The Year's Best Horror Stories XXII

THICKER THAN WATER by Joel Lane

Paul had never seen any of the canal people, but he knew all about them. Everyone knew. The way Kevin had worded it, the assignment didn’t require him to find anything out. “Go and have a look. Get a feel for the district. It might give you some ideas for a feature… What we need, Paul, is a serious campaign. Rumors are not enough. The city needs a real answer to this problem.” Of course, Kevin would never tell him to make things up. That way, he couldn’t be held responsible for what the Messenger printed; or its effects. Paul didn’t know if the Messenger’s editor was capable of feeling guilty. He only knew that guilt made you lie to yourself, as well as to others.

The afternoon dragged, while Paul browsed through the archive office’s local press cuttings on “the problem.” It was too hot to do much active work; and there was no fan in the archive office, which smelled of old paper. There were reports, going back five or ten years, about the vagrant communities around Dudley and West Bromwich. One article said they were gypsies; another said they were just ordinary sub-citizens on the run from the authorities. They drifted up from the South and got stuck here. Paul didn’t like the word “sub-citizen,” it reminded him of “sub-editor,” which was his job most of the time. He preferred to use the old-fashioned words like scum, dropout or criminal.

Even from the early years, there were stories about break-ins and thefts from shops and warehouses in these districts. Mostly food and clothes, rather than things to be resold. Lately, of course, the accusations were more serious. But the whole situation had changed. Groups of squatters were occupying the derelict offices and tenement buildings, driving out the legitimate community. They weren’t canal people any more, though the name had stuck. The Messenger had carried a story about disappeared babies and small children. Kevin wasn’t a fool. He’d remarked to Paul that when babies went missing in bad areas, especially when the parents were young, it was easier to blame the gypsies than to investigate. This summer, with the heat and the water shortages, disease was spreading in the unsafe areas. Most local peopled hoped it would wipe out the vagrants before they contaminated the city.

The air in the archive office grew hotter as the afternoon progressed and the sun drew level with the windows. Paul’s vision blurred as his contact lenses began to swell up; rubbing his eyes got dust onto the surfaces, and he couldn’t blink it away. He gave up reading and let the anger in his mind edit and stress the thoughts. A big fly, droning at the window, had the same effect. When it settled within Paul’s reach, he smeared it with the palm of his hand. At once, he made for the toilets and washed his hands with a liquid soap that had the consistency of saliva. The sound of water running in the basin made him pause, briefly unable to move. He didn’t know why, and he felt guilty about wasting tap water. After that, he filed away the newspaper cuttings and left early.

When he got home, Carol was in a bad mood. Their elder daughter, Dawn, had been off school with an attack of dysentery. Paul went up to see her, but she was asleep in a darkened room. “I want to talk to you after dinner,” Carol said. They ate in a fatigued silence; even Stella, their younger daughter, was unusually quiet. Dawn stayed in her room. After dinner, Paul watched the news on three channels in succession. The living room was still full of sunlight; it felt wrong, this late. The fly’s blood was a streak across his thoughts. He wondered why it was paler than human blood. The local news on the independent channel included a report on the new science and technology exhibition center at Monkspath. Someone from the city council described it as part of this year’s major initiative to brighten up the region’s image.

Paul got up and went into the kitchen, where he poured himself a large gin. From habit, he filled up the glass with ice; then he wished he’d left it neat. He was still staring at the glass when Carol found him. “Paul,” she said. “I found this with your clothes.” It was a page from a local newspaper, not the Messenger; she had to unfold it several times. Paul blinked at it and restrained himself from drinking.

“Yeh,” he said. “Story I covered. But they never used it. This is someone else’s write-up, for the Express and Star.”

“What a tragic business. Was it someone you knew?”

Paul shook his head. “No, I just investigated it. Didn’t find out any more than this reporter. Happens all the time, you know. Unwanted pregnancies, botched abortions, even this.” He swallowed his gin before too much of the ice could melt into it.

