The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

TONY RICHARDS Man, You Gotta See This!

See, there's this thing about Jer.

There was a Monet exhibition in our city once. I and Kara — my then girlfriend — trooped through with the rest. Gazed upon the garden scenes and renderings of fog-bound London. Were awed by the way the paintings changed with age and failing eyesight. Loved it. But…

There is something more than love, in art. I found that out right at the end.

The exhibit reached its conclusion, you see, in a big square room that just contained one painting. A triptych, they called it. Three almighty canvases put together to form one.

It was water lilies, of course. Took up an entire wall.

And there were benches in front of it, so I just sat down. And then allowed my mind to fall forward into that weightlessness of pastel colour.

I didn't realize Kara had gone wandering back to see the scenes near Tower Bridge again.

When she tapped my shoulder, asked me if I'd been sitting here all this time, more than half an hour had passed.

I had gone completely elsewhere. I'd been lost. Blissfully so.

And Jer would never understand that.

Jerry Mulligrew — almost like the jazz saxophonist — my oldest and closest friend. Thirty-four, but looking rather younger. Pony-tailed and scrawny. Avoider of honest labour, as, for the most part, was I. Connoisseur of soft and medium-soft drugs. Lover of heavy metal. Expert puller of the student babes at our local bar — thus proof that earnest eyes, a winning smile and a quick sense of humour compensate for what I'd call weasely looks and dubious dress-sense.

Jer just wasn't into beauty of that kind. It was a concept, he often told me, which had had its day. All of that was misty-eyed stuff, far removed from actual life. We were in the Cyber Age now, and that kind of beauty was old hat.

'And we should replace it with what?' I'd ask him.

'Wonderment, man. Just… infinite possibilities. There ain't nothin' we can't do.'

We both lived on Packwell Street, me in a pokey one-bedroom apartment that had had its rent fixed twenty years ago, Jer a couple of blocks down in the loft room of a long established squat. If you walked past late at night, you could see the glow of his three state-of-the-art home computers through the window, like some otherworldly glow.

Seeing as he hadn't held down a job since the original George Bush, you might ask how he managed to afford them.

Don't ask.

And… when Old Man Hubert died, it was rather like that thing Dorothy Parker said when Calvin Coolidge — I think it was Calvin Coolidge — did the same. 'How can they tell?'

No one could remember when they had last seen him. He'd had his groceries delivered, and he'd never ventured out. He was almost like a mythic figure to most people on the street. He'd lived in the big house at the very end of Packwell, where the street met the hill, rose for a few blocks, and then gave way to shabby looking woods. Huge house. Old house. Cupolas and stuff. It was surrounded by an iron fence, and all the drapes were permanently closed.

What did he do there?

'He's supposed to be a painter,' Ray the Bartender informed us one time.

'No shit? He has opening nights and stuff?'

Ray shrugged. 'Never heard of any. Never seen anything by him. S'far as I know, he never even tries to sell his paintings. The word is he's got inherited money.'

I exchanged glances with Jer, but he just shook his head.

'No way, dude,' he said once Ray had moved off. 'I'm not into that art-stuff, but I respect all creators. In a way, I'm one myself. He's old anyhow. We'll leave it till he's dead.'

And now he was.

One day, a hearse simply appeared at the end of the road, but with no limousines following it. A coffin was brought out, and loaded in, and then driven away. The front door was padlocked and the windows boarded up. No moving truck appeared.

When I saw Jer that afternoon, his thumbs were pricking, like the witches in Macbeth. He was all keyed up. Then he looked down at my ankle, remembered that I'd twisted it last night — on a loose paving-slab, extremely drunk; he'd had to help me stagger home. And groaned.

'Ah, what the hell?' he philosophized. 'It'll probably be months before some lawyer gets around to having the place emptied. We can be in and out as much as we like, take a little at a time. Like — shoplifting, you know? There must be God-knows-what in there.'

He was off towards the house alone an hour after darkness fell. Sitting in front of my TV, feeling pretty sorry for myself, I could imagine him prying back the boards.

An hour and a half after darkness fell, my phone went. It was Jer, on the cell phone he had bought from Ray a month back.

'Man, you gotta get up here!'

'What are you talking about, bro?'

'Man, you gotta see this!'

I felt myself go slightly red. 'I'm a cripple, for chrissake! I can't go doing B-and-E in my condition!'

'You get up here right now, man, or you'll forever kick yourself. I shit you not even slightly. This has to be seen to be believed.'

What did? I next asked him.

But he told me that he could not even describe it. He gave me details of how to get in.

I was cursing as I limped up the gradient. Two things, apart from the discomfort, really bothered me. First, Jerry often took some kind of upper before heading out on such a venture, to heighten his senses and make his reactions quick. I wondered if his wild excitement was simply the product of some chemical, and nothing more.

Secondly — and this one, honestly, had been nagging away at the back of my mind ever since that talk with Ray — if Old Man Hubert had been a painter, then what was he painting with the drapes all drawn?

The door might be padlocked, but the metal gates had been left open — forgotten about, presumably, when the hearse had driven out through them. I went down the shadiest side of the house, brushing past a row of trees, and there was the small side window, just as Jer had described, with two-thirds of the boards pulled away. There was an overturned bucket to heft myself up from, otherwise I don't think I'd have made it. But my ankle was still hurting like hell by the time I was inside.

'Jer?' I whispered.

A small flashlight came on.

I couldn't see Jerry behind it, but could hear the tremolo in his voice.

'C'mon man! Follow me! You gotta see this stuff!'

He sounded like a little kid who'd just found a dead squirrel.

I hobbled along behind him, painfully aware that if Five-O showed up now I didn't have a chance of running. And I prayed that there weren't any stairs involved.

There weren't.

We went down a corridor into the pitch-black centre of the house. Through a door, which Jer told me to close.

Once I did, a switch clicked — and I was temporarily blinded.