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

Bairns was on the step, and came in at once. Five of his colleagues followed, trying to equal his expressionlessness, and Claire didn’t know when the house had felt so crowded. “He’s in the front room, Inspector,” Wilf said.

“If you and Mrs Maynard would stay here.” Bairns’ gaze had already turned to his colleagues, and a nod sent two of them to stand close to the Maynards. He paced into the front room and lingered just inside, hands behind his back, as a prelude to squatting by Gummer’s body. He hardly touched it before standing up, and Claire felt as if he’d confirmed her loathing of it. “I must ask you to accompany us to the police station, Mr Maynard,” he said.

“I’m ready.”

“You too, Mrs Maynard, if you will. You’ll understand if I ask you not to travel in the same car.”

“In that case do you mind if I give my wife a cuddle, Inspector? I expect it may be her last for a while.”

The policeman’s impassiveness almost wavered as he gave a weighty nod. Wilf took hold of Claire’s shoulders and drew her to him. For a moment she was afraid to hug him with all the fierceness in her, and couldn’t quite think why. Of course, he’d scratched himself with his patrolman’s badge that night on the golf course. The scratches would have healed by now, not that she had seen his bare chest for years. When he put his arms around her she responded, and felt him trying to lend her strength, and telling her silently to support his version of events. They remained embraced for a few seconds after Bairns cleared his throat, then Wilf patted her back and pushed her away gently. “We’d best get this over and done with then, Inspector.”

Bairns had been delegating men to drive the Maynards. He directed an unambiguously sympathetic glance at Claire before turning a more purposeful look on Wilf. Wilf was going to convince him, she thought — had already convinced him. She had never realised her husband could be so persuasive when he had to be. She saw him start towards the front door, matching his pace to that of his escort as though he was taking his first steps to his cell. Her sense of his persuasiveness spread through her mind, and in that instant she knew everything.

“I’ll drive you whenever you’re ready, Mrs Maynard,” a youngish policeman murmured, but Claire was unable to move. She knew why Wilf had seemed relieved at the prospect of the sentence he was courting — because he’d been afraid he might be jailed for worse. Everything made its real sense now. Nobody had been more obsessed with the way Laura dressed and was developing than Wilf. Claire remembered accusing Gummer of being attracted to a girl as a preferred version of an older woman she resembled. The accusation had been right, but not the man.

“Mrs Maynard?”

She saw Wilf’s back jerking rhythmically away from her, and imagined its performing such a movement in the bunker. For a moment she was certain she could emerge from her paralysis only by flying at him — but she was surrounded by police who would stop her before she could finish him off, and she had no proof. She’d nursed her rage until tonight, she had hidden it from the world, and she could do so again. She felt pregnant with its twin, which would have years to develop. “I’m ready now,” she said, and took her first step as her new self.

Wilf was being handed into the nearest police car as she emerged from the house. Shut him away, she thought, keep him safe for me. His door slammed, then the driver’s, but apart from a stirring of net curtains the activity went unacknowledged by the suburb. As Claire lowered herself stiffly into the next car, Wilf was driven off. One thing he needn’t worry about was her confirming his tale. She would be waiting when he came out of prison, and she could take all that time to imagine what she would do then. Perhaps she would have a chance to practise. While she was waiting she might find other men like him.

Lawrence Watt-Evans was born and raised in Massachusetts, but after sojourns in Pennsylvania and Kentucky he is now firmly settled in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D. C. He is a full-time writer of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, with more than two dozen novels and a hundred short stories to his credit, as well as articles, comic books, poetry, etc.

In 1988 he was nominated for a Nebula and won the Hugo Award and the Asimov’s Readers’ Poll Award for his story “Why I left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers”. He served two years as president of the Horror Writers Association (1994–1996), and his most recent novels are Touched by the Gods and Dragon Weather.

They’re so damn loud up there. Yelling and fighting, and then that thumping — I guess it must be folk dances or something.

They could show a little consideration, couldn’t they?

And then there was the time they left the water running and it leaked through the bathroom ceiling and damn near flooded the place, and of course it was the weekend and we couldn’t get hold of the landlord until Monday — no, Tuesday, it was a long weekend! And there was wet plaster falling all over the sink and the floor. And stains everywhere.

I tell you, if we could find a decent apartment we’d have been out of this rathole years ago.

And they won’t talk to us when we see them in the halls, when I shout at them they just walk right on by like they didn’t even hear me. I went up there once to complain, but they wouldn’t answer the door.

Maybe they were busy; I think their refrigerator must have broken down or something, because even with the door closed I could smell something rotten.

They can’t be very clean.

Anyway, tonight was the last straw, more yelling, and singing this awful high-pitched song, like something the Arabs sing in one of those old movies, and then thumping about and I swear I heard the furniture breaking.

“I’ve had enough,” Jack said, and I agreed and said he should call the cops, and he said no, he’d settle it himself, and he went up there.

There was more yelling then, and banging, but then it stopped. I guess he talked some sense into them.

I wish he’d get back, though. There’s something dripping through the ceiling again.

It’s not water, though, it must be paint.

It’s bright red.

Caitlín R. Kiernan’s short fiction has appeared in such anthologies as Love in Vein II, Dark Terrors 2 and 3, Dark of the Night, White of the Moon, Silver Birch, Blood Moon, Darkside, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and Best New Horror.

Her first novel, Silk, was published in 1998 and has so far received both the International Horror Guild and Barnes & Noble Maiden Voyage awards for best first novel. She also writes the graphic novel series The Dreaming for DC Comics/Vertigo. A collection of her short fiction, Tales of Pain and Wonder, is forthcoming from Gauntlet Publications, and her second novel, Trilobite, will appear from Penguin/Roc. The author also publishes her own irregular newsletter, Salmagundi, and her official website is http://www.negia.net/~pandora, which she shares with Poppy Z. Brite and Christa Faust.

As Kiernan reveals, “I think that the ocean has always affected me the way that outer space affects a lot of people — that same dizzying sense of awe at the vastness of it, at the unknown. A lot of my childhood was spent by the sea, and it was always fascinating and terrifying at the same time. It still is.

“In ‘Postcards from the King of Tides’, the main thing I wanted to do was communicate these feelings about the sea, in particular, the way that my first visit to the Pacific coast of Oregon and northern California affected me. There aren’t many things I love as much as the sea, but there aren’t many things that frighten me as much, either. The title was suggested by George Darley’s poem, ‘The Rebellion of the Waters’ (1822).”