Christopher Fowler - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 10

Because he had no other way to do it, he built a slow fire beneath one of the iron tubs in the bath-house, and laid pieces of pork inside it on a bed of well-scrubbed stones. As the bath and the stones heated, so fat melted and ran down to spit and hiss on hot enamel; and this was what he needed, not the meat.

While the lard rendered, he made crude pots from clay he’d dug with his fingers from the lake’s edge. Baking in the fire’s ashes, several of them cracked or flindered; but some survived well enough to use, he thought.

Pork for dinner, roasted dry but he wouldn’t heed that. The skin had gone to crackling; as he crunched it something roiled and stirred the water, far out in the centre of the lake. He heard his father cry out in the darkness, and he heard a staccato rattle of gunfire; and he heard his mother’s slow choking; and louder than any, louder than all of those he heard the sounds of kicking.

His father came to him again when he should have been sleeping. Wet serge warned him, smelling strongly in the damp air; cracking his eyelids barely open showed him an outline against the sky, the glint of moonlight on buckles.

He heard boots shift on stone, he heard each separate breath like a groan. But no kiss this time, no touch at all; and after his father was gone, what he heard until he slept was his mother’s rope creaking in the wind, as she dangled somewhere close at hand. He wouldn’t open his eyes again to look, but he thought perhaps she was up between the pillars of the portico, that close.

In the morning, he scooped a potful of lard from the bath and set it to melt by his cooking-fire outside. Threads drawn from his blanket and plaited together made a wick; he laid that across the pot and let it sink, with ends trailing out on either side.

When he lit them in the shadows behind the bath-house door, they made more soot and smell than light; but they made light enough to work by, Light enough to reclaim the cellars from his mother, perhaps, though she could dangle as well in light as darkness.

She couldn’t knock, knock knock at his eyes in the light, and that was what counted.

He made as much light as he could, three lamps each with two wicks burning at both ends, twelve guttering flames to save him. He carried them down one at a time, and even the first time there was no body swinging at the head of the stairs, nor any at the foot, nor in the chamber below: only the boilers and the pumps and the constant rushing sound of water.

By his third trip down, coming from light into light with light right there in his hands, he felt secure until he looked more closely at the machinery. All the surfaces were coated in a sticky black mixture of dust and grease, generations old; but two words gleamed out at him in the light he’d brought, shining where someone had written them with a finger in that clagging muck. One of course was Guilty , and Coward was the other.

One quick sobbing breath, staring, seeing the finger in his mind — fine and delicate for sure, trembling a little perhaps with the enormity of it all — and then he turned abruptly, and saw the box of tools in the corner, half-hidden under dark and heavy piping.

A galvanised iron bucket, and a wooden box of tools: hammers and screwdrivers and wrenches, everything he could possibly need. No can of grease, but he didn’t need grease now, he had his bathful of rendered fat. He could sieve that through his shirt to get the grit out. Not first, though. Cleaning came first; and first for cleaning were the boilers that bore those two accusations, those truths.

Days he worked down there, days and into the nights sometimes, cleaning and greasing and taking apart, sketching plans and patterns of flow with charred sticks on the tiled floor. His parents left him largely undisturbed, his father no longer crossing the lake, his mother only distantly dangling. If they were making room for the girl, if it was her turn now, she was being slow to show; and he wasn’t waiting.

Not consciously, at least. Consciously, he was learning how to plumb.

At last, the turn of a great brass stopcock brought water gushing through the pipes. The furnace burned hot and fast on gathered wood; and as soon as pressure started to build, the first leaks showed where rubber had perished and his rabbitskin-and-porkfat improvisations wouldn’t hold. He patched as best he could, and set the bucket to catch the worst of the drips. It didn’t matter, he was only testing the system, and there was a drain in the floor in any case. If it wasn’t blocked.

Sweating, he refilled the furnace and threw a lever, and the pump started to knock, knock knock. Knocked and failed, and knocked again. More leaks, jets of steam now, clouding out the light; briefly he thought the show was over for the day, knock knock and nothing more.

But again a knock, and a faster knocking; the rhythm changed abruptly, hard and steady and unfaltering now, and he thought of course of kicking; and the girl came walking to him out of the steam and oh, she was so afraid.

She wore white, as she had when last he saw her. Her fingers plucked at the fabric of her dress, her eyes were wide and panic-lost and all her body was trembling. Her mouth shook so much, at first she could say nothing.

There was nothing he could say, and nothing he wanted said between them; but she tried, and tried again, and at last,

“They shot your father,” she said. “They took him out and shot him. For cowardice,” she said; and she had said all this before though not like this, not so dreadfully afraid. “There was a court martial and they found him guilty, and they shot him.”

Her voice had been hard before, hard and accusatory. You lied to me, it had been saying, you’re a coward too. There had been no tears then, and none of the pleading, none of the terror he saw in her pallid face.

Then as now, he had been unable to speak at all; then as now, she had gone driving heedlessly on, far past what was honourable or decent. And yes, he was an expert on honour by then, he’d seen it from both sides and knew it better than any.

“Your mother,” she said, though she clearly, she so much didn’t want to. “That’s why she, why she hanged herself,” she said. “For shame,” she said, “she hanged herself for shame.”

Let herself dangle in the dark for him to find when he walked clean into her, her bare toes knock knock against his blinded, desperate eyes.

“You should do that too,” she said, “why not? Why don’t you? A coward and the son of a coward, and your mother the only honourable one among you all, why don’t you just jump in the river? Too scared, I suppose,” she said, answering herself. “I should have known then, when I realised you were a water-funk. Once a coward, always a coward. Like father, like son…”

And that was all she said, because it was all she had said the first time. After that it was only crying out, and grunting.

And now as then, and this was what she’d been so afraid of: that it would happen again as it had, that it would have to.

And of course it did. He swung wildly, and felt the solidity of her against the back of his hand as she sprawled at his feet; and feet, yes, already he was kicking.

Kicking and kicking, but not to silence her this time, not for shame. Only because she was there, as his parents were intermittently there, in their intermittent deaths; and the thing was there to be done, and so he did it.

Felt better, second time. Not good, never that; but better. She cried, but not he cried. No choking, no fire in his throat or eyes, neither anger nor grief could find him. Fear might have found him, perhaps, but he wasn’t afraid of this.