Best New Horror #26

Simon Kurt Unsworth THE NIGHT RUN

ELISE DROVE A private ambulance. Unlike most ambulances, this one was dressed in a monotone, sombre grey, had no sirens or flashing lights, and the patients it carried were beyond treatment or help or hope of recovery. There was no need for rush, no pressure on Elise to arrive at her destination quickly, there was simply smooth movement of the world rolling past the windows and the knowledge that in the vehicle’s chill rear, her passengers rode in silence. She never turned the radio on when she drove, despite the fact that the ambulance’s cab was separate from the back section, feeling somehow that it would be disrespectful during these final journeys. Elise gave the dead serenity and grace wherever she could, quietness after life’s noise.

These night-time rides were the ones that she enjoyed the most; there was little traffic, especially out here where the buildings had given way to farmland and the ground rose to hills, and she could drive without effort or concentration, letting her mind reach out into the sky and land around her and find shapes and scents and sounds that, she thought, few other people ever felt or smelled or heard.

Old man Tunstall’s funeral parlour was out in one of the villages, serving the isolated communities scattered throughout the farmlands. Actually, they maybe weren’t isolated communities, Elise thought, but one huge community stretched thin and laid across the hills and valleys and fields like a net, hundreds of individual strands twisting around each other in links that stretched from farmhouse to terraced street to barn and back to farmhouse. Few people escaped the area, once arrived, not for any length of time. Tunstall had once told her that most of his business was what he called “in-house”, people from the area dying at home and being buried in the land that had sustained them. It was only occasionally that Elise was called on to take a body from the hospital in the city to Tunstall’s, and the runs were always at night.

Outside, the ground was dusted with frost and occasional banks of snow. It had been bitterly cold these last few weeks, the earth hardening, becoming frigid, and Elise drove slowly, letting the vehicle’s weight give it grip on the iced surface. The roads glistened in the dying moonlight and, around her, the fields drowsed under a caul of ice and the journey was all that mattered, this last journey between the places of life and the places of death.

Elise carried only one traveller that night. “He killed himself,” the morgue attendant had told her in a voice somewhere between glee and horrified awe, “and we don’t know who he is!” The man had apparently walked to the banks of the river that wound down from the hills, passing through the town on its way to the sea, stripped, knelt down on the ridged and furled mud at the bitter water’s edge and frozen to death. His clothes were in a bag next to Elise now, neatly folded, the top of the bag rolled and held down with tape.

“He was frozen solid,” the morgue attendant had said, “and we had to defrost him like a piece of chicken!” Elise had met people like the attendant before, people for whom the mechanics of death were the most fascinating part of the journey, for whom the biology of things was the most important. There had been the paramedic who had told her, voice rich with undisguised fascination, about the suicide who had jumped from a tall building and landed on the ground at an odd angle. Their head, said the paramedic, had connected hard with a kerbstone and cracked open and their brain had burst free and slithered, almost intact, across the road “like a big pink snail”.

He had asked her out for a drink after telling her this. She had refused, politely, and taken the suicide’s body into her private ambulance to begin its next stage of the procession into the ground. For Elise, death wasn’t a moment; rather, it was a string of moments, a set of markers that led from life to burial or cremation, to earth or fire, and she saw herself as a companion and guide to these, the most significant of journeys.

The rear of the ambulance shifted slightly as she went around a corner, the wheels slipping over ice, and she slowed.

The dead man was being delivered to Tunstall’s Funeral Home simply because Tunstall had a council contract to deal with the unidentified dead; there were spaces in the graveyards out here. In the cities, space for the departed was rapidly being filled and the real estate of passing on carried heavy costs that councils couldn’t pay, so people like Elise’s passenger were sent out, to where populations were lower and the grounds cheaper.

The rear of the vehicle shifted again. There was a noise as it shifted, a gentle knocking.

Elise slowed again, dropping smoothly through the gears, letting the engine quieten. There was another thud from behind her, and a slight shiver ran through the vehicle. Had she run over something in the road? A rock or branch, maybe an animal? She glanced in her wing mirror but the road behind her, painted in fragile moonlight, was clear. She let her speed creep back up, happy that all was well. Elise took the dead man on.

Another thud, another slight shiver. Movement. In the rear of the vehicle.

Elise’s first thought was that something had come loose back there, one of the straps holding the man’s coffin possibly, that it was flapping, but no—the thud had been too loud and the shiver too heavy to be caused by a simple loose strap. Perhaps the coffin itself was moving, slipping on its base and banging against the vehicle’s wall when she went around corners?

Another corner, slower now, but no accompanying shift or thud, the road straightening, letting the ambulance speed up and then a definite bang from the rear. Elise started, the tyres shimmying across the surface of the frozen road before she grasped the wheel and brought the vehicle back into line. The bag of belongings next to her fell from the seat into the footwell with a rustle of plastic that sounded almost organic, like an owl opening its wings and stretching. Making sure the road was straight ahead for a while, Elise turned and tried to peer through the small observation window between the cab and the refrigerated rear section.

The glass was dark, throwing back a reflection of her face, eyes inked pools below her pale forehead.

She turned back to the road, lifting her foot from the accelerator and taking the vehicle gently left, in towards the roadside. When it came to a halt, she put the ambulance in neutral and unclipped her seatbelt, turning properly to the observation slit. Cupping her hands around her eyes, she peered into the blackness that travelled at her back. It was almost absolute, a gloom that was broken only vaguely by pale edges and shapes.

Something moved loosely in the dark and then the engine of the ambulance abruptly cut out.

