The Year's Best Horror Stories: XVIII

The Earth Wire by JOEL LANE

Geoff's first encounter with the unknown had been when he found his parents' house burned out, and the street already in the process of demolition. He hadn't known what to expect, of course, returning so soon after the disturbances. The area hadn't changed that much. It was north of Birmingham, part of the confusion of little towns and industrial wasteland that was still called the Black Country, after the factory-based conurbation of the old days. The old communities had declined with the closure of the small industries, mostly car-related, that had formed their ground. In spite of projects of redevelopment, no new imprint had really taken hold. Asian small businesses had filled a few of the economic and territorial gaps, like metal in a decaying line of teeth. The present landscape was a mosaic of elements juxtaposed without any kind of underlying pattern. In the gaps, the traces of the past were still visible: the network of disused canals and railways, dating from the Industrial Revolution.

This much, Geoff had grown up with, and observed on his intermittent visits home over the past seven years. It still made him feel lost, a prisoner of his own adolescence. Even when away, he could sense himself picking through the same jigsaw of pieces that didn't fit together. After the disturbances he'd felt compelled to visit his parents, if only to confirm that that part of his life was still in place. It wouldn't be long before the postal and telephone services were put back to rights, but in the meantime all he could do was take the train up from Surrey. Living in the countryside, he had escaped the worst of the past few months. London, Birmingham and the North had been most badly affected, he knew. The imposition of martial law had coincided with a breakdown of general order. In other major cities, riots had turned into open civil warfare. Now, according to the newspapers, order had been restored; but many travel routes and communications were blocked off. In isolated districts, violence between gangs was still escalating. Meanwhile, the majority of peaceful citizens had gone back to work, waiting for news of the international situation.

On the train, Geoff had been unnerved by the silent young men in green uniforms who restlessly patrolled the carriages for want of anything else to do. From their faces, you might have thought they were outlaws, not soldiers. But most people looked like that these days; it came from living on your nerves, not knowing what or who could be counted on. Near home, the recent disorder was visible in details: smashed windows, wrecked cars, shops boarded up. Soldiers or armed police stood in little groups on street corners or traffic islands, watching. There was little activity in the streets; it was a Sunday morning in January, still and clear.

On the corner opposite the street where Geoff had been born, a chorus of massed voices sounded from the little church with its metallic Christ nailed to a concrete slab. He couldn't remember that place ever having had much of a congregation. Its narrow stained-glass windows were protected by wire grids. The voices divided into nervous fragments before unifying for another phase of certainty. As Geoff walked away, the reality filled his view before his mind could make sense of it. The street opposite was mostly burned down. His parents' house was just recognizable, a hulk of carbon boarded up against the daylight. The door and its number were gone. The street was being systematically demolished from the far end; for now, the machines stood idle, seeming too large for the fragile structures they were intended to bring down.

Geoff walked back to the church and let the communal voice fill his head for a few moments. Then he went back down the road, checking its name, confirming that his parents' home was among those burned out, even if he had misidentified the building itself. Beyond the demolition machines, two lines of shops pointed back toward the town center. From that direction, an old man was walking an Alsatian along the road; Geoff greeted him. "Do you know what happened up there in Tulson Road?" he asked.

"There was a fire," was the answer, "don't know how. That was in November, you know. When all the trouble was. Nothing could get through the bloody roads, with all the crowds and the fighting. Could have been that that started it. A petrol bomb. Or the army trying to show who was boss. Only kids, half of them."

"Were many people killed?" Geoff thought of the silent Christmas that had followed the uprisings, most of the postal service suspended. There was no reliable way of getting in touch with anyone in the cities, and snowstorms made all the travel problems worse. People were said to have starved in some areas.

"You mean in the fire? Nobody took much notice at the time. I think they evacuated most of the houses, though. But God knows where they can all have ended up. In those army hostels you read about now, maybe. Why, you from round here?"

"Yes," Geoff said. "My parents lived in Tulson Road. Their house is gone."

The old man stared at him, as if really seeing him for the first time. "That's a shame. They could still be around, you know. You want to make enquiries. Try some of the hospitals, maybe. They wouldn't be there any more, but you might be able to trace them. Good luck." The Alsatian edged past Geoff suspiciously and accompanied his owner toward the remains of Tulson Road. Geoff headed back toward the town center. But the further he walked, the more his own past seemed to detach itself from him. It was all at the edge of his vision, coming apart, instead of being part of himself. The landscape itself felt unreal and enclosed on its own hidden purposes. Advertising boards screened off patches of wasteland; posters claimed the walls of derelict buildings. He walked around the town center for an hour, unable to convince himself that he had once lived here.

