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

The man pulled his horses to a standstill and clambered down. The moon was slipping behind a cloud so Ted still couldn’t get a good look at the man’s face as he began to unload the contents of his cart. He needed to see him, for when he got away — he’d need to describe him to the police. Audrey first. Then this guy. The cops would throw the book at them both.

(Oh yes, and what happens when they go digging around in your past? What happens when they find out about Frank?)

The huge figure began picking up the corpses again, putting them over his shoulder. He whistled once more as he worked, which made what he was doing all the more disturbing. He tossed them on the heaps of rubbish as if he was flinging old tyres.

Ted tried to twist away, to get his legs and arms moving, to climb out and get free of this place. Run, find a phone and—

But he was going nowhere. They were down to the last few women in the cart, which didn’t take the man long to clear.

“Look. Hey, I have money,” Ted managed. ( Oh yeah, whose? )

The man ignored him, heaving the last of the scrawny bodies onto a pile of trash.

He turned and began making his way back towards Ted.

“Can’t we at least talk about it, please?”

“Help me. P-Please!” The words of that woman back in the cellar rattled around in his head.

The man was drawing nearer. “Please, I don’t want to die!” shouted Ted, with more force than he’d been able to muster since he woke.

His captor paused then, lingering as if mulling something over. Then he began to walk off to one side.

Yes! I’ve got through to him , thought Ted. Maybe I should offer him some money again? He frowned, though, as he watched the man rooting around in the rubbish there, fishing something out. As the large figure turned, Ted saw he was holding up a cracked mirror.

And, as the guy came back, the moon passed from behind those clouds at the same time as the Rag and Bone Man lifted his head. Ted just about had time to register those features — and realise just how appropriate his name was — before the mirror was lifted.

Then it all fell into place. Flashes of the man’s face, so similar to Frank’s, something he himself had inherited through a bloodline and profession that went back so far. ( A lot of people think that Rag and Bone men only go back a couple of hundred years, but some say it’s further. To the middle ages, or maybe even before that.)

A trade plied during plague times, when they would carry the dead away from infected areas? You don’t, you can’t , do something like that without being granted some kind of immunity by Death himself. They were His helpers, in effect: some even changing to resemble their master.

The rags and bones, all that was left of the dead, were collected by them. By people who were little more than rag and bones themselves. It was a bloodline that had been broken when Ted came along — not simply persuading Audrey to sell up, but engineering the little “accident” that would take Frank’s life and provide the means for her to do so.

Frank was an old man, his heart weak: it wasn’t that hard to sneak inside the house and give him a little. scare.

Just like Ted was scared now. Because not only was he seeing something he really didn’t want to in the mirror, he was also remembering. That it hadn’t been the first time he’d woken up back there in the cellar, that Audrey had already done things to him which made the others look like she was just getting started. Pain so intense he’d blocked it out, kept alive — barely — while he watched her cut up the women.

But not kept alive long enough.

The image, the face — or what was left of it — staring back at Ted was barely recognisable as his own. It had been shredded, along with the rest of him: skin flayed from his body so that you couldn’t tell where his clothes ended and his flesh began. Ted recalled the whipping now with some kind of cat o’ nine tails, spiked ends digging deep with each swipe. He howled then, just as he had when Audrey had done her worst, finally getting up close and personal, pulling off his finger- and toe-nails, doing hideous things to his privates that meant he’d never be capable of cheating on anyone again.

Ted looked away and the Rag and Bone Man dropped the mirror. His charge had seen enough obviously, but things were only just getting started.

Ted looked past the skeletal figure, whose coat could no longer conceal its ribcage, open to the air. This representation of everything Frank held so dear, this figure that was all the Rag and Bone Men there’d ever been rolled into one, had made its home in a fittingly nightmarish place.

Because the more Ted looked, the more he saw of the yard, filled not only with ordinary rubbish, but the more specific junk of human waste. Bones, organs, scraps of clothing, all plugged the gaps where he’d dared not look before.

Ironically, Ted felt like laughing. He’d been pleading for his life when all along there was no life to spare. No wonder Audrey had been ignoring him — had he really been speaking at all? Had any of this actually been happening? It certainly felt real to him, but that didn’t mean anything.

Somehow Ted knew he would soon fill the spaces here, just like those women who wronged Audrey, who’d wronged the line. Trapped in their own private Hell. (For a moment, Ted wondered if they were seeing this, or something else entirely; perhaps this little treat had been reserved only for him?)

But it was time, he saw. When the Rag and Bone Man came for him now, Ted surrendered without protest.

To be carried over to the pile of junk, of scrap human life.

To join the walls of organs, body parts and muscle.

To join. no, finally to become the rag.

and the bone.

GEMMA FILES is a former film critic/film history teacher. She is now probably best-known for either her 1999 International Horror Guild Best Short Fiction Award-winning story “The Emperor’s Old Bones”, or her Weird Western “Hexslinger Series” trilogy ( A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns and A Tree of Bones ) from ChiZine Publications.

She has stories upcoming in the anthologies Magic, A Season in Carcosa and A Mountain Walked , and is currently hard at work on what she hopes will be her first contemporary horror novel.

“I wrote this piece very quickly,” explains the author, “in a sort of frenzy, while deep in the middle of putting together my second novel. I’d agreed to contribute something to Conrad Williams’ anthology Gutshot , a collection of ‘weird west’ tales from PS Publishing, and this was what came out.

“At the time, I wasn’t entirely sure if it fit the bill, but Conrad liked it enough to pick it up, so who am I to say?

“As for influences: I’ve been a Greek mythology buff from childhood on, so I’d always wanted to do something about Medusa and her sisters, the Gorgonae.

“I’m also a huge fan of HBO’s sadly defunct Dustbowl Gothic series Carnivàle , which probably shows, but there’s some input there as well from Robert Jackson Bennett’s first novel, Mr Shivers , and even Peter Crowther’s Depression-era werewolf tale ‘Bindlestiff’, which I read in his collection The Longest Single Note .

“I also stole the title from a line in a Barbra Streisand song, ‘Prisoner (Theme from Eyes of Laura Mars )’.”