Elise jerked back from the glass. What had that been? She twisted back around and turned the key, starting the vehicle again. The engine sputtered for a moment, caught and slipped, caught again and grumbled to full life. She opened the driver’s side door and stepped out, leaving it open so that the cab lights fell across the road. There were no other lights out here, no street lamps, no cars or trucks barrelling along the road, just the stars above her and the moon dipping low as the night came to its end.

She made her way to the rear of the ambulance, reached out and took hold of the handles, felt the cold bite of chill metal against her fingers and palms, felt rather than heard something bump behind the doors, and then swung them open.

Everything was in its place. The coffin and its inhabitant were still on the lower ledge off on the right side, where she had placed them, and the straps around the wooden box were still tight and fastened. She climbed in, crouching and pulling on the padded nylon cables; there was no give in them. She looked around, seeing nothing that shouldn’t be there, nothing loose that would have explained the movement or the sounds. Experimentally, she placed her hands on the end of the coffin and pushed, wondering if the noises had been caused by it moving up and down rather than swinging sideways, but the casket remained still. Something inside it, then? No, she had watched as the dead man had been placed inside, the padding arranged around him to prevent precisely the kind of movement she was wondering about.

There was nothing on the other ledges, three of them, which could have moved. The rear of Elise’s ambulance was, as ever, neat and clean and a fitting cradle for the dead on these, the last of their courses.

The engine, then, or something mechanical underneath the vehicle. She would simply have to drive carefully and hope she made it to Tunstall’s, then make a judgement there about whether it was safe to drive back. She returned to the front of the ambulance and climbed in, shivering in the warmth. With the door shut and the belt back across her chest and securely clipped she pulled away, keeping her speed low.

The road was rising now, curling around one of the fells. It would fall and rise several more times before she reached Tunstall’s, she knew, and wondered if the ambulance would make it. She dug her phone from her pocket and checked it; a good charge but not much signal.

Another curve in the road and this time something definitely moved in the rear of the ambulance, banging hard against the side and setting the vehicle rocking outwards on its axles before it fell back to stability, distorting the vehicle’s balance for a moment. This time, the bang had been accompanied by a noise that might have been a sheet tearing or something flapping—a long low noise, only just audible above the sound of the engine. Her foot jerked on the accelerator, sending the ambulance lurching forward and onto the other side of the road before she could bring herself and it back under control, return them to the right side of the centre line and to a safer speed.

Before Elise could do anything else there was another bump, this time even harder, jolting the vehicle and making the wheel twitch in her hands, along with a long, drawn-out noise like something dragging across metal from somewhere behind her.

The dead man’s bag of belongings slithered across the footwell, the top pulling open and spilling the contents out. There were jeans and a dirty brown coat, pieces of paper covered in writing, and feathers. They must have been in the pockets of the jacket, dozens and dozens of them, hundreds of them, small and large, black and white and brown, speckled and plain, floating out in drifts. The smell of them, of the clothes, was rich and earthy, grimy with sweat and death and cold. One of the feathers settled on Elise’s hand and she shook it off violently, not liking the greasy feel of it.

Another bang, another moment where the ambulance belonged not to Elise but to itself, another correction and control regained and still they were travelling on, Elise wanting to get to Tunstall’s now, to get out of the ambulance and into light and company.

Feathers drifted around the cab, dancing and spinning, as she pressed down on the accelerator, urging the vehicle to gather up the road and loose it out behind them, now sure that the problem wasn’t the ambulance or its engine but whoever was in the ambulance’s rear, whatever was in the ambulance’s rear.

She risked a glimpse behind her. As she turned, there was a long cracking noise and the unmistakeable sound of wood splintering and something falling, the vibration of it rattling through the floor, heavy against her feet. There was a dash of pale movement in the slit, a pallid shape that rose behind the pane and then fell again, not a hand or a face but something indefinable, as though it was wrapped in linen or muslin.

The engine cut out as Elise jerked back from the glass, reaching out to turn the key even though she was still coasting forward, gears in neutral and nothing, nothing, no reaction from the ambulance except to slow and slow, inertia and the slope bringing it to a halt soon, too soon.

The internal lights clicked off with a sound like a gunshot, the dashboard’s glimmer suddenly extinguished. She put the handbrake on, ignoring the increasingly loud, repeating sound of flapping behind her, not looking at the glass, not looking at whatever might be peering through at her, turning the key again and again trying to start the vehicle.

And then the thing with the head like a dog seated next to her turned and drew back lips from teeth that were huge and which were the colour of old, tarnished ivory. She shrieked and jerked back from it, fumbling for the handle and opening the door and falling out into the road a single frenzied jumble of flail and cry. Her shoulder struck the gritted concrete and an off-colour bolt of pain leapt through her upper body and she cried out again, helpless.

A series of taps and shudders ran through the vehicle, tiny vibrations that she could hardly see, visible only as a shiver against the distant night. Feathers, more feathers than she had ever seen before, more than could have possibly been in the bag, drifted out after her, curling and circling in thick clouds, floating upwards instead of down, rising on breezes Elise could not feel.

There was another bang, this from the centre of the ambulance, as though something had struck the partition between the space of the dead and the space of the living, then the long drawn-out groan of something opening and the unmistakeable sound of coins falling into a dish or cup.

For a moment Elise had the terrible sense of having offended something vast and old and she screamed, a wordless apology wrenching out of her. In the now-dark cab of the ambulance, the dog-headed thing shook its head and grinned and held its arms out, and from all around her she heard the sound of beating wings.