Obsidian: A Decade of Horror Stories by Women

by Tanith Lee

  He was wearing a set of ear plugs, and there was the low buzz of sound. She assumed they were trying to rouse him with a melody. There was no visible response. The laughing eyes that still haunted Anne’s dreams remained closed.

  Anne was both saddened by his plight, and relieved. She could not be entirely mad to have imagined a man that really existed, and Kelly did not seem disappointed by this older incarnation.

  The nurse was still around and might expect some signs of affection, so Anne sat down in the chair, picked up Davey’s hand and held his fingers gently. She promised him a rock CD to replace the classical one when they came again.

  “Well, the rock CD seems to be working.” The older nurse had begun to approve of Anne and Kelly’s belated vigil. “We think he may be coming around.”

  “Oh,” Anne said, uncertain what else to say.

  It was Christmas, and she had just put a new CD wrapped up in snowflake paper on the bedside table. Anne had brought Kelly’s present too, as she was staying at her grandparents over the holiday. Kelly’s present was large and soft, a dark blue fluffy dressing gown wrapped in galloping reindeer. Anne had not told Kelly that Davey might never need it, she had not the heart to, and perhaps, after all, he would.

  “He may not remember everything at once,” the nurse warned.

  So, should she be alarmed if he did not remember her, or alarmed if he did?

  Holding Davey’s hand and stroking the coarse hairs on his wrist, Anne waited on into the early hours; worrying about Davey’s reaction when he woke; worrying about the agency job she had recently started, and might not get to in the morning. She was too worried to sleep easily, but must have dozed.

  A glow on white under dim night-lights was the first thing she was aware of. Then the starched clean hospital sheets smooth against her cheek and the background hum of a working hospital with which she had become familiar. Lastly, she became aware that the hand she was clasping for comfort had tightened around hers. She looked up, startled, into the dark eyes of her dreams.

  “Hi,” croaked Davey.

  There was a faint baffled frown on his craggy face.

  Anne felt guilty, like a child caught picking flowers by the elderly gardener.

  “Hi,” she whispered.

  Her nerve was failing and she would have fled at this point, but the hand around hers was surprisingly strong for a sick man.

  “You’re…?” He thought for a moment. “Anne?”

  By early summer, Anne was becoming used to slipping her finger into Davey’s palm and feeling the reassuring response of his strong hand around hers.

  Slowly rebuilding his strength, and re-growing his ponytail and beard, he was the solid reliable type.

  They were in the Kingsthorpe Cemetery, standing on a quiet hillock of grass staring down at a plain black headstone. Other graves around had been brightened with plastic flowers, flags and windmills, but this was the first time Davey had been back.

  He laid a small bunch of fresh flowers beneath a gold inscription that still echoed his thoughts, Eleanor May Williams, loving and loved mother. Eleanor had been born sixty-six years ago in Northampton and had fallen in love with a soldier while studying in Oxford. They had intended to wed when he returned from tour, only he had not returned. Eleanor had moved away with her bastard son David to get away from lingering prejudices, but she had wanted to be buried in Northampton.

  Heading homewards in the early hours of the morning after the funeral, Davey had reached the Queen Eleanor roundabout at speed on The Duke. He had probably been understandably distracted, and may have missed the change in traffic lights. Or perhaps the tired lorry driver had not seen him in the twilight and chanced an otherwise empty road. Investigations into the accident were held in Davey’s prolonged absence.

  There was nowhere in this life scenario for Davey and Anne to have occurred, but he never said anything. He remembered her as younger, but he remembered Kelly too, and that would not logically fit. Nor did a council flat in a city he had only ever visited once since infancy. This did not stop him being discharged to Anne’s flat as soon as humanly possible. Anne’s single bed became a double mattress on the floor, and not as uncomfortable as that might sound.

  Maybe Davey put the many inconsistencies down to lapses in memory. The hospital had warned him there might be lingering disorientation. He hung on relentlessly to the illusion that Anne had created, forestalling any attempts she made to enlighten him. Anne had no excuses to make if she had been able to think of anywhere to start.

