Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (25 page)

    A black spoke of pain lanced down into her skull, a nail-gun fired straight into the brain. She was down and flailing and he kicked her in the head. That lick didn't hurt so much, but took the life out of her, as if she were no more than an appliance, and he had jerked the power cord out of the wall.

    When he rolled her onto her stomach and twisted her arms behind her back, she had no strength in her to resist. He had the heavy-duty plastic ties, the flexicuffs they used on the prisoners in Iraq sometimes. He sat on her ass and squeezed her ankles together and put the flexicuffs on them too, tightening until it hurt, and then some. Black flashes were still firing behind her eyes, but the fireworks were smaller, and exploding less frequently now. She was coming back to herself, slowly. Breathe. Wait.

    When her vision cleared she found Carmody sitting above her, on the edge of her father's bed. He had lost weight and he hadn't any to lose. His eyes peeked out, too bright at the bottom of deep hollows, moonlight reflected in the water at the bottom of a long well. In his lap was a bag, like an old-fashioned doctor's case, the leather pebbled and handsome.

    "I observed you while you were running this morning," he began, without preamble. Using the word
observed,
like he would in a report on enemy troop movements. "Who were you signalling when you were up on the hill?"

    "Carmody," Mal said. "What are you talking about, Carmody? What is this?"

    "You're staying in shape. You're still a soldier. I tried to follow you, but you outran me on the hill this morning. When you were on the crest, I saw you flashing a light. Two long flashes, one short, two long. You signalled someone. Tell me who."

    At first she didn't know what he was talking about; then she did. Her canteen. Her canteen had flashed in the sunlight when she tipped it up to drink. She opened her mouth to reply, but before she could, he lowered himself to one knee beside her. Carmody unbuckled his bag and dumped the contents onto the floor. He had a collection of tools: a pair of heavy-duty shears, a taser, a hammer, a hacksaw, a portable vice. Mixed in with the tools were five or six human thumbs.

    Some of the thumbs were thick and blunt and male, and some were white and slender and female, and some were too shrivelled and darkened with rot to provide much of any clues about the person they had belonged to. Each thumb ended in a lump of bone and sinew. The inside of the bag had a smell, a sickly-sweet, almost floral stink of corruption.

    Carmody selected the heavy-duty shears.

    "You went up the hill and signalled someone this morning. And tonight you came back with a lot of money. I looked in the envelope while you were in the shower. So you signalled for a meeting and at the meeting you were paid for intel. Who did you meet? CIA?"

    "I went to work. At the bar. You know where I work. You followed me there."

    "Five hundred dollars. Is that supposed to be tips?"

    She didn't have a reply. She couldn't think. She was looking at the thumbs mixed in with his mess of tools.

    He followed her gaze, prodded a blackened and shrivelled thumb with the blade of the shears. The only identifiable feature remaining on the thumb was a twisted, silvery, fishhook scar.

    "Plough," Carmody said. "He had helicopters doing flyovers of my house. They'd fly over once or twice a day. They used different kinds of helicopters on different days to try and keep me from putting two and two together. But I knew what they were up to. I started watching them from the kitchen with my field glasses, and one day I saw Plough at the controls of a radio station traffic 'copter. I didn't even know he knew how to pilot a bird until then. He was wearing a black helmet and sunglasses, but I still recognized him."

    As Carmody spoke, Mal remembered Corporal Plough trying to open a bottle of Red Stripe with the blade of his bayonet, and the knife slipping, catching him across the thumb, Plough sucking on it and saying around his thumb,
motherfuck, someone open this for me.

    "No, Carmody. It wasn't him. It was just someone who looked like him. If he could fly a helicopter, they would've had him piloting Apaches over there."

    "Plough admitted it. Not at first. At first he lied. But eventually he told me everything, that he was in the helicopter, that they had been keeping me under surveillance ever since I came home." Carmody moved the tip of the shears to point at another thumb, shrivelled and brown, with the texture and appearance of a dried mushroom. "This was his wife. She admitted it too. They were putting dope in my water to make me sluggish and stupid. Sometimes I'd be driving home, and I'd forget what my own house looked like. I'd spend twenty minutes cruising around my development, before I realized I had gone by my place twice."

    He paused, moved the tip of the shears to a fresher thumb, a woman's, the nail painted red. "She followed me into a supermarket in Poughkeepsie. This was while I was on my way north, to see you. To see if you had been compromised. This woman in the supermarket, she followed me aisle to aisle, always whispering on her cell phone. Pretending not to look at me. Then, later, I went into a Chinese place, and noticed her parked across the street, still on the phone. She was the toughest to get solid information out of. I almost thought I was wrong about her.

    "She told me she was a first-grade teacher. She told me she didn't even know my name and that she wasn't following me. I almost believed her. She had a photo in her purse, of her sitting on the grass with a bunch of little kids. But it was tricked up. They used Photoshop to stick her in that picture. I even got her to admit it in the end."

    "Plough told you he could fly helicopters so you wouldn't hurt him anymore. The first-grade teacher told you the photo was faked to make you stop. People will tell you anything if you hurt them badly enough. You're having some kind of break with reality, Carmody. You don't know what's true anymore."

    "You would say that. You're part of it. Part of the plan to make me crazy, make me kill myself. I thought the thumbprints would startle you into making contact with your handler and they did. You went straight to the hills, to send him a signal. To let him know I was close. But where's your back-up now?"

    "I don't have back-up. I don't have a handler."

    "We were friends, Mal. You got me through the worst parts of being over there, when I thought I was going crazy. I hate that I have to do this to you. But I need to know who you were signalling. And you're going to tell. Who did you signal, Mal?"

    "No one," she said, trying to squirm away from him on her belly.

