Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (29 page)

    "You saw him?"

    Dougal nodded. "I still see him."

    "When does this happen?" I asked, "on the anniversary of his death or something?"

    "Oh, no." He shook his head. "Every night."

    I glanced out the window at the moonlit deck. "Are we waiting for him now? Tonight?"

    Dougal nodded. "He should come soon. He comes around this time. Every night. You'll see."

    After that first time, Dougal told me, he had kept the curtains drawn. "But I knew he was out there. I could feel him, smell him. Hear him, too, feeling along the glass, looking for a way in."

    It was late now, and in the heavy stillness of that summer night you could hear everything: insects chirring, a distant speedboat gunning through the darkness, out of sight across the bay, the waves shushing in on the beach, lapping against the bulkhead.

    Then there was a sound that cut across the regular rhythm of the waves, a slopping, wallowing sound. Dougal stopped talking; his face fell apart, as if someone had just cut the strings that held it together. A rotten, low-tide stench filled the room, getting stronger and stronger until I could barely breathe.

    Deep in the shadows, I saw something lying on the deck; I was sure it hadn't been there earlier.

    Then whatever it was stood up. It stumbled across the deck and pressed itself against the glass.

    "He wants to come in," I said, surprised at the sound of my own voice in the still room.

    "I won't let him in," Dougal said. "I'll never let him in."

    The figure felt its way along the windows until it reached the far railing of the deck. You could hear the soft pat of its hands against the glass, hear the slight creaking of the window-frames as it pressed against them.

    It was too dark to see clearly. I got no more than a glimpse of white flesh through the window, flesh too white to be living, and somehow soft, corrupt, swollen.

    I saw the palms of its hands against the glass.

    It was appalling. I shut my eyes, and shielded them with an open hand, the way you do against sun-glare, to make sure, I guess, that no image of that thing could get through, light or no light.

    When I opened my eyes again it had gone, though I thought I could make out a dim form moving slowly towards the end of the dock. Another minute and something clambered down the pilings and slipped into the bay water.

    We sat there in silence for a long time. Dougal's breathing was rough and uneven, as if he'd just run up a flight of stairs. I had to consciously keep myself from holding my breath. I didn't want to draw the dense, rotten miasma of salt marsh and mudflat that filled the room into my lungs.

    "You saw that?" Dougal asked after a while.

    "Yes," I admitted. "I saw it. How do you know it's Finn?"

    "It's Finn. No doubt about that."

    "What does he want?"

    "This is what he wants. He wants me to remember. He doesn't want me to forget. He doesn't want me to have any more happiness, any more life, than he does."

    I thought of Dougal, sitting here in the dark, night after night, waiting for his dead brother to visit him.

    "Are you afraid? Do you think it's trying to get in to do you harm?"

    Dougal shook his ruined head. "Oh no. He can't harm me. He hasn't the power to hurt me, physically. That's why I opened the curtains, to confront him, to show him I'm not afraid of him. That way he can't hurt me."

    I looked around the empty house, its shut-up rooms smelling of mildew, stuffy, peeling walls, the whole house falling apart. I looked at Dougal, his body destroyed by alcohol, his life reduced to a nightly vigil of horror and guilt.

    "I think I'd better go," I said. Dougal nodded, never taking his eyes off the window, staring out over the bay.

    "He won't come back now," Dougal said. "Not tonight."

    "Good night, Dougal," I said. I couldn't think of anything else to say.

    Dougal just sat there, silently, cradling a bottle in his lap, staring out at the water.

    I let myself out.

    Dougal had done all the talking, but I had had something I meant to tell him. In the event I never came out with it. That was just as well.

    I didn't have the heart to tell him that I had married Jeanne Cary. I thought he had enough to bear without that.

    I drove her home the night of the graduation party. She had been planning on getting a ride from Finn, or Dougal. Otherwise I might not have met someone like her. I comforted her. No, it wasn't like that. But when we met again, there was an opening, an emotional contact already made. We started from there. One thing, as they say, led to another. We spent some good years together before I had to watch her die of cancer. Now that was over and I was back where it all started.

    I wouldn't have minded seeing her again, but that was not given to me.

    Driving back home along the shore road, I stopped just before the road bends away from the water and looked back towards the admiral's house. On the far point I could just make out the looming shape of it, shadows hovering over a spark of yellow light, the small table lamp burning at the back of the room overlooking the deck. I knew now why Dougal hadn't lit the other lamps.

    I knew Dougal was still sitting there, drinking and staring out at the bay. I also knew that one night, when he felt he had waited long enough, been punished enough, Dougal would get up and open the door.

    I opened all the windows of my car to let the warm summer night air chase out the heavy, rotten stink of low tide mud that had followed me from the admiral's house and filled the car interior to choking. By the time I pulled up in front of my house I couldn't smell it any more.

13 - Tony Richards - Man, You Gotta See This!

    See, there's this thing about Jer.

    There was a Monet exhibition in our city once. I and Kara - my then girlfriend - trooped through with the rest. Gazed upon the garden scenes and renderings of fog-bound London. Were awed by the way the paintings changed with age and failing eyesight. Loved it. But…

    There is something more than love, in art. I found that out right at the end.

    The exhibit reached its conclusion, you see, in a big square room that just contained one painting. A triptych, they called it. Three almighty canvases put together to form one.

    It was water lilies, of course. Took up an entire wall.

