The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

of shadow and drifts of leaves; places where there are no people.

The last few weeks of that summer were close and humid. The newspapers were full of road accidents, murders, rapes. I can remember walking through the city center and seeing the crowd of people suddenly blur and sway, as though they had all started to dance. Alan and I kept in touch; he was under increasing stress, not knowing whether Paul really wanted to be with him in the future. He was holding onto a job and a home while hoping that he’d be asked to leave them behind. He said he still missed me. We were uneasy with each other, not really knowing what to say or to hope for. For me, it wouldn’t have been hard to forgive him. The most difficult thing would have been to trust him.

In spite of this uncertainty, the glare of madness was fading in my head. I was drinking less heavily, though that had never been the core of the trouble. Many people helped me, Mends and strangers; and while nobody’s help was crucial in itself, the total effect got me through. There’s more humanity around than I’ve tended to think. It’s not human nature that gives power to the vultures and maggots; it’s only human culture. Dead things like money and authority.

The last time I saw one of the antipeople was in August. It was outside the Nightingale, between two and three a.m. on a Saturday night. I was drunk and on my own, wishing I had someone to share the taxi fare with; or even pay it myself, but not have to go home alone. Opposite the Hippodrome, I saw a body crumpled against a wire fence. Somebody was kneeling over it. As I crossed the road, the figure reared up and gave me an unmistakable look that meant Go away. This one’s mine. When I saw the face of the man on the ground, my skin turned cold. It was Jason, and he was bleeding from a deep cut above one eye. The creature’s long fingers were pressed against the wound. I saw them turn red and stiffen like tiny pricks. They were hollow.

For a moment, I hesitated. It seemed impossible to change what was happening. Then I lurched toward them, almost falling, and grabbed at the thing’s hair. It felt like a mesh of dry plastic threads. I was afraid the hair would pull out and leave me with no grip. But he tilted backward and twisted around to face me, his arm stretching before the fingers came loose from Jason’s face with a kind of tearing sound. The creature’s own face was flat and expressionless, with eyes like holes in the ground. He fell against me, knocking me over; when I picked myself up, he’d gone.

Jason was lying very still, but he was breathing. One arm was pinned under his body. His face was like a copper mask, melting at the nose and forehead. I shook him gently; his eyes opened. “David,” he said. “My God. What time is it! I must… I got beaten up. Did you see them?”

I shook my head. “You’ll be all right. Take it easy.” He stood up, then wavered and nearly fell. I caught hold of him, and we hugged each other for a few moments. He was wearing a crimson silk shirt which was dark with sweat. The cut in his forehead was like a jewel, and suddenly I thought of Douglas Fairbanks as Sinbad in a film I’d seen as a child. Still holding onto him, I steered Jason across the road and down the sidestreet to the club entrance. They were about to close up, but I told them what had happened and one of their staff went to get some tissues and ice. They knew Jason. He sat down on the doorstep, quite calmly. There was hardly anyone about. The night was blue and warm.

When the wound was cleaned up, I could see a bruise forming around it. His nose and right cheek were puffy, too, though the skin was even paler than usual. The ice seemed to lessen the pain. After a few minutes, we walked down to the taxi-hire firm. I told him we’d have to go to the hospital. “Can’t I just go home?” he said.

“If you don’t get that cut stitched up, it won’t heal properly.” He nodded slowly. We waited in silence, Jason holding a ball of clotted tissues like a rose stiff with color. I bit my lip to stay awake. Eventually a taxi came.

The casualty department at the General Hospital was brightly lit and reassuringly blank. Several rows of plastic chairs marked out the waiting area. In front of Jason was a rather gaunt-looking man of thirty or so, who was explaining loudly to the nurse that he’d swallowed a penny and was now unable to shit. It had been three days, he said. “I don’t know why I swallowed it. It was just something I had to do.” The nurse, with well-concealed impatience, suggested he try a curry. “Nothing works,” he said. The look of hopelessness in his face betrayed him. I could pencil in his background easily enough: he lived alone, was unemployed, an incipient schizophrenic or perhaps an outpatient at Highcroft. But no amount of psychiatric help could change the fact that he had no friends and no way of gaining affection from another human being. When the nurse dismissed him, he took a seat behind us and waited to be seen again.

After Jason had talked to the nurse, we went and sat in another waiting area, with red upholstered seats and a number of silent people, all with minor injuries. I thought about the antipeople. They seemed to be everywhere in this hospital, waiting just out of sight. Perhaps they hung around the little curtained rooms where patients were left alone. One thought kept recurring to me, something Alan had said once. The opposite of love is indifference.

Eventually, Jason’s name was called and he followed a nurse out through the swing doors. I waited, still drunk but sober in whatever part of me reacted to what was happening. Half an hour later he came back, with fourteen stitches in his forehead. It was past four o’clock. Jason lived in Kidderminster with his parents; he’d had to move back there after losing his job. I took him back to my flat, where he slept like a child. In the morning, I woke up and lay there for a while, looking at him. If anything visited him in the night, I didn’t see. He woke up around midday and left soon afterward, thanking me repeatedly for my help. But somehow, I still felt responsible. Fourteen stitches are not enough.

WELSH PEPPER by D. F. Lewis

I was on a solitary walking holiday, the way I always liked it, with my rucksack, large colored umbrella and personal headset.

For many years, I had been coming to this part of North Wales, enjoying the rugged scenery and challenging treks, far from most tourist enclaves. I slept rougher than many would countenance, my only shelter being the umbrella which I would stake to the ground with string guyed from every pinion to keep it steady in most winds thereabouts, but sadly not preventing the driving rain from slanting in upon my sleeping bag.

Good job I always slept “like a log,” as my mother used to say.

She never liked the idea of me coming away on these ventures, for fear of me catching the death of cold or falling down some (god)forsaken ravine.

As she had been dead now for a year or two, I no longer felt guilty at making her fret. One thing I do remember is her telling me never to beat about the bush, even when telling a story.

I was listening to my favorite Beatles album, as the path took me into an unfamiliar valley. I had decided earlier in the day, after a particularly dreadful night of really soaking rain, that I would turn almost full circle on myself and head toward a hostel that I had once before visited on a previous hike, where I would be able to dry out for a day or so. This inevitably meant putting up with the back-to-back discos and irritating bonhomie of the young set but, too bad, when the devil needs, the devil must. The girls there would make a nice change of view, in any case…

I admit that I am one of those men who believe any shortcomings are the fault of factors other than themselves. On coming across this valley, I automatically assumed that geography was to blame, rather than myself, for the valley should never have been there at all. I was quite familiar with the waterfalls a mile or so back which should have led to some nuclear silos in view of the hostel’s back bedroom windows. But the turnings instead had taken me to a deep cleft between mountainous slopes which, if I did not know better, were tantamount to twin Snowdons. A mighty frothing river surged between wooded slopes…

I had not heard the crash of the waters for my headset was an expensive one, more or less acoustically leak-proof and, in any event, it was a specially noisy bit at the opening of the Sergeant Pepper album.

Sitting down to remove a large stone from my boot, which I had been enduring for some while, I suddenly felt as if I were being watched.

A young girl, certainly not more than half my age, was crouched upon a nearby rock and, since she was wearing a gray dress, I was not surprised at missing her presence until now, merging with the rock as she did.

“Excuse me! What’s the name of this area?” I asked.