The Mammoth Book of Terror (53 page)

Beast. Not really a loa, something else; I knew that, somehow. Sometimes it looks like a man and sometimes it looks like hot honey in the darkness.

What are you doing
?

I’m taking darkness by the eyes, by the mouth, by the throat.

What are you doing
?

I’m burning alive.

What are you doing
?

I’m burning the heat beast and I have it just where I want it. All the heat anyone ever felt, fire and body heat, fever, delirium. Delirium has eyes; I push them in with my thumbs.
Delirium has a mouth; I fill it with my fist. Delirium has a throat; I tear it out. Sparks fly like an explosion of tiny stars and the beast spreads its limbs in surrender, exposing its white-hot
core. I bend my head to it and the taste is sweet, no salt in his body at all.

What are you doing
?

Oh, honey, don’t you know?

I took it back.

He wanted to talk; I didn’t. Later he called the police and told them everything was all right, he’d found me and I was coming home with him. I was sure they didn’t care.
Things like that must have happened in the Quarter all the time.

In the ladies’ room at the airport, the attendant sidled up to me as I was bent over the sink splashing cold water on my face and asked if I were all right.

“It’s just the heat,” I said.

“Then best you go home to a cold climate,” she said. “You do better in a cold climate from now on.”

I raised my head to look at her reflection in the spotted mirror. I wanted to ask her if she had a brother who also waved his hair. I wanted to ask her why he would bother with a cold woman, why
he would care.

She put both hands high on her chest, protectively. “The beast sleeps in cold.
You
tend him now. Maybe you keep him asleep for good.”

“And if I don’t?”

She pursed her lips. “Then you gotta problem.”

TIM LEBBON HAS WON
two British Fantasy Awards and a Bram Stoker Award, and his work (including the following story) has been optioned for the screen on
both sides of the Atlantic.

His books include the novels
Face, The Nature of Balance, Mesmer, Until She Sleeps, Dusk, Desolation
and
Into the Wild Green Yonder
(with Peter Crowther), plus the novellas
Naming of Parts, White, Exorcising Angels
(with Simon Clark),
Changing of Faces
and
Dead Man’s Hand.
Lebbon’s short fiction has been collected in
As the Sun Goes
Down, White and Other Tales of Ruin
and
Fears Unnamed.

Brian Keene is a winner of the Bram Stoker Award and the author of
The Rising, Terminal, City of the Dead
and other novels. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and
anthologies, and is collected in
No Rest at All, No Rest for the Wicked
and
Fear of Gravity.
He contributed one half of the Earthling Publications chapbook
The Rise and Fall of
Babylon
back-to-back with John Urbanick, and he is also the fiction editor of
Horrorfind.com.

“I’ve written several stories based during the First World War,” reveals Lebbon, “and this is one of my favourites. The scale of that destruction, that waste of life,
that slaughter, has always had a profound effect on me, and when Brian and I worked on this story I read quite a bit around the subject. I felt terrible for giving those poor soldiers something
even more awful to deal with than the hell of the trenches, but it all came together for me with the end of the story, and that wide-ranging twist on events.”

“‘Fodder’ was a real treat to write,” Keene admits. “Tim is not only one of my best friends – he’s also an author that I have an enormous amount of
respect for. I knew that in collaborating with Tim, I would have to be on top of my game. We originally wrote the story for a William Hope Hodgson tribute anthology, and the character of William
was based (very) loosely on him. We both had relatives that served during the First World War, so we wanted to touch on that. We also wanted to add the very real element of the flu bug that killed
tens of thousands of people at the end of the war.”

—Wilfred Owen

The remaining men of the British 3rd Infantry shuffled southward. Swirling clouds of dust, kicked up by their boots, marked their passage along the road towards Argonne. Around them, the beet
fields had come to life with the buzzing chatter of insects and the birds’ morning chorus, interrupted only by muffled booms from the front; intermittent, yet always present. The sounds of
battle were drawing closer with every step.

William blinked the sweat from his eyes and listened to the symphony around him, losing himself in the strange beauty of the moment. The strings and brass of the remaining wildlife accompanied
the angry percussion of man. A new poem began to suggest itself to him then, and he longed for a sheet of paper and a pen to write it down. He was away pondering the first line when he slammed into
Liggett.

“You, Bollocks,” the irate Corporal spat in his thick Cockney accent? “why don’t you watch where yer going?”

“Sorry, Liggett,” William mumbled apologetically. “I was listening to the birds.”

“Oh yeah, listening to the birds, were you? Walking around with your bloody head in the clouds more like.” He stopped to rescue his dropped cigarette from the dirt.

“He’s right, William,” laughed Winston. “Keep going like you are, you’ll float above this mess one day.”

“Leave him be,” Morris said, coming to his friend’s defence. “You can laugh all you want now, but William will have the last laugh when he writes a book about all of
this.”

“Not if he gets his head blown off first,” Liggett mumbled, “and that’s exactly what’ll happen if he don’t join the rest of us back down here on earth.”
His mood did not improve when he found the cigarette in a small, brown puddle. “Look at this,” he gasped. “The only bit of water on this whole bleeding road, and Potter makes me
drop my lastciggiein it!”

