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

The floor was littered with prostrate bodies. Some were hanging by their necks from knotted leather straps attached to the ceiling rails. All had been recently murdered and bore signs of mutilation. There were dozens of the corpses packed into the carriage. Their limbs protruded at misshapen angles from the humps of flesh and clothing. Extreme terror and pain marked their facial expressions. The body of Carlos Miguel lay amongst the charnel crowds. Like the Castilian, Gray had been left for dead.

Somehow he’d come to be a passenger in a carriage that appeared to date from, he guessed, the 1920s. The carriage lights were single bulbs housed in Art-Deco glass oysters with a very wide aisle running between the longitudinal seating. It must have been antiquated rolling stock, for there were advertisements from that far-off decade above the windows and the Underground map showed routes such as the Hampstead and Highgate Line, the City and South London Railway and the Central London Railway. Back then the Victoria and Jubilee lines had not even been thought of, let alone built. Moreover, the map was like a complicated tangle of spaghetti and not modelled on the famous Beck circuit-board design.

Struggling to his feet and clutching the pole at the end of the seats, Gray stood in a daze for a moment, rocking with the motion of the train. His wristwatch showed 1:20 a.m. He’d been out cold for well over eight hours. His left trouser leg stuck to the inside of his thigh, where the stream of blood oozing from his rectum had partially dried. He picked his way through the corpses and found that he was trapped in the last carriage of the train and the connecting door to the penultimate carriage had been welded shut.

Gray crept back to a seat and peered through the window to the tunnels outside. Suddenly the train entered a platform, without slowing, and he pressed his face to the glass in order to try and make out the station name as it flashed past. The light from the interior of the carriages projected enough illumination for him to see a faded sign reading NORTH END. It also just made visible the stunted, faceless forms that haunted the shadows of passageways further back – forms that shunned the light, but which welcomed the arrival of the Sentinel with malefic glee, chattering deafeningly in the semi-darkness.

Gray had no doubt that the inner and outer gates were closed right the way across the Underground network, now that the Sentinel had completed its journey. He harboured the notion that these gates served a purpose quite different from the official one and were used to prevent escape along the tracks to the surface. Drayton had described many pieces of the jigsaw in his book The Secret Underground . Gray had not fitted them together until it was too late and would finally solve the mystery in the labyrinthine reaches of an industrial Sheol.

In his mind’s eye he saw a vision in which the disparate chapters of Drayton’s book merged to form a coherent explanation of what was happening. It was an explanation involving a series of derelict reverse skyscrapers, one of which was beneath North End, whose ultimate depth was probably over a thousand feet; a structure populated by beings who were sometimes bored with the repast foraged by using the smaller tunnels that led to the cemeteries and burial grounds across London. Could it be possible that the feasters had absorbed some of the characteristics of the corpses upon which they preyed, as in cannibalistic folklore?

He thought of an abandoned train and its driver . . . Como una palomilla . . . of a man called Heath with thick eyeglasses, his face obscured, and who knew as much as Drayton himself . . .

As he thought about the ghost stations on the Piccadilly Line, the Central Line, the Metropolitan Line and all the others, he guessed that each doubtless had its own Sentinel operating that night as well.

Suddenly, the lights in all the carriages went out.

Acting on the signal, as they’d done so many times in the past, they surged up from the edifice’s black abyss of corridors and debris-choked rooms in a ravenous tide.

As the stunted forms eagerly scrambled across the divide between them and the train, he finally realised that, in order to keep them down there in the dark, to prevent them overrunning London altogether, it was necessary for them to be fed.

Gray only had time to scream once in the darkness.

ELIZABETH HAND

The Saffron Gatherers

ELIZABETH HAND IS THE multiple-award-winning author of eight novels, including Generation Loss and Mortal Love , and three collections of short fiction, the most recent being Saffron & Brimstone: Strange Stories . She lives on the coast of Maine.

“ ‘The Saffron Gatherers’ is the last tale in a four-story sequence titled ‘The Lost Domain’,” the author reveals, “which deals with the themes of creative and erotic obsession.

“All four tales are set in a post-9/11 world resembling our own; in the case of ‘The Saffron Gatherers’, a dark world that is just now being born.”

HE HAD ALMOST BEEN as much a place to her as a person; the lost domain, the land of heart’s desire. Alone at night she would think of him as others might imagine an empty beach, blue water; for years she had done this, and fallen into sleep.

She flew to Seattle to attend a symposium on the Future. It was a welcome trip – on the East Coast, where she lived, it had rained without stopping for thirty-four days. A meteorological record, now a tired joke: only six more days to go! Even Seattle was drier than that.

She was part of a panel discussion on natural disasters and global warming. Her first three novels had presented near-future visions of apocalypse; she had stopped writing them when it became less like fiction and too much like reportage. Since then she had produced a series of time-travel books, wish-fulfilment fantasies about visiting the ancient world. Many of her friends and colleagues in the field had turned to similar themes, retro, nostalgic, historical. Her academic background was in classical archeology; the research was joyous, if exhausting. She hated to fly, the constant round of threats and delay. The weather and concomitant poverty, starvation, drought, flooding, riots – it had all become so bad that it was like an extreme sport now, to visit places that had once unfolded from one’s imagination in the brightly-colored panoramas of 1920s postal cards. Still she went, armed with eyeshade, earplugs, music and pills that put her to sleep. Behind her eyes, she saw Randall’s arm flung above his head, his face half-turned from hers on the pillow. Fifteen minutes after the panel had ended she was in a cab on her way to SeaTac. Several hours later she was in San Francisco.

He met her at the airport. After the weeks of rain back East and Seattle’s muted sheen, the sunlight felt like something alive, clawing at her eyes. They drove to her hotel, the same place she always stayed; like something from an old B-movie, the lobby with its ornate cast-iron stair-rail, the narrow front desk of polished walnut; clerks who all might have been played by the young Peter Lorre. The elevator with its illuminated dial like a clock that could never settle on the time; an espresso shop tucked into the back entrance, no bigger than a broom closet.

Randall always had to stoop to enter the elevator. He was very tall, not as thin as he had been when they first met, nearly twenty years earlier. His hair was still so straight and fine that it always felt wet, but the luster had faded from it: it was no longer dark-blonde but grey, a strange dusky color, almost blue in some lights, like pale damp slate. He had grey-blue eyes; a habit of looking up through downturned black lashes that at first had seemed coquettish. She had since learned it was part of a deep reticence, a detachment from the world that sometimes seemed to border on the pathological. You might call him an agoraphobe, if he had stayed indoors.