The Best New Horror 2 (37 page)

“But I think I may have . . .” She stopped. She could not tell him. She could not explain what she had done because she did not understand it. She had let them take away the woman and she had done nothing to stop them. “Shhh,” she said to Peter. “Do you hear that?”

Peter listened silently. “No, I don’t hear anything,” he finally said.

Maggie started to cry again. “I still hear her screaming.”

Maggie waited until Peter and Rich left the apartment for the airport. Then she packed a bag and got into the car and began the drive to Mexico. Peter was right. People had to face their fears. She had to find out what had happened to the woman. Then maybe the screaming would stop.

She drove into the night. She stopped once for coffee. She heard the sounds of the woman’s screams, and she quickly returned to the car and started driving again. She cried as she traveled through Mexico; Rich said it was not safe at night. She took a wrong turn and had to double back. Then she was at the village. She stopped the car in front of the police station.

She climbed out of the car. The night was quiet. The air was damp and fishy smelling. She heard the waves stroking the sand. No one screamed.

She walked into the police station. It was a small room. Two officers sat behind desks, their feet up, talking and laughing together. They both stood when she came into the room. Her legs trembled. Her vision blurred. I have to sleep, she thought; I have to eat.

“How may we help you?” one of the men asked, speaking English. She stared at them. They were the men who had taken away the woman. She put out a hand to steady herself. It was the middle of the night and she was alone with the two men who had killed the woman.

Someone screamed. Maggie looked out toward the traffic circle. It was empty.

“May we help you?” the man repeated. A baton and gun were strapped to his leg.

“I—I saw a woman here, three or four days ago,” Maggie said. She slowly backed out of the office. “In the middle of the night. You took her away.”

The men looked at each other, puzzled. “I am sorry but you must be mistaken,” the man said. “We have no woman. Was she a friend of yours?”

The woman screamed again. Maggie put her hands over her ears. This had to stop. She stumbled out of the office.

“You look tired. Are you well?” The officer followed her into the street.

Maggie looked over at the statue. Were the horse’s hooves moving? Was there blood staining the metal? I should have helped her, Maggie thought. I could have saved her. Evil flourishes where good people do nothing. Who said that? Maggie ran toward the statue. Edmund Burke? William Shakespeare? The woman screaming in her ear?

The screams were shrill, heartbreaking. Maggie shook her head as she raced toward the statue. She had to get the cries out of her brain. She had to find the woman and save her.

She stood near the horse. The world spun. The horse moved. She opened her mouth and screamed. The police officers were beside her, trying to calm her. “It’s all right,” they both said in Spanish. “You will be fine.” Each of them took an arm. “We will take you to the hospital. You will be fine.”

Maggie screamed. Fear overwhelmed her. How could she have lived her entire life without seeing—without realizing how terrifying everything was? “Help me!” she cried. She kicked the police officer. He pulled out his baton and then dropped it. The horse’s bloody hooves beat the air. The woman still screamed. Maggie pulled at her hair.

“Help me!” she screamed one more time before the officers dragged her away, out of sight of the hotel window where a woman sat watching.

A
LTHOUGH ONE OR TWO
of his earlier stories have been called horror, Garry Kilworth admits he wrote them as fantasy or science fiction, and he has only recently ventured into the horror short fiction field.

Born in York, England, his formative years were spent in South Arabia and he currently lives in Hong Kong. The author’s short stories have been published in such magazines and anthologies as
Omni, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Fantasy Tales, Twilight Zone, Interzone, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Other Edens, Beyond the Lands of Never
and the
15th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories
.

Collections of his own fiction include
The Songbirds of Pain, In the Hollow of the Deep-Sea Wave
and
Dark Hills, Hollow Clocks
, while
Hunter’s Moon
and
Midnight’s Sun
are recent novels.

The following story obviously draws upon the writer’s travels, but beneath the rich texture of character and setting lurks a powerful fear and a nasty twist . . .