    He grabbed her hair, and wrapped it around his fist, to keep her from going anywhere. She felt a tearing along her scalp. He pinned her with a knee in her back. She went still, head turned, right cheek mashed against the knubbly rug on the floor.

    "I didn't know you were married. I didn't notice the ring until just tonight. Is he coming home? Is he part of it? Tell me." Tapping the ring on her finger with the blade of the shears.

    Mal's face was turned so she was staring under the bed at the case with her M4 and bayonet in it. She had left the clasps undone.

    Carmody clubbed her in the back of the head, at the base of the skull, with the handles of the shears. The world snapped out of focus, went to a soft blur, and then slowly her vision cleared and details regained their sharpness, until at last she was seeing the case under the bed again, not a foot away from her, the silver clasps hanging loose.

    "Tell me, Mal. Tell me the truth now."

    In Iraq, the Fedayeen had escaped the handcuffs after his thumbs were broken. Cuffs wouldn't hold a person whose thumb could move in any direction… or someone who didn't have a thumb at all.

    Mal felt herself growing calm. Her panic was like static on a radio, and she had just found the volume, was slowly dialling it down. He would not begin with the shears, of course, but would work his way up to them. He meant to beat her first. At least. She drew a long, surprisingly steady breath. Mal felt almost as if she were back on Hatchet Hill, climbing with all the will and strength she had in her, for the cold, open blue of the sky.

    "I'm not married," she said. "I stole this wedding ring off a drunk. I was just wearing it because I like it."

    He laughed: a bitter, ugly sound. "That isn't even a good lie."

    And another breath, filling her chest with air, expanding her lungs to their limit. He was about to start hurting her. He would force her to talk, to give him information, to tell him what he wanted to hear. She was ready. She was not afraid of being pushed to the edge of what could be endured. She had a high tolerance for pain, and her bayonet was in arm's reach, if only she had an arm to reach.

    "It's the truth," she said, and with that, PFC Mallory Grennan began her confession.

11 - Nicholas Royle - Lancashire

    Nelson, colne, darwen," said Cassie, reading the names off the road signs. "I remember all these Lancashire towns from Bournemouth," she said.

    "Your mam's talking nonsense again," said her husband Paul into the rear-view mirror.

    "What are you talking about, Mummy?" asked James, who at ten was the elder of the two. His two front teeth still hadn't closed the gap, freckles scattered across his nose.

    "From when I worked in the sorting office in Bournemouth one Christmas," Cassie explained.

    "For Christmas… yeah…" began Ellie, James's younger sister, "I want an iPod Nano. A black one."

    Ellie, her naturally streaked hair looking like it needed a good brush, enunciated slowly, as if she still couldn't quite believe she could speak. Or was Paul projecting his own wonder at his daughter's power of speech? She had been able to speak for years, of course, but had indeed been a slow starter.

    "You can't have one," said her brother.

    "Why not?"

    "Because I haven't got one."

    "You've got one on your Christmas list. I saw it."

    "But I haven't got one yet and you can't get one at the same time as I get one. You have to wait till I've had one for six weeks. Or a year."

    "No, I don't. Mummy, do I?"

    "That's enough, children," said Cassie, smiling at Paul. "Look at the wonderful scenery. Isn't this lovely? Just imagine. If we'd been driving for half an hour from our old house, we wouldn't even have got beyond the North Circular."

    James and Ellie ignored this, bent over PSP and Game Boy respectively, articulating their thumbs in ways their parents had never learned to do. Paul wondered how long it would be before Ellie decided she also had to graduate from a Game Boy to a PSP.

    Sunlight flashed across the windscreen, sparkling in a scattering of raindrops and temporarily blinding him.

    "Are you keeping your eye on the map?" he asked Cassie.

    "Just keep going on the A666," said Cassie. "All the way."

    "Right through Blackburn?" he asked, blinking.

    "Right on past these dark Satanic mills," she said as they passed another refurbished chimney.

    "Mummy?"

    "Do you know what I read the other day?" said Paul. "I read that 'dark Satanic mills' was never meant to imply this sort of thing-" he waved his hand at yet another converted mill, "-the industrial revolution and all that. What Blake was really talking about, apparently, were Oxford and Cambridge universities."

    "Mummy?"

    "What, darling?"

    "What does Satanic mean?"

    "Oh, really, Paul?" said Paul, pretending to mimic Cassie. "That's fascinating, Paul. Thank you for sharing that, Paul."

    "Ask your dad, Ellie. He seems to know all about it." Cassie placed her hand on Paul's leg and smiled at him. "It was fascinating, darling. I didn't know that, actually."

    "It's only conjecture. Academic gossip, you know."

    "Are we nearly there?" asked James.

    "That's a good question," said Cassie, looking at Paul.
"Are
we nearly there?"

    "You tell me. You've got the map." Paul's lips straightened into a suppressed smile.

    Conversation was soon restricted to the essentials of navigation while they negotiated Blackburn.

    "Who are we going to see again?" James asked as they found their way back on to the A666.

    "Penny and Howard. Friends of your mam's."

    "Howard and Penny, friends of your dad's more like," said Cassie.

    "I thought we were going to see Connor," said James.

    "We are," said Paul. "Connor is Penny and Howard's son."

    "Are those the people we met in the park?" James asked.

    "You know they are. Now, shush, matey. I've got to read the signs."

    "Your dad needs all his concentration to read the signs. A lot of men find it very, very hard reading signs."

    Paul smiled, then frowned at a hidden sign.

    "What did that say? Did that say Wilpshire?"

    They turned off the A666 and within a couple of minutes pulled up outside a well-kept Victorian semi. Pampas grasses grew in the lawned garden, steps led up to the front door. Paul pulled on the handbrake.