  Having inherited his mother’s large coastal house, Davey’s time was spent calling up old clients to get his bike repair business back on track. He just assumed that his girlfriend, Anne, and her daughter were going home with him. He could see no reason why they would want to stay in a Northampton council flat, and Anne had to admit he had a point there. Discussion consisted of him proudly showing Anne pictures of his bikes and prized Gibson guitar. He told Kelly how close the sea was, and the best places to walk a dog. Kelly was over the moon. They would take the train.

  As they made their way back through the trees towards the main gate, Anne walked slowly by his side in the dappled sunlight. He was still struggling on the crutches, but she knew better than to highlight his weakness with a suggestion that he should sit down for a moment on one of the memorial benches.

  “We still have time to go for a drink before leaving,” Anne said.

  “Where, The King Billy?”

  There was an edge to his voice.

  “Well,” Anne said uneasily, “we could go down to the King Billy when we get off the bus, and then take a taxi down to the station...” Her voice trailed off and she held her breath.

  “Did it really happen like that?” he asked at last. “It can’t have, but I don’t see any other way it could have.”

  “I know what you mean,” Anne said, “but I do have a theory.”

  “I’m intrigued. I don’t even have that, and I’ve been trying to work it out for weeks.”

  “When you were in hospital,” Anne said, “one of the nurses let slip that they’d had you on a new drug they were trialling. The intention was to keep your brain active and encourage recovery. I think the drug did more than that. What do you remember?”

  He shuffled awkwardly, turned toward her and balanced his arms across his crutches.

  “I remember the dark despair that afternoon, grief for my mother, but also for all those frustrated years. As a young man I tried to create the family I’d missed out on. Perhaps my expectations were too high, my wife moved away with my sons and I lost contact. When Mum became ill there was no chance to try again, she was the only family I had and needed me. Her death was inevitable and a relief in many ways, but my life was suddenly very empty. Then there was a big bang, a young girl called Eleanor, a beautiful woman, Anne, and her daughter, Kelly. Dreamlike and very real, as most dreams are when you’re in them, I suppose. It was like I had known you always. Except that I couldn’t touch all the sweet things I saw.” He ran his fingers gently across Anne’s cheek. “You think I was having an out-of-body experience?”

  Anne nodded. “You saw people as they saw themselves. People talk to each other unaware of how old they have become. Inside, none of us are a day over twenty. The anorexic barmaid still saw herself as fat even when she had become painfully thin. Why I saw you when others couldn’t, I don’t know.

  “Then the trial ended and they took you off the drug.”

  Davey frowned. “As the dream began to fade, I tried desperately to hang on to it. I didn’t want to come back to a miserable pain-filled reality. I thought I was losing the fight. Then I heard the music...”

  He leaned towards her, a battle-scarred old warrior trying to find a meaning to life.

  “Do you think we should mention these curious side effects?” Anne said.

  “Who’d believe us?”

  Reassured, Anne became lost in the handsome dark eyes, the moment…

  “Hey!” Ke
lly’s voice brought them back to reality. “No time for snogging, we’ve got a train to catch.”

  Paul’s Mother

  Lisa Tuttle

  Paul’s mother never liked me. I’d been judged and found lacking before we met, condemned by the fact that I was neither a church-goer nor Scottish. Because he loved us both, Paul – the apple of her eye, her only child – thought it was only a matter of time before she came to terms with the fact of our marriage, and learned to accept and maybe even love me, but he had no idea what a monster she really was.

  At first, she didn’t seem so terrible. Mrs. Ione McGregor struck me as an austere and chilly little person, intimidating and unsympathetic, but as she was Paul’s mother I tried to make allowances, although she made none for me. I could scarcely move or open my mouth without seeing a flicker of distaste on her unsmiling face, and she applied the most rigid personal standards to absolutely everything. I don’t think that I ever managed to express an acceptable opinion on anything, including the weather.

