Feelings of Fear

by Graham Masterton

  She didn’t reply, but very, very slowly closed her eyes.

  “Sarah, talk to me. Don’t go to sleep. I have to tell you all about this dream.”

  Her eyes remained closed. The color gradually began to seep out of her cheeks. Her lips were almost turquoise.

  “Sarah – listen to me – Sarah!”

  He tried to take hold of her shoulder to shake her, but his hand seized nothing but blanket. He sat up, shocked, and it was then that he realized that only her head was lying next to him. Her severed neck was encrusted with dried blood and part of her windpipe was protruding on to the sheet.

  He made an awful moaning noise and half-jumped, half-fell out of the bed, tangling his feet in the sheets. His head struck the edge of his bedside table and his plastic water-jug dropped on to the floor, along with his book and his chocolates and his wristwatch.

  A nurse came hurrying over. “Martin! Martin, what’s the matter?”

  She helped him up. He tilted on to his feet, and twisted around to stare at the bed. Sarah’s head had vanished, and he knew that it hadn’t really been there at all. It had been nothing more than a nightmare. He sat down on the side of the bed, feeling shocked and bruised. The trouble was, it was worse being awake. Sarah was dead and he was alone, and he could never wake up from that, ever.

  * * *

  Back at the flat, with the blinds and the curtains drawn, he sat at the kitchen table and smoothed out the page from the Evening Standard that Jenny had given him. He had read the advertisement for The Sympathy Society again and again, and every time he read it he had been left with an odd feeling of unease. “Unlike all other counselors, we can offer you what you’re really looking for.” How did they know what he was looking for? How did they know what anybody was looking for?

  He ate another spoonful of cold spaghetti out of the can. That was all he had eaten since he came out of hospital. He didn’t have to cook it, he barely had to chew it, and it kept him alive. It seemed absurd, to keep yourself alive when you wanted so much to die, but he didn’t want to die a lingering death, through starvation and dehydration; and there was always a chance that somebody would find you, and resuscitate you, and feed you with drips and tubes. He wanted to die instantly, the way that Sarah had died.

  After almost an hour, he picked up the phone and dialed the number in Buckinghamshire. It rang for a long time, with an echoing, old-fashioned ringing tone. Eventually, it was picked up. There was a moment’s breathy pause, and then a clear voice said, “Miller.”

  “I’m sorry. I think I must have the wrong number. I wanted The Sympathy Society.”

  “You’ve reached The Sympathy Society. How can I help you?”

  “I’ve, er – I saw your ad in the Standard.”

  “I see. And may I ask if you have recently been bereaved?”

  “About six weeks ago. I lost my partner. She—” He found that he couldn’t get the words out.

  Mr Miller waited for a while, and then he asked, with extreme delicacy, “Was it sudden, may I ask? Or an illness?”

  “Sudden. It was very sudden. An accident, while she was on holiday.”

  “I see. Well, that means that you’re very suitable for Sympathy Society counseling. We don’t counsel for illness.”

  “I’ve had some psychiatric counseling on the NHS.”

  “And?”

  “It hasn’t made me feel any better, to tell you the truth.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me. Psychiatrists, on the whole, have a very conventional view of what it is to be ‘better.’”

  “I don’t quite understand what you mean.”

  “Well, if you’re interested in us, why don’t you come to see us? It never did anybody any harm to talk.”

  “How much do you charge?”

  “Financially, nothing.”

  “You mean there are no fees at all?”

  “Let me put it this way. I do expect some output from all of the people we help. I’ll explain it you when you come to see us.”

  “You sound pretty confident that I will.”

  “We word our advertisement very carefully. It appeals only to those who we can genuinely help.”

  It started to rain again. Martin couldn’t see it through the blind, but he could hear the castanet-clatter of water on the concrete outside.

  “Tell me how to reach you,” he said.

  The taxi dropped him off by a sagging green-painted gate, at the end of a driveway that was made almost impassable to motor vehicles by its overgrown laurel-bushes. His feet crunched up the wet pea-shingle until eventually a redbrick Victorian house came into view. Its windows were black and empty, and one of its side-walls was streaked green with lichen. Three enormous ravens were strutting on the lawn, but they flapped away when they saw him coming, and settled on the roof instead, like three bad omens.

