The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

AND SOME ARE MISSING by Joel Lane

The first time, it was someone I didn’t know. Inevitably. I’d gone out to use the phone box, around eleven on a Tuesday night. This was a month after I’d moved into the flat in Moseley. I phoned Alan, but I don’t remember what I said; I was very drunk. Coming back, I saw two men on the edge of the car park in front of the tower block I lived in. It looked like a drunk was being mugged. There was one man on the ground: gray-haired, shabby, unconscious. And another man crouching over him: pale, red-mouthed, very tense. As I came closer, he seemed to be scratching at the drunk’s face. His hand was like a freeze-dried spider. I could see the knuckles were red from effort. With his other hand, he was tugging at the man’s jacket.

Too far gone to be scared, I walked toward them and shouted, “What are you going?” The attacker looked up at me. His eyes were empty, like an official behind a glass screen. I clenched my fist. “Fucking get off him. Go on…” He smiled as if he knew something I didn’t. Then he got up and calmly stalked away into the darkness behind the garages. The man on the ground looked about fifty; from his clothes and stubble, he could have been a vagrant. There were deep cuts on his face, slowly filling up with mirrors of blood. He was sweating heavily.

I ran back to the phone and called an ambulance. Then I went back to the injured man and dabbed uselessly at his face with my sleeve. Now the shock was wearing off, I needed to go to sleep. I looked at my wristwatch; it was past midnight. There was no blood on my sleeve. I looked again at the drunk’s face. It was pale with sweat and blurred by a grayish stubble. But there were no wounds. Jesus, I thought, I’ve started to hallucinate. It’s strictly Diet Coke from now on. Leaving him for the ambulance, I struggled into the building. Living on the top floor meant I didn’t have to keep count. The next thing I knew, my alarm clock was ringing. I didn’t remember setting it, let alone going to bed.

The flat’s okay, though it costs more to rent than a poorly furnished studio flat should. At least it’s pretty secure. You’d need wings or a sledgehammer to break in. Before I paid the deposit, I asked if there was a phone point; the landlord showed me where it was. It was only when I’d moved in that I discovered the phone point hadn’t been used in decades and was no longer viable. When I tried to contact the landlord, a snotty assistant told me it was hard luck, but they weren’t responsible for telephones. I said that having been told there was a phone line, I had a right to assume it was viable. She said they hadn’t told me it was. I thanked her for explaining, then hung up. My hands were shaking. Unless I was prepared to make the landlord a free gift of an installation costing a month’s rent, I’d have no telephone until I moved.

A few nights after the incident in the car park, I woke up in the middle of the night. I’d been dreaming about Hereford, Alan’s home town. We’d spent the last Christmas there with his family. I remembered the cathedral, the old houses, the hills out toward Fownhope that were so heavily wooded you seemed to be indoors. Suddenly I was crying. Then I felt something touch my face. Fingers. They seemed to be following the tears. One of them scratched my right eye. I lay very still, sweating with fear. The touching was gentle, but there was no kindness in it. A cold palm slid over my mouth. I pulled away, then lashed out in the darkness, cursing. Something moved at the side of the bed. I switched the light on, but the room was empty. There was nobody else in the flat.

I was more scared than I’d been when I thought there was someone in the room with me. I’m a real coward when it comes to dentists and hospitals, but with people my temper takes over. A few years ago, I was walking home late at night when I was stopped by this massive bloke. He asked for directions to somewhere or other, then pushed me against the wall and tried to take my wallet. I pushed him hard, shouted “Fuck off” and ran; he didn’t follow me. I sat on my bed, remembering this, staring at the walls of the flat. There was a picture of a town covered with snow at night, done in pastel blue and white on black paper; Alan had drawn that for me. There were Picasso and van Gogh prints, stills from James Dean films, and a sketch of mine that showed an abandoned card table on a bridge over a canyon. I’d filled the flat with images that made me feel at home. But it didn’t work.

Some evenings, my head was full of a violence I could only control by drinking myself unconscious. The new flat had been rented in a hurry, while I was staying with friends after the split. Alan was in love with another man: a bearded American, younger than me and more intelligent. Two years of living together, and now suddenly it was all gone. Hard to believe; but every day I had to rediscover it by waking up. Alan and I were still close: we met regularly for coffee or lunch in the city center, to exchange news or just spend time together.

He wanted to go to America with Paul, and live there. Until that happened, I needed to hold onto whatever feelings for me still lived in him. Perhaps by refusing to let go of him completely, I was damaging both of us—as though the relationship were a kind of wound that we both carried, and which the contact between us kept reopening.

It was at one of those awkward meetings that he told me Sean was dead. I hadn’t known him well—a familiar face in one or two pubs, always chatty, but genuinely friendly underneath the banter. He invented nicknames for people that were invariably perfect, and never malicious. One Sunday afternoon we met by chance at the Triangle cinema, and he gave me a lift home. He struck me then as rather subdued and thoughtful. We talked about people we both knew; Sean said he’d grown out of the scene, and wanted a more settled life.

