true, but who the fuck was he to deserve the truth.

“You chew?” he asked.

“Chew what?”

“Tobacco.”

“Eugh. No.”

The sailor chanted something rhythmic in response, like he was singing her a song but knew his limitations when it came to carrying a tune:

“Down in Nagasaki,

Where the fellas chew tobaccy

And the women wicky-wacky-woo.”

Carol stared at him. Confused. Not necessarily nervous. Not yet. She gestured out at the woods. “Where’d you come from?” she said.

“Dahlonega, Georgia. Little town northeast of Atlanta. Foot of the Appalachians.”

That wasn’t what she’d meant and she started to tell him so, but he interrupted.

“Ever been to Nagasaki, honeybun?”

“No.”

“How about Shanghai?”

The sailor was still sitting in profile to her. Talking to her, but staring straight ahead into the woods and beyond. He didn’t wait for a reply. “Docked there once,” he said. “Didn’t get shore-leave. Fellas who did told me I missed something, boy. Said there were whores there could practically tie themselves in knots. Real limber. Mmm. A man likes that. Likes ’em limber.”

Carol was very careful not to say anything at all. Not to move. Not to breathe.

“Clean, too,” said the sailor. “That’s important to me. Well, who knows? Maybe I’ll get back there one of these days. ’Course, once they get a good look at me, I might have to pay extra.” He turned finally to face her. “Whaddaya think?”

Half of his face was bone-pale and bloated, as if it had drowned years ago and been underwater ever since. His hair hung dank like seaweed and something pearl-like glinted in the moist dripping blackness of what used to be an eye-socket.

“Jesus Christ!” Carol said, frozen in shock, watching helplessly as the sailor put his cigarette in his half-ruined mouth, lit it, and inhaled.

“Calling on the Lord for salvation,” he said. “Good for you. Might help.” Smoke oozed out from the pulpy white flesh that barely clung to the bone beneath his dead face. “Might not.”

He rose to his feet and grinned at her. “Useta chase pigs through the Georgia pines, sweet thing,” he said, flinging his cigarette aside. “Let’s see if you’re faster than them little squealers.”

And then he came for her.

“I was a lot faster, though,” said Carol. “But it still took me ten minutes to lose him.”

“Fuck, Carol,” said Michael. “That wasn’t funny.”

“I didn’t say it was funny. I said it was weird. Remember?”

Michael turned to look at her and she tilted her face to look up at his, dark eyes glinting, adorably proud of herself. They’d walked nearly a full circuit of the lake now, neither of them even thinking to branch off in the direction of the park’s northern gate and the way home.

“Well, it was weird, all right,” Michael said. “Creepy ghost sailor. Pretty good.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Turns out there was a ship went down there in the Second World War. All hands lost.”

“Went down in the woods. That was a good trick.”

“It wasn’t the woods. Didn’t I tell you that? It was the beach. That’s where it all happened.”

“Was it Redondo?”

“The fuck’s Redondo?” she said, genuinely puzzled.

“It’s a beach. In America. I’ve heard of it. It’s on that Patti Smith album.”

“Oh, yeah. No. This wasn’t in America. It was in Cornwall.” She thought about it for a moment. “Yeah. Had to be Cornwall because of the rock pool.”

“You didn’t say anything about a rock pool.”

“I haven’t told you yet,” she said, exasperated. “God, you’re rubbish.”

Michael laughed, even though something else had just hit him. He was walking on a moonlit night alone with a beautiful girl and it apparently wasn’t occurring to him to try anything. He hadn’t even put his arm around her, for Christ’s sake. Terry and Kirk would give him such shit for this when he told them. He wondered for the first time if that was something Carol knew, if that was what had always been behind her stories, why she found them, why she told them, like some instinctive Scheherazade keeping would-be lovers at bay with narrative strategies. He felt something forming in him, a kind of sadness that he couldn’t name and didn’t understand.

“Is everything all right, Carol?” he asked, though he couldn’t say why.

“Well, it is now,” she said, deaf to the half-born subtext in his question. “I got away. I escaped. But that spoils the story, dickhead. You’ve got to hear what happened first.”

The park was silver-grey in the light from the moon. He wondered what time it was. “The rock pool,” he said.

“Exactly,” she said, pleased that he was paying attention.

She hadn’t seen it at first. Had kept moving along the deserted beach until the sandy shore gave way to rocky cave-strewn outcrops from the cliffs above the coastline. It was only when she clambered over an algae- and seaweed-coated rock wall that she found it. Orphaned from the sea and held within a natural basin formation, the pool was placid and still and ringed by several large boulders about its rim. It was about twenty feet across and looked to be fairly deep.

On one of the boulders, laid out as if waiting for their owner, were some items of clothing. A dress, a pair of stockings, some underwear. Carol looked from them out to the cool inviting water of the pool. A head broke surface as she looked, and a woman started swimming toward the rock where her clothes were. Catching sight of Carol, she stopped and trod water, looking at her suspiciously. “What are you doing?” she said. “Are you spying?” She was older than Carol, about her mum’s age maybe, a good-looking thirty-five.

“No, I’m not,” Carol said. “Why would I be spying?”

“You might be one of them,” the woman said.

“One of who?”

The woman narrowed her eyes and looked at Carol appraisingly. “You know who,” she said.

“No, I don’t,” Carol said. “And I’m not one of anybody. I was with some friends. We went to France. Just got back. The boat’s down there on the beach.”

“They’ve all got stories,” the woman said. “That’s how they get you.”

“Who?! Stop talking shit, willya? I –” Carol bit her tongue.

For the first time, the woman smiled. “Are you moderating your language for me?” she said. “That’s adorable.”

Carol felt strangely flustered. Was this woman flirting with her?

“I understand,” the woman said, still smiling, still staring straight into Carol’s eyes. “I’m an older lady and you want to be polite. But, you know, I’m not really that much older.” She stepped out of the pool and stood there right in front of Carol, glistening wet and naked. “See what I mean?” she said.

Carol felt funny. She swallowed. The woman kept her eyes fixed on Carol as she stepped very close to her. “I’m going to tell you a secret,” she said, and leaned forward to whisper the secret in Carol’s ear. “I’m real limber for my age.”

Carol jumped back as the woman’s voice began a familiar rhythmic chant.

“Down in Nagasaki,

Where the fellas chew tobaccy,

And the women wicky-wacky-woo.”

Carol tried to run but the woman had already grabbed her by the throat. “What’s your rush, sweetheart?” she said, and her voice was different now, guttural and amused. “Party’s just getting started.”

Carol was struggling in the choking grip. She tried to swing a fist at the woman’s head but her punch was effortlessly blocked by the woman’s other arm.

“Your eyes are so pretty,” the woman said. “I’m going to have them for earrings.”

Her mouth opened inhumanly wide. Her tongue flicked out with reptile speed. It was long and black and forked.

“But, like I said,” said Carol, “I escaped.”

“How?” said Michael, expecting another previously unmentioned element to be brought into play, like a knife or a gun or a really sharp stick or a last-minute rescue by her Francophile friends from the recently-invented boat. But Carol had a different ending in mind.

“I walked into the moon,” she said.

Michael looked up to the night sky.

“No,” said Carol. “Not that moon. This one.”

She was pointing out towards the center of the utterly calm lake and the perfect moon reflected there. Looking at it with her, neither of them walking now, Michael felt the cold of the night as if for the first time. He waited in silence, afraid to speak, afraid to give voice to his questions, afraid that they would be answered.

She told another story then, the last, he knew, that his sweet lost friend would ever tell him, the tale of how the other moon had many ways into and out of this world: through placid lakes on summer evenings; through city streets on rain-slicked nights; from out of the ocean depths for the eyes of lonely night-watch sailors.

And when she was done, when Michael could no longer pretend not to know in whose company he truly was, she turned to him and smiled a heartbreaking smile of farewell.

She looked beautiful in monochrome, in the subtle tones of the moon that had claimed her for its own. Not drained of colour, but richly reimagined, painted in shades of silver and grey, of black and delicate lunar blue. She looked almost liquid, as if, were Michael to reach out a hand and even try to touch her, she might ripple into strange expansions of herself.

“Thanks, Michael,” she said. “I can make it home from here.”

Michael didn’t say anything. Didn’t know what he could possibly find to say that the tears in his young eyes weren’t already saying. The beautiful dead girl pointed a silver finger beyond him, in the direction of his life. “Go on,” she said kindly. “Don’t look back.”

And he didn’t look back, not even when he heard the impossible footsteps on the water, not even when he heard the shadow moon sigh in welcome, and the quiet lapping of the lake water as if something had slipped effortlessly beneath it.

He’d later hear the alternative versions, of course – the stories of how, one moonlit night, Carol had walked out of the third-floor window of her step-father’s house and the vile rumors as to why – but he would prefer, for all his days, to believe the story that the lost girl herself had chosen to tell him.

He continued home through the park, not even breaking step as his fingers sought and found the numb spot on his cheek, the frozen place where her cold lips had blessed him, waiting for her frostbite kiss to bloom in tomorrow’s mirror.

GENE WOLFE

Sob in the Silence

GENE WOLFE IS ACCLAIMED for his dense, allusion-rich prose. He is a prolific short story writer as well as a novelist, and has won two Nebula Awards and three World Fantasy Awards.

His latest books are Pirate Freedom, published by Tor, and Severian of the Guild: The Book of the New Sun, from Gollancz. The author has been described as being “simultaneously the Dickens and the Nabokov of the speculative genres”. He lives in Barrington, Illinois.

“ ‘Sob in the Silence’ is horror, I think,” says Wolfe. “It originally appeared in Strange Birds, a chapbook published by Greg Ketter’s DreamHaven Books. The art is Lisa Snelling-Clark’s, and the stories are mine.

“In the booklet, the reproduction of Lisa’s ‘The Children’s Hour’ is too small and too dim to see the terrified faces of the children; they are peeping from the pocket of a tall figure with a puppet. The original art, in all its dark glory, comes pretty close to terrifying.”

“THIS,” THE HORROR WRITER told the family visiting him, “is beyond any question the least haunted house in the Midwest. No ghost, none at all, will come within miles of the place. So I am assured.”

Robbie straightened his little glasses and mumbled, “Well, it looks haunted.”

“It does, young man.” After teetering between seven and eight, the horror writer decided that Robbie was about seven. “It’s the filthy yellow stucco. No doubt it was a cheerful yellow once, but God only knows how long it’s been up. I’m going to have it torn off, every scrap of it, and put up fresh, which I will paint white.”

“Can’t you just paint over?” Kiara asked. (Kiara of the all-conquering pout, of the golden hair and the tiny silver earrings.)

Looking very serious, the horror writer nodded. And licked his lips only mentally. “I’ve tried, believe me. That hideous color is the result of air pollution – of smoke, soot, and dirt, if you will – that has clung to the stucco. Paint over it, and it bleeds out through the new paint. Washing—”

“Water jets under high pressure.” Dan was Robbie’s father, and Kiara’s. “You can rent the units, or buy one for a thousand or so.”

“I own one,” the horror writer told him. “With a strong cleaning agent added to the water, it will do the job.” He paused to smile. “Unfortunately, the stucco’s old and fragile. Here and there, a good jet breaks it.”

“Ghosts,” Charity said. Charity was Mrs Dan, a pudgy woman with a soft, not unattractive face and a remarkable talent for dowdy hats. “Please go back to your ghosts. I find ghosts far more interesting.”

“As do I.” The horror writer favored her with his most dazzling smile. “I’ve tried repeatedly to interest psychic researchers in the old place, which has a – may I call it fascinating? History. I’ve been persuasive and persistent, and no less than three teams have checked this old place out as a result. All three have reported that they found nothing. No evidence whatsoever. No spoor of spooks. No cooperative specters a struggling author might use for research purposes.”

“And publicity,” Kiara said. “Don’t forget publicity. I plan to get into public relations when I graduate.”

“And publicity, you’re right. By the time you’re well settled in public relations, I hope to be wealthy enough to engage you. If I am, I will. That’s a promise.”

Charity leveled a plump forefinger. “You, on the other hand, have clearly seen or heard or felt something. You had to have something more than this big dark living-room to get the psychics in, and you had it. Tell us.”

The horror writer produced a sharply bent briar that showed signs of years of use. “Will this trouble anyone? I rarely smoke in here, but if we’re going to have a good long chat – well, a pipe may make things go more smoothly. Would anyone care for a drink?”

Charity was quickly equipped with white wine, Dan with Johnnie-Walker-and-water, and Robbie with cola. “A lot of the kids drink beer at IVY Tech,” Kiara announced in a tone that indicated she was one of them. “I don’t, though.”

“Not until you’re twenty-one,” Dan said firmly.

“You see?” She pouted.

The horror writer nodded. “I do indeed. One of the things I see is that you have good parents, parents who care about you and are zealous for your welfare.” He slipped Kiara a scarcely perceptible wink. “What about a plain soda? I always find soda water over ice refreshing, myself.”

Charity said, “That would be fine, if she wants it.”

