The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

A trade plied during plague times, when they would carry the dead away from infected areas? You don’t, you can’t, do something like that without being granted some kind of immunity by Death himself. They were His helpers, in effect: some even changing to resemble their master.

The rags and bones, all that was left of the dead, were collected by them. By people who were little more than rag and bones themselves. It was a bloodline that had been broken when Ted came along — not simply persuading Audrey to sell up, but engineering the little “accident” that would take Frank’s life and provide the means for her to do so.

Frank was an old man, his heart weak: it wasn’t that hard to sneak inside the house and give him a little. scare.

Just like Ted was scared now. Because not only was he seeing something he really didn’t want to in the mirror, he was also remembering. That it hadn’t been the first time he’d woken up back there in the cellar, that Audrey had already done things to him which made the others look like she was just getting started. Pain so intense he’d blocked it out, kept alive — barely — while he watched her cut up the women.

But not kept alive long enough.

The image, the face — or what was left of it — staring back at Ted was barely recognisable as his own. It had been shredded, along with the rest of him: skin flayed from his body so that you couldn’t tell where his clothes ended and his flesh began. Ted recalled the whipping now with some kind of cat o’ nine tails, spiked ends digging deep with each swipe. He howled then, just as he had when Audrey had done her worst, finally getting up close and personal, pulling off his finger- and toe-nails, doing hideous things to his privates that meant he’d never be capable of cheating on anyone again.

Ted looked away and the Rag and Bone Man dropped the mirror. His charge had seen enough obviously, but things were only just getting started.

Ted looked past the skeletal figure, whose coat could no longer conceal its ribcage, open to the air. This representation of everything Frank held so dear, this figure that was all the Rag and Bone Men there’d ever been rolled into one, had made its home in a fittingly nightmarish place.

Because the more Ted looked, the more he saw of the yard, filled not only with ordinary rubbish, but the more specific junk of human waste. Bones, organs, scraps of clothing, all plugged the gaps where he’d dared not look before.

Ironically, Ted felt like laughing. He’d been pleading for his life when all along there was no life to spare. No wonder Audrey had been ignoring him — had he really been speaking at all? Had any of this actually been happening? It certainly felt real to him, but that didn’t mean anything.

Somehow Ted knew he would soon fill the spaces here, just like those women who wronged Audrey, who’d wronged the line. Trapped in their own private Hell. (For a moment, Ted wondered if they were seeing this, or something else entirely; perhaps this little treat had been reserved only for him?)

But it was time, he saw. When the Rag and Bone Man came for him now, Ted surrendered without protest.

To be carried over to the pile of junk, of scrap human life.

To join the walls of organs, body parts and muscle.

To join. no, finally to become the rag.

and the bone.

GEMMA FILES Some Kind of Light Shines from Your Face

GEMMA FILES is a former film critic/film history teacher. She is now probably best-known for either her 1999 International Horror Guild Best Short Fiction Award-winning story “The Emperor’s Old Bones”, or her Weird Western “Hexslinger Series” trilogy (A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns and A Tree of Bones) from ChiZine Publications.

She has stories upcoming in the anthologies Magic, A Season in Carcosa and A Mountain Walked, and is currently hard at work on what she hopes will be her first contemporary horror novel.

“I wrote this piece very quickly,” explains the author, “in a sort of frenzy, while deep in the middle of putting together my second novel. I’d agreed to contribute something to Conrad Williams’ anthology Gutshot, a collection of ‘weird west’ tales from PS Publishing, and this was what came out.

“At the time, I wasn’t entirely sure if it fit the bill, but Conrad liked it enough to pick it up, so who am I to say?

“As for influences: I’ve been a Greek mythology buff from childhood on, so I’d always wanted to do something about Medusa and her sisters, the Gorgonae.

“I’m also a huge fan of HBO’s sadly defunct Dustbowl Gothic series Carnivale, which probably shows, but there’s some input there as well from Robert Jackson Bennett’s first novel, Mr Shivers, and even Peter Crowther’s Depression-era werewolf tale ‘Bindlestiff’, which I read in his collection The Longest Single Note.

“I also stole the title from a line in a Barbra Streisand song, ‘Prisoner (Theme from Eyes of Laura Mars)’.”

It is immediately obvious that the Gorgons are not really three but one plus two. The two unslain sisters are mere appendages due to custom; the real Gorgon is Medusa.

— Jane Ellen Harrison

COOCH’S THE ONE thing always plays, Miz Forza told me, right from the start. And damn if I didn’t come pretty quick to believe her ’bout that, just like I did ’bout so much else: Better than freaks, better than tricks, safer and more sure by far than creatures that required twice the feed of a grown man, not to mention a whole heap of mother-lorn care lest they catch ill and shit ’emselves to death, run wild and kill the rubes, or just bite at their own bellies ’til their guts fell out on the road.

Not that anything was really safe back then, in them dustbowl days of endless dirt and roaming; it was our stock in trade to hook folks in and get ’em riled up, after all, then see how much money we could pull from between their starving teeth before the inevitable backlash. The whole damn world was a half- stuffed firecracker, just as like to fizzle as it was to take your face off, and waiting on the spark — or maybe a mine dug deep in the mud of La Belle France of the kind Half-Face Joe used to tell tales on, a- whistling into Skinless Jenny’s ear and flapping his flippered hands along for accompaniment, as though he was making shadow-dogs bark on Hell’s own wall. After which Jenny would translate, her own uncertain voice sweet and slow as stoppered honey, while the lamplight flickered so bad it looked like every one of her Thousand and Ten Tattoos was dancing the low-down shimmy with each other.

Joe’d been a handsome young man once, ’fore them Europe kings and such got to squabbling with each other. Now he took tickets with a bag over his head ’til it was time to stump up on-stage and exhibit himself, making women and kids squeal and grown-ass men half-faint with his flesh’s horrid ruin. In an odd way, he made a perfect palate-cleanser for the cooch show, too. always boiled the crowd off a bit, sent the ladies scurrying, leaving their menfolk ready to pay big for a bit of sweet after all that sour.

Them gaiety-gals was the real stars of the show, though, for all they came and went right quick — got picked up in one shit-hole town, dropped off again three more over, and never seen since. I didn’t ever tend to look too hard at their faces, myself — why bother? Be it on-stage or off-, wasn’t a one of us didn’t know how with them, all true interest began to build strictly beneath the neck.