Dark Cities Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dark Cities

  INTRODUCTION

  by Christopher Golden

  THE DOGS

  by Scott Smith

  IN STONE

  by Tim Lebbon

  THE WAY SHE IS WITH STRANGERS

  by Helen Marshall

  WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS

  by M.R. Carey

  GOOD NIGHT, PRISON KINGS

  by Cherie Priest

  DEAR DIARY

  by Scott Sigler

  WHAT I’VE ALWAYS DONE

  by Amber Benson

  GRIT

  by Jonathan Maberry

  DARK HILL RUN

  by Kasey Lansdale & Joe R. Lansdale

  HAPPY FOREVER

  by Simon R. Green

  THE SOCIETY OF THE MONSTERHOOD

  by Paul Tremblay

  THE MAW

  by Nathan Ballingrud

  FIELD TRIP

  by Tananarive Due

  THE REVELERS

  by Christopher Golden

  THE STILLNESS

  by Ramsey Campbell

  SANCTUARY

  by Kealan Patrick Burke

  MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

  by Sherrilyn Kenyon

  GRAFFITI OF THE LOST AND DYING PLACES

  by Seanan McGuire

  THE CRACK

  by Nick Cutter

  About the contributors

  Also Available From Titan Books

  Edited by CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

  TITAN BOOKS

  DARK CITIES

  Hardback edition ISBN: 9781785655791

  US paperback edition ISBN: 9781785652660

  UK paperback edition ISBN: 9781785655807

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781785652677

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First edition: May 2017

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  INTRODUCTION Copyright © 2017 by Christopher Golden

  THE DOGS Copyright © 2017 by Scott Smith

  IN STONE Copyright © 2017 by Tim Lebbon

  THE WAY SHE IS WITH STRANGERS Copyright © 2017 by Helen Marshall

  WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS Copyright © 2017 by M.R. Carey

  GOOD NIGHT, PRISON KINGS Copyright © 2017 by Cherie Priest

  DEAR DIARY Copyright © 2017 by Scott Sigler

  WHAT I’VE ALWAYS DONE Copyright © 2017 by Amber Benson

  GRIT Copyright © 2017 by Jonathan Maberry

  DARK HILL RUN Copyright © 2017 by Kasey Lansdale & Joe R. Lansdale

  HAPPY FOREVER Copyright © 2017 by Simon R. Green

  THE SOCIETY OF THE MONSTERHOOD Copyright © 2017 by Paul Tremblay

  THE MAW Copyright © 2017 by Nathan Ballingrud

  FIELD TRIP Copyright © 2017 by Tananarive Due

  THE REVELERS Copyright © 2017 by Christopher Golden

  THE STILLNESS Copyright © 2017 by Ramsey Campbell

  SANCTUARY Copyright © 2017 by Kealan Patrick Burke

  MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH Copyright © 2017 by Sherrilyn Kenyon

  GRAFFITI OF THE LOST AND DYING PLACES Copyright © 2017 by Seanan McGuire

  THE CRACK Copyright © 2017 by Nick Cutter

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  DARK CITIES

  An Introduction by

  CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

  In the opening years of the 1990s, I had an office on the 39th floor of the building at 1515 Broadway in Manhattan. My office window overlooked Times Square. On the wall just behind my computer I tacked a small piece of paper bearing a quote from the novel Dead Lines by horror legends John Skipp and Craig Spector.

  New York is the City that eats its young,

  with high-rise teeth and pavement tongue.

  I came.

  I saw.

  I was digested.

  I loved working in Manhattan, but at twenty-two, I didn’t have the courage to live there. It’s one of the major regrets of my life and sometimes I wonder just what the hell I was afraid of. (Sure, part of it was the staggering cost of living in the city, but I know it wasn’t just that. The city intimidated me.) Still, I managed to do my share of exploring, have my share of late nights and subway rides and wandering into the wrong streets, the strange little blocks far downtown that don’t follow the strict order of their uptown counterparts.

  Since those years, I’ve wandered other cities and gotten lost in cobblestoned labyrinths that look as if they haven’t changed in centuries, and I’ve messed up directions and found myself on a dead-end street bookended by boarded-up crack dens in the most dangerous neighborhood in the city. There are so many cities I love, from Boston to Vienna, London to New York, L.A. to Paris. But just because I love them, that doesn’t mean they don’t make me a little nervous sometimes.

  On a recent conference panel, a half dozen writers discussed where they felt more afraid, in the city or in rural areas. (Strangely, the suburbs never came up, though so much of modern horror has taken place in small towns.) While I understood the fear of walking in the forest alone—listening for the wolves or mountain lions that must be following your every step—I confessed that I find more potential terror in the thought of walking the streets and alleys of a large city in the small hours of the morning, when everyone with good intentions is either fast asleep or working third shift. The wolves that hunt people on the streets of some dark city are the ones that haunt me, even if those wolves are only shadows themselves.