Carol shrugged. “Funny thing to keep.” She folded up the page, then absentmindedly tore it into four pieces. “Sorry, did you want it?”

Paul shook his head. He suppressed the impulse to shout, Fuck. What did you do that for? “How’s Dawn?” he asked as the gin started to blacken his nerves. He felt like a photograph left too long in developing fluid.

“Shitting and vomiting,” Carol said. “But nothing dangerous, no blood. The doctor says she’ll be okay in three or four days. She needs to rest as much as possible. Paul, I found something else. In an envelope, in your desk. I’ve thrown them away.”

“What were you looking there for?”

“Paul… You don’t use condoms with me. On the rare occasions that we have sex, you don’t use them. Who are they for?”

“Keep your voice down. Stella will hear you.” Paul finished his drink. Carol was still staring at him. “All right,” he said. “I fuck the office boy in my lunch breaks.”

“Was it that Alison Simmons?”

“And coffee breaks.”

“Did you forget once? Was that why…”

“Shut your face.” Paul stood up. With one hand, he mimed the closing of a mouth. Then he stared at his fist, remembering the fly and its thin blood. Thinner than water. He felt himself seize up. It never happened, he told himself. Only on the surface, the acts, the facts, the story. It was never real inside me.

Was it real inside her? “Leave me alone,” he said quietly. Carol went upstairs. She was good like that sometimes. Paul looked around the kitchen. The wall was flecked with damp; it needed repainting. Perhaps he’d do it soon, and show he was a good family man. Only squatters let the places they lived in fall apart. It was growing dark outside. Paul carried on drinking. He heard Carol putting Stella to bed, heard Dawn saying good night. He’d seen her upstairs an hour before, heading for the toilet. She looked pale and dark-eyed, like a figure from a Munch engraving.

When Paul went up to bed, the house was still. Carol was waiting for him. “Sorry,” he said, as if that could atone for all past, present and future offenses. In the dark, she tried to caress him. “Sorry,” he said again, this time meaning: It’s the drink. They both knew it wasn’t only the gin. He’d been impotent with Carol ever since… well, since Alison died. He knew Carol would have connected the times when she saw the newspaper cutting. She always kept diaries and calendars. Why did she try to make love to him even when they’d had a row? Because she had no other source of comfort, Paul thought; he felt paralyzed with guilt. Carol lay still, holding him tight against her. He tried to will some of his alcoholic calm into her taut muscles. After a few minutes, she turned over and went to sleep, curled inward on herself.

The next morning, Paul visited the canal district for the first time. It was another hot, bright day; the city center was choked with traffic. Young army recruits hung around the shopping precincts, their faces marked by the sun with a look of perpetual embarrassment. The shop windows were like dusty mirrors. Days like this numbed your vision, so you couldn’t see properly in the shade. Paul considered going into the office to catch up with some routine subbing and admin work for next Sunday’s issue of the Messenger. But instead, he caught the bus out toward West Bromwich. It took him past the house on the Hagley Road where Alison had lived. Further north, Smethwick was a gray chessboard of terraces and factory walls, like an open-plan prison. From a hilltop, Paul could see the glint of water in the reservoir’s drying socket.

What was he looking for? Where he got off the bus, the street was empty. He walked through a circular shopping precinct, where only a few small offices were open. The shops themselves, including a bank, were boarded up, the boards sprayed with messages that overlaid each other into meaninglessness, like voices in a crowded place. This place felt crowded even though nobody was around. In the middle of the precinct, a hot-food kiosk had been literally plated with armor. On three sides, tower blocks reared up against the sky; their balconies overlooked the courtyard where Paul was standing. Each story was about eight feet deep. Looking upward, he had a terrible sense of the ground being hollow.

