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

Boys never tire of bad behaviour. Through the principals of economics and the theory of gravity, the Wars of the Roses and Shakespeare’s symbolism, we cut open golf balls and tied pupils up in the elastic, carved rocket-ships into desks and forged each others’ parental signatures on sick notes.

During puberty, Simon bought a mean leather jacket. I opted for an orange nylon polo-neck shirt with Velcro fastenings. He looked like James Dean. I looked like Simon Dee. In order to meet girls, we signed up for the school opera. Simon met a blue-eyed blonde backstage while I appeared as a dancing villager in a shrill, off-key production of The Bartered Bride . We double-dated. I got the blonde’s best friend, who had legs like a bentwood chair and a complexion like woodchip wallpaper, but her father owned a sweet shop so we got free chocolate. I rang Simon’s girlfriends for him because he was inarticulate, and hung around his house so much that his mother thought I’d been orphaned. Our friendship survived because he gave me visibility, confidence and a filtered charisma that reached me like secondary smoking. He stopped me from believing there was no one else in the world who understood me. And there he remained in my mind and heart, comfortable and constant, throughout the years, like Peter Pan’s shadow, ready to be reattached if ever I needed it, long after his wasteful, tragic death.

But before that end came, we shared a special moment. By the time this happened, we had gone our separate ways; he became the conformist, with a country home and family, and I turned into the strange one, living alone in town. Recontacting Simon, I persuaded him to come to a horror convention with me, in a tiny Somerset town called Silburton, where the narrow streets were steeped in mist that settled across the river estuary, and fishing boats lay on their sides in the mud like discarded toys. The place reeked of dead fish, tar and rotting shells, and the locals were so taciturn it seemed that conversation had been bred out of them.

The hotel, a modern brick block that looked like a caravan site outhouse, had no record of our booking, and was full because of the convention. In search of a guesthouse, we found a Bed & Breakfast place down beside the river ramps and lugged bags up three flights through narrow corridors, watching by the landlady in case we scratched her Indian-restaurant wallpaper. The beds felt wet and smelled of seaweed.

By the time we returned to the convention hotel, the opening night party was in full swing. A yellow-furred alien was hovering uncertainly in the reception area, struggling to hold a pint mug in his rubber claws, and a pair of local Goth girls clung to the counter, continually looking around as though they were afraid that their parents might wander in and spot them, raising their arms to point and scream like characters from Invasion of the Body Snatchers .

Every year the convention had a theme, and this year it was “Murderers on Page and Screen”, so there were a few Hannibal Lecters standing around, including a grinning lad with the top of his head sawn off. The bar staff took turns to stare at him through the serving hatch.

“Is this really what you do for fun?” Simon asked me, amazed that I could take pleasure from hanging out with guys dressed as Jason and Freddy, films no one even watched any more. “Who comes to these things?”

“Book people, lonely people,” I said simply, gesturing at the filling room. “Give it a chance,” I told him. “There’s no attitude here, and it gets to be fun around midnight, when everyone’s drunk. Come on, you said your life was very straight. This is something new.”

Simon looked unsure; he hardly ever read, so the dealers’ rooms, the panels and the literary conversation held no interest for him. He talked about his kids a lot, which was boring. I wanted him to be the kid I’d admired at school. He could relate to drinking, though, and relaxed after a couple of powerful local beers that swirled like dark sandstorms in their glasses. Simon could drink for England. “So,” he asked, “are they all writers looking for tips?”

“In a way. Take this year’s theme. We’re intrigued by motivation, method, character development. How do you create a realistic murderer? Who would make a good victim?” I tried to think of a way of involving Simon in my world. “Take the pair of us, for example. I’m on my home turf here. People know me. If I went missing, there would be questions asked. For once, you’re the outsider. You were once the tough guy, the bike-riding loner nobody knew, and you’re unknown here. That would make you the perfect victim.”

“Why?” Simon wasn’t the sort to let something beat him. His interest was piqued, and he wanted to understand.

“Because taking you out would require an act of bravery, and would be a show of strength. Killers seek notoriety to cover their inadequacies. But they also enjoy the remorse of loss.”

Simon snorted. “How the hell does that work?”

“There’s a strange pleasure to be taken in melancholy matters, don’t you think? A kind of tainted sweetness. Look at the Goths and their fascination with death and decay.”

“Okay, that’s the victim sorted, so who’s the killer?”

“Look around. Who would you choose?”

Simon scoped out the bar area. “Not the Jason or Freddy look-alikes. They’re geeks who would pass out at the sight of a paper cut. They’d be happy to watch, but they wouldn’t act.”

“Good, keep going.”

“And the Goths couldn’t kill, even though they’re professional mourners. They look tough but play gentle.”

“Excellent.”

“But him, over there.” He tapped his forefinger against the palm of his hand, indicating behind him. “He looks like he’s here to buy books about guys who murder their mothers. It wouldn’t be such a big step to committing a murder.”

“Yeah, we get a few of those at conventions. They sit in the front row at the Q&As, and are always the first to raise their hands with a question. There’s one guy, a retired doctor, who even gives me the creeps. Over there.” I pointed out the cadaverous Mr Henry, with his greasy comb-over and skin like the pages of a book left in the sun. He never missed a convention, even though he wasn’t a writer or publisher, or even a reader. “He once told me he owns one of the country’s largest collections of car crash photographs, and collects pictures of skin diseases.”

“That’s gross. I knew there would be freaks here.”

“Relax, he’s too obvious. If there’s one trick to serial killer stories, it’s making sure that the murderer is never someone you suspect. Have you noticed there are some very cute girls hanging around the bar?”

“You’re right about that,” Simon grudgingly admitted, watching two of them over the top of his glass.

“You should go and make their acquaintance,” I suggested. “I’ll just be here talking weird books with old friends, or the other way around.”

I got into a long discussion/argument about the merits of Psycho II and III , about Thomas M. Disch and William Hope Hodgson and what makes a good story, and lost all track of the time. I only checked my watch when the waiter started pulling shutters over the bar. Bidding farewell to my fellow conventioneers, I staggered off through the damp river air toward the guest-house.

Somehow I managed to overshoot the path, and ended up on the seaweed-slick ramp to the harbour. The only sounds were the lapping of the water and the tinging of masts. The tide was coming in, and the boats were being raised from their graves like reanimating corpses. Drunk and happy and suddenly tired, I sat down on the wet brown sand and allowed the sea-mist to slowly reveal its secrets. It formed a visible circle around me, like the kind of fog in a video game that always stays the same distance no matter how hard you run. A discarded shovel someone had used to dig for lugworms stood propped against the harbour wall. Orange nylon fishing nets, covered with stinking algae, were strung out like sirens’ shawls.