  Martin went to the front door and rang the bell. He waited for two or three minutes but nobody answered, so he rang it again. He couldn’t hear it ringing anywhere in the house. A corroded brass knocker hung in the center of the door, with the face of a hooded monk. He banged it twice, and waited some more.

  At last the door opened. Martin was confronted by a white-faced young woman with her hair twisted on top of her head in a messy but elaborate bun. She wore a simple gray smock and grubby white socks.

  “You must be Martin,” she said. She held out her hand. “I’m Sylvia.”

  “Hello, Sylvia. I wasn’t sure I’d come to the right house.”

  “Oh, you have, Martin. Believe me, you have. Come inside.”

  Martin followed her into a huge gloomy hallway that smelled of frying onions and lavender floor-polish. On the right-hand side of the hallway, a wide staircase ran up to a galleried landing, where there was a high stained-glass window in ambers and browns and muted blues. It depicted two hooded monks in prayer and a third figure in a thick coat that looked as if it were made of dead stoats and weasels and water-rats, all sewn together, their mouths open, their legs lolling. This figure had its back turned, so that it was impossible to see who it was meant to be.

  Sylvia led Martin along the hallway until they reached a large sitting-room at the back of the house. It was wallpapered and furnished in brown, with two dull landscapes on the walls. Here sat three others – two men and a woman. They turned around as Martin came in, and one of them, a silver-haired man in a baggy brown cardigan, stood up and held out his hand. The other man remained where he was, black-haired, with deep black rings under his eyes, hunched in his big worn-out armchair. The woman was standing by the window with a cup of milky coffee in her hand. She was so thin that she was almost transparent.

  “Geoffrey,” said the silver-haired man, shaking Martin’s hand. “But you can call me Sticky, my dear Mary always did. Ardent stamp-collector, that’s why.”

  “Sticky – the stamp-collector who came unhinged,” put in the black-haired man, in a West Country accent.

  Sticky gave Martin a tight little smile. “This is Terence. Sometimes Terence is extremely cordial but most of the time Terence is extremely offensive. Still, we’ve learned to take him as he comes.”

  “What he means is, they’ve learned to keep their gobs shut,” said Terence.

  Sticky ignored him. “Over here – this is Theresa. She used to be a very fine singer, you know. Cheltenham Ladies’ Chorus.”

  Theresa gave Martin an almost imperceptible nod of her head. “It’s a pity,” said Sticky. “She hasn’t sung a single note since she lost her family.”

  Terence said, “Where’s the pity in that? I haven’t plowed a single furrow and you haven’t stuck in a single stamp, and Sylvia hasn’t strung together a single necklace. There has to be a reason for doing things, doesn’t there? A reason. And none of us here has a single reason for breathing, let alone singing.”

  “Come on, Terence,” Sticky chided him. “You know we do. You know what we’re here for, all of us.”

  At that moment another door opened on the opposite side
of the sitting-room, and a tall man entered, leaning on a walking-stick. He was very thin, almost emaciated, with steel-gray hair scraped back from his forehead, and a nose as sharp as an ax. His eyes were so pale that they looked as if all of the color had been leached out of them by experience and pain. A triangular scar ran across his left cheek and disappeared into his hairline.

  He wore a black double-breasted suit with unfashionably flappy lapels. As he walked into the room, Martin had the impression that beneath his clothes, his body was all broken and dislocated. It was the way he balanced and swiveled as he made his way across the carpet.

  “Martin,” he said, in a voice like glasspaper. “You’ll forgive me for not shaking hands.”

  “Mr Miller,” said Martin.

  “Tybalt, please. Ridiculously affected name, I know; but my father was an English teacher at a very pretentious boys’ primary.”

  He eased himself into one of the armchairs and propped his stick between his knees. “You must tell us who you have lost, Martin; and how. But before you do, your fellow-sufferers here will tell you why they sought the help of The Sympathy Society. Sticky – why don’t you start?”

