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

“Been away, have you?” the driver asked as Paul settled himself awkwardly in the back.

“Yes.” Why not let him think that? If he said he didn’t live here, there would be questions he couldn’t answer. The cab swerved around potholes in the road, passed the grey skeletons of buildings. This might as well be his home: a town that had lost its sense of identity. He belonged here. The driver stopped at a traffic light; a young woman crossed the road, a phone pressed to the side of her face.

The nursing home was a few miles out of town, where the dereliction was softened by the flame and rust of autumn trees. Dead leaves marked the road with an incomplete pattern. The cab’s wheels crunched on the gravel driveway. The building had a new white frontage, though its side was rotting grey brick. Paul paid the driver; it was almost all the cash he had.

The young male nurse who answered the door stared at Paul as if trying to remember who he was. Paul knew how the lad felt. He said, “I’ve come to visit Mr Parr. Is he in?”

The nurse nodded. “You’ll find him in room 17, ground floor.” As Paul moved towards the door, he added: “Have you booked?”

“Sorry, no. I wasn’t sure when I’d get here.” The nurse looked like he was considering blocking the way, but then stepped aside at the last moment.

The interior of the home was poorly lit and smelled like an old-fashioned dry cleaner. Mothballs, that was it. Pipes vibrated behind the walls. The dirt in the cracked floor-tiles suggested a partly-erased image. Most of the doors were shut, but the open ones leaked other smells: antiseptic, stale urine, bacon. A cry echoed through the narrow corridor, more like a seagull than a human voice.

Room 17 was on the right, a long way into the building. Paul had to touch the raised number to make sure of it. The door was open by a crack. He pressed his shoulder to it and stepped through. A small room with a table and a few chairs, a bookcase, a TV set with the picture on but no sound. A flickering mercury light. Two shrunken figures in armchairs, not watching the TV. Neither of them moved as Paul entered the room.

“Is Thom Parr in here?”

The two men looked at each other. Then one of them pointed back over his shoulder. Paul realised there was a side room, or an alcove, with a vague shape just visible against a creased black curtain. “Thank you,” he said, and walked through.

The stuttering of the light made it hard to understand what was there. The curtain was just random streaks of damp in the wall. The man seated in the chair, or rather held by it in a sitting position, was wrapped below the neck in a lace blanket. He was almost bald. His eyes were sunk so far into his narrow face that it took Paul a while to see that they were open.

“Mr Parr? Hello?” The face didn’t stir. Paul looked closer. He could have been looking in a cracked and grimy mirror. “I’m a reader,” he said, and blushed with shame at the uselessness of that. “Are you okay?”

There was no sound of breath. The old man’s lips trembled, but perhaps that was just the light. Paul reached out slowly and touched the side of his throat, where the pulse should be. The flesh was cold. He brushed a fingertip against the dry lips: no air movement. He wondered what he might have to do to be sure that Parr was dead. Maybe the problem was in himself.

He reported the death back at the reception desk. They didn’t seem either surprised or upset. He asked if there was anyone who needed to be informed, and was told that Parr had no relatives and no property. Everything he owned had been sold to pay for his place at the retirement home.

When Paul left, the daylight was fading. He felt drained by the effort of reporting the death, as if he’d used up his clarity of mind for the day. He’d better get back to the station, but that didn’t seem possible until he got his bearings. The still face drifted in front of him, shedding flakes of skin like dead leaves. His legs ached, but he couldn’t stop walking until the white building was out of sight. Then he walked on, looking for a sign.

Woodland, reminding him of childhood walks with his parents. Later, with girlfriends, he’d stayed in the city, maybe walked hand in hand along the canal towpath. Never made love out of doors. But the smell of decaying leaves excited him for some reason he couldn’t explain. If only he could find the book, he could become Parr, not have to go home to a city he didn’t know any more.

Not only his legs but his lungs ached, his hands were losing sensation, his throat was raw. But he couldn’t stop. As if there were wings at his back. Night was falling, crossing out the errors of daylight. Burning the page.

At the edge of the wood, he reached a derelict house. Its doorway and windows were boarded up. Had Parr tried to sell it? He dimly remembered going into a derelict house on one of those childhood walks, finding a butterfly brooch, giving it to his mother. Black or dark blue. Had that happened, or was it a dream?

Behind the house was a patch of waste ground. He couldn’t see where it ended, though he could hear running water. And a faint pulse, like the beating of wings. He could just make out a few dead trees in the half-light around him, with no leaves to shed. Had this been a garden? Was his real life coming to an end, as well as the false life in a city whose name he couldn’t remember? The ground was as cold as the thin face he’d touched. The pulsing of wings made him flatten himself against the dead grass and fragments of stone, the pattern he couldn’t see.

Then the wings were above him, beating slowly in the dark, their edges brushing his face. The pages turning. The dark covers shutting out the town’s distant light. A clear memory came back to him: lying with his first girlfriend on a narrow bed, pinning back her wings of flesh with his tongue. Their hands locked together. And then the book folded around his body, and its dry pages gave the dust of their stories back to him.

TIM LEBBON IS A New York Times best-selling writer from South Wales. He has had thirty novels published to date, as well as dozens of novellas and hundreds of short stories.

His latest novels include Coldbrook from Hammer/Arrow, The Heretic Land from Orbit, and London Eye: Toxic City Book One , the first in a new YA trilogy from Pyr. Other recent books include The Secret Journeys of Jack London series (co-authored with Christopher Golden), Echo City and The Cabin in the Woods movie novelisation.

The Secret Journeys of Jack London is in development with 20th Century Fox. Several other projects are also at varying stages of movie development, and he is working on new screenplays, solo and in collaboration.

Lebbon has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award and a Scribe Award, and he has been a finalist for the World Fantasy, International Horror Guild and Shirley Jackson Awards.

“I often think the spookiest thing about a ghost story is the setting,” reveals the author. “So when I was asked by Jonathan Oliver at Solaris to write a haunted house story, I found myself dwelling more on the house than the ghost.

“Buildings are home to histories, but is it our imaginations that project them? Or are they really there, in the fabric of the building, its dust-sheened floors, its still air?

“Approach this from the viewpoint of a character already confused and on edge about where she is, and why, and ‘Trick of the Light’ is the result. I’m very pleased with the story, and delighted and proud to see it included herein.

“It spooked me a little when I was writing it. and surely that’s a good sign.”