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

“Mrs Dorcas Williams was allowed to bring her best black silk dresses to the asylum, and they say that she sat in a certain chair in the ward, without speaking a word, for thirty-seven years. They say that she ate hearty, and never spotted her black silk dress.

“Mrs Williams’ family name was Hyett, and any small child in the region will run screaming if one says: ‘Mother Hyett was very hungry.’ “

Vlad picked up Jack from his family’s home, and said that they were off to a meeting of the mysterious committee.

The man at the head of the table said that, like the interesting club in New York City whose only rule was that there were no rules, this committee had no name, no schedule of meetings — this was either its third, tenth, or twelfth session, depending on how you looked at it — and no formal chair. “And if anyone else would rather chair this, speak up, I’ll gracefully yield.” No one spoke up.

Then the people around the table looked up to see two other people who hadn’t been present before. “What the hell,” said Bagnell. “You’re not supposed to be here, you know.”

“I know,” said Vlad Smith. “Do you still doubt what I saw?”

Said Bagnell, “I never doubted it.”

“Why the secrecy, Branch, why?” asked Vlad.

“I was trying to protect you,” said Dave Branch.

“Like hell,” said Jack Stewart. “You were all trying to protect your frigging academic turf.”

The men faced each other silently for a moment.

“Who told you?” asked Bagnell.

“ I told them,” said Claire Zimmerman. “They are here at my invitation, because they belong here. So let’s stop squabbling over which kids are allowed in the clubhouse, and get on with it.”

Having no other choice, they got on with it.

The man at the head of the table, whom Branch identified for Vlad and Jack as Augustus Elbaum, had a reddish grizzled beard. He sighed and said, “All right. On the principle that it doesn’t matter where you begin to measure the circumference of a circle, as usual we’ll begin anywhere. Notes and queries have been sent to me, and I’ve answered some and sent some around. We’ll go over a few of them anyway.” He paused and looked around the table, then continued.

“The trouble is, you know, we are getting in over our depths. We began as a group of folklorists, most of us trained to classify and catalog: ‘Oh, this is obviously a version of Childe Ballad number such-and-such.’ Now we’ve got historians, criminologists, physicians — and we just keep getting in deeper and deeper. We may already be in over our heads. Seen the newspapers? Seen a certain picture of a certain head?”

A stir in the chamber. Not a particularly stately chamber. One might expect to see it contain a meeting of insurance salesmen looking at graphs. A stir, and a woman said, “This is. definitely a. one of ours?”

Bagnell said almost wearily, “It is definitely one of ours. By and by we’ll show you another photograph. You’ll need no convincing. But how it got to be part of a Caribbean cult ceremony in New York, I have no idea. Perhaps just as well because if I had an idea, so would the press.” He eased his long, lanky body back into his chair.

Elbaum began to pick up papers and read aloud. “ ‘ Could the jerky gait ascribed to the String-Fellow be explained by the shortening of tendons? If so, which tendons and how do they shrink ?’ Would you give that one some thought, Doctor Calloway?”

“Okay, Gus. Yes, get back to you on it.”

In the silence right after, the incessant sound of the airconditioning made itself heard. Before Elbaum could read another slip of paper, there was a vocal query in the bland, blank room. “What became of the mental patient, Hillsmith, who —?”

Bagnell stirred and spoke. “Yes, I investigated that myself. Oh, Hillsmith is certainly insane, with a horrible and disturbing delusion. On one level it’s a mad reiteration of parts of the Bible. Particularly the vision of Ezekial in the valley of the dry bones. No doubt about that. But, on another level, per haps it was triggered by the actual sighting of dormant Paper-Men, a whole group of them maybe, in a very old house, suddenly coming alive, so to speak, and beginning to move. Enough to knock anybody off the steady spin around his mental axis.”

Claire said softly and thoughtfully, her black hair hugging her round face, “Dr Elbaum, I’ve been wondering why — so far — there only seem to be Paper- Men . Why hasn’t there been a single report of a Paper- Woman? This is hardly an Equal Opportunity issue, but still I wonder, don’t you?”

Elbaum poured a glass of water and after a moment said, “We just don’t know. That’s a measure of our ignorance, not our knowledge. Why do women get pregnant and men have prostate trouble? We all know why, but with this other we can’t and don’t see why. One of many things for which we have no answer, but that’s not to say we don’t have a question. Why do sightings of Paper-Men occur most frequently just before outbreaks of war? Does the hostility and tension in the air stir them? Do our current tensions explain the upsurge of recent sightings? We have far more questions than we have answers.”

A pale woman in an odd sort of hat scratched some notes on a pad and spoke, “If the disease model is correct, all the life processes would be slowed down. metabolism. pulse. peristalsis. mental functioning. extreme desiccation. Could the Paper-Man possibly speak ? When he’s jolted from his dormant state, or when he’s still in the transition from life to pseudo-life, could he talk to us?”

“Impossible,” said someone. There were murmurs of discussion in the meeting room. “. mmm. nnn. ”

Someone else said, “There would be no pulse as we know it, I should think. The hedgehog in hibernation may be said to cease breathing. Hibernating hedgehogs have been submerged in water for over half an hour and they didn’t drown, they just got wet.”

Silence. The air a dull cool which did not refresh.

“I’d say. from what I’ve heard and read and thought about… it seems to me that some of them died despairing and some died hating. and those ones that are most dangerous died hating.”

Someone who had been drinking water suddenly put it down and asked, hastily, “Oh say, Gus. Rats? About those rats — ”

About the rats…

Elbaum wondered aloud, “Where to begin, where to begin?” Then said that he would begin by considering not merely no supernatural explanation, but no explanation that could not be made in only moderately non-conventional terms.

“Okay. about them eating rats; let’s say we have someone named Jack Jones in, say, Memphis in 1845, suffering from any one of a number of possible diseases causing intense cramps and vomiting. Say there’s been an outbreak of cholera. Or plague. Everyone will at once assume he’s got the pest. and everyone will clear out, fast. So now assume that he is a stranger in Memphis, and he’s all alone in some shack, some whore’s crib. Okay. Time passes. No one comes near him. He might very well have died, but, somehow, he doesn’t die. After a week or two he’s probably on the floor and he may be partially naked, hell, even entirely naked. Need I say that he’s terribly emaciated, puking and nearly dead, glarey-eyed and gaunt and very likely more than a bit out of his mind. He’s famished, famished. If there’d been a crust of bread, a cheese rind or a bacon rind, why, he’d already eaten that long ago, as soon as he could eat. Then along comes a rat. A rat creeps along the wall as rats do.”