Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

"Billy — what —»

The car twisted and he tipped out, landing on his back in the revolving tunnel. Susannah's hands reached out toward him, her fingers splayed wide, then her car rounded a black-painted peak and was gone. The cylinder turned him over once, twice, dropping him down into the uplit paper fires of damnation, scuffing his elbows and knees on the greased tracks.

And then there was nothing beneath his limbs.

When he opened his eyes again, he found himself in the fierce green fields behind the house. Judging by the smell of fresh grass in the morning air, it was late spring, but he was wearing the same clothes. The sun was hot on his face, his bare arms. The voice spoke softly behind him. He could only just hear it over the sound of the crickets and the rustling grass.

"Oh Billy, what a beautiful day. If only it was always like this. I remember, I remember — " She was lying in the tall grass near the tree, running a curving green stem across her throat, her lips. Her print dress had hiked around her bare pale thighs. She stared into the cloudless sky as though seeing beyond into space.

"What have you done with the baby, Susannah?"

"I don't know," she replied slowly. "It must be around here somewhere. Look how clear the sky is. It feels like you could see forever."

The day was so alive that it shook with the beat of his heart, the air taut and trembling with sunlit energy. It was hard to concentrate on anything else. "We have to find the baby," he told her, fighting to develop the thought. "We went to all that trouble."

He looked up at the sun and allowed the dazzling yellow light to fill his vision. When he closed his eyes, tiny translucent creatures wriggled across the pink lids, as mindless and driven as spermatozoa.

"I forget what I did with it, Billy. You know how I forget things. Will you make me a daisy chain? Nobody ever made me a daisy chain. Nobody ever noticed me until you."

"Let's find the baby first, Susannah."

"I thi'nk perhaps it was out in the field. Yes, I'm sure I saw it there." She raised a lazy arm and pointed back, over her head. Her hair was spread around her head in a corn-coloured halo. She smiled sleepily and shut her eyes. The lids were sheened like dragonfly wings. "I can see the stars today, even with my eyes closed. We should never leave this place. Never, ever leave. Look how strong we are together. Why, we can do anything. You see that, don't you? You see that…" Her voice drifted off.

Her watched her fall asleep. She looked a little older now. Her cheekbones had appeared, shaping her face to a heart. She had lost some puppy fat. Light shimmered on her cheeks, wafted and turned by the tiny shields of leaves above. "I have to go and look, Susannah," he told her. "There are bugs everywhere."

"You just have to say the name," she murmured. "Just say the name." But her voice was lost beneath the buzzing of crickets, the shifting of grass, the tremulous morning heat.

He rose and walked deep into the field, until he came to a small clearing in the grass. Lowering himself onto his haunches, he studied the ant nest, watching the shiny black mass undulating around a raised ellipse in the brown earth. The carapaces of the insects were darkly iridescent, tiny night-prisms that bustled on thousands of pin-legs, batting each other with antennae like blind men's canes. He shaped his hands into spades and dug them into the squirming mass of segmented bodies, feeling them tickle over his hands and wrists, running up his arms. They nipped at his skin with their pincers, but were too small to hurt. Digging deeper until his fingertips met under the earth, he felt the fat thoraxes roll warmly over his skin. Carefully he raised the mound, shaking it free of insects. A baby's face appeared, fat and gurgly, unconcerned by the bugs that ran across his wide blue eyes, in and out of the pouted lips. Raising the child high toward the fiery summer globe, he watched as the last of the ants fell away, revealing his smiling, beautiful son.

"Tyler," he said, "Tyler Fleet."

And he set off back towards his sleeping wife.

"Billy. Billy, you came back." Her lank hair hung over his face, tickling. Her plucked eyebrows were arched in a circumflex of concern. She had been crying.

"What's your problem?" he asked slowly, feeling the words in his mouth. He was lying on the cool dry dirt in front of the ghost train ride. A few passers-by had stopped to watch.

"You fell out of the carriage is what's the problem," she said, touching his cheek with her fingers. "You cut your forehead. Oh, Billy."

"I'm fine. Was just a slip is all." He raised himself on one elbow. "No need to get so worked up." He rubbed the goosebumps from his arms.

"I was so frightened in there, I thought I'd lost you, I panicked," she told him. "Look." She held up her palm and showed him the crimson dot. "It's my blood, not yours. I started late, that's all. I'm not pregnant, Billy. I'm sorry."

He realized why she had been so unconcerned at the fair. She had been happy to place her trust in him unquestioningly. It had never crossed her mind that things might not work out. He studied her face as if seeing her for the first time. "I'm so sorry," she said again, searching his eyes in trepidation.

"Don't worry," he told her, pulling himself up and dusting down his jeans. "Maybe we can make another one." He offered his arm. "Give me your hand." He sealed his fingers gently over the crimson dot. She pulled him to his feet, surprisingly strong.

Molly looked up as he passed the ticket booth to the Twilight Express. There was no way of knowing what she was thinking, or if she was thinking anything at all. "Hey Billy, Papa Jack wants you to work with him tomorrow night," she told him. "You gonna need to put that money by. The baby'll be back, and maybe next time you'll be ready for him."

Then she went back to counting the change from the tickets.

The moon above the Elysium funfair shone with the colours of the sideshow, red and blue glass against butter yellow, as the calliope played on, turning wishes into starlight.

The Twilight Express was gone. It had been replaced by the Queen of The South, a Mississippi riverboat ride where passengers seated themselves on cream-coloured benches and watched as their paddle steamer slipped upriver, not past the real southland of jute factories and boatyards and low-cost housing, but an imagined antebellum fantasy of filigreed plantation houses glimpsed through Spanish moss. The candy-coloured deck looked out on pastel hardboard flats and painted linen skies that creaked past on a continuous roll as birds twittered on the tape loop.

Molly was still here at the Elysium, working the riverboat ride now. She watched him approach without pleasure or sorrow shaping her face. He supposed carnie folk saw too much to care one way or the other. To her, he was just another small-town hick.

"So you didn't leave," she said, sweeping coins from her counter without looking up.

"Did I say I was going?" he asked defensively.

"Didn't have to." She stacked dimes to the width of her hand, calculating the value, then swept them into a bag. "You should bring your wife here."

"You don't know I married her," he said, kicking at the dry dirt in annoyance.

"Don't I, though." Her expression never changed.

He left her counting the gate money, and resolved not to bring Susannah to the Elysium. But he did, that Friday night.

He breathed in the smell of hot caramel, sawdust and sugar-floss, fired a rifle at pocked metal soldiers and hooked a yellow duck for Tyler, but wouldn't go near Molly's ride. "I don't need to go on that," he told his wife, watching as she held their baby to her breast. "Not after last time."

Susannah jiggled the baby and stood looking up at the painted riverbank. "That was more than three years ago, Billy. The Twilight Express is gone. It's not a ghost train anymore. No one's gonna fall out of the car." She smiled at him bravely, as if it was all that could protect her from his simmering impatience.