Year's Best Horror Stories XVIII Part 9

He walked toward Jeff's dorm. A couple pa.s.sed the other way, drunk and laughing.

Clyde went to the side door -- the guys always left it propped open. He went slowly down the familiar hall. No one in sight. He walked toward room 106. He checked the knife again and he thought he sensed Jeff trying to fight through but the c.o.ke kept Clyde awake no problem and Clyde was glad that Jeff would have to watch his own death through a dream.

On the right: room 114. Jack Lofton's.

112. 110.

To the left: 109. Frank and Stan's room.

108.

He could feel Jeff fighting like a maniac, trying to jolt himself out of sleep, to send Clyde to dreamland.

Across from 108, in the alcove, there was a pinball machine he didn't remember.

106.

We meet at last, collegeboy. If only for a moment.

Clyde knew the door was unlocked as always. Jeff would be sleeping. He turned the k.n.o.b slowly and quietly and walked into the dark room. He flicked the light switch and was about to pull out his knife for the execution.

"HEY GET THE f.u.c.k OUT OF MY ROOM!" a male voice shouted.

Clyde was shocked that Jeff was awake -- and then he saw that it wasn't Jeff at all; it was a stranger. The stranger was nude but was struggling to put on a pair of gym shorts. On the bed a frightened female, also naked, pulled the bedsheets around her neckline to cover her body.

Clyde glanced around the well-lit room. It was not the room he knew: where Jeff had a picture of Bach there was now was a picture of Bruce Springsteen; the desk was in a different corner; the bed was on the wrong side of the room, and the spread was blue instead of brown.

Everything was different.

And Jeff was not here -- but he had to be.

Clyde, stunned, backed into the hall, glanced at the door again. Right room: 106. He supported himself against the wall. Seconds later the stranger was on him, screaming: "Hey, d.i.c.khead, what's your f.u.c.king problem?"

Clyde managed to get some words out: "Sorry. Sorry. I was looking for a friend; I thought this was his room."

"Well, it's not." Then, surprisingly calmer, the stranger asked: "What's your friend's name?" "Never mind."

"What's his name?" the stranger asked again forcibly.

Clyde told him. "His name's Jeff Goodwin."

The stranger said nothing.

Clyde pressed, "Do you know him?" The stranger's eyes said that he did.

"You do know him -- don't you?"

"Yeah."

"Well, where is he? I came a long way to see him."

The stranger stood quiet for a moment. "Look, I'm not sure how to say this but... Jeff's dead. This was his room for two years. He was killed in a car wreck last summer, hit by a drunk driver a few days before cla.s.ses. I thought all his friends knew by now." He added kindly: "You want to come in and sit down for a few minutes?"

Clyde walked away, staggering. The cocaine and adrenaline were wearing off and he felt tired. He walked into the common room and lay down on one of the couches. He had no reason to stay awake.

Soon he was Jeff at 17. He was taking a math test and he was sure he'd gotten all the problems right except for two. Jeff finished ahead of time and lay his head down on the wood desk.

Renaissance.

by A. F. Kidd.

A. F. Kidd, better known to her friends as Chico, has written and ill.u.s.trated three small chapbooks of her own stories: Change & Decay, In and Out of the Belfry, and her latest, Bell Music, from which the following story is taken. Born in Nottingham on April 21, 1953, Kidd presently lives in Middles.e.x, where she manages to find time from her work to indulge her interests in Jamesian ghost stories and in campanology, the English art of change-ringing (it has to do with bells in towers -- look it up). Fortunately, since spare time is in short supply, she is able to combine ill.u.s.tration, writing, and bell-ringing all in one, and she is a frequent contributor to the British small press.

Now, about that novel. Kidd explains: "I'm still trying to get this d.a.m.n sf novel under way but things like work intrude: I've got a design and advertising business now which seems to give me no spare time at all. You could say I'm working on it, if you like: I know more or less what's going to happen in it, it's just a case of transferring it from my head to paper!" Ah, there's the rub...

It's fas.h.i.+onable to say that the English have a fascination for Tuscany, but most people then go on to make derogatory remarks and deplore the fact that you can't spit without hitting an expatriate writer. I like to think that I like the area for its own sake. I love the crumbling voluptuousness of Florence: they paint the buildings in fading flesh-tones, which always put me in mind of peeling suntans.

But it's uncompromising, too: presenting sleepy blank green-shuttered eyes to you instead of windows, and quite oblivious of the scooters skimming its narrow cobbly streets.

I first visited Tuscany more years ago than I care to remember, at the invitation of an extraordinary man by the name of Enrico Camilletti. An antiquarian and Anglophile, he and his family had been interned during the war (he'd been doing research at Cambridge) until a talent of his, which I'm not allowed to talk about, came to light; and that was how we met.

The Army's talent for inapt job selection, which sets the tone-deaf to bugling and the myopic to photographic reconnaissance, put me in Intelligence, a devious and exacting business for which my only qualification was linguistic ability. I had been trained as a singer, having what I was told was a "warm Italian tenor," and somehow had been seduced into learning to speak the languages as I learned to sing them. That, and painting, unmartial talents, gave me an entree to Enrico's world, and a useful Intelligence coup.

