The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

“Let’s have a pic,” Kerner said, when they were outside. He got Mac to take a photograph of them, standing in front of the cavern entrance, and then they were ushered out of the grounds and it was much colder out here and the stars were studs of glass scattered across an oily hard shoulder.

“Nightcap?” Kerner asked.

Don shook his head. “I’m wiped,” he said. “Thanks for an interesting evening.”

“Sad to leave ya, Eurasian beaver.”

“Good night.”

Again. Did it become a ritual if it happened more than once?

A hot bath. The Scotch. The music she loved, Joni Mitchell. He mustered the memory of the smells that made her who she was. Tea tree oil. Fennel. He thought back to the last time they had made love. The flush of red on her chest. The eyes closing. The quickening of her breath. Don, Don.

Sleep was over him and around him, closing, like a thin blanket, but it was not yet in him. His breath deepened. His eyes rolled back. He submitted himself. Sleep sank into him like something taking a bite. And just at the moment he felt himself go under, he was aware, in the dark, of a shape at the foot of his bed. It was heart- shaped, a muted grey, and it took a while to understand that it was the shape of someone’s back: the arms and head lost to shadow. Slowly, it shifted. He heard the shiver of nylon moving against itself. He saw the nubs of vertebrae in a spine curve subtly against the fabric of a cardigan. And it was her cardigan. His heart leaped. Until:

Why are you doing this?

He flinched. Her voice was too close, as if she were whispering in his ear. And there was something wrong with it. She sounded as though she was thirsty. The voice, full of holes.

I love you but you have to let me go don’t blame yourself

“Julie? Julie, what can I do? Where are you?” He stared at the figure at the end of the bed as it stretched and writhed. “Don’t leave me. It was so sudden.”

I have to go I want to go to the white I want to run through the snow you can set me free

The shush of her nylons. but she never wore tights.

“Julie?” He jerked upright in bed, blinking himself awake. The shape toppled forward, turning. Her hair fell across her face so he could see only a sliver of gleaming eye through the mouse blonde bands of it. She raised her thin limbs and showed him where she’d cut through the veins of her arms with the shattered remnants of her snow globe.

The blood hissing like water from punctured hoses, eternal.

I’d have killed myself anyway, eventually. don’t blame yourself

In the second it took him to wrench himself free of the bedclothes, winter sunshine was streaming through the window and his alarm clock was droning and she was gone. He turned back to see his pillow, streaked with red. A pebble of glass sitting there like something the tooth fairy had forgotten to collect.

“Woah, pal. Easy. What bit you this morning?”

Don had dropped his glass of cranberry juice. He watched the spreading red stain around his breakfast plates and tried to stop his hands from shaking. Surely everyone could see that. They’d think he’d been drinking at daybreak. Or that he had something terrible to hide. Kerner watched him while he chewed his interminable muesli. His question hung in the air. Don ignored it.

He poured coffee and tried to hide in its steam. The plaster on his face felt tight and itchy, but he wasn’t going to sit there with a wet hole flapping in front of all these people while they tucked into their grilled tomatoes.

After his shower that morning he’d noticed there were other points on his face beginning to flare up. Most worryingly, there was an ache building behind his left eye. Another in his chest. The windscreen had shattered into a million pieces. How many of them had disappeared inside him? How many were now worming their way out, rejected by his flesh after the slow journey of a year? In the horror of it, came the thrill. The glass might have connected him to his wife. What if, as he had read once, it was possible for slivers of glass to pass through your body? Perhaps some of them had become embedded in her. He was in her, then, after a fashion. And now that he was here, in Sheckford, some numinous frequency, made in blood, had been opened between them. It was the kind of thing she believed in. The end was never the end. We were all passengers in transit.

“There’s something wrong with my camera,” Kerner said. “Just found out this morning.”

“I think there’s a camera shop in the village. Maybe they’d have a look at it for you.” Don hated the sound of his own voice. It was weak, pathetic, more so since his eventful night.

“Not this. Specialist job, I reckon. Fault somewhere. And not with my picture-taking abilities, for once. It’s as if I’d forgotten to take the film out and rewound it and taken more exposures over the top.”

“Have you checked that?”

Kerner gave him a look. He checked his watch. “Hmm,” he said. “Says here that it’s still the twenty-first century. That must mean I’ve got a digital camera.”

The sudden, spearing conclusion that he didn’t like Kerner. Don was glad his camera was knackered. He hoped it would cost him a fortune to repair it.

“Look, see,” Kerner said, pushing his bowl to one side and setting the expensive camera on the table. He pressed a few buttons and the screen on the rear flashed up a picture: the one Mac had taken the previous evening.

Don came around the table and squinted at the glass oblong. “Christ,” he said.

The two of them, standing in front of the cavern entrance, the blue guide lights set into the floor illuminating them from below, giving them an unhealthy, cyanotic glow. Shadows falling on the uneven rock behind them: Kerner’s, Don’s, and someone else’s.

“See that?”

“Yeah. It can’t be Mac’s shadow, can it?”

“Hey?” Kerner leaned in closer. “I hadn’t actually noticed that. I was talking about that. glow, in your chest.”

Now Don saw it. In roughly the position where his heart might be, a fist-sized lump of grainy light, like the diffuse aura cast by a sodium street-lamp. He pressed his fingers to his breastbone.

“What could it be?” he asked. His voice sounded perilously close to choking. Tears ganged up. But Kerner seemed not to notice.

“Could just be some hot pixels on the sensor, maybe. Maybe a lens problem. But I have some pictures I took before and after, and they seem clean. That shadow you point out though. it’s obvious something’s not right. Bollocks. It’s quality glass that. Spent a fortune on it. ”

“I have to go,” Don said.

Kerner nodded, smiled. His fingers fidgeted with the buttons on the camera body. “Adieu, caribou.”

Go home. Leave this place. Let it sink into time, let it become a fossil in your memory.

But how could it? This was as much Julie’s place as his now. They were inextricably linked by Sheckford, the things that happened to them here.

He was back in his room, standing in front of the mirror, his shirt off, staring at his chest, willing the glow to reappear. It’s you, isn’t it? Julie?

He switched on the light and his breath caught. Two shadows. But one was merely a copy of the other, bounced back by the silvered glass. He pressed his fingers against his skin and felt something hard. It was like a swelling. All of the other hotspots of pain in his skin sang out. He buttoned his shirt and returned to the bedroom. There was a sense of someone having just departed. The mattress seemed to be rising slightly, where it might have cushioned a body moments before. There was a slight shift in the temperature of the room. A microscopic change in its pressures.

I want to go to the white I want to run through the snow

The crystal snow globe had been so important to her. It had been with her for much of her life, and it had helped to end it too. She had often told him how lovely it would be to live in a snow globe, to be protected from all the evils in the outside world by that perfect glass. The silence, the beauty.