  Yet Paul encouraged me to believe I could win her over, if I only kept trying. My self-confidence took a battering every time we met, but as long as we lived in London I only had to cope with her icy disapproval in person once or twice a year. Then Paul was posted to Herriot-Watt, we bought a house on the outskirts of Edinburgh, and I got a job with the council, in the social services department. I liked everything about our new life except one thing: Paul’s mother lived only ninety minutes away by car, and more frequent visits were mandatory.

  Sympathetic as Paul tried to be, he really didn’t understand why I found his mother’s company so stressful. Ione was a clever enemy. She was never openly insulting or unkind; her cruelty was subtle and almost invisible, operating through a range of techniques designed to wear me down. It would have seemed like paranoia or pathetic whining if I had pointed out every instance to Paul, and, besides, I didn’t want to force him to take sides, but his blindness, or indifference, to what was happening made me wonder. Maybe she had not been the paragon of maternal love he claimed, and he’d only survived her constant needling by developing a very thick skin.

  I wanted to let her comments bounce off me, too, but the more I pretended not to notice, the more dull and stupid I felt myself become. One day I couldn’t take it anymore, and fought back, countering her every criticism with a cleverly barbed retort.

  She pretended to be deeply wounded. Paul was horrified, and we had the worst row of our marriage afterwards. Worse than the quarrel (which we made up as soon as we got home) was the gleam of malicious satisfaction I’d seen in Ione’s eyes at making me do what she wanted. Nothing I could say could wound her; all I could do was damage my marriage.

  At last Paul realized how difficult I found my encounters with his mother, and he started going to see her on his own. This created a new source of stress, though, as he always came home from those visits in a strange mood, and I knew she had managed to pour poison in his ear. Sometimes he was prickly and unsettled, finding fault with everything; at other times he stared at me in a cold, distant way, as if trying to remember what he used to like about me. Fortunately, away from her, in our own home, those moments of alienation never lasted long.

  And then I got pregnant.

  When we broke the news to Paul’s mother she was visibly startled, and then I saw an expression I’d never seen on her face before, a smile of pure, unadulterated happiness.

  “Why, I thought you weren’t... I thought you’d never... Oh, you clever girl!” she exclaimed and, to my astonishment, hugged me. This was the woman who’d previously found me too distasteful to touch. It was a quick embrace, over almost before I realized what had happened, but still. Finally, I had managed to please my impossibly demanding mother-in-law.

  From then on she treated me gently and with respect. Unlike Paul, I could see there had been no fundamental shift in her feelings; she was simply playing a part. There was no honesty, so could be no genuine closeness in our relationship, but the outward semblance of friendship was good enough, I thought. I could stop trying so hard. Now that I was going to bear her son’s child, she had an investment in our marriage. Unless she was prepared to risk losing contact with her only shot at immortality, we both knew she could no longer try to turn Paul against me.

  After Leah was born (full name: Leah Ione McGregor) Paul’s mother announced she was moving to Edinburgh to help out.

  The very idea of leaving my beautiful baby alone with that woman made me sick with anxiety. When Paul became aware of my feelings we teetered on the brink of an apocalyptic row, and only the easy tears that came with my still-fragile post-partum state saved the day. He concluded I was not entirely rational, but that wasn’t my fault. Motherhood changed you. Very gently, he reminded me that she had raised him, and he had turned out all right – didn’t I agree? Surely I didn’t think Leah would be better off looked after by strangers, in a nursery or a workplace crèche?

  I had no rational, acceptable answer, no way of justifying my terror; all I could do was delay returning to work and prevaricate about my reasons. When I did go back, it was part-time, at a lower grade, in a job-share, the best I could do to minimize the number of hours Leah would spend alone with her grandmother.

