Best British Horror 2014 Read online

  Next week. Alex felt his insides churn hungrily at the thought of seeing Yuki again, seeing her suffer and die in new and terrible ways.

  The synopsis of Love Hotel made it sound like the worst of the lot. Same ‘guinea pig’ concept but this time set in one of those weird Japanese hotels he’d read about online. The kind where you could fuck a manga character on a spaceship or grope a schoolgirl in a room designed like a train carriage. He’d found the trailer for the film on a J-horror fan site and it looked seriously reprehensible. Even some of the hardcore gorehounds said the level of sexual violence was too much for them.

  Alex slid down in his chair as his cock began to stir.

  The film was even worse than he’d anticipated. Murky and grainy, as though someone had simply held up a cheap camera and filmed it playing on a TV. The poor quality actually made the gore seem more real.

  Yuki didn’t appear until halfway through and Alex almost didn’t recognise her. She was thinner and paler and she seemed even more fragile. But she was still beautiful. She wore an elaborate gothic Lolita dress with frilly petticoats and a lacy apron and mop cap. But not for long. Her ‘customer’ cut the flimsy costume away with a pair of shears. From the way Yuki yelped and twisted, it was clear he was cutting her too. Blood trickled down one arm and over her belly and she stared straight into the camera for one heart-stopping moment. Alex had the uncomfortable sense that he was watching a genuine victim this time and not an actress.

  His thumb hovered over the stop button for a few seconds before he reminded himself that there was a fourth film on the list, Aesthetic Paranoia, which she was apparently still shooting. If this was real, surely she wouldn’t have made another such film. Surely she’d be shouting ‘Police!’ or ‘Help!’ He was sure he’d recognise that level of distress even in a language he couldn’t speak. No, it was just that weird sense of authenticity you sometimes got with ultra low-budget films.

  Yuki cried and begged in plaintive Japanese while the man stripped the mattress off the bed and threw her onto the bare springs. He bound her, spread-eagled, with wire that Alex could see biting into her delicate wrists and ankles. Then he threw a bucket of water over her and she screamed again and again, writhing on the springs.

  The man lifted the head of the bed and propped it against the wall so that it rested at an angle. The camera zoomed in and around Yuki’s naked, shivering body, shooting from underneath the bed to show the mesh pressing painfully into her back, the wires cutting into her skin. In close-up the springs looked rusty and Yuki was bleeding in several places. The detail was too subtle not to be real and Alex began to feel light-headed again. But he couldn’t tear his eyes away.

  The man held up a series of huge fishhooks with what looked like electrodes attached and Yuki screamed herself hoarse as the hooks were threaded through her skin one by one in a scene that went on for nearly ten minutes. When he was done the man connected the trailing wires to a machine at his feet. He pressed a button and there was a terrible buzzing sound, followed by another piercing scream. Yuki leapt and bucked against the springs for what felt like an eternity before the current stopped. Wisps of smoke began to rise from the contact points and Alex thought he could smell something burning. Blood ran from Yuki’s eyes like tears as she gasped and panted, too breathless to scream. The camera zoomed in on her face and she stared directly out of the screen again, as though she were looking through a window right at Alex.

  When the buzzing sound began again Yuki tensed and began to plead frantically, this time with whoever was behind the camera. Alex closed his eyes against her screams and the metallic rattle of the springs and the zap of electricity. He held his breath as it went on and on, wishing it would end.

  At last there was silence. Silence and the smell of scorched meat. He shut the film off and ran for the bathroom. He almost made it.

  It was several days before Yuki came back.

  Alex had put the three DVDs in a carrier bag, knotted it and pushed it to the back of the bathroom cupboard. When Josh had asked how he liked the film he’d forced a laugh and said it was rubbish, with crappy effects. And if his voice had trembled when he’d said it, Josh didn’t seem to notice. Yuki’s picture was gone from his phone and the J-horror sites he’d bookmarked were erased from his browsing history.

