Mammoth Books Presents Monsters in Our Midst Read online

  Mammoth Books presents

  Monsters in Our Midst:

  Three Stories by Michael Marshall Smith, Gary Kilworth and John Langan

  Taken from The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume 22, edited by Stephen Jones

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  Stories taken from The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 22 edited by Stephen Jones,

  published by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2011

  Collection and editorial material copyright © Stephen Jones, 2011, 2012

  SUBSTITUTIONS copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 2010.

  Originally published in Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  OUT BACK copyright © Gary Kilworth 2010.

  Originally published in FantasyCon 2010 Souvenir Programme.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  CITY OF THE DOG copyright © John Langan 2009.

  Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction No.687, January/February 2010.

  Reprinted by permission of the author.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition

  that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold,

  hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover

  other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition

  including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters,

  places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination

  or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,

  living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication Data is available from the British Library

  EISBN: 978-1-47210-272-0

  Contents

  Substitutions

  Out Back

  City of the Dog

  MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH

  Substitutions

  MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH IS a novelist and screenwriter. Under this name he has published seventy short stories and three novels – Only Forward, Spares and One of Us – winning the Philip K. Dick Award, International Horror Guild Award, August Derleth, and the Prix Bob Morane in France. He has also won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction four times, more than any other author.

  Writing as “Michael Marshall”, he has also published five international best-selling thrillers, including The Straw Men, The Intruders, Bad Things and, most recently, Killer Move. The Intruders is currently under series development with BBC TV.

  He is currently involved in screenwriting projects that include a television pilot set in New York and an animated horror movie for children. The author lives in North London with his wife, son, and two cats.

  As Smith recalls: “This story came about in the simplest way, the way I always enjoy most – something happening in real life that makes you think ‘What if?’

  “Our household gets a lot of its food via an online delivery service, and one day when I was unpacking what had just been dropped at our house I gradually realised there was something . . . not quite right about the contents of the bags.

  “There’s two things that are strange about that experience. The first is that – given that every household is likely to buy at least some things in common – you don’t realise straight away that you’ve been given the wrong shopping. You don’t immediately think ‘This is wrong’, more like . . . ‘This is weird’. The second is how personal it is, gaining accidental access to this very tangible evocation of some other family’s life. You can’t help but wonder about the people the food was really destined for.

  “In real life, I just called up the delivery guy and got it sorted out: but in fiction, you might tackle things slightly differently . . .”

  HALFWAY THROUGH UNPACKING THE second red bag I turned to my wife – who was busily engaged in pecking out an email on her Blackberry – and said something encouraging about the bag’s contents.

  “Well, you know,” she said, not really paying attention. “I do try.”

  I went back to taking items out and laying them on the counter, which is my way. Because I work from home, it’s always me who unpacks the grocery shopping when it’s delivered: Helen’s presence this morning was unusual, and a function of a meeting that had been put back an hour (the subject of the terse email currently being written). Rather than standing with the fridge door open and putting items directly into it, I put everything on the counter first, so I can sort through it and get a sense of what’s there, before then stowing everything neatly in the fridge, organised by type/nature/potential meal groupings, as a kind of Phase Two of the unloading operation.

  The contents of the bags – red ones for stuff that needs refrigeration, purple for freezer goods, green for everything else – is never entirely predictable. My wife has control of the online ordering process, which she conducts either from her laptop or, in extremis, her phone. While I’ve not personally specifi ed the order, however, its contents are seldom much of a surprise. There’s an established pattern. We have cats, so there’ll be two large bags of litter – it’s precisely being able to avoid hoicking that kind of thing off supermarket shelves, into a trolley and across a busy car park which makes online grocery shopping such a boon. There will be a few green bags containing bottled water, sacks for the rubbish bins, toilet rolls and paper towel, cleaning materials, tins of store cupboard staples (baked beans, tuna, tinned tomatoes), a box of Diet Coke for me (which Helen tolerates on the condition that I never let it anywhere near our son), that kind of thing. There will be one, or at the most two, purple bags holding frozen beans, frozen peas, frozen organic fish cakes for the kid, and so on. We never buy enough frozen to fill more than one purple carrier, but sometimes they split it between a couple, presumably for some logistical reason. Helen views this as both a waste of resources and a threat to the environment, and has sent at least two emails to the company about it. I don’t mind much as we use the bags for clearing out the cats’ litter tray, and I’d rather have spares on hand than risk running out.

