Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

Fingers slithered around her neck. A barbed thumb pressed into the soft flesh under her jaw.

Her scream shut off. She couldn’t swallow her own spit. Air couldn’t reach her lungs.

The grip lifted her off her feet. Her back pressed against a window that felt like an ice-sheet. She was wrung out, couldn’t even kick.

She smelled foul breath, but saw only dark.

The train passed a searchlight. Bleaching light filled the corridor. Uniform highlights flashed: twin lightning-strike insignia, broken cross armband, jewel-eyed skull-badge, polished cap-peak like the bill of a carrion bird. No face under the cap, not even eyes. A featureless bone-white curve.

The boche had her!

She tried to forget things carried in her head. Names, code phrases, responses, locations, times, number-strings. But everything she knew glowed red, ready for the plucking.

Her captor held up his free hand, showing her a black, wet Luger. The barrel, cold as a scalpel, pressed to her cheek.

The light passed.

The pistol was pushed into her face. The gunsight tore her skin. Her cheek burst open like a peach. The barrel wormed between her teeth. Bitter metal filled her mouth.

The grip around her throat relaxed, a contemptuous signal.

She drew in breath and began to talk .

“Annie,” said Harry Cutley, open hand cupped by her stinging cheek, “come back.”

She had been slapped.

She was talking , giving up old names, old codes. “Dr Lachasse, Mady Holm, Moulin Vielle, La Vache, H-360 . . .”

She choked on her words.

Harry was bent over her. She was on a divan in the lounge carriage. Myles and Richard crowded around. Arnold the Conductor attended, white towel over his arm, bearing cocktails. Hers, she remembered, was a gimlet.

“Where were you?” asked Harry. “The War?”

She admitted it. Harry had been holding her down, as if she were throwing a fit. Suddenly self-conscious, he let her go and stood away. Annette sat up and tugged at her dress, fitting it properly. Nothing was torn, which was a mercy. She wondered about her face.

Her heart thumped. She could still feel the icy hand, taste oily gunmetal. When she blinked, SS scratches danced in the dark.

“Can we get you anything?” asked Harry. “Water? Tea?”

“I believe that’s mine,” she said, reaching out for her cocktail. She tossed it back at a single draught. Her head cleared at once. She replaced the empty glass on Arnold’s tray. “Another would be greatly appreciated.”

Arnold nodded. Everyone else had to take their drinks from the tray before he could see to her request. They sorted it out – a screwdriver for Myles, whisky and water for Harry, a virgin mary for Richard. Arnold, passing no comment on her funny turn, withdrew to mix a fresh gimlet.

“Case of the horrors?” diagnosed Myles.

She held her forehead. “In spades.”

“A bad dream,” said Harry, disappointed. His pen hovered over a blank sheet in his folder. “Hardly a manifestation .”

“To dream, wouldn’t she have to be asleep?” put in Richard. “She went into it standing up.”

“A fugue, then. A fit.”

Harry erred on the side of rational explanation. Normally, Annette admired that. Harry kept an investigation in balance, stopped her – and the rest of the spooks – from running off with themselves. Usually, ghosts were only smugglers in glow-in-the-dark skeleton masks. Flying saucers were weather balloons. Reanimated mummies were rag week medical students swathed in mouldy bandages. Now, his thinking was just blinkered. There were angry spirits on the Scotch Streak. And, for all she knew, little green Martians and leg-dragging Ancient Egyptians.

“Have you had fits before?” asked Richard.

“No, Richard,” she said patiently. “I have not.”

“But you do get, ah, ‘visions’?”

“Not like this,” she said. “This was a new experience. Not a nice one. Trust me. It reached out and hit me.”

“ ‘It’?” said Harry, frowning. “Please try to be more scientific, Annie! You must specify. What ‘it’? Why an ‘it’ and not a ‘them’?”

Her heartbeat was normal now. She knew what Harry – irritating man! – meant. She tried to be helpful.

“Just because it’s an ‘it’ doesn’t mean there’s no ‘them’? An army is an ‘it’, but has many soldiers, a ‘them’.”

Harry angry, at something Richard called him .

“What came for me wasn’t one of my usuals,” she continued. “I see what might happen. And not in ‘visions’, as Richard put it. I don’t hear ‘voices’ either. I just know what’s coming, or might be coming. As if I’d skipped ahead a few pages and skim-read what happens next.”

Harry, Richard and Myles backing away from her . No, they were still close – they wouldn’t back away for a few minutes.

“I see round corners. Into the future. This was from somewhere else.”

“The past?” prompted Richard. “A ghost?”

“The past? Yes. A ghost? Not in the traditional sense. More like an incarnation , an embodiment. Not a personality. My idea of the Worst Thing. It reached into me, found out what my Worst Thing was, and played on it. But there was still the train. I was on the train. It lives here. The Worst Thing. The Worst Thing Ever. The Worst Thing in the World.”

“Dramatic, Annie, but not terribly helpful.”

Harry put the top back on his biro.

“Listen to her,” said Richard, slipping an arm around her shoulder – a mature gesture for such a youth. “She’s not hysterical. She’s not imagining. She is giving you a report. Write down what she’s said.”

Harry was not inclined to pay attention to the Jeperson Boy.

“I can’t,” he said. “It’s static. It’ll cloud the issue. We need observable phenomena. Incidents that can be measured. Traced back to a source. I’ll get the instruments.”

“We have instruments,” said Richard. “Better attuned than your doodads, Daddy-O. We have Annette and Magic Fingers.”

He didn’t include himself, but should have.

A burst of indignant fury belched from Harry as Richard called him “Daddy-O”. She flinched at the psychic outpouring, but less than she would if she hadn’t known it was coming.

The lad was pushing with Harry. He couldn’t help himself.

Myles laid a hand on her forehead, nodded.

“Something’s been at her,” he said. She didn’t like the sound of that. “Left clawmarks.”

“Will everybody please stop talking as if this were my autopsy,” she said. “I have been attacked, affronted, shaken. But I am not a fragile flower you need to protect. I can take care of myself.”

Like she did in the War.

The curve under the SS cap came back to her. If questioned, she would have talked. Everyone did, eventually. It had never come to it, because of her trick, her way of putting her feet right, of avoiding situations. Others – the names that had come back to her – had been less fortunate. As far as she knew, they were dead or damaged beyond repair. Most had been caught – talking made no difference in the end, they were still killed.

Ever since, she had been putting her feet right. Walking near peril, not into it. Here, she was on a train – a row of linked boxes on wheels. There might be no right steps here. There might only be danger. Her gift was often knowing where not to be. Here, knowing where not to be did not mean she could avoid being there.

She trusted her instincts. Now, they were shouting: pull the communication cord! She could afford the fine for misusing the emergency stop signal. One swift tug, and brakes would be thrown. The Scotch Streak would scream to a halt. She could jump onto the tracks, head off over the fields.