The Mammoth Book of Terror (57 page)

The things doing the killing last night were not even human.

William picked his way between corpses, but it soon became too much to look down all the time. So he strode, arms swinging, every fourth or fifth step finding something soft to walk on. He
closed his eyes for minutes at a time, mindless of the danger of flooded shell-holes or barbed wire. He had faced much, much worse.

On the backs of his eyelids he saw perfection, beauty, Utopia: the valley back home that could not possibly be as wonderful and innocent as he saw it now, but in his mind’s eye it was
still the ultimate aim for his poor wandering self. He could smell it and taste it, and he could see it as well, every detail clear and defined, every rolling field—

He wondered what might live
beneath his father’s farm.

He had to get back to his lines, warn them, tell them there was something here worse than the Hun. He had seen and heard thousands die, but he could save many more if he hurried. There was so
little time. It was midday already. He did not want to be out here after dark.

William sneezed twice and spat out a great clot of mucus. A parliament of rooks feeding on a horse’s bloated corpse took to the air.

He wiped his nose with a muddy sleeve. His head had begun to throb and his joints were stiffening with every step.

Damn. After all this, he was coming down with the ‘flu.

MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH IS
a novelist and screenwriter who lives in north London and Brighton with his wife Paula and two cats. His first novel,
Only
Forward
, won the August Derleth and Philip K. Dick awards. His second,
Spares
, was optioned by Steven Spielberg and translated in seventeen countries worldwide, while his third,
One
of Us
, was optioned by Warner Brothers.

His most recent books,
The Straw Men
and
The Lonely Dead
(aka
The Upright Man
), were published under the name “Michael Marshall” and have been international
best-sellers. He is currently writing a third volume in the series.

Smith’s short stories have won the British Fantasy Award three times, and are collected in
What You Make It
and the International Horror Guild Award-winning
More Tomorrow &
Other Stories.
Six of his tales are currently under option for television.

“I’d been nursing the underlying idea for this story for quite a while,” reveals the author, “waiting to find a way to get into it: I am someone who will watch wacky home
video programmes on television and spend as much time looking at the details in the houses, at the hints of other lives, as I do laughing at the people falling over. Then one afternoon I happened
to walk past a nice, normal house in our neighbourhood, and I thought ‘Wouldn’t it be odd to just walk up that path, knock on the door and walk in.’

“Thankfully I only did it in a fictional reality . . .”

Here’s how it happened. It’s a Saturday. My wife is gone for the day, out at a big lunch for a mate who’s getting married in a couple weeks. Shit – that’s another
thing she’ll have to . . . whatever. She’ll work it out. Anyway, she got picked up at noon and went off in a cab full of women and balloons and I was left in the house on my own. I had
work to do, so that was okay. Problem was I just couldn’t seem to do it. Don’t know if you get that sometimes: just can’t apply yourself to something. You’ve got a job to do
– in my case it was fixing up a busted old television set, big as a fridge and hardly worth saving, but if that’s what they want, it’s their money – and it just won’t
settle in front of you as a task. No big deal, it wasn’t like it had to be fixed in a hurry, and it’s a Saturday. I’m a free man. I can do anything I want.

Problem was that I found I couldn’t settle to anything else either. I had the afternoon ahead, probably the whole evening too. The wife and her pals don’t get together often, and
when they do, they drink like there’s no tomorrow. Maybe that was the problem – having a block of time all to myself for once. Doesn’t happen often. You get out of the habit. I
don’t know. I just couldn’t get down to anything. I tried working, tried reading, tried going on the web and just moping around. None of it felt like I was doing anything. None of it
felt like
activity.
It just didn’t feel like I thought it would.

I don’t like this, I thought: it’s just not
working out.

In the end I got so grumpy and restless I grabbed a book and left the house. There’s a new pub opened up not far from the tube station, and I decided I’d go there, try to read for a
while. I stopped by a newsagents on the corner opposite the pub, bought myself a pack often cigarettes. I’m giving up. I’ve been giving up for a while now – and sticking to it,
more or less, just a few here and there, and never in the house – but sometimes you’ve just got to have a fucking cigarette. Sometimes the giving up is worse for you than the cigarettes
themselves. Your concentration goes. You don’t feel yourself. The world feels like it’sjust out of reach, as if you’re not a part of it any more and not much missed. The annoying
thing is that anyone who knows you’re not smoking tends to think that anything that’s wrong with you, any bad mood, any unsettled-ness, is just due to the lack of cigs. I was pretty
sure it wasn’t nicotine drought that was causing my restlessness, but so long as I was out of the house I thought I might as well have a couple.

When I got to the pub – which we called the Hairy Pub, because it used to be covered in ivy to the point where you couldn’t actually see the building underneath – it
wasn’t too crowded, and I was able to score one of the big new leather armchairs in the window, right by a fucking great fern. The pub never used to be like this. It used to be an
old-fashioned, unreconstituted boozer, and – as such – a bit shit. I like old-fashioned pubs as much as the next man, but this one just wasn’t very good. Now they’ve got
posh chairs and a cappuccino machine and polite staff and frankly, I’m not complaining. They cut off all the ivy and painted it black and it looks alright. Whatever. The pub’s not
really relevant. I sat there for an hour or so, having a couple of coffees and smoking a couple of my small packet of cigarettes. Each one caused me a manageable slap of guilt, as did the chocolate
powder sprinkled on the cappuccinos. I’ve been on the frigging Atkins diet for a month, to cap it all, which means, as you doubtless know, no carbohydrates. None. “Thou shalt not
carb,” the great Doctor proclaimed, and then died. Chocolate is carbs, as – more importantly – are pizza, pasta and special fried rice, the three food groups which make human life
worth living, the triumvirate of grubstuffs which make crawling out of the swamp seem worth it. That month has seen me lose a big six pounds, or, put another way, one point something pounds a week,
while not being able to eat anything I like. It’s crap. Anyway.

