Mammoth Book of Best New Horror (41 page)

    He reached the iron railings that bounded the Potter's Field, and slipped between them.

    "Hullo?" he called. There was no answer. Not even an extra shadow in the hawthorn bush. "I hope I didn't get you into trouble, too," he said.

    Nothing.

    He had replaced the jeans in the gardener's hut - he was more comfortable in just his grey winding sheet - but he had kept the jacket. He liked having the pockets.

    When he had gone to the shed to return the jeans, he had taken a small hand-scythe from the wall where it hung, and with it he attacked the nettle-patch in the potter's field, sending the nettles flying, slashing and gutting them till there was nothing but stinging stubble on the ground.

    From his pocket he took the large glass paperweight, its insides a multitude of bright colours, along with the paint pot, and the paintbrush.

    He dipped the brush into the paint and carefully painted, in brown paint, on the surface of the paperweight, the letters EH and beneath them he wrote WE DON'T FORGET.

    It was almost daylight. Bedtime, soon, and it would not be wise for him to be late to bed for some time to come.

    He put the paperweight down on the ground that had once been a nettle patch, placed it in the place that he estimated her head would have been, and, pausing only to look at his handiwork for a moment, he went through the railings and made his way, rather less gingerly, back up the hill.

    "Not bad," said a pert voice from the Potter's Field, behind him. "Not bad at all."

    But when he turned to look, there was nobody there.

17 - Joel Knight - Calico Black, Calico Blue

    IT gave him A bit of a fright when he saw it. Having had a particularly objectionable day at the office, and navigated his way up three flights of stairs due to the inactivity of the lift, it was, in all honesty, the last thing he had expected to see. It was rested against his front door at a slight angle due to the pile of the doormat: a child's doll; not one of those modern things that cry and need their nappies changing, but a china doll, the kind he always thought of as being quintessential Victoriana. It was wearing a blue calico dress and tiny shoes with tinier buckles. Above painted rosy cheeks its eyes were black and dull. He picked the thing up and held it. There was something strange about the hair: it was very fine, and more akin to the strands of a cobweb than any imitation of a child's head of hair. He brought the doll into the flat and left it on the table in the hall whilst he found pen and paper. With its legs dangling over the edge of the tabletop it did actually look remarkably realistic. He wondered to whom it belonged; obviously to a resident of the flats, or to a younger relative or visitor, as whoever had left it would had to have gained access to the building using the security code. He wrote a very brief message - CHILD'S DOLL FOUND. PLEASE CONTACT DAVID HARNECK. FLAT 12 - leaving his telephone number underneath. On his way to work the following morning, he pinned the note to the board in the entrance hall: the doll itself he had moved to the spare room.

    It was a woman's voice. There was a trace of an accent that he could not place.

    "You have found my doll?"

    The telephone had been ringing as he entered the flat, and he stood in the hallway, slightly out of breath.

    "Yes. It was outside my front door," he replied.

    "Thank you so much. I have been very worried."

    "That's quite alright." He began attempting to manoeuvre himself out of his jacket, whilst balancing the handset between his shoulder and cheek. He was making rather a hash of it.

    "I hope she has not caused you any trouble?"

    "No, no trouble at all," he replied.

    "I will come up for her. I live at number nine."

    With no further word he heard a faint click, and then the line was dead. He replaced the handset, and disentangled himself from the jacket, consciously leaving his shoes on. He had barely got to the kitchen to fetch himself a glass of water when the doorbell rang, once, then twice. He moved quickly into the hallway - stubbing the front of his shoe in a bump in the carpet in the process - and opened the front door. There was a woman in the hallway. She was standing a few feet back from the actual doorway at a distance that betrayed possible reticence, apprehension or over-politeness. She showed no sign of exertion, in spite of the fact that, given the amount of time elapsed since the telephone call and the doorbell sounding, she would had to have moved very quickly indeed. Her hands were neatly folded in front of her: her hair very long and dark: her skin pale, and imbued with a slight translucent quality. She was wearing an evening dress that was more than a little ill fitting. She was regarding him with very large eyes. Then she spoke:

    "Mr David Harneck?"

    "Yes," he replied.

    "I believe you have found something of mine," she said.

    That accent again: that which he had heard on the phone. He stood looking at her for a few moments, feeling a little out of sorts.

    "You've come for the doll?" he said.

    "For the doll, yes," she replied.

    There was something slightly haughty about her manner, and yet, there was more to it than that. Regal, may have been a more adequate, if potentially over-generous description.

    "Do you want to come in for a minute?" he said, instinctively.

    "Thank you, no," came the response.

    There was something so final about the statement that he knew there was nothing to be done by way of dissuasion.

    "I have your doll here," he said. "It's in the spare room, I won't be a moment."

    He left her in the doorway and went to retrieve the doll. It was, of course, exactly as he had left it - on top of the bookcase, but faced down, to afford less opportunity for it falling. When he returned to the front door with the doll in one hand he observed that she had moved hardly a muscle. Her eyes glinted when she saw the doll, and in the light from the hallway it seemed her eyes had changed colour, although of this he could not be sure. Her expression - hitherto one of utter earnestness - brightened: the ghost of a smile played across her lips.

    "You are really most kind," she said. "She is such a silly thing, quite - but what is the word - strong-willed, is, I think you say."

    She took the doll from him and held it, as would a child. It was an odd gesture, and one that did not exactly become a woman in her early thirties, as he presumed her to be. He chose to make light of her utterance about the doll possessing a strong will.

