Kilworth - Mammoth Books presents Monsters in Our Midst: Three Stories by Michael Marshall Smith, Gary Kilworth and John Langan

Constable & Robinson Ltd

5556 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 authors 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

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.

Theres 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 dont realise straight away that youve been given the wrong shopping. You dont 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 familys life. You cant 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...

H ALFWAY 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 bags 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, its always me who unpacks the grocery shopping when its delivered: Helens 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 whats 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 Ive not personally specifi ed the order, however, its contents are seldom much of a surprise. Theres an established pattern. We have cats, so therell be two large bags of litter its 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 dont mind much as we use the bags for clearing out the cats litter tray, and Id rather have spares on hand than risk running out.

Then theres 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, thats 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 Helens idea of similarity of goods differs somewhat from the supermarkets. Otherwise, you could set your watch by our shopping, if youll pardon the mixed metaphor and this continuity of content is why Id turned to Helen when I was halfway through the second red bag. Yes, thered 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 childrens 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.