And now—what, eighteen months later?—he’d killed himself. From what Alan said, he’d been suffering from mental illness and couldn’t see himself recovering. I cried suddenly, briefly. Sean was only twenty-three. I wish I understood why so many people don’t value themselves. Why someone with vitality and humor and warmth should deliberately end his life. Perhaps it’s people like that who get hurt the most, and can’t hide from it. Somehow they come to believe that they don’t matter. And there’s nobody to tell them they’re wrong.

Everyone seemed to be in trouble that week. It was late summer; the days were hot and sticky, you had people wearing sunglasses and carrying umbrellas. That kind of weather makes everyone restless and uneasy. A couple that Alan and I had known for years split up unexpectedly, and had to sell their house in order to live apart. I started losing track of who was seeing whom, and which affairs were open and which were secret.

Jason, a good friend of mind, lost his job as the result of a pointless row. He was working for the council, answering phone calls from the public. A few of the senior management people had started complaining about the way he dressed. His clothes were colorful and stylish enough to have some of the gray people muttering about “flamboyance.” Perhaps Jason was too stubborn for his own good. Or perhaps he felt that, after four years of successful work, he deserved more acceptance from his colleagues. Either way, he tried to shame the management into an apology by offering his resignation. They accepted it.

I didn’t have problems like that at work, but sometimes the general level of unhappiness in the company was frightening. Our salaries had been frozen indefinitely, while mishandling of computer files had cost the company a fortune. The directors blamed the recession; but the recession didn’t force them to be arrogant, inept and cynical. Nor, indeed, to be absent most of the time.

At the end of that week, I went out to the Nightingale. They’d redecorated it in black wood-chip wallpaper, with black leather seating. The effect was deadpan and oppressive. I brought someone back to the flat. He was a quiet, sensitive guy in his mid-thirties, with a strong Back Country accent. It was more for company than anything else. We were both quite drunk. He used amyl nitrite in bed, which only seemed to distance him. I tried it, but it just made me sweat. Probably I was too tired. When he climaxed his body was immobile, like a statue melting in the rain.

He was asleep when I woke up and saw a figure at the foot of the bed. It seemed hardly more than an outline, and it was somehow too jagged, stretched-looking, like some kind of satirical cartoon. It was just watching. Perhaps waiting for something to happen. That was when I first thought: the antipeople. I shifted closer to the sleeping man, touching his arm, his shoulder, his hair. But the cold feeling remained. In the morning we both felt a bit awkward, and didn’t arrange to meet again.

A few days later, Alan drove round with some things I needed from the house. Because my new flat was so small, I’d left a lot of possessions behind. I’d have to collect them soon, before Alan moved out. He hoped to be with Paul in New York by the end of the year. We circled around each other nervously, able to hug but not kiss. He’d already said that I could sleep with him again if I wanted to. Paul wouldn’t mind—after all, he’d been seeing Paul for three months while I was still in the house. Moving out had reduced the stress, enabled me to get some kind of grip on things. But underneath, I still felt the same way.

It didn’t happen until Alan was on the point of leaving. I kissed him fiercely and started to unbutton his shirt. “Lie down. Please.” It took less than fifteen minutes, but it was as good as any sex I can remember. Afterward, we lay there and rested, no longer touching—as always when we slept together. Then I saw the creature sitting over him. It was probing his face with its narrow fingers; the nails were broken. Then it bent farther down and pressed its teeth against his arm, just above the wrist. The creature looked a bit like me, but not very much. I hope.

For a few seconds I wondered if I should just let it happen. It wasn’t that I wanted to hurt Alan. But… why should I protect him, after what he’d put me through? Then I reached out, grabbed the pale thing’s shoulder and pulled hard. My finger sank into the stale flesh and hooked on the bone. The creature pawed at my arm, scratched it with one ragged finger. The skin turned white and hard. Then I was alone with Alan. He opened his eyes and reached for me.

After he’d gone, I put a record on the stereo. Leonard Cohen sang: Now I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair / With a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere. I poured myself a glass of gin and tried to think. Was human love enough to motivate life, to give everything a meaning? Or was it so debased that the only source of meaning was something above humanity? I didn’t know. In fact, I didn’t trust people who claimed that they knew. The scar on my arm was numb; it seemed to be frozen. About a week later, the strip of dead skin fell away.

From the window in my flat, I can see out beyond the garages, to where a semicircle of trees forms a natural skyline. There’s a cedar, a few birches and a pine tree of some kind. It makes me think of forests, green places full of shadow and drifts of leaves; places where there are no people.