Kiara said she did, and he became busy behind the bar.

Robbie had been watching the dark upper corners of the old, high-ceilinged room. “I thought I saw one.”

“A ghost?” The horror writer looked up, his blue eyes twinkling.

“A bat. Maybe we can catch it.”

Dan said, “There’s probably a belfry, too.”

“I’m afraid not. Perhaps I’ll add one once I get the new stucco on.”

“You need one. As I’ve told my wife a dozen times, anybody who believes in ghosts has bats in his belfry.”

“It’s better, perhaps,” Charity murmured, “if living things breathe and move up there. Better than just bells, rotting ropes, and dust. Tell us more about this place, please.”

“It was a country house originally.” With the air of one who performed a sacrament, the horror writer poured club soda into a tall frosted glass that already contained five ice cubes and (wholly concealed by his fingers) a generous two inches of vodka. “A quiet place in which a wealthy family could get away from the heat and stench of city summers. The family was ruined somehow – I don’t recall the details. I know it’s usually the man who kills in murder-suicides, but in this house it was the woman. She shot her husband and her stepdaughters, and killed herself.”

Charity said, “I could never bring myself to do that. I could never kill Dan. Or his children. I suppose I might kill myself. That’s conceivable. But not the rest.”

Straight-faced, the horror writer handed his frosted glass to Kiara. “I couldn’t kill myself,” he told her. “I like myself too much. Other people? Who can say?”

Robbie banged down his cola. “You’re trying to scare us!”

“Of course I am. It’s my trade.”

Dan asked, “They all died? That’s good shooting.”

The horror writer resumed his chair and picked up his briar. “No. As a matter of fact they didn’t. One of the three stepdaughters survived. She had been shot in the head at close range, yet she lived.”

Dan said, “Happens sometime.”

“It does. It did in this case. Her name was Maude Parkhurst. Maude was a popular name back around 1900, which is when her parents and sisters died. Ever hear of her?”

Dan shook his head.

“She was left penniless and scarred for life. It seems to have disordered her thinking. Or perhaps the bullet did it. In any event, she founded her own church and was its pope and prophetess. It was called – maybe it’s still called, since it may still be around for all I know – the Unionists of Heaven and Earth.”

Charity said, “I’ve heard of it. It sounded innocent enough.”

The horror writer shrugged. “Today? Perhaps it is. Back then, I would say no. Decidedly no. It was, in its own fantastic fashion, about as repellent as a cult can be. May I call it a cult?”

Kiara grinned prettily over her glass. “Go right ahead. I won’t object.”

“A friend of mine, another Dan, once defined a cult for me. He said that if the leader gets all the women, it’s a cult.”

Dan nodded. “Good man. There’s a lot to that.”

“There is, but in the case of the UHE, as it was called, it didn’t apply. Maude Parkhurst didn’t want the women, or the men either. The way to get to Heaven, she told her followers, was to live like angels here on earth.”

Dan snorted.

“Exactly. Any sensible person would have told them that they were not angels. That it was natural and right for angels to live like angels, but that men and women should live like human beings.”

“We really know almost nothing about angels.” Charity looked pensive. “Just that they carry the Lord’s messages. It’s Saint Paul, I think, who says that each of us has an angel who acts as our advocate in Heaven. So we know that, too. But it’s really very little.”

“This is about sex,” Kiara said. “I smell it coming.”

The horror writer nodded. “You’re exactly right, and I’m beginning to wonder if you’re not the most intelligent person here. It is indeed. Members of the UHE were to refrain from all forms of sexual activity. If unmarried, they were not to marry. If married, they were to separate and remain separated.”

“The University of Heaven at Elysium. On a T-shirt. I can see it now.”

Charity coughed, the sound of it scarcely audible in the large, dark room. “Well, Kiara, I don’t see anything wrong with that if it was voluntary.”

“Neither do I,” the horror writer said, “but there’s more. Those wishing to join underwent an initiation period of a year. At the end of that time, there was a midnight ceremony. If they had children, those children had to attend, all of them. There they watched their parents commit suicide – or that’s how it looked. I don’t know the details, but I know that at the end of the service they were carried out of the church, apparently lifeless and covered with blood.”

Charity whispered, “Good God . . .”

“When the congregation had gone home,” the horror writer continued, “the children were brought here. They were told that it was an orphanage, and it was operated like one. Before long it actually was one. Apparently there was some sort of tax advantage, so it was registered with the state as a church-run foundation, and from time to time the authorities sent actual orphans here. It was the age of orphanages, as you may know. Few children, if any, were put in foster homes. Normally, it was the orphanage for any child without parents or close relatives.”

Dan said, “There used to be a comic strip about it, Little Orphan Annie.”

The horror writer nodded. “Based upon a popular poem of the nineteenth century.“ ‘Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay,An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up,an’ brush the crumbs away,An’ shoo the chickens off the porch,an’ dust the hearth an’ sweep,An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread,an’ earn her board an’ keep.An’ all us other children,when the supper things is done,We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest funA-list’nin’ to the witch tales ’at Annie tells about,An’ the Gobble-uns ’at gets youEf youDon’tWatchOut!’

“You see,” the horror writer finished, smiling, “in those days you could get an orphan girl from such an orphanage as this to be your maid of all work and baby-sitter. You fed and clothed her, gave her a place to sleep, and paid her nothing at all. Despite being showered with that sort of kindness, those girls picked up enough of the monstrosity and lonely emptiness of the universe to become the first practitioners of my art, the oral recounters of horrific tales whose efforts preceded all horror writing.”

“Was it really so bad for them?” Kiara asked.

“Here? Worse. I haven’t told you the worst yet, you see. Indeed, I haven’t even touched upon it.” The horror writer turned to Dan. “Perhaps you’d like to send Robbie out. That might be advisable.”

Dan shrugged. “He watches TV. I doubt that anything you’ll say will frighten him.”

Charity pursed her lips but said nothing.

The horror writer had taken advantage of the pause to light his pipe. “You don’t have to stay, Robbie.” He puffed fragrant white smoke, and watched it begin its slow climb to the ceiling. “You know where your room is, and you may go anywhere in the house unless you meet with a locked door.”

Kiara smiled. “Secrets! We’re in Bluebeard’s cashel – castle. I knew it!”

“No secrets,” the horror writer told her, “just a very dangerous cellar stair – steep, shaky, and innocent of any sort of railing.”

Robbie whispered, “I’m not going.”

“So I see. From time to time, Robbie, one of the children would learn or guess that his parents were not in fact dead. When that happened, he or she might try to get away and return home. I’ve made every effort to learn just how often that happened, but the sources are contradictory on the point. Some say three and some five, and one says more than twenty. I should add that we who perform this type of research soon learn to be wary of the number three. It’s the favorite of those who don’t know the real number. There are several places on the grounds that may once of have been graves – unmarked graves long since emptied by the authorities. But . . .”

Charity leaned toward him, her face tense. “Do you mean to say that those children were killed?”

The horror writer nodded. “I do. Those who were returned here by their parents were. That is the most horrible fact attached to this really quite awful old house. Or at least, it is the worst we know of – perhaps the worst that occurred.”

He drew on his pipe, letting smoke trickle from his nostrils. “A special midnight service was held here, in this room in which we sit. At that service the church members are said to have flown. To have fluttered about this room like so many strange birds. No doubt they ran and waved their arms, as children sometimes do. Very possibly they thought they flew. The members of medieval witch cults seem really to have believed that they flew to the gatherings of their covens, although no sane person supposes they actually did.”

Charity asked, “But you say they killed the children?”

The horror writer nodded. “Yes, at the end of the ceremony. Call it the children’s hour, a term that some authorities say they used themselves. They shot them as Maude Parkhurst’s father and sisters had been shot. The executioner was chosen by lot. Maude is said to have hoped aloud that it would fall to her, as it seems to have done more than once. Twice at least.”

Dan said, “It’s hard to believe anybody would really do that.”

“Perhaps it is, although news broadcasts have told me of things every bit as bad. Or worse.”

The horror writer drew on his pipe again, and the room had grown dark enough that the red glow from its bowl lit his face from below. “The children were asleep by that time, as Maude, her father, and her sisters had been. The lucky winner crept into the child’s bedroom, accompanied by at least one other member who carried a candle. The moment the shot was fired, the candle was blown out. The noise would’ve awakened any other children who had been sleeping in that room, of course; but they awakened only to darkness and the smell of gun smoke.”

Dan said, “Angels!” There was a world of contempt in the word.

“There are angels in Hell,” the horror writer told him, “not just in Heaven. Indeed, the angels of Hell may be the more numerous.”

Charity pretended to yawn while nodding her reluctant agreement. “I think it’s time we all went up bed. Don’t you?”

Dan said, “I certainly do. I drove one hell of a long way today.”

Kiara lingered when the others had gone. “Ish really nice meeting you.” She swayed as she spoke, though only slightly. “Don’ forget I get to be your public relations agent. You promished.”

“You have my word.” The horror writer smiled, knowing how much his word was worth.

For a lingering moment they clasped hands. “Ish hard to believe,” she said, “that you were dad’s roommate. You sheem – seem – so much younger.”

He thanked her and watched her climb the wide curved staircase that had been the pride of the Parkhursts long ago, wondering all the while whether she knew that he was watching. Whether she knew or not, watching Kiara climb stairs was too great a pleasure to surrender.

On the floor above, Charity was getting Robbie ready for bed. “You’re a brave boy, I know. Aren’t you a brave boy, darling? Say it, please. It always helps to say it.”

“I’m a brave boy,” Robbie told her dutifully.

“You are. I know you are. You won’t let that silly man downstairs fool you. You’ll stay in your own bed, in your own room, and get a good night’s sleep. We’ll do some sight-seeing tomorrow, forests and lakes and rugged hills where the worked-out mines hide.”

Charity hesitated, gnawing with small white teeth at her full lower lip. “There’s no nightlight in here, I’m afraid, but I’ve got a little flashlight in my purse. I could lend you that. Would you like it?”

Robbie nodded, and clasped Charity’s little plastic flashlight tightly as he watched her leave. Her hand – the one without rings – reached up to the light switch. Her fingers found it.

There was darkness.

He located the switch again with the watery beam of the disposable flashlight, knowing that he would be scolded (perhaps even spanked) if he switched the solitary overhead light back on but wanting to know exactly where that switch was, just in case.

At last he turned Charity’s flashlight off and lay down. It was hot in the too-large, too-empty room. Hot and silent.

He sat up again, and aimed the flashlight toward the window. It was indeed open, but open only the width of his hand. He got out of bed, dropped the flashlight into the shirt pocket of his pajamas, and tried to raise the window farther. No effort he could put forth would budge it.

At last he lay down again, and the room felt hotter than ever.

When he had looked out through the window, it had seemed terribly high. How many flights of stairs had they climbed to get up here? He could remember only one, wide carpeted stairs that had curved as they climbed; but that one had been a long, long stair. From the window he had seen the tops of trees.

Treetops and stars. The moon had been out, lighting the lawn below and showing him the dark leaves of the treetops, although the moon itself had not been in sight from the window.

“It walks across the sky,” he told himself. Dan, his father, had said that once.

“You could walk . . .” The voice seemed near, but faint and thin.

Robbie switched the flashlight back on. There was no one there.

Under the bed, he thought. They’re under the bed.

But he dared not leave the bed to look, and lay down once more. An older person would have tried to persuade himself that he had imagined the voice, or would have left the bed to investigate. Robbie did neither. His line between palpable and imagined things was blurred and faint, and he had not the slightest desire to see the speaker, whether that speaker was real or make-believe.

There were no other windows that might be opened. He thought of going out. The hall would be dark, but Dan and Charity were sleeping in a room not very far away. The door of their room might be locked, though. They did that sometimes.

He would be scolded in any event. Scolded and perhaps spanked, too. It was not the pain he feared, but the humiliation. “I’ll have to go back here,” he whispered to himself. “Even if they don’t spank me, I’ll have to go back.”

“You could walk away . . .” A girl’s voice, very faint. From the ceiling? No, Robbie decided, from the side toward the door.

“No,” he said. “They’d be mad.”

“You’ll die . . .”

“Like us . . .”

Robbie sat up, shaking.

Outside, the horror writer was hiking toward the old, rented truck he had parked more than a mile away. The ground was soft after yesterday’s storm, and it was essential – absolutely essential – that there be tracks left by a strange vehicle.

A turn onto a side road, a walk of a hundred yards, and the beam of his big electric lantern picked out the truck among the trees. When he could set the lantern on its hood, he put on latex gloves. Soon, very soon, the clock would strike the children’s hour and Edith with the golden hair would be his. Beautiful Kiara would be his. As for laughing Allegra, he neither knew nor cared who she might be.

“Wa’ ish?” Kiara’s voice was thick with vodka and sleep.

“It’s only me,” Robbie told her, and slipped under the covers. “I’m scared.”

She put a protective arm around him.

“There are other kids in here. There are! They’re gone when you turn on the light, but they come back. They do!”

“Uh huh.” She hugged him tighter and went back to sleep.