T
HEY HAD BEEN LOUD-HAILING
the place for days, and it certainly looked empty, but John said you can’t knock down a building that size without being absolutely sure that some terrified Chinese child wasn’t trapped in one of the myriad of rooms, or that an abandoned old lady wasn’t caught in some blocked passageway, unable to find her way out. There must have been elderly people who had set up home in the center of this huge rotten cheese, and around whom the rest of the slum was raised over the years. Such people would have forgotten there
was
an outside world, let alone be able to find their way to it.

“You ready?” he asked me, and I nodded.

It was John Speakman’s job, as a Hong Kong Police inspector, to go into the empty shell of the giant slum to make sure everyone was out, so that the demolition could begin. He had a guide of course, and an armed escort of two locally born policemen, and was accompanied by a newspaper reporter—me. I’m a free-lance whose articles appear mainly in the
South China Morning Post
.

You could say the Walled City was many dwellings, as many as seven thousand, but you would be equally right to call it a single structure. It consisted of one solid block of crudely built homes, all fused together. No thought or planning had gone into each tacked-on dwelling, beyond that of providing shelter for a family. The whole building covered the approximate area of a football stadium. There was no quadrangle at its center, nor inner courtyard, no space within the ground it occupied. Every single piece of the ramshackle mass, apart from the occasional fetid airshaft, had been used to build, up to twelve stories high. Beneath the ground, and through every part of this monstrous shanty, ran a warren of tunnels and passageways. Above and within it, there were walkways, ladders, catwalks, streets, and alleys, all welded together as if some junk artist like the man who built the Watts Towers had decided to try his hand at architecture.

Once you got more than ten feet inside, there was no natural light. Those within used to have to send messages to those on the edges to find out if it was day or night, fine or wet. The homemade brick and plaster was apt to rot and crumble in the airless confines inside and had to be constantly patched and shored up. In a land of high temperatures and humidity, fungus grew thick on the walls and in the cracks the rats and cockroaches built their own colonies. The stink was unbelievable. When it was occupied, more than fifty thousand people existed within its walls.

John called his two local cops to his side, and we all slipped into the dark slit in the side of the Walled City, Sang Lau the guide going first. Two
gwailos
—whites—and three Chinese, entering the forbidden place, perhaps for the last time. Even Sang Lau, who
knew the building as well as any, seemed anxious to get the job over and done with. The son of an illegal immigrant, he had been raised in this block of hovels, in the muck and darkness of its intestines. His stunted little body was evidence of that fact, and he had only volunteered to show us the way in exchange for a right to Hong Kong citizenship for members of his family still without Hong Kong citizenship. He and his immediate family had taken advantage of the amnesty that had served to empty the city of its inhabitants. They had come out, some of them half-blind through lack of light, some of them sick and crippled from the disease and bad air, and now Sang Lau had been asked to return for one last time. I guessed how he would be feeling: slightly nostalgic (for it was his birthplace), yet wanting to get it over with, so that the many other unsavory remembrances might be razed along with the structure.

The passage inside was narrow, constantly twisting, turning, dipping, and climbing, apparently at random. Its walls ran with slick water and it smelled musty, with pockets of stale-food stink, and worse. I constantly gagged. Then there were writhing coils of hose and cable that tangled our feet if we were not careful: plastic water pipes ran alongside wires that had once carried stolen electricity. When the rotten cables were live and water ran through the leaking hoses, these passageways must have been death traps. Now and again the beam from the lamp in my helmet transfixed a pointed face, with whiskers and small eyes, then the rat would scuttle away, into its own maze of tunnels.

Every so often, we paused at one of the many junctions or shafts, and one of the Chinese policemen, the stocky, square-faced one, would yell through a megaphone. The sound smacked dully into the walls, or echoed along corridors of plasterboard. The atmosphere was leaden, though strangely aware. The massive structure with all its holes, its pits and shafts, was like a beast at the end of its life, waiting for the final breath. It was a shell, but one that had been soaked in the feverish activity of fifty thousand souls. It was once a holy city, but it had been bled, sweated, urinated, and spat on not only by the poor and the destitute, but also by mobsters, hoodlums, renegades, felons, runaways, refugees, and fugitives, until no part of it remained consecrated. It pressed in on us on all sides, as if it wanted to crush us, but lacked the final strength needed to collapse itself. It was a brooding, moody place and terribly alien to a
gwailo
like myself. I could sense spirits clustering in the corners: spirits from a culture that no Westerner has ever fully understood. More than once, as I stumbled along behind the others, I said to myself,
What am I doing here? This is no place for me, in this hole
.

