The Best New Horror 2 (55 page)

The private lift was ready to take him to the Shadowshark. He holstered his trusty airgun.

Plunging towards his destiny, he exulted in the thrill of the chase. He was back.

Accept no pale imitations. Avoid the lesser men, the men of wavering resolves, of dangerous weaknesses.

He was the original.

—Rex Cash, “The Return of Dr Shade” (1991)

Greg was at his easel, drawing. There was nothing else he could do. No matter how much he hated the commission, he had to splash the black ink, had to fill out the sketches. It was all he had left of himself. In the panel, Dr Shade was breaking up a meeting of the conspirators. African communists were infiltrating London, foully plotting to sabotage British business by blowing up the Stock Exchange. But the Doctor would stop them. Greg filled in the thick lips of Papa Dominick, the voodoo commissar, and tried to get the fear in the villain’s eyes as the shadowman raised his airgun.

“Did you hear,” P said, “they’re giving me a chance to write for the
Argus
. The Stamp of Truth, they’ll call my column. I can write
about music or politics or fashion or anything. I’ll be a proper little girl reporter.”

Crosbie told him Derek Leech was delighted at the way the strip was going. Dr Shade was really taking off. There was Dr Shade graffiti all over town, and he had started seeing youths with Dr Shade goggles tattooed around their eyes. A comics reviewer who had acclaimed
Fat Chance
as a masterpiece described the strip as “racist drivel.” He hadn’t been invited to any conventions recently, and a lot of his old friends would cross the street to avoid him. Greg’s telephone rang rarely, now. It was always Crosbie. To his surprise, Tamara had cut herself out of the 10% after the first week of the
Argus
and told him to find other representation. He never heard from Harry, just received the scripts by special messenger. Greg could imagine the writer disconsolately tapping out stories in Donald Moncrieff’s style at his Amstrad. He knew exactly how the other man felt.

He had the radio on. The riots were still flaring up. The police were concerned by a rash of airgun killings, but didn’t seem to be doing much about them. It appeared that the victims were mainly rabble-rousing ringleaders, although not a few West Indian and Asian community figures had been killed or wounded. Kenneth Hood, a popular vicar, had tried to calm down the rioters and been shot in the head. He wasn’t expected to live, and two policemen plus seven “rioters” had died in the violent outburst that followed the attempt on his life. Greg imagined the shadowman on the rooftops, taking aim, hat pulled low, cloak streaming like demon wings.

Greg drew the Shadowshark, sliding through the city night, hurling aside the petrol-bomb-throwing minions of Papa Dominick. “The sun has shone for too long on the open schemes of the traitors,” Harry had written, “but night must fall . . . and with the night comes Shade.”

Early on, Greg had tried to leave the city, but they were waiting for him at the station. The girl called P, and some of the others. They had escorted him home. They called themselves Shadeheads now, and wore hats and cloaks like the doctor, tattered black over torn T-shirts, drainpipe jeans and steel-toed Doc Martens.

P was with him most of the time now. At first, she had just been in the corner of his vision, watching over him. Finally, he’d given in and called her over. Now, she was in the flat, making her calls to the Doctor, preparing his meals, warming his single bed. They’d pushed him enough, and now he had to be reassured, cajoled. He worked better that way.

Derek Leech was on the radio now, defending the record of his security staff during the riots. He had pitched in to help the police, using his news helicopters to direct the action, and sending his people into the fighting like troops. The police were obviously not happy,
but public opinion was forcing them to accept the tycoon’s assistance. Leech made a remark about “the spirit of Dr Shade,” and Greg’s hand jumped, squirting ink across the paper.

“Careful, careful,” said P, dipping in with a tissue and delicately wiping away the blot, saving the artwork. Her hair was growing out. She’d never be a
Comet
Knock-Out, but she was turning into a surprisingly housewifely, almost maternal, girl. In the end, Shadeheads believed a woman’s place was with her legs spread and her hands in dishwater.

In the final panel, Dr Shade was standing over his vanquished enemies, holding up his fist in a defiant salute. White fire was reflected in his goggles.