In Scales Mound, the horror writer parked the truck and walked three blocks to his car. He had paid two weeks rent on the truck, he reminded himself. Had paid that rent only three days ago. It would be eleven days at least before the rental agency began to worry about it, and he could return it or send another check before then.

His gun, the only gun he owned, had been concealed in a piece of nondescript luggage and locked in the car. He took it out and made sure the safety was on before starting the engine. It was only a long-barreled twenty-two; but it looked sinister, and should be sufficient to make Kiara obey if the threat of force were needed.

Once she was down there . . . Once she was down there, she might scream all she liked. It would not matter. As he drove back to the house, he tried to decide whether he should hold it or put it into one of the big side pockets of his barn coat.

Robbie, having escaped Kiara’s warm embrace, decided that her room was cooler than his. For one thing, she had two windows. For another, both were open wider than his one window had been. Besides, it was just cooler. He pulled the sheet up, hoping she would not mind.

“Run . . .” whispered the faint, thin voices.

“Run . . . Run . . .”

“Get away while you can . . .”

“Go . . .”

Robbie shook his head and shut his eyes.

Outside Kiara’s bedroom, the horror writer patted the long-barreled pistol he had pushed into his belt. His coat pockets held rags, two short lengths of quarter-inch rope, a small roll of duct tape, and a large folding knife. He hoped to need none of them.

There was no provision for locking Kiara’s door. He had been careful to see to that. No key for the quaint old lock, no interior bolt; and yet she might have blocked it with a chair. He opened it slowly, finding no obstruction.

The old oak doors were thick and solid, the old walls thicker and solider still. If Dan and his wife were sleeping soundly, it would take a great deal of commotion in here to wake them.

Behind him, the door swung shut on well-oiled hinges. The click of the latch was the only sound.

Moonlight coming through the windows rendered the penlight in his shirt pocket unnecessary. She was there, lying on her side and sound asleep, her lovely face turned toward him.

As he moved toward her, Robbie sat up, his mouth a dark circle, his pale face a mask of terror. The horror writer pushed him down again.

The muzzle of his pistol was tight against Robbie’s head; this though the horror writer could not have said how it came to be there. His index finger squeezed even as he realized it was on the trigger.

There was a muffled bang, like the sound of a large book dropped. Something jerked under the horror writer’s hand, and he whispered, “Die like my father. Like Alice and June. Die like me.” He whispered it, but did not understand what he intended by it.

Kiara’s eye were open. He struck her with the barrel, reversed the pistol and struck her again and again with the butt, stopping only when he realized he did not know how many times he had hit her already or where his blows had landed.

After pushing up the safety, he put the pistol back into his belt and stood listening. The room next to that in which he stood had been Robbie’s. Presumably, there was no one there to hear.

The room beyond that one – the room nearest the front stair – was Dan’s and Charity’s. He would stand behind the door if they came in, shoot them both, run. Mexico. South America.

They did not.

The house was silent save for his own rapid breathing and Kiara’s slow, labored breaths; beyond the open windows, the night-wind sobbed in the trees. Any other sound would have come, almost, as a relief.

There was none.

He had broken the cellar window, left tracks with the worn old shoes he had gotten from a recycle store, left tire tracks with the old truck. He smiled faintly when he recalled its mismatched tires. Let them work on that one.

He picked up Kiara and slung her over his shoulder, finding her soft, warm, and heavier than he had expected.

The back stairs were narrow and in poor repair; they creaked beneath his feet, but they were farther – much farther – from the room in which Dan and Charity slept. He descended them slowly, holding Kiara with his right arm while his left hand grasped the rail.

She stirred and moaned. He wondered whether he would have to hit her again, and decided he would not unless she screamed. If she screamed, he would drop her and do what had to be done.

She did not.

The grounds were extensive, and included a wood from which (long ago) firewood had been cut. It had grown back now, a tangle of larches and alders, firs and red cedars. Toward the back, not far from the property line, he had by merest chance stumbled upon the old well. There had been a cabin there once. No doubt it had burned. A cow or a child might have fallen into the abandoned well, and so some prudent person had covered it with a slab of limestone. Leaves and twigs on that stone had turned, in time, to soil. He had moved the stone away, leaving the soil on it largely undisturbed.

When he reached the abandoned well at last, panting and sweating, he laid Kiara down. His penlight showed that her eyes were open. Her bloodstained face seemed to him a mask of fear; seeing it, he felt himself stand straighter and grow stronger.

“You may listen to me or not,” he told her. “What you do really doesn’t matter, but I thought I ought to do you the kindness of explaining just what has happened and what will happen. What I plan, and your place in my plans.”

She made an inarticulate sound that might have been a word or a moan.

“You’re listening. Good. There’s an old well here. Only I know that it exists. At the bottom – shall we say twelve feet down? At the bottom there’s mud and a little water. You’ll get dirty, in other words, but you won’t die of thirst. There you will wait for me for as long as the police actively investigate. From time to time I may, or may not, come here and toss down a sandwich.”

He smiled. “It won’t hurt you in the least, my dear, to lose a little weight. When things have quieted down, I’ll come and pull you out. You’ll be grateful – oh, very grateful – for your rescue. Soiled and starved, but very grateful. Together we’ll walk back to my home. You may need help, and if you do I’ll provide it.”

He bent and picked her up. “I’ll bathe you, feed you, and nurse you.”

Three strides brought him to the dark mouth of the well. “After that, you’ll obey me in everything. Or you had better. And in time, perhaps, you’ll come to like it.”

He let her fall, smiled, and turned away.

There remained only the problem of the gun. Bullets could be matched to barrels, and there was an ejected shell somewhere. The gun would have to be destroyed; it was blued steel; running water should do the job, and do it swiftly.

Still smiling, he set off for the creek.

It was after four o’clock the following afternoon when Captain Barlowe of the Sheriff’s Department explained the crime. Captain Barlowe was a middle-aged and heavy-limbed. He had a thick mustache. “What happened in this house last night is becoming pretty clear.” His tone was weighty. “Why it happened . . .” He shook his head.

The horror writer said, “I know my house was broken into. One of your men showed me that. I know poor little Robbie’s dead, and I know Kiara’s missing. But that’s all I know.”

“Exactly.” Captain Barlowe clasped his big hands and unclasped them. “It’s pretty much all I know, too, sir. Other than that, all I can do is supply details. The gun that killed the boy was a twenty-two semi-automatic. It could have been a pistol or a rifle. It could even have been a sawn-off rifle. There’s no more common caliber in the world.”

The horror writer nodded.

“He was killed with one shot, a contact shot to the head, and he was probably killed for being in a room in which he had no business being. He’d left his own bed and crawled into his big sister’s. Not for sex, sir. I could see what you were thinking. He was too young for that. He was just a little kid alone in a strange house. He got lonely and was murdered for it.”

Captain Barlowe paused to clear his throat. “You told my men that there had been no cars in your driveway since the rain except your own and the boy’s parents’. Is that right?”

The horror writer nodded. “I’ve racked my brain trying to think of somebody else, and come up empty. Dan and I are old friends. You ought to know that.”

Captain Barlowe nodded. “I do, sir. He told me.”

“We get together when we can, usually that’s once or twice a year. This year he and Charity decided to vacation in this area. He’s a golfer and a fisherman.”

Captain Barlowe nodded again. “He should love our part of the state.”

“That’s what I thought, Captain. I don’t play golf, but I checked out some of the courses here. I fish a bit, and I told him about that. He said he was coming, and I told him I had plenty of room. They were only going to stay for two nights.”

“You kept your cellar door locked?”

“Usually? No. I locked it when I heard they were coming. The cellar’s dirty and the steps are dangerous. You know how small boys are.”

“Yes, sir. I used to be one. The killer jimmied it open.”

The horror writer nodded. “I saw that.”

“You sleep on the ground floor. You didn’t hear anything?”

“No. I’m a sound sleeper.”

“I understand. Here’s my problem, sir, and I hope you can help me with it. Crime requires three things. They’re motive, means, and opportunity. Know those, and you know a lot. I’ve got a murder case here. It’s the murder of a kid. I hate the bastards who kill kids, and I’ve never had a case I wanted to solve more.”

“I understand,” the horror writer said.

“Means is no problem. He had a gun, a car, and tools. Maybe gloves, because we haven’t found any fresh prints we can’t identify. His motive may have been robbery, but it was probably of a sexual nature. Here’s a young girl, a blonde. Very good-looking to judge by the only picture we’ve seen so far.”

“She is.” The horror writer nodded his agreement.

“He must have seen her somewhere. And not just that. He must have known that she was going to be in this house last night. Where did he see her? How did he know where she was going to be? If I can find the answers to those questions we’ll get him.”

“I wish I could help you.” The horror writer’s smile was inward only.

“You’ve had no visitors since your guests arrived?”

He shook his head. “None.”

“Delivery men? A guy to fix the furnace? Something like that?”

“No, nobody. They got here late yesterday afternoon, Captain.”

“I understand. Now think about this, please. I want to know everybody – and I mean everybody, no matter who it was – you told that they were coming.”

“I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it a great deal, Captain. And I didn’t tell anyone. When I went around to the golf courses, I told people I was expecting guests and they’d want to play golf. But I never said who those guests were. There was no reason to.”

“That settles it.” Captain Barlowe rose, looking grim. “It’s somebody they told. The father’s given us the names of three people and he’s trying to come up with more. There may be more. He admits that. His wife . . .”

“Hadn’t she told anyone?”

“That just it, sir. She did. She seems to have told quite a few people and says can’t remember them all. She’s lying because she doesn’t want her friends bothered. Well, by God they’re going to be bothered. My problem – one of my problems – is that all these people are out of state. I can’t go after them myself, and I’d like to. I want have a good look at them. I want to see their faces change when they’re asked certain questions.”

He breathed deep, expanding a chest notably capacious, and let it out. “On the plus side, we’re after a stranger. Some of the local people may have seen him and noticed him. He may – I said may – be driving a car with out-of-state plates.”

“Couldn’t he have rented a car at the airport?” the horror writer asked.

“Yes, sir. He could, and I hope to God he did. If he did, we’ll get him sure. But his car had worn tires, and that’s not characteristic of rentals.”

“I see.”

“If he did rent his car, it’ll have bloodstains in it, and the rental people will notice. She was bleeding when she was carried out of her bedroom.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Not much, but some. We found blood in the hall and more on the back stairs. The bad thing is that if he flew in and plans to fly back out, he can’t take her with him. He’ll kill her. He may have killed her already.”

Captain Barlowe left, Dan and Charity moved into a motel, and the day ended in quiet triumph. The experts who had visited the crime scene earlier reappeared and took more photographs and blood samples. The horror writer asked them no questions, and they volunteered nothing.

He drove to town the next morning and shopped at several stores. So far as he could judge, he was not followed. That afternoon he got out the binoculars he had acquired years before for bird-watching and scanned the surrounding woods and fields, seeing no one.

At sunrise the next morning he rescanned them, paying particular attention to areas he thought he might have slighted before. Selecting an apple from the previous day’s purchases, he made his way through grass still wet with dew to the well and tossed it in.

He had hoped that she would thank him and plead for release; if she did either her voice was too faint for him to catch her words, this though it seemed to him there was a sound of some sort from the well, a faint, high humming. As he tramped back to the house, he decided that it had probably been an echo of the wind.

The rest of that day he spent preparing her cellar room.

He slept well that night and woke refreshed twenty minutes before his clock radio would have roused him. The three-eighths-inch rope he had brought two days earlier awaited him in the kitchen; he knotted it as soon as he had finished breakfast, spacing the knots about a foot apart.

When he had wound it around his waist and tied it securely, he discovered bloodstains – small but noticeable – on the back of his barn coat. Eventually it would have to be burned, but a fire at this season would be suspicious in itself; a long soak in a strong bleach solution would have to do the job – for the present, if not permanently. Pulled out, his shirt hid the rope, although not well.

When he reached the well, he tied one end of the rope to a convenient branch and called softly.

There was no reply.

A louder “Kiara!” brought no reply either. She was still asleep, the horror writer decided. Asleep or, just possibly, unconscious. He dropped the free end of the rope into the well, swung over the edge, and began the climb down.

He had expected the length of his rope to exceed the depth of the well by three feet at least; but there came a time when his feet could find no more rope below him – or find the muddy bottom either.

His pen light revealed it, eight inches, perhaps, below the soles of his shoes. Another knot down – this knot almost the last – brought his feet into contact with the mud.

He released the rope.

He had expected to sink into the mud, but had thought to sink to a depth of no more than three or four inches; he found himself floundering, instead, in mud up to his knees. It was difficult to retain his footing; bracing one hand against the stone side of the well, he managed to do it.

At the first step he attempted, the mud sucked his shoe from his foot. Groping the mud for it got his hands thoroughly filthy, but failed to locate it. Attempting a second step cost him his other shoe as well.

