Stephen Jones: Dark Terrors 5: The Gollancz Book of Horror

To my surprise she quoted me a price list, which ruined everything. I swore at her, and pushed her away, disgusted. She, in turn, began calling me every filthy name under the sun, which attracted unwanted attention to both of us. It was then that I saw the ginger-headed man again, standing to the left of me, speaking into his chubby fist.

The Trafalgar Tavern, Greenwich

I ran. Tore myself free of her and ran off along the towpath, through the corrugated iron alley beside the scrapyard and past the defunct factory smoke-stacks, keeping the river to my right. On past The Yacht, too low-ceilinged and cosy to lose myself inside, to the doors of The Trafalgar, a huge gloomy building of polished brown interiors, as depressing as a church. Inside, the windows of the connecting rooms were dominated by the gleaming grey waters beyond. Nobody moved. Even the bar staff were still. It felt like a funeral parlour. I pushed between elderly drinkers whose movements were as slow as the shifting of tectonic plates, and slipped behind a table where I could turn my seat to face the river. I thought that if I didn’t move, I could remain unnoticed. In the left pocket of my jacket I still had my sketchbook. I knew it would be best to get rid of it, but didn’t have the heart to throw it away, not after all the work I had done.

When I heard the muttered command behind me, I knew that my sanctuary had been invaded and that it was the beginning of the end. I sat very still as I watched the red-headed man approaching from the corner of my eye, and caught the crackle of radio headsets echoing each other around the room. I slowly raised my head and for the first time saw how different it all was now. A bare saloon bar filled with tourists, no warmth, no familiarity, no comfort.

When I was young I sat on the step — every pub seemed to have a step — with a bag of crisps and a lemonade, and sometimes I was allowed to sit inside with my dad, sipping his bitter and listening to his beery laughter, the demands for fresh drinks, the dirty jokes, the outraged giggles of the girls at his table. They would tousle my hair, pinch my skinny arms and tell me that I was adorable. Different pubs, different women, night after night, that was my real home, the home I remember. Different pubs but always the same warmth, the same smells, the same songs, the same women. Everything about them was filled with smoky mysteries and hidden pleasures, even their names, The World Turned Upside Down, The Queen’s Head and Artichoke, The Rose and Crown, The Greyhound, The White Hart, all of them had secret meanings.

People go to clubs for a night out now, chrome and steel, neon lights, bottled beers, drum and bass, bouncers with headsets. The bars sport names like The Lounge and The Living Room, hoping to evoke a sense of belonging, but they cater to an alienated world, squandering noise and light on people so blinded by work that their leisure-time must be spent in aggression, screaming at each other, shovelling drugs, pushing for fights. As the red-haired man moved closer, I told myself that all I wanted to do was make people feel at home. Is that so very wrong? My real home was nothing, the memory of a damp council flat with a stinking disconnected fridge and dogshit on the floor. It’s the old pubs of London that hold my childhood; the smells, the sounds, the company. There is a moment before the last bell is called when it seems it could all go on forever. It is that moment I try to capture and hold in my palm. I suppose you could call it the land before Time.

The Load Of Hay, Havistock Hill, Belsize Park

The red-haired officer wiped at his pink brow with a Kleenex until the tissue started to come apart. Another winter was approaching, and the night air was bitter. His wife used to make him wear a scarf when he was working late, and it always started him sweating. She had eventually divorced him. He dressed alone now and ate takeaway food in a tiny flat. But he wore the scarf out of habit. He looked in through the window of the pub at the laughing drinkers at the bar, and the girl sitting alone beside the slot-machine. Several of his men were in there celebrating a colleague’s birthday, but he didn’t feel like facing them tonight.

How the hell had they let him get away? He had drifted from them like bonfire smoke in changing wind. The Trafalgar had too many places where you could hide, he saw that now. His men had been overconfident and undertrained. They hadn’t been taught how to handle anyone so devious, or if they had, they had forgotten what they had learned.

He kept one of the clear plastic ampoules in his pocket, just to remind himself of what he had faced that night. New technology had created new hospital injection techniques. You could scratch yourself with the micro-needle and barely feel a thing, if the person wielding it knew how to avoid any major nerve-endings. Then it was simply a matter of squeezing the little bulb, and any liquid contained in the ampoule was delivered through a coat, a dress, a shirt, into the flesh. Most of his victims were drunk at the time, so he had been able to connect into their bloodstreams without them noticing more than a pinprick. A deadly mixture of RoHypnol, Zimovane and some kind of coca-derivative. It numbed and relaxed them, then sent them to sleep. But the sleep deepened and stilled their hearts, as a dreamless caul slipped over their brains, shutting the senses one by one until there was nothing left alive inside.

No motives, no links, just dead strangers in the most public places in the city, watched by roving cameras, filled with witnesses. That was the trouble; you expected to see people getting legless in pubs.

His attention was drawn back to the girl sitting alone. What was she doing there? Didn’t she realise the danger? No one heeded the warnings they issued. There were too many other things to worry about.

He had been on the loose for a year now, and had probably moved on to another city, where he could continue his work without harassment. He would stop as suddenly as he had begun. He’d dropped a sketchbook, but it was filled with hazy pencil drawings of pub interiors, all exactly the same, and had told them nothing. The only people who would ever really know him were the victims — and perhaps even they couldn’t see behind their killer’s eyes. As the urban landscape grew crazier, people’s motives were harder to discern. An uprooted population, on the make and on the move. Fast, faster, fastest.

And for the briefest of moments he held the answer in his hand. He saw a glimmer of the truth — a constancy shining like a shaft through all the change, the woman alone in the smoky saloon, smiling and interested, her attention caught by just one man; this intimacy unfolding against a background warmth, the pulling of pints, the blanket of conversation, the huddle of friendship — but then it was gone, all gone, and the terrible sense of unbelonging filled his heart once more.

Christopher Fowlerlives in London, and he would probably have it no other way. His retrospective collection of twenty-one short stories, Uncut, appeared from Warner Books in 1999, and it was followed by Something for Your Monkey, a collection of thirteen stories from Serpent’s Tail. His latest book, Calabash, is a mainstream novel with fantastic undertones which moves between a 1970s seaside town and ancient Persia. It will be followed by another novel, set in present-day London, entitled Rainy Day Boys. ‘“At Home in the Pubs of Old London” follows my continuing fascination with obsessives,’ explains Fowler, ‘coupled with the realisation that London (Mmm… London) pubs have probably changed less than anything else in the entire city. This makes them, in some strange way, the most “constant” feature in a fast-changing world. It’s odd how pubs largely keep their clientele through all kinds of social upheavals. I particularly recall the interior of a local pub where I grew up in Greenwich, and went back recently to find that although the furnishings had changed, it held the exact same atmosphere (smoky, raucous, friendly, same mix of people) as it had when I was seventeen. In terms of psychic geography, pubs hold key positions, and they’re vanishing fast (something like five a week in London), so it’s entirely logical (to me, anyway) that my lead character would feel most at home here.’