The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 19

Proffit's arms firmly encircled the bulky contents of the black plastic bag for the whole of the journey across the city. The driver had been visibly curious, but had refrained from questioning him. That suited Proffit, preoccupied as he was with his own internal dialogue, in which he argued with himself that this latest purchase was a good deal and not a dud. More than that, it seemed a portent of a better future. Not that the present is all that bad, he thought as the driver slowed and prepared to double park briefly.

The house was one of a row of Victorian buildings facing the park. Ironwork and window mouldings were testament to a prosperous past. Now, if anyone could be bothered, the brickwork needed pointing, and the window frames several fresh coats of paint. Litter choked basement railings.

Dashes of curtain colour, plantless plant-pots and space-filling ornaments were all that distinguished Proffit's building from its neighbours, on one side three floors of dentists and on the other a firm of insurance brokers behind smeared windows. Beneath a sparse wig of aerials Proffit's ersatz family peeped at him from the windows of his rooms on the third floor.

Proffit pushed open the cab door and placed the bag carefully on the pavement, before getting out himself. Having spent enough that afternoon without parting with more, Proffit fed the exact fare into the cabby's hand. The cab screamed off at speed, the driver making a point, Proffit supposed, unless he were anxious to reacquaint himself with the city's busier thoroughfares, whose clamour, heard from this enclave, was a seditious murmur.

Inside the house Proffit was only mildly out of breath by the time he'd reached the top of the stairwell, the item being more awkward than heavy to carry. Entering his flat, he was presented with the problem of where to place the thing amongst his growing collection. In the living room alone every spare surface was lumpy with china and ceramics, a broken Ormolu clock, an ivory chess set, a pile of 1970s box games. Only the walnut coffee table before the second-hand sofa was clear.

The black polythene covered the great roundness like silk. Proffit unknotted the chicken-neck twist of plastic and a whispering crackle welcomed his delving hands. With care, he lifted out the globe and transferred it reverently to the table. He switched on the ceiling light, and the reflected room thrust out over the road. The globe's ghost twin hovered, a dark moon over the park opposite.

Hitherto, the thrill of finding, the bargaining and the moment of possession had been succeeded by an anticlimactic slump in his mood. Not this time.

The globe was clasped at its poles by a plain brass meridian half-ring. Spinning it produced a frail, but strangely eager, squeal, as of something surprised at its own resurrection.

This wasn't Earth, far, perhaps literally far, from it. Bass-relief mountain ranges crossed oceans of red that faintly stained Proffit's fingers where he'd touched. To most of the surface, black oil paint had been applied with a palette knife, in a scale like effect; Proffit had no idea what physical feature this represented. Zephyrs presided, three or four in each hemisphere; thin rather than plump, their sexlessness assured by discreetly raised bony thighs. They had ashen curls, and cruel teardrop eyes. Cheeks were puffed out roundly in their haggard faces, and from their pursed lips issued burst-pillow effects of crimson feathers. Their fists terminated in black talons.

The woman had asked for twenty pounds in the squashed confines of Cuttings Curios. Fifteen, returned Proffit, with a shrug that said, Doing you a favour love — I mean — look at it. And she had looked, her upper lip pulled fastidiously out of true. She'd capitulated to Proffit's offer, cast a cloud of black plastic in his direction, and as good as stood back. People were funny, Proffit reflected.

He stretched. Half a day trawling the charity shops and market stalls had left him pleasurably fatigued. He was hungry though, and for more than the dry and curling morsels in the fridge. Food; he resented the way it spirited away his limited funds, then itself. Objects remained. Even so, his stomach protested, aloud.

Three streets away the basement restaurant bore the weight of a dozen perpetually darkened floors. Proffit told the waiter not to stint on peppers and chillies; without them food tasted of nothing to him. Afterwards he went to the video store and hired a war film.

Back in his flat, whenever Proffit had to avert his eyes from the screen, they met the blood-red deserts of the globe. Worst of all was the soldier dealing out his intestines, like a magician casting forth cloth sausages from a top hat. Something like this just might have interested Proffit's charges, when blackboard battles never had.

The film over, Proffit reached for the globe and pushed along its horizontal axis. Shades of blacks, browns and reds smeared, then blurred and seemed to rise off the surface in an effect like encompassing dirty cloud. An arbitrary god, Proffit stopped its whirl. A bit of investigating might unearth a value, failing that he'd make one up; experts did it all the time. Proffit yawned off any other bright ideas. Bed first. Should I attend for work in the morning? The option was no longer available to him, but surveying his narrow kingdom, from the wide throne that was his threadbare sofa, it still gave him pleasure to answer in the negative.

Not a traveller he. Never a hankering to set foot on the foreign fields he'd chalked too many times onto a blackboard. Not a flyer either.

Madness to be in this miles high tube. But flying troubles him now at a basement level. More immediate is the likelihood that one of the passengers in the front rows of the plane is going to turn and see him, pyjama-ed and prone in the brass-framed bed at the rear.

Proffit minimizes himself beneath the covers as the hostess stops just beyond where his feet make twin-peaks of the blanket. 'We'll arrive shortly,' she says. Her voice has a slight buzz as if it were a discreet tone in the ambient sound of the engine. She's a star he cannot name. She glows like sun-washed terracotta. ''kay,' he says meekly, snuggling, arranging the flies of his pyjama bottoms as he knows he'll have leave the refuge of his bed soon.

In the porthole, the stars are so close he can see flames. He corrects himself: they aren't stars, they're planets on fire. Noticing a sensation of inexorable turning, he looks out of the round window to his right.

The black blind is pulled most of the way down, its lower edge bowed in a curve. Only it's not a blind, it's the southern pole of the Earth. He hadn't realized they'd gone so high. The Earth is massive, the plane a hollow pin in comparison, and he a pinprick of blood inside it.

No sense of motion now. The circumference of the black disc is out of sight. It's a target seeking its arrow. He'd never have guessed the Earth's shadowed side could be this dark.

There's a change in the note of the engine. A sick, floating sensation inside Proffit.

A clunking beneath him — landing gear? Not long after, a jolt and rattle as of colossal crates. A sense of motion again, fast but gradually decelerating.

All the lights are out in the cityscape, at the edge of what Proffit assumes is the vast apron of an airport. If landing lights of other runways exist they are comprehensively concealed by multitudes.

The plane has stopped. Voices make thunder against which are lightning solo cries of triumph and anguish. Proffit notices pools of elegantly licking flame. A body rolls, clothed in fire; some think kicking will douse it. To others, the plane offers a distraction. They crush forward. They have upraised pikes and spears-a forest of them. Proffit is dismayed at the horde surrounding the plane. There is a tattered banner marked by a huge black blot.

Despite the peril presented, the door has been opened. The passengers are impassively filing out. 'Come on,' the hostess calls to him, a tease in her voice. Then she is gone. The lights in the cabin go out, a prompt that he is to follow. Faint firelight from outside suffuses the interior.

He'll stay here, that's what he'll do. Responding to his thoughts, the door shuts, subduing the massed voices. But what now? Proffit fingers his blanket as if the stitching encodes an escape- plan.

The plane is an oven building heat.

A toddler begins to wail. Wait a second, the child isn't outside in the maelstrom of violence — it's in here. It must have been left behind, either by accident of design. Whatever the reason, the toddler's harsh thin wailing isn't fearful. Proffit ponders nervously. The child hasn't the years to have accumulated such hate and aggression. Proffit thinks any object might serve as a focus for that savage crying.