The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

pardoned himself as it crashed to the ground, scattering paper plates and plastic foods onto the silent shapes of a seated family.

He passed into the well-mannered trees, which grew in geometric patches around the park. He could see her fluttering rapidly ahead of him, alternating shadow side and sunny side like a leaf twirling in the breeze off the water. She peeked back over her shoulder, her cheek making a dark-edged blade. She laughed as sharply, with no happiness in it. Something was whipping his knees — he looked down and the flesh below his shorts had torn on underbrush that hadn’t been here before, that had been allowed to grow and threaten. He started to run and the trees greyed and spread themselves into the patchy walls of an ill-kept hallway — inside the residential hotel he’d lived in his last few years of college. Dim sepia lighting made everything feel under pressure, as if the hall were a tube travelling through deep water.

Wearily he found his door and stepped into a room stinking of his own sweat. He slumped into a collapsed chair leaking stuffing. He thought to watch some television, but couldn’t bring himself to get up and turn the set on. Gravity pushed him deeper into the cushion, adhering his hands to the chair’s palm-stained arms.

The knock on the door was soft, more like a rubbing. “Ricky? Are you home?”

He twisted his head slightly, unable to lift it away from the thickly-padded back. He watched as the doorknob rattled in its collar. He willed the latch to hold.

“Ricky, it’s Miri,” she said unnecessarily. “We don’t have to do anything, I swear. We could just talk, okay?” Her voice was like a needy child’s asking for help. How did she do that? “Ricky, I just need to be with somebody tonight. Please.”

She knew he was there, but he didn’t know how. He’d watched his building and the street outside long before he came in — she’d been nowhere in sight.

“Are you too tired, Ricky? Is that it? Is that why you can’t come to the door?”

Of course he was tired. That had been the idea, hadn’t it? Everything was so incessant about her — you couldn’t listen without being sucked in. She wanted him too tired to walk away from her. He closed his eyes, could feel her rubbing against the door.

He woke up in his living room, the TV muted, the picture flickering in a jumpy, agitated way. It looked like one of those old black and white Val Lewton films, Cat People perhaps, the last thing he’d want to watch in his state of mind. He was desperate to go to bed, but he couldn’t move his arms or legs. He stared at his right arm and insisted, but he might have been gazing at a stick for all the good it did. He blinked his grainy eyes because at least he could still move them. After a few moments he was able to jerk his head forward — and his body followed up and out of the chair. He almost fell over but righted himself, staggering drunkenly down to their bedroom.

He couldn’t see Elaine in the greasy darkness, but she whispered from the bed. “I know it’s the job, wearing you out, but the kids were asking about you. They were disappointed you didn’t come say goodnight — they wanted to talk more about the puppet show. Go and check on them — at least tomorrow you can tell them you did that.”

He felt like lashing out, or weeping in frustration. Instead he turned and stumbled back out into the hall. He could have lied to her, but he went down to Jay Jay’s room.

The boy in the bed slept like a drunk with one foot on the floor. He looked like every boy, but he didn’t look anything like his son. What his son actually looked like, Rick had no idea.

Molly had kicked all the covers off, and lay there like a sweaty, sick animal, her hair matted and stiff, her mouth open exposing a few teeth. She seemed too thin to be a child — he watched as her ribs made deep grooves in the thin membrane of her flesh with each ragged breath. How was he expected to save such a creature? He walked over and picked her sheet off the floor, tucked her in and, when she curled into a sigh, kissed her goodnight.

When he climbed into bed Elaine was asleep. He avoided looking at her, not wanting to see whatever it was he might see. He must have looked at his wife’s face tens of thousands of times over the years of their marriage. If you added it all up — months certainly — of distracted or irritated or loving or passion-addled gazes. And yet there were times, such as after the 3 a.m. half-asleep trudge to the bathroom, when he imagined that if he were to return to their bedroom and find Elaine dead, it wouldn’t be long before he’d forget her lovely face entirely.

He sometimes loved his family like someone grieving, afraid he would forget what they’d looked like. An obsession with picture-taking helped keep the fear at bay, but only temporarily. As a graphic designer he worked with images every day. He knew what he was talking about. It didn’t matter how many snapshots he kept — we don’t remember people because of a single recognisable image. In his way, he’d conducted his own private study. We remember people because of a daily changing gestalt — because of their ability to constantly look different than themselves. The changing set of the mouth, the tone of the skin, the engagement of the eyes. The weight lost and the weight gained. The changing tides of joy and stress and fatigue. That’s what keeps people alive in our imaginations. Interrupt that flow, and a light leaves them. That’s what Miri had done, was doing, to him. She was draining the light that illumined his day. Sometime during the night he turned over and made the error of opening his eyes, and saw her face where Elaine’s used to be.

“Rick, you’re gonna have to redo these.” Matthew stood over him, a sheaf of papers in hand, looking embarrassed. They’d started in college together, back when Rick had been the better artist. Now Matthew was the supervisor, and neither of them had ever been comfortable with it.

“Just tell me what I did wrong this time — I’ll fix it.”

“It’s this new character, the goth girl. The client will never approve this — it’s the wrong demographic for a mainstream theatre chain.”

“I didn’t—” But seeing the art, he realised he had. The female in each of the movie date scenes was dark- haired and hollow-eyed, depressed-looking. And starved.

“She looks like that woman you dated in college.”

“We didn’t date,” Rick snapped.

“Okay, went out with.”

“We never even went out. I’m not sure what you’d call what we did together.”

“I just remember what a disaster she was for you, this freaky goth chick—”

“Matt, I don’t think they even had goths back then. She was just this poor depressed, suicidal young woman.”

He smirked. “That was always your type, if I recall. Broody, skinny chicks.”

Now his old friend had him confused with someone else. There had never been enough women for Rick to have had a type. “Her name was Miriam, but she always went by Miri. And do you actually still use that word ‘chick’? Do you understand how disrespectful that is?”

“Just when I’m talking about the old days. No offence.”

“None taken. I’ll have the new designs for you end of the week.”

Rick spread the drawings out over his desk and adjusted his lamp for a better look. He never seemed to have enough light anymore. There was an Elvira-like quality to the figures, or like that woman in the old Charles Addams panel cartoons, but Miri had had small, flattened breasts. It embarrassed him that he should remember such a thing.

In college all he ever wanted to do was paint. But it had really been an obsession with colour — brushing it, smearing it, finding its light and shape and what was revealed when two colours came against each other on the canvas. He’d come home after class and paint late into the night, sometimes eating with his brush in the other hand. Each day was pretty much the same, except Saturday when he could paint all day. Then Sunday he’d sleep all day before restarting the cycle on Monday.

Women were not a part of that life. Not that he wasn’t interested. If he wanted anything more than to be a good painter it was to have the companionship and devotion of a woman. He simply didn’t know how to make that happen — he didn’t even know how to imagine it. To ask a woman for a date was out of the question because that meant being judged and compared and having to worry if he would ever be good enough and unable to imagine being good enough. He’d had enough of that insanity growing up.

At least he was sensitive enough to recognise the dangers of wanting something so badly and believing it forever unobtainable. He wasn’t about to let it make him resentful — he wasn’t going to be one of those lonely guys who hated women. The problem was his, after all.

He was aware a female had moved into the residential hotel, because of conversations overheard and certain