This time, however, his groping fingers found a large, soft thing in the mud. His pen light winked on – but in the space of twenty seconds or a little less its always-faint beam faded to darkness. His fingers told him of hair matted with mud, of an ear, and then of a small earring. When he took his hand from it, he stood among corpses, shadowy child-sized bodies his fingers could not locate. Shuddering, he looked up.

Above him, far above him, a small circle of blue was bisected by the dark limb to which he had tied his rope. The rope itself swayed gently in the air, its lower end not quite out of reach.

He caught it and tried to pull himself up; his hands were slippery with mud, and it escaped them.

Desperately, almost frantically, he strove to catch it again, but his struggles caused him to sink deeper into the mud.

He tried to climb the wall of the well; at his depth its rough stones were thick with slime.

At last he recalled Kiara’s body, and by a struggle that seemed to him long managed to get both feet on it. With its support, his fingertips once more brushed the dangling end of the rope. Bracing his right foot on what felt like the head, he made a final all-out effort.

And caught the rope, grasping it a finger’s breadth from its frayed end. The slight tension he exerted on it straightened it, and perhaps stretched it a trifle. Bent the limb above by a fraction of an inch. With his right arm straining almost out of its socket and his feet pressing hard against Kiara’s corpse, the fingers of his left hand could just touch the final knot.

Something took hold of his right foot, pinning toes and transverse arch in jaws that might have been those of a trap.

The horror writer struggled then, and screamed again and again as he was drawn under – screamed and shrieked and begged until the stinking almost liquid mud stopped his mouth.

NICHOLAS ROYLE

Continuity Error

NICHOLAS ROYLE WAS BORN in Manchester in 1963. He is the author of five novels, Counterparts, Saxophone Dreams, The Matter of the Heart, The Director’s Cut and Antwerp, and one short story collection, Mortality (Serpent’s Tail). A novella, The Enigma of Departure, is forthcoming from PS Publishing.

Widely published as a journalist, with regular appearances in Time Out and the Independent newspaper, Royle has also edited twelve anthologies. He currently teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University.

“Much of what happens in the story did actually happen in so-called real life,” confirms the author. “I would like to acknowledge Rebecca Healey’s generous help with lip-reading and Michael Kemp’s kind permission to quote from his poetry.”

CHRISTINE RANG MADDOX on his mobile. A little accident, she said. A bump.

“Was anyone hurt?”

“No, no one was hurt.”

He made his way to the side street in Shepherd’s Bush where it had happened. A one-way street temporarily blocked off by roadworks at the junction with Goldhawk Road. Estate agent’s on the corner. Christine had reversed away from the roadworks and at five miles an hour hit a silver Toyota coming out of the concealed exit from the sunken car park behind the estate agent’s.

By the time Maddox arrived, the driver of the silver Toyota was in full magnanimous third-party mode, confident the insurance companies would find in his favour. Maddox hated him on sight. Too reasonable, too forthcoming. Like providing his address and insurance details was some kind of favour.

Maddox’s son Jack had got out of the car and stood staring at the small pile of shattered glass on the road, seemingly transfixed by it. Christine was visibly upset, despite the unctuous affability of the Toyota driver and Maddox’s own efforts to downplay the situation.

“It’s only a couple of lights and a new wing. No one was hurt, that’s the main thing.”

Two days later, Maddox and Jack were walking past the top of the side street. The roadworks had been removed and a car was exiting into Goldhawk Road without any difficulty.

“Is that where the accident happened, Daddy?” asked the little boy.

“Yes.”

Jack stopped, his big eyes taking in the details. The fresh asphalt by the junction, the concealed exit from the sunken car park behind the estate agent’s.

“Is it still there?” the little boy asked.

“What? Is what still there?”

“The accident. Is the accident still there?”

Maddox didn’t know what to say.

They were getting ready to go out. Christine was ready and Maddox was nearly ready, a too-familiar scenario. She waited by the front door, smart, made-up, tall in new boots and long coat, enveloped in a haze of expensive perfume.

“Are you nearly ready, Brian?”

That she added his name to the harmless query was a bad sign. It meant her patience was stretched too thin. But he’d lost his car key. He’d looked everywhere. Twice. And couldn’t find it.

“Where did you last have it?” she shouted up the stairs.

The unhelpfulness of the question grated against his nerves.

“I don’t know. That’s the whole point.”

He started again. Bedroom (bedside drawer, dressing gown). Jacket pockets. Kitchen.

“Have you looked in your box?”

“Yes, I’ve looked in my box.”

They each had a box, like an in-tray, in the kitchen. Christine never used hers, but always knew where everything was. Maddox used his, but still managed to lose at least one important item every day. Wallet, phone, keys. Chequebook, bank card. Everything always turned up, sooner or later, but in this case, not soon enough.

“I can’t find it. I’ve looked everywhere.”

Heavy sigh.

If the atmosphere hadn’t become tense he would jokingly accuse her of having hidden it, of trying to make him think he was losing his mind. But that wouldn’t play now. They were beyond that.

“It’s probably at the flat,” she said, loading the word with her customary judgmental emphasis.

“How could it be at the flat when my car’s outside?” he snapped before realising that she must have been joking.

“It’s a pity you don’t have a spare key,” she said.

“It’s a pity your car’s in the garage,” he retorted, “about to be declared uneconomical to repair. Look, Christine, it’s very late. I can’t find it and I certainly won’t find it with you hovering, getting all wound up, so I suggest you get a cab and I’ll follow.”

“But what if you don’t find it?’

“I’ll find it. I’ll be there, just a little late, that’s all. You go. You’ll easily pick up a black cab on the Green. You’re only going to Ladbroke Grove.”

Sweating, he listened as the front door was opened and shut – slammed. Gate clanged. Fading echo of footsteps receding. He felt the tension flow out of him and collapsed on to the nearest chair. He loosened his tie and reached for a glass.

In their bedroom he pressed the power button on his laptop. While waiting, he stared blankly at the framed poster on the wall. A production he’d been in more than twenty years ago. Colossus. Clive Barker’s play about Goya. He allowed the faces of cast members to run through his mind, particularly those who’d gone on to other things. Lennie James – you saw him on television all the time now. A part in Cold Feet. A one-off drama, something he’d written himself. That prison series. Buried. Right. Buried in the schedules.

Aslie Pitter, the most naturally talented actor in the cast. He’d done one or two things – a Channel Four sitcom, guest appearance in The Bill – then disappeared. Maddox had last seen him working for a high-street chain. Security, demonstrating product – he couldn’t remember which.

Elinore Vickery had turned up in something at the Waterman’s. Maddox had liked her, tried to keep in touch, but there was an invisible barrier, as if she’d known him better than he knew himself.

Missing out on a couple of good parts because of his size (five foot five in stocking feet, eight stone dead), Maddox had quit the theatre and concentrated on writing. Barker had helped with one or two contacts and Maddox sold a couple of horror stories. Over the years he’d moved away from fiction into journalism and book-length non-fiction. The current project, New Maps of Hell, hadn’t found a home. The publishers he’d offered it to hadn’t been able to reject it quickly enough. They didn’t want it on their desks. It made them uncomfortable. That was fine by Maddox. He’d worry if it didn’t. They’d want it on their lists, though, when it was too late. He’d finish it first, then pick one editor and let the others write their letters of resignation.

He read through the afternoon’s work, then closed the laptop. He opened his bedside drawer and there was his car key. He looked at it. Had it been there before? Of course it had. How could it not have been? But he’d not seen it, so it might as well not have been. It had effectively disappeared. Hysterical blindness? Negative hallucination?

He pocketed the key and went downstairs. The door closed behind him and the car started first time. He sneaked past White City – the exhibition halls were gone, torn down for a future shopping centre – and slipped on to the Westway. He didn’t think of Christine as he approached Ladbroke Grove, but of Christie, John Reginald Halli-day. The former relief projectionist at the Electric, who had murdered at least six women, had lived at 10 Rillington Place, later renamed Ruston Close before being demolished to make way for the elevated motorway on which Maddox was now driving. The film, starring Dickie Attenborough as the killer and John Hurt as his poor dupe of an upstairs neighbour, who swung for at least one of Christie’s crimes, had been filmed in Rillington Place itself. Maddox understood, from comments posted on ghoulish message boards on the internet, that the interiors had been shot in No.8 and the exteriors outside No.10. But when the police, acting on a tip-off from Timothy Evans, yanked open a manhole cover outside No.10, Attenborough could be seen peering out through the ground-floor window of the end house in the terrace, No.10, where three of Christie’s victims had been walled up in the pantry, his wife Ethel being found under the floorboards in the front room. For Maddox it was the key shot in the film, the only clear evidence that they’d gained access to the charnel house itself. The only other explanation being that they’d mocked up the entire street in the studio, which he didn’t buy.

The case accounted for five pages in Maddox’s book. He concentrated mainly on the interweaving of fact and fiction, the merging of film and reality. Attenborough as Christie. No.8 standing in for No.10, if indeed it did. The internet also yielded a piece of Pathe film footage of the demolition of Ruston Close. Two men with pickaxes. A third man speaking to camera. A burning house. Shots of the house at the end of the street with the white (replacement) door. Clearly the same house as that in the film. But there was no sound, the reporter mouthing inaudible commentary. Maddox lured a lip-reader to the flat, a junior editor from one of the publishers that had turned down his book. She reminded him of Linzi with her green eyes and shoulder-length streaked hair. Even in heels she didn’t reach Mad-dox’s height, but she had a confident, relaxed smile, She held his gaze when he spoke to her and appeared to be looking into his eyes, but must have been watching his lips, as she relied heavily on lip-reading. Maddox was careful to make sure she was looking in his direction before speaking to her, probably over-careful. She must have spent a lifetime compensating for situations in which people wouldn’t have made such allowances. Working backwards from the first words she managed to lip-read and then having to catch up. So much information assumed rather than known for certain, but Maddox could relate to that. In some areas of life he, too, knew nothing for certain. The deaf woman’s name was Karen. He assumed the proposal for his book had been rejected by someone senior who had given Karen the unpleasant job of telling the author, but he didn’t know that for certain. Possibly she’d read it and rejected it herself and only agreed to provide lip-reading services because she felt bad about it.

When she entered the flat, Maddox felt at ease. In control. He apologised for the loud, bass-heavy music coming from the downstairs flat, but she said she couldn’t hear it.

“I thought you might be able to feel it,” he said.

“It’s a new building,” she said. “Concrete floors. Otherwise . . .”

He showed her the footage. She said it wasn’t straightforward. The quality was poor and the picture kept pixellating, plus the reporter unhelpfully turned his head to the side on several occasions.

Maddox asked her if she would come back and have another go if he was able to tidy the picture up a bit.

“I don’t think I’ll be able to get much off it for you,” she said.

“If you wouldn’t mind just trying one more time, perhaps when you’re less tired,” he said. “It’s very important to me, for my book, you know.”

Maddox pulled into one of the reserved spaces outside a block of purpose-built flats in the depressed residential trapezium bordered by Green Lanes and the roads of West Green, Seven Sisters and St Ann’s. He listened to the ticking of the cooling engine for a few moments as he watched the darkened windows of the second-floor flat. The top flat.

The street door had been left open by one of his neighbours. He walked up.

Inside the flat, he left the light switched off, poured himself a drink and sat in the single armchair. He pulled out his phone and sent a short text message. Orange street-lighting cast a deathly glow over the cheap bookshelves stacked with pulp novels, true crime, horror anthologies and dystopian science fiction. His phone chimed. He opened it, read the return message and replied to it. When he’d lived here, the room had been dominated by a double bed. Moving into Christine’s house had allowed him to turn the tiny flat into the dedicated office he’d always wanted by burning the bed on the waste ground out the back. He’d considered giving it away, since selling it had struck him as tiresome: placing an ad, answering calls, opening the door to strangers. Easier to burn the damn thing and all the memories associated with it. So then he’d moved his desk from the east end of the room, under the Velux window, to the west-facing windows overlooking the street.

Another text arrived. He read it and closed the phone without replying.

As usual, loud music was playing in the downstairs flat.

He drained his glass and let his head fall back against the soft cushion. The Artex ceiling had attracted cobwebs and grime, but he doubted he would ever feel the need to repaint or clean it. Very few people ever came here. Linzi had spent a lot of time in the flat, of course. He laughed bitterly, then chewed his lip and stared at the ceiling, sensitive to the slightest noise in spite of the thump of the bass from the downstairs flat. Christine had hardly stepped over the threshold. She’d been once or twice soon after they’d met, but not since. There was no reason to. It was clear from the odd comment that she resented his keeping the flat, since it was a drain on resources, but as he’d argued, there was no room in the house for all these books and tapes. Not to mention the stuff stored in the loft. He chewed his lip again.

He switched on the stereo and the ordered chaos of Paul Schiitze’s New Maps of Hell clattered into battle with the beat from below. Schiitze’s 1992 release was the constant soundtrack to any work he did on the book in the flat. (On the rare occasions that he worked on it at the house, he played the follow-up, New Maps of Hell II: The Rapture of Metals.) He believed it helped. It started out as an aid to getting the mindset right, he sometimes imagined telling Kirsty Wark or Verity Sharp in a television interview, and soon became a habit, a routine. I simply couldn’t work on the book without having the music playing in the background. It was about the creation of a hermetically sealed world. Which, I suppose you have to admit, Hell is. Although one that’s expanding at an alarming rate, erupting in little pockets. North Kensington, Muswell Hill. London is going to Hell, Kirsty.