  As disturbing as it had been, he knew it was fake. That was part of the point of films like that – to trick the viewer into thinking it was real. Actual snuff films were an urban legend. None had ever been found and they certainly wouldn’t be readily available online in any case. People had been fooled by special effects before. And while it was a compliment to the makers of Yuki’s films, Alex had seen enough.

  He was in bed, almost asleep, when he first heard the sound. A soft rustle, as though someone were reading a newspaper in the next room. He froze. He had the mad urge to call out ‘Who’s there?’ even though there was no one else in the flat. Unless someone had broken in. It was that kind of neighbourhood but the flat was too small for a burglar to hide in without Alex knowing. A rat, then? It would have to be an awfully big one.

  His heart hammered in his chest, drowning out any sounds that might be coming from the other room. Seconds passed like hours as he sat staring towards the open doorway, feeling like a child who’d woken from a nightmare. He should get up and switch on all the lights but the thought of putting his feet on the floor, exposing them to the empty space under the bed, was too frightening.

  ‘Get a grip,’ he mouthed, trying to spur himself into action. But still he didn’t move.

  There was another sound. A soft slap, like a bare foot on the hard floor. Then another. And another.

  His blood turned to ice water as the footsteps came closer and closer. A thin shape was emerging from the darkness of the corridor. Then he heard the dripping. He could almost believe it was some girl he’d brought home from a club and forgotten about. She’d just got out of the shower without drying off and now –

  Except it wasn’t. It was Yuki.

  When she reached the bedroom Alex bit back a scream. She stood in the doorway, naked and dripping with blood. Her arms hung loose at her sides and Alex’s stomach clenched as he saw the symbols carved into her body. The calligraphy was more extensive than he remembered from the scene in the film. The cuts ran from the base of her throat, across her small breasts and down her torso.

  A strangled sound escaped his throat and Yuki’s head turned towards him. It was a careful, deliberate movement, as though she had only located him by the sound and was trying to fix his exact position. She turned and took a step into the room. Alex stared at her in horror, desperate to run but unable to move.

  It wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. It was a dream or a hallucination, just like the images in his head he hadn’t been able to get rid of. But worst of all, he felt himself responding as he always had. Hot desire pulsed in his groin even as bile rose in his throat.

  Each step she took opened the cuts further. Blood flowed over her body like water, pooling on the floor. What was almost worse was the residual grace in her movements. She didn’t shuffle or sway drunkenly. Rather, she moved with the precision of a dancer, each movement full of purpose. Blood gleamed in the light from the window, shining on her mutilated skin like a wet carapace, and Alex shuddered as he felt himself growing hard.

  ‘No,’ he managed to whisper. ‘No, please.’

  Yuki responded to his voice, reaching out for him. Her eyes were empty pools of black but her lips seemed to be forming a smile.

  It took all his courage to shut his eyes and wish the sight away.

  He counted to three before his eyes flew open again in fright. Yuki was gone.

  It was some time before he was able to get up off the bed and even then his legs threatened to buckle with each step he took towards the doorway. There was no blood on the floor, no evidence that anything had ever been there.

 
It was the middle of the night but Alex got dressed and drove all the way to work to throw the DVDs away. He snapped the disks in half and scattered them, along with the packaging, into the three large industrial bins behind the office building. He wondered if he ought to say something, but what? A prayer? He wasn’t religious so he didn’t imagine it would do any good. But surely it couldn’t do any harm.

  ‘Goodbye, Yuki,’ he whispered, and her name felt like an obscenity on his lips. ‘Please don’t come back.’

  But she did.

  It was four nights later and Alex was asleep. He was deep inside a pleasant childhood dream when his eyes fluttered open with a start and there she was, standing over him.

  He screamed and scrambled away until he was cowering on the floor against the wall. Yuki cocked her head as if in confusion, her eyes streaming with black, bloody tears, her temples scorched and pierced by fishhooks. She looked thinner, more wasted.

