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

He started to walk, though had no real idea in which direction the town centre lay. The silence was so unnerving that even the tiny crackle of grit beneath his soles made him wince. The narrow streets with their shuttered store-fronts all looked the same, and after a while he began to wonder whether he was walking in circles. His mind still felt oddly inactive, as though unable to form thoughts of any substance. Every so often he didn’t so much stop to listen as stumble to a halt, as if he was a machine that periodically needed to conserve its energy to recharge. Unless his senses were as faulty as his memory, it seemed he was utterly alone. There was neither the distant rumble of traffic, nor even the faintest trill of birdsong.

Perhaps it was Sunday and everything was shut. The thought was less a comfort, and more an attempt to prevent his sense of disquiet escalating into fear. In truth he knew that no town centre was ever this devoid of life. Something had happened here, probably while he had been asleep on the train. The town had been abandoned or evacuated for some reason, and somehow he had been overlooked.

Blundering to yet another halt he nervously sniffed the air. The only reason he could think of for such a wide-scale evacuation was the presence of some kind of severe physical threat. Was the place about to be bombed by terrorists or could the attack already be underway? Perhaps he was wandering around, blithely inhaling toxic fumes; perhaps germ warfare had come to middle England and he was gulping down anthrax spores or worse. Or perhaps, he thought, as he examined his skin and tried to convince himself that the nausea and breathlessness he was feeling were psychosomatic, the attack had already happened. Perhaps a nuclear bomb had been dropped close by and the town’s population had been evacuated to protect them from the approaching cloud of radioactive dust.

There were flaws in his thinking, he knew that. But one thing was certain: he had to get to a phone, had to find out what was going on. He started to run, telling himself it was only stress that was making his lungs hurt and his legs feel leaden. But if so, what was it that was affecting his memory? He couldn’t even remember getting on the train, never mind where he had been going, or for what reason.

As if his desperation for answers had made it happen, he suddenly emerged from the stultifying maze of drab streets full of shuttered buildings and found himself in a pedestrianised precinct leading to what appeared to be a central square. There were comfortingly familiar chain-stores here – Woolworth, Gap, HMV – though they seemed to be more impoverished versions of the ones he was used to seeing back home.

Home. Where was that? The renewed surge of panic that accompanied his dawning realisation that he knew almost nothing about himself was so overwhelming that he stumbled and almost fell as the strength drained out of him. He staggered up to a Miss Selfridge’s and put an outspread palm on the display window to steady himself. His head was pounding, his body slick with sweat, and he was finding it difficult to breathe.

His mind, however, was in overdrive. He thought of the air teeming with germs and chemicals, thought of toxins rushing through his body, disrupting and destroying it. He expected to start coughing up blood at any moment, expected blisters to erupt on his skin. He waited for the first searing pain in his gut or head, and hoped that when it came it would be intense enough to render him quickly unconscious. He’d rather pass out and die unknowing than writhe in agony as his innards dissolved into soup.

He was heartened to discover, however, that several minutes later, rather than deteriorating, his condition had actually improved. He felt well enough, at least, to push himself away from the window and stand unaided. He even managed a wry grin. Panic attack , he thought, not gas attack. Now pull yourself together, Meacher . It was at this point that he noticed that all the mannequins in the clothes shop window had plastic bags over their heads.

At first he thought it was some kind of avant-garde display, thought the store was simply using shock tactics to grab attention. If so, he hoped it backfired on them. It was creepy, sick and irresponsible. He almost welcomed his sense of indignation. For the first time since waking up on the train he was responding emotionally to something that was not directly related to his own situation, and the respite, though brief, was welcoming. He looked around almost as if hoping to spot someone in authority he could complain to, as if momentarily forgetting he was alone. His eyes swept across the rows of shops, of which several more – River Island, Envy, Benetton – used mannequins to display the clothes they sold, and as he noticed each of them in turn his indignation gave way to a mounting unease.

There was not one mannequin he could see that did not have its face hidden in some way. Most had plastic bags over their heads, though in Envy they (whoever they were; the staff presumably) had simply draped articles of clothing over the figures. The sight put Meacher in mind of parrots whose cages are covered to simulate night and encourage them to sleep. He couldn’t for the life of him imagine what the motives of the staff might have been in this instance, unless the gesture was somehow symbolic or perhaps even a form of black joke.

Whatever the reason, the sight of all those smothered heads gave him the creeps. He shuddered and turned his gaze purposefully towards the central square. As he did so, noticing that it contained a statue of what appeared to be a figure on horseback, which he thought might be able to give him an indication of where he was, he heard the first sound behind him that he hadn’t made himself.

It was an odd sound, and brief, like someone liquidly clearing their throat or attempting to gargle with their own phlegm. It was also faint and muffled, as if he had heard it inside a house from several rooms away. He whirled round, but by the time he had spun ninety degrees all was quiet once more. Nevertheless, he hurried across to the door of River Island, which he had pinpointed in his mind as the source of the sound, and yanked the handle. Finding the door locked, he peered through one of its reinforced glass panels at the store interior.

The place was gloomy and apparently deserted. He was about to turn away when yet another mannequin caught his eye. This one was standing at the back of the shop, and like all the others had a plastic bag draped over its head. In this case, however, not only did the bag appear to be clinging tightly to the mannequin’s face, but there seemed to be an oval-shaped indentation in the plastic that to Meacher resembled a gaping mouth desperate for air.

Recoiling with a cry, Meacher turned away. There was a part of him that instantly wanted to go back, if only to reassure himself that what he had seen had been nothing but the result of shadow-play and his own imagination. However his revulsion was too great, and propelled him towards the statue that dominated the central square. As he drew closer to it he noticed two things almost in unison. One was the presence of a quartet of telephone boxes – all Perspex and cold grey steel – on the pavement outside a darkened café called Petra’s Pantry, and the other was that what appeared to be a hessian sack had been pulled down over the statue’s head.

At least they left the horse alone, Meacher thought, and felt a sudden urge to giggle. He clapped a hand over his mouth and rushed towards the telephone boxes like a drunken man looking for somewhere to throw up.

Wrenching open the door almost pulled his arm out of its socket. He fell inside, snatched up the receiver and rammed it against his ear. The familiar hum of the dialling tone filled him with such joy that he did laugh out loud, and was immediately alarmed at how hysterical he sounded. The display screen informed him there was a minimum call charge of twenty pence. Meacher shoved his left hand into his pocket and felt nothing but lining. Tilting his head to trap the phone between shoulder and ear, he rooted through all his pockets increasingly feverishly with both hands. At some point during his snooze on the train he must have been robbed because his pockets were empty. Not only did he have no money, he had no wallet, no train tickets, not even a handkerchief. Had he once had a mobile phone? If so, it had gone now.