He opened a file and did some work, tidied up some troublesome text. He saved it and opened another file, “Dollis Hill”. Notes, a few stabs at an address, gaps, big gaps. He was going to have to go back.

He replayed the mental rushes. Autumn 1986. A fine day. Gusty, but dry, bright. Walking in an unfamiliar district of London. A long road, tree-lined. High up. View down over the city between detached houses and semis. Victorian, Edwardian.

The entryphone buzzed, bringing him back to the present with a start. He closed the file. He got to his feet, crossed to the hall and picked up the phone.

“The door’s open. Come up,” he said, before realising she couldn’t hear him.

He remained standing in the hall, listening to footsteps climbing the interior staircase. When the footsteps stopped outside his door there was a pause before the knock came. He imagined her composing herself, perhaps straightening her clothes, removing a hair from her collar. Or looking at her watch and thinking of bolting. He opened the door as she knocked, which startled her.

“Come in,” he said. “Thanks for coming.”

All Maddox had done to improve the image on the video was change the size of the Media Player window so that the reporter’s mouth, while slightly smaller, was less affected by picture breakup.

While Karen studied the footage, Maddox crossed to the far side of the room. He returned with a glass of red wine, which he placed beside the laptop. Karen raised a hand to decline, but Maddox simply pushed the glass slightly closer to her and left it there. Finally, while she was watching the footage for a third time, her hand reached out, perhaps involuntarily, to pick up the glass. She took a sip, then held the glass aloft while studying the image of the jaunty reporter: Michael Caine glasses, buttoned-up jacket, button-down shirt, hand alighting on hip like a butterfly.

Maddox watched as she replayed the footage again. Each time the reporter started speaking, she moved a little closer to the screen and seemed to angle her head slightly to the left in order to favour her right ear, in which she had a trace of hearing, despite the fact there was no sound at all on the film. Habit, Maddox decided.

Karen leaned back and looked at Maddox before speaking.

“He’s saying something like newspaper reports . . . of the investigation . . . into the discovery of the burned-out bodies of two women . . . Fifteen – or fifty – years ago . . . Something of the century. I’m sorry, it’s really hard.”

Her speech was that of a person who had learned to talk the hard way, without being able to hear the sound of her own voice.

“That’s great. That’s very helpful, Karen. It would be fifteen, not fifty. I didn’t even know for certain that he was talking about Christie’s house. Burned-out, though, are you sure? That’s strange.”

“No, I’m not sure, but that’s what it sounds like.”

Karen’s choice of expression – sounds like – reminded him of a blind man who had asked Maddox for help crossing the road as he was going to see the doctor.

Maddox went to fill up her glass, but she placed her hand over it.

“I’ve got to go,” she said. “I said I could only stop by for a minute.’

Maddox stood his ground with the wine bottle, then stepped back.

“Another time,” he said.

“Have you got something else you want me to look at?”

“I might have. If it’s not too much of an imposition.”

“Just let me know.”

He showed her out, then switched the light off again and watched from the window as she regained the street. She stopped, looked one way, then went the other, as if deciding there and then which way to go. Hardly the action of a woman with an appointment. He watched as she walked south towards St Ann’s Road and disappeared around the corner, then he sat down in the armchair and emptied her wine glass. His gaze roved across the bookshelves and climbed the walls before reaching the ceiling. He then sat without moving for half an hour, his eyes not leaving the ceiling, listening to the building’s creaks and sighs, the music downstairs having been turned off.

He took a different route back, climbing the Harringay Ladder and going west past the top of Priory Park. He floored the pedal through the Cranley Gardens S-bend and allowed the gradient to slow the car so that he rolled to a stop outside No. 23. There he killed the engine and looked up at the second-floor flat where Dennis Nilsen had lived from October 1981 to February 1983. One of Nilsen’s mistakes, which had led to his being caught, was to have left the window in the gable dormer wide open for long periods, attracting the attention of neighbours.

Maddox looked at his watch and started the engine. He got on to the North Circular, coming off at Staples Corner, heading south down Edgware Road and turning right into Dollis Hill Lane. He slowed to a crawl, leaning forward over the wheel, craning his neck at the houses on the south side. He was sure it would be on the south side. He definitely remembered a wide tree-lined avenue with views over central London. Land falling away behind the house. Long walk from the tube. Which tube? He didn’t know.

He turned right, cruised the next street. He wasn’t even sure of the street. Dollis Hill Lane sounded right, but as soon as he’d got the idea of Cricklewood Lane off the internet that had sounded right too. He’d gone there, to 108/110 Cricklewood Lane, after reading on the net that that was where they’d shot Hellraiser. When he got there and found it was a branch of Holmes Place Health Clubs, he worked out it must have been the former location of Cricklewood Production Village, where they’d done the studio work.

Some time in the autumn of 1986, Maddox had come here, to a house in Dollis Hill. A movie was being made. Clive Barker was directing his first film. Hellraiser. They were shooting in a rented house and Maddox had been invited to go on the set as an associate of Barker’s. He was going to do a little interview, place it wherever possible. Could be his big break. It was good of Clive to have agreed to it. Maddox remembered the big white vans in the street outside the house, a surprising number of people hanging around doing nothing, a catering truck, a long table covered with polystyrene cups, a tea urn. He asked for Steve Jones, unit publicist. Jones talked to him about what was going on. They were filming a dinner party scene with Andrew Robinson and Clare Higgins and two young actors, the boy and the girl, and a bunch of extras. Maddox got to watch from behind the camera, trying to catch Barker’s eye as he talked to the actors, telling them what he wanted them to do. Controlling everybody and everything. Maddox envied him, but admired him as well. A make-up girl applied powder to Robinson’s forehead. A hairdresser fixed Ashley Laurence’s hair. They did the scene and the air was filled with electricity. Everyone behind the camera held their breath, faces still and taut. The tension was palpable. The moment Barker called “Cut”, it melted away. Smiles, laughter, everyone suddenly moving around. Maddox noticed the hairdresser, who looked lost for a moment, diminutive and vulnerable, but Steve Jones caught Maddox’s arm in a light grip and cornered Barker. The director looked at Maddox and there was a fraction of a second’s pause, no more, before he said, “Brian,” in such a warm, sincere way that Maddox might have thought Clive had been looking forward to seeing him all morning.

They did a short interview over lunch, which they ate on the floor of a room at the back of the house.

“We’re surrounded by images which are momentarily potent and carry no resonance whatsoever,” Barker was saying in transatlantic Scouse. “Advertising, the pop video, a thing which seems to mean an awful lot and is in fact absolutely negligible.”

Maddox noticed the hairdresser carrying a paper plate and a cup. She sat cross-legged on the floor next to another crew member and they talked as they ate.

“What frightens you?” he asked Barker.

“Unlit streets, flying, being stuck in the tube at rush hour. Places where you have to relinquish control.”

Once they’d finished, Maddox hung around awkwardly, waiting for a chance to talk to the hairdresser. When it came – her companion rising to go – he seized it. She was getting up too and Maddox contrived to step in front of her, blocking her way. He apologised and introduced himself. “I was just interviewing Clive. We’ve known each other a couple of years. I was in one of his plays.”

“Linzi,” she said, offering her hand. “I’m only here for one day. The regular girl called in sick.”

“Then I’m lucky I came today,” he said, smiling shyly.

She was wearing a dark green top of soft cotton that was exactly the same shade as her eyes. Her hair, light brown with natural blonde streaks, was tied back in a knot pierced by a pencil.

“Are you going to stick around?” she asked.

“I’ve done my interview, but if no one kicks me out . . .”

“It’s a pretty relaxed set.”

He did stick around and most of the time he watched Linzi, promising himself he wouldn’t leave until he’d got her number. It took him the rest of the afternoon, but he got it. She scribbled it on a blank page in her Filofax, then tore out the page and said, “Call me.”

The chances of finding the house in darkness were even less than in daylight. He’d been up to Dollis Hill a couple of times in the last few weeks, once in the car and once on foot. Lately, he’d been thinking more about Linzi, and specifically about the early days, before it started to go wrong. He’d spent enough time going over the bad times and wanted to revisit the good. He wanted to see the house again, but couldn’t. He needed to locate it for his book. He’d rewatched the film, which contained enough shots of the house’s exterior that it should have been easy to locate it, but it didn’t seem to matter how many times he trailed these suburban avenues, the house wasn’t there. Or if it was, he couldn’t see it. He’d begun to think it might have been knocked down, possibly even straight after the shoot. It could have been why the house had been available. In the film there was a No.55 on the porch, but that would be set dressing, like the renumbering of 25 Powis Square, in Performance, as No.81.

He looked at his watch and calculated that if he was quick he could get to Ladbroke Grove in time for coffee and to drive Christine home, thereby reducing the amount of grief she would give him. Negligibly, he realised, but still.

In the morning, he feigned sleep while she dressed. Her movements were businesslike, crisp. The night before had been a riot, as expected. When he had turned up at the dinner, two and a half hours late, she had contented herself with merely shooting him a look, but as soon as they left she started. And as soon as she started, he switched off.

It didn’t let up even when they got home, but he wasn’t listening. He marvelled at how closely he was able to mimic the condition with which Karen, his lip-reader, had been born. Thinking of Karen, moreover, relaxed him inside, while Christine kept on, even once they’d got into bed. Elective deafness – it beat hysterical blindness.

When he was sure Christine had left the house – the slammed door, the gate that clanged – he got up and showered. Within half an hour, having spent ten minutes pointing the DVD remote at the television, he was behind the wheel of the car with his son in the back seat. South Tottenham in twenty minutes was a bigger ask by day than by night, but he gave it his best shot. Rush hour was over (Christine, in common with everyone who worked on weekly magazines, finished earlier than she started), but skirting the congestion charge zone was still a challenge.

He parked where he had the night before and turned to see that Jack was asleep. He left him there, locked the car and walked up. He had decided, while lying in bed with his back to Christine, that it would be worth going up into the loft. Somewhere in the loft was a box containing old diaries, including one for 1986. He had never been a consistent diarist, but some years had seen him make more notes than others. It was worth a rummage among the spider’s webs and desiccated wasps” nests. His size meant he didn’t bang his head on the latticework of pine beams.

The loft still smelled faintly of formalin. He suspected it always would until he got rid of the suitcase at the far end. He shone the torch in its direction. Big old-fashioned brown leather case, rescued from a skip and cleaned up. Solid, sturdy, two catches and a strap with a buckle. Could take a fair weight.

He redirected the torch at the line of dusty boxes closer to the trap door. The first box contained T-shirts that he never wore any more but couldn’t bear to throw away. The second was full of old typescripts stiff with Tipp-Ex. The diaries were in the third box along. He bent down and sorted through: 1974, a shiny black Pocket Diary filled mainly with notes on the history of the Crusades; 1976, the summer of the heatwave, Angling Times diary, roach and perch that should have been returned to the water left under stones to die; 1980, the deaths of his three remaining grandparents, three funerals in one year, coffins in the front room, all burials; 1982, his first term at university, meeting Martin, his best friend for a while. Martin was a year older, which had impressed Maddox. The age difference hadn’t mattered. Everything was changing. Leaving school, leaving home. Living in halls. Martin was a medical student. They would stay up late drinking coffee and Martin would smoke cigarettes and tell Maddox about medicine, about anatomy and about the bodies he was learning to dissect.

Maddox could listen to Martin for hours. The later they stayed up, the more profound their discussions seemed to become. Maddox watched as Martin dragged on his cigarette and held the smoke in his lungs for an eternity, stretching the moment, before blowing it out in perfect rings. When Martin talked about the bodies in the anatomy lab, Maddox became entranced. He imagined Martin alone in the lab with a dozen flayed corpses. Bending over them, examining them, carefully removing a strip of muscle, severing a tendon. Getting up close to the secrets, the mysteries, of death. Martin said it didn’t matter how long he spent washing his hands, they still smelled of formalin. He held them under Maddox’s nose, then moved to cup his cheeks in an affectionate, stroking gesture.

“You don’t mind, do you?” he said, as his hand landed on Maddox’s knee.

“Could you get me in there? Into the lab?” Maddox asked, shaking his head, picturing himself among the bodies, as Martin’s hand moved up his thigh.

“No. But I could bring you something out. Something you could keep.”

Martin’s hand had reached Maddox’s lap and Maddox was mildly surprised to discover that far from objecting, he was aroused. If this was to be the downpayment on whatever Martin might fetch him back from the dissection table, so be it.

“I’ve got something for you,” Martin said a couple of days later, “in my room.”

Maddox followed Martin to his room.

“So where is it?” Maddox asked.

“Can’t just leave that sort of thing lying about. But what’s the rush?’

