Best British Horror 2014 Read online

  These stories, which Joel began writing in the early ’90s, were finally collected in Where Furnaces Burn, which deservedly won the 2013 World Fantasy Award for Best Collection. Its theme of ‘the antipeople’ harks back to ‘And Some Are Missing’, a story from Joel’s first collection, The Earth Wire, but it’s an extraordinary story in its own right – taut, spare, imaginative, beautifully written and packing a final emotional punch that will stay with you for a long time.

  Joel Lane died, aged fifty, on 26th November 2013, and we still don’t know why. I mean that in the sense that it’s hard to comprehend a universe that could snuff out such a brilliant writer and such a kind and gentle human being so early, when there was so much he still had to do, and in a far more literal one: Joel just went to sleep that night, and he never woke up again. Knowing that gives ‘Without A Mind’s opening lines an almost prophetic feel.

  His dreams and visions, at least, remain. Turn the page and discover them, if you haven’t already. And if you have, welcome once more.

  – SIMON BESTWICK, Swinton, 30th January 2014.

  Without a Mind

  JOEL LANE

  None of this was an investigation. It was personal. Though I first became aware of it when talking with the coroner at the Law Courts about suspicious deaths. He said that people sometimes died for no reason. In the last year, for example, there’d been a cluster of sudden deaths in South Birmingham from previously undiagnosed diseases. ‘Sudden organ failure – the heart, the kidney, the liver. No obvious risk factors, no environmental cause. Maybe it’s a new trend they’ll find a reason for in a few years’ time. At the moment, the only medical verdict is that shit happens.’

  That wasn’t a verdict many people would have disagreed with. It was the early nineties, the nadir of the recession, and emptiness was spreading like an infection through the high streets and trading estates. I was based at the Acocks Green station then, and we were having a bad year. Local crime had jacked up the insurance costs for newsagents and off-licences so high that most of them had gone out of business, robbed or not. The press was blaming negligent policing, while the local authority was slashing our budget.

  My own life was a bit jittery at that time. Elaine was trying to combine work with looking after our daughter Julia, and was unhappy about the amount of overtime I was doing. I told her we were busy fighting the crime wave. True enough, but I didn’t want to tell her I’d taken out a private loan to compensate for not getting a promotion I’d been relying on. She knew money had disappeared, and hinted that she thought I was salting it away for a mistress or a runner. I’d had no such thoughts – that all came later. There was a phrase from a Springsteen song that wouldn’t go out of my head in those days: debts no honest man could pay.

  One evening I was having an off-duty drink with some friends in the Corvid Arms when an old man staggered in, wearing a faded suit. He paused, leaning on a table, then made his way unsteadily towards the bar. As he tried to make himself heard over the juke-box, the barman picked up his mobile and spoke briefly into it. Two security staff came over from the door and informed the old man that he was leaving. I didn’t interfere, though the old man was no worse drunk than half the teenagers around the bar. From the doorway his voice rose in protest, then faded. The bouncers didn’t return.

  A minute later, prompted by a mild unease, I slipped out the door. It was a crisp October night. Between the doorway and a line of cars, a dark figure lay curled on the pavement. Blood was trickling down his face from a gash over one eye. He was holding onto something that looked like a crumpled plastic bag half-full of soft food. As I came closer, I could see blood was draining into it – but not from his forehead. I couldn’t make out what the whitish shape was. Surely I hadn’t had that much to drink? I reached out, and it backed away from me. Part of it remained attached to the base of the old man’s throat.

  As blood drained into the creature, its form became clearer. It was something like a human baby, but twisted up and nearly flat, made of some kind of glassy matter or ectoplasm. Its hands were reaching down to its inert victim; the fingers, which were long and slender, were poking into his neck. Blood was flowing through them into the creature’s small body. It made me think of a vacuum bag.

  The old man twitched and choked as the attacker pressed in harder. Its tiny face had no eyes or mouth. I reached out to try and stop it, or to prove I wasn’t really seeing it – and the thing pulled away, covering itself with the blood-streaked feathery tissue it had pulled out from the old man’s chest cavity. And then it was gone, crawling faster than a rat, dragging its spoils with it. I looked down at the silent man. Apart from the gash on his forehead and a few small drops of blood on his neck, there was no sign of injury. But he was dead.

