There had been a lot of chatter and laughter on the bus going out. Now the sound of voices barely rose above the rumble of the wheels, and all the women watched in silence when it drew up at the waterside and Mrs Berry and Miss Jervis got off.
'You look a bit tottery.' Mrs Berry, leaning on her stick, took pity on her. 'Would you like to have a cup of tea with me?'
'No thank you, Phoebe.'
It was dusk, but the air was still warm. Mrs Berry tried to make conversation. 'Lovely evening,' she said. 'Lots of midges, though.' They could just be seen above the pale surface of the water, dancing in congregations. Before long they would be invisible. Miss Jervis watched them but said nothing.
'Don't worry about it,' said Mrs Berry. 'It won't seem so bad in the morning.' She breathed heavily, as though kindliness cost her an effort. 'None of us is perfect.'
Miss Jervis murmured good night, and Mrs Berry watched until she had trailed slowly across the road to her front door, fumbled for her key and let herself in.
Mrs Berry walked painfully away. 'Stupid bloody woman,' she grunted. 'Looks as if she wants to do away with herself. Well, she shouldn't have done what she done in the first place.'
Miss Jervis did, in fact, have death in mind. How could she face anyone ever again? She put on her nightdress but did not go to bed. Instead she sat by the empty fireplace until the daylight had washed itself out of the sky, and then she opened her front door and went barefoot across the road to the waterside. She had unpinned her hair, and the grey strands hung loosely. It no longer mattered.
She went carefully, out of habit, down the grassy bank, and before her toes touched the water she leant over and looked down. The movement allowed her unpinned hair to brush her face, and saved her life.
The touch of her hair swinging against her face made her automatically lift her head to brush it away, and it was then she saw the midges. Phoebe Berry was right; there were clouds of them. As they gyrated they made shapes as wispy as bubbles on the point of bursting. If creatures so flimsy continued to exist, why should she die?
Miss Jervis turned away, and slipped. She should have known how treacherous the bank was because it was here she had weighted Rosemary for the eels. But now she had let both feet slide into the water, and she had to struggle before she managed to get a tight enough grip on the grass to crawl up the bank.
The edge of her nightgown was wet and clung to her ankles as she crossed the road, and as soon as she was indoors she changed it.
'Now a nice hot cup of tea, Miss Jervis,' she said, lecturing herself, 'and no more nonsense.'
The sound of her own voice made her feel stronger. She would go to bingo again and brazen it out. She would be generous, so generous that they would all be overwhelmed with guilt for accusing her. And then she would forgive them, and they would respect her even more.
'Because you stand for something in this village,' she told herself, 'and always will.' She dried her feet vigorously. 'Now off to bed with you.'
Despite the rubbing, her feet and ankles remained cold so she took a hot water bottle with her. The bed was soon luxuriously warm, and her mind was at rest.
She slept so soundly that she awoke with cramp down one side and nothing would ease the pain until she moved about her room. It was still dark, and she pulled aside the curtains, as she had so often done, to look at the water and be certain that nothing was disturbing Rosemary. That worry was done with forever.
It was a summer's night and enough light filtered from the sky to show the smooth face of the river, and even the track of bent grass she had left in the verge. And her wet footprints still led to the door.
'The sun will be my friend,' she said. 'All will be dry soon.'
She slid back into bed. The water bottle was cold and she pushed it to one side, but its coolness lingered. She thrust it further away and gasped with annoyance. It must have burst because a cold wetness was on her feet. She sat up and reached down. The chill rubber was clammy. Slimy. It slipped under her fingers as though it was moving. She flung it out of bed. It slapped the floor, but she had used too much violence because she heard it slither further.
'Damn!' Miss Jervis never swore, but she was angry. The water bottle would be leaking all over the floor, and she also had to change the bed. 'Damn!'
She threw aside the bedcover, but the damp sheet had twisted around her feet. She was reaching down to untangle herself when her heart thudded. She was not alone in the room. Silhouetted against the window was a shape.
Fear had made Miss Jervis cringe backwards, but suddenly she leant forward, and now her heart was pounding with anger. The silhouette was human. But it was neither tall nor broad. It was a child. One of her pupils. Some stupid prank.
'Get out!' It was a classroom order. 'Get out at once!'
The child, however, came forward, slowly and heavily. Its footsteps dragged as if with a great weight.
'I'll see you pay for this!'
Miss Jervis gathered herself to lunge, but her feet would not obey her. They would not move. She reached down. The bed was wet and cold, but it was not the sheet that had trapped her feet. Something slippery had coiled itself around her ankles. And it was moving. She felt something slide between her toes and tenderly begin to stroke her leg.
'No!' she cried. 'No!'
Feverishly, trying to pull back at the same time, she reached down. Her fingers plunged into a nest of eels.