The news was over, and the new Crusaders single came on. “There’ll Always Be an England.” It was climbing the charts.

Greg looked out of the window. He imagined fires on the horizon.

He took a finer pen, and bent to do some detail work on the strip. He wished he had held out longer. He wished he’d taken more than one beating. Sometimes, he told himself he was doing it for Harry, to protect the old man. But that was bullshit. They hadn’t been Reggie Barton and Hank Hemingway. Imaginative torture hadn’t been necessary, and they hadn’t sworn never to give in, never to break down, never to knuckle under. A few plain old thumps and the promise of a few more had been enough. Plus more money a month than either of them had earned in any given three years of their career.

Next week, the Doctor would execute Papa Dominick. Then, he would do something about the strikers, the scroungers, the slackers, the scum . . .

A shadow fell over the easel, cloak spreading around it. Greg turned to look up at the goggled face of his true master.

Dr Shade was pleased with him.

D.F. L
EWIS
is perhaps the most prolific published author working in the horror field today. While that’s no idle boast, it’s easier to understand when you realize that most of his stories only cover a few pages at most.

“Madge” is no exception, yet despite its brief length, Des Lewis manages to pack as much of a punch into his sparse prose as many horror writers take a whole book to achieve.

Recent outlets for his fiction have included such small press publications as
Winter Chills, BBR, Cobweb, Dementia 13, Flickers
‘
n
’
Frames, Peeping Tom, Dreams & Nightmares, Dark Star, Deathrealm, Arrows of Desire, Dream, Overspace
and
After Hours
, along with appearances in
The Year’s Best Horror Stories
and, of course,
Best New Horror
.

T
HE WOMAN SAT THERE CROONING
of one she loved.

The sea’s roar was backdrop to the song, those listening swaying with its rhythms, their hair forking in the tumbling winds; they’d heard the song several times before, supposedly understanding the deep sorrow it betokened, but never so plangent, never so heartfelt as now.

The woman caught her breath momentarily, wrapped her shawl tighter against the seaspray that was borne as far inland tonight as it ever had; and she took up some new verses heretofore unsung, except when on her own late at night, to lull herself into fitful sleep.

Those listening ceased swaying, tankards poised upon their lips, not drinking, but ready to drink when the song ended . . . but the end now was so unpredictable. Many held their breath; but amid such winds as blew along those coasts, it was possible for the lungs to respire without the consent of mind or body.

The song entered areas to which none would dare listen, given the choice. Many hoped that the growing thunder of the encroaching seas would deafen . . .

Later, in her cot, as the storm neared its peak, she attempted lullaby after lullaby, not only to take sleep upon herself from the pitch darkness, but also gently to entice her partner for the night into a rest which, he told her, would help him to work the trawler through the next week or so. They had loved long and hard since day-repair, so surely sleep would be easy.

He whispered:

“Your song was hard to bear, this night, Madge.”

“I could hardly bear it myself, but I was determined to get through all the verses . . .”

“The others did not know where to put their faces . . . But I hoped, I really hoped, you would choose me tonight, and you must have read as much in my eyes, for here I be.”

“I needed someone strong this night of all nights, not only because the storm is fiercer than I at least can remember, but my mother once told me that if I sang the song straight through, without break, he of which it speaks will know he can finally rest—but will need to see me for the last time. And, if he comes tonight, I want him to know I’m happy, strongly serviced by the likes of you.”

“Madge, don’t you think he’ll be bitter seeing me share your cot?”

“Ghosts can never be bitter, man, they can only hope for the happiness of those they leave behind. That’s where all the tales and songs be wrong.”

“If you say so . . .”

The storm hurtled louder than the quaking of the Earth at the end of time.

She wrapped herself tighter into his arms, feeling that his breath was staunched, like hers, for the duration of the moment’s sanctity.

Day-break, with the storm quickly passing over, the rest of the village woke to hear her renewed crooning. This time it was with a morning’s melody and lightsome words.

Madge’s mother found her still locked in the twine of the man’s white unmoving limbs, as she carolled of a new ghost . . .