I tried to read, but couldn’t really get into my book. Couldn’t get into a newspaper either. My attention kept drifting, lighting on people sitting in clumps around the pub,
wondering what they were doing there on a Saturday afternoon. Some looked hungover already, others were in the foothills of starting one for Sunday. They were all wearing their own clothes and had
their hair arranged in certain ways, which they were happy with, or not; some had loud laughs, others sat pretty quietly. The staff swished to and fro – most of them seem to be rather gay, in
that pub: not something that exercises me in the least, merely making a factual observation. I’ve often wondered what it’s like, being gay. Different, certainly. The music was just loud
enough to be distracting, and I only recognised about one song in three. I could see other people tapping their feet, though, bobbing their heads. The songs meant something in their lives. Not in
mine. I wondered when they’d first heard it, how come it had come to be a part of them and not me. I looked at my coffee cup and my book and my little pack of cigarettes and I got bored with
them and myself, and bored with my trousers and thoughts and everything else I knew and understood. Custom had staled their infinity variety. Custom was making my hands twitch.

In the end I got up and left. I stomped back out onto the street, caught between wistful and depressed and pissed off. Then I did something I wasn’t altogether expecting. Instead of
walking straight past the newsagent, I swerved and went back in. I went straight up to the desk and asked for a pack of Marlboro Lites. The guy got it, and I paid for them. Emerged back onto the
street, looking at what I held in my hands. Been a long, long time since I’d bought a pack of twenty cigarettes. It’s like that with everyone these days – you check, in the pubs
and bars, everyone’s smoking tens now, just to prove they’re giving up.

But you can give up giving up, you know. You can choose to say one thing instead of the other, to say the word “twenty” instead often”. That’s all it takes. You’re
not as trapped as you think you are. There are other roads, other options, other doors. Always.

I crossed the street at the lights and then, instead of walking back the way I’d come (along the main road, past the station), I took a turning which led to a shortcut through some quiet
residential streets. It’s pretty hilly around where I live now, though if you’re on the way back from the pub then you’re walking down for most of the way. My first right took me
into Addison Road, which is short and has a school on one side. Then I turned left into a street whose name I’m not even sure of, a short little road with some two storey brick Victorian
houses on either side. At the bottom of it is Brenneck Road, at which point I’d be rejoining the route I would have taken had I gone the other way.

I was walking along that stretch of pavement, halfway between here and there, halfway between one thing and the other, when I did it.

I turned left suddenly, pushed open the black wooden gate I happened to be passing, and walked up to the house beyond it. Don’t know what number it was. Don’t know anything about the
house. Never noticed it before. But I went up to the door and saw that it was one house, not divided up into flats. I pressed the buzzer. It rang loudly inside.

While I was waiting I glanced back, taking a better look at the front garden. Nothing to see, really – standard stuff. Tiny bit of grass, place for the bins, a small tree. Manageable.

I turned when I heard the sound of the door being opened.

A young woman, mid-twenties, was standing there. She had shoulder length brown hair and a mild tan and white teeth. She looked nice, and pretty, and I thought okay – I’m going to do
it.

“Hello?” she said, ready to be helpful.

“Hi,” I replied, and pushed past her into the house. Not hard, not violent, just enough to get past her.

I strode down the hallway, took a quick peek in the front room (stripped pine floors, creamy-white sofa, decent new widescreen television) and went straight through to the kitchen, which was out
the back. They’d had it done, got some architect or builder to knock out most of the wall and replace it with glass, and it looked good. I wanted to do something like that at home, but the
wife thought it would be too modern and “notin keepingwith aVictorian residence”. Bollocks. Itlooked great.

“Just a bloody minute . . .” said a voice, and I saw the woman had followed me in. She looked very wary, understandably. “What the hell are you doing?”

I glanced over her shoulder and saw the front door was still open, but first things first. I went over to the fridge – nice big Bosch, matt silver. We’ve got a Neff. One of those
retro ones, in pale green. Looks nice but holds fuck all. This Bosch was full to the brim. Nice food, too. Good cheese. Pre-cut fruit salad. A pair of
salmon en croute
, tasty, very nice with
some new potatoes, which I saw were also there ready to go. Cold meats, pasta salads, da da da. From Waitrose, supermarket of choice. Wife always shops at Tescos, and it’s not bad but
it’s not half as good.

“Nice,” I said. “Okay. Did you buy all this? Or was it your fella?”

She just stared at me, goggle-eyed, didn’t answer. But I knew it was her, just from the way she looked at it. She blinked, trying to work out what to do. I smiled, trying to reassure her
it was all okay.

“I’m going to call the police.”

“No you’re not,” I said, and smacked her one.

It wasn’t hard, but she wasn’t expecting it. She staggered back, caught her leg on one of the chairs around the table (nice-looking chairs, kind of ethnic, oak) and fell back on her
arse. Head clunked against the fridge. Again, not hard, but enough to take the wind out of her sails for a second.

I checked the back door – shut, locked – and then stepped over her down the hallway and to the front. A woman with a pram was passing by on the pavement. I gave her a big smile and
said good afternoon and she smiled back (what a nice man) and then I shut the door. Went to the little table, grubbed around a second, and came up with a set of keys, and a spare. Locked the front
door. Went into the front room to check: all windows shut and secured, and here’s a couple who stumped up for double glazing. Good for keeping the heat in. Good for keeping the noise in too,
I’m afraid.