  Yuki raised one pale arm and reached for him. He could see the gleam of bone through the cuts on her chest. The wounds gaped like tiny mouths with each movement, as though trying to speak the words they represented. Alex shuddered with revulsion as Yuki drew her hand down over his torso. Her touch was gentle as she took hold of his cock. He stiffened in her grasp, unable to move, unable to resist as she stroked him like a lover. She pressed her blackened lips to his and he closed his eyes with a sickened moan as he came.

  Then he crumpled to his knees on the floor, crying.

  ‘Mate, you look like hell.’

  Alex had been tempted not to answer the door but Josh had kept pounding, shouting that he knew Alex was home.

  ‘Yeah,’ he mumbled. ‘Got some bloody bug.’

  ‘I’ve been ringing you for days. The guys at work thought you’d died or something. You didn’t even call in sick.’

  Alex managed a rueful smile. ‘Too sick to.’

  ‘Well, is there anything I can do for you? You need food? Booze? Drugs?’

  ‘No, I’m fine.’

  But his assurances didn’t get rid of Josh. His friend muttered about how stuffy it was in the flat before planting himself on the battered sofa where they’d watched so many DVDs together. He shrugged out of his leather jacket, revealing a black Faces of Death T-shirt. Alex stared at the grinning skull and spiky red lettering for several seconds before looking away. Josh didn’t seem to notice his uneasiness.

  An awkward silence stretched between them but Alex couldn’t think of anything to say. He couldn’t tell Josh he was seeing ghosts, much less the specifics of the encounters. But Yuki’s presence hung in the air in spite of his silence. He could still smell her blood and burnt flesh, still feel the slick touch of her fingers on his skin.

  He’d scrubbed himself raw in the shower after the first time but it hadn’t changed anything. She’d returned the next night, and the next. She looked worse with each visit but each time Alex’s own body had betrayed him, succumbing to her touch even as he choked back the sickness welling in his throat. He couldn’t resist or escape and each violation only seemed to excite him more.

  He was pretty sure he understood what the symbols were now. Hours of online searching had led him to a website about curses. He didn’t need to read Japanese to know that one of the characters represented ‘desire’ and another ‘obsession’. He hadn’t dared to search further to see if ‘love’ was also among them.

  Josh was talking, telling him about some new film he’d just seen, one his girlfriend hadn’t been able to stomach.

  Alex felt his own stomach churn queasily.

  ‘Anyway,’ Josh continued, oblivious to his friend’s discomfort, ‘pretty weird about that actress, huh?’

  Alex blinked. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Didn’t you get my email?’

  ‘What email?’

  ‘The one I sent you last week. About that Japanese girl. The one in the film you had me track down?’

  Alex felt a crawling sensation in his guts. So his fixation on Yuki hadn’t been lost on Josh after all. ‘What about her?’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  The words seemed to come from a long way away, like a transmission he’d already heard. He couldn’t speak. The skull on Josh’s shirt seemed to be laughing now.

  ‘Alex? You OK?’

  He nodded weakly. ‘Yeah, I think so.’ Some part of him had already known, of course.

  Josh went on. ‘I figured you liked her since you wanted all her films and I was trying to find a copy of that last one for you – Aesthetic Paranoia. She died on the set. Some kind of freak accident.’

  ‘When?’ Alex managed to ask.

  ‘That’s what’s so weird, mate. It was only a few weeks ago, before I even showed you Victim Factory 2. She was dead the whole time we’ve been watching her films. Hey, are you sure you’re OK? You’re white as a fucking sheet.’

  That night Alex lay in bed listening for the familiar sticky wet slap of her feet. There was no point in trying to resist. Yuki would come for him, would keep coming for him, until there was nothing left of either of them. He’d met her eyes through the screen and she had chosen him. He was special.

  He hadn’t liked the way Josh had said we. We’ve been watching her films. He didn’t like the thought of Josh seeing Yuki the way he did.

  She was no longer able to stand upright but she could crawl. Her hair hung in matted clumps around her face as she pushed herself towards him on rotting hands and knees. Her skin was peeling away from the bone in places, hanging like strips of charred, wet paper.

