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

“I suppose I could keep doing this forever,” she said, her voice quiet, and I knew he must be there, somewhere, just out of earshot; asleep, perhaps, blissfully unaware that she would be gone before he woke, and that he would never have her again. “What’s that poem, you know… the one where she eats men like air? It’s so easy, Ruth. They make it so easy. The world will never run dry of gullible men.”

The slow drip of the toilet cistern, like water torture. Press “2” to repeat. Press “3” to delete.

“I suppose I could keep doing this forever,” she said.

Press “2” to repeat.

“It kills them when they realise they can’t have me,” she said. “Only it’s not really me they want. That’s the thing. They want the idea of me, the one they’ve built in their heads. I give them so little to work with, and when they fill in the blanks the Elodie they come up with never looks like me. It’s only you, Ruth. You’re the only one who knows me at all.”

Press “2” to repeat.

“It’s only you, Ruth.”

Slack face pressed against cold tiles. Mouthing her words like an incantation.

Press “2” to repeat.

“It’s only you.”

“It just felt right,” she said. “It felt like it was time. Like a voice, somewhere inside. Calling me back. I had a good run this time, I think.”

I drew air into disembodied lungs, breathing on blind faith. I was numb meat. I might not have existed at all but for the dull fire of my fingertips, my toes, cold-bitten and burning as I kicked feebly against the current, struggling to stay afloat.

Her voice cut through the cold blood-rush of the water, an arrow to the brain: “It tires you out, always having to pretend. And of all the places I’ve been, of all the people I’ve met, you were the only one who ever got it right. You were the only one who thought to look inside.”

Hands light on my shoulders. Skin so cold the breath caught in my lungs. Above me, moonlight seared through the gaps in the pier, stark as bleached ribs. I’d looked inside of her and seen nothing at all but bones couched in black rot; her magpie soul, pieced together out of the fragments she stole from other people, other lives, like a ransom note assembled from newsprint. I could have destroyed her, if I’d wanted to. I could have ruined her. I could have.

“Remember when I told you I’d seen the face of God?”

Arms around me, firm. A lover’s embrace. Drifting together out into that dark, quiet space, away from the shore. Numb feet free-floating in the cold, black water. Gently, she lifted my head.

“Nobody believed me but you. Nobody knows me like you do, Ruth. Nobody loves me like you do.”

I remembered Sean on the beach, staring fretfully at the blood-red embers. She never felt real , he’d said, and he’d been right. Elodie wasn’t real. She was better than real. She was an act nobody could follow. How could you love a flesh-and-blood human after being exposed to such a perfect cipher?

Her teeth against my skin, anaesthetised with cold as she tore away the flesh, swallowed without chewing. Her tongue was so warm, lapping catlike at my blood. I had dreamed of this, of her tongue and her mouth and her hands, fingers sliding between my teeth. I bit down, tasted the bitter salt of her the way she had tasted me.

Perhaps, when she returned—decades later, somewhere far from here, wearing someone else’s face, someone else’s name—there would still be something of me inside of her. A fragment lodged deep in that black, empty cavity; woven into the tapestry of her salvage-yard persona, a series of anecdotes here, a personality quirk there. Perhaps she might even remember me.

“It’s only you, Ruth.” Skin shearing as her mouth opened wide, hot and cavernous, the wet tear of muscle fibre, of flesh; like birth in reverse, the silk of her pulsing throat hot against my skull. The exquisite agony of teeth splintering bone. Down into the black water, where she was lithe and strong, legs tight around my ribcage, squeezing out the last tightly held breath. Silvery bubbles rose, broke on the surface. Her lips eclipsed me.

It’s only you.

Her mouth, like a black hole. Like the end of everything.

With a subtle turn of the outboard, Abesh steered them towards a narrow gap between the two nearest vessels. Before they slipped into the dark channel, Samir cast another glance along the coast, taking in all of the tankers and container ships beached there. Some of the vessels were still very much intact, and if they did not look as good as new they at least looked functional. Others were merely skeletal outlines of steel, stripped down to holds empty of all but shadows. Or so they seemed.

The ship Abesh was taking him to was in a state of only partial decay. Several attempts had been made to take it apart, but work was now far behind schedule. It usually took three to six months to break a ship, but the Karen May had been sitting in the mud for nearly a year.

They passed massive propeller blades that sat only half submerged, huge fans of rusty red-brown metal hanging mud-crusted over seawater they had once twisted into currents, churned into froth. And then man and boy were past them and between ships, moving through the shadows of giants.

A sudden chill enveloped Samir as they left the sun behind, its warmth and light eclipsed by the ships either side. The metal walls channelled a cool breeze between them as Abesh steered them in and through with the tide, bump-bumping over the small waves that swelled in the reduced straight space of the sea. The shadows here were deep, deep as the cavities exposed in the steel, the metal skins of the ships pockmarked and stripped of material. Enormous superstructures, rising out of the water, they threw a vast darkness that seemed to leak from their hulls, casting them into premature dusk until there, suddenly, from high above, a shower of shooting stars that were gone before they could reach the water. Sparks from an acetylene torch somewhere nearby. Someone was working late.

Abesh muttered something, his Chittagonian fast and clipped with urgency. He put a finger to his lips to hush Samir, though he wasn’t the one to have spoken.

“They will tell us it is dangerous,” Abesh said, his voice low.

“It is,” said Samir.

Abesh cut the engine and they drifted, carried by their momentum. It was the same way Samir had travelled for years now. Momentum. All that had ever happened drove him towards all that was yet to occur.

“Listen,” said Abesh.

Samir could hear the waves slapping against the sides of their own small boat and the enormous ships to their left and right. From somewhere hidden within one of them came some deep gurgling, the throaty rumble of an ocean contained, longing to escape. He heard the resounding clank of something heavy, its echo swallowed by other settling noises.

“Can you hear them?”

Abesh was joking, or trying to, but Samir said, “Not yet.”

The boy shrugged. “This is it.” He pulled their drifting boat closer to the structure beside them. The sea lapped into an exposed corridor or hold, Samir couldn’t tell, and a set of steps led deeper into the vessel. “This is a good place,” Abesh said as he roped them to the framework.

“That’s not what I was told.”

Abesh laughed. “Are you scared?”

Samir shook his head. “No,” he said, but he was lying.

Samir had come to Chittagong three days ago. More specifically, he had come to a single stretch of coastline where ships came to die. Not so many years ago, it was a part of Bangladesh that would have been dense with mangroves. Now it held more than a hundred ship-breaking yards, the mangroves cleared to make way for the ever-expanding and always-profitable business of destruction.