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

They had spent the evening photographing the pictures, making careful notes of any damage they found, and then had re-covered them, this time with plastic sheeting. As they had covered the last of the pictures, Parry had said, “Sorry, ma’am, but you can come out again soon.”

Mandeville had never seen Parry so excited. “Do you understand how important this is, that they’ve survived? Gravette and Priest, they were both fine artists in their own right, but this was considered by both to be their crowning glory, and it’s still here, and we can make it public again!

“As you move up through the levels of the hotel, you pass from the mechanised glories of the man-made world on the ground floor, through human pastimes, hunting and drinking and sunbathing, on the first floor.

“If the second floor had been left alone and not torn apart, we’d have found art that showed men and women abandoning their earthly pursuits, their clothes, work, so that by the time we hit the third floor we’re returning to an understanding that all of life is about the worship of nature and a recognition of its power, its supremacy .

“Do you know that through most of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the pictures on the third floor had other pictures hung in front of them? That they were considered ‘old-fashioned’ and ‘outdated’? What a fucking travesty, all that beauty and life trapped behind crappy prints and photographs of misty fucking landscapes and Victorian watercolours, desperate to be free, and we can do it, we can free it, let it out, let it be loved again!”

“Well, the owners can, if that’s what they want to do. All we can do is make the suggestion and try to persuade them,” said Mandeville.

“Persuade them?” said Parry. “They have to. We have to make them! It can’t stay hidden any more, it was made to be looked at, created to be seen. They have to.”

“We’ll try,” said Mandeville. “Trust me, we’ll try.”

Mandeville was woken by footsteps. Bleary, champagne-heavy, he forgot he was wrapped in a sleeping bag and on a cot and tried to roll, falling heavily to the floor. The shock jolted him fully alert, and as he struggled to his knees, he listened.

They weren’t footsteps, not exactly; they were too rapid, too light, and seemed to come from all around the room, from two or three places at once.

It was dark, the only light the digital glow from the clock and the glimmer from the extension cable’s unblinking LED eye. At the edge of the pale illumination, a darkness shifted, bled out into the shadows around it and formed again, low and cautious. Another patch moved on the far side of the room, easing in through the entrance from the sun corridor.

Mandeville freed his arms from his sleeping bag and unzipped it, stepping out and fumbling for his boots. As his hand found them, one of the patches moved again, slinking around the edge of the room.

Now the noise was slower, still light, like pencil tips tapping a wooden desk. Mandeville risked looking down for a second to slip his boots on, Priest’s patterned floor turning sinuously beneath his soles, and when he looked up, the two patches had been joined by a third.

Parry’s cot was empty, but Yeoman was sleeping soundly on his.

Mandeville hissed at him, leaning over to shake him when he didn’t wake. Even as he leaned, the flowing, creeping patches of darkness, somehow blacker than the shadows around them, began to come in closer, still circling.

“What?” mumbled Yeoman.

“Be quiet,” said Mandeville softly, “and wake up. Now . There’s something in here.”

“Something?” asked Yeoman loudly. His breath smelled of cigarettes and sour air and tiredness.

“Something,” repeated Mandeville. “Three somethings, actually. Look.”

Yeoman sat up in bed, rubbing his hands through his beard with a noise like sandpaper rustling. Whatever it was circling the room, they reacted to the noise, coming in closer, still just out of reach of the light, still mere blackness against blackness, moving with an increasingly rapid tactactactac sound.

“What the fuck?” said Yeoman, finally seeing them. “What are they?”

“Don’t know,” said Mandeville. “Have you got the torch?”

“Yeah,” said Yeoman and began rooting on the floor. Finally, with a muffled grunt that might have been the words “found it”, he emerged holding the large lantern torch they used at night.

The things were moving faster and faster around them, passing each other, getting lower, still impossible to see other than the movement , the rapid circling centring in on the two men, purposeful and raw.

There was a click as Yeoman turned the light on, the beam at first glancing into Mandeville’s eyes and then upwards, leaving him dazzled, before dropping and gleaming out into the room, catching in its gaze the things that moved about them.

Yeoman screamed.

Mandeville fled as things that could not be, impossible things, came streaking across the space towards Yeoman in a matter of seconds, brown and lithe in the jerking, spastic light from the torch, and fell upon him.

As Mandeville reached the entrance to the sun corridor, Yeoman shrieked, once, the sound cutting off with a noise like tearing paper.

The sun corridor was deserted, silent apart from the frenzied fall of his own feet, and Mandeville ran. The large panes were covered, he saw, in blurred silhouettes, arms outstretched as though trying to embrace the world beyond, overlapping and chaotic, a silent audience for his flight.

Ripping sounds danced around him, roars and snarls and, once, a sharp, heavy crack , and he ran faster. Through the empty games room and out, along the corridor and into the foyer towards the door, but he was already too late, one of the shapes was there before him, drained to a grimy sepia by the light from above them except around its mouth, where a rich redness pooled and dripped.

It came from the restaurant, cutting off his passage to the door, forcing him to shift direction, to go towards the stairs.

He hit them at a stumbled run, leaping two or three at a time as the thing streaked towards him, emitting a noise like an escalating fire siren. Its feet (claws , he told himself, disbelieving, they’re claws ) skittered as it ran, the nightmarish tactactactac getting closer and closer.

At the top of the stairs, Mandeville hesitated briefly. The bar was open ahead of him, but he would be trapped in there. The panel that had nearly fallen on him was leaning in the doorway where he had propped it earlier in the day, its face now blank, the wood smooth and unsullied.

The tactactactac was getting louder behind him, closer, the fire-whistle sound of the impossible thing’s growling surrounding him, and then there was light from above him.

It wasn’t light, though, not really; more a kind of greasy glow that clung to the walls, dripping from above him, from the upper flights of stairs, from above the second floor in the shadows that clung to the opening of the third floor. In the opening, the darkness seemed to close itself up like a fan, solidifying into a figure that emerged from the doorway, waving at him.

He started towards it and then, shrieking, the thing from below was on him.

Despite the champagne, Parry couldn’t sleep. Even when Yeoman started snoring (which, oddly, he found a reassuring rather than an irritating sound), he found himself lying awake, teasing at something. He couldn’t work out what it was, not exactly; they’d uncovered the pictures that formed The Stations of the Way and found them in almost perfect condition, true, so he should be celebrating, yes?

No.

Something about the top corridor, about this whole place, bothered him. Despite what he had said earlier, flushed with success and alcohol, he wasn’t sure about recreating Gravette and Priest’s masterwork in its entirety.