The tides were too far out to hear. But, when her song was done, she listened to the squelch of boots as men mumbled into their beards and dragged their boats through new-made troughs to the distant sea.

C
HERRY
W
ILDER
is a New Zealander who lives in Germany. Her first story was published in 1974 and, although she is better known as a science fiction writer, a number of her recent tales have been in the horror genre.

Her work has appeared in such anthologies and magazines as
New Terrors, Dark Voices, Skin of the Soul, Interzone, Omni
and
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, while her books include
Second Nature
, the
Torin
and
Rulers of Hylor
trilogies, and
Cruel Designs
, the latter a horror novel set in her adopted country.

Like “The House on Cemetery Street” by the same author, which was one of the most popular stories in our first volume, “Alive in Venice” is a deceptively quiet story in which the horror builds slowly and surely to a powerful resolution.

T
HE
P
ENSIONE
G
UARDI WAS A SOMBRE BUILDING
fifteen minutes’ brisk walk from the Accademia. It stood at the end of a brick tunnel, a
sottoportego
, on the banks of a canal that had long been filled in. The Pensione was crushed up against the rambling rear walls of a palace . . . perhaps it had once been an annex of the more splendid edifice. When Susan Field looked out of her bedroom window, craning her neck to the right, she could see the wings and rump of a stone lion, outlined against blue sky.

The bedroom was very small and mercifully it was around one corner of the corridor from the larger bedroom inhabited through the langorous summer nights by Jamie and Olive. Susan was not ignorant of the “facts of life”. Fate, she saw, had played her brother and sister-in-law a cruel trick. Bad enough to have a family misfortune which banished their wedding to a country church in Oxfordshire but worse, far worse to go on honeymoon accompanied by—ugh—the groom’s fourteen-year-old sister.

Honeymooners, as everyone knew, needed to be alone. Susan was not sure what this “alone” really meant. Alone in bed together? Far away from their families and friends? Venice was crowded and the young couple would not have dreamed of travelling without Kidson, a dour woman of fifty, Olive’s personal maid.

Susan set out to be good and self-effacing. She succeeded so well that she became a sort of ghost; Jamie and Olive jumped when she spoke or tugged them by the sleeve. She was surprised when confronted by her own reflection in one of a thousand mirrors, framed in gold. She hung back in the teeming streets, became lost and found herself again. At the Pensione she explored all the rooms in which she could reasonably spend time by herself. Her favourite was the writing room.

It had faded gilt furniture, a desk topped in dove-grey leather, and a soft watery light from the eastern windows. No one ever seemed to write although the inkwells were full and there was a sand shaker as well as blotting paper. She would not have been surprised to find a quill pen and a roll of parchment. She bought postcards but because of her peculiar situation she had no one to send them to except herself. She addressed them to the London house which was quite empty now and thought of them falling through the letter-box on to the mat with a ghostly Susan running down the stairs to pick them up.

One wall of the room was unpapered and had no windows; it was of grey stone relieved by four large woven panels. Three of these panels were covered with a repeating pattern of arabesques and flowers, but the larger central panel was a tapestry picture of two ladies stepping down into a gondola. Masked revellers watched them idly from a bridge; the moon was rising; servants carried a ribboned mandolin, a lap-dog, a basket of flowers. It was an interesting picture and she sat
watching it by the hour. She decided that the ladies—one of them was really a young girl—were going home after a visit. Perhaps they had been at a party or a masquerade; the older woman wore a half-mask and powdered hair.

Sometimes people came to fetch her from the writing room.

“Oh there you are, Tuppence!” said Jamie, still her teasing big brother.

“They’re waiting, Miss!” said Kidson, stiff with disapproval.

“Ah,
poverina
. . .” sighed the Signora, who had red hair and a comfortable figure. Worst of all was Mrs Porter, wife of Canon Porter, who had struck up an acquaintance at breakfast in the courtyard. This good woman had a most particular interest in Susan herself and had offered to “mind” her while the young couple went off by themselves. Mrs Porter had read the London papers, even the more gruesome ones, and when the girl was in her clutches she asked questions. Susan, crimson in the face, refused to answer.