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

And through the mist I gradually discerned a slender figure, his head lolling slightly to one side, one arm lower than the other, like the skeleton in Aurora’s “Forgotten Prisoner” model kit, or the one that features on my cover of The Seventh Pan Book of Horror Stories . It was standing so still that it seemed to be more like the unearthed figurehead of a boat than a man.

There was a strong smell of ozone and rotting fish. The figure raised a ragged, dripping sleeve to its skull, rubbing skin to bone. It seemed as though it had ascended from the black bed of the sea.

“I fell off the fucking dock and tore my jacket. I am so incredibly slaughtered,” said Simon, before tipping over and landing on his back in the sand with a thump.

The next morning, screaming seagulls hovered so close to my bedroom window that I could see inside their mouths. Shafts of ocean sunlight bounced through the window, punching holes in my brain. My tongue tasted of old duvet. I needed air.

I knocked on Simon’s door, but there was no answer. Breakfast had finished, and the landlady had gone. The Easy Rider motorbike still stood in the car park behind the guest house.

The tide was out and the mist had blown away, leaving the foreshore covered in silvery razor-clams and arabesques of green weed. On the stone walkway above the harbour, an elderly lady in a tea-cosy hat marched past with a shopping bag. There was no one else about. The gulls shrieked and wheeled.

Carefully, I walked across the beach to the spot where Simon had fallen, and knelt down. It took a moment to locate the exact place. Rubbing gently at a patch of soft sand, I revealed his sand-filled mouth, his blocked nostrils, one open shell-scratched eye that stared bloodily up into the sky. I rose and stood hard on his face, rocking back and forth until I had forced his head deeper into the beach. I carefully covered him over with more sand, smoothing it flat and adding some curlicues of seaweed and a couple of cockleshells for effect. Finally I threw the shovel I had used on his neck as far as I could into the stagnant water of the harbour.

As I headed back to the convention hotel, ready to deliver my lecture on “Random Death: The Luxury of Harm”, a heartbreaking happiness descended upon me. I knew that there would be plenty of time to savour the full delicious loss of my old friend in the days, the months, the years to come.

MARK SAMUELS

Sentinels

MARK SAMUELS WAS BORN in Clapham, London. He is the author of two collections, The White Hands and Other Weird Tales and Black Altars , as well as the novella The Face of Twilight . His third collection of short stories is provisionally titled Glyphotech and Other Macabre Processes and is scheduled to be published by Midnight House.

His stories have appeared in both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series, along with such recent anthologies as Summer Chills, Inferno and Alone on the Darkside . He has been nominated twice for the British Fantasy Award.

“When my friend Adam Clayton brought out his non-fiction book Subterranean City in 2000,” Samuels recalls, “its publication reawakened in me an interest in the abandoned ‘ghost’ stations of the London Underground tube network, which I then began to research in more detail.

“This research somehow got mixed up in my imagination with a 1970s film called Deathline starring one of my favourite actors, Donald Pleasance. His portrayal of a seedy police inspector, in turn, got mixed up with ‘Death and the Compass’ by Jorge Luis Borges. This story is the final result.”

INSPECTOR GRAY’S INVOLVEMENT in the affair was due to a combination of ill fortune and the photographic cover of a London “urban legends” paperback called The Secret Underground . He should not really have been in that part of London at the time, but had been forced to stay late in the office and complete a batch of gruelling paperwork required by his superior the following morning. Had he driven past a matter of seconds before, he would have seen nothing. After all, he was off-duty and his main concern was to get back to his dingy flat in Tufnell Park, sink a few glasses of whiskey and forget about that day.

He planned to lose himself in some cheap and trashy horror paperback from his little collection. The TV had broken down months ago and instead of replacing it he found that he had got into the habit of reading musty book relics from the ’60s and ’70s, with their yellowing, brittle pages and lurid covers. Gray fancied himself something of a connoisseur when it came to the covers; in fact he felt himself in opposition with the old maxim about never judging a book by them. He harboured the conviction that those featuring a weird photographic composition were invariably superior to those that had artwork depicting the tired cliché-symbols of horror; skulls, snakes or gothic castles for example.

In fact, he had come in for some jokes at his expense back at the Yard over his choice of reading matter. Most of his colleagues talked about little except what they watched on TV the night before, often sleazy porn videos that they’d “loaned” from the Obscene Publications division. They’d taken to calling him “The Weird Detective” behind his back and on one occasion he’d turned around sharply to find a group of constables miming having vampire fangs by putting their index fingers at the corners of their mouths. Gray made sure thereafter that he wasn’t seen reading any of his books during the little time he had for lunch. Instead he read one of the broadsheet papers as he consumed his sandwiches at his desk. His alienation from his colleagues caused him pain and he suspected that the department would run more smoothly were he not there.

What Gray saw as he passed by in his car appeared to be some sort of stunted, emaciated creature peering through the trellis gates of Kentish Town Underground Station. The thing was only around four or five feet tall and dressed in black ragged overalls. Its face was obscured by a mass of dusty shoulder-length hair.

It was gone 1:00 a.m. when Gray passed the Underground Station, and it had been closed for only a short time. He had pulled over to the side of the road and looked back in order to see whether the apparition was still there, but there was no sign of it at all. Doubtless, he thought, his colleagues back at the Yard would have laughed at what he thought he saw; too many of those damn books he read. But Gray felt his heart racing in his chest. He could not dismiss the thing that easily from his mind. What he’d seen was no product of the imagination. It had really been there.

Although the station was closed, it might not yet be deserted. Once the train service finished there were still staff working on the platforms and in the tunnels. An army of cleaners called “Fluffers” made their way along the lines and scoured them for debris. All manner of litter had to be cleared away, beer-cans, half-eaten junk food, newspapers, even tumbleweeds composed of skin and human hair. There was also the “Gangers”; the engineers who checked track safety. Perhaps Gray had simply glimpsed one of those overnight workers having a break, one whose similarity to the uncanny thing on the front cover of The Secret Underground was nothing more than a trick of the light.

Nevertheless, what he had observed remained in his thoughts, causing uneasy dreams when he finally slept: dreams of endless subterranean tunnels and of a gaunt silence punctuated by a distant rustling or whispering noise. Had he not seen whatever it was at the station (or whatever he thought it was) the case that came to his attention afterwards might not have seemed significant and worth pursuit.