  “Silly thing, really,” said Sticky, as if he were talking about nothing more traumatic than allowing himself to be bowled lbw in a local cricket match. “I was looking after my grandson for the day. Beautiful little chap. Blond hair. Sturdy little legs. We were going to go down to the beach and look for crabs. I went to get the car out of the garage, and I didn’t realize that I’d left the front door open. Little chap followed me, you see. I reversed out of the garage and he was so small that I didn’t see him standing behind me. I ran over him. Slowly. And stopped, with the wheel resting on his stomach.”

  He paused for a moment and took out a clean, neatly pressed handkerchief. “He was lying on the concrete looking up at me. There was blood coming out of his ears but he was still alive. I’ll never forget the expression on his face as long as I live. He was so bewildered, as if he couldn’t understand why this had happened to him. I moved the car off him, but that might have been the wrong thing to do. He died almost at once.

  He smiled, but tears were filling his eyes. “Of course, that was the end of everything. My marriage; my family. Do you think my daughter could ever look me in the eye again? I thought of killing myself by putting a plastic bag over my head. I nearly succeeded, but a friend of mine stopped me just in time. And I was glad. Suffocating like that – that was the coward’s way out.”

  “Sylvia?” said Tybalt.

  Sylvia stared at the floor and spoke in a hurried monotone. “My husband Ron was all I ever wanted in the whole world. He was loving and kind and generous and he was always bringing me flowers. He was a firefighter. About nine weeks ago he went out on a shout in Bromley. Paint factory on fire. He was the first in, as usual. His nickname was Bonkers because he was always rushing into things without thinking.

  “He kicked open a door just as a tank of paint-stripping gel blew up. He was covered in it, from head to foot. The coroner said it had the same effect as napalm. It stuck to him, and it cremated him alive. He was screaming and screaming and trying to get it off him, but there was nothing that any of his mates could do. Two of them had to take early retirement with post-traumatic stress disorder. And me? I missed Ron so much that it was like a physical pain. I wandered around like a zombie for the first few weeks. I walked in front of buses, hoping that they wouldn’t stop. I thought of pills. I bought two hundred paracetamol from different chemists. But then I thought, no. That’s not the way. That’s when I saw the ad for The Sympathy Society. And rang. And here I am.”

  “Your turn, Terence,” said Tybalt.

  Terence didn’t say anything at first, but cracked his knuckles one by one. Theresa, at the window, winced with exaggerated sensitivity at every crack.

  “Come on Terence,” Tybalt coaxed him. “Martin needs to know what happened to you.”

  “Farming accident,” said Terence, at last. “There’s a kind of plow called a disk plow. It’s got steel disks instead of shares. Ours got jammed last year, and my sister tried to fix it. It decided to unjam itself when she was right underneath. Dragged her halfway through it. She called for help for two hours before she died. I was plowing in the next field and I couldn’t hear her. The doctor said he’d never seen anybody suffer such terrible injuries and stay alive for so long. Half her face was torn off and one of her legs was twisted around backward, so that the foot was pointing the other way.

  “After the funeral I went home and I took out my shotgun. I sat in the parlor for nearly an hour with the barrel in my mouth. But I think I knew all the time that I wasn’t going to do it.”

  There was another long pause and it became obvious that Terence wasn’t going to say any more than that. “Theresa?” said Tybalt.

  Theresa gave a wan smile. Without turning away from the window, she said, “It’s extraordinary how your life can be heaven one second and hell the next. Just like that, without any warning at all. We were on holiday in Cornwall, my husband Tom and I and our daughter Emma. It was a beautiful, beautiful day. The sun was shining. The breeze was blowing off the sea. We went for a walk on the cliffs. Tom and I were holding hands and Emma was running all around us. Then suddenly she was gone. Vanished. We were frantic. We thought she’d fallen over the cliff, and we searched and searched but there was no sign of her anywhere. Not on the rocks. Not on the beach. It was just as if she’d vaporized; as if she’d never existed.