Farther away from the main road, the streets were lined with factory walls; rusty steel hooks and coils of barbed wire protected the interior. One large building had been demolished, leaving only a roofless square of gray wall around a salvage dump. The unreal blue of the sky framed each building. Then, suddenly, he was walking past a series of little housing projects, each one a flattened U-shape around a gravel courtyard. They couldn’t date back any farther than the nineteen-nineties, but already their model village effect was threadbare. Most of the flats were boarded up; in some cases, blankets or pieces of tarpaulin were nailed across the window frames. Doorways were padlocked and chained, but not sealed up. The courtyards and the entry passages between buildings were littered with black plastic bags and crates full of refuse. A few rusty shells of cars perched in driveways, without wheels. On a hilltop, a children’s playground contained various elaborate climbing frames, but no children.

Paul walked on for some time before he saw anyone. It was too hot for activity. The older part of the district was less visibly derelict than the estates; perhaps the tenants were harder to dislodge. Tower blocks, crusted with scaffolding like insects shedding their skins, broke up the pattern of terraced houses. Rubbish was everywhere—in gutters, beside doorsteps, blocking the entries to the alleyways—but it was too dry to smell really bad. A frail-looking dog clawed slowly at a heap of refuse bags; a few gnats flickered above the animal’s head like a heat-haze. Beyond, Paul could see a man crouching in the alley. At the sight of him, the other backed away and was lost in the shadows. Paul had a momentary sensation of being the hunter. Reporters were supposed to be witnesses; but forget that for the time being. If he didn’t do something, there might not be much to witness.

The alley was empty. They always kept themselves hidden. That was how they got away with it. At the far end, the boarding of windows in the terraced houses suggested occupation: it had been done clumsily, with odd pieces of broken blank. Pieces of black cloth were nailed to several of the boards, like a torn flag. It was evidently some kind of sub-community effort. The houses were about ten feet wide; Paul wondered who could have lived there in the first place. A gap between two houses looked like another alley, but turned out to be the bridge over a canal. Even from this distance, the water stank. Gnats made the warm air shiver. Paul bit his lip. If he vomited here, what could he rinse his mouth with? He watched a crow flap up from underneath the bridge, carrying a piece of refuse in its beak. Water dripped across the bright pavement. Within minutes, as Paul stared at the road, the splashes dried to faint red smears.

When Paul was six years old, his parents had taken him to the Welsh coast for a fortnight in the summer. That was when he’d started learning to swim. One of the days, they were walking inland across the fields. Paul had seen a sheep fence made of barbed wire, with tufts of wool hanging from it. Some of the wool was red. His mother had said it was the dye that farmers used to mark their own sheep. She’d also told him that taking communion in church meant drinking the blood of Christ. Paul stared at the sky. The sky stared back at him. It must be a stray dog in the canal. There were packs of dogs roaming around down there. It wasn’t courage that made him find the stone steps at the side of the bridge. It was something he didn’t have a name for.

The walls of the bridge were crusted with whitish deposits of lime. The water level was several feet below the towpath. Heaped in the water, not floating but piled on top of each other, were at least twenty human bodies. Some of them were too small to be adult. Though discolored and slightly swollen with water, they could not have been there long. Birds or rats had torn pieces off them, but Paul could see the marks of rifle bullets in their heads and bodies. Beyond the bridge, trails of blood had dried and blackened like tar. The only sound Paul could hear was the droning of flies, the same sound that had been in his head for weeks.

It wasn’t water flowing across his face. It was light. Paul woke up in a painful shudder that meant he’d lost whatever he’d been dreaming. He forced his eyes to stay open. The edges of red clouds were bleached by the sun. He must have passed out last night and forgotten to shut the curtains. He was sleeping in the spare bedroom now, which was Carol’s idea but suited him okay. Stella was with Carol, and Dawn was still recovering. But they were not foremost in Paul’s thoughts at the moment. He had an hour before he needed to go into work. It was Friday, the third day since his visit to the canal district.