At the end of the morning, people emerged from the churches and disappeared into their homes. Nobody was even playing football in the park. Geoff walked passed the line of poplar trees there, held onto the railings and looked over the expanse of thin grass that was lightly tinted with frost. He wished he could take cover inside his own childhood. He had never felt lost then.

The same impulse directed him onto the canal system, and an endless stony network that led nowhere but onto renewed outgrowths of itself. At least there were no soldiers here. Railings, factory walls and rough, impassable slopes narrowed the towpath; the water was dark and static, reflecting nothing. Here and there a few thin patches of ice hardened the surface. Geoff wandered in a vague, purposeless state through dirty stone tunnels and over small iron bridges. Eventually, that stretch of canal ended at a wooden lock. Above this, a boy was standing on a footbridge and looking down onto half a mile or so of water. Geoff climbed up to share the view. He felt weary and confused. It was mid-afternoon and he had not eaten since morning. That, and a hint of the coming darkness, made the canal below appear black and without limit, a gap in the world.

The youth was looking at him. He was about seventeen, of average height and build, wearing black jeans and a waterproof gray jacket with a zip. He looked vaguely familiar, perhaps like someone whom Geoff had been to school with. His hair was black and cropped short but unevenly; his face was pale, as though he were unused to daylight. "You're in trouble, aren't you?" he said. Geoff gazed down at the dark water. The wooden handrail of the bridge shook as he leant on it. He looked back; the boy's face held a complex burden of patience and sadness. His eyes were an unusually deep blue, the color of stained glass. "Why not talk to me?"

"What's been going on here?" Geoff said. "I haven't been back here since all the trouble in November. My parent's house is burned down. I don't know where they are. But everything's upside down and I simply… don't know where to start…"He pulled at the handrail as if he could tear it free as a weapon. His chest was shaking with a grief still locked in his body. His face tightened, but only the cold reached it; and there was no feeling of relief, only the annoyance of having lost his self-control in front of a stranger.

"Look," the boy said, "I can tell you something about how things have gone here. Maybe I can help you reconnect yourself. All I do these days is watch and listen. And talk to people. I've lost my parents, too. They died three years ago. I live in their flat, partly. And partly on the canal, in a boat. That's where I sleep. It's out of harm's way… You look like you've been awake all night. Did you just get here today?"

"Yes, this morning. I've been walking around for hours. I'll have to go back. Can't stay at my parents', can I?"

The boy thought for a moment. "I'll take you round to the flat. You can sit down there and talk for a bit. I'll find you something to eat. You look hungry. My name's Mark, by the way." He led Geoff downhill onto a crowded estate of little terraced houses, a few decades old. The house facing it shadowed Mark’s house; it had an air of preserved age, which it no doubt owed to the perpetual lack of light. His flat was the upper floor of the house; the stairs began a few feet back from the front door. "You can't really tell what's new and what's old round here, can you?" Mark said. "Whatever they build turns just like everything else in a few years."

Upstairs it was cold and dim. "There's no electric here," Mark explained. "I use batteries for most things — radio, torch, clock. There's a paraffin cooker here, and a heater on the boat. Otherwise nothing." He coughed. The floor was scattered with bits of electrical circuits: wires, batteries, fuses and less identifiable components. "That's my hobby. I mend radios, things like that. I used to have a Citizens' Band radio. But everything like that has been outlawed now. So I'm trying to fix the radio on my boat to pick up stray frequencies. I lie there at night, wandering over the airwaves. Listening for all the drifting voices of the lost ones." He struck a match and lit the paraffin stove in the corner of the room. Its bluish light circled his dark head for a moment like an aura.

Geoff sat in a dusty chair and fought off all the questions that clustered around him. He focused on the wavering cone of light: blue at its heart, then purple, mauve, flickering red at its edges. Mark's eyes were points of color in a blurred face. He took off his coat; underneath, he was wearing a pale shirt and braces. His arms and hands were thin in proportion to his body. He carried on talking; evidently glad to have company, as he heated up a tin of soup. Geoff listened, bemused, to this voice that seemed to consist of a throng of submerged partial voices, that talked with and against itself.