Martin lay down on the bed and unbuckled his belt.

Maddox hesitated, considered walking out, but he felt certain he’d always regret it if he left empty-handed. Instead, he knelt beside the bed and spat into his palm.

Afterwards, Martin pulled open his desk drawer.

“There you go,” he said.

Maddox withdrew a strong-smelling package. He started to work at the knot in the outermost plastic bag, but it wouldn’t come easily. He asked Martin what it contained.

“A piece of subcutaneous fat from the body of a middle-aged man. If anyone ever asks, you didn’t get it from me.”

Maddox returned to his own room on the seventh floor, washing his hands on the way. He cut open the bag and unwrapped his spoils. The gobbet of fat, four inches by two, looked like a piece of tripe, white and bloodless, and the stench of formalin made him feel sick and excited at the same time. Maddox was careful not to touch the fat as he wrapped it up again and secured the package with tape. He opened his wardrobe and pulled out the brown suitcase he’d liberated from a skip in Judd Street.

He saw less of Martin after that. At first he contrived subtly to avoid him and then started going out with Valerie, a girl with fat arms and wide hips he picked up in the union bar on cocktails night. He wasn’t convinced they were a good match, but the opportunity was convenient, given the Martin situation.

The piece of fat remained wrapped up in its suitcase, which smelled so strongly that Maddox only had to open the case and take a sniff to re-experience how he had felt when Martin had given him the body part. As he lay in bed trying to get to sleep (alone. Valerie didn’t last more than a few weeks) he sometimes thought about the man who had knowingly willed his cadaver to science. He wondered what his name might have been and what kind of man he was. What he might have been in life. He would hardly have been able to foresee what would happen to the small part of him that was now nestled inside Maddox’s wardrobe.

When Maddox left the hall of residence for a flat in Holloway, the case went with him, still empty but for its human remains. He kept it on top of a cupboard. It stayed there for two years. When he moved into the flat in N15, he put the suitcase in the loft, where it had remained ever since. The piece of fat was no longer in Maddox’s possession, but the suitcase was not free of the smell of formalin.

Maddox’s 1986 diary was at the bottom of the box. It took only a couple of minutes to find what he was looking for. “Hellraiser, 11:00 a.m.” he’d written in the space reserved for Friday 10 October. A little further down was an address: 187 Dollis Hill Lane.

He drove to Dollis Hill via Cranley Gardens, but on this occasion didn’t stop.

“Why didn’t I think of checking my old diaries before, eh, Jack?” he said, looking in the rear-view mirror.

His son was silent, staring out of the window.

Turning into Dollis Hill Lane from Edgware Road, he slowed to a crawl, oblivious to the noisy rebuke of the driver immediately behind him, who pulled out and swerved to overtake, engine racing, finger given. Maddox brought the car to a halt on a slight incline outside No. 187. He looked at the house and felt an unsettling combination of familiarity and non-recognition. Attraction and repulsion. He had to stare at the house for two or three minutes before he realised why he had driven past it so many times and failed to recognise it.

Like most things recalled from the past, it was smaller than the version in his memory. But the main difference was the apparent age of the building. He remembered a Victorian villa, possibly Edwardian. The house in front of him was new. The rendering on the front gable end had gone up in the last few years. The wood-framed bay windows on the first floor were of recent construction. The casement window in the top flat, second floor, was obviously new. The mansard roof was a familiar shape, but the clay Rosemarys were all fresh from the tile shop. The materials were new, but the style was not. The basic design was unchanged, from what he could remember of the exterior shots in the film, which he’d looked at again before coming out, but in spite of that the house looked new. As if a skeleton had grown new muscle and flesh.

“Just like Frank,” he said out loud.

“What, Daddy?”

“Just like Frank in the film.”

“What film?”

“They made a film in this house and I came to see them make it. You’re too young to see it yet. One day, maybe.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about a man who disappears and then comes back to life with the help of his girlfriend. It happened in that room up there.” He pointed to the top flat. “Although, the windows are wrong,” he said, trying to remember the second-floor window in the film. “I need to check it again.”

The only part of the exterior that looked as if they’d taken care to try to match the original was the front door.

As he’d walked from the Hellraiser set back to the tube two decades earlier, he’d read and re-read Linzi’s number on the torn-out piece of Filofax paper. He called her the next day and they arranged to meet for a drink.

“Why are you so interested in this house, Daddy?” Jack asked from the back seat.

“Because of what happened here. Because of the film. And because I met somebody here. Somebody I knew before I met your mother.’

Linzi lived in East Finchley. They went to see films at the Phoenix or met for drinks in Muswell Hill. Malaysian meals in Crouch End. He showed her the house in Hillfield Avenue where he had visited Clive Barker.

“Peter Straub used to live on the same road, just further up the hill,” he told her.

“Who’s Peter Straub?”

“Have you heard of Stephen King?”

“Of course.”

“Straub and King wrote a book together. The Talisman. They wrote it here. Or part of it, anyway. King also wrote a story called ‘Crouch End’, which was interesting, not one of his best.”

Maddox and Linzi started meeting during the day at the Wisteria Tea Rooms on Middle Lane and it was there, among the pot plants and mismatched crockery, that Maddox realised with a kind of slow, swooning surprise that he was happy. The realisation was so slow because the feeling was so unfamiliar. They took long walks through Highgate Cemetery and across Hampstead Heath.

Weeks became months. The cherry blossom came out in long straight lines down Cecile Park, and fell to the pavements, and came out again. Linzi often stayed at Maddox’s flat in South Tottenham, but frowned distastefully at his true-crime books. One morning while she was still asleep, Maddox was dressing, looking for a particular T-shirt. Unable to find it, he climbed up the ladder into the loft. Searching through a box of old clothes, he didn’t hear Linzi climbing the ladder or see her head and shoulders suddenly intrude into the loft space.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Shit.” He jumped, hitting his head. “Ow. That hurt. Shit. Nothing. Looking for something.”

“What’s that smell?”

“Nothing.”

He urged her back down the ladder and made sure the trap door was fastened before pulling on the Eraserhead T-shirt he’d been looking for.

Whenever he went into the loft from then on, whether Linzi was around or not, he would pull the ladder up after him and close the trap door. The loft was private.

When he got back to the flat that evening, he went up into the loft again – duly covering his tracks, although he was alone – and took the small wrapped parcel from the suitcase. The lid fell shut, the old-fashioned clasps sliding home without his needing to fasten them. Quality craftsmanship.

When it was dark, he buried the slice of tissue in the waste ground behind the flats.

As the decade approached its end, the directionless lifestyle that Maddox and Linzi had drifted into seemed to become more expensive. The bills turned red. Maddox started working regular shifts on the subs’ desk at the Independent. He hated it but it paid well. Linzi applied for a full-time job at a ladies’ salon in Finsbury Park. They took a day trip to Brighton. They went to an art show in the Unitarian Church where Maddox bought Linzi a small watercolour and she picked out a booklet of poems by the artist’s husband as a return gift. They had lunch in a vegetarian café. Maddox talked about the frustrations of cutting reviews to fit and coming up with snappy headlines, when what he’d rather be doing was writing the copy himself. Linzi had no complaints about the salon. “Gerry – he’s the boss – he’s a really lovely guy,” she said. “Nicest boss I’ve ever had.”

They spent the afternoon in the pubs and secondhand bookshops of the North Laines. Maddox found a Ramsey Campbell anthology, an M. John Harrison collection and The New Murderers” Who’s Who. On the train waiting to leave Brighton station to return to London, with the sun throwing long dark shapes across the platforms, Linzi read to Maddox from the pamphlet of verse.

“ ‘This is all I ever wanted/to meet you in the fast decaying shadows/on the outskirts of this or any city/alone and in exile.’ ”

As the train rattled through Sussex, Maddox pored over the photographs in his true-crime book.

“Look,” he said, pointing to a caption: “Brighton Trunk Crime No.2: The trunk’s contents.”

“Very romantic,” Linzi said as she turned to the window, but Maddox couldn’t look away from the crumpled stockings on the legs of the victim, Violette Kaye. Her broken neck. The pinched scowl on her decomposed face. To Maddox the picture was as beautiful as it was terrible.

Over the next few days, Maddox read up on the Brighton Trunk Murders of 1934. He discovered that Tony Mancini, who had confessed to putting Violette Kay’s body in the trunk but claimed she had died accidentally (only to retract that claim and accept responsibility for her murder more than forty years later), had lodged at 52 Kemp Street. He rooted around for the poetry pamphlet Linzi had bought him. He found it under a pile of magazines. The poet’s name was Michael Kemp. He wanted to share his discovery of this coincidence with Linzi when she arrived at his flat with scissors and hairdressing cape.

“Why not save a bit of money?” she said, moving the chair from Maddox’s desk into the middle of the room. As she worked on his hair, she talked about Gerry from the salon. “He’s so funny,” she said. “The customers love him. He certainly keeps me and the other girls entertained.”

“Male hairdressers in women’s salons are all puffs, surely?”

Linzi stopped cutting and looked at him.

“So?” she said. “So what if they are? And anyway, Gerry’s not gay. No way.”

“Really? How can you be so sure?”

“A girl knows. Okay?”

“Have you fucked him then or what?”

She took a step back. “What’s the matter with you?”

“How else would you know? Gerry seems to be all you can talk about.”

“Fuck you.”

Maddox shot to his feet, tearing off the cape.

“You know what,” he said, seizing the scissors, “I’ll cut my own fucking hair and do a better job of it. At least I won’t have to listen to you going on about Gerry.”

He started to hack at his own hair, grabbing handfuls and cutting away. Linzi recoiled in horror, unable to look away, as if she were watching a road accident.

“Maybe I should tell you about all the women at the Independent?” he suggested. “Sheila Johnston, Sabine Durrant, Christine Healey . . . I don’t know where to start.”

It wasn’t until he jabbed the scissors threateningly in her direction that she snatched up her bag and ran out.

The next day he sent flowers. He didn’t call, didn’t push it. Just flowers and a note: “Sorry.”

Then he called. Told her he didn’t know what had come over him. It wouldn’t happen again. He knew he’d be lucky if she forgave him, but he hoped he’d be lucky. He hadn’t felt like this about anyone before and he didn’t want to lose her. The irony was, he told her, he’d been thinking his flat was getting a bit small and maybe they should look for a place together. He’d understand if she wanted to kick it into touch, but hoped she’d give him another chance.

She said to give her some time.

He shaved his head.

He drove down to Finsbury Park and watched from across the street as she worked on clients. Bobbing left and right. Holding their hair in her hands. Eye contact in the mirror. Gerry fussing around, sharing a joke, trailing an arm. As she’d implied, though, he was distributing his attentions equally among Linzi and the two other girls.

Mornings and evenings, he kept a watch on her flat in Finchley. She left and returned on her own. He chose a route between his flat and hers that took in Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill. He parked outside No.23 and watched the darkened windows of the top flat. He wondered if any of the neighbours had been Nilsen’s contemporaries. If this man passing by now with a tartan shopping trolley had ever nodded good morning to the mass murderer. If that woman leaving her house across the street had ever smiled at him. Maddox got out of the car and touched the low wall outside the property with the tips of his fingers.

Linzi agreed to meet up. Maddox suggested the Wisteria Tea Rooms. It was almost like starting over. Cautious steps. Shy smiles. His hair had grown back.

“What got into you?”

“I don’t know. I thought we’d agreed to draw a line under it.”

“Yes, you’re right.”

At the next table a woman was feeding a baby.

“Do you ever think about having children?” Linzi asked, out of the blue.

“A boy,” Maddox said straightaway. “I’d call him Jack.”

Maddox didn’t mention Gerry. He took on extra shifts. Slowly, they built up trust again. One day, driving back to his place after dropping Linzi off at hers, he saw that a board had gone up outside 23 Cranley Gardens. For sale. He rang the agents. Yes, it was the top flat, second floor. It was on at £64,950, but when Maddox dropped by to pick up a copy of the details (DELIGHTFUL TOP FLOOR ONE BEDROOM CONVERSION FLAT), they’d reduced it to £59,950. He made an appointment, told Linzi he’d arranged a surprise. Picked her up early, drove to Cranley Gardens. He’d never brought her this way. She didn’t know whose flat it had been.

A young lad met them outside. Loosely knotted tie, shiny shoes. Bright, eager.

Linzi turned to Maddox. “Are you thinking of moving?”

“It’s bigger and it’s cheap.”

Linzi smiled stiffly. They followed the agent up the stairs. He unlocked the interior door and launched into his routine. Maddox nodded without listening as his eyes greedily took everything in, trying to make sense of the flat, to match what he saw to the published photographs. It didn’t fit.

“The bathroom’s gone,” he said, interrupting the agent.

“There’s a shower room,” the boy said. “And a washbasin across the hall. An unusual arrangement.”

Nilsen had dissected two bodies in the bathroom.

“This is a lovely room,” the agent said, moving to the front of the flat.

Maddox entered the room at the back and checked the view from the window.