Kevin’s reaction had upset him, but he was getting used to it now. The Messenger’s editor had listened to Paul’s story in silence, then told him to get on with the sub-editing for the next issue. “Remember what I said, Paul? The city needs an answer to this problem. If the army boys are sorting it out in their own way, all well and good.” He took a deep breath and looked straight at Paul, straight through the back of his head at the photographs and documents on the far wall. “You have to consider the effect of what gets printed. It’s for the benefit of the community. The real people of the city.”

Paul nodded and stood up; Kevin saw his hands shake. “Don’t go back there,” he said. “And get your drinking under control, unless you want to end up on the street.” It didn’t matter now, Paul realized. Human life was only the surface of things. As always in a crisis, faith comforted him and helped him to accept the way things had to be. With a strange sense of detachment, he wondered about the future: the lives of his children, his grandchildren. What memories would Dawn and Stella have of him? For a moment he felt cold. They’d heard him and Carol screaming at each other in the night, so many times. It was unbelievable, the things they’d come out with. But his parents had been just the same. Had that affected him?

Still feeling unreal, he got up to go to the bathroom. The frosted glass above the washbasin trapped a layer of pinkish light, like the skin of an angel. He ran lukewarm water into the basin, while his reflection in the mirror ignored him. The inside of his mouth was coated with the taste of alcohol; he could feel it in his gut, cold like silver. He listened to the sound of his own breathing. He needed to piss, but he’d have to wait until his prick went down. What had he been dreaming about? Paul waited for a long time before touching the water in the basin. He was afraid to break its surface. In the end he washed with his eyes shut, and cut himself shaving.

As he dressed and left for work, Paul kept thinking of Alison. She wasn’t the first mistress he’d had, but she was the first who’d threatened his marriage. For Paul, these affairs were a kind of escape. He didn’t allow them to become real. It was the sense of danger that turned him on. He suspected that, without Carol to go back to, he wouldn’t have bothered with any of them. Alison had seemed just his type. She was young and easily controlled, and she drank even more than Paul did. He saw her once or twice a week, always parking his car some distance from the house where she lodged.

It had gone on for nearly a year. There was something in Alison he’d never found before, and couldn’t put into words. She came from the coast—the Isle of Wight—and city life was strange to her. She sometimes talked about swimming in the sea, the freedom and wildness of it. That had been the only good thing about her childhood. She’d left home at fifteen, gone to London, then drifted up into the Midlands like so many others. Her room was full of shells and flowers and old records; having developed a catlike adaptation to confined spaces, she didn’t like to go out. She had a good voice, but Paul didn’t like to hear her sing; it frightened him, for some reason. What did it mean to want what you were most afraid of? Or to fear what you most wanted?

He’d left Alison when she’d refused to have an abortion. It wouldn’t have been the first time for her, so Paul had felt justified in taking a firm stand. She’d asked him to divorce Carol, and he’d explained to her that divorce was wrong, and abandoning your family was more so. He shouldn’t even have had to explain these things to Alison. She’d called him a two-faced bastard, and that had been the end of it. He’d stopped calling on her, and was relieved when she didn’t try to find him. Months later he’d come across the story of her death, while flicking through a day-old copy of a rival newspaper on the bus. Alison’s landlord had broken her door down and found her dead from an overdose of sleeping pills. She was six months pregnant. The fetus inside her had died at the same time.

This morning, Paul felt as though he were committed to her. He felt displaced from his former life. Was that because of the trouble in his marriage, or the trouble in his job? Or the drink, which was having the same effect on both? Getting drunk was a way of remembering Alison, as well as of returning to his own childhood. Of course, getting drunk didn’t make you like a child; it just made you feel that you were. The bus into town was packed with fresh-faced office workers, just the wrong side of a nine o’clock start. He told himself he’d have the car back soon. It was only a three-month ban: clumsy driving, slightly over the limit; nobody had been hurt.

The brilliant sunlight shadowed him from New Street to the Messenger’s offices in Hockley. It glittered from car roofs and scaffolding and broken glass. The roadway between Snow Hill and the old Hockley flyover was all elevated above ground level. If you looked at the advertisement boards, you could forget where you were.