The soup boiled; Mark poured it into a cup, drank a mouthful, and passed the rest to Geoff. "Electricity is fascinating," he was saying. "It does almost everything in the city. People live by it, yet they've got no idea how it works. And it can do all kinds of damage as well. You'll probably see the Wheel tonight. But an electric current is like any kind of power. It has a natural tendency to hurt people." He picked up a plug from the floorboards and opened it swiftly with a screwdriver. "You know what the middle wire is? The earth wire. Right. The plug can work without it. It's just a safety device. The conscience of the circuit. True?" Geoff asked what the Wheel was. "You'll know when you see it," was the only answer.

The room darkened, shrinking around the flame of the stove. "Some awful things are happening," Mark said quietly. "Give me time, I might understand them. I'm just a watcher and a listener. Nobody has any peace these days. Before the soldiers came in, there were gangs fighting the police. Now, there's like another army. Young people with no power, only a charge. And a need to hurt. They've called on resources no community should know about. I think all the things that kept people together have been turned against them. There's no community now. Only the mob. Anyone who's different gets… reversed. Made into carbon. Imagine shouting No, denying at the top of your voice. Then imagine doing that No to someone. Last, imagine being that No forever, all the way through." The voice dissolved into a fit of coughing. Mark's body was contorted with the force of it.

When the boy looked up, his face was luminous with sweat. He pulled on his coat and zipped it up.

"Let's go," he said. "I'll show you where my boat is. We'll be back in time to see the Wheel." Geoff stood up and followed Mark back downstairs and through the narrow streets toward the canal. By now, he was worried about Mark's condition as well as about whatever they were going to witness. But the sense of displacement still clung to him, leaving him helpless. A single white streetlamp illuminated the stretch of canal where Mark's boat was moored, a few yards below road level. It was a short black barge with windows around a central cabin; navy blue curtains were drawn along the sides. Mark and Geoff climbed onto the barge and sat on the roof, waiting for it to stop rocking. By now, night was settling all around. In the lamplight, the ripples spreading on the canal surface looked like silver wires.

"I sleep here at night," the boy said. "It's quiet and peaceful out here. Just me and the radio, and the canal water transmitting the murmurs from the past. I keep lots of old things inside, by the bunk. Notebooks, photographs, tapes, newspapers. Everything I can remember, everything people tell me, ends up here." They could see along the shining distance of still water to the next bridge; and to one side, the flaking wall of a disused factory. To the other side, a railway cutting fell down into the darkness. The street-lamp outlined the whitewashed metal footbridge that linked them to the road, several yards overhead; from below, it seemed too bright and delicate to be real.

Mark stared intently into the surrounding gloom. "I could walk along here with you," he muttered, "and tell you who built everything, and when. How every bridge was designed, how they set the stones, who opened the factories and who shut them down. I heard a song about it once. You know it? Their mark on this land is stilt seen and still laid, the way for a commerce where vast fortunes were made. The supply of an Empire where the sun never set, which is now deep in darkness but the railway's there yet. It's true. This area's another residue where the glacier of profit stopped and melted a little before it passed on, a long time ago. If you lie here long enough, you can hear the stone and metal still going on about it." His eyes were the same intense blue as the paraffin flame, dissolving into black at their centers.

Looking out onto the canal, as the last traces of daylight turned to iron, Geoff began to see a few unstable outlines. As they moved they took up light and became more complex, more nearly alive. They struggled and turned into figures. Now he could see men working on the bridge and the railway, opening the lock at the head of the canal, crowding out of the factory doors. Water poured into the canal from the open lock; waste flowed down from the channels in the factory wall. Off to the side, he could see women coming home from their jobs, cleaning and cooking in their houses; he could see children playing in the web of streets, and throwing stones into the canal. There was something almost terrible in the intensity of this scene, composed as it was of grains of color moving against the common darkness of water and sky. Geoff closed his eyes and heard the violent beating of his own heart.

In a few moments everything became quiet and still again. Geoff sat up, and felt the boat tremble. Mark was blinking into the lamplight, confused. "God, that was a strange dream," he murmured, and gripped Geoff s hand momentarily. "We'll fall off here if we're not careful." As clumsily as if the cold had got into their limbs, the two climbed down onto the towpath. Something slowed Geoff s movements and made him feel distant from this situation. Had he been able to find the words, he might have called it the possessive hold of memory, the way it resisted change. But it made no sense for him to feel like that about his parents, now of all times. Nor about Mark, when he'd only known him a few hours.

