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

Maddox sat in the car park, behind the wheel of the car. He hadn’t got what he’d come for. The milk and the bread. Maybe it didn’t matter any more. He sat in the car for a long time and only turned the key in the ignition when he realised the sky over central London was beginning to get dark.

He didn’t go to the house. He didn’t imagine Christine would be there, but it was kind of irrelevant either way. Instead, he drove to South Tottenham. He drove through the top of the congestion charge zone. It didn’t matter any more. It was rush hour. It took an hour and a half to get to N15. The street door was open. He walked up, entered the flat. Thump-thump-thump from downstairs. He took out his phone and sent a text message, then stood by the window for a while watching the street. He left the phone on the window ledge and pulled down the ladder and climbed into the loft, retrieving the ladder and closing the trap door behind him. Stooping, he walked over to the suitcase, which smelled strongly of formalin. He knelt in front of it for several minutes, resting his hands on the lid, then touching the clasps.

He released the clasps and opened the case.

It was empty.

He frowned, then sat and stared at the empty case for some time, listening to the creaks of the beams and the muffled basslines from the downstairs flat. He wondered if Karen would come, how long she might be. He wasn’t sure what he would do when she arrived.

Slowly, he rose, then lowered the upper half of his body into the case, folding his legs in afterwards. Inside the case, the smell of formalin was very strong. He stared at the pine beams, the cobwebs, the shadows clinging to the insulating material. He could still faintly hear his neighbour’s loud music, which Karen had been unable to hear, and then, rising above it, the clear and unmistakeable chime of his phone, down in the flat, announcing the arrival of a text message. He started to uncurl his body and the lid of the case fell forward.

He had twisted his body far enough that the hump of his shoulder caught the closing lid.

He climbed out and lay down next to the suitcase.

A minute later his phone chimed a reminder.

He thought about Linzi. Linzi had been good for him, until things went bad. He wondered where she was. He looked at the empty suitcase again and plucked a long fine strand of fair hair from the lining. He thought about Karen and her need, unacknowledged, to be looked after. He remembered how vulnerable Linzi had seemed when he saw her for the first time.

Karen would be along soon. Probably. She hadn’t let him down yet.

He still had options.

MICHAEL BISHOP

Dr Prida’s Dream-Plagued Patient

MICHAEL BISHOP HAS PUBLISHED seventeen novels in his nearly thirty years as a freelance writer, including the Nebula Award-winning No Enemy But Time; Unicorn Mountain , winner of the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award; and Brittle Innings , an imaginative study of minor-league baseball in the Deep South during World War II and winner of the Locus Award for best fantasy novel.

His short-fiction collections include Blooded on Arachne, One Winter in Eden, Close Encounters with the Deity, Emphatically Not SF Almost, At the City Limits of Fate, Blue Kansas Sky and Brighten to Incandescence: 17 Stories , featuring an incandescent wraparound cover by his son, Jamie. His recent novelettes “The Door Gunner” and “Bears Discover Smut” have each won Southeastern Science Fiction Association awards for best short fiction.

He has published numerous essays and reviews, including a collection from PS Publishing, A Reverie for Mister Ray , also with an evocative wraparound cover by his son, and edited such anthologies as Light Years and Dark , winner of the Locus Award for best anthology, three Nebula Award volumes and, most recently, A Cross of Centuries: Twenty-Five Imaginative Tales About the Christ .

He lives in Pine Mountain, Georgia, with his wife Jeri, an elementary-school counsellor, and he is currently Writer in Residence at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia.

“I’m not very keen on vampire fiction,” Bishop admits, “although I recognise this bias as a form of bigotry, based on stereotypes, and know that any theme or subject matter admits of excellent work if the writer focuses, rethinks, and eschews cliché. Have I done that here? I hope so.

“My inspiration for the story was an invitation from the editors of a relatively new magazine, Aberrant Dreams , to submit to them and the fact that I’d come to the end of a semester of full-time teaching, with four writing classes that kept me so busy either preparing for each new session or grading essays that I wrote nothing of my own (beyond blood-red notes in the margins of student papers) for over four months.

“When January came, then, and I had my first free day in a long time, I wrote ‘Dr Prida’s Dream-Plagued Patient’ at our kitchen table in longhand with a fine felt-tipped pen in four or five hours of concentrated work. Careful readers will note that I afflicted my narrator with a devilish horror of the mundane and conventional, and that aberrant dreams play a significant, moody role in my quasi-Lovecraftian piece because I was writing for a magazine with that provocative name.”

WELL, OF COURSE, I sleep during the day, Dr Prida – in a storm pit or canning cellar (whichever term you prefer) beneath the pantry of a country Victorian home in an aggressively modernizing county in a Southern state whose denizens display little belief in and even less tolerance for creatures of my ilk. I lie in a rotting wooden johnboat on a slab of plywood atop a pair of stumpy-legged sawhorses, and my diurnal companions – in the clayey darkness beneath the prosaic brightness of day – include spiders of several species, spotted camel crickets, and bewildered moths. (The moths’ wings often fleck my lips and forehead with their chalky powder.) The darkness attracts and soothes, I guess, not only these unlovely insects but also the rarely sated longings of my forfeited soul. Selah.

I’m here this evening, Dr Prida, at the urging of an early mentor and under protest, but must admit that your gracious couchside manner and delicate bone-china complexion – is that last observation sexist? – have considerably palliated my initial prejudice against this visit. Perhaps it will in fact lessen my anxiety, counteract my depression, and give me the necessary incentive to explore those perilous extremities of night – dawn and dusk – with a bravado heretofore alien to me. By the way, I like your chignon. And the flush at your throat derives, I feel sure, from the lamp beside your wing-back rather than from the somatic manifestations of a quickened pulse. After all, with that Chopin nocturne playing almost inaudibly in the background, your office has a truly calming ambience – indeed, the security of my canning cellar without the attendant dankness.

Ah, how charmingly you chuckle. All right, then, laugh . By that descriptive verb, Dr Prida, I meant no derogation of your femininity. Willie Shakespeare had a character – was it Edgar in King Lear ? – say that ripeness is all, but in another context. I place more value on specificity, whatever the circumstances, and am like to remark a person’s looks and actions, not to mention speech, with more apprehensive detail than does your ordinary machine-stamped client. No offense, of course, to either you or those pitiable lockstep clones. Let me also note that you have decidedly appealing little wren tracks beside your eyes when you frown.