  As trend-waves crash onto the shores of publishing— zombies, dystopian fiction, contagion—I’ve turned more and more toward the kinds of horror stories I’ve always loved best, intimate and personal, rooted in love or loneliness or abandonment. I also gravitate toward folklore, both ancient and modern. When I start thinking along such lines, searching for great stories to read on whatever subject has me fired up at the moment, my desire for such stories leads to a simple conclusion: don’t just seek out such stories, make them happen.

  When I reached out to the extraordinary list of authors you will find within—from massive New York Times bestsellers to some of the most acclaimed literary writers in the genre—the response was overwhelming. These writers share my fears and are inspired by their own. In the following pages, each will explore the horrors they’ve found in the city’s shadows, whether those shadows be in the lonely corners of an uncaring city or inside their own hearts.

  Come, now. Turn the page. Enter the darkest of cities.

  THE DOGS

  by

  SCOTT SMITH

  Her real name wasn’t Rose—that was just what she used when she met guys on Craigslist: Rose or Rosa or Rosemary or even Rosaline (but mostly Rose). She’d always liked names that came from flowers. When she was six, she’d had a set of dolls, four of them, dressed like little cowgirls, and she’d named them Rose, Daisy, Petunia, and Tulip. Rose had been her favorite, t
hough, the one she’d slept with every night.

  There was a way you could phrase your post on Craigslist so it was clear what you wanted—or what you were offering— without being too explicit. Rose’s go-to headline was: “Gorgeous Young Girl Searching For Generous Older Gent.” She didn’t think of herself as a prostitute because she never took money from the men. Or only one time, with that Egyptian guy, and then just because it would’ve felt awkward to refuse it—the wad of bills he’d slid into her jacket pocket as they kissed goodbye at the door. It was a thick wad, but mostly tens and fives (even a couple of singles), so it seemed like it ought to have been more than it actually turned out to be. Rose ended up feeling disappointed when she finally had a chance to count it, in a bathroom stall at Penn Station, waiting to board the 8:37 AM train back to her mother’s house. She hadn’t eaten, and she was coming down from whatever the pink pills were that she and the Egyptian had taken together, so her hands were shaking, and she kept dropping the bills onto the bathroom’s dirty floor, kept dropping them and picking them up, and each time she did this she lost count and needed to start all over again. She never managed to arrive at a consistent number—it was one hundred and twelve dollars, or maybe one hundred and seventeen—a weird number either way, and small enough to make Rose feel cheap and whorish rather than classy like she’d hoped.

  Money was never the point. It was the sense of adventure, the feeling of power, and the thrill of the places where the men took her, places Rose never would’ve been able to go on her own—expensive restaurants, clubs, and hotels… even their own apartments sometimes. Rose spent a night in a penthouse once, overlooking the East River, with a Christmas tree on the terrace. The guy she was with turned on the tree’s little white lights for her. Rose wanted to take a photo with her phone, but the guy wouldn’t let her. He was worried she’d post the picture online somewhere, and that his wife might see it. The wife was in Anguilla with the children, who were out of school for the holidays.

  Rose lived at her mother’s house, in New Jersey, an hour’s train ride west of Penn Station. She had a room in the basement. This wasn’t as depressing as it might sound. Rose had her own shower and toilet down there, her own entrance; the only reason she ever needed to venture upstairs was if she wanted to use the kitchen—which she didn’t, mostly. She had a mini-fridge beside her bed, and a hot plate she never used, and there was a pizza place a short walk down the road, so who needed a kitchen? Rose was nineteen, but believed she looked older. She’d bought a fake Ohio driver’s license online two years ago; it listed her age as twenty-three, and no bouncer or bartender had ever questioned it. Rose had gotten her GED the previous summer, and then had taken a few classes in dental hygiene before dropping out (she told anyone who asked that she planned to go back, but she didn’t really believe it). Now she worked part-time at a beauty salon in downtown Dunellen, massaging shampoo into the scalps of elderly women and sweeping up the cut hair. On the first of every month, she paid her mother seventy-five dollars cash for the room in the basement (her mother called this “a symbolic gesture”).

  Her mother didn’t know about her Craigslist dates. Rose would tell her she was going to spend the night in the city with friends—with Holly or Carrie—and this always covered things. Her mother didn’t know that Holly had moved with her boyfriend to Buffalo, or that Carrie had gotten mono and then hepatitis and then some sort of intestinal disorder, and now she was living in Alabama with a Pentecostal aunt and uncle, who were trying to cure her with prayer (so Rose didn’t really have anyone left in her life you could properly call a friend).

  Enough people had told Rose she was pretty in the past decade that she’d come to believe it, too. She was self-conscious about her teeth (she had a slight overbite; if she wasn’t careful, it could make her lisp), and she wished her hair had more body to it, and always in the back of her mind was the comment a boy had made in tenth grade (that she had a rabbity, white-trash aura about her), but generally Rose could keep all of this at bay, and feel almost beautiful—especially at night, especially if she’d been drinking. Long blond hair, blue eyes, skinny hips, softball-sized breasts: sometimes on Craigslist she’d describe herself as “a young Britney,” and no one she’d met had ever challenged her on this.

