Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

After his shower that morning he’d noticed there were other points on his face beginning to flare up. Most worryingly, there was an ache building behind his left eye. Another in his chest. The windscreen had shattered into a million pieces. How many of them had disappeared inside him? How many were now worming their way out, rejected by his flesh after the slow journey of a year? In the horror of it, came the thrill. The glass might have connected him to his wife. What if, as he had read once, it was possible for slivers of glass to pass through your body? Perhaps some of them had become embedded in her. He was in her, then, after a fashion. And now that he was here, in Sheckford, some numinous frequency, made in blood, had been opened between them. It was the kind of thing she believed in. The end was never the end. We were all passengers in transit.

“There’s something wrong with my camera,” Kerner said. “Just found out this morning.”

“I think there’s a camera shop in the village. Maybe they’d have a look at it for you.” Don hated the sound of his own voice. It was weak, pathetic, more so since his eventful night.

“Not this. Specialist job, I reckon. Fault somewhere. And not with my picture-taking abilities, for once. It’s as if I’d forgotten to take the film out and rewound it and taken more exposures over the top.”

“Have you checked that?”

Kerner gave him a look. He checked his watch. “Hmm,” he said. “Says here that it’s still the twenty-first century. That must mean I’ve got a digital camera.”

The sudden, spearing conclusion that he didn’t like Kerner. Don was glad his camera was knackered. He hoped it would cost him a fortune to repair it.

“Look, see,” Kerner said, pushing his bowl to one side and setting the expensive camera on the table. He pressed a few buttons and the screen on the rear flashed up a picture: the one Mac had taken the previous evening.

Don came around the table and squinted at the glass oblong. “Christ,” he said.

The two of them, standing in front of the cavern entrance, the blue guide lights set into the floor illuminating them from below, giving them an unhealthy, cyanotic glow. Shadows falling on the uneven rock behind them: Kerner’s, Don’s, and someone else’s.

“See that?”

“Yeah. It can’t be Mac’s shadow, can it?”

“Hey?” Kerner leaned in closer. “I hadn’t actually noticed that. I was talking about that. glow, in your chest.”

Now Don saw it. In roughly the position where his heart might be, a fist-sized lump of grainy light, like the diffuse aura cast by a sodium street-lamp. He pressed his fingers to his breastbone.

“What could it be?” he asked. His voice sounded perilously close to choking. Tears ganged up. But Kerner seemed not to notice.

“Could just be some hot pixels on the sensor, maybe. Maybe a lens problem. But I have some pictures I took before and after, and they seem clean. That shadow you point out though. it’s obvious something’s not right. Bollocks. It’s quality glass that. Spent a fortune on it. ”

“I have to go,” Don said.

Kerner nodded, smiled. His fingers fidgeted with the buttons on the camera body. “ Adieu , caribou.”

Go home. Leave this place. Let it sink into time, let it become a fossil in your memory .

But how could it? This was as much Julie’s place as his now. They were inextricably linked by Sheckford, the things that happened to them here.

He was back in his room, standing in front of the mirror, his shirt off, staring at his chest, willing the glow to reappear. It’s you, isn’t it? Julie?

He switched on the light and his breath caught. Two shadows. But one was merely a copy of the other, bounced back by the silvered glass. He pressed his fingers against his skin and felt something hard. It was like a swelling. All of the other hotspots of pain in his skin sang out. He buttoned his shirt and returned to the bedroom. There was a sense of someone having just departed. The mattress seemed to be rising slightly, where it might have cushioned a body moments before. There was a slight shift in the temperature of the room. A microscopic change in its pressures.

I want to go to the white I want to run through the snow

The crystal snow globe had been so important to her. It had been with her for much of her life, and it had helped to end it too. She had often told him how lovely it would be to live in a snow globe, to be protected from all the evils in the outside world by that perfect glass. The silence, the beauty.

He was out of the hotel and walking hard along the street before he had any concrete notion of where he was heading.

His mind was filled with white.

Mac let him through the gate but was unsympathetic when Don told him he might have lost his car keys in the cavern. “It’s not really my job to go hunting for lost property. I’m a security guard.”

“I’ll go,” Don said.

“I don’t think so. This isn’t a drive-through restaurant. You don’t just pop back whenever you feel like it.”

A twenty-pound note changed his mind.

Don steeled himself at the entrance, but only because the pain in his chest ramped up a notch. It was like heartburn, only a hundred times worse. He thought he might retch, but nothing would come when he leaned over. Something felt sharp just beneath the skin. Something was coming.

He could hear the water ploughing over and under and through the rock as it had done for so many millions of years. It had churned through this cavern at the moment of his birth and at the moment of Julie’s death. He staggered along the pathway, grateful for its enormous sound; it meant he did not have to listen to his own skin tearing open.

He reached the boulder choke and stared at the foot of it, where the tiny opening was like a pupil in a dead eye. He imagined great acres of untouched white crystal beyond it, like a field of virgin snow before the children have wakened, like Heaven.

“Julie?” he called out, but his voice was unable to best the roar. It hurt too much to try again. He felt his chest fail, and lifted his hands as if he might prevent himself from tipping out on the cold, wet path. What was there in his chest cut his hand. Blood sped from him, slicking his fingers. It was difficult now, to find purchase on the slippery curve of the glass in him.

He saw movement at the lip of the aperture. Julie? But of course it wasn’t. What could he have hoped from this? Julie was cold and dead as the piece of glass within him.

Long, white nails attached to long white fingers. The skin of something eternally damp, of something that had never known sunlight. It skittered out, all elbows and fish-thin ribs pulsing beneath translucency. A sore-looking jaw, red-rimmed, loaded with icy needles that glittered like Hoar frost, splinters of the missing packed between them. It made a sound that was almost beyond a frequency audible to him. It sounded like metal scraped across glass. It turned an eye to him that was as pale as moonstones.

Don turned to run, but his foot slid in his own filth. The chunk in his chest shifted. As he gripped it and pulled, closing his eyes to the terrible suck as the glass came free, the lights went out and it fell on him, all too keen to lend him its assistance.

SIMON KURT UNSWORTH WAS born in Manchester in 1972. He currently lives on a hill in the north of England with his wife and child, where he writes essentially grumpy fiction (for which pursuit he was nominated for a 2008 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story).

His work has been published in a number of critically acclaimed anthologies, including At Ease with the Dead, Shades of Darkness, Exotic Gothic 3, Gaslight Grotesque, Never Again and Lovecraft Unbound . He has also appeared in three previous volumes of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and also The Very Best of Best New Horror .