    And there were benches in front of it, so I just sat down. And then allowed my mind to fall forward into that weightlessness of pastel colour.

    I didn't realize Kara had gone wandering back to see the scenes near Tower Bridge again.

    When she tapped my shoulder, asked me if I'd been sitting here all this time, more than half an hour had passed.

    I had gone completely elsewhere. I'd been lost. Blissfully so.

    And Jer would
never
understand that.

    Jerry Mulligrew - almost like the jazz saxophonist - my oldest and closest friend. Thirty-four, but looking rather younger. Pony-tailed and scrawny. Avoider of honest labour, as, for the most part, was I. Connoisseur of soft and medium-soft drugs. Lover of heavy metal. Expert puller of the student babes at our local bar - thus proof that earnest eyes, a winning smile and a quick sense of humour compensate for what I'd call weasely looks and dubious dress-sense.

    Jer just wasn't into beauty of that kind. It was a concept, he often told me, which had had its day. All of that was misty-eyed stuff, far removed from actual life. We were in the Cyber Age now, and that kind of beauty was old hat.

    "And we should replace it with what?" I'd ask him.

    "Wonderment, man. Just… infinite possibilities. There ain't nothin' we can't do."

    We both lived on Packwell Street, me in a pokey one-bedroom apartment that had had its rent fixed twenty years ago, Jer a couple of blocks down in the loft room of a long established squat. If you walked past late at night, you could see the glow of his three state-of-the-art home computers through the window, like some otherworldly glow.

    Seeing as he hadn't held down a job since the original George Bush, you might ask how he managed to afford them.

    Don't ask.

    And… when Old Man Hubert died, it was rather like that thing Dorothy Parker said when Calvin Coolidge - I
think
it was Calvin Coolidge - did the same. "How can they tell?"

    No one could remember when they had last seen him. He'd had his groceries delivered, and he'd never ventured out. He was almost like a mythic figure to most people on the street. He'd lived in the big house at the very end of Packwell, where the street met the hill, rose for a few blocks, and then gave way to shabby looking woods. Huge house. Old house. Cupolas and stuff. It was surrounded by an iron fence, and all the drapes were permanently closed.

    What did he do there?

    "He's supposed to be a painter," Ray the Bartender informed us one time.

    "No shit? He has opening nights and stuff?"

    Ray shrugged. "Never heard of any. Never seen anything by him. S'far as I know, he never even tries to sell his paintings. The word is he's got inherited money."

    I exchanged glances with Jer, but he just shook his head.

    "No way, dude," he said once Ray had moved off. "I'm not into that art-stuff, but I respect all creators. In a way, I'm one myself. He's old anyhow. We'll leave it till he's dead."

    And now he was.

    One day, a hearse simply appeared at the end of the road, but with no limousines following it. A coffin was brought out, and loaded in, and then driven away. The front door was padlocked and the windows boarded up. No moving truck appeared.

    When I saw Jer that afternoon, his thumbs were pricking, like the witches in
Macbeth.
He was all keyed up. Then he looked down at my ankle, remembered that I'd twisted it last night - on a loose paving-slab, extremely drunk; he'd had to help me stagger home. And groaned.

    "Ah, what the hell?" he philosophized. "It'll probably be months before some lawyer gets around to having the place emptied. We can be in and out as much as we like, take a little at a time. Like -shoplifting, you know? There must be God-knows-what in there."

    He was off towards the house alone an hour after darkness fell. Sitting in front of my TV, feeling pretty sorry for myself, I could imagine him prying back the boards.

    An hour and a
half
after darkness fell, my phone went. It was Jer, on the cell phone he had bought from Ray a month back.

    "Man, you gotta get up here!"

    "What are you talking about, bro?"

    "Man, you gotta
see
this!"

    I felt myself go slightly red. "I'm a cripple, for chrissake! I can't go doing B-and-E in my condition!"

    "You get up here right now, man, or you'll forever kick yourself. I shit you not even slightly. This has to be seen to be believed."

    What did? I next asked him.

    But he told me that he could not even describe it. He gave me details of how to get in.

    I was cursing as I limped up the gradient. Two things, apart from the discomfort, really bothered me. First, Jerry often took some kind of upper before heading out on such a venture, to heighten his senses and make his reactions quick. I wondered if his wild excitement was simply the product of some chemical, and nothing more.

    Secondly - and this one, honestly, had been nagging away at the back of my mind ever since that talk with Ray - if Old Man Hubert had been a painter, then what was he painting with the drapes all drawn?

    The door might be padlocked, but the metal gates had been left open - forgotten about, presumably, when the hearse had driven out through them. I went down the shadiest side of the house, brushing past a row of trees, and there was the small side window, just as Jer had described, with two-thirds of the boards pulled away. There was an overturned bucket to heft myself up from, otherwise I don't think I'd have made it. But my ankle was still hurting like hell by the time I was inside.

    "Jer?" I whispered.

    A small flashlight came on.

    I couldn't see Jerry behind it, but could hear the tremolo in his voice.

    "C'mon man! Follow me! You gotta see this stuff!"

    He sounded like a little kid who'd just found a dead squirrel.

    I hobbled along behind him, painfully aware that if Five-O showed up now I didn't have a chance of running. And I prayed that there weren't any stairs involved.

    There weren't.

    We went down a corridor into the pitch-black centre of the house. Through a door, which Jer told me to close.

    Once I did, a switch clicked - and I was temporarily blinded.