  * * *

  He said his name was Patrick, but he didn’t seem like a Patrick to Rose. In Rose’s mind, “Patrick” implied an Irish look—tall and fair-haired and blue-eyed, rather than short and dark and fidgety, the latter quality so pronounced in this case that Rose thought maybe he’d fortified himself for the date with a bump or two of coke. She didn’t care what his real name was. Most of the men she met were lying about one thing or another, just like her—names were the least of it. He took her to dinner at a sushi place in the Meat Packing district, and then escorted her across the street to a bar where it was too loud to talk. They ended up making out for five minutes in the little hallway that led to the bathrooms, and when she refused to follow him into the men’s room, Patrick told her he wanted to take her home.

  He’d said he was thirty, but Rose guessed he must be closer to forty, if not already safely across the line. She thought he probably wore glasses in his normal life, because his eyes had a blurred, watery look when he talked to her, as if he couldn’t quite bring her into focus. His face was round, and slightly flushed, like the baby angels she’d seen in old paintings. Rose was certain she’d known the name for these creatures once, but she couldn’t remember it now—sometimes this would happen to her. Right after they’d sat down for dinner, he’d announced that he was a lawyer, and Rose had no reason to doubt him, but if he was saying it merely to impress her, he was aiming in the wrong direction.

  He kissed her again in the cab uptown, his mouth tasting of sushi and sake, and then he cupped her breasts in his hands, first the right, then the left, giving each a gentle squeeze: Rose had a brief memory of her mother, in the produce section at Safeway, testing oranges for ripeness. She was half-splayed across Patrick’s lap, and she could feel his erection through his pants—the bulk and heat of it. When she pressed down with her leg, Patrick groaned, then bit her ear.

  His apartment was on the Upper West Side, somewhere beyond Lincoln Center, but before the Apple Store, a prewar building, with no doorman. The elevator was tiny, almost phone booth size—they rode it to the seventh floor—and then there was a long, dimly lit hallway, a door with three separate locks. The door was dark gray, and had two black numbers painted at eye level: 78. Patrick looked nervous suddenly. He undid the first lock, dropped his keys, undid the second lock, dropped the keys again. Rose was accustomed to this by now, the terror some men appeared to feel when there was no longer any question of what was about to happen. It always seemed odd to her, since this was precisely the moment when she began to feel most calm: no one needed to think anymore, they were in the chute, all of the necessary decisions had already been made, and now gravity could take command. Other people’s anxiety had a way of unsettling Rose—as if it were contagious—and she felt an urge to soothe Patrick. She lifted her hand to caress the nape of his neck; she was close enough to feel that buzzy sensation another person’s skin can radiate an instant before you touch it, when the barking began. Rose jumped at the sound, then laughed, and the final lock was undone, and the door was swinging open, and there they were: three dogs, one big and black and shaggy, one small and white and fluffy, and the last of them lean and brown with a white patch over its eye, like the hero in a children’s picture book.

  Rose managed only a brief impression of the apartment. It had a dorm room feel: linoleum on the floor, a glimpse of what appeared to be a plastic lawn chair through the archway to the darkened living room. There was a flurry of panting and licking from the dogs, along with much wagging of tails, and some leaping and yapping by the fluffy white one, and then Patrick was leading Rose across the little entranceway, kicking off his shoes, dragging his shirt over his head, pulling her down the hall to the bedroom. He pushed her onto t
he bed, and started to undo his belt, while all three dogs watched from the doorway. The dogs stayed there while she and Patrick fucked; every time Rose glanced in their direction, she saw them staring. Rose was too drunk to enjoy the sex—it felt hazy and faraway, and the bed kept threatening to start spinning—but none of this was Patrick’s fault. He was surprisingly gentlemanly in his efforts; he seemed to want her pleasure almost as much as he desired his own, and Rose was grateful for this—grateful, too, for the glass of water he fetched afterward, grateful for what felt to her like clean sheets, and grateful most of all that Patrick showed no appetite for post-coital conversation. Sometimes guys wanted to talk. In Rose’s experience, it was never a good idea.

  The last thing Patrick said to her was the dogs’ names.

  Jack was the taut, brown, intelligent-looking fellow with the patch over his eye—a mix of whippet and Lab.

  Zeus was the big, black, shaggy one… a Bernese mountain dog.

  Millie was the tiny, fluffy, white one: a Bichon Frise, which Patrick assured Rose meant French bitch.

  “For real?” Rose asked.

  Patrick laughed, and something about the sound jarred loose the word she’d been searching for earlier. It just popped into her mind—sometimes that could happen, too.

  Cherub.

  A moment later, with the lights still on, they were both asleep.

  * * *

  “The most difficult part is right here: believing this is happening. If you can manage that, you can manage everything.”

  Rose was still half-asleep when she heard the voice—a male voice, calmer than Patrick’s, deep and slow. There was an air of authority to the words, of command; Rose sensed it was the slowness that accounted for this quality (one further tap of the brakes, and the voice would’ve slipped into a drawl). She opened her eyes. Patrick wasn’t in the room—she could hear the shower running. Jack, the tan dog with the eye patch, was sitting beside the bed, staring at her, and she knew without a moment’s doubt that it was his voice she was hearing.