Тим Леббон - New Fears 2 - Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

If I wasn’t so terrified, so confused and frightened, it might have been beautiful.

Just past an old car showroom, now displaying a score of vehicles resting on flat tyres and with rust eating at bodywork, I drew level with the local park. It had once contained a playing field, a bandstand and a play area for children, but now all that was gone. Close to the park gates and fence were three JCBs, motionless and dead. Beyond them, the park had been excavated in several long, wide strips. Some of these massive trenches were partly filled in, but most remained open to view. One was filled with rough timber coffins, piled in without any real care, like a tumble of giant Jenga blocks. The next trench along was filled with skeletons. They had run out of time to box up the dead.

I stopped and leaned against the cast-iron fence at the park’s boundary. I felt a deep, cool shock settling in me, a sickness of the soul as similar images from history sprung to mind. But these were no murder pits. Piled beside one trench were hundreds of simple wooden crosses, unplanted. I wondered if each of them bore a name, and my eyes were drawn back to the countless skeletons settled in the open excavation, staring at the sky with hollow eyes as they waited forever to be hidden away from this cruel, dead world.

I tore myself away from the dreadful sight and moved on. I saw no other mass burials, but the memory remained with me, an awful visual echo to everything else I witnessed.

When I reached my house there were no surprises to be found. It was the same as everywhere else. My home, the place where I lived and loved and felt safe, had fallen into ruin.

Seeing a place I knew so well in such a state was shattering, hitting home much harder than anything else I had seen. The house name Jayne and I had screwed to the front wall together was broken in two, half of it fallen away. She’d cut her thumb while we were fixing the plaque to the brickwork, and I’d put it in my mouth to ease her pain. The garish red paintwork she had chosen for the front door was faded, much of it peeled away to the bare wood beneath. The hawthorn tree we had planted in the front garden, and which had become so much work to keep under control, had grown wild, its spiked branches reaching forward for the street and back towards the house as if to embrace the place for itself. I remembered clipping those branches one by one, while Jayne snipped them small enough to feed carefully into the garden-waste bags. We’d both suffered pricks and wounds that day. She’d laughed at my pin-cushion hand that evening, and I’d rolled her onto the sofa and silenced her with a kiss.

I sobbed, standing in the street and staring at the place I had once called home.

I’d only left three hours earlier.

“Somebody!” I shouted. “Jayne! Anybody!” My cries echoed from buildings close by, but were soon swallowed by the wild trees and shrubs along our street. I reckoned that within another ten years much of this place would resemble an infant forest. Twenty years after that, new trees would be higher than the house roofs. And a century later, the houses would be little more than piles of rubble subsumed by undergrowth, hugged to the land’s embrace by brambly limbs.

I shouted again, the only reply my despairing and muffled cry echoing back at me. I took a step towards the house. It was desolate, silent and dead, and I dreaded what I might find inside. Nothing would be bad. The bones of my wife would be so much worse.

And then, as I pushed past the rotten front fence and the clasping plants that held it upright, movement. A shadow shifted in one of my home’s upper windows. Sunlight glinted from fractured glass. A pale face appeared at the window, still too far inside to make out properly, but definitely there.

Jayne , I thought, and took a step forward.

But it was not Jayne.

The face that appeared at the window was wild, heavy with beard and framed with long, straggly hair, thin and sunburned, eyes staring and mad. I felt a moment of rage at the man who had made my house his own.

Then I realised that this was the only person I had seen since leaving the tunnel, and my rage became confused. Tears came to my eyes, and I felt a pang of deep loneliness. I wanted to rush in and hug this man, speak to him, and hopefully understand that this strange situation was not merely my own personal madness. I wished it was.

“Hello!” I called. I took another step forward into the front garden, edging around the clasping thorns of the hawthorn. “What happened here? I went for a run and when I came back––”

He lifted an object and pointed it at me. I heard a low twang , and something sliced across my right bicep.

Shock rooted me to the spot as the man fumbled with the object and raised it again. I fell to the left just as another arrow whispered by, bouncing off the road behind me. Then I stood and ran.

Another arrow struck my bare left thigh, and I felt the piercing cool kiss of the tip slicing into my skin. I yelped and reached back, but the arrow had fallen away. Its head had merely cut my flesh, and when I brought my hand up it was smeared with blood. The pain was keen and sharp, the wound superficial. It didn’t seem to have affected my ability to move.

I did not stop running. I could not. I had to run as fast as I could, back across that strange town I had once known and over the drained canal, up the hillside, into the tunnel where everything had changed. There was no discernible thought process leading to this action, no consideration. It was the only thing to do, and it felt like the only way I might find my way back to normality.

From the house I had once lived in came a dreadful, guttural roar, a scream of such hopelessness that my blood ran cold and every hair on my body stood on end. I sprinted back the way I had come, fearing another arrow. The buildings around me now loomed, and every dark window or open doorway might have been the source of another deadly shot. But no more came, and it seemed that the person in my old house might have been the only one. I glanced back when I felt it safe, and for a second––just as I checked the ground ahead before twisting around to look behind me––I knew that he would be there with me, a ragged, wild shape so close behind that I could smell his breath, feel his body heat as he ran after me in complete, monstrous silence.

I was alone. I reached the bottom of the hill and retraced my steps, crossing the drained canal, climbing, arriving at last at the tunnel mouth beneath the steep bank. Panting hard, sweating, I hesitated only for a second before ducking inside. I glanced at the skull as I did so, suddenly certain that it would not be a sheep’s skull at all, but a human’s. Buried there at the tunnel entrance, it was one of the few things about my world that had not changed.

I moved much faster than I had the first time. The tunnel seemed smaller, the floor higher. My head torch lit the way and I ducked to avoid banging my skull on the low ceiling.

He’s behind me , I thought, crawling, hands clawed, so quiet that my own gasps and scramblings covered his sound. I looked back but I was alone.

Every shadow was danger. Only the small splash of light ahead offered any hope of freedom and salvation, but the sinking conviction came that I would emerge into that desolate landscape once again.

The first time I’d come in here I had somehow turned around, exiting the way I had entered even though I had continued through the tunnel towards daylight at the other end. I had no wish to do that again. Reaching into my backpack’s hip pocket I pulled out the small penknife I always carried with me. Jayne had given it to me for my eighteenth birthday, our first year together.

I opened the blade and crawled to the tunnel wall, ready to carve in a simple arrow to show me the direction I was taking. When I aimed my head torch at the old brickwork, at first I thought it was laced with a network of thin white strands, roots from one of the trees growing above. Then I saw the arrows.