  Nothing terrible happened, nothing bad at all. I made a point of popping in sometimes, unannounced and unexpected, but never found anything to raise even the smallest alarm. Leah was safe. Ione knew what she was doing. But while she had her own, decades-old experience to call on, for once she did not insist on doing things her way. She agreed to stick to my schedules and follow my instructions, even when they included dietary restrictions she had earlier sniffed at as “faddy.” As Leah continued to thrive, I became less anxious. Maybe I had been unfair to Paul’s mother. She still kept me at arm’s length, but was easily, openly affectionate with her grandchild, cooing and kissing and cuddling her as much as anyone could wish. Leah was loved, Leah was happy, and it was clear to me that Paul could not have grown up into such a wonderful man if his mother had not known how to be kind and nurturing. Maybe it was my problem, not Ione’s fault, that I still could not feel comfortable with her.

  So I learned to discount my instincts and accepted as much help as Ione would give. Leah started school, and I went back to working forty hours a week. Life was sometimes hectic, but it was good; I thought the same pattern would continue all through our daughter’s childhood and beyond.

  We were completely unprepared when Paul got the phone call from his mother’s next-door neighbour telling him she really didn’t think Mrs. McGregor was fit to live on her own any longer. She didn’t look after herself properly; she was always locking herself out of her house, and once she’d flooded the place, having left the bath filling while she walked down to the shop in her dressing-gown and slippers, without her purse, for no reason she could explain. I had noticed that Ione was no longer always so perfectly attired – her clothes sometimes had food-stains on them, or appeared to have been worn for several days – and that she was increasingly forgetful, but I hadn’t connected the two in the way that perhaps I should have. When we questioned Leah, the evidence of dementia became ever more obvious. She told us about keys dropped into a post-box, letters stored in the freezer, new clothes thrown out with the rubbish, and two electric kettles destroyed by being put on the gas ring, as well as many small tasks she’d become responsible for performing for her grateful, scatter-brained Nana.

  But why hadn’t she told us before? She was almost ten years old, and a bright, observant, responsible girl who should have realized this was wrong. Leah began to cry, finally confessing that Nana had made her promise not to tell. She said if anyone else knew, she’d be sent far, far away and locked up in an institution until she died.

  “You won’t send her away, will you?” Leah finished anxiously. “Please don’t let them lock her up! I can look after her!”

  “Sweetheart,” said Paul gently, “You can’t. You’re only a little girl, and you have to go to school.
You’ve been wonderful, but Nana needs more help than you can give.”

  Her eyes widened. “You are going to lock her up! She was right – I shouldn’t have said!”

  “And if you hadn’t told, and she’d burned her house down with herself in it, how would you feel then? Listen, darling, your Nana was quite, quite wrong to tell you to keep this secret. You should always tell us about anything that worries you, so we can help.”

  “How can you help?”

  Paul looked at me. He didn’t have to say anything. Although my heart sank at the thought of inviting my old enemy into our home, I told myself not to be selfish. Even though I couldn’t love her the way Paul and Leah did, I could at least act like I did. I put on a brave smile and turned to Leah and said, “What would you think about having your Nana come to live here, with us?”

  Leah’s small, round face was surprised, then glowed with satisfaction.

  As I had expected, Ione resisted the idea of moving anywhere, and was icily furious with both her interfering neighbour and with me for daring to suggest she couldn’t manage perfectly well as she had always done, but after a few weeks during which I kept my daughter well away from her, she weakened. I felt bad, a little guilty, for using Leah to clinch the argument, but obviously a child too young to be left on her own should not left in charge of an adult with dementia. Maybe Ione realised, in a moment of lonely lucidity, that she was only delaying the inevitable. At any rate, the next time I asked – diplomatically phrasing the invitation as a temporary stage “while you decide what you want to do.” She sighed and said, “You’re right. It is time for me to move on.”

  Older people were not my specialty; in my professional life I usually worked with families, single mothers, younger people, but I had heard stories about the effect that a move could have on someone with dementia, and knew Ione might go quickly downhill after she had settled in with us. But nothing could have prepared me for what happened.