  Then there’s the red bags, the main event. The red bags represent the daily news of food consumption – in contrast to the contextual magazine articles of the green bags, or the long-term forecasts of the purple. In the red bags will be the Greek yoghurt, blueberries and strawberries Helen uses to make her morning smoothie; a variety of vegetables and salad materials; some free-range and organic chicken fillets (I never used to be clear on the difference between the non-identical twin joys of organic and free range, but eleven years of marriage has made me better informed); some extra-sharp cheddar (Helen favours cheese that tastes as though it wants your tongue to be sad), and a few other bits and pieces.

  The individual items may vary a little from week to week, but basically, that’s what gets brought to our door most Wednesday mornings. Once in a while there may be substitutions in the delivery (when the supermarket has run out of a specifi ed item, and one judged to be of near equivalence is provided instead): these have to be carefully checked, as Helen’s idea of similarity of goods differs somewhat from the supermarket’s. Otherwise, you could set your watch by our shopping, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor – and this continuity of content is why I’d turned to Helen when I was halfway through the second red bag. Yes, there’d been spring onions and a
set of red, green and yellow peppers – standard weekly fare. But there were also two packs of brightly-coloured and fun-fi lled children’s yoghurts and a block of much milder cheddar of the kind Oscar and I tend to prefer, plus a family pack of deadly-looking chocolate desserts. Not to mention a six-pack of thick and juicy-looking steaks, and large variety pack of further Italian cured meats holding fi ve different types of salami.

  “Yum,” I said.

  I was genuinely pleased, and a little touched. Normally I source this kind of stuff – on the few occasions when I treat myself – from the deli or mini-market which are both about ten minutes’ walk away from the house (in opposite directions, sadly). Seeing it come into the house via the more socially condoned route of the supermarket delivery was strangely affecting.

  “Hmm?” Helen said. She was nearing the end of her email. I could tell because the speed of her typing increases markedly as she approaches the point when she can fire her missive off into space.

  She jabbed SEND and finally looked up properly. “What’s that you said?”

  “Good shop. Unusual. But I like it.”

  She smiled, glad that I was happy, but then frowned. “What the hell’s that?”

  I looked where she was pointing. “Yoghurts.”

  She grabbed the pack and stared with evident distaste at the ingredient list. “I didn’t order those. Obviously. Or that.” Now she was pointing at the pile of salamis and meats. “And the cheese is wrong. Oh, bloody hell.”

  And with that, she was gone.

  I waited, becalmed in the kitchen, to see what would unfold. A quick look in the other bags – the greens and purples – didn’t explain much. They all contained exactly the kind of thing we tended to order.

  Five minutes later I heard the sound of two pairs of footsteps coming down the stairs. Helen re-entered the kitchen followed by the man who’d delivered the shopping. He was carrying three red bags and looked mildly cowed.

  “What it is, right,” he muttered, defensively, “Is the checking system. I’ve told management about it before. There are fl aws. In the checking system.”

  “I’m sure it can’t be helped,” Helen said, cheerfully, and turned to me. “Bottom line is that all the bags are correct except for the red ones, which both belong to someone else.”

  When I’d put all the items from the counter back into the bags I’d taken them out of, an exchange took place. Their red bags, for ours. The delivery guy apologised five more times – somehow making it clear, without recourse to words, that he was apologising for the system as a whole, rather than any failure on his part – and trudged off back up the stairs.

  “I’ll let him out,” Helen said, darting forward to give me a peck on the cheek. “Got to go anyway. You’re alright unpacking all this, yes?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I always manage somehow.”

  And off she went. It only took a few minutes to unpack the low-fat yoghurts, sharp cheese, salad materials and free-range and organic chicken breasts.

  A funny thing happened, however. When I broke off from work late morning to go down to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, I lingered at the fridge for a moment after getting the milk out, and I found myself thinking:

  What if that had been our food?

  I wasn’t expressing discontent. We eat well. I personally don’t have much of a fix on what eating healthily involves (beyond the fact it evidently requires ingesting more fruit and vegetables per day than feels entirely natural), and so it’s a good thing that Helen does. If there’s anything that I want which doesn’t arrive at our door through the effortless magic of supermarket delivery, there’s nothing to stop me going out and buying it myself. It’s not as if the fridge or cupboards have been programmed to reject non-acceptable items, or set off a siren and contact the diet police when confronted with off-topic foodstuffs.

  It was more that I got a sudden and strangely wistful glimpse of another life – and of another woman.

  I was being assumptive, of course. It was entirely possible that the contents of the red bags I’d originally unpacked had been selected by the male of some nearby household. It didn’t feel that way, however. It seemed easier to believe that somewhere nearby was another household rather like ours. A man, a woman, and a child (or perhaps two, we’re unusual in having stopped at one). All of the people in this family would be different to us, of course, but for the moment it was the idea of the woman which stuck in my head.