Miss Jervis screamed. She flung her hands to the bedrail to haul herself free. She struggled. The cold grip tightened and held her legs still. She could not move.
She was whimpering as the child came closer. Its footsteps slithered and squelched and it brought the darkness of deep water into the room. It stopped by the bedside, and a hand reached out to hold hers. If it was a hand. Miss Jervis never knew.
The child's fingers writhed and were slimy. And the child's head, when it bent over her, had many damp tendrils of hair that, eager and slippery, reached out to busily caress her face, loving her.
When the sun came up and filled the room with warmth, Miss Jervis lay quite still. Her nightgown, however, heaved with a life of its own.
9/ Bram Stoker - Jonathan Marker's Journal
I suppose I must have fallen asleep; I hope so, but I fear, for all that followed was startlingly real - so real that now, sitting here in the broad, full sunlight of the morning, I cannot in the least believe that it was all sleep.
I was not alone. The room was the same, unchanged in any way since I came into it; I could see along the floor, in the brilliant moonlight, my own footsteps marked where I had disturbed the long accumulation of dust. In the moonlight opposite me were three young women, ladies by their dress and manner. I thought at the time that I must be dreaming when I saw them, for, though the moonlight was behind them, they threw no shadow on the floor. They came close to me and looked at me for some time and then whispered together. Two were dark, and had high aquiline noses, like the Count's, and great dark, piercing eyes, that seemed to be almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. The other was fair, as fair as can be, with great, wavy masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires. I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where. All three had brilliant white teeth, that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina's eyes and cause her pain; but it is the truth. They whispered together, and then they all three laughed - such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand. The fair girl shook her head coquet-tishly, and the other two urged her on. One said:
'Go on! You a
re first, and we shall follow; yours is the right to begin.' The other added:
'He is young and strong; there are kisses for us all.' I lay quiet, looking out under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation. The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet, and sent the same tingling through the nerves as her voice, but with a bitter underlying the sweet, a bitter offensiveness, as one smells in blood.
I was afraid to raise my eyelids, but looked out and saw perfectly under the lashes. The fair girl went on her knees and bent over me, fairly gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat. Then she paused, and I could hear the churning sound of her tongue as it licked her teeth and lips, and could feel the hot breath on my neck. Then the skin of my throat began to tingle as one's flesh does when the hand that is to tickle it approaches nearer - nearer. I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited - waited with beating heart.
But at that instant another sensation swept through me as quick as lightning. I was conscious of the presence of the Count, and of his being as if lapped in a storm of fury. As my eyes opened involuntarily I saw his strong hand grasp the slender neck of the fair woman and with giant's power draw it back, the blue eyes transformed with fury, the white teeth champing with rage, and the fair cheeks blazing red with passion. But the Count! Never did I imagine such wrath and fury, even in the demons of the pit. His eyes were positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell-fire blazed behind them. His face was deathly pale, and the lines of it were hard like drawn wires; the thick eyebrows that met over the nose now seemed like a heaving bar of white-hot metal. With a fierce sweep of his arm, he hurled the woman from him, and then motioned to the others, as though he were beating them back; it was the same imperious gesture that I had seen used to the wolves. In a voice which, though low and almost a whisper, seemed to cut through the air and then ring round the room, he exclaimed:
'How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him, or you'll have to deal with me.' The fair girl, with a laugh of ribald coquetry, turned to answer him:
'You yourself never loved; you never love!' On this the other women joined, and such a mirthless, hard, soulless laughter rang through the room that it almost made me faint to hear; it seemed like the pleasure of fiends. Then the Count turned, after looking at my face attentively, and said in a soft whisper:
'Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so? Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him, you shall kiss him at your will. Now go! go! I must awaken him, for there is work to be done.'
'Are we to have nothing tonight?' said one of them, with a low laugh, as she pointed to the bag which he had thrown upon the floor, and which moved as though there were some living thing within it. For answer he nodded his head. One of the women jumped forward and opened it. If my ears did not deceive me there was a gasp and a low wail, as of a half-smothered child. The women closed round, whilst I was aghast with horror; but as I looked they disappeared, and with them the dreadful bag. There was no door near them, and they could not have passed me without my noticing. They simply seemed to fade into the rays of the moonlight and pass out through the window, for I could see outside the dim, shadowy forms for a moment before they entirely faded away.
Then the horror overcame me, and I sank down unconscious.
10/ Anthony Horowitz - Bath Night
She didn't like the bath from the start. Isabel was at home the Saturday they delivered it and wondered how the fat, metal beast was ever going to make it up one flight of stairs, around the corner, and into the bathroom. The two scrawny workmen didn't seem to have much idea either. Thirty minutes, four gashed knuckles and a hundred swear words later it seemed to be hopelessly wedged and it was only when Isabel's father lent a hand that they were able to free it. But then one of the stubby legs caught the wallpaper and tore it and that led to another argument right in front of the workmen, her mother and father blaming each other like they always did.
