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

His legs were bleeding, although the tears in his skin didn’t feel deep. Mandeville rolled and then stood, unsteadily, leaning on the wall for support.

The panel in the doorway swayed, making the cat’s face emerge and vanish into the bar’s darkness, as though it was rocking back and forth and considering him quizzically.

From below, in the foyer, came the sound of a distant train, the noise ascending, dopplering and then muffling within the space of a moment.

Going into the tunnel , he thought as the noise started again. In and out, in and out .

The other two cats were there, and God knew what else. He looked back up at the waving figure; it had emerged and was now standing at the top of the stairs, still waving, beckoning him upwards.

It was the woman.

Even in the grey light filtering through the glass ceiling, she seemed to glow all colours, casting her illumination about her the way great art did. And she was great art, he understood suddenly, perhaps the greatest there was.

He began to move to her, wincing as he climbed the stairs. Where else could he go?

As he approached, she moved back, returning to the corridor where her glow danced about her like distant, guttering flames. As he reached the corridor entrance, he saw movement beyond her.

At the far end of the third floor, almost lost to the darkness that pooled there like spilled paint, Parry was sitting against the wall as a myriad tentacles clenched about him. The largest was wrapped around his neck, was pulled so taut that the skin either side of the tentacle bulged, bloody and mottled.

The air around Parry was filled with moving, darting shapes, fins lifting and dropping and mouths open wide. As Mandeville watched, a larger shape emerged, conical, mouth agape, and tore into Parry’s side, shaking him like a rag doll, tearing a piece from him and disappearing back into the darkness.

Parry twitched spastically, blood spraying from him but not falling to the floor, instead floating around him, breathed in by the fish and the octopuses and squid and the things without names that scuttled and bobbed and feasted upon him.

Parry managed to twist his head, despite the ever-tightening arm of the octopus that was wrapped around his neck and whose bulbous body was drifting in the air above him. For a moment he was looking directly at Mandeville, his eyes desperate, and then the contact was gone as he was twisted further around.

Mandeville didn’t move. After all, what could he do?

There were none of the angels in the corridor, he suddenly realised, and just as quickly the realisation came that they were only metaphors, not alive in the way that the cats, the train that was in fact a prick, the undersea creatures were. They were intellect and spirituality, not flesh and lusts and desires and passions and things to worship. They weren’t alive in the way that she was, the woman.

She was standing in the centre of the corridor, her arms outstretched as though to show him the things that belonged to her, and they did belong to her, he saw; they moved around her, never touching her, always giving her space.

It’s how they’ve been painted , he realised, to worship her. If she’s a female archetype, then those other things are men, sleek and brutal and driven by lust and greed and desire, and between them they make. what?

She was approaching him again now, moving down the corridor as though carried by currents that he could not feel, moving towards him, beautiful and austere and suddenly he wanted her, was hard and sweating despite the pain in his legs and the part of him that even now was calling for his attention, was screeching its fear of this impossible situation.

She came closer still, her features resolving, streaks forming on her skin in a pattern of delicate brushstrokes. Her hair moved in clumps, strands matted together, painted together. Her arms were outstretched and suddenly Mandeville thought about her, about her pressing herself against the glass of the sun corridor, about her seeing the outside world at night and spending most of her time trapped under boards, locked inside the paint, alive and claustrophobic and alone except for creatures without mouths or intellects, just cocks made to love her.

How terrible must her life have been these last years, he suddenly thought, trapped here day in night out, with no one to look at her, no one to feast themselves upon her, how awful it must have been.

And what damage had it done to her?

Her face twisted into a snarl as she came, lips drawing back from teeth that seemed suddenly too large and too white and too hard, her arms stretching forward, the skin of her hands broken by paintbrush swirls that reminded Mandeville of the sucking pads of the octopuses and squid that served attendance upon her.

Sharks darted between her legs, and still she came and Mandeville saw the hate in her eyes, the desperation to hold him and own him, to take him from the outside and bring him in and keep him so that he, too, could look at her and worship her, and he turned and ran.

The two cats were waiting for him on the stairs between the foyer and first floor, brown and wooden yet terribly fluid, moving back and forth with a restless energy. Trapped between them and her, Mandeville stopped on the first floor and turned a full circle, looking for an escape route.

The bar was blocked to him; the third cat still stood in its entrance, back on its board but its mouth open in a rictus of teeth and ravenous appetite. He debated running back to the second floor, losing himself in the place where Gravette and Priest’s hold had been comprehensively removed, but the woman was already between him and it.

A vast octopus, stretching an impossible height from the floor, moved behind her, its black eyes gleaming, and around it circled the sharks and the smaller fish. She was smiling, possessive, absolute, still coming on, placid and inexorable.

That left only the sun deck.

Mandeville ran to it, crashing against the door and forcing the cheap lock in one stumbled fall of his body weight. One of the cats leaped at him, snagging its teeth into his leg, but its grip was weak and he managed to kick it off. The octopus came past the woman, spreading its arms in an effort to reach him but he ran, dodging past it and out onto the wooden apron of the deck.

He had time to wonder why, if they wanted to get out, the woman and her entourage didn’t simply come out here, and then he was at the concrete wall with its pictures that moved as he saw them, writhing and trying to grasp at him, and then he was over the wall and was airborne.

In the moment before he hit the ground, Mandeville suddenly realised: art, true art, has no urge to escape to the outside, it wants instead to bring the outside in, to make itself the centre of a world that it defines.

The last thing he saw as he fell past the sun corridor’s floor-length windows were the myriad images that the woman had left of herself across the inside of the glass, and he smiled.

Falling, colliding, escaping, these were human things and he was, at least, human and free to fall.

EVANGELINE WALTON (1907–96) was the pseudonym used by Evangeline Wilna Ensley. Born to a Quaker family in Indianapolis, Indiana, she suffered from chronic respiratory illness as a child. Treated with silver nitrate tincture, her fair skin absorbed the pigment and turned blue-grey, which continued to darken as she aged.

She grew up reading the works of L. Frank Baum, Lord Dunsany, Algernon Blackwood and James Stephens, and most of her fiction was written between the 1920s and the early 1950s.

Inspired by the Welsh Mabinogi , her first novel, The Virgin and the Swine was published in 1936, but it was not until it was reissued as The Island of the Mighty in 1970, as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, that the subsequent three books in the series — The Children of Lyr, The Song of Rhiannon and Prince of Annwn — saw print. All four novels were collected in an omnibus volume, The Mabinogian Tetralogy , in 2002.