  As I knelt there, feeling for a pulse, one of the bouncers came up to me and struck my shoulder with his fist. I looked up. He said quietly: ‘Any trouble about this and they’ll find your little daughter in the canal.’ Then he turned and went back into the bar. I phoned for an ambulance.

  The old man, an Irish Brummie aged seventy-two, was found to have died of natural causes. A haemorrhage had ripped through his lungs like a hailstorm through a leafy shrub, killing him in seconds. There was no damage to his skull, or to the flesh of his withered throat. A past history of pneumonia was suspected. Alcohol was assumed to have been a contributory factor.

  A few days later, I was called out to make a shoplifting arrest at a shoe shop in Acocks Green. When I got there, the suspect – a woman of thirty or so – was unconscious in the manager’s office. The shoes were all defective stock, heavily discounted. That seemed to make the whole thing worse. An ambulance was on its way, the shop manager assured me. ‘She just passed out. Unless she’s faking it. You never know, do you?’

  The woman, who was very thin, was lying diagonally on the carpet of the narrow room. Her long dark hair was tangled below her, as if under water. I knelt to move her onto her side, and my hand passed through something cold above her face. The light was twisting and corrupting into a figure I already recognised. The creature had attached itself to the unconscious woman’s ribs, and its pale figures were starting to redden. I swiped at it and felt a terrible chill bite into my fingers, as if they were covered with frost. But I couldn’t get any grip on its translucent flesh. I was dimly aware of the shop manager telling me how the thief had been apprehended. Her story continued as, helpless, I watched the visitor drag out a pulsing mass of tissue and scuttle away to a corner, where it and its prize faded.

  ‘. . . her before. This time she didn’t get away with it.’ As the manager finished her account, the office door swung open. Two paramedics rushed in, too late. I didn’t have to feel for a pulse to know the woman’s heart had stopped.

  Karen was one of a group of North Birmingham coppers I used to meet occasionally for an off-duty chat in a pub near the Hockley Flyover. We always cleared out sharpish at last orders, before the Friday night lock-in started. One of those nights, Karen told me about the anti-people. It had been a long and stressful week, and despite my financial worries I couldn’t resist the lure of their guest ales. I was into my second or third pint when the conversation turned to other people’s drinking – always an easy thing to condemn. A senior colleague of ours had recently taken early retirement due to a ‘drink problem’.

  ‘It’s a way of committing suicide on the instalment plan,’ a young officer commented tritely.

  ‘More like bad company – someone hanging on you who won’t let you give up your bad habits,’ said another.

  Karen shook her head. ‘Not someone you know. A stranger feeding on you, like a worm. A kind of anti-person.’

  ‘Steady on, wench. You’ll be seeing things next. Like Mulder here.’ I laughed at that. Had to. Karen applied herself to her thin glass of rosé. She was a small woman with spiky ash-blond hair, very different from Elaine.

  When the conversation had moved
on, I caught her eye. ‘Did you mean that literally?’ I asked. ‘About the anti-people?’

  Karen gazed uneasily at me for a few seconds. ‘Have you seen them too?’ she said quietly. Her face was expressionless. I bit my lip.

  A few minutes later, I visited the gents’. My face in the rust-flecked mirror looked sickly and lost. On the way back, I met Karen. She touched my arm. ‘Can I have a word?’ she said. I nodded.

  ‘You know I work on the Hagley Road? Addicts and prostitutes, it’s not fun. The crimes people commit against themselves. Three nights ago, we found a girl who’d been beaten up. By a pimp or a client probably. We called an ambulance and I tried to give her some first aid. Her face was a mess. Later we heard she’d lost the sight in both eyes. Detached retinas, from the beating.’

  Karen swayed. Her face was coated with a film of sweat. ‘You’ve had a shock – ’ I began, but she went on.