He needed to be alone for a minute, to regain his perspective. "Do you want something to eat?" he asked the boy. Mark shook his head; he was busy fastening the boat's moorings. Geoff remembered passing a shop just up the road. "Wait here," he said.

"I'll be back in a few minutes." Out of sight of the canal, he had a feeling of relief. The small Asian-run chip shop had several other customers. A group of teenagers stood round a video game, one playing, the others watching. Geoff waited by the counter, reassured by the sense of anonymity. He could hear the distant contention of voices; they were in his head, he imagined, until he noticed the shop's owner looking past him at the window. The narrow street was filled with people. Hurriedly, the teenagers left the shop to join them. Geoff crossed to the glass door and looked out. They weren't soldiers, just a crowd of youths all going in the same direction. He could hear angry voices, but no chorus.

As rapidly as it had filled, the road emptied again. "Where are they going?" Geoff asked. "Who are they?" The Asian shop owner was still looking outward, not moving. The video game flashed and buzzed nervously. The pale strip light by the window superimposed the interior on the view. The darkness outside was an impersonal pressure that felt charged with threat.

"Over the canal," the shop owner said at last. "They're just a gang of hooligans. Or they were. There are more of them every day. I don't know why the soldiers don't stop them. The soldiers interfere in everything else." He turned away and began stacking cans and boxes behind the counter. His hands were unsteady, but an effort of concentration kept him from knocking anything over. Geoff hoped the man wouldn't mind him leaving without buying anything. He had to catch up with the group. Mark would know what they were up to.

He got back to the canal just in time to see the last of the crowd disappearing along the towpath, under and around the bridge. Near his barge, Mark was sprawled at the water's edge. He had fallen down; one of his hands gripped the metal ring that the mooring-rope was tied to. Geoff turned him over; he was breathing heavily, and bleeding from his mouth. His eyes opened. "I'm all right," he said. "They knocked me over, that's all." He coughed hard and sat up. There was mud on the arm and shoulder of his coat from the ground. He held onto Geoff s arm and pulled himself to his feet, then stood very still, as though he were about to fall again. His face was passive, lost to thoughts that nobody could share.

Then he knelt, dipped a hand in the murky water, and wiped the blood from his mouth. "This is the Wheel," he said. "We can go and watch if you want. You ought to see it once." Picking his way carefully in the poor light, he led Geoff down the towpath, then up into a maze of side streets and bridges where the canal and railway network had been overlaid with a perpetuation of the town. More strongly than before, Geoff could feel the tension that the gang left in its wake — a stillness heavy with anger, like a cloud that was about to turn itself inside-out and discharge its secret violence in one blinding shock. They caught up with the mob at a crossroads, where a valley in one plane coincided with a hilltop in another. His father would have called it a saddle-point, Geoff reflected.

There was rain in the air now, a vague drizzle that could be felt only when it settled against the skin, and only seen when it made the pavements reflect the lamplight. From a distance, Geoff and Mark watched the crowd of youths gather closer together at the crossroads. There were about a hundred of them; some were older than Geoff, some younger than Mark. There were women among them, though not many. The crowd would block off any traffic. But no soldiers or police came to break them up. They were completely quiet now, drawn toward some common purpose. Geoff's chest tightened as he saw that their focus was a prisoner: someone half-lifted in the middle of the gang, his arms held apart. His face was gagged, and there was a rope around his neck being used to prevent him from struggling. Geoff pressed himself back in the shadow of the wall, trying to make himself smaller; and to make the image smaller, reduce it to a television screen, a photograph. The boy was silent beside him, watching.

On the far side of the crossroads, the wire fence had been torn down from in front of a power generator. Between the red DANGER sign and the two black tanks set in the ground, some kind of machine had been installed. As far as Geoff could see, it was a metal cross-supported on a crude motor, which was connected to the generator by heavy black cables. Some of the crowd was chanting now, but out of unison; Geoff could not make out any of the words. Two men tied the prisoner to the iron cross, which was then tilted backward to free it from the ground. Now he was suspended in mid-air, unable to move; his arms and legs were stretched out in a regular X. Throughout this process he had shown no sign of resistance. The nearest of the crowd to the center drew back. A mist of raindrops hung in stasis between the sodium lamps and the pavement, increasing Geoff s sense of being witness to something detached from reality.

