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

It seemed too intense, almost extremist in its views; it was everywhere , when you looked. From the panels and pictures on all the floors to the design of the taps to the carpeting along the corridors (which no longer existed but which pictures showed had consisted of a complex paisley pattern of interlocking, swirling stems and buds which Priest had called “cunts and pricks” in one of her notebooks), this place wasn’t so much a homage to the supremacy of life and procreation over industrialisation as it was a proselytisation of it.

The Stations of the Way was a good example: taken by itself, it was simply a series of pictures that between them formed a narrative, one of returning to recognise the beauty of nature and God’s place within it.

The religious allegory was unsubtle, and the pictures themselves beautifully done, some of Gravette’s best work. But, read another way, they were something more.

Gravette and Priest had fucked in every room on the third floor once the pictures were set in place, and there were persistent rumours that Gravette had mixed his semen and Priest’s menstrual blood into his paints. Early sketches showed that the original ideas for the Stations pictures were far more graphic, with the angels of sea and air having sex with the woman, transporting her to God’s side in a storm of sexual energy and passion and lust.

The woman. It was the woman in the pictures that bothered him, he suddenly realised. Getting out of his sleeping bag, he pulled on his shoes and went to his untidy pile of folders and photocopies and prints.

The problem was that the art in the Grand hadn’t ever been formally catalogued, and most of it wasn’t recorded anywhere, so his research had had, by necessity, to travel circuitous routes to find the information they needed.

As well as Gravette’s and Priest’s notebooks, he had scoured old newspaper articles, private photograph collections and what little television appearances the Grand had made to try to get an accurate picture of its inside.

Leafing through the papers, he came across the screen grabs from the television documentary about the Grand’s closure, eight of them that showed in not particularly good details some of the pictures from the third floor. Looking at them by torchlight, prints from a not very high quality source document, he saw what bit it was that had been bothering him.

The pictures were different.

The positioning of the characters within the pictures was the same, their layout and structure unchanged, but the woman and the creatures that surrounded her were definitely altered.

Christ, had someone removed the originals, replacing them with fakes? Only, that didn’t feel right either; the boards covering the pictures had looked to be the originals from the documentary, filmed just after the Grand finally closed and the pictures themselves were, he would have sworn, original Gravettes.

This made no sense, none.

Taking the prints and the torch, Parry went out into the Grand.

The pictures were definitely different, every one of them that he could make comparisons for. In the prints he held, the woman and the creatures, both the ones that emerged from the air and the water, were painted as innocents. They had wide eyes, almost perfectly round ( like anime characters , Parry suddenly thought, wondering if there was a research paper there, looking at the shorthand artists of different ages used to depict innocent and vitality), looking back at the observer as they viewed the pictures.

Now, though, that had changed. The woman looked past the viewer, her eyes no longer open wide but narrowed, focused on something over the viewer’s shoulder. The undersea creatures, although not completely anthropomorphic, had flickers of recognisable emotion painted across their features, mouths twisting in anger or frustration, arms and fins and tentacles curling around the woman not in support but in possessive twists, as though holding her back and preventing her from escaping.

The later pictures in the series, the ones with the woman being elevated into the sky and surrounded by things that might have been angels, or man’s better nature freed from the shackles of the flesh, showed the woman still looking back out of the pictures, still staring at something beyond Parry, beyond the Grand itself.

The angels looked cold, emotionless, their hands taut upon the woman’s body but the expressions on their faces supercilious and dismissive.

Parry had reached the end of the corridor, had studied each of the pictures as best he could in torchlight, and he was convinced that they were the work of Gravette. They were technically skilled, full of subtleties and tight, hidden details that only emerged when you looked at them for longer periods, but they weren’t the pictures that had been nailed behind cheap boards of wood fifteen or more years back.

Had the owners pulled some kind of switch? But why? What would be the point, when they could have merely taken the pictures? He’d have to tell Mandeville, let the owners know, assuming they weren’t already aware of the changes.

He made to go back down the corridor when he stopped. Was something moving down there, in the tar-like shadows that pooled along the edges of the floor? And there? There?

Everywhere?

As Parry watched, something glistening detached from one of the pictures and drifted to the floor in the centre of the corridor. It rippled and swelled as it fell, floated really, dancing in the air as more fell from every picture along the corridor.

Soon the corridor was full of the things, gossamer and glimmering. Some of them moved along the floor after they descended, slithering to the edges of the walls and joining the shadows, thickening them, making them pulse and bulge.

It was oddly beautiful, the descents drifting, slow, tracing gentle parabolas through the corridor before alighting with a touch that appeared as delicate as the spinning of feathers or the kiss of elegant mouths.

Soon, the corridor was full of them, pressing out from the walls, swelled by the arrival of more and more of the things.

In the centre of the corridor, the first shape he had seen was now moving, not to the side but away from him, along the carpeted floor towards the stairway. As it went, it coalesced, drawing in seemingly identical shapes that were standing ahead of it. Parry counted three, four, ten, fourteen, and as they merged the remaining moving shape became more solid, more real .

Parry made out the curve of buttocks, the sway of full breasts, the outstretching of arms, and the opening of hands, and then something else was moving.

A long tendril came out of the shadow by Parry’s side, solidifying as though it was drawing itself together from the thinner shapes, languidly curling in the air above his head. It tapered down to a delicate point, he saw, trembling as though sniffing the atmosphere. As it broadened, became fatter and more solid, pale discs emerged across its underside, shivering and clenching wetly.

It’s a tentacle , he thought to himself, but before he had time to scream, it had dropped onto him and wrapped around his neck.

It hurt , crashing into Mandeville’s legs and knocking him to the floor. He braced himself for further attack, but whatever it was simply flung him out of the way, growling, and dashed on. It hit the wooden panel leaning just inside the doorway, sending it spinning on one edge before it fell, ending up propped between the two sides of the doorframe, canted at a drunken angle.

Where it had been blank before, the wood now contained a carving of a huge jungle cat, not a tiger or a lion exactly, but a creature that was an amalgam of those and others.

Fierce nature , Mandeville thought wildly, Gravette’s fierce nature, hunted and abused but never cowed . Would two other panels in the bar be blank if he went in and looked at them? He suspected so.