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

Martin felt a gnawing unease, but unable to find words to express it, remained silent.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s just – I can’t say it.”

Another long pause, and then Martin said, “It’s really nothing,” and felt his eyes for no reason suddenly fill with tears. Standing up quickly, so Marline would not see, he turned to face the way they had come.

“I’m going up back a little bit,” he said to her. “I just want to see how long the shadows actually are.” She did not reply, so he began to slowly move through the low bushes, sole cover to the treeless earth, through the infinite symphonic tones of yellows and browns and black-greens that reeked of spice and animal excreta. The sky was absolutely cloudless.

Some paces uphill, back on the unmetalled track, he turned to look. The north slopes of Effendis to the right were now in shadow, but every object in the imperfect dark was still visible. He could almost hear the rocks, dusty purple in the shade, crack as they started to cool from the day’s impartible heat.

The rest of the hills, ahead and to the left, and the valley between, were filled with light that tore the heart, obsidian sharp, crystalline, clear. Marline, small and distant below, had packed the few pieces of mess gear, and was now smoking a cigarette, seated arms around her knees, looking the same direction as Martin, setting sun to their backs.

And then he saw the shadow, his own. At first he was not sure, until he moved, and the shadow moved with him. It was enormous, occluding acres of hillside below the horizon up to the valley’s end, beyond, miles away. He felt dizzy, and to steady himself, turned round and stumbled further up, hugging himself with his arms, gulping great breaths, gasping after air.

Coming to a halt, he slowly turned again.

His shadow, since he was higher, had of course moved upward with him. In the flat light, it was now taller than the lofty ridgeline of the farthest range, and covered a reasonably large part of the sky above, darkening the air, which still remained transparent.

Stunned, Martin slowly lifted an arm, and its umbra eclipsed the blue, almost to the zenith.

He began to hyperventilate sharply, and with vertigo and nausea washing over him, panic took hold. He ran down to his wife, stumbling once, falling, cutting open a pant leg at the knee, so he bled, but paid no heed.

She was waiting, with her arms stretched wide, waiting to catch him, to enfold him. He wept, eyes closed, as she held him, crooning, soothing her lost child.

“Don’t be afraid, there’s nothing wrong, you’re here, with me, there now . . .” she said.

“But you saw it, didn’t you?” he repeated over and over again, without her any reply, only the soft caress. Eventually, shaking still, he left her embrace, and stood up.

The shadows were gone now, the sun down at last behind them. At the spot where the world had turned to the dimensions of a shoe box minutes before, the sky was evenly shaded.

It must be my eyes , he thought, the macular degeneration, those spots that float across . He saw one now, thread-like in the air before him, and blinked to make it go away. When he opened his eyes, the hanging string, like a piece of thick shimmering cord, was larger, wriggling in front of him, a dark blue transparent plastic worm vibrating at an impossible rate. He blinked furiously; with each blink, the writhing blue rope gained in definition, and his breathing stopped.

Speechless, mouth hanging open in supplication, he looked back at Marline. But it was no longer her, but the grinning thrust-jawed demon of the night before who looked back at him. Teeth gleaming, this creature shook her head in quick small jerks from side to side, like someone palsied, and small, brilliant blade-like rays of green and blue outlined her silhouette, streaming off her.

Despairing, Martin turned round a last time, and faced the now motionless protuberance. Its hue, he noted on the abstract, complemented, but did not match, that of the air. He heard Yes, yes , come from behind him, but he did not know whose voice.

Reaching out, using his nails, he worried the limp thing loose, except for one solidly emplaced end, embedded in the air.

With a firm grip and a single wrap around his fist, using great force, he jerked the cool and wet object straight down, ripping open – to the applause of his wife behind him, with the satisfying roar of torn canvas and rock-broken waves in his ears – the mountains to their root, and the sky, the traitor sky he always knew was wrong.

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

Houses Under the Sea

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN IS A FOUR-TIME recipient of the International Horror Guild Award and a World Fantasy Award finalist.

Her novels include Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels and Daughter of Hounds , and her short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder, From Weird and Distant Shores, Alabaster and To Charles Fort With Love . She is currently working on her next novel, Joey LaFaye , and a collection of science-fiction stories, both of which will be released in 2008. The author lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her partner, doll-maker Kathyrn Pollnac.

“ ‘Houses Under the Sea’ was written in February and March 2004, and was only my third attempt to write a short story as a first-person narrative,” Kiernan reveals. “For many years, I’d avoided fp, for a number of reasons, some perfectly valid and some admittedly questionable. But beginning with ‘Riding the White Bull’ and The Dry Salvages in 2003, I finally became intrigued enough with its possibilities that I began to experiment.

“When I finished ‘Houses Under the Sea’ on March 5th, I was still somewhat sceptical, though, as evidenced by this comment from my online journal entry from March 6th regarding the difficulty I was having finding a title for the piece: ‘If I had my druthers, it would have no title at all. In most cases, giving titles to first-person narratives only compounds the problems of disbelief. Not only am I to believe that Character X sat down and wrote this story for me to read, I’m to believe that she gave it a title.

“ ‘And if she didn’t, then who did? The author? No, Character X is the “author”; to believe otherwise defeats the illusion.’ Finally, I took a line from T. S. Eliot’s ‘East Coker’ for the title, as it seemed appropriate and the poem had served as one of the story’s central inspirations.”

I

WHEN I CLOSE MY EYES, I see Jacova Angevine.

I close my eyes, and there she is, standing alone at the end of the breakwater, standing with the foghorn as the choppy sea shatters itself to foam against a jumble of grey boulders. The October wind is making something wild of her hair, and her back’s turned to me. The boats are coming in.

I close my eyes, and she’s standing in the surf at Moss Landing, gazing out into the bay, staring towards the place where the continental shelf narrows down to a sliver and drops away to the black abyss of Monterey Canyon. There are gulls, and her hair is tied back in a ponytail.

I close my eyes, and we’re walking together down Cannery Row, heading south towards the aquarium. She’s wearing a gingham dress and a battered pair of Doc Martens that she must have had for fifteen years. I say something inconsequential, but she doesn’t hear me, too busy scowling at the tourists, at the sterile, cheery absurdities of the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company and Mackerel Jack’s Trading Post.

“That used to be a whorehouse,” she says, nodding in the direction of Mackerel Jack’s. “The Lone Star Café, but Steinbeck called it the Bear Flag. Everything burned. Nothing here’s the way it used to be.”