As he walked, his head hurt more and more. Around him, early-morning people busied themselves, whistling cheerfully as they worked, restoring recent damage. There weren’t many cars about, but a lot of people were nipping between the craters on bicycles.
There was a tube station nearby, the Angel. It was a part-time shelter, but the trains were running again. A policeman at the entrance was checking papers. Many of the bombed-out were being reassigned to vacant housing.
As he went down the escalator into the depths, Frankham passed framed advertisements for Ovaltine, a Googie Withers film, Lipton’s Tea, powdered eggs, Bovril. Every third advertisement showed the Old Man giving the V-sign, with a balloon inviting tourists to share the “Blitz Experience.”
Suddenly, halfway down the escalator, Frankham had to sit, a shudder of cold pain wrenching his wounded arm. Passersby stepped delicately around him, and the moving steps nudged him out at the bottom. He found a place to sit, and tried to will the throbbing in his forehead away.
A little girl with curls stepped into his field of vision. Her mother, with a calf-length swirl of skirts and precious nylons, tugged disapprovingly.
“Don’t play with the poor man, dear.”
The little girl dumped something in his lap and was pulled away. Frankham looked down at the canvas-covered lump and, with his good hand, undid the bundle. A gas mask tumbled out. He lifted it up to his face and, fumbling with the straps, fitted it on, inhaling the smell of rubber and cotton. Somehow the pain was eased. He drew up his knees and hugged them.
It wouldn’t be over by Christmas, Frankham knew. But that didn’t matter. London could take it.
COMPANIONS
by Del Stone Jr.
Del Stone Jr. neglected to send me the date and place of his birth. Just another troublemaker messing up my demographic and astrologic studies of writers in The Year’s Best Horror Stories. However, Stone did remember to mention that he is a relative newcomer to writing, with work in both horror and science fiction genres in prose and comics. In prose he has hit various small press publications and is now moving into major markets. His work for the comics includes stories for Hellraiser, Thumbscrew, Vortex Riders, Roadkill and its sequel, Heat. He is at work on his first horror novel, Tidal Pools.
Stone says he “is single by default and lives with two cats, which does not mean they will inherit his millions. When he is not writing he enjoys league bowling, long talks over coffee, and performing his smoke ring trick (which involves putting the business end of a cigarette in his mouth). He is the assistant editor of a newspaper. That’s where he gets his ideas.”
Cats. Coffee. Do you see a pattern?
Manion was dreaming again.
He and Nina and another couple he didn’t know and a real estate agent were standing in the formal dining room of a magnificently expansive house in the countryside, a house most people would call a mansion, a house of such rarefied gentility that even within the skewed perspective of this dream, Manion knew he did not belong here and had no business posing as a buyer.
The room stretched to the horizon on one end; on the other, a pair of double-wide carved oak doors opened to a landing at the foot of a spiral staircase. The room looked through a battery of French windows into the leafless, wintery woodlands outside; slanting bars of sunlight brought airborne layers of near-motionless dust into glaring contrast.
The agent was going on about the lost art of woodworking, her hands fluttering in the sunlight, the shadows of her hands capering against the opposite walls, larger and darker than life, when Manion turned his eye to Nina, shoving his own hands into his pants pockets and simply watching, admiring. Her hair blazed in the sun, showing bronze and copper threads that appeared and disappeared within a burnt-orange cascade of lazy curls. Her hair seemed alive. Individual strands rose and fell in the still air as if Nina herself were the source of a very small, discrete center of convection.
That was when Manion heard the laughter.
It began upstairs, slithering down the staircase like fog in a horror movie, slow and very low in the throat but gaining in volume and tittering up the scale of octaves until it became a shrieking cackle that seemed to rub cold fingers against the knobs of his spine, leaving a trail of gooseflesh. Nina turned to Manion and her eyes had narrowed to a feral squint.
The agent giggled nervously. She said in a flustered voice, “Oh, don’t pay any attention to that. It’s just the demon. All old houses are inhabited by ghosts… or demons.”
Inhabited. And as the agent blathered on, the words skidding off her tongue like cars wrecking on an icy overpass, Manion turned to the wall, where the fresco of their shadows stretched to the ceiling, and saw…
… something. A shimmering blur of black silhouettes, as if the image had been liquified by twisting thermals, and from Nina’s shadow sprouted a set of horns, an arching of leathery wings… and the shadowy hint of a penis.
Then the laughter spiraled out of control and Manion jerked awake and raised himself from the pillow, his heart thudding in his chest and ears, his lungs aching for the lack of a breath.
The bedroom door was swinging open.
He’d closed and locked it the night before, and now it was opening, as if somebody had just walked out of the room.
He did not move. He did not want to think about moving. Because if he moved, he’d do it this way: reach with his right hand, over his hip, to the half of the mattress behind him, feeling for Nina. And if she were there, asleep, he might die of fright, right here in the bedroom.
The toilet flushed and he heard Nina’s familiar morning smoker’s hack, and the air gushed out of his lungs, the sheets ungluing themselves from his clammy flesh, and he collapsed back to the mattress in a fever of relief.
He took three deep breaths, the way the psychiatrist had instructed him to do, and felt the rumble of fear ease out of his muscles, subsiding to a growl, then only the suggestion of a throb, like a cold engine finally throttling down to an idle. Then a strange thought occurred to him:
I have had that dream before…
And his heart began to race anew. He thought, Is it starting again?
But he could not remember enough to answer.
Nina? No, not Nina.
Yet here she was, pacing the Aztec glyph-pattern throw rug he’d bought in New Mexico, her arms jittering like bat wings, her lip curling to expose her teeth, the canines jutting like fangs. He wondered how she didn’t cut her lips on those fangs. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed them before.
“Jesus, is it asking so much?” she shouted, stalking to the edge of the rug, spinning on her heel, stalking back, hands landing on hips, then flying up, fangs sliding out of then back into her mouth.
“All I want is a little consideration. All I want is to feel like I’m a part of—of—” her arms spread as if she were soaring on her frustration, “whatever plan it is you’ve got for the future. I mean, honest to God, Manion. I feel like a frigging appliance around here. Turn me on when you need your coffee brewed or your dishes washed, turn me off when you’re done.” She stopped in front of him, her burnt-orange hair undulating like a flame, and glowered at him. “It doesn’t work that way, Manion. You have to contribute to this relationship.”
Her words weren’t the salient issue. Manion had heard them before, many times; he knew the litany by heart. It was the way she said them. It was the anger that gave rise to her words, and the glimpses of what lay behind her anger, that loomed in Manion’s thoughts. The way she moved her arms. The way she showed her teeth. Subtle clues as to what was going on here.