Inside his office, Paul felt more secure. His computer terminal was as reassuring as a piano, and much quieter. He edited on-screen, not bothering to mark corrections on a printout beforehand. The added eyestrain was compensated by the sense of potency. Suddenly he wished his own life story were on the screen. Then every morning, he could retrieve himself; correct himself; justify himself; save himself. The pun reminded him of something he couldn’t quite bring to mind. There was the usual scattering of civic events to deal with. Another story about the new science exhibition centre; and one about the new sports complex, designed with half an eye on some future Olympian Games. A handful of robbery, violence and accident stories; still nothing about the canal district.

He spoke to Kevin at lunchtime. The editor was looking tense and on edge, which struck Paul as a good sign. “Are you still ignoring what happened?” he asked. On a better day, Kevin might have pretended not to understand him. But he stared hard at Paul, then shook his head.

“The situation seems to be under control,” he said. “We don’t want to stir up public interest in the area. Or innocent people will get hurt. It’s not as though people don’t know what’s going on. But it’s in the sub-citizens’ interests to keep things quiet. Preserve calm. Most of them will be transported out of the districts where these communities are. Dispersed or jailed. The only alternative is what you saw. It’s got to happen, one way or the other.” He walked away before Paul could interpret the unease in his face.

For the next hour, Paul sat in the canteen and watched the reporters and ad men and typists come and go. Who could he talk to that might understand? The faces of the young men reminded him of the army recruits he’d seen in the city center on Tuesday. It was still easy for him to see the young as perfect versions, originals of which he was a defective offprint. But he knew from experience, they were bastards in embryo. Their apparent perfection was just immaturity. He’d never trusted men. Or women. Was that because he didn’t trust himself? He thought about Carol, and knew he’d have to patch things up this weekend. The decision gave him no comfort.

Quite suddenly, with no external jog to his memory, he knew what the joke about saving himself had reminded him of. It was a line of poetry—some Irish poet from the late twentieth century that his mother had liked. Seamus Heaney, that was it:

Where to be saved you only must save face.

And whatever you say, you say nothing.

In the afternoon, Paul started to fall asleep at his desk. The pile of typescripts under his hands made him dream about a bundle of newspaper. Three old women were sitting in a brick-walled alley somewhere beyond reach of the sun; they were passing the bundle back and forth between them. Each tore away a layer and passed on the rest of it, like a party game. Paul could still hear the chatter of printers from the office, but he refused to open his eyes. There was nothing inside the bundle, unless it was too dry and shrunken to tell apart from the last twisted-up pages, gray with newsprint. The wrinkled hands of the old women were covered with stories. Paul woke with a shock that felt like a magnesium flare in his head. He arranged the sheets on his desk into a logical order, scrambled them and rearranged them. How long could it be before someone noticed he’d done nothing?

Somehow he got through the bulk of work on his desk, half-aware of errors he was letting through or even creating. What did anyone care? If they were comfortable with lies, it was screamingly absurd for them to worry about spelling and punctuation. He could always give it a final check tomorrow morning. At five o’clock Paul unplugged his computer. Instead of catching the bus into town, he walked into the nearest pub. The beer was tepid and had a stiff head he could have shaved with. He drank three pints in half an hour. When he went to piss, the water streaming down the sides of the urinal paralyzed him; he couldn’t look away.

The bus that took him to the canal district went by a different route from the one he’d caught on Tuesday. Paul didn’t recognize the streets, until he saw the elevated concrete circle of the shopping precinct, with the blocks of flats built around its edge. He got off and stood holding onto the white wall that fronted the expressway, telling himself the buildings weren’t really tilted. A white-haired alcoholic in a blue anorak knelt on the pavement, singing to himself. In the precinct, an Alsatian was trying to push through the jagged gap a brick had left in a shop window. Paul could hear pieces of glass fall and smash as the dog broke through. There was nobody else in sight, and no traffic on the road.