'I told you to measure it.'
'I did measure it.'
'Yes. But you said the legs came off.'
'No. That's what you said.'
It was so typical of her parents to buy that bath, Isabel thought. Anyone else would have been into the West End to one of the smart department stores. Pick something out of the showroom. Out with the credit card. Delivery and free installation in six weeks and thank you very much.
But Jeremy and Susan Harding weren't like that. Ever since they had bought their small, turn-of-the-century house in Muswell Hill, North London, they had devoted their holidays to getting it just right. And since they were both teachers - he at a public school, she in a local primary - their holidays were frequent and long.
And so the dining-room table had come from an antique shop in Hungerford, the chairs that surrounded it from a house sale in Hove. The kitchen cupboards had been rescued from a skip in Macclesfield. And their double bed had been a rusting, tangled heap when they had found it in the barn of a French farmhouse outside Boulogne. So many weekends. So many hours spent searching, measuring, imagining, haggling and arguing.
That was the worst of it. As far as Isabel could see, her parents didn't seem to get any pleasure out of all these antiques. They fought constantly - in the shops, in the market places, even at the auctions. Once her father had got so heated he had actually broken the Victorian chamber pot they had been arguing about and of course he'd had to buy it anyway. It was in the hall now, glued back together again, the all-too-visible cracks an unpleasant image of their twelve-year-old marriage.
The bath was Victorian too. Isabel had been with her parents when they bought it - at an architectural salvage yard in West London. 'Made in about 1890,' the dealer had told them. 'A real beauty. It's still got its own taps…'
It certainly didn't look beautiful as it squatted there on the stripped pine floor, surrounded by stops and washers and twisting lengths of pipe. It reminded Isabel of a pregnant cow, its great white belly hanging only inches off the ground. Its metal feet curved outwards, splayed, as if unable to bear the weight. And of course it had been decapitated. There was a single round hole where the taps would be and beneath it an ugly yellow stain in the white enamel where the water had trickled down for perhaps a hundred years, on its way to the plug-hole below. Isabel glanced at the tap, lying on its side next to the sink, a tangle of mottled brass that looked too big for the bath it was meant to sit on. There were two handles, marked with a black H and a C on faded ivory discs - but only one outlet. Isabel imagined the water thundering in. It would need to. The bath was very deep.
But nobody used the bath that night. Jeremy had said he would be able to connect it up himself but in the end he had found it was beyond him. Nothing fitted. It would have to be soldered. Unfortunately he wouldn't be able to get a plumber until Monday and of course it would add another forty pounds to the bill and when he told Susan that led to another argument. They ate their dinner in front of the television that night, letting the shallow laughter of a sitcom cover the chill silence in the room.
And then it was nine o'clock. 'You'd better go to bed early, darling. School tomorrow,' Susan said.
'Yes, Mum.' Isabel was twelve but her mother - a short and rather severe woman - treated her sometimes as if she were much younger. Maybe it came from teaching in a primary school.
Isabel undressed and washed quickly - hands, face, neck, teeth, in that order. The face that gazed out at her from the gilded mirror above the sink wasn't an unattractive one, she thought, except for the annoying pimple on her nose… a punishment for the Mars Bar ice-cream she'd eaten the day before. Long brown hair and blue eyes (her mother's), a thin face with narrow cheek-bones and chin (her father's). She had been fat until she was nine but now she was getting herself in shape. She'd never be a super-model. She was too fond of ice-cream for that. But no fatty either, not like Belinda Price, her best friend at school who was doomed to a life of hopeless diets and baggy clothes.
The shape of the bath, over her shoulder, caught her eye and she realized suddenly that from the moment she had come into the bathroom she had been trying to avoid looking at it. Why? She put her toothbrush down, turned round and examined it. She didn't like it. Her first impression had been right. It was so big and ugly with its dull enamel and dribbling stain over the plug-hole. And it seemed - it was a stupid thought but now it was there she couldn't make it go away - it seemed to be waiting for her. She half-smiled at her own foolishness. And then she noticed something else.
There was a small puddle of water in the bottom of the bath. As she moved her head, it caught the light and she saw it clearly. Isabel's first thought was to look up at the ceiling. There had to be a leak, somewhere upstairs, in the attic. How else could water have got into a bath whose taps were lying on their side next to the sink? But there was no leak. Isabel leant forward and ran her third finger along the bottom of the bath. The water was warm.
'I must have splashed it in there myself,' she thought. 'As I was washing my face…'
She flicked the light off and left the room, crossing the landing to her bedroom on the other side of her parents'. Somewhere in her mind she knew that it wasn't true, that she could never have splashed water from the sink into the bath. But it wasn't an important question. In fact it was ridiculous. She curled up in bed and closed her eyes.
The Puffin Book of Horror Stories Page 8
