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

Cleethorpes was a crap mouser. She would hide underneath the sink if a rodent, a squirrel or a neighbour’s cat even came near the open back door. Clearly, sleeping sixteen hours a day drained her reserves of nervous energy, and she was forced to play dead if her territory was threatened. She was good at a couple of things: batting moths about until they expired with their wings in dusty tatters, and staring at a spot on the wall three feet above the top of Edward’s head. What could cats see, he wondered, that humans couldn’t?

Cleethorpes was his only companion now that Sam was dead and Gill had gone. He’d bought her because everyone else had bought one. That was the month the price of cats skyrocketed. Hell, every cats’ home in the country sold out in days, and pretty soon the mangiest strays were changing hands for incredible prices. It was the weirdest form of panic-buying that Edward had ever seen.

He’d lived in Camden Town for years, and had been thinking of getting out even before he met Gill; the area was being compared to Moscow and Johannesburg after eight murders on its streets in as many weeks earned the area a new nickname: “Murder Mile”. There were 700 police operating in the borough, which badly needed over a thousand. It was strange, then, to think that the real threat to their lives eventually came not from muggers, but from fast-food outlets.

Edward lived in a flat in Eversholt Street, one of the most peculiar roads in the neighbourhood. In one stretch of a few hundred yards there was a Roman Catholic church, a sports centre, a legendary rock pub, council flats, a bingo hall, a juvenile detention centre, an Italian cafe, a Victorian men’s hostel for transients and an audacious green-glass development of million-pound loft apartments. Edward was on the ground floor of the council block, a bad place to be as it turned out. The Regent’s Canal ran nearby, and most of the road’s drains emptied into it. The council eventually riveted steel grilles over the pipe covers, but by then it was too late.

Edward glanced over at Gill’s photograph, pinned on the cork noticeboard beside the cooker. Once her eyes had been the colour of cyanothus blossom, her hair saturated in sunlight, but now the picture appeared to be fading, as if it was determined to remove her from the world. He missed Gill more than he missed Sam, because nothing he could do would ever bring Sam back, but Gill was still around, living in Hackney with her two brothers. He knew he was unlikely ever to see her again. He missed her to the point where he would say her name aloud at odd moments for no reason at all. In those last days after Sam’s death, she had grown so thin and pale that it seemed she was being erased from her surroundings. He watched helplessly as her bones appeared beneath her flesh, her clothes began hanging loosely on her thin arms. Gill’s jaw-length blonde hair draped forward over her face as she endlessly scoured and bleached the kitchen counters. She stopped voicing her thoughts, becoming barely more visible than the water stains on the walls behind her. She would hush him with a raised finger, straining to listen for the scurrying scratch of claws in the walls, under the cupboards, across the rafters.

Rats. Some people’s worst nightmare, but the thought of them no longer troubled him. What had happened to their family had happened to people all over the city. “Rats!” thought Edward as he welded the back door shut, “they fought the dogs and, killed the cats, and bit the babies in the cradles. ..” He couldn’t remember the rest of Robert Browning’s poem. It hadn’t been quite like that, because Camden Town was hardly Hamelin, but London could have done with a pied piper. Instead, all they’d got was a distracted mayor and his dithering officials, hopelessly failing to cope with a crisis.

He pulled the goggles to the top of his head and examined his handiwork. The steel plates only ran across to the middle of the door, but were better than nothing. Now he could sort out the chewed gap underneath. It wasn’t more than two inches deep, but a cat-sized rat was capable of folding its ribs flat enough to slide through with ease. He remembered watching thousands of them one evening as they rippled in a brown tapestry through the back gardens. There had been nights when he’d sat in the darkened lounge with his feet lifted off the floor and a cricket bat across his knees, listening to the scampering conspiracy passing over the roofs, feet pattering in the kitchen, under the beds, under his chair. He’d watched as one plump brown rat with eyes like drops of black resin had fidgeted its way between books on a shelf, daring him into a display of pitifully slow reactions.

The best solution would be to rivet a steel bar across the space under the door, but the only one he had left was too short. He thought about risking a trip to the shops, but most of the ones in the high street had closed for good, and all the hardware stores had sold out of stock weeks ago. It was hard to imagine how much a city of 8 million people could change in just four months. So many had left. The Tubes were a no-go zone, of course, and it was dangerous to move around in the open at night. The rats were no longer frightened by people.

He was still deciding what to do when his mobile buzzed its way across the work counter.

“Is that Edward?” asked a cultured, unfamiliar voice.

“Yeah, who’s that?”

“I don’t suppose you’ll remember me. We only met once, at a party. I’m Damon, Gillian’s brother.” The line fell warily silent. Damon, sanctimonious religious nut, Gill’s older brother, what was the name of the other one? Matthew. Fuck. Fuck.

“Are you still there?”

“Yeah, sorry, you caught me a bit by surprise.”

“I guess it’s a bit of a bolt from the blue. Are you still living in Camden?”

“One of the last to leave the epicentre. The streets are pretty quiet around here now.”

“I saw it on the news, didn’t recognize the place. Not that I ever really knew it to begin with. Our family’s from Hampshire, but I expect you remember that.”

Stop being so damned chatty and tell me what the hell you want, thought Edward. His next thought hit hard: Gill’s condition has deteriorated, she’s made him call me.

“It’s about Gillian, isn’t it?”

“I’m afraid — she’s been a lot worse lately. We’ve had a tough time looking after her. She had the problem, you know, with dirt and germs-”

Spermophobia, thought Edward, Mysophobia. A lot of people had developed such phobias since the rats came.

“Now there are these other things, she’s become terrified of disease.”

Nephophobia, Pathophobia. Once arcane medical terms, now almost everyday parlance. They were closely connected, not so surprising when you remembered what she’d been through.

“It’s been making life very difficult for us.”

“I can imagine.” Everything had to be cleaned over and over again. Floors scrubbed, handles and counters sprayed with disinfectant, the air kept refrigerated. All her foodstuffs had to be washed and vacuum-sealed in plastic before she would consider eating them. Edward had watched the roots of fear digging deeper within her day by day, until she could barely function and he could no longer cope.

“She’s lost so much weight. She’s become frightened of the bacteria in her own body. She was living on the top floor of the house, refused to take any visitors except us, and now she’s gone missing.”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t seem possible, but it’s true. We thought you should know.”

“Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”