  ‘There were two of us, me and another WPC. We were waiting for the ambulance. Just before it came, I saw something move out of the gutter. Like a surgical glove or a plastic bag blowing. But there was no wind. It slipped onto the girl’s face, and I went to pull it off but my hand went through it. The blood from her face soaked into it, and I saw it was like . . . like some tiny flattened child. It was kissing the girl’s eyes. She was unconscious. Then it peeled away and just melted into the pavement. I thought I was imagining it. When the ambulance came, I already knew what would happen to the girl. But Jane, the other officer, she didn’t see nothing. Am I going mad?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen two of them. We need to talk about this. But not now.’

  Karen smiled. Her teeth were sharp. ‘Yeah. We’d better get back. Or the others will think we’re having an affair.’

  Did it cross my mind, even then, that I wouldn’t mind justifying their suspicions? If so, it was the drink hinting.

  We swapped numbers, but I didn’t feel able to call her. The anti-people were my personal nightmare, not a secret to be shared. But five days later, Karen called me at my desk in the Acocks Green station.

  ‘I’ve found a nest of them,’ she said. ‘Where they hide. Where they take what they’ve stolen.’

  The nest was in Harborne, she said; near the disused railway. ‘I used to play there as a kid. When I was twelve, thirteen, I used to go there with boys. It’s got memories for me. Yesterday, my day off, I went there for a walk. Just trying to forget about some recent things. Then I saw one of them, creeping under a railway bridge. It was carrying some . . . trophy, something it had. Then another one followed it. I could almost see through them. Made me think of . . . shrimps in a rock pool. If they didn’t move, you wouldn’t know they were there.

  ‘After a few minutes, I followed them. Down in the valley . . . where there’s rotten wood from bonfires, and derelict cars, and stuff. There were dozens of the things, all gathered together, surrounded by fireweed. I think they were praying, but I couldn’t see what to. I ran away.’

  That evening, Karen’s shift ended at nine and mine at ten. We met at the Green Man pub in Harborne, and I drove her to the railway bridge near the fire station. She led me through a gap in the fence. ‘This hasn’t changed in ten years,’ she said. We had torches, but the yellow half-moon was bright enough for us not to need them. At Karen’s suggestion, I’d brought something else: a can of petrol.

  The railway track was half worn away and overgrown with brambles. I followed Karen down onto the footpath and under the railway bridge, which stank of piss and decay. There were a couple of occupied sleeping bags against the brick wall, but we ignored them. Further on, trees broke up the moonlight like cracks in a window. Karen slowed down, looking ahead carefully. ‘It’s not far from here.’

  A few rusty shells of cars were lined up at the edge of a small clearing. Beyond them, I could see an old mattress and some pillows lying on the remains of a bonfire. Karen gripped my hand. ‘Wait.’ She crouched behind one of the ruined cars; I dropped beside her. Ahead of us, the pale fireweed and dead bracken were trembling in the breeze. Then I realised the air was still.

  I don’t know how many of them were in the clearing. It was just a restless folding and corrupting of the light, and a smell like an open wound. Without blood, there was hardly anything to them. Beside me, Karen didn’t move; but her breathing told me how afraid she was. I gripped the petrol can and waited. Slowly, as my eyes – or some other kind of vision – adjusted, I could make out their flattened shapes climbing over the pile of charred wood to the mattress. They all left some kind of material there: whitish streaks and lumps of ectoplasm, the ghost organs they had extracted from their human victims.

  For what seemed like hours, we watched them put together two figures on the stained mattress. The moon had passed overhead and was sinking through the wet trees when the bodies first stirred. Karen drew in a sharp breath. I thought my heart would stop. The two lifeless shapes rose to a hunched standing posture and faced each other. Around them, the barely visible anti-people crept and prayed on the heap of rotten wood and among the rank weeds.

  Still taking shape, the figures pressed together in a slow clinch. I thought they were fighting until I glimpsed a low swelling on one of them that was seeking the other. Kneeling on the mattress, their rough-shaped bodies locked together and shuddered in clumsy passion. Their eyeless faces grew mouths to cry out silently.