The stocky policeman seemed startled by his own voice, blaring from the megaphone: he visibly twitched every time he had to make his announcement. From his build I guessed his family originally came from the north, from somewhere around the Great Wall. His features and heavy torso were Mongol rather than Cantonese, the southerners having a tendency toward small, delicate statures and moon-shaped faces. He probably made a tough policeman out on the streets, where his build would be of use in knocking heads together, but in here his northern superstitions and obsessive fear of spirits made him a liability. Not for the first time I wondered at John Speakman’s judgment in assessing human character.

After about an hour of walking, and sometimes crawling, along tunnels the size of a sewer pipe, John suggested we rest for a while.

I said, “You’re not going to eat sandwiches in here, are you?”

It was supposed to be a joke, but I was so tense, it came out quite flat, and John growled, “No, of course not.”

We sat cross-legged in a circle, in what used to be an apartment: It was a hardboard box about ten-by-ten feet.

“Where are we?” I asked the torchlit faces. “I mean in relation to the outside.” The reply could have been “the bowels of the earth” and I would have believed it. It was gloomy, damp, fetid, and reeked of prawn paste, which has a odor reminiscent of dredged sludge.

Sang Lau replied, “Somewhere near east corner. We move soon, toward middle.”

His reply made me uneasy.

“
Somewhere
near? Don’t you know exactly?”

John snapped, “Don’t be silly, Peter. How can he know
exactly
? The important thing is he knows the way out. This isn’t an exercise in specific location.”

“Right,” I said, giving him a mock salute, and he tipped his peaked cap back on his head, a sure sign he was annoyed. If he’d been standing, I don’t doubt his hands would have been on his hips in the classic “
gwailo
giving orders” stance.

John hadn’t been altogether happy about taking a “civilian” along, despite the fact that I was a close friend. He had a very poor opinion of those who did not wear a uniform of some kind. According to his philosophy, the human race was split into two: There were the protectors (police, army, medical profession, firemen, et al.) and those who needed protection (the rest of the population). Since I apparently came under the second category, I needed looking after. John was one of those crusty bachelors you find in the last outposts of faded empires: a living reminder of the beginning of the century. Sheena, my wife, called him “the fossil,” even to his face. I think they both regarded it as a term of endearment.

However, he said he wanted to do me a favor, since he knew that my job was getting tough. Things were getting tight in the free-lance business, especially since Australia had just woken up to the fact that Hong Kong, a thriving place of business where money was to be made hand over fist, was right on its doorstep. The British and American expatriates equaled each other for the top slot, numerically speaking, but Aussie professionals were beginning to enter—if not in droves, in small herds. With them they brought their own parasites, the freelancers, and for the first time I had a lot of competition. It meant I had to consolidate friendships and use contacts that had previously been mostly social. Sheena and I were going through a bit of a rough time too, and one thing she would not put up with was a tame writer who earned less than a poorly paid local clerk. I could sense the words “proper job” in the air, waiting to condense.

Even the darkness in there seemed to have substance. I could see the other young policeman, the thin, sharp Cantonese youth, was uncomfortable too. He kept looking up, into the blackness, smiling nervously. He and his companion cop whispered to each other, and I heard “Bruce Lee” mentioned just before they fell into silence again, their grins fixed. Perhaps they were trying to use the memory of the fabled martial-arts actor to bolster their courage? Possibly the only one of us who was completely oblivious, or perhaps indifferent, to the spiritual ambience of the place was John himself. He was too thick-skinned, too much the old-warrior expat, to be affected by spooky atmospheres. I thought he might reassure his men though, since we both knew that when Chinese smiled under circumstances such as these, it meant they were hiding either acute embarrassment or abject terror. They had nothing to be embarrassed about, so I was left with only one assumption.