  “I can’t describe the panic I felt. Tom called the police and the coastguard, and they searched, too.

  They had tracker dogs out, helicopters, everything. I overheard them saying things like, ‘She’ll probably be back on the five o’clock tide, three miles down the coast.’ Tom was wonderful. He kept telling me that she was probably playing some silly game, and that she’d soon turn up, teasing us for being so worried.

  “But she wasn’t playing some silly game, and she didn’t turn up. We did an appeal on television. You might even remember it. Somebody said they had seen her in Fowey, with a strange man in a raincoat. But that was all a mistake.

  “A little Jack Russell terrier found Emma, in the end. She had fallen down a natural chimney in the ground, nearly sixty feet down, and so narrow that she was completely wedged, and scarcely able to breathe. The post-mortem showed that it had taken her five days to die.”

  “Tom went out the next day and it was only when I was putting away the ironing that I found the letter he had left me. It was too late by then. He had hanged himself in a lock-up garage in Ealing.

  “Everybody was so kind. Once or twice my sister nearly persuaded me that it was worth going on, that life could still be worth living. I took too many pills, but I washed them down with vodka, and I was sick. I thought of cutting my wrists, they say you have to do it from wrist to elbow, don’t they, so that nobody can stop the bleeding before you die. But what happens when you take pills? You fall asleep, and that’s it. And what happens when you cut your wrists? You gradually lose consciousness. You don’t stay wedged in a hole in the ground for five days, slowly dying of thirst and starvation, looking at the little circle of daylight sixty feet above you and wondering why your parents haven’t come to rescue you. You don’t suffer, as Emma must have suffered. You don’t lose your faith in the people who are supposed to be taking care of you.”

  She stopped in mid-flow, and lifted one hand, as if she were trying to attract the attention of somebody in the garden. But there was nobody there. Only the overgrown bushes, and the apple trees heavy with half-rotten Worcesters.

  Martin turned to Tybalt, and Tybalt raised one eyebrow, as if he were asking him if he was beginning to understand what was happening here, at The Sympathy Society. Martin looked from Theresa to Sylvia, and then at Sticky, who was making a show of folding up his handkerchief again.

  “Martin?” said Tybalt. “Why don’t you tell us your story?”

  Later in the evening, they sat in th
e kitchen and ate a supper of chicken casserole with green peppers, and home-made bread – prepared, said Tybalt, by “Mrs Pearce … such a dear person … she comes up from the village.” The atmosphere at dinner was strained. Terence was twitchy and obnoxious. Sylvia couldn’t stop dabbing her eyes and her nose with her paper napkin. Theresa wouldn’t eat anything, except for a tiny nibble of bread, and Sticky was deeply distracted, as if he were thinking about something else altogether.

  During the cheese course (when the table was messy with crumbs and stripped-off sticks of celery) Tybalt scraped back his chair and said, “Martin – you’ve realized by now what we’re doing here, haven’t you?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Martin. “I think perhaps I’m missing something.”

  “Understatement of the year,” put in Terence.

  Tybalt ignored him. “We’re not here to cry for you, Martin; or mollycoddle you; or make you believe that life has to go on. What a fallacy that is! Life doesn’t have to go on, if you don’t want it to. Where were you, before you were born? You weren’t anywhere. You didn’t exist. In the same way, you won’t exist after you’re dead. There’s no heaven, Martin. There isn’t any hell. But there is one thing: in the instant when you die, there’s revelation”

  “Revelation?” Martin was used to being the center of attention, and he didn’t like the way that Tybalt dominated the whole room, and everybody in it.

  “Revelation like the Book of Revelations,” said Terence. “Revelation like the scales falling from your eyes.”

  Tybalt smiled. “When you’re dead, you’re dead. That’s all there is to it. Blackness, nothingness, that’s it. We all know it, even if we’re scared to admit it. But I believe there’s a split-second, when you die, that you see the world as it really is. We probably see it when we’re born, too. Why do you think babies cry, when they first come out of the womb? But babies forget; and babies can’t tell us what they’ve seen.”

  “Neither can dead people,” said Martin.