  I wondered what she’d look like. What kind of things made her laugh. How, too, she’d managed to miss out on the health propaganda constantly pushed at the middle classes (she had to be middle class, most people in our neighbourhood are, and everyone who orders online from our particular supermarket has to be, it’s the law) – or what had empowered her to ignore it.

  We get steak every now and then, of course – but it would never be in the company of all the other meats and rich foods. One dose of weapons-grade animal fats per week is quite risky enough for this household, thank you. We live a moderate, evenly balanced life when it comes to food (and, really, when it comes to everything else). The shopping I’d seen, however foolishly, conjured the idea of a household which sailed a different sea – and of a different kind of woman steering the ship.

  I was just a little intrigued, that’s all.

  A couple of days later, I was still intrigued. You’d be right in suspecting this speaks of a life in which excitement levels are low. I edit, from home. Technical manuals are my bread and butter, leavened with the occasional longer piece of IT journalism. I’m good at it, fast and accurate, and for the most part enjoy my work. Perhaps “enjoy” isn’t quite the right word (putting my editing hat on for a moment): let’s say instead that I’m content that it’s my profession, am well paid and always busy, and feel no strong desire to be doing anything else, either in general or particular.

  But nobody’s going to be making an action movie of my life any day soon.

  And that’s perhaps why, sometimes, little ideas will get into my head and stick around for longer than they might in the mind of someone who has more pressing or varied (or viscerally compelling) things to deal with on a day-to-day basis.

  I was still thinking about this other woman.

  This different girl.

  Not in a salacious way – how could I be? I had no idea what she looked like, or what kind of person she was (beyond that spoken of by her supermarket choices). That’s the key word, I think – difference. Like any man who’s been in a relationship for a long time (and doubtless a lot of women too, I’ve never asked), every once in a while you beguile a few minutes in fantasy. Sometimes these are sexual, of course, but often it’s something more subtle which catches your internal eye. I’ve never felt the urge to be unfaithful to Helen – even now that our sex life has dropped to the distant background hum of the long-term married – and that’s partly because, having thought the thing through, I’ve come to believe that such fantasies are generally not about other people, but about yourself. What’s really going on, if you spend a few minutes dreaming about living in a scuzzy urban bedsit with a (much younger) tattooed barmaid/suicide doll, or cruising some sunny, fuzzy life with a languid French female chef? These women aren’t real, of course, and so the attraction cannot be bedded in them. They don’t exist. Doubtless these and all other alternate lifestyles would come to feel everyday and stale after a while, too, and so I suspect the appeal of such daydreams actually lies in the shifted perception of yourself that these nebulous lives would enshrine.

  You’d see yourself differently, and so would other people, and that’s what your mind is really playing with: a different you, in a different now.

  Perhaps that insight speaks merely of a lack of courage (or testosterone); nonetheless, the idea of this nearby woman kept cropping up in my mind. Perhaps there was also a creative part of my mind seeking voice. I don’t edit fiction, and have never tried to write any either. I enjoy working with words, helping to corral them into
neat and meaningful pens like so many conceptual sheep, but I’ve discovered in myself neither the urge nor the ability to seek to make them evoke people or situations which are not “true”. With this imaginary woman, however – not actually imaginary of course, unless it was a man, it was more a case of her being “unknown” – I found myself trying to picture her, her house, and her life. I guess it’s that thing which happens sometimes in airports and on trains, when you’re confronted with evidence of other real people leading presumably real lives, and you wonder where everyone’s going, and why: wonder why the person in the seat opposite is reading that particular book, and who they’ll be meeting at the other end of the journey you’re, for the moment, sharing.

  With so little to go on, my mind was trying to fill in the gaps, tell me a story. It was a bit of fun, I suppose, a way of going beyond the walls of the home office in which I spend all my days.

  I’m sure I wouldn’t have tried to take it further, if it hadn’t been for the man from the supermarket.

  A week to the day after the first delivery, he appeared on the doorstep again. This was a little unusual. Not there being another order – Helen considerately books the deliveries into the same time slot every week, so they don’t disrupt my working patterns – but it being the same man. In the several years we’ve been getting our groceries this way, I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered the same person twice, or at least not soon enough that I’ve recognised them from a previous delivery.

  But here this one was again.

  “Morning,” he said, standing there like a scruffy Christmas tree, laden with bags of things to eat or clean or wipe surfaces or bottoms with. “Downstairs, right?”

  I stood aside to let him pass, and saw there were a couple more crates full of bags on the path outside.

  That meant I had a few minutes to think, which I suddenly found I was doing.

  I held the door open while he came up, re-ladened himself, and tramped back downstairs again. By the time he trudged up the stairs once more, I had a plan.