Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Vol 15

“I wanted to kill him,” she said. “But I didn’t want his ghost haunting me. I can see them sometimes, ghosts, but I can’t do anything with them.”

“You did quite well with Cagliostro’s pet.”

“They’ll put me away, won’t they?”

“I have never before taken on an apprentice, Miranda. I have lived a solitary life ever since I moved to London. Last night, you said that I had no real friends. That I did not let anyone get close to me. And you were right. But times have changed, much more than I believed when I first began to walk the streets at night. You have a powerful gift, and I can teach you how to use it, if you will let me. But I should warn you that it will not be an easy path.”

“Teach me.”

She said it with a sudden, raw, naked passion, and in that moment I had my first glimpse of the real Miranda, the human being who hid behind the sullen, wary mask of a child brought up on the stones.

“Teach me,” she said. “Teach me stuff.”

Born in London, brought up in the south-west of Ireland and living in Wales for the last seventeen years, Mike O’Driscoll remains uncertain about where he really belongs.

He has worked in construction, transport and recruitment, and owned his own business (a video rental store) for five years, this last being an enjoyable experience apart from the near-bankruptcy. For the last four years he has worked in childcare, combining the terrors of fostering with the less rigorous demands of working part-time towards a Master’s degree in Literature.

O’Driscoll has been writing short stories for fifteen years, and his fiction has appeared in The 3rd Alternative, Interzone, BBR, Crime Wave, Peeping Tom, Nemonymous, Albedo One, Indigenous Fiction and Fear, plus online at Infinity Plus, Eclectica and Gothic.net. He has also contributed to such anthologies as Off Limits, Lethal Kisses, Darklands, Last Rites and Resurrections, Decalog 5, The Sun Rises Red, The Dark: New Ghost Stories, Gathering the Bones, Thackery Lambshead’s Pocket Guide to Eccentric or Discredited Diseases and all three volumes of Cold Cuts. His regular comment column on the horror genre, “Night’s Plutonium Shore ”, which has appeared for over two years at the Alien Online website, was recently transferred to a new home in the pages of The 3rd Alternative.

About the following novella, the author recalls: “Travelling by rail and road across America back in 1996, I made a detour to Death Valley, prompted mostly by imaginary encounters with desert landscapes in countless films and books. It is one of the few places I’ve ever been which I would describe as truly ‘otherworldly’, evoking, as it does, an unsettling sense of isolation and mystery, combined with a fragmented geological weight and power.

“For a long time afterwards I tried repeatedly to write a story set in the valley, but could never come up with a narrative frame that would do justice to the landscape. When the opportunity came to write a ghost story for The Dark, I began toying with the idea of using Death Valley as a locale to explore the relationship between consciousness and landscape, originally intending to cast the valley itself in the role of ghost. Early drafts were written while listening to Hank Williams, and I guess that over the weeks, the story became more imbued with the desperate sense of loneliness and longing that haunts so many of Hank’s songs.

“By the time it was finished, it seemed that the restless Henry Woods had stumbled out of one of those songs and found a kind of home, if not peace, in this valley.”

Nothing is infinite. in a lifetime a man’s heart will notch up somewhere in the region of 2,500 million beats, a woman’s maybe 500 million more. These are big numbers but not infinite. There is an end in sight, no matter how far off it seems. People don’t think about that. They talk instead about the sublime beauty of nature, about the insignificance of human life compared to the time it’s taken to shape these rocks and mountains. Funny how time can weigh heavier on the soul than all these billions of tons of dolomite and dirt. A few years back a ranger found something squatting against the base of a mesquite tree at the mouth of Hanaupah Canyon. It was something dead, he saw, and the shape of it suggested a man. Curious, the ranger crouched down and touched it. The body, or whatever it was, had been so dessicated by heat and wind that it started to crumble and when the desert breeze caught it, the whole thing fell away to dust. No way to tell what it had really been, or if it was heat alone or time that caused its naturalization.

Fifty-year highs for July average 116 degrees. Anyone caught out here in that kind of heat without water has a couple of options. You can try to find shade, which, if you get lucky, will cut your rate of dehydration by about fifteen per cent. Or you can just rest instead of walking, which will save you something like forty per cent. But the ground temperature out here is half again higher than the air. Ideally, what you want is a shaded spot elevated above the ground. If you’re lucky enough to find such a place, and if you’re smart enough to keep your clothes on, which will cut your dehydration by another twenty per cent, then you might last two days at 120 degrees max without water. If you’re out of luck, then just keeping still you’ll sweat two pints in an hour. If you don’t take in the equivalent amount of water, you’ll begin to dehydrate. At five per cent loss of body weight you’ll start to feel nauseous. Round about ten per cent, your arms and legs will begin tingling and you’ll find it hard to breathe. The water loss will thicken your blood and your heart will struggle to pump it out to your extremities. Somewhere between fifteen and twenty per cent dehydration, you’ll die.

Which goes to show that there is, after all, one thing that is infinite: the length of time you stay dead. There is no real correlation between what I’m thinking and the SUV that heads slowly south along the dirt road. Even when it pulls over and stops beside the dry lake running along the valley floor, I can’t say for sure what will happen. I’m unwilling to speculate. Even when nothing happens I don’t feel any kind of surprise.

I scan the oval playa with my binoculars. Indians are supposed to have raced horses across it, which is why it’s called the Racetrack. There’s an outcrop of rock at the north end which they call the Grandstand but I don’t see any spectators up there. Never have. Below the ridge from where I watch, there are clumps of creosote bush and the odd Joshua tree. Further north, there are stands of beavertail and above them, on the high slopes of the Last Chance Range, are forests of juniper and pinyon pine. A glint of sunlight catches my eye and I glance towards the vehicle. But nothing has moved down there. I shift my gaze back out on to the playa, trying to pretend I don’t feel the cold chill that settles on my bones. I look away at the last moment and wipe the sweat from my face. Thirst cracks my lips and dust coats the inside of my mouth. There’s plenty of water in my Expedition, parked a half-mile further south along the road, but I make no move to return to the vehicle. Whatever is happening here I have no choice but to see how it plays out.

A shadow moves on the playa. When I search for it all I can see are the rocks scattered across the honeycombed surface of the dry lake. I scan them closely, looking for a lizard or rodent, even though nothing lives out there. The air is still and quiet, no breeze at all to rustle through the mesquites. Then something catches my eyes and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. A movement so painfully slow I doubt it happened at all. Until it rolls forward another inch. From this distance, I estimate its weight at eighty to a hundred pounds. I glance at the rocks nearest to it but none of them have moved. Only this one, its shadow seeming to melt in the harsh sunlight as it heaves forward again. There’s no wind, nothing to explain its motion. All the stories I’ve heard about the rocks have some rational explanation but there’s no reason at all to what I’m seeing here.