    "She often wanders off then, does she?"

    "Oh, yes," the woman replied. "She is full of mischief. I sometimes think she is not happy in our family."

    To that, he had no response. The woman was obviously a little eccentric, and had carried too many traits - often endearing in a child - into her adult life that were best left behind or outgrown.

    "You are most kind," she repeated. "Will you allow me to repay you for your kindness in some way?"

    "I can assure you that's not necessary. It was nothing, really.'

    "Then, perhaps," she said, "you would come to have a drink with me. I live at number nine. Not this evening, I'm afraid. I am busy this evening, for I have other guests, but shall we say tomorrow?"

    He hesitated for a moment, and then something made him acquiesce.

    "That would be very pleasant."

    He held out his hand. She looked at it, and then turned. She still had the doll in her hand, dangling - though not limply - by her side.

    "Come at eight-thirty," she said.

    He watched her go, his hand still extended, feeling really rather foolish.

    "What is your name?" he said.

    But then there was nothing but an empty corridor.

    The truth is that, throughout the afternoon of the following day, he seriously considered forgetting the whole thing. It would have appeared terribly impolite not to turn up having agreed to, but there had been something about the woman he had found a little disquieting. All that business with the doll had struck him as more than a bit peculiar: he could have quite done without it. And as for the evening dress, he assumed simply that she had been host to a soiree (she herself admitted that she was entertaining that evening.) But as he sat watching television a few hours after his encounter with her, it had occurred to him that number nine must have been one of the two flats - the other being number eight, by his reckoning - overlooked by his kitchen window. (The architecture of the apartment block was such that his flat formed an L-shape around one side of a central courtyard that only the ground floor flats had access to.) He had looked out of the kitchen window and observed that both flats -eight and nine - were in complete darkness. He thought no more about it at the time, but found it very difficult to get to sleep that night. Thoughts of the woman's skin, and its curious pellucid quality troubled him. He also thought a great deal about what would possess a woman to don an evening dress only to sit around in a darkened flat: and what manner of activity might become such a situation.

    Upon leaving work he had all but made up his mind to stay in for the evening. That day was a Tuesday, and he was due to drive up to Manchester the following morning to attend a two-day conference. But something happened on the way home that made him change his mind. It was really rather strange. As he was driving down the Uxbridge Road just past the Shepherd's Bush roundabout he happened to pass an accident, or the aftermath of an accident, to be more precise. A car had mounted the pavement and ploughed straight into a lamppost. The bonnet was shaped like a concertina and steam was rising from the engine. There was a crowd of people gathered around the car, and an ambulance was approaching - its sirens flashing -from the opposite direction in which he himself was travelling. He made to pull over, and as he did so, the crowd around the car parted and he caught a glimpse of something - for he was now moving slow enough to do so - that gave him a bit of a start. It was a pair of bare feet, very pale, sticking out from the underside of the car. The soles of the feet were directly facing him as he looked, and the whole tableau reminded him of the early Renaissance painting with the battle, the fallen soldier and the skewed perspective. The crowd was milling around gesticulating, and a slightly plump ambulance man was approaching wearing a livid yellow visibility jacket.

    He drove on, but found himself quite unable to forget what he had seen. It was not the first accident of its kind that he had been partial witness to: it was simply those feet.
Why had the feet been bare?
he kept asking himself.
And to whom did they belong?

    He was still thinking about it when he got home: and indeed, it was only after he had changed out of his work clothes and put on something more casual - having showered and shaved also - that he was able to occupy himself with any other thought. It was at that point that he found himself halfway out of the door, with a bottle of wine (purchased three days earlier, and unopened in the interim) in one hand and his front door key in the other.

    He must have passed by the entrance to number nine countless times throughout his residence at the flats, but as he was now a visitor, it somehow afforded him a new perspective. There was no doormat, he observed, and the letterbox appeared to be slightly smaller than usual.

    He rang the bell, and from very far away - almost at a distance that should have belied the size of the flat itself - he heard the sound of an electronic buzzer. He had for some reason almost expected the sound of a chime that would have befitted the stateliest of country residences - an entirely fanciful notion -and he could not help thinking that the sound the buzzer made was remarkably squalid.

    After a few moments, the door opened, and the woman stood in the doorway. She was wearing a black silk shirt and very tight trousers that were almost riding breeches. Her eyelids looked very sleepy, and he noticed with some distaste that she had already been drinking. Her hair was tangled, and the colour was high in her cheeks.

    "Mr David Harneck," she said.

    The hallway behind her was completely dark, although he noticed that the wall to her immediate right had quite a considerable crack in it.

    "David, please," he said.

    "So good. I am glad you could come. Please."

    She stood back and to one side a little. He entered the flat and was immediately struck with how very warm it was. He took a few steps forward and she closed the door behind him. He could smell her perfume: it was a strange smell, not entirely unpleasant, though altogether unfamiliar.

    "Won't you come into the kitchen?"

    He followed her into a room to the left. An overhead light was turned on: the bulb itself appeared to be of inordinately low wattage, given the circumstances.

    "You've brought wine. How nice," she said. "Let me get you a glass."

    "That would be nice. Thank you."

    He looked around. The kitchen appeared filled with relatively modern looking fixtures and appliances. He could not help noticing, however, that there was a fairly substantial looking crack along the far wall. It occupied almost three-quarters of the length, and he thought, suddenly, of structural faults in the building, perhaps even lying dormant in his own property. Then she was there with a glass of wine in an outstretched hand.