“At least this is unchanged,” he said to Linzi, who had appeared alongside.

“What do you mean?”

He looked at her and realised what he’d said.

“This flat’s all different. I’ve seen pictures of it.”

The story came out later, back at Maddox’s place.

“You took me round Dennis Nilsen’s flat?”

He turned away.

“You didn’t think to mention it first? You thought we might live there together? In the former home of a serial killer? What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“It’s cheap,” he said, to the closing door.

He watched from the window as she ran off towards West Green Road. He stayed at the window for a time and then pulled down the ladder and went up into the loft. He pulled up the ladder and closed the trap door. He opened the big brown suitcase. It was like getting a fix. He studied the dimensions of the suitcase. It was not much smaller than Tony Mancini’s trunk.

Christine was at work. Maddox read a note she’d left in the kitchen: “We need milk and bread.”

He went into the living room and took down the Hellraiser DVD from the shelf. Sitting in the car with Jack outside the house on Dollis Hill Lane, Maddox had noticed something not quite right about the windows on the second floor. They were new windows and set in two pairs with a gap between them, but that wasn’t it. There was something else and he didn’t know what. He fast-forwarded until the exterior shot of Julia leaving the house to go to the bar where she picks up the first victim. The second-floor window comprised six lights in a row. For some reason, when rebuilding the house, they’d left out two of the lights and gone with just four, in two pairs. But that wasn’t what was bothering him.

He skipped forward. He kept watching.

Frank and Julia in the second-floor room, top of the house. She’s just killed the guy from the bar and Frank has drained his body. Julia re-enters the room after cleaning herself up and as she walks towards the window we see it comprises four lights in a row. Four windows. Four windows in a row. Not six. Four.

Maddox wielded the remote.

Looking up at the house as Julia leaves it to go to the bar. Second floor, six windows. Inside the same room on the second floor, looking towards the windows. Four, not six.

So what? The transformation scenes, which take place in that second-floor room at the front of the house, weren’t shot on Dollis Hill Lane. Big deal. That kind of stuff would have to be done in the studio. The arrival of the Cenobites, the transformation of Frank, his being torn apart. It wasn’t the kind of stuff you could shoot on location. But how could they make such a glaring continuity error as the number of lights in a window? Six from outside, four from within. It couldn’t be a mistake. It was supposed to mean something. But what?

“Daddy?”

Maddox jumped.

“What is it, Jack?”

“What are you watching?”

Maddox looked at the screen as he thought about his response.

“This film, the one shot in that house.”

“The house with the windows?”

“Yes.”

“Why is it important?”

“I don’t know. No, I do know.” His shoulders slumped. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s not.”

He drove to the supermarket. Jack was quiet in the back. They got a trolley. Maddox stopped in front of the newspapers. He looked at the Independent. Although he’d first met Christine on the Independent arts desk, it wasn’t until they bumped into each other some years later, when they were both freelancing on TV listings magazines at IPC, that they started going out. Although they were equals at IPC, Christine had routinely rewritten his headlines at the Independent and while he pretended it didn’t still rankle, it did. Not the best basis for a relationship, perhaps. Then a permanent position came up on TV Times, and they both went for it, but Christine’s experience counted. They decided it wouldn’t affect things, but agreed that maybe Maddox should free himself of his commitments at IPC. He said he had a book he wanted to write. Together they negotiated an increasingly obstacle-strewn path towards making a life together. If they stopped and thought about it, it didn’t seem like a very good idea, but neither of them had a better one.

Maddox looked around to check that Jack was still in tow, then moved on.

He stood silently in cold meats, swaying very gently.

“Gone,” he said quietly. “All gone. Disappeared.”

“What, Daddy? What’s gone?”

“Wait there, Jack. I’ll be back. Don’t move.”

He walked to the end of the aisle and turned the corner. He walked to the end of the next aisle and then the next, looking at the items on the shelves, familiar brands, labels he’d seen a thousand times. All meaningless. He recognised nothing. What was he looking for? Bread and milk? Where were they? He couldn’t remember. He went back to where he’d left the trolley. It was there, but Jack wasn’t.

He looked up and down the aisle. The brand names that had meant nothing to him a moment ago now leapt out at him, shouting, screaming for attention. It was as if the two sides of the aisle had suddenly shifted inward. Jack was nowhere to be seen.

“Jack!”

Maddox ran to the end of the aisle and looked both ways. He looked up the next aisle, then up the next and the one after. He kept calling Jack’s name. Shoppers stopped and stared, but Maddox moved faster and shouted louder. He looked at the line of tills and wondered if Jack had gone that way. He could already be out of the store, wandering around the car park, about to be run over or abducted. He told himself to calm down, that he would find him, but at the same time another voice suggested that sometimes the worst thing imaginable did happen. It had before, after all. Would this be the next case heard about on the news? A half-page in the paper. London man loses child in supermarket. Brian Maddox, 42, took his eyes off his son for one moment and he was gone. But he hadn’t taken his eyes off him for just one moment. He’d gone to the next aisle, or the one after. He’d gone away. He could have been gone five minutes. Ten, fifteen.

“Jack!”

“Sir?”

A young lad, a shelf stacker, was standing in front of him. Maddox told him his son had disappeared. The shelf stacker asked for a description. Maddox gave him one and the lad said he would start from the far end of the store and advised Maddox to start from the other. They would meet in the middle and most likely one of them would have found Jack. Maddox did as he was told and neither of them found Jack. Maddox was short of breath, dry in the mouth, his chest rising and falling, unbearable pressure being exerted on his temples. He could no longer call out Jack’s name without his voice breaking. More staff were on hand now. They took Maddox’s arms and led him to an office where he was sat down and given a drink of water.

“Maybe the boy’s with his mother?” someone suggested.

Maddox shook his head.

“Do you have a number for her?”

Maddox produced Christine’s number. He was dimly aware of a phone call being made. The office was full of people. Managers, security, cashiers. They swopped remarks, observations. Some expressions hardened. “What did she say?” a voice asked. “There is no son,” another one answered. “No kids at all, apparently.” A security guard replayed videotape on a monitor. Grainy, vivid. Maddox entering the store on his own with a trolley. Standing in front of the newspapers, on his own. Leaving the trolley in cold meats. No unattached children.

They gave Maddox another glass of water while waiting for the police to arrive. The store didn’t want to press charges. “What would be the point?” Maddox was free to go. “Has this happened before?” Shake of the head. “If it were to happen again, the store would have to consider taking action . . . Very upsetting for other shoppers . . . You will see someone?”

Maddox sat in the car park, behind the wheel of the car. He hadn’t got what he’d come for. The milk and the bread. Maybe it didn’t matter any more. He sat in the car for a long time and only turned the key in the ignition when he realised the sky over central London was beginning to get dark.

He didn’t go to the house. He didn’t imagine Christine would be there, but it was kind of irrelevant either way. Instead, he drove to South Tottenham. He drove through the top of the congestion charge zone. It didn’t matter any more. It was rush hour. It took an hour and a half to get to N15. The street door was open. He walked up, entered the flat. Thump-thump-thump from downstairs. He took out his phone and sent a text message, then stood by the window for a while watching the street. He left the phone on the window ledge and pulled down the ladder and climbed into the loft, retrieving the ladder and closing the trap door behind him. Stooping, he walked over to the suitcase, which smelled strongly of formalin. He knelt in front of it for several minutes, resting his hands on the lid, then touching the clasps.

He released the clasps and opened the case.

It was empty.

He frowned, then sat and stared at the empty case for some time, listening to the creaks of the beams and the muffled basslines from the downstairs flat. He wondered if Karen would come, how long she might be. He wasn’t sure what he would do when she arrived.

Slowly, he rose, then lowered the upper half of his body into the case, folding his legs in afterwards. Inside the case, the smell of formalin was very strong. He stared at the pine beams, the cobwebs, the shadows clinging to the insulating material. He could still faintly hear his neighbour’s loud music, which Karen had been unable to hear, and then, rising above it, the clear and unmistakeable chime of his phone, down in the flat, announcing the arrival of a text message. He started to uncurl his body and the lid of the case fell forward.

He had twisted his body far enough that the hump of his shoulder caught the closing lid.

He climbed out and lay down next to the suitcase.

A minute later his phone chimed a reminder.

He thought about Linzi. Linzi had been good for him, until things went bad. He wondered where she was. He looked at the empty suitcase again and plucked a long fine strand of fair hair from the lining. He thought about Karen and her need, unacknowledged, to be looked after. He remembered how vulnerable Linzi had seemed when he saw her for the first time.

Karen would be along soon. Probably. She hadn’t let him down yet.

He still had options.

MICHAEL BISHOP

Dr Prida’s Dream-Plagued Patient

MICHAEL BISHOP HAS PUBLISHED seventeen novels in his nearly thirty years as a freelance writer, including the Nebula Award-winning No Enemy But Time; Unicorn Mountain, winner of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award; and Brittle Innings, an imaginative study of minor-league baseball in the Deep South during World War II and winner of the Locus Award for best fantasy novel.

His short-fiction collections include Blooded on Arachne, One Winter in Eden, Close Encounters with the Deity, Emphatically Not SF Almost, At the City Limits of Fate, Blue Kansas Sky and Brighten to Incandescence: 17 Stories, featuring an incandescent wraparound cover by his son, Jamie. His recent novelettes “The Door Gunner” and “Bears Discover Smut” have each won Southeastern Science Fiction Association awards for best short fiction.

He has published numerous essays and reviews, including a collection from PS Publishing, A Reverie for Mister Ray, also with an evocative wraparound cover by his son, and edited such anthologies as Light Years and Dark, winner of the Locus Award for best anthology, three Nebula Award volumes and, most recently, A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-Five Imaginative Tales About the Christ.

He lives in Pine Mountain, Georgia, with his wife Jeri, an elementary-school counsellor, and he is currently Writer in Residence at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia.

“I’m not very keen on vampire fiction,” Bishop admits, “although I recognise this bias as a form of bigotry, based on stereotypes, and know that any theme or subject matter admits of excellent work if the writer focuses, rethinks, and eschews cliché. Have I done that here? I hope so.

“My inspiration for the story was an invitation from the editors of a relatively new magazine, Aberrant Dreams, to submit to them and the fact that I’d come to the end of a semester of full-time teaching, with four writing classes that kept me so busy either preparing for each new session or grading essays that I wrote nothing of my own (beyond blood-red notes in the margins of student papers) for over four months.

“When January came, then, and I had my first free day in a long time, I wrote ‘Dr Prida’s Dream-Plagued Patient’ at our kitchen table in longhand with a fine felt-tipped pen in four or five hours of concentrated work. Careful readers will note that I afflicted my narrator with a devilish horror of the mundane and conventional, and that aberrant dreams play a significant, moody role in my quasi-Lovecraftian piece because I was writing for a magazine with that provocative name.”

WELL, OF COURSE, I sleep during the day, Dr Prida – in a storm pit or canning cellar (whichever term you prefer) beneath the pantry of a country Victorian home in an aggressively modernizing county in a Southern state whose denizens display little belief in and even less tolerance for creatures of my ilk. I lie in a rotting wooden johnboat on a slab of plywood atop a pair of stumpy-legged sawhorses, and my diurnal companions – in the clayey darkness beneath the prosaic brightness of day – include spiders of several species, spotted camel crickets, and bewildered moths. (The moths’ wings often fleck my lips and forehead with their chalky powder.) The darkness attracts and soothes, I guess, not only these unlovely insects but also the rarely sated longings of my forfeited soul. Selah.

I’m here this evening, Dr Prida, at the urging of an early mentor and under protest, but must admit that your gracious couchside manner and delicate bone-china complexion – is that last observation sexist? – have considerably palliated my initial prejudice against this visit. Perhaps it will in fact lessen my anxiety, counteract my depression, and give me the necessary incentive to explore those perilous extremities of night – dawn and dusk – with a bravado heretofore alien to me. By the way, I like your chignon. And the flush at your throat derives, I feel sure, from the lamp beside your wing-back rather than from the somatic manifestations of a quickened pulse. After all, with that Chopin nocturne playing almost inaudibly in the background, your office has a truly calming ambience – indeed, the security of my canning cellar without the attendant dankness.

Ah, how charmingly you chuckle. All right, then, laugh. By that descriptive verb, Dr Prida, I meant no derogation of your femininity. Willie Shakespeare had a character – was it Edgar in King Lear? – say that ripeness is all, but in another context. I place more value on specificity, whatever the circumstances, and am like to remark a person’s looks and actions, not to mention speech, with more apprehensive detail than does your ordinary machine-stamped client. No offense, of course, to either you or those pitiable lockstep clones. Let me also note that you have decidedly appealing little wren tracks beside your eyes when you frown.

