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

I rush down the stairs, nearly slipping on something that coats them. The tattooed girl at the front desk clicks her studded tongue against her teeth as I sign out and hand her the key.

“You aren’t staying?”

“There’s nothing here to see anymore,” I mutter, my head down, and scurry from the Windhaven Inn while trying to dispel the image of that dark child from my memory. If the girl says anything more to me, it does not register.

I stop on the porch of the Windhaven Inn, my hastily packed bag in my hand, and look up at the dark clouds that are like an indelible stain upon the sky. And I wonder, for a moment, if it’s not my soul that has been so marked.

Then, at the foot of the steps, I see the large six-toed cat once again. It still stares blankly ahead as though it is waiting for something but has forgotten what. It sits, blocking my passage, but I don’t dare touch it — I cannot bring myself to relive the experience of feeling its matted fur slide across its body. As I watch I see that what it chews is not grass, not any longer. I put my bag down and take a hesitant step towards the creature, not heeding the low growl it gives as warning. Instead, I crane my head further until what I see between its teeth is the head of a flower from which a long stem trails back to the ground; a flower that has impossibly sprouted through a dark oily film and beneath an even darker sky.

A flower. A life for a life. A promise of re-growth.

I reach towards the old cat but it only growls and bites.

JOAN DELANO AIKEN MBE (1924–2004) was born in Rye, East Sussex, the daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet and ghost story author Conrad Aiken. She began writing at an early age, and in her early twenties she had some of her stories broadcast by the BBC.

In the 1950s she joined the editorial staff of Argosy magazine which, along with a number of other popular periodicals at the time, published her short fiction. During this period she also produced her first two collections of children’s stories and began work on her classic novel The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962), which was set in an alternate history of Britain.

By now a full-time writer, she produced two or three books a year for the rest of her life. Her more than 100 titles included Midnight is a Place, Black Hearts in Battersea, The Cuckoo Tree, Dark Interval, The Crystal Crow, Voices in an Empty House, The Kingdom Under the Sea, The Cockatrice Boys, The Scream, Midwinter Nightingale and The Witch of Clatteringshaws , along with a series of historical novels based around Jane Austen’s characters.

Aiken was also a life-long fan of ghost stories, particularly the works of M. R. James and Fitz James O’Brien, and her own contributions to the genre include the novels The Shadow Guests and The Haunting of Lamb House , along with the collections The Windscreen Weepers, A Whisper in the Night and A Creepy Company .

More recently, Small Beer Press published The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories , a posthumous collection that included seven previously unpublished stories, including the macabre tale that follows.

A Guest of Honour at the 1997 World Fantasy Convention in London, Joan Aiken won the Guardian Award and the Edgar Allan Poe Award, and in 1999 was presented with an MBE for her services to children’s literature.

TOM ORFORD STOOD leaning over the rail and watching the flat hazy shores of the Red Sea slide past. A month ago he had been watching them slide in the other direction. Sarah had been with him then, leaning and looking after the ship’s wake, laughing and whispering ridiculous jokes into his ear.

They had been overflowingly happy, playing endless deck games with the other passengers, going to the ship’s dances in Sarah’s mad, rakish conception of fancy dress, even helping to organise the appalling concerts of amateur talent, out of their gratitude to the world.

“You’ll tire yourself out!” somebody said to Sarah, as she plunged from deck-tennis to swimming in the ship’s pool, from swimming to dancing, from dancing to ping pong. “As if I could,” she said to Tom. “I’ve done so little all my life, I have twenty-one years of accumulated energy to work off.”

But just the same, that was what she had done. She had died, vanished, gone out, as completely as a forgotten day, or a drift of the scent of musk. Gone, lost to the world. Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, he thought. Not matter, no. The network of bones and tendons, the dandelion clock of fair hair, the brilliantly blue eyes that had once belonged to Sarah, and had so riotously obeyed her will for a small portion of her life — a forty-second part of it, perhaps — was now quietly returning to earth in a Christian cemetery in Ceylon. But her spirit, the fiery intention which had co-ordinated that machine of flesh and bone and driven it through her life — the spirit, he knew, existed neither in air nor earth. It had gone out, like a candle.

He did not leave the ship at Port Said. It was there that he had met Sarah. She had been staying with friends, the Acres. Orford had gone on a trip up the Nile with her. Then they had started for China. This was after they had been married, which happened almost immediately. And now he was coming back with an address, and a bundle of hair to give to her mother. For she had once laughingly asked him to go and visit her mother, if she were to die first.

“Not that she’d enjoy your visit,” said Sarah dryly. “But she’d be highly offended if she didn’t get a lock of hair, and she might as well have the lot, now I’ve cut it off. And you could hardly send it to her in a registered envelope.”

He had laughed, because then death seemed a faraway and irrelevant threat, a speck on the distant horizon.

“Why are we talking about it, anyway?” he said.

“Death always leaps to mind when I think of Mother,” she answered, her eyes dancing. “Due to her I’ve lived in an atmosphere of continuous death for twenty-one years.”

She had told him her brief story. When she reached twenty-one, and came into an uncle’s legacy, she had packed her brush and comb and two books and a toothbrush (“All my other possessions, if they could be called mine, were too ugly to take”), and, pausing only at a hairdresser’s to have her bun cut off (he had seen a photograph of her at nineteen, a quiet, dull-looking girl, weighed down by her mass of hair) she had set off for Egypt to visit her only friend, Mrs Acres. She wrote to her mother from Cairo. She had had one letter in return.

“My dear Sarah, as you are now of age I cannot claim to have any further control over you, for you are, I trust, perfectly healthy in mind and body. I have confidence in the upbringing you received, which furnished you with principles to guide you through life’s vicissitudes. I know that in the end you will come back to me.”

“She seems to have taken your departure quite lightly,” Orford said, reading it over her shoulder.

“Oh, she never shows when she’s angry,” Sarah said. She studied the letter again. “Little does she know,” was her final comment, as she put it away. “Hey, I don’t want to think about her. Quick, let’s go out and see something — a pyramid or a cataract or a sphinx. Do you realise that I’ve seen absolutely nothing — nothing — nothing all my life? Now I’ve got to make up for lost time. I want to see Rome and Normandy and Illyria and London — I’ve never been there, except Heathrow — and Norwegian fjords and the Taj Mahal.”

Tomorrow, Orford thought, he would have to put on winter clothes. He remembered how the weather had become hotter and hotter on the voyage out. Winter to summer, summer to winter again.