The last few weeks of that summer were close and humid. The newspapers were full of road accidents, murders, rapes. I can remember walking through the city center and seeing the crowd of people suddenly blur and sway, as though they had all started to dance. Alan and I kept in touch; he was under increasing stress, not knowing whether Paul really wanted to be with him in the future. He was holding onto a job and a home while hoping that he’d be asked to leave them behind. He said he still missed me. We were uneasy with each other, not really knowing what to say or to hope for. For me, it wouldn’t have been hard to forgive him. The most difficult thing would have been to trust him.

In spite of this uncertainty, the glare of madness was fading in my head. I was drinking less heavily, though that had never been the core of the trouble. Many people helped me, Mends and strangers; and while nobody’s help was crucial in itself, the total effect got me through. There’s more humanity around than I’ve tended to think. It’s not human nature that gives power to the vultures and maggots; it’s only human culture. Dead things like money and authority.

The last time I saw one of the antipeople was in August. It was outside the Nightingale, between two and three a.m. on a Saturday night. I was drunk and on my own, wishing I had someone to share the taxi fare with; or even pay it myself, but not have to go home alone. Opposite the Hippodrome, I saw a body crumpled against a wire fence. Somebody was kneeling over it. As I crossed the road, the figure reared up and gave me an unmistakable look that meant Go away. This one’s mine. When I saw the face of the man on the ground, my skin turned cold. It was Jason, and he was bleeding from a deep cut above one eye. The creature’s long fingers were pressed against the wound. I saw them turn red and stiffen like tiny pricks. They were hollow.

For a moment, I hesitated. It seemed impossible to change what was happening. Then I lurched toward them, almost falling, and grabbed at the thing’s hair. It felt like a mesh of dry plastic threads. I was afraid the hair would pull out and leave me with no grip. But he tilted backward and twisted around to face me, his arm stretching before the fingers came loose from Jason’s face with a kind of tearing sound. The creature’s own face was flat and expressionless, with eyes like holes in the ground. He fell against me, knocking me over; when I picked myself up, he’d gone.

Jason was lying very still, but he was breathing. One arm was pinned under his body. His face was like a copper mask, melting at the nose and forehead. I shook him gently; his eyes opened. “David,” he said. “My God. What time is it! I must… I got beaten up. Did you see them?”

I shook my head. “You’ll be all right. Take it easy.” He stood up, then wavered and nearly fell. I caught hold of him, and we hugged each other for a few moments. He was wearing a crimson silk shirt which was dark with sweat. The cut in his forehead was like a jewel, and suddenly I thought of Douglas Fairbanks as Sinbad in a film I’d seen as a child. Still holding onto him, I steered Jason across the road and down the sidestreet to the club entrance. They were about to close up, but I told them what had happened and one of their staff went to get some tissues and ice. They knew Jason. He sat down on the doorstep, quite calmly. There was hardly anyone about. The night was blue and warm.

When the wound was cleaned up, I could see a bruise forming around it. His nose and right cheek were puffy, too, though the skin was even paler than usual. The ice seemed to lessen the pain. After a few minutes, we walked down to the taxi-hire firm. I told him we’d have to go to the hospital. “Can’t I just go home?” he said.

“If you don’t get that cut stitched up, it won’t heal properly.” He nodded slowly. We waited in silence, Jason holding a ball of clotted tissues like a rose stiff with color. I bit my lip to stay awake. Eventually a taxi came.

The casualty department at the General Hospital was brightly lit and reassuringly blank. Several rows of plastic chairs marked out the waiting area. In front of Jason was a rather gaunt-looking man of thirty or so, who was explaining loudly to the nurse that he’d swallowed a penny and was now unable to shit. It had been three days, he said. “I don’t know why I swallowed it. It was just something I had to do.” The nurse, with well-concealed impatience, suggested he try a curry. “Nothing works,” he said. The look of hopelessness in his face betrayed him. I could pencil in his background easily enough: he lived alone, was unemployed, an incipient schizophrenic or perhaps an outpatient at Highcroft. But no amount of psychiatric help could change the fact that he had no friends and no way of gaining affection from another human being. When the nurse dismissed him, he took a seat behind us and waited to be seen again.

After Jason had talked to the nurse, we went and sat in another waiting area, with red upholstered seats and a number of silent people, all with minor injuries. I thought about the antipeople. They seemed to be everywhere in this hospital, waiting just out of sight. Perhaps they hung around the little curtained rooms where patients were left alone. One thought kept recurring to me, something Alan had said once. The opposite of love is indifference.

Eventually, Jason’s name was called and he followed a nurse out through the swing doors. I waited, still drunk but sober in whatever part of me reacted to what was happening. Half an hour later he came back, with fourteen stitches in his forehead. It was past four o’clock. Jason lived in Kidderminster with his parents; he’d had to move back there after losing his job. I took him back to my flat, where he slept like a child. In the morning, I woke up and lay there for a while, looking at him. If anything visited him in the night, I didn’t see. He woke up around midday and left soon afterward, thanking me repeatedly for my help. But somehow, I still felt responsible. Fourteen stitches are not enough.