All this is old history; but when Enrico and his daughter (his wife had died in 1942, of cancer) returned to Italy, he left me with an open invitation to visit, and eventually I did so, armed with rucksack and paints.

Italy, perhaps by virtue of its past of warring city-states, still strikes me as extraordinarily diverse: Venice, which snags at the memory like a thorn, casting visions of narrow alleys and the reflections of gondolas; Rome, which I hate, being like London with ruins (only dirtier); the involved coast of the south, where houses climb the cliffs. And Tuscany, tower-studded, a landscape of trees like mist and hills like smoke, with the spiky diagrams of cypresses inked on the horizon and ragged red rooftops among the olive groves.

In the hills surrounding Florence I found a great domed church which could have been the twin of Sant-Andrea del la Valle in Rome, where the first act of Tosca is set.

The church struck chords within me as soon as I saw it: the sort of cool calm sacred stone, which opens into frescoes and mosaics of startling, ancient brilliance.

There are parts of Tuscany where you feel overloaded with art, glutted with color, sated with gold, and the Renaissance lies long aeons in the future: there was a part of this church, San Donatus di Fiesole, which was so old it was almost alien. Most of it was fourteenth century, but one of the tiny chapels attached to it, cold rough stone, gave off such an aura -- or perhaps it would be more accurate to say "miasma" -- of age that you could almost believe the builder would have remembered the Apostles from personal experience. And the frescoes were, literally, unbelievable. On seeing them for the first time it felt as if my heart had suddenly loosened within me: I had entered that chapel expecting -- well, nothing at all; and had been confronted with something like a revelation.

As I entered, my eyes strained in the dim darkness: I could practically feel the pupils dilating. Gradually, as I became accustomed to the gloom, glints of jewel-like color and the dull gleam of gold began to encroach on my vision.

They were brilliant, those frescoes: as detailed as photographs. Slowly I paced along the chapel. Up and down I went: to and fro. Once or twice I touched, very delicately, the painted surface, almost unable to believe it was only a wall.

Some artist of consummate skill had been at work there: some painter so far ahead of his time that his fame should have shouted from there to Rome and beyond. Here shone a saint, his face abstracted; there, an angel of such beauty that it almost hurt to behold.

After a time, I became aware that a darker vision than I had first thought had been at work. The unknown artist had enhanced the beauty of his religious subject matter by introducing contrasts in the form of the grotesque and revolting.

Grinning skulls and drooling demons leered from corners, made more malevolent by the skill of the draughtsmans.h.i.+p.

I came to a shuddering halt in front of one figure. It seemed to exude a powerful impression of evil quite disproportionate to its image: my spine crawled at the sight, yet there was little to see. It was cloaked, clawed; its face in shadow.

Within its dark hood shone two faint glows, as of eyes. I decided I was quite glad that the artist had spared his audience full sight of the creature -- it was the sort of thing, had I been able to see what it really looked like, that would have destroyed my sanity in one glimpse. The thing was terrible for its understatement, its hidden threat -- there was no artifice there, no cheap shock value. But you knew, incontrovertibly, what it was. It was rather as if someone had shown me a pit and said: That's h.e.l.l. And I had known it for the literal truth.

I walked quite rapidly out of the chapel. Through the outer door, the sun had laid a honey-colored rectangle on the church's stone floor. Outside, a balmy breeze stirred the pale leaves of the olive trees, and pointed black cypresses moved gently.

All quite normal. But I couldn't shake off the dull, poisonous conviction that that painted image was the representation of the negation of all that my life signified: music, art, harmony; all pleasant things.

Still, something compelled me to go and look again. This time, I saw the beautiful, not the grotesque. Sometimes Renaissance art is cruel to women (although it is not the artists, but the conventions of the time; you might just as well say, as I have heard some foolish people do, that opera is misogynistic); but here I found an image, which I ached to copy. I had no camera, and even if I had, in those days it would have been the height of discourtesy to go flas.h.i.+ng lights in a church.

Mary Magdalene, I guessed: a tear glinted in her eye. Her hair was fair, like Primavera's: a little blonde strand fell over one brow. Tosca came into my mind again -- Chi e quella donna bionda la.s.su? / La Maddalena. Ti place? / E troppo bella.

I looked to see whether I could find someone -- priest? Sacristan? To give me permission to paint in the church, but in that early afternoon there was little sign of life. Lizards sneaked in the old stonewalls, the swiftest creatures to be seen; a few sightseers were wandering round in the gentle October sun. The only other moving objects were a pair of Franciscan monks in their brown habits, beneath which the sandals, which poked out, looked incongruously modern.

So I sat down on a wall and gazed absently at the delicate mist, which lay over Florence below, giving Brunelleschi's majestic dome the appearance of floating in a sea of cobwebs. And that was when things began to happen, on a misty-gold autumn day in Tuscany.

I flapped my s.h.i.+rt to try and cool down: I was running with sweat. A movement snagged the corner of my eye, and I turned, unaccountably troubled, but nothing was to be seen. Eventually, I decided, tentatively, to approach the monks; and after some consultation ascertained that it would be quite all right for me to paint inside the church.

