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

I search among the lifeless rocks for an hour. The ground is flat and the rocks are neither plentiful nor large enough to provide cover for anything much bigger than a gecko. Finally, as the sun falls towards Ubehebe Peak, I sit down on a rock, feeling dizzy and nauseous. I drink about half a litre of tepid water and pour the rest over my head. I raise the binoculars and see the vehicles where I left them, two dusty sentinels watching over the playa. As I shift my gaze northwards I’m startled by a flash of light from the mountains above Racetrack Road. I turn back to the cars, then search the slopes above them, looking for something up there in the creosote. I lower the binoculars and feel a tightness across my chest. I breathe slowly, head hanging between my knees, and that’s when I see it for the first time, the faint trail cut like a groove in the dried mud. It ends at the rock between my feet. It wasn’t there when I sat down, I think, but I’m not certain. I’m spooked a little by it, even more when I notice more trails terminating at the other rocks lying nearby. I try to picture a rain-softened surface and a hundred-mile-an-hour wind pushing them along but it’s all in vain.

The flesh crawls on my back and for some reason the air feels cooler. The silence is weird and when I hear the two shots ring out, I need no further prompting to leave the rocks behind. I pick up the backpack, unholster my pistol and set off at a slow trot north towards the sound of the gunfire. I don’t think about what has happened, about the mess Delauney has got them into. Instead I concentrate on getting there, on locating their position even though there are no further sounds to guide me towards them.

I pass the vehicles on the road, a half-mile or so to my left, without having seen anything I don’t recognize. But I keep on, another mile, until I realize I’m heading right towards the Grandstand. I don’t turn back. There’s no point, even though I won’t find anything there. Nothing alive. Yet I have to see.

There’s nobody at the Grandstand. I drink another bottle of water to quiet my despair. Shadows stretch out across the playa towards the outcrop, painting the surface the colour of blood. For a while I stare at the rocks, losing track of time. There are a dozen or so, scattered in a wide circle round the outcrop. Had these shapes seen Sophie? I grind the dust and dirt from my faithless eyes and when I open them again I see that the rocks have drawn closer. The last rays of sunlight pick out their newly laid trails. My heart is racing and the band across my chest tightens even more. At first I think I’m having a heart attack, that I’m really dying, but after two minutes I realize that isn’t possible. I focus on the nearest rock. It’s eighteen inches high, a little more than that from back to front, weighing, I guess, about 300 pounds. The ground is bone dry, not even a whisper of wind. Even though I haven’t seen it, I accept that the rock has moved. It’s too late to matter a damn. I don’t feel anything as I set off towards the road

The sky is almost dark by the time I reach the two vehicles. The Rav4 stands empty like a ruin. I sit in my own vehicle and try to call HQ to report the missing people. But once again I get no proper signal, no voices other than my own to trouble the darkness. I keep trying but nobody responds. After a while, I return to the Toyota. The camera is still on the seat where I left it, the tape stopped in exactly the same place. I press play and watch the blue screen, trying to see beyond it to what’s on the other side. I let it run for a minute but it’s a waste of time. Just as I’m about to stop it, the blue turns to white, which slowly reconfigures into a honeycombed pattern which moves back and forth across the frame. In quick succession three shots ring out on the tape, the first sounds since Teakettle Junction. I am calm, I don’t feel any fear, not until another minute has passed and a fourth blast sounds out and the screen fades to black.

Outside, I peer into the dark and see the more intense darkness of the Grandstand looming up out of the Racetrack. It’s no closer than it was before, I tell myself, though I no longer feel any inclination to trust my perceptions. An hour has passed when I climb back into the Expedition. Nobody has come. This time, when I call HQ, I do finally get something, a voice reporting an abandoned SUV out at the Racetrack. I shut the power off quickly, drink more water and try not to imagine the rocks gathering out on the playa. I think about the voice I heard and what it was saying. Speaking only to myself I respond, “You won’t find anything out there.” And after a minute’s silence I add, “They’re gone.” Hearing something, I get out of the car. I walk to the side of the road, feeling the weight of the night as it falls on the Valley. I can’t see anything but I look anyway, knowing that the rocks are edging their way up from the south. I tell myself someone must have heard them, that someone will come. These are the certainties that sustain me. I can’t stop myself from listening so when they stop it comes as a shock. Then, before I can register it, they start moving again, heading west, towards the road. I have no strength left. I sit down in the dirt to wait for someone to arrive even though I already know that nobody is coming here, that no one else belongs. The truth is I have as much right to be here as the dark. It’s reason that’s out of place here, that doesn’t belong. Reason can’t explain the rocks that roll, the moans of night or the flakes of sky that drift quietly down to Earth, which, given time, I probably could.

Simon Clark’s most recent books include Vampyrrhic Rites, In This Skin, Stranger and The Night of the Triffids (winner of the British Fantasy Award). His fiction has also been published in newspapers and broadcast on talk radio.

Tim Lebbon’s books include the novels Face, The Nature of Balance, Mesmer, Until She Sleeps, Dusk, Desolation and Into the Wild Green Yonder (with Peter Crowther), plus the novellas Naming of Parts, White, Changing of Faces and Dead Man’s Hand. His short fiction has been collected in As the Sun Goes Down, White and Other Tales of Ruin and Fears Unnamed. He has won two British Fantasy Awards and a Bram Stoker Award, and his work (including the novella that follows) has been optioned for the screen on both sides of the Atlantic.

While Clark readily acknowledges that war is a terrible thing, he reveals: “If the First World War hadn’t happened I wouldn’t be here, nor would the events have occurred that inspired this story. My grandmother was engaged to a young soldier who was killed in the trenches in France. About the time of that soldier’s death the Welsh writer Arthur Machen wrote a story, ‘The Bowmen’, which sparked an astonishing episode of public hysteria rivalled only by Orson Welles’s radio dramatization of The War of the Worlds a couple of decades later.

“I found the events surrounding Machen’s story fascinating, and when I was talking to Tim Lebbon I realized that I’d found a like mind and fellow Machen fan.”

“I’m fascinated by the ever-shifting boundaries between truth and fiction,” adds Lebbon, “and how they are often blurred, whether by events or by the perception of those viewing them. In the case of ‘The Bowmen’ a simple story was transformed into a great myth that enveloped a generation, and which still endures today.”

“We both agreed that we must collaborate on a story that centred somehow on Machen and his tale that inspired the legend of ‘The Angels of Mons’,” continues Clark. “At last we did, and this is the result. A story about a story that just might have turned the tide of the Great War, which in turn shaped the world we live in today.”