It took Paul a long time to find the canal bridge among the terraces, and even then he wasn’t sure it was the same one. The canal was stagnant, and shapeless hulks of furniture or tree branches littered its surface; but there was no trace of what he’d seen three days before. He made his way cautiously along the canal towpath toward the next bridge. The buildings overhead became taller, factories rather than houses. He had an overwhelming sense of neglect and disuse—of an old network whose purpose was hardly remembered, submerged beneath the new roads and concrete walkways. An old word for canal was cut, he’d read somewhere. It was supposed to be a part of local dialect. The cut; the missing frame; the part of the story condemned to silence.

An hour later, he still hadn’t found any evidence of either life or death along the canal. Soon he’d have to give up and find his way back to the city center. But he was completely lost now. There were no streets within sight of the towpath: only a blank factory wall, a scrap yard, a grassy embankment. Some goods carriages stood empty on a rusty track. The sun was low in the sky ahead, its reddish beams dividing the close air into layers. Paul’s eyes were starting to sting and blur. Even when he thought his inability to cry would make him go blind, there was nothing he could do. The accumulated dirt on the walls and stone bridges seemed to bring the night closer. Not far ahead, the view disappeared into the mouth of a tunnel. Perhaps he could rest in there, shielded from the glare of the sun. But he was still in the open air when the tunnel bit him.

Pain turned the world inside-out. There was stone inside him, and flesh on the path. He was staring down into a cloudless sky, at the black afterimage of the sun. Why did he have to keep waking up like this? Then he looked at himself and thought: Jesus wept. It was some kind of wire snare, a net with hooks. Had he walked into a tripwire? The pain was receding now; it was only a background noise. Lifting himself on one arm, he realized the snare had almost missed him. Hooks had scored his chest and belly on the left side, almost removing his shirt. More hooks were embedded in his left arm; but he couldn’t feel them.

Fucking bastards. Was it a gypsy trap for stray dogs? Or an army trap for vagrants? Very slowly, Paul sat up and looked around him. There was nobody within sight. In the tunnel, something dark was floating on the water; a canal barge, he realized, moored to the bank. He looked up at the buildings above the towpath. They might be houses, but he couldn’t see them properly. Fuck it. He called out “Help!” The sound was absurdly thin, a child’s voice. One by one, he detached the remaining hooks from the flesh of his arm.

There might be someone aboard the barge. Paul walked under the bridge, his arms locked together in a cradle of whole and injured flesh. The feeling was gone from the left side of his body. Flanking the tunnel on either side was a series of brick-lined alcoves that reminded him of a museum gallery. There were images on the walls, crusts of lichen or chemical waste that absorbed moisture from the air. The barge seemed to be pulling slowly away from him. As he got closer to it, he could see that the black wood of its hulk was rotten and streaked with lime. Someone was sitting on its roof, facing him; so still, he thought she must be dead. Then she leaned forward and touched his face. The fingers were soft and cool. Her other arm was holding a child, pressed close to her, its head in the hollow of her throat. The child too was facing him. It had no mouth.

Someone moved behind him. Paul turned and saw thin figures emerging from the alcoves, on both sides of the tunnel. One of the canal people stepped closer and touched Paul’s injured arm. It was still bleeding, but the fluid that ran from it wasn’t blood. Paul could see the blue of his own tattered shirt; and flowing from the wounds in his arm, a dirty water that smelt like the canal. The man behind him ripped the sleeve from his own shirt, then tied it around Paul’s arm. The flow stopped, but the numbness remained. Paul looked back at the face of the child. Other people were drawing closer around him. He wanted to tell them that he didn’t need to be rescued, that this was where he belonged. But he couldn’t speak. They seemed to understand in any case. Some of them helped him to climb aboard the barge. When the barge started to move, Paul realized the sunlight had deceived him. This wasn’t a tunnel; nor, strictly speaking, a canal.