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

“Leave it with him,” Frankie said, and I dropped the.38 on Cody’s dead chest.

“Watch,” Frankie said, trying for dispassionate but failing to completely mask the fascination and excitement.

So I watched. Partly because information is power, and partly because Mom always told me it’s a bad idea to piss off a crazy old fucker with a gun.

The blood jetting out of Cody’s shattered skull was being sucked into the liquid sheen of the clay like mother’s milk into the mouth of a greedy newborn. And it was a two-way street. Cody’s flesh was invaded by the faecal brown of the mud he’d died on until, inside of a minute, he looked like something somebody’d moulded from the wet and alien earth itself.

So much for any lingering hope that this could all be explained away by sedimentary settlement.

“It accepts the offering,” Frankie said, more out there by the fucking minute. “But don’t entertain any hope that this can replace your own sacrifice. There was no gravitas here. No ceremony. The unfortunate news for you is that your death needs to be both slow and somewhat spectacular.”

Fuck me. With the exception of his charming opening gambit with the C-word back in his trophy room, everything this guy said sounded like he’d lifted it from his back catalogue of crappy scripts. Case in point, his subsequent lurid description of what I had to look forward to before the day was much older.

“I’m going to blah blah blah. Blah blah blah, Kitty, blah blah blah.” On and fucking on. Use your imagination. I assure you it’s at least as good as his.

“That how you get it up?” I said, when he was finally done. “Telling girls what you’re going to do to them?”

“No, Ms Donnelly,” he said. “I get it up watching people’s eyes turn glassy with dread as they feel all hope of escape disappear.” TV’s Frankie Metcalfe, Ladies and Gentlemen. A real fucking sweetheart. “Now, let’s move on to the central chamber.”

We moved ahead through a curving anterior walkway. Only then, within its lower ceiling and narrower walls, did I pause to wonder where the hell the light was coming from. But it was a meaningless question. I could see perfectly well. And I had no idea how or why.

Another of those misshapen flowers was growing from the weeping wall to our left. This one was vanguard minded, attempting an impression of colour, its stalk and leaves blood red, its petals an eerie and bilious yellow. Frankie’s left hand plucked it from the wall with a flourish.

“Here,” he said, shaking some of its slime from his fingers and flinging it at me. “Pretend it’s Prom Night.”

“Thanks,” I said, catching it and pretending to sniff it before holding it to my wrist like a corsage. “Every time I smell it, I’ll think of you.”

He gave me a look that told me he was smart enough to know I’d stolen the line, but not sharp enough to remember from whom — let me save you the Google; it was my fellow Irish deviant, Oscar Wilde — and then, all done with our little time-out flirtation, waved me ahead impatiently, waggling the gun like a signalling device.

“Got it,” he said. “You’re un-fucking-flappable. Now get moving, or I’ll drag you there by the short-and-curlies.”

Sad old bastard. Like anybody has pubic hair anymore. I dropped the nasty little flower — wet and rubbery and pulsing unpleasantly like it hadn’t yet decided its final shape — and moved ahead of him, conceding reluctantly to myself as I walked on that things were not looking good for our plucky girl detective. Fact, I could feel The Adventure of the Hollow Hill lobbying to give itself a real fucking downer of an ending as I stepped out from the walkway into what he’d called the central chamber. There was a bubbling quicksand-like pool at its heart, surrounded by several ill-defined shapes that put me in mind of the grotesque statue that Cody’s body had become. More formal offerings, I thought. The place was a compost heap, a mulch pit, and Frankie’s ode to its insane splendour confirmed as much.

“You’ve doubtless seen all that pentagram and puff of smoke nonsense in the movies,” he said. “But the truth is it takes time and effort to actually effect a materialisation. The ground must be prepared. I’ve been seeding it for years, Kitty. Seeding it with frozen pain, with artefacts that contain the captured essence of human suffering. I’ve brought such treasures here. The skulls of slaughtered children, a letter to the media that one of our most celebrated serial killers wrote in the blood of a victim, a copy of the De Vermis Mysteriis bound in human skin. ‘The Devil Rides Shotgun’ would have been a beautiful addition, but alas. ”

He let his voice trail off theatrically. Prime fucking ham.

I’d have asked him the obvious question — why the hell are you doing this? — but I knew there was no point. He wouldn’t have an answer because he wasn’t really here anymore. He was as hollow as his hill, and just as much in the process of transformation. Whatever the human motivations that had kicked him off — curiosity, excitement, thrill of the forbidden, whatever — he was now merely a vessel of the Other’s desire to manifest itself. He had nothing to do with it. He was long gone. Whatever was blossoming in his cavern had eaten Frankie Metcalfe from the inside too.

So why leave the crust?

He was staring at the bubbling pool at the heart of it all and, for a second or two, hardly paying attention to me. I’d think later that perhaps either outcome was equally acceptable to what was left of the man he used to be, but I wouldn’t think about it much because it allowed for too much human ambiguity in the monster he’d become. I sure as shit didn’t think about it in the moment. I was younger and faster, and all his meditative pause in the proceedings meant to me was this: forget the gun, close the gap, get one hand on his skull and the other on his chin, and snap his wretched ancient neck like a fucking twig.

I’d have run anyway, but the terrifying re-ossification of the whole cavern lent my legs a whole new level of motivation. Killing Frankie had been like flipping a power-down switch on whatever he’d been ushering in to our world. It made sense, I suppose. Any other death down here — like, you know, mine — would have been just more mulch on the shit-pile of its becoming, but the death of its possessed summoner threw everything into reverse. Whatever had been coming was now retreating, and the hill was reclaiming its solidity. Reclaiming it, thank fuck, not quite as fast as I reclaimed the rope ladder and clambered my way back up into the house.

By the time I let myself out of the front door and headed for the Cadillac, the sun was just starting to set. California perfect. Orange and blue and purple and beautiful.

But I wasn’t really thinking about that. I was thinking about this:

Neck tattoo, five-foot-six, name of Scott.

Catch you later.

SIMON STRANTZAS IS THE critically acclaimed author of Nightingale Songs, Cold to the Touch and Beneath the Surface — three collections of the strange and supernatural currently available from Dark Regions Press.

His award-nominated fiction has appeared previously in the Mammoth Book of Best New Horror series, Zombie Apocalypse! Fightback, PostScripts and Cemetery Dance .

At the moment he is hard at work on his fourth collection, while also editing an anthology about thin places by some of the genre’s best new talent. He still lives in Toronto, Canada, with his ever-patient wife and an unyielding hunger for the flesh of the living.

“My wife and I once took a weekend trip on the advice of a friend,” Strantzas recalls, “and it turned out to be the most horrendous experience either of us had ever had. So horrendous, in fact, that it did not take long for aspects of the trip to end up incorporated into my fiction, along with my long-standing fear of punishment dolls and my obsession with regret.