  Karen snatched the petrol can from my hand, together with the oil-stained cloth it was wrapped in. She flicked a lighter to the cloth, stood up and threw the bundle onto the mound of black wood. It struck the edge of the mattress, which started to burn. The figures carried on struggling even as the fire touched them, as if this was the climax they’d worked to reach. Then the petrol can exploded, scarring my vision. A wave of heat struck me through the car’s empty windows. I smelt something burning that wasn’t wood or flesh; it made me retch uncontrollably.

  Around us, trees and bushes were catching fire. Karen pulled at my arm, turning away. We ran together through the wet undergrowth, hitting branches, stumbling in the darkness, along the footpath, through the bridge, up to the railway line and back down to the road where my car was parked.

  I was shaking too hard to drive. We sat in the car for a few minutes. Then Karen pressed her face against my chest. She was crying. I stroked her cropped hair, then slowly lifted her head until it was level with my own. As we began to kiss, I wondered if it was really our own desire that was forcing us together. But that didn’t stop my mouth, or my hands.

  It was a few minutes past midnight. I drove from Harborne to the Bristol Road, out beyond Longbridge to the silhouetted hills. We parked in an empty lay-by and moved to the back of the car. The radio was playing, a new song from Massive Attack. Like a soul without a mind, in a body without a heart. Karen breathed hard, but made no other sound, as I thrust inside her.

  Neither of us spoke on the way back through the city. Karen’s eyes were closed; she was shivering, though I’d turned up the heating in the car. I was thinking of an incident from my childhood: when an older boy had followed me home from school, spitting repeatedly on the back of my coat. The roads were quiet. The moon was no longer in the sky.

  We should have left it there, but didn’t. I needed to get past the memory of those desperate puppets and their audience. Karen wanted something from me I no longer had to give. It was hard enough managing my own life, let alone a double one.

  We settled it as best we could, with a few furtive dates and a restless night at a cheap Stafford hotel. The night of the fire was the only time we didn’t take precautions. We’d just about put the phantom of love to rest when Karen told me she was pregnant.

  The waste ground fire had spread a little, but there wasn’t much for it to harm. We’d gone back in the daytime and found nothing abnormal, except a bad smell that could have been burnt plastic. The local police had put out an alert for a teenage arsonist.

/>   Karen decided to keep the baby. I won’t presume to define her motives. But to some extent, it made the connection between us permanent. And as the foetus grew, my feelings became more complex. It might be a boy, and I’d always wanted a son. Elaine couldn’t have any more children. Maybe some day I could acknowledge him. Or her. It was something to look forward to as well as fear.

  One night in September, around eleven, Karen phoned me at the station to say she’d gone into labour. I called Elaine and said the station had an emergency. Hoped there wouldn’t be too many more lies like that. When I came off shift, I drove straight to the hospital.

  As soon as I saw her, I knew something was wrong. Her face had a shrink-wrapped look. She tried to smile when she saw me, but her eyes were focused inward. The maternity ward was uncomfortably warm. I held her hand while a nurse took her temperature and reassured her that all was well and the midwife would be along in a few minutes. ‘I need more painkillers,’ she said. The nurse hurried off, and I gave Karen a gentle hug. Her breathing sounded torn. I felt sick with guilt, both at being there and at not doing more.

  My daughter Julia had been born in another local hospital. It had seemed quite an easy birth – but afterwards, Elaine had lost a lot of blood. They’d had to operate. That was in my mind as I sat holding Karen’s hand, watching the sweat trickle down her taut face.

  ‘It hurts,’ she whispered. Her lips were cracked. I filled a glass from the jug of water on the bedside table and turned back to her, holding it. A pale, hollow thing was crouching on her belly. I dropped the glass and lashed out at the creature, but felt only a chilly breath. Its long fingers were turning red. Karen was lying still; her eyes were shut.

  At that moment, the nurse came back with a syringe. ‘What are you doing?’ she said to me. ‘Did you spill the water?’ I stood there, unable to move, as the misty creature drew a small blood-streaked mass head-first from Karen’s belly. It dragged its trophy under the bed, where the pool of water was spreading. The nurse pushed me back and applied the syringe to Karen’s inert arm.