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

“In here, quickly, if you don’t want them to find you.”

Though Meacher hesitated, it still took him less than a second to make up his mind. The boom of his shoulder hitting the door was even now reverberating in the alleyway; in the otherwise total silence his pursuers would have to be deaf not to have heard it. Scrambling upright, he propelled himself towards the figure, that backed away at his approach.

Crossing the threshold felt like passing through a portal between this world and the next. The darkness into which Meacher plunged seemed so profound that for several seconds he was completely disorientated. Opening his eyes wide and finding nothing for his vision to latch on to, he flailed with his arms, and was rewarded or punished by a crack of pain across the knuckles of his left hand. Undeterred, he groped again for the hard surface he had encountered and found a thin ledge of some kind – possibly a shelf or the edge of a desk. He clung to it like a shipwrecked man might cling to driftwood until his eyes had adapted to the sudden absence of light.

It took perhaps a minute for the slowly emerging slatted shapes to gain sufficient definition to reveal themselves as books. As soon as they did, he acknowledged that the shop was full of them. Of course, he would have known sooner if he had focused on any sense other than his eyesight, because as soon as he saw the books he became aware of their musty odour. In any other circumstance he would have found the smell comforting, even homely, though he had hardly read a book since his childhood. Hearing a snick behind him he whirled, but it was only the sound of the catch sliding into place as the shop door closed. So dingy was it, and so effectively did the shop owner blend into his surroundings, that the cowled man’s movement from the door to the far side of the room seemed as soundless and insubstantial as a drift of smoke.

“Thank you,” Meacher said, his throat clogged by dust and exertion, but the man’s only response was a sharp upraising of his left hand.

Though it was hard to make him out in the gloom, Meacher could tell by his stance that he was listening. As though deferring to a greater authority, Meacher too remained as still as he could, even though his exhausted body longed to sag. He did his utmost to contain his breath despite the attempts his racing heart and toiling lungs were making to encourage him to pant and wheeze. The two of them stood there for so long that Meacher began to wonder whether the shop owner was once again waiting for him to speak, and he was gathering the courage to do so when the man murmured, “Alas.”

Before Meacher could ask him what was wrong, a pounding on the door invalidated his question. Meacher instinctively scuttled forward, then ducked, twisting his head to look wildly behind him. Perhaps the most frightening aspect of the blows that seemed to be making the books shiver on their shelves was that they were not urgent but ponderous, relentless, evenly spaced. They sounded more like the pounding of some vast machine piston than human fists on wood. They suggested to Meacher that his pursuers would never give up, that they would hunt him down remorselessly, that in their eyes (if they had eyes beneath those hoods) the outcome of the chase was inevitable. Still cowering, he looked from the door to the shop owner, in the same way that a small child would look to a parent for guidance.

“Go up the stairs,” the man murmured, pointing to a shadowy patch of wall between two bookcases that on closer inspection Meacher realised was a door. “You’ll find an unlocked room there. Go inside and lock yourself in.”

Will I be safe ? Meacher would have asked if fear had not denied him his voice, and if he had not been so terrified of the answer.

He blundered across the room, feeling as though the must and mould of ancient books was lining his lungs like silt, and scrabbled at the dark blot of shadow that was the handle to the door that led upstairs. It opened smoothly, devoid of the creak he was expecting. He caught a glimpse of the stairs – little more than bands of differently-hued shadow – before the door clicked shut behind him, taking the last vestige of light with it.

A part of him welcomed the blackness. He wished he could curl up and close his eyes and lose himself in its folds. It was almost with reluctance that he forced himself on, edging forward until his toe-end connected with the bottom stair. He began to climb, his body now incredibly weary, his joints grinding with glassy pain. He tried not to wonder where this would end, whether – by some miracle – he would escape the clutches of his pursuers, recover his memory and find his way home. Without knowing why, he had become a fugitive, and the purpose of a fugitive was to run, and to keep running until he either got away or was caught.

Maybe his new-found ally would help him. Maybe, when Mea-cher’s pursuers had gone, the two of them would sit down together and the shop owner would answer all his questions. Meacher couldn’t hear anything from downstairs, couldn’t even hear the pounding. Was the shop owner talking to his pursuers at this moment? Or had they simply moved on? Had they knocked on the shop door not because they had known he was inside, but because they were knocking on every door, hoping to either rouse and question the occupants or simply to frighten him into bolting from wherever he might have chosen to hide?

He knew he had reached the upper landing only when his raised right foot failed to encounter another stair. He settled it gently next to his left and used his arms as antennae to probe the way ahead. Encountering no resistance, he shuffled forward, the soles of his feet scraping along a surface that felt like rough, gritty wood. After a few steps he moved to his right, and within seconds encountered a wall of what seemed to be cold, uneven plaster.

Feeling his way along, it only took him several seconds more to locate a door. His hands slithered over it until one of them found the knob, which was twisted in both directions several times before Meacher concluded that it was locked.

What was it the shop owner had said? Go upstairs and into the unlocked room? Something like that. Which meant, presumably, that of several rooms up here, only one was unlocked. He simply had to find it, that was all, simply had to be methodical.

Rather than move across to the other side of the landing, he decided to feel his way to the next door on this side, then there would be no chance of missing one. Blinking into the darkness and finding it unchanging, he probed the way cautiously forward with his feet, and almost immediately his left palm, caressing the wall, bumped against the jutting side of a second door frame.

Even without his sight, his hand moved unerringly to the door knob, and this time, with barely a twist, the door opened. Meacher stepped inside and quietly closed it behind him. Remembering what the shop owner had said about locking himself in, his searching fingers found a key, which rewarded him with a satisfying click when he twisted it clockwise.

Turning to face the room, he realised that it was not as dark as he had first thought. The faint, brownish illumination was provided by a meagre spill of light through a small window coated in grime and dust. Though the light was barely managing to establish itself, Meacher could just make out a bed with rumpled bedclothes and a tall blocky wardrobe. He did not notice the child, however, until it started whispering.

His head twisted so sharply that a hot thread of pain flared in his neck. The child was standing so closely to the wall furthest away from the door that until he focused on it fully it resembled nothing so much as a particular fall of shadow on an uneven patch of plaster. Thinking that his fumblings at the door may have caused the child to scuttle across the room and press itself against the wall in fear, Meacher moved closer to reassure it, more out of fear that it would give him away than because of a genuine urge to offer it comfort. However he had taken no more than four steps towards it when he stopped.