The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

He was out of the hotel and walking hard along the street before he had any concrete notion of where he was heading.

His mind was filled with white.

Mac let him through the gate but was unsympathetic when Don told him he might have lost his car keys in the cavern. “It’s not really my job to go hunting for lost property. I’m a security guard.”

“I’ll go,” Don said.

“I don’t think so. This isn’t a drive-through restaurant. You don’t just pop back whenever you feel like it.”

A twenty-pound note changed his mind.

Don steeled himself at the entrance, but only because the pain in his chest ramped up a notch. It was like heartburn, only a hundred times worse. He thought he might retch, but nothing would come when he leaned over. Something felt sharp just beneath the skin. Something was coming.

He could hear the water ploughing over and under and through the rock as it had done for so many millions of years. It had churned through this cavern at the moment of his birth and at the moment of Julie’s death. He staggered along the pathway, grateful for its enormous sound; it meant he did not have to listen to his own skin tearing open.

He reached the boulder choke and stared at the foot of it, where the tiny opening was like a pupil in a dead eye. He imagined great acres of untouched white crystal beyond it, like a field of virgin snow before the children have wakened, like Heaven.

“Julie?” he called out, but his voice was unable to best the roar. It hurt too much to try again. He felt his chest fail, and lifted his hands as if he might prevent himself from tipping out on the cold, wet path. What was there in his chest cut his hand. Blood sped from him, slicking his fingers. It was difficult now, to find purchase on the slippery curve of the glass in him.

He saw movement at the lip of the aperture. Julie? But of course it wasn’t. What could he have hoped from this? Julie was cold and dead as the piece of glass within him.

Long, white nails attached to long white fingers. The skin of something eternally damp, of something that had never known sunlight. It skittered out, all elbows and fish-thin ribs pulsing beneath translucency. A sore-looking jaw, red-rimmed, loaded with icy needles that glittered like Hoar frost, splinters of the missing packed between them. It made a sound that was almost beyond a frequency audible to him. It sounded like metal scraped across glass. It turned an eye to him that was as pale as moonstones.

Don turned to run, but his foot slid in his own filth. The chunk in his chest shifted. As he gripped it and pulled, closing his eyes to the terrible suck as the glass came free, the lights went out and it fell on him, all too keen to lend him its assistance.

SIMON KURT UNSWORTH The Ocean Grand, North West Coast

SIMON KURT UNSWORTH WAS born in Manchester in 1972. He currently lives on a hill in the north of England with his wife and child, where he writes essentially grumpy fiction (for which pursuit he was nominated for a 2008 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story).

His work has been published in a number of critically acclaimed anthologies, including At Ease with the Dead, Shades of Darkness, Exotic Gothic 3, Gaslight Grotesque, Never Again and Lovecraft Unbound. He has also appeared in three previous volumes of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and also The Very Best of Best New Horror.

His first collection of short stories, Lost Places, was released by Ash-Tree Press in 2010, and his second, Quiet Houses, followed from Dark Continents Publishing a year later. A further collection, Strange Gateways, is now available from PS Publishing, with another set to launch the “Spectral Press Spectral Signature Editions” imprint in 2013.

“‘The Ocean Grand, North West Coast’ first appeared in Quiet Houses, my portmanteau collection set as far as possible in real locales,” explains Unsworth. “This particular story is based on the Midland Hotel in Morecambe.

“The Midland has a long and chequered history, and when I first went there ten years ago it was just before it closed amid accusations of mismanagement and ownership wrangles. Back then, it was a perfect example of faded seaside glamour; it had the most beautiful fixtures and fittings, but they were falling to pieces.

“We used to go on Saturday evenings and have an after-dinner drink, sitting in a long glass corridor that extended across the rear of the hotel and gave out on magnificent views of Morecambe Bay and, in the distance, the Barrow headlands. It was always freezing in the sun corridor because the heating was never on and half the windows were broken, but it was worth it for the sight of the ocean and the sense of being somewhere that had a foot placed firmly within a magnificent past.

“The story came about because I’d read Barry Guise and Pam Brook’s excellent history of the Midland, The Midland Hotel: Morecambe’s White Hope (Palatine Books, 2007) and it made me think about how buildings made to be full of people might feel if they were closed and empty, and about art created to be viewed being alone and going slowly, claustrophobically mad.

“Gravette and Priest and the art they created for the Ocean Grand are very, very loosely based on the work and philosophies of the architect Oliver Hill and the artists Eric Gill and Marion Dorn, who designed and decorated the Midland originally. But mostly they’re my creations. Make of that what you will.

“The Midland, after years of closure, has been completely refitted and has re-opened, and looks spectacular. I’d urge you to visit and to have a drink in the new sun corridor or a meal in one of the restaurants.

“Me, I’m still a little nostalgic for those Saturday nights in the old sun corridor, when we had to keep our coats on because of the cold and when the wind danced in through the broken windows smelling of brine and sand.”

Arrival; Initial Impressions

MANDEVILLE TWISTED ON the key, hard, and felt it grate in the lock. With a final yank, it came around and then the Ocean Grand was open for the first time in fifteen years.

The central door was large and heavy and, even unlocked, it took him several hard shoves to open it fully; it had swollen from the years of disuse, clinging and screeching as it moved and cutting tracks through the dirt on the floor. Pieces of crumpled paper shifted away in the light breeze that entered the hotel around Mandeville. Of course, he thought, it wasn’t really the first time the building had been open for fifteen years, and he had to be careful not to romanticise the experience or what he found inside. Safety assessors had been inside only recently and security checks were carried out monthly, but he was the first outsider to gain entrance since it had closed as a working site in the early 1990s.

Actually, even that wasn’t quite true. A local television news team had accompanied one of the early safety crews and had filmed them placing boards over the wall murals and picture windows. Mandeville had a copy of the footage in his bag; in it, the unseen presenter talked about the glories and controversies of the art deco pieces that adorned the Grand’s walls whilst workmen nailed large boards over each piece “to protect it for the few months that the hotel was shut during its refit”. The “few months” had turned into almost two hundred, the refit had never occurred and the Grand had remained shut to everyone as it changed owners time and again in the intervening years. Until now.

Behind Mandeville, Parry began to unload the van, dropping their gear onto the cracked surface of the car park and telling a joke to Yeoman, the third member of the self-dubbed “Save Our Shit Crew”. Mandeville could already smell the sharp tang of Yeoman’s cigarette, and he smiled to himself.

Yeoman had said little on the journey, but his silence had become more pointed as they travelled and Parry refused to pull over for a rest stop, claiming that he was helping to break Yeoman’s habit by forcing him into periods of abstinence. Yeoman wouldn’t enter the Grand until he had smoked at least three cigarettes in the car park,