The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

from the sun corridor.

Mandeville freed his arms from his sleeping bag and unzipped it, stepping out and fumbling for his boots. As his hand found them, one of the patches moved again, slinking around the edge of the room.

Now the noise was slower, still light, like pencil tips tapping a wooden desk. Mandeville risked looking down for a second to slip his boots on, Priest’s patterned floor turning sinuously beneath his soles, and when he looked up, the two patches had been joined by a third.

Parry’s cot was empty, but Yeoman was sleeping soundly on his.

Mandeville hissed at him, leaning over to shake him when he didn’t wake. Even as he leaned, the flowing, creeping patches of darkness, somehow blacker than the shadows around them, began to come in closer, still circling.

“What?” mumbled Yeoman.

“Be quiet,” said Mandeville softly, “and wake up. Now. There’s something in here.”

“Something?” asked Yeoman loudly. His breath smelled of cigarettes and sour air and tiredness.

“Something,” repeated Mandeville. “Three somethings, actually. Look.”

Yeoman sat up in bed, rubbing his hands through his beard with a noise like sandpaper rustling. Whatever it was circling the room, they reacted to the noise, coming in closer, still just out of reach of the light, still mere blackness against blackness, moving with an increasingly rapid tactactactac sound.

“What the fuck?” said Yeoman, finally seeing them. “What are they?”

“Don’t know,” said Mandeville. “Have you got the torch?”

“Yeah,” said Yeoman and began rooting on the floor. Finally, with a muffled grunt that might have been the words “found it”, he emerged holding the large lantern torch they used at night.

The things were moving faster and faster around them, passing each other, getting lower, still impossible to see other than the movement, the rapid circling centring in on the two men, purposeful and raw.

There was a click as Yeoman turned the light on, the beam at first glancing into Mandeville’s eyes and then upwards, leaving him dazzled, before dropping and gleaming out into the room, catching in its gaze the things that moved about them.

Yeoman screamed.

Mandeville fled as things that could not be, impossible things, came streaking across the space towards Yeoman in a matter of seconds, brown and lithe in the jerking, spastic light from the torch, and fell upon him.

As Mandeville reached the entrance to the sun corridor, Yeoman shrieked, once, the sound cutting off with a noise like tearing paper.

The sun corridor was deserted, silent apart from the frenzied fall of his own feet, and Mandeville ran. The large panes were covered, he saw, in blurred silhouettes, arms outstretched as though trying to embrace the world beyond, overlapping and chaotic, a silent audience for his flight.

Ripping sounds danced around him, roars and snarls and, once, a sharp, heavy crack, and he ran faster. Through the empty games room and out, along the corridor and into the foyer towards the door, but he was already too late, one of the shapes was there before him, drained to a grimy sepia by the light from above them except around its mouth, where a rich redness pooled and dripped.

It came from the restaurant, cutting off his passage to the door, forcing him to shift direction, to go towards the stairs.

He hit them at a stumbled run, leaping two or three at a time as the thing streaked towards him, emitting a noise like an escalating fire siren. Its feet (claws, he told himself, disbelieving, they’re claws) skittered as it ran, the nightmarish tactactactac getting closer and closer.

At the top of the stairs, Mandeville hesitated briefly. The bar was open ahead of him, but he would be trapped in there. The panel that had nearly fallen on him was leaning in the doorway where he had propped it earlier in the day, its face now blank, the wood smooth and unsullied.

The tactactactac was getting louder behind him, closer, the fire-whistle sound of the impossible thing’s growling surrounding him, and then there was light from above him.

It wasn’t light, though, not really; more a kind of greasy glow that clung to the walls, dripping from above him, from the upper flights of stairs, from above the second floor in the shadows that clung to the opening of the third floor. In the opening, the darkness seemed to close itself up like a fan, solidifying into a figure that emerged from the doorway, waving at him.

He started towards it and then, shrieking, the thing from below was on him.

Despite the champagne, Parry couldn’t sleep. Even when Yeoman started snoring (which, oddly, he found a reassuring rather than an irritating sound), he found himself lying awake, teasing at something. He couldn’t work out what it was, not exactly; they’d uncovered the pictures that formed The Stations of the Way and found them in almost perfect condition, true, so he should be celebrating, yes?

No.

Something about the top corridor, about this whole place, bothered him. Despite what he had said earlier, flushed with success and alcohol, he wasn’t sure about recreating Gravette and Priest’s masterwork in its entirety.

It seemed too intense, almost extremist in its views; it was everywhere, when you looked. From the panels and pictures on all the floors to the design of the taps to the carpeting along the corridors (which no longer existed but which pictures showed had consisted of a complex paisley pattern of interlocking, swirling stems and buds which Priest had called “cunts and pricks” in one of her notebooks), this place wasn’t so much a homage to the supremacy of life and procreation over industrialisation as it was a proselytisation of it.

The Stations of the Way was a good example: taken by itself, it was simply a series of pictures that between them formed a narrative, one of returning to recognise the beauty of nature and God’s place within it.

The religious allegory was unsubtle, and the pictures themselves beautifully done, some of Gravette’s best work. But, read another way, they were something more.

Gravette and Priest had fucked in every room on the third floor once the pictures were set in place, and there were persistent rumours that Gravette had mixed his semen and Priest’s menstrual blood into his paints. Early sketches showed that the original ideas for the Stations pictures were far more graphic, with the angels of sea and air having sex with the woman, transporting her to God’s side in a storm of sexual energy and passion and lust.

The woman. It was the woman in the pictures that bothered him, he suddenly realised. Getting out of his sleeping bag, he pulled on his shoes and went to his untidy pile of folders and photocopies and prints.

The problem was that the art in the Grand hadn’t ever been formally catalogued, and most of it wasn’t recorded anywhere, so his research had had, by necessity, to travel circuitous routes to find the information they needed.

As well as Gravette’s and Priest’s notebooks, he had scoured old newspaper articles, private photograph collections and what little television appearances the Grand had made to try to get an accurate picture of its inside.

Leafing through the papers, he came across the screen grabs from the television documentary about the Grand’s closure, eight of them that showed in not particularly good details some of the pictures from the third floor. Looking at them by torchlight, prints from a not very high quality source document, he saw what bit it was that had been bothering him.

The pictures were different.

The positioning of the characters within the pictures was the same, their layout and structure unchanged, but the woman and the creatures that surrounded her were definitely altered.

Christ, had someone removed the originals, replacing them with fakes? Only, that didn’t feel right either; the boards covering the pictures had looked to be the originals from the documentary, filmed just after the Grand finally closed and the pictures themselves were, he would have sworn, original Gravettes.

This made no sense, none.

Taking the prints and the torch, Parry went out into the Grand.