  ‘I’m here,’ Alex said softly, tapping the floor to guide her.

  When she reached the source of the sound she stopped. A heavy obstacle was in the way. She reached out a tentative bony hand to touch it. Her fingers moved over the grinning skull and the red letters that were smeared with blood, then found the tear in the material. She prodded the gaping wound in Josh’s chest, gingerly touching the bloody edge of the kitchen knife while Josh stared vacantly up at the ceiling.

  Yuki frowned, looking lost for a moment before recoiling from the unfamiliar body. Hurt by the deception, she raised her head and a feeble sound emerged from what remained of her throat. Alex could see the glistening strings of muscle trying to work to form words. His heart twisted.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But I had to know I was the only one.’

  She responded to his voice, turning her head towards him and then making her way to the bed with painful care. Too weak to climb up, she raised her thin arms like a child. Alex ignored the crunch of disintegrating bone as he lifted her up and sat her in his lap, his cock already swelling hungrily. Her lips hung in bloody tatters and he smoothed them into the semblance of a pout as he kissed her.

  ‘I love you too,’ he whispered. Then he slid his hand between her ruined legs.

  Touch Me With Your Cold, Hard Fingers

  ELIZABETH STOTT

  Friday is always lads’ night for Tony, but Saturday is their night. It’s sacrosanct. Maureen had to work today, or she’d have been there at lunchtime and they’d have spent the afternoon shopping. To make up for it, she buys pizzas on the way to Tony’s flat – they’ll have a cosy night-in together.

  The pizzas smell inviting from the boxes on the back seat of her car. Maureen parks in the usual place opposite his flat, under the streetlight. Tony said it was safer to park the car there where it can be seen. And she has come to think of it as her personal parking space; that she has a stake on his territory now. He’s given her the key to his flat, putting the key ring over her ring finger. Tony had been something of a womaniser, but Maureen has changed him. Now, she is his one and only. Now, she has the key to his flat. No woman has ever been given the key to his flat. It’s only a matter of time before she moves in.

  Tony’s flat is on the ground floor of a small modern block in a good area. It’s not big – two-
bedroomed – but nicely finished and newly fitted out with a stylish kitchen and bathroom. Maureen thinks she could be content to move in here – make it do for two.

  She knocks gently, to warn him, although he should expect her. She’d left a message on his phone. He should welcome her with a kiss, a snuggle in the doorway . . . But the hall is in darkness. There is no music, no television, no sound of a shower or any sign that anyone is home.

  The ticking of the kitchen clock pushes through the dark as Maureen makes her way through the hall, calling Tony’s name. She turns on the kitchen light. All looks normal, tidy. Tony is fussy like that, but it looks like he hasn’t prepared any food today. She places the pizzas on the kitchen table. The blind is open and the window looks blackly back at her. She closes it and notices that the plant she put on the windowsill is drooping; she waters it from the tap, flushing away loose bits of potting compost. The water makes a cold rushing sound in the sink, loud in the quiet flat. Surely he would have heard her? But there is nothing.

  The lounge door is closed. Maureen stands outside, hesitantly touching the door handle.

  ‘Tony?’

  No answer.

  She pushes open the door. The room is lit by a single table lamp – one that Maureen bought to make the room more homely. The television is off. The curtains are drawn shut.

  Tony is in his usual spot on the sofa, facing away from the door, looking towards someone sitting in the place where she usually sits, but Maureen cannot see who she is – her body is obscured by Tony’s. Yes, it is a her; a halo of feminine blonde hair catches the light. Maureen stands in the doorway and looks, feeling like a voyeur. Tony does not turn to acknowledge her, even though she speaks his name several times. Her voice shakes. There’s no sign that he has even noticed her. The room is fusty, as if it has been closed up all day. Maureen wants to open a window and let in some fresh air, but she is rooted to the spot. It is as if the blood has congealed in her veins.