My dreams? You want to know what sort of aberrant dreams I have lying in my great-grandfather’s johnboat in my great-grandmother’s canning cellar? What would any sane and cogent professional expect? They appal me, my dreams. They make the plush beneath my fingernails engorge and the flesh of my scrotum tighten. My languid heart accelerates, my flaccid lungs assume the groaning liveliness of bellows, my back arches, and my agitated body balances on the sensitive points of my shoulder blades, coccyx, and heels. A low-level galvanic current crisscrosses my chest and abdomen and streams discontinuously, maddeningly, from a shifting locus in my brain to my fingertips and toes. An onlooker would no doubt suppose me electrified: an epileptic suffering a fit at once disruptive and shackling. If only I could awaken.

Their substance? Relate the substance of these dreams? Specificity? Of course. You want from me only what I pride myself on providing: namely, facts: namely, details; namely, the distillation of the synaptic impulses informing my visions into words that narrate and evoke. Very well. How can I deny you? How can I transgress against the eminence who made me this way – and who sent me to you – by withholding that which, fully aired and processed, could perhaps end my torment? But, Dr Prida, I hesitate – out of conscience as well as shame – to subject you, a respectable professional woman, to the specifics, to the dreadful aberrance of these subterranean sleep-engendered imaginings. I hesitate to alarm, repel, violate, and, ultimately, estrange you. I cringe from disclosing the heinous constructs of my id, whose depravity only a god or a child could visit without life-altering damage.

You scoff? Well, go ahead. As young as you look, you claim to have practiced a decade and a half? You’ve heard – as confessions – the laments of anorexics, adulterers, pederasts, fools, bigots, self-mutilators, poltroons, traitors, murderers, and blasphemers? Nothing I can say – no shameful act I might reveal – could possibly dent your therapist’s armor, much less pierce it and render you, the queen of unshakable aplomb, a gibbering parody of your degree-bearing self? Very well, then, I’ll speak. Remember that I warned you. Remember that I hold in higher regard that kernel of innocence at your venerable core than you do yourself . . .

Three days ago, in my johnboat coffin amid the pseudo-foetuses of canned squash and tomatoes in their ill-shelved Mason jars, I had three devastatingly aberrant dreams in a row. That I survived even one of them – that I outlasted all three – even yet astonishes me, Dr Prida. The first alone would have unmanned nine-tenths of the diurnal sleepers of my unhappy persuasion – indeed, shocked them to utter insentience and left them the unresisting prey of brown recluses, camel crickets, and mice. Forgive what must sound like unmitigated boasting, but I know the Achilles’ heels of my colleagues, as well as my own, and that first dream let fly its pernicious arrow at that highly vulnerable portion of my psychic anatomy, and struck it square on.

The dream: get to the dream. I’ll recount it as starkly as it inflicted itself upon me: I awoke – not in reality, but in the washed-out opalescent landscape of my vision – and struggled out of bed into a chamber of undivided white: white ceiling, white floor, white walls, white bedstead, white clothes-tree, and, upon this clothes-tree, an assortment of white clothes for the ten-year-old boy that, in dreaming, I had become. I had to garb myself, for I had awakened naked and the stinging brightness of the chamber required an immediate adjustment on my part to prevent my going blind. Shuddering at the touch of each item, I donned a pair of schoolboy briefs, a ribbed white wife-beater undershirt, a pair of white-duck trousers, a starched white dress shirt, and a hooded white sweatshirt, whose hood allowed me some small shelter from the overweening brightness. Head down, I groped my way back to the bed, found a pair of white cotton sweat socks on the white feather pillow, and pulled one of these socks onto my pallid toes, over my albino’s instep, and up and over my leprous left ankle. The sock had no end. It covered my calf, knee, thigh, groin, and, by some inexplicable geometric convolution, my midriff, torso, and neck, so that I was finally imprisoned in a snowy full-body strait-stocking that clung to nearly every square inch of me, mercilessly. When I screamed, still sleeping, this first dream unraveled – without, however, releasing me to the dank but comforting reality of my great-grandmother’s canning cellar.

Ah, my recitation has left you speechless, Dr Prida. I understand. What could more reliably silence a psychiatrist than the indelible image of an ignorant child wrapped in a tenacious white strait-stocking? You smile – no doubt to solace me, to convey by a compassionate look that not even this horror estranges you, that I may speak freely, with no inhibiting fear of your outrage or censure. All right, then, my second dream, which followed the first after an interval of chaotic blankness and erupted into my apprehensive consciousness in the workaday vicinity of noon.

Not surprisingly, this daymare centered on eating.

As a young man of twenty-five or -six, I sat in a rustic Victorian kitchen before an immense porcelain tureen of potato soup. Beside this tureen resided a large white platter hosting a grilled sandwich of mozzarella or possibly provolone cheese, a hardboiled egg, and a scoop of macaroni pasta with almond slices, buttons of watercress, and shards of sun-bleached celery. From the table’s white Formica surface a tumbler of skin milk rose up like a small Doric pillar. Nauseated, I spooned soup, nibbled at the sandwich, bit off tatters of egg, sampled the pasta, and sipped the milk in a predictably ceaseless repeating sequence that my dream self had no power to halt. The peristaltic action of my throat continued without hindrance or interruption until white tears began falling into my soup and a muffling lambency-shot fog filled the kitchen, putting a gauzy clamp on both my esophagus and my second dream.

You smile again? More comfort for a troubled client? More compassion for a deviant dreamer? Of course, of course. What else do we pay you for, Dr Prida? Who else can we turn to? But you see now why shame mantles me and my conscience gnaws. But if I’ve gone this far, how may I refrain from unburdening myself of my final dream, my third and most ruthlessly aberrant horror show?

Listen, then, Dr Prida. Listen as you have listened to the others, and withhold your condemnation – your outrage and its inevitable articulation – until I have wholly purged myself of this psychic poison. Know, though, that it has a narrative arc absent from the first two dreams and an additional character: a story as opposed to the static imagery of those inchoate earlier visions. Know, too, that had my mentor not found me in the throes of an abreactive post-dream spasm and stepped in to help me, I might have died forever. The word forever, at least in this hypothetical projection, has more finality to it than I, or any of my anonymous half-, quarter-, or no-blood siblings, can fully bear.

Listen:

As a man of forty or so (my apparent age this evening, Dr Prida), I stand at an altar in a white tuxedo and exchange vows with a woman twelve years my junior clad in a traditional white bridal gown. She gazes upon me with a nonjudgmental gentleness as rare as midsummer sleet. After the wedding and a grand reception in a country Victorian house appointed ivory and cream – from interior dome to transoms to louvered shutters to wainscoting to balusters – we ride in a bone-hued limousine to a marble villa on the crest of a mountain of quartz and milky chalcedony. Here, in the last light of the afternoon in a high-windowed room overlooking a valley carpeted with white mums and pale gardenias, we consummate with neither bites nor strangle marks the promise of our vows and lie in each other’s arms until we move again in the same tender way and so traverse the entire self-negating night to the doorstep of morning . . . at which point my real body, the one in the pit, began to thrash in dread-stricken protest against the conventional harmoniousness of such a wholesome union. And, as I’ve already said, I might have died forever but for the timely intercession of Gregor, your undying father.

Yes, smile: smile wider. And approach me smiling in your black-velvet slippers. What big pretty teeth you have, such incisive incisors, my dear Dr Prida, and such a way with wordlessness that perhaps we need never speak again . . .

MARK CHADBOURN

The Ones We Leave Behind

A WINNER OF THE BRITISH FANTASY AWARD, Mark Chadbourn is the author of eleven novels and one non-fiction book. His current fantasy sequence, “Kingdom of the Serpent”, continues with The Burning Man in early 2008.

A former journalist, he is now a screenwriter for BBC television drama. His other jobs have included running an independent record company, managing rock bands, working on a production line and as an engineer’s “mate”. He lives in a forest in the English Midlands.

“A few years ago,” recalls Chadbourn, “I had the pleasure of spending time in several conversations with the acclaimed Vietnam War photographer Tim Page for a magazine article I was writing.

“Tim’s pictures helped define that war, but his own personal story illustrated the horrors of the conflict just as clearly. Torn apart by an explosion, losing a significant part of his brain to shrapnel, he spent agonising years reclaiming his health and his life. His recovery was so amazing these days it’s hard to tell how much he suffered.

“He is the inspiration behind ‘The Ones We Leave Behind’.”

THE PAST CAN’T BE TRUSTED. Our memories play tricks with us, whispering lies to make us feel better or haunting us with images half-glimpsed in the shadows of our heads. I used to think photographs were different. They captured the moment so perfectly, more real than real because they saw things you never did. Subtle expressions barely noticed, a fugitive smile or nascent tear, rare light, odd juxtapositions, nature’s secret ironies. In photographs, old friends lived forever, just as you always knew them.

Or so I thought.

Outside the sound of the shells hitting the suburbs are almost lost beneath the screams of panic. A woman, face contorted by grief, throws herself off the building opposite. One of those who fled the north twenty years ago. Better death at her own hand than the slow killing of an unforgiving revenge.

I never thought I would see Saigon like this. The City of Smiles. The eye of optimism and tranquillity at the heart of the Vietnam storm. Everyone is running. For escape, for shelter. For food, for drink, for love and money. No point. The city is encircled by sixteen divisions – 140,000 men. In his resignation speech, President Thieu blamed the US for paying for the war in money while the Vietnamese paid in blood. He tried to get his betrayal in first, but he’d missed the boat by several years.

Anyone with half a brain would be attempting to buy their way out on one of the Hercules transports leaving the airport. As a photo-journalist and integral part of the Imperialist propaganda machine, I should be first in the queue. Once the Communists get here, they’ll have my head on a spike at the Presidential Palace faster than you can say Tan Son Nhut.

But in a way, I’m just like that poor woman committing suicide. Sometimes it’s not just about life or death; there are occasions when worse things enter the equation. I have to find an old man with a bitter heart before the past catches up with me. Before I fall off the edge of existence and can’t even claim a memory to my name.

The first time I saw Van Diemen was in the back of a tent, glowing with the seething light of a hissing lamp while shadows of jungle moths passed across his face. I remember the stickiness of the night, the way my shirt clung to my back, the sickening taste of fear that never left my dry mouth. You lived with all those things back then, and they are still as real as anything I know.

It was 7 January 1967, the evening before Operation Cedar Falls. The regular grunts had no idea they were on the brink of a KO punch into VC strongholds, designed to stop the Communists in their tracks and provide a springboard for US victory. At least that was the plan.

The Pack knew no more, cared even less. We saw ourselves as old-style adventurers, relishing the adrenaline rush of any danger zone. The scent of napalm or Agent Orange on the breeze was enough to get us grabbing our cameras. There were four of us, all in our twenties, young enough not to know the distinction between bravery and stupidity. Chet was from some dusty Arizona town; a lazy accent, a love of grass and a nice little commission from Life. Alain had given up documenting the tensions on the streets of Paris for what he saw as life on the edge in ‘Nam.

And then there was Justin and myself, childhood friends from the same dorm in some second-rate public school no one had ever heard of, both with too-rich parents and no real need to earn a living. Brits abroad with Empire-borne arrogance that neither of us recognised. Justin was brash, revelling in his aristocrat links, however far removed. I was quieter. And in the arrogance of our youth and our background and our job, we thought nothing could touch us.

That night we’d been smoking some grass, drinking a little bourbon, talking about where we would go once the current mess had blown over. The Middle East, maybe. Always good for a little mayhem. Or Africa, a leaking steam pipe waiting to blow.

The sound of the chopper coming in low over the tree-tops stirred us from our debate. We watched with stoned fascination as it landed in the camp to release a flurry of wild activity, soldiers free of the sweat and grime of the jungle coalescing around a smaller group, at the core a shock of silver hair shimmering in the glare of the lights. They ducked low beneath the whirring blades and hurried as one into the heart of the camp.

“Something is afoot,” Alain said.

“What do you say, Will?” Justin asked me. “Too high to creep down there to see if we’ve had a secret visit from the Prez himself?”

“Go yourself. I’m not your lackey.” I felt obliged to offer the lip service protest, but we both knew it would be me. I was too curious by far and everyone else always took advantage of it.

“The Prez,” Chet said dreamily. “Now that would be a picture. Maybe . . . maybe it’s Ann-Margret.” He drifted off into a reverie.

“Are we going to do this or not?” I said before I lost them further. With foul-mouthed protest, they shuffled into a seated position, Alain propping up Chet. I made Justin stop skinning up and then checked the camera. Through the lens they looked like a bunch of idiots on holiday. I set the timer and threw myself into the middle of them. In the white flash, the whole world disappeared.

I slipped away a few minutes later, past the stinking latrines, skirting the tent where Love were singing that “Seven and Seven Is”, until I found myself at Ops, where the officers regularly pored over their maps, drinking beer and reminiscing about life before they went In Country and mutated into a different species.

The coterie of guards in pristine fatigues had melted away. Through the tent flaps I could see three officers, two men in civilian clothes – spooks, I guessed – and that shock of silver hair. It was on a man with a face like an Easter Island statue, impenetrable, mysterious, aloof. He must have been in his seventies, but he didn’t look frail; there was a gravity to him that turned all the others into satellites. He wore small, wire-framed glasses that reflected the light like flares as he examined a map spread out on the trestle table.