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

The salt piles shifted in a gentle trembling. The papers moved askew and some were picked up in a new breeze. The torch fell from where it nestled in the bag strap and began to roll, turning half-circles this way and that and jittering with the new vibrations that were passing through the ship.

Samir stood. He clutched at the nearest support.

The lost engine, and all the ghost machinery of the vessel, was making itself heard for a final time. From somewhere distant came the sound of water churning. For a brief moment Samir wondered if it was his turn to be taken and was glad there were few to remember him. Then the ship listed and Samir staggered with it. He clutched at a frame where a hatch used to be and his legs kicked out into open air as the vessel suddenly slumped violently to one side. Pieces of it fell. Lots of them. A thunderous succession of crashes, metal clattering on metal. Samir felt a wash of heat, and for a moment shadows were cast into dancing shapes by some blooming flare of orange somewhere distant in the ship’s belly.

The echo of whatever blast that had been faded like a sigh.

Samir found his feet again, though the floor he stood on now was angled and it groaned as if the weight of him was too much to bear.

Samir scooped up his torch and ran.

He’d done it. What he hadn’t expected, though, was the quick disintegration of the ship once it had let go. Now metal buckled beneath his feet and he stomped boot prints into each panel as he fled. Each step of the stairs bowed in the middle as he climbed, the last few giving way entirely under him just as he set foot on the next. He stumbled onto the deck and rolled, got back to his feet. The entire ship was leaning, as if pitched in some slow violent sea, and Samir was disorientated. His torch still worked but he might as well have been in darkness; he did not recognise where he was. Until there, on the ground, a spent match. This was the way Abesh had come. And there—another. He followed them quickly, found more stairs, and hauled himself up as parts of them crashed away beneath him.

He burst out of the ship’s confines into the free fresh air of its uppermost deck and saw they were being swept out in a rush to sea. Pulled from the shore that no longer held them, water washing in and around them as the land receded, receded—

Samir threw himself overboard. For a moment he held a graceful dive, like he’d seen the boys doing at dusk, and he panicked, recognising how he had been tricked. He had been expelled, jettisoned like spray from a cresting whale, and he had a moment to worry that he had flung himself from a great height towards mud flats that would smack him dead. But there was tide enough to catch him after all, and though it was so shallow that he felt the seabed in his kick to resurface, it held him safe.

Beside him, looming huge where it had always been, was the mud-mired steel-picked wreck of the Karen May , hollow and unhallowed. Sullen and spiteful, and silent now, but for the quiet hush of the shallows around it, and the bumping of the boat in which Abesh had brought them, still tethered to its hull and empty of all but shadows.

It was an unusual hour for anyone unbidden to be knocking at my door. Night had fallen and the porch light was off, extending no further invitations. I couldn’t see through the slats of the blinds who was out there and felt some hesitation about turning the light on, but inside my house the lights were burning brightly, so my caller could certainly see me. I illuminated my porch and did not recognize with the middle-aged male face looking back at me with its hat-in-hand expression.

I could tell at once that he wasn’t a salesman. There was something kindly and enquiring about his countenance that eased any concerns I might have had about undoing the locks.

“Good evening,” he said in a voice ripe with character. “You don’t know me, but I live a block over, on Angora Path.” He half-turned and pointed across my street to the second house on the left. “Over there, behind the Sturdivants.”

I could see no house behind the Sturdivants, only trees, but this was not to say there might not be a house there, somewhere beyond them.

I was already calculating, in the back of my mind, the possibilities awaiting me behind this obliquely neighbourly approach. This fellow had mentioned the name of a family, the Sturdivants, but in the more than thirty years that Cosima and I had lived on Locust Lane, I had never known them as anything more than a whisper of rumour, a passing blur. Of course, we kept to ourselves, by and large, though we had always been friendly with our immediate neighbours, those on either side of us, and responsive to their needs when required. In all the time we had lived here, we had seen the ramshackle house two doors down and across run down, refurbished, sold and run down again several times before the Sturdivants involved themselves in its trading of hands. But where was all this leading?

“Excuse me,” I said, closing the storm door and—in the same movement—sliding the upper window down to permit continued conversation. “I’m sorry,” I explained, “but we have a cat that likes to dart out.”

“No offence taken. That’s quite all right.”

“Was a package of ours delivered to you by accident?” I asked, hazarding a guess. “The delivery people are always doing that. I’m afraid the only time I ever get over to Angora Path is when I have someone else’s mail under my arm.”

“Well, as you see, I don’t,” my visitor said, showing his arms upraised and empty-handed. “I’ve actually come to you about another matter. It’s about…” He lowered his voice. “It’s concerning someone in the neighbourhood.”

“The drummer? I know what you mean. We can hear him clear over here when he’s practising. I can’t imagine the hell it must be for you, living right next to him.”

“No, no, that’s not what this is about.”

“All right then”—I hurried him along as politely as I could—“what is this about?”

“I don’t mean… to disturb you,” he said, showing sensitivity to my feelings and pausing every few words to weigh and squeeze those next to be spoken, “but there are… some things in place… for which we all must… assume some responsibility. It’s simply the way things work. We only involve people when they absolutely need to be and… well, now… you need to be.”

What the—? “I’m listening.”

“There is a neighbour of ours… a certain neighbour who requires, shall we say, a nightly escort.”

“An escort.”

“I assure you,” he pressed, detecting a hard coloration of suspicion in my tone, “this is nothing sinister nor unwholesome. But it is ,” he continued, after a slow peer over each shoulder, “hush-hush. A kind of privilege, you might say. All that I mean is precisely what I said.” He leaned closer to the door and lowered his voice. “We have a special neighbour, who keeps a very low profile. This neighbour moves around a lot and needs to be accompanied when the time comes for them to move… from place to place. It’s as simple as that, really. It may sound strange, but the fact is, each and every night, this neighbour packs up all their belongings in a single suitcase and moves house. And we of the neighbourhood have inherited this arrangement that this business is always conducted on our watch, under our protection.”

“This person… packs up. All of their belongings… and moves house. Every night.”

“Well, yes,” my visitor confirmed. “You know how some people are about walking around after dark.”