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

The warm seawater reached Carrefour’s chin, wave caps surrounding and embracing his neck. He continued to walk forward, his mouth filling with its intensely salty sting, the salt seeming to explode like gunpowder, sending images flashing through his mind in time with the flashes of lightning from the great tropical storm brewing overhead.

Men will tell her story many times , he thought. They will whisper it by firelight, and they will write it in their books. They will draw and paint its strange scenes as they grasp hopelessly to understand them. They will retell tales of the white healer in their poems and their songs. their troubadours will sing of how she walked these shores accompanied by one of our own living dead.

Yes, so shall they sing. but none shall sing for me.

The water covered Carrefour’s unblinking eyes, salt burning them until they could see no more. The ocean closed over his head and roughly plunged him down even deeper, forcing him undersea by the roots of his woolly scalp.

In the distance he heard the shouts and cries of his ancestors, the wails of his long-ago mothers and long-ago fathers when the iron shackles of the Brillante dragged them under the sea, joined by the howls of terror-stuck slaves aboard the Estrella as its wooden hull shattered against the knife-like ridges of a hidden reef.

Their wailing slowly eased into softer calls, faraway echoes of contentment and peace, of tribal drums around crackling fires, of the hooves of zebra and wildebeest thundering in the distance across hard-packed yellow earth, of the laughter of small brown children watching, of happy group-chanting as the orange sun descended slowly on the warmth of the African plains, and of the gentle whispers of love from the lips of his brother’s wife.

For the first time in as long as he could effectively remember, something resembling a smile curled at the edges of Carrefour’s dead black lips.

Until, finally, it all went dark.

ALISON LITTLEWOOD LIVES WITH her partner Fergus in West Yorkshire, where she dreams dreams, writes fiction and hoards a growing collection of books with the word “dark” in the title.

Her short fiction has appeared in such magazines as Black Static, Shadows and Tall Trees, Crimewave, Not One of Us and the British Fantasy Society’s Dark Horizons . Anthology appearances include Where Are We Going? Read by Dawn Volume 3, Midnight Lullabies, Full Fathom Forty, Best Horror of the Year 4 and the charity anthology Never Again .

New stories are due to appear in the anthologies Magic, Resurrection Engines, Alt.Zombie, Terror Tales of the Cotswolds and The Screaming Book of Horror . Another story set in caves, this time the flooded cenotes of Mexico, is available as a chapbook from Spectral Press.

The author’s first novel, A Cold Season , was published in January 2012 by Jo Fletcher Books and was selected for the Richard and Judy Book Club in the UK. Path of Needles , a twisted fairy tale meets crime story, is forthcoming from the same imprint early in 2013.

“‘About the Dark’ is really a meditation on the source of evil,” Littlewood explains. “We associate bad things with dark places: they happen in secret, away from view and the relief of daylight. And the dark never seems to be quite empty — at least, not when you start to stare into it.

“This story takes things a step further. What if evil didn’t just happen in the dark — what if the evil was the dark? And what happens when that darkness finds an answering echo inside ourselves?”

DARK CAVE DIDN’T sound the most promising place to hang out, but it was the driest place Adam could think of away from the town centre. Adam didn’t want to be in the town centre, mainly because his latest school had an “attendance optimiser”, otherwise known as a truant officer. The truant officer knew what Adam looked like, partly because of the number of times he’d hauled him back to classes, and partly because of the way Adam had tried to deck him the last time he’d tried.

He’d nearly been expelled for that one, and it was only because they decided to blame his mother that expulsion had been commuted to a three day suspension; a punishment that seemed to more than fit the crime, although not in the way they’d intended. Adam grinned at the thought, then grimaced. Blaming his mother was what everyone did. No one seemed to expect anything from his dad, least of all Adam himself.

He turned now to see Sasha flick wet hair out of her face, rubbing at her black-rimmed eyes. Adam decided not to tell her she’d smudged her make-up. No doubt she’d find out later, on her own. He exchanged looks with Fuzz, so named for his shaved head rather than any liking for the police. Fuzz nodded back. He didn’t tell Sash about the smudge on her cheek, either.

There was a wall of rain behind Sash, the muted grey-green of trees beyond that. She already had a cigarette clamped between her lips and she flicked her lighter, emitting a brief flame that fizzled before it could begin.

“Get under, shit-fer,” Adam said. Shit-fer brains: his favourite mode of address. Adam stood just beneath the cave mouth, not quite far enough that the dangling ferns couldn’t drip down the back of his neck. Fuzz edged onto the rock behind him, feet slipping, sending loose pebbles down to clip Adam’s feet. Adam stared at them.

“Soz,” said Fuzz.

Adam didn’t say anything. Sometimes he didn’t have to, and that was best. That was when he knew it had worked; the face he put on, the tough words, the fists. No one messed with him anymore. Now he skived off classes because it made him look hard. That wasn’t why he’d done it at his last school.

Sash started giggling, trying to get the cig to light. She couldn’t. Adam rolled his eyes, snatched it away, felt damp paper under his fingers and flicked it, one-handed, out into the rain. He ignored Sash’s squeal of protest. Instead he turned and looked into the cave mouth, the way its misshapen walls faded into the dark.

“You going in?” He looked at Fuzz. He didn’t look at Fuzz because he wanted Fuzz to lead the way: he didn’t want Fuzz to lead anything. That was Adam’s job. He said it as a challenge.

“Course.”

Adam didn’t ask Sash. He knew she’d follow. He knew that because of the way he’d told her, once, to take off her top; the way, after a moment’s hesitation, she had.

Sash had full tits, for a skinny lass. Adam remembered them now, thought of how they would feel under his hands in the rain, the way her top would stick to them. He felt a flush of warmth beneath the cool air that rose from the cave. There was a smell, too; dank stone, mingling with the scent of rain. He wrinkled his nose. “Come on,” he said, and stepped forward. He flicked on his own lighter as he went.

It was more difficult than Adam had expected. The lighter emitted a circular glow, highlighting each finger in glowing blood red, but not illuminating much else. It was hot and he kept switching hands, pulling a face he knew no one could see. He felt the irregular rock through his shoes. He heard the others following, their footsteps seeming more sure than his own. That wouldn’t do. He couldn’t show weakness; something he’d learned the hard way. Weakness painted a target on your back.

Now he was the one who punched and spat and made boasts and smoked, the one who led. He had assumed his new role when he started his new school. It had been like slipping on a new skin, but sometimes he could still feel it moving over his old one, loose and ill-fitting.