Everyone was looking at the helpless figure, directing their tension inward to the crossroads. Violence flickered in the air like dark moths; energy twitched the wires of falling rain. But nothing happened, and the mob was as passive as their victim. Then his gag started to burn. His face was obscured by smoke as the cross began turning. Sparks jumped between the limbs, hissing. Then the motor was coughing with life, and the cross was spinning into a blur of crimson and blue flame. The air became dense with the mixed odors of burning materials: rubber, paint, flesh and cloth. That and the drifting smoke made Geoff feel drugged to the point of insensitivity. The Wheel dimmed, its blackened weight appearing massive as it stopped moving. The face was no longer distinct. Without a focus, the crowd drifted apart uneasily. Some of them stood as though lost, taken over by the night that pressed in from all directions.

In minutes, they had dispersed entirely, leaving only the outstretched figure that had formed the center of the gathering. At a distance, what was visible looked like the negative image of one of Blake's angels. "Who was it?" Geoff asked.

"Nobody," the boy answered. "Could have been anyone." As they walked back toward the canal, he added, "You'll see it again. Happens all the time now. But we saw it together. That means neither of us can go away and say he didn't see it. True?" When they reached the towpath, they were alone. Mark leaned on Geoff s arm for support. "I need to rest a bit," he said. They stopped at a bench lit from overhead. The rain had intensified, darkening their coats. Geoff held the boy's shoulders while he shook with a fit of coughing.

More than rain was visible in the air now. Ashes were blowing toward them across the canal, like creased snowflakes of carbon. Where they struck Geoff's face and hands they felt clinging, permanent. He felt as though his own core had been blackened, and the night had come in to claim all of his memories, his debts, and his future. Mark was whispering something in a tired but urgent voice. "It all goes on and on," he was saying; "the more you take in, the more gets taken out of you. I'm just a watcher and a listener… I can't change anything. I can't even tell you where to look, or who to go to. I'm losing myself, that's why… Nothing in my lungs but pollution and bad dreams." His words dissolved into a kind of helpless choking; he pressed a handkerchief into his mouth. It came away deep red. That could be a disease or an internal wound; Geoff couldn't tell which.

A breeze caught the stained handkerchief and made it flutter. The rain diluted the blood, running it through the boy's fingers. The color washed out with unnatural speed; within a minute the cloth was entirely white. Perhaps there was some active chemical in the rain. Or, Geoff realized, perhaps the blood was not as material as it looked. Mark clenched his fist. He was trembling with cold; his eyes stared at something in the distance. "We ought to get you to a hospital," Geoff said.

Mark shook his head and smiled briefly. "Just get me back to the boat," he said. "I'll feel better when things have changed a little. You should understand that by now." The strength was coming back into his voice. He leaned nearer to Geoff; close up, his eyes appeared blue-black, like bruises. "But what are you going to do?" he asked. "You still don't know where to start, do you? Everything you see here makes you want to run away. You see your parents everywhere, and instead of looking for them, you're looking for a way to get free of them. All you want is something else, somewhere else. Do you wonder you can't begin to work out what it is?"

Several minutes passed in silence. Mark's face seemed to undergo conflict from within; it gave way to a community of faces, old and young, male and female. Then he regained himself. "Make contact somewhere," he said quietly. "If you give yourself up to everyone, you'll be torn apart. But if you hold off too long, you'll never be able to earth yourself. You're like a Catherine wheel, spinning instead of moving. True? Plug in somewhere, connect yourself." He reached up and touched Geoff's cheek; a fragile pulse of warmth passed through his fingertips.

Soon after, Geoff was standing alone on the canal towpath, looking at the black barge with its curtains drawn against the lamplight. He had helped Mark walk back to his boat and climb inside. As Geoff had last seen him, the boy was lying on his side in the narrow bunk, turning the knob on the radio endlessly back and forth in search of the wavelength by which the dead spoke. It was a small portable radio, run on batteries, and weakened by Mark's recurrent tinkering with its circuits. "Be careful," were Mark's final words to him. Geoff stood beside the still barge for an hour or more, knowing that he had no reason to stay.

When he began to walk, his limbs felt mechanical and foreign. The empty night stripped him of identifying features. Whatever had kept him waiting by the boat faded into the blur of the thoughts that could not be remembered. In the distance, a few city lights shone yellow and silver. They looked nearer than they were. Geoff thought of the Wheel, flaming with all the vivid colors of terror and denial; and he thought of the red handkerchief whitening faster than a person could die. At the first bridge, he turned back and tried to make out the shape of the barge against the dark water. He fought off the impression that it was being carried away into the distance by water currents. This was a canal, not a river. Nothing moved here. Indeed, nothing much had changed here in a hundred years.