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

Inside the terminal, a crowd of reporters and television people awaited, shouting questions and turning cameras on them as they stumbled down the corridor. No one ran; everyone found a place to stand, alone, with a cell phone. Suzanne staggered past the news crews, striking at a man who tried to stop her. Inside the terminal there were crowds of people around the TV screens, covering their mouths at the destruction. A lingering smell of vomit, of disinfectant. She hurried past them all, lurching slightly, feeling as though she struggled through wet sand. She retrieved her car, joined the endless line of traffic and began the long drive back to that cold green place, trees with leaves that had yet to open though it was already almost June, apple and lilac blossoms rotted brown on their drooping branches.

It was past midnight when she arrived home. The answering machine was blinking. She scrolled through her messages, hands shaking. She listened to just a few words of each, until she reached the last one.

A blast of static, satellite interference; then a voice. It was unmistakably Randall’s.

She couldn’t make out what he was saying. Everything was garbled, the connection cut out then picked up again. She couldn’t tell when he’d called. She played it over again, once, twice, seven times, trying to discern a single word, something in his tone, background noise, other voices: anything to hint when he had called, from where.

It was hopeless. She tried his cell phone again. Nothing.

She stood, exhausted, and crossed the room, touching table, chairs, countertops, like someone on a listing ship. She turned on the kitchen faucet and splashed cold water onto her face. She would go online and begin the process of finding numbers for hospitals, the Red Cross. He could be alive.

She went to her desk to turn on her computer. Beside it, in a vase, were the flowers Claude had sent her, a half-dozen dead narcissus smelling of rank water and slime. Their white petals were wilted, and the color had drained from the pale yellow cups.

All save one. A stem with a furled bloom no bigger than her pinkie, it had not yet opened when she’d left. Now the petals had spread like feathers, revealing its tiny yellow throat, three long crimson threads. She extended her hand to stroke first one stigma, then the next, until she had touched all three; lifted her hand to gaze at her fingertips, golden with pollen, and then at the darkened window. The empty sky, starless. Beneath blue water, the lost world.

MARK MORRIS

What Nature Abhors

MARK MORRIS BECAME a full-time writer in 1988 on the British government’s Enterprise Allowance Scheme, and a year later saw the publication of his first novel, Toady .

His thirteenth novel, Doctor Who: Forever Autumn , was recently released, and his fourteenth, The Deluge , will be published by Leisure Books. The author’s short stories, novellas, articles and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of anthologies and magazines, and he is editor of the HWA Bram Stoker Award-nominated Cinema Macabre , a book of fifty horror movie essays by genre luminaries.

Forthcoming titles includes a Hellboy novel, The All-Seeing Eye , and a novella entitled It Sustains , which will be published by Earthling in summer 2008.

“ ‘What Nature Abhors’ was inspired by an otherwise extremely pleasant visit to Hampton Court Palace with my wife, Nel,” Morris explains. “It was a sunny day, and we were strolling through the gardens when we came across the statue of a figure, the upper half of which was tightly draped in black plastic.

“A sign explained that the statue had been damaged by the elements and was awaiting restoration, but the sight of it, like an upright, partially concealed murder victim, was arresting, incongruous and deliciously eerie, and it stayed with me.”

WHEN MEACHER OPENED his eyes the train was empty, though he had thought it was the jolt of the brakes that had woken him. He stood up, the low-level anxiety of disorientation already beginning to grind in his belly. The carriage was old and grimy, and smelled musty, as if each threadbare seat had absorbed too much sweat over too many years. The upholstery and stained carpet was predominantly grey with overlapping flecks in two shades of bilious green that jittered like TV interference on the periphery of his vision.

Outside the window the stone walls of the station building looked smoke-blackened, except for pale oblongs where the station’s name-plates had been removed, probably by vandals. As far as Meacher could see, it was not only the train that was deserted but the platform too – and so profoundly, it seemed to him, that he suppressed the urge to call out, oddly fearful of how intrusive, or worse insignificant, his voice might sound in the enveloping silence.

Stepping into the aisle, he automatically reached towards the luggage rack above his head, but found it empty. Had he had a bag, or even a jacket, at the outset of his journey? It would have been unusual for him to have travelled with neither, but his brain felt so dulled by fatigue that he honestly couldn’t remember. He sat down again, intimidated by solitude and by his own aberrant memory. He had a notion that the merest glimpse of a guard or another passenger, or perhaps even the incomprehensible blare of a station announcer’s voice, would be all that he would need to restore his sense of himself and his surroundings.

However when he realised, ten minutes later, that he was actually holding his breath in anticipation of a hint of life besides his own, he decided he could be passive no longer. He stood up with a decisiveness that was for no one’s benefit but his and lurched along the length of the carriage, his arms pumping like a cross-country skier’s as he yanked at seats to maintain his momentum.

Once on the platform he paused only briefly, so that he would not have to consciously acknowledge the absence of life. The EXIT sign caused his spirits to flare with a disproportionate fierceness if only because, albeit impersonal, it was a form of communication, and hinted at more to come. He stumped through the arch beneath the sign and found himself in a ticket office containing back-to-back rows of red metal seats and an unmanned ticket window. From above this too a name-plate had been removed, and with such care that Meacher wondered whether the place was understaffed because it was on the verge of closure.

The station was certainly small enough for this theory to be feasible, or at least appeared too inconsequential to have been granted a car park, because a further exit door led down a flight of stone steps and thence to what appeared to be a town centre side-street. Even out here there was no indication of life, though Meacher felt optimistic that he would encounter some sooner rather than later. There were signs of human occupation – the stink of stale urine as he had descended the steps, discarded confectionery wrappers and food cartons emblazoned with comfortingly iconic logos: McDonalds, Kit Kat, KFC. On the far side of a pedestrian crossing a chalked sign in a pub window promised BIG SCREEN SKY SPORTS! Meacher might have ventured inside to freshen his dry mouth with something sweet and fizzy if the pub’s wooden doors, so hefty they put him in mind of a dungeon, had not been firmly shut.

The pub’s neighbours were equally inaccessible. Indeed, a grubby jeweller’s and a shop which contained second-hand musical instruments had reinforced their unwillingness to attract trade via the employment of metal shutters. Meacher wondered what time it was. If the shops were closed and the pub not yet open he guessed it must be somewhere between six and seven p.m. Looking up afforded him no clue, because the greyness between the rooftops more closely resembled a thick net stretched between the buildings than a portion of sky.