“Can we have a break, Crown Sergeant?” Winston called out to the large man ahead of him.

Crown Sergeant Sterling paused and looked back at the four men. “I suppose you lads will be wanting tea next then?”

“No, Crown Sergeant, it’s just that we haven’t stopped since . . .” Winston’s voice trailed off, lost in the warbling of the birds.

William closed his eyes and unbidden images of the last battle flooded in, the horrors of close-quarter bayonet fighting, the brutal, terrified expressions on their enemies’ faces that
meant
It’s you or me.
Hideous memories of how Dunhill and the others had died.

Sterling softened. The past was haunting him as well.

“I guess we could all do with a break,” he said quietly. “Right then! We’ll rest here and carry on just before sunset. Should be there within another couple of
hours.”

Gratefully the exhausted men unslung their knapsacks, rested their rifles upright to keep them clean and sank to the ground. William felt his muscles knotting into cramps, and he spent long
minutes stretching the pain away. He did not mind the cramps. He could deal with them. There were far worse pains he had seen other people suffering, indignities visited upon them by murderous Man
. . .

“What will we do when we reach the forest, Crown Sergeant?” Morris asked.

The big man drank deeply from his canteen before answering. “Find out if any of the other lads made it out alive,” he answered grimly. “See if we’re the lot of it. If so,
we’ll fall in with the French and the Yanks until we reach the Hindenburg line. The Yanks are sure to have a radio. I’ll get advisement from headquarters on what we’re to
do.”

“If it’s all the same to you, Crown Sergeant,” Winston joked, “I’ll just walk on to London. I’ve seen enough to the Hun and I’d like to hear a bit more
about this Chaplin fellow.”

“That’s very noble of you, Private,” Sterling said with a humorless grin. “But I’m guessing you’ll stay with the rest of us.”

“Who is this Chaplin bloke anyhow?” asked Morris. “I heard some boys from the Royal Fifth speaking of him as well.”

“A politician, I should guess,” Liggett said. “One of the bastards . . .”

They chatted, bantered, avoiding any subject close enough to remind them of the war. William tuned them out because he so liked to watch, to see the way their eyes changed when the spoke of
home, to sense the relaxation settling into their bones when they could forget the fight, even for a moment. Fighting men, he thought, were as close to the basis of the human animal as could be.
Every emotion was emphasized, every thought clear, the fear and the hope and the dread actually
felt
, not just thought.

“Penny for your thoughts, William,” Morris said.

William started, realized he had been drifting away, although to where he had no idea.

“I’m not sure I could articulate them properly,” he said, pausing to think for a moment. He was aware that the others were silent now, watching him. “Have you noticed the
birds and the insects all around us?”

“I hadn’t given it much thought,” Morris admitted, fishing through his knapsack.

“There’s a war going on all over, happening in their very home, yet they stay. They adapt. They sing along with the sounds of the artillery. Remember when we saw the
tanks?”

Morris nodded. Then he frowned.

William wondered if they were remembering the same thing.

There had been more of them then, of course. They’d been farther north, securing a bridge to provide safe passage for the armored column. It was the first time any of them had actually
seen the new form of weaponry. The tanks had been slow, ponderous things. Even Crown Sergeant Sterling, a career soldier, marvelled at the sheer destructive force the machines bespoke.

As the column had rolled safely across the bridge and chewed its way through a field on the other side, a herd of deer stood watching from the treeline.

“Those deer adapted as well,” William said to the seated men. “Something new had entered their home and they investigated, then dismissed it. The sound of artillery echoes off
the hills, and the birds become accustomed to it so quickly. I was just wondering . . . how does nature accept the changes?” He shook his head. “How long before it
refuses
to
accept them?”

He kicked at the dirt under his feet, and wondered whether it was the dust of dead men.

“And just look at the new ways we’ve devised to kill each other: the machine-gun; the tank; poison gas! The press calls this the war to end all wars. We hurtle toward our date with
destiny, our date with the future. Yet what do we really know of the world we live on? What mysteries of nature have eluded our grasp? What do we truly know of this planet’s inhabitants? I
wonder what other creatures have adapted to this chaos . . . creatures we don’t even know about yet. After all, this is their home too. We’re the intruders here. We’re the
murderers.”

“Well, that may be,” Morris replied, “but it’s not very well our choice.” He fished around in his rucksack and pulled out a faded photograph. A young woman stared
back at him. He sighed deeply.

“You miss her,” William stated.

“Oh aye, I miss her terribly,” Morris whispered. “But it’s more than that.”

“What?”

The men were silent, none of them looking at Morris, all of them waiting to hear what he had to say.

“I’m sure I’ll never see her again.”

Dunhill was holding something ropy and glistening. As William raced toward him Dunhill held up his cupped hands in a plea for help, and the shining strands spilled out into the mud.

William knelt to help him, the mud squelching around his knees. Desperately, he grabbed at the soldier’s innards, clawing his hands as they slipped through his fingers and into the
dirt.

He scraped at the mud. A pair of yellow eyes stared up at him.

They blinked.

“
Everything
has adapted, William,” Dunhill spat, a crimson froth forming on his mouth. “Known, and not yet known.”