In front of La Maddalena I set up my easel and began sketching, and sang Recondita armonia from Tosca because I felt just like Cavaradossi painting there.

It was late when I packed up, leaving the easel where it was.

Enrico Camilletti inhabited the top floor apartment in a crumbling sunburn- colored building overlooking the river and (if you leaned out of the window and squinted) the Ponte Vecchio. The stairs were steep, worn stone, with cast-iron railings: it seemed a very long way to the top. But I was tired anyway, and went to bed early -- I was supposed to be on holiday for a rest (I had been working much too hard recently). That night I had an odd dream, which I was unable quite to recall in the morning. All that remained was a sense of something receding, and a voice saying (for all the world like something from an Italian-language course) "Non e qui; e li." It's not here, it's there.

The following day I was eager to return to the church and get on with my painting; Enrico's daughter Silvana asked me if she could come with me, and her father gave her permission -- you have to remember that this was not long after the war, when children were more dutiful than they are now, and Silvana was, oh, about seventeen, I should think. She was a nice, lively, bright child, as you would expect if you knew her father; fair and pretty and as thin as a stick.

It's still difficult to talk about this. It was rather like being shot. My copy of the fresco had changed -- had been changed. I didn't, couldn't, believe it at first: I remember taking off my gla.s.ses and polis.h.i.+ng them, as if that would restore reality.

Framed by the ash-pale hair was a face turned hideous, corrupted into a worm-ridden thing of decay. Obscenely, a scab-colored tongue protruded between delicately pointed teeth.

I gasped for breath. Felt, physically, blood draining out of my face, and then surging back in like lava. Fury is too light a word. I wanted to commit murder.

"Dio," said Silvana softly, reaching out a tentative hand to the easel. I ripped the paper off before she could touch it, and she jumped back, startled.

"They weren't like this," she said, gesturing vaguely at the walls.

"What do you mean?"

She looked at the frescoes surrounding us with their primitive colors, vibrant and vital.

"They must have been -- hidden -- somehow. And now, for some reason, they're getting clearer again."

I saw what she meant, impossible as it sounded. "You mean if they'd been visible for centuries, they'd be famous?"

She nodded, and then suddenly pointed at the wall. "Look."

I looked. I winced. I don't know how I'd missed it. In the crowd gathered round the Crucifixion scene was a familiar face. It was identical: the blonde hair, the soft and rotting features. The tongue. And looking at the crowd now, I could see many more corrupted faces: not caricatures, but something more unpleasant.

So I searched for the cloaked figure, which had somehow taken on the role of a leitmotiv. (Was it something perhaps in a cloak, which kept sliding out of the corners of my vision?) There; it seemed clearer than it had been: the draperies gleamed, as if wet under moonlight, silver like snail-trails. Here and there the cloth molded itself to the form beneath: the shape of its limbs was totally unhuman.

"What if they're getting out?" whispered Silvana. I wasn't sure I'd heard her right at first. "I'm going to borrow Father's camera tomorrow."

"Will they mind you taking photographs?"

"Don't worry. If you smile and act humble, it's amazing what you can get away with."

"Let's go and have a drink," I said. Silvana hesitated. "I bet they won't move while you're looking at them." "Like The Mezzotint, you mean?" she said, surprising me. "You're probably right."

As we pa.s.sed the easel she cast a glance in its direction, which gave me an idea. I had a small sketchpad, which I hadn't actually used, but which I'd left by the easel.

"Do you think that'll have changed too?"

"That's what I want to find out," I replied, opening it. The first half-dozen pages were blank, but the next one, randomly selected, perhaps, bore an unpleasantly familiar outline, seemingly drawn in charcoal: that of a cloaked figure. Beneath it, in crabbed capitals, was the legend CAVEAT PICTOR.

"Beware the -- ?"

"Let the artist beware," I corrected her. "It's a warning, then. But why mess up the Magdalene picture?"

"It didn't," she said. Her voice had the inevitability of rain. "Whatever changed the picture is the thing you've got to beware of. After all, you've seen it, haven't you?"

Dark shape sliding past the corner of my eye. "Yes, I think so."

"And so did our unknown fresco painter."

"And it's his -- ghost -- that's warning us." I couldn't quite bring myself to say "me."

"Doesn't it make sense?" asked Silvana, sounding very like her father. "If it debased his paintings, wouldn't he want to warn another painter?"

"What is it, then, the thing in the cloak?"

She shrugged. "Elemental, demon, devil?" The word "elemental" reminded me of something. If she'd read James -- ?

"Did you ever read a story called Celui-la?"

" 'M, yes: who wrote it? Not M. R. James. Le Fanu?"

"Eleanor Scott."

"Yes, I was about thirteen when I read it -- it scared the h.e.l.l out of me." "Me, too," I agreed. "Well, that's what this reminds me of." Silvana looked back into the dim church. " Won e qui; e li'," I muttered.

"What?"

"Something I dreamed."

" 'It's not here; it's there'. I wonder what that's supposed to mean."

"Mm," I said.