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

Martin shrank from the voice. It spoke the truth. He was a boy. He was wicked. He had put his skinny fingers into a purse and pulled out a coin.

“You done it, so you knew this was coming. I give you a walk on the roof, didn’t I? Like I do to everyone I has to deal with. I give you a breath of fresh air and let you see the countryside, but then I bring you down here and you got to face it.”

There were tears on his face, but there was no chance to cry out. He was choked to silence by heavy fingers across his face.

“You don’t want to be gagged now, do you, son?”

The fingers relaxed and as they did so Martin ceased to struggle.

“That’s more like it, boy. Now I want you to step forward.”

He heard himself whimper. Then the voice of the hangman. “Three steps . . . that’s all it takes.”

He was gripped and pushed. He saw the outline of the trap in the floor, and his feet were kicked until he stood on it.

His legs were bound. The rope brushed his head, but there was no hood. He felt the knot of the noose tighten under his ear. The rope was rough on his neck. He struggled, silently, lithe as a cat, writhing like a dangling man but with his feet still scuffling the solid trapdoor. And now came the hood, and blackness. The cloth was against his mouth and his last breath was muffled as the trap fell away beneath him, and he dropped.

Then nothing . . .

blankness . . .

darkness . . .

Pain flashed white in his brain, and a voice was saying something.

The hangman had bungled. His neck was not broken. He struggled to free his arms from the cords. There were no cords.

The voice again: “Dr Glover . . . can you hear me? We’ve been looking for you. You weren’t in your office and we found you here . . .”

He lay on a hard floor. He moved an arm. He was not shackled. A flashlight blinded him, and he shielded his eyes.

“We thought you must’ve gone onto the roof for a breath of air, but there was no sign of you.”

Suddenly he was sitting up. There were two men. “Who are you!”

“Night staff. We’ve just found you.”

He looked around wildly. He was in the picture gallery. The light was dim except for the beam stabbing into his eyes. No gallows. He slid his hand over the polished floor. No sign of a trapdoor.

“Where is he?” he said

The men were crouched beside him. Who did he mean, they asked.

“Jack,” he said. He scrambled to his feet. “Where’s the one they call Jack?”

The men were silent for a moment. Then one of them said, “There’s only us two, Dr Glover – Maurice and Fred, we do the night watch together.”

Silence. He looked from one to the other. Maurice and Fred. He opened his mouth but no words came.

“You must have fainted, Doctor. Did you hurt yourself?”

“No . . . no, there’s nothing wrong with me.” He looked around the gallery. He got to his feet without help, and after a moment turned cautiously to face them. “Long ago,” he said, knowing that he spoke slyly, “I believe this room had another purpose. Is that so?”

Both men smiled. “You mean when it was a prison?” said Maurice, the leader. “Someone’s been telling you the old story.” He nodded towards the corner. “It’s true enough. The gallows used to be over there, in the execution chamber.”

Martin’s mouth was too dry to speak. He was unsteady, and Maurice noticed. “Let’s go down to your room, Dr Glover, and we’ll get you a drink.”

Sitting at his desk with the companionship of two others he began to recover. “I didn’t know anything about the gallows but I certainly felt strange in that room,” he said.

They both nodded. “Fred and I can tell you that something lingers in places like that, and if you weren’t feeling too good, well . . .” Maurice shrugged.

Martin had only hinted at his nightmare, but he had to test what had happened. “I was told . . .” he began and then corrected himself. “People say there have been a lot of suicides here . . . people leaping from the Castle walls.”

“I’ve never heard of any,” said Maurice, and Fred agreed.

“But there’s a list,” Martin insisted.

Both men looked blank and shook their heads and in his exasperation Martin suddenly burst out, “Jack told me the Castle kept a record!” Jack again, and there was no Jack. He looked away. “I’m sorry.”

It was Fred, the quieter of the two, who shuffled for a moment before he stood up and went to a filing cabinet in the corner of the tiny room that had at one time been a dungeon. He had to rummage before he took out what looked like an old account book and laid it on Martin’s desk. “I don’t know about suicides,” he said, “but I reckon this is a sort of register.”

Martin opened it. In fact it was an account book with columns marked in red ink. There was a list of dates and against each was a person’s name, and beneath that another name and then a sum of money. In each case the amount was one guinea.

Martin looked up. “They can’t be suicides.”

“No, Doctor. Not suicides, but they all died here in the Castle. They were executed here. Murderers mostly.”

He looked again at the columns. The names of hanged men, their age, and against each one the name of his trade. On the line beneath every one was written: Paid J. Ketch, one guinea .

“That was for a job well done, Doctor Glover.” Both watchmen were smiling. “Jack Ketch was the name this city used to give to the public hangman – so as no one knew who he really was.”

“And they do say that Jack made all his clients suffer,” said Maurice. “Kind of played with them before he turned them off. And he never got the drop right so they suffered a lot more than they had to – more strangled than hanged.”

Martin nodded. His eyes dipped again to the page, the column of names and, at the bottom of the list, one in particular: Martin Jones, aged twelve, thief, and then the trade he was apprenticed to glover .

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER

The Luxury of Harm

CHRISTOPHER FOWLER HAS WRITTEN many award-winning novels and collections of short stories. His 2003 book Full Dark House won the British Fantasy “August Derleth” Award for Best Novel and was also a finalist for the Crime Writer Association’s Dagger Award. The Water Room was short-listed for the CWA’s People’s Choice Award in 2004, and he won British Fantasy Awards for his short story “American Waitress” the same year and for his novella “Breathe” in 2005.

When he’s not writing horror or dark comedy, he’s creating new adventures for Bryant & May, his elderly detectives of the sinister. He lives in King’s Cross, London, with a very nice view of St Paul’s Cathedral. His latest novel is White Corridor , and his upcoming collection of twenty-one new short stories is titled Old Devil Moon .

As Fowler admits: “ ‘The Luxury of Harm’ is a mean-spirited blend of real-life events that included being Best Man at an old friend’s wedding and going to a horror festival in an English coastal town. I don’t think I’ll be invited back after they read this.”

WHEN I WAS ELEVEN, I was warned to stay away from a new classmate with freckles and an insolent tie, so naturally we became inseparable partners in disruption, reducing our educators to tears of frustration.

For the next eight years our friendship proved mystifying to all. Simon horrified our teachers by illegally racing his Easy Rider motorbike across the football field. We took the deputy headmaster’s car to pieces, laying it out in the school car park as neatly as a stemmed Airfix kit. We produced a libellous school magazine with jokes filched from TV programmes, and created radio shows mocking everyone we knew. When you find yourself bullied, it’s best to team up with someone frightening. Simon perverted me from learning, and I made his soul appear salvageable whenever he super-glued the school cat or made prank phone-calls. I fretted that we would get into trouble, and he worked out how we could burn down the school without being caught.