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

“Can’t just leave that sort of thing lying about. But what’s the rush?’

Martin lay down on the bed and unbuckled his belt.

Maddox hesitated, considered walking out, but he felt certain he’d always regret it if he left empty-handed. Instead, he knelt beside the bed and spat into his palm.

Afterwards, Martin pulled open his desk drawer.

“There you go,” he said.

Maddox withdrew a strong-smelling package. He started to work at the knot in the outermost plastic bag, but it wouldn’t come easily. He asked Martin what it contained.

“A piece of subcutaneous fat from the body of a middle-aged man. If anyone ever asks, you didn’t get it from me.”

Maddox returned to his own room on the seventh floor, washing his hands on the way. He cut open the bag and unwrapped his spoils. The gobbet of fat, four inches by two, looked like a piece of tripe, white and bloodless, and the stench of formalin made him feel sick and excited at the same time. Maddox was careful not to touch the fat as he wrapped it up again and secured the package with tape. He opened his wardrobe and pulled out the brown suitcase he’d liberated from a skip in Judd Street.

He saw less of Martin after that. At first he contrived subtly to avoid him and then started going out with Valerie, a girl with fat arms and wide hips he picked up in the union bar on cocktails night. He wasn’t convinced they were a good match, but the opportunity was convenient, given the Martin situation.

The piece of fat remained wrapped up in its suitcase, which smelled so strongly that Maddox only had to open the case and take a sniff to re-experience how he had felt when Martin had given him the body part. As he lay in bed trying to get to sleep (alone. Valerie didn’t last more than a few weeks) he sometimes thought about the man who had knowingly willed his cadaver to science. He wondered what his name might have been and what kind of man he was. What he might have been in life. He would hardly have been able to foresee what would happen to the small part of him that was now nestled inside Maddox’s wardrobe.

When Maddox left the hall of residence for a flat in Holloway, the case went with him, still empty but for its human remains. He kept it on top of a cupboard. It stayed there for two years. When he moved into the flat in N15, he put the suitcase in the loft, where it had remained ever since. The piece of fat was no longer in Maddox’s possession, but the suitcase was not free of the smell of formalin.

Maddox’s 1986 diary was at the bottom of the box. It took only a couple of minutes to find what he was looking for. “ Hellraiser , 11:00 a.m.” he’d written in the space reserved for Friday 10 October. A little further down was an address: 187 Dollis Hill Lane.

He drove to Dollis Hill via Cranley Gardens, but on this occasion didn’t stop.

“Why didn’t I think of checking my old diaries before, eh, Jack?” he said, looking in the rear-view mirror.

His son was silent, staring out of the window.

Turning into Dollis Hill Lane from Edgware Road, he slowed to a crawl, oblivious to the noisy rebuke of the driver immediately behind him, who pulled out and swerved to overtake, engine racing, finger given. Maddox brought the car to a halt on a slight incline outside No. 187. He looked at the house and felt an unsettling combination of familiarity and non-recognition. Attraction and repulsion. He had to stare at the house for two or three minutes before he realised why he had driven past it so many times and failed to recognise it.

Like most things recalled from the past, it was smaller than the version in his memory. But the main difference was the apparent age of the building. He remembered a Victorian villa, possibly Edwardian. The house in front of him was new. The rendering on the front gable end had gone up in the last few years. The wood-framed bay windows on the first floor were of recent construction. The casement window in the top flat, second floor, was obviously new. The mansard roof was a familiar shape, but the clay Rosemarys were all fresh from the tile shop. The materials were new, but the style was not. The basic design was unchanged, from what he could remember of the exterior shots in the film, which he’d looked at again before coming out, but in spite of that the house looked new. As if a skeleton had grown new muscle and flesh.

“Just like Frank,” he said out loud.

“What, Daddy?”

“Just like Frank in the film.”

“What film?”

“They made a film in this house and I came to see them make it. You’re too young to see it yet. One day, maybe.”

“What’s it about?”

“It’s about a man who disappears and then comes back to life with the help of his girlfriend. It happened in that room up there.” He pointed to the top flat. “Although, the windows are wrong,” he said, trying to remember the second-floor window in the film. “I need to check it again.”

The only part of the exterior that looked as if they’d taken care to try to match the original was the front door.

As he’d walked from the Hellraiser set back to the tube two decades earlier, he’d read and re-read Linzi’s number on the torn-out piece of Filofax paper. He called her the next day and they arranged to meet for a drink.

“Why are you so interested in this house, Daddy?” Jack asked from the back seat.

“Because of what happened here. Because of the film. And because I met somebody here. Somebody I knew before I met your mother.’

Linzi lived in East Finchley. They went to see films at the Phoenix or met for drinks in Muswell Hill. Malaysian meals in Crouch End. He showed her the house in Hillfield Avenue where he had visited Clive Barker.

“Peter Straub used to live on the same road, just further up the hill,” he told her.

“Who’s Peter Straub?”

“Have you heard of Stephen King?”

“Of course.”

“Straub and King wrote a book together. The Talisman . They wrote it here. Or part of it, anyway. King also wrote a story called ‘Crouch End’, which was interesting, not one of his best.”

Maddox and Linzi started meeting during the day at the Wisteria Tea Rooms on Middle Lane and it was there, among the pot plants and mismatched crockery, that Maddox realised with a kind of slow, swooning surprise that he was happy. The realisation was so slow because the feeling was so unfamiliar. They took long walks through Highgate Cemetery and across Hampstead Heath.

Weeks became months. The cherry blossom came out in long straight lines down Cecile Park, and fell to the pavements, and came out again. Linzi often stayed at Maddox’s flat in South Tottenham, but frowned distastefully at his true-crime books. One morning while she was still asleep, Maddox was dressing, looking for a particular T-shirt. Unable to find it, he climbed up the ladder into the loft. Searching through a box of old clothes, he didn’t hear Linzi climbing the ladder or see her head and shoulders suddenly intrude into the loft space.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Shit.” He jumped, hitting his head. “Ow. That hurt. Shit. Nothing. Looking for something.”

“What’s that smell?”

“Nothing.”

He urged her back down the ladder and made sure the trap door was fastened before pulling on the Eraserhead T-shirt he’d been looking for.

Whenever he went into the loft from then on, whether Linzi was around or not, he would pull the ladder up after him and close the trap door. The loft was private.

When he got back to the flat that evening, he went up into the loft again – duly covering his tracks, although he was alone – and took the small wrapped parcel from the suitcase. The lid fell shut, the old-fashioned clasps sliding home without his needing to fasten them. Quality craftsmanship.