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

Lowell attempted to regain his feet, but Whateley was too quick for him. The younger man kicked the photographer in the side and stomped down on his exposed gut. Lowell screamed. He rolled over and attempted to crawl away, dragging himself through the snow with his good arm.

Whateley followed him. Wielding the cane like a riding crop, he delivered a series of rapid blows across Lowell’s back, dropping the photographer onto his stomach. Lowell tried to speak — to apologise, to plead for mercy — but found he had not the breath for it.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Whateley raise the cane and take aim at his left temple. The blow connected with a startling crack. The world flashed white before him and the vision in his left eye flickered and dimmed. A warm trickle poured from the torn scalp, staining his shirt and collar. He collapsed onto his stomach and closed his eyes.

Snow settled above his brow and melted. Cold fluid streamed down his forehead and into his damaged eye. Patrick’s face returned to him in that moment, surfacing from the crimson cloud that obscured his vision.

“Forgive me,” he murmured. “Please.”

“Scum.”

Whateley wiped his stick on Lowell’s shirt and spit on him as he would a beggar or criminal. Then he turned away. His footsteps retreated, muffled by fresh snow.

“Come,” Lowell heard him say. “We’re due at the Grand.”

He opened his eyes.

Night had fallen. Hours might have passed or mere minutes — he could not be sure — but the agony he experienced on waking was indescribable. His chest ached. His temples pounded, and he had lost the sight in his left eye. Nauseous, he rotated his head and threw up into the fresh snow. His vomit was yellow and dark, the colour of old bruises.

He crawled to the nearest wall and propped himself against it. Slowly he counted down from five, whispering the words to himself as he did before a picture. When he reached the end, he vaulted himself into a standing position. He wobbled dangerously, nearly fell, but caught himself against the wall. He cast his gaze back in the direction of his studio. The door was open, but he could not bring himself to return there, not now.

Breathing heavily, he hauled himself hand over hand down the alleyway and emerged into the gas-lit sheen of the street. Only this morning he had walked this same block, but tonight, everything had changed. Providence itself now swam in the lens of Patrick’s camera. Even the newest buildings bore the signs of decay, marked by smoke stains and fallen roofs, brown curls of dying ivy on every wall.

It was late — too late — but the city hummed with activity. An endless stream of carriages clattered over the cobbles. Lowell stumbled into the path of a police officer, but the man simply ignored him, turning up his collar to hurry past.

No one else seemed to notice him. He passed among the midnight crowds — anonymous, unseen — cursed by solitude as in the year that Patrick left him. A dogcart flew past, missing him by less than a yard. Reeling, he took two steps backward, lost his footing, and tumbled into the gutter.

He lay there for a time, quite collapsed, while men and women passed him by. At one point he spotted the two sisters from the morning and observed that their faces had grown heavy with the accumulation of years, all vestiges of their former beauty spoiled. On a chain between them, they carried a purse that bulged with miserly excess.

Behind them, shackled to the purse by a pair of manacles, walked a young woman of waxy countenance who wore nothing but a cotton shift. Lowell could see that she alone understood his plight, but she only lifted her shackled wrists, as though to indicate her own helplessness, and then shuffled past, dragged on like a dog by the women she served.

No one would help him — that much was clear — and he called on reserves of strength he did not know he possessed in order to regain his feet. Once he had steadied himself, he began to walk, continuing down the pavement toward Saint Andrew’s. He thought he must be dying. He shivered in his shirtsleeves, occasionally spitting blood into the slush at his feet.

On the corner, he passed the paperboy. The lad grinned wickedly through his front teeth and shoved the evening circular into his face.

“No,” Lowell gasped. “I don’t need it.”

“Yessir,” the boy drawled. “But ye do want it, don’t ye?”

Lowell tore the paper from the boy’s grasp and threw it into the street. He pressed past him to the church of Saint Andrew’s, where he mounted the stone stairs. He took them slowly, his legs weakening with each step. At last he reached the high doors. He rattled the handles but to no effect. Locked fast: even the Church had closed its doors to him.

In despair he cast his gaze heavenward, seeking out that point in space where the cross-topped spire disappeared into endless snowfall. Then he saw it: the cross had become a crucifix. A living figure writhed in agony on that bronze tree, naked and abandoned with only the dark for comfort. Lowell recognised him at once, even at that great distance.

He fell to his knees, trembling as before the altar. He heard a cry — a boy’s voice, he fancied, though he could not make out the words. The world was falling from him, a garment shed. His head tipped back and he tumbled into nothingness.

He woke up swathed in snow. His clothes had frozen in conformance to the shape of his body, and the blood had thickened in his beard. He wiped the snowmelt from his face, relieved to find he could see through his left eye, and levered himself into a crouch. The pain was excruciating, but perhaps not as intolerable as before.

He was in the alleyway behind his studio. His nightmare, then, had been a nightmare in truth, a vision brought on by the blow to his skull. It made no difference. He was a man haunted, damned beyond atonement. He understood this now. Though years might pass, nothing could erase from his mind the image of that crucified figure.

He struggled to his feet and limped back into the studio. A fire smouldered in the grate and the room was still warm. From this he concluded that his unconsciousness could not have lasted more than an hour. He went to the side cabinet and extracted the brandy bottle. He took three quick slugs before replacing it.

He crossed the room to the corner where the shipping crate lay discarded, left behind in his excitement over Patrick’s camera. He turned it upside down. A brown envelope slipped free and drifted to the floor. No name was indicated, but he knew it was meant for him.

Inside was a photograph. Lowell recognised it as one that he himself had taken many years before. In the picture, a young child regarded the camera without smiling. Patrick. The child’s features were fair, his nose turned slightly to the right where it had once been broken. His eyes were blue: wide with terror, blank with suffering.

Lowell blinked. His vision blurred. The room swam before him and the blood rushed to his ears. He thrust the photograph into the fire. He watched it light — the child’s face blackening, falling through — and then lunged for Patrick’s camera.

He toppled the tripod, dashing the instrument onto the floor. Dropping to his knees, he ripped free the hood and shattered the slide loader, punching through the mahogany frame, his knuckles splitting where they connected with brass. He plucked out the lens from the viewfinder and carried it into the darkroom, the glass slipping between his injured fingers. In the darkroom, he held up the lens to the mirror and glimpsed himself in its depths.

What did he hope to see there? Lowell could not say. Some hidden truth, perhaps — some veiled hope of which he was only half-aware. But his appearance had not altered. In the lens, he saw only the same broken man as in the mirror, a bloodied beast stalked by the same demons, the same ghosts. With a roar of agony, more animal than human, he hurled the lens against the far wall and heard it shatter.