Luckily that evening they were seeing a different and more recent group, some of whom were certified human beings. Richard stood at the bar affably enough, slowly downing a long series of Kronenbourgs while Chris alternately went to talk to people or brought them to talk to him. One of the latter, a doctor whom Richard believed to be called Kate, peered hard at him as soon as she hove into view.
‘What’s that?’ she asked, bluntly.
Richard was about to tell her that what he was holding was called a cigarette, that it consisted of the dried and rolled leaves of the tobacco plant, and that he had every intention - regardless of any objections she or anyone else might have - of sticking it in his mouth and lighting it, when he realized she was looking at his left hand. Too late, he tried to slip it into his pocket, but she reached out and snatched it up.
‘Been in a fight, have you?’ she asked. Behind her Chris turned from the man she was talking to and looked over Kate’s shoulder at Richard’s hand.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Just a bizarre moving accident.’
‘Hmm,’ Kate said, her mouth pursed into a small moue of consideration. ‘Looks like someone’s come at you with a knife, if you ask me.’
Chris looked up at Richard, eyes wide, and he groaned inwardly.
‘Well, things between Chris and I haven’t been so good lately. . .’ he tried, and got a laugh from both of them. Kate wasn’t to be deflected, however.
‘I’m serious,’ she said, holding up her own hand to demonstrate. ‘Someone tries to kill you with a knife, what do you do? You hold your hands up. And what happens is often the blade will nick the defending hands a couple of times before the knife gets through. See it all the time in Casualty. Little cuts, just like those.’
Richard pretended to examine the cuts on his hand, and shrugged.
‘Maybe Kate could look at your ribs,’ Chris said.
‘I’m sure there’s nothing she’d like better,’ he said. ‘After a hard day at the coal face there’s probably nothing she’d like more than to look at another piece of coal.’
‘What’s wrong with your ribs?’ Kate asked, squinting at him closely.
‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just banged them.’
‘Does this hurt?’ she asked, and suddenly cuffed him around the back of the head.
‘No,’ he said, laughing.
‘Then you’re probably all right,’ she winked, and disappeared to get a drink. Chris frowned for a moment, caught between irritation at not having got to the bottom of his rib problem and happiness at seeing him get on with one of her friends. Just then a fresh influx of people arrived at the door and Richard was saved from having to watch her choose which emotion to go with.
Mid-evening he went to the gents and shut himself into one of the cubicles. He changed the dressings on his penis and chest, and noted that some of the cuts on his stomach were now slick with blood. He didn’t have enough micropore to dress them, and realized he would just have to hope that they stayed manageable until he got home. The cuts on his hands didn’t seem to be getting any deeper.
Obviously they were just nicks. Almost, as Kate had said, as if someone had come at him with a knife.
* * * *
They got home well after midnight. Chris was more drunk than Richard, but he didn’t mind. She was the only woman he’d ever met who got even cuter when she was plastered, instead of maudlin or argumentative.
Chris staggered straight into the bathroom, to do whatever the hell it was she spent hours in there doing. Richard made his way into the study to check the answerphone, banging into walls whose positions he still hadn’t really internalized.
One message.
Sitting heavily down on his chair, Richard pressed the play button. Without noticing he was doing it, he reached forward and turned down the volume so only he would hear what was on the tape. A habit born of the first weeks of his relationship with Chris, when Susan was still calling fairly regularly. Her messages, though generally short and uncontroversial, were not things he wanted Chris to hear. Again, a programme of protection, now no longer needed. Feeling self-righteous, and burping gently, Richard turned the volume back up.
He almost jumped out of his skin when he realized the message actually was from Susan, and quickly turned the volume back down. She said hello, in the diffident way she had, and went on to observe that they hadn’t seen each other that year yet. There was no reproach, simply a statement of fact. She asked him to call her soon, to arrange a drink.
The message had just finished when Chris caroomed out of the bathroom smelling of toothpaste and moisturizer.
“ny messages?’
‘Just a wrong number,’ he said.
She shook her head slightly, apparently to clear it rather than in negation. ‘Coming to bed then?’ she asked, slyly. Waggling her eyebrows, she performed a slow grind with her pelvis, managing both not to fall over and not to look silly, which was a hell of a trick. Richard made his ‘Sex life in ancient Rome’ face, inspired by a book he’d read as a child.
‘Too right,’ he said. ‘Be there in a minute.’
But he stayed in the study for a quarter of an hour, long enough to ensure that Chris would have passed out. Wearing pyjamas for the first time in ten years, he slipped quietly in beside her and waited for the morning.
The bedroom seemed very small as he lay there, and whereas in Belsize Park the moonlight had sliced in, casting attractive shadows on the wall, in Kingsley Road the only visitors in the night were the curdled orange of a streetlight outside and the sound of a siren in the distance.
* * * *
As soon as Chris had dragged herself groaning out of the house, Richard got up and went through to the bathroom. He knew before he took his night clothes off what he was going to find. He could feel parts of the pyjama top sticking to areas on his chest and stomach, and his crotch felt warm and wet.
The marks on his stomach now looked like proper cuts, and the gash on his chest had opened still further. His penis was covered in dark blood, and the gashes around it were nasty. He looked as if he had collided with a threshing machine. His ribs still hurt a great deal, though the pain seemed to be constricting, concentrating around a specific point rather than applying to the whole of his side.
He stood there for ten minutes, staring at himself in the mirror. So much damage. As he watched he saw a faint line slowly draw itself down three inches of his forearm; a thin raised scab. He knew that by the end of the day it would have reverted into a cut.
Mid morning he called Susan at her office number. As always he was surprised by how official she sounded when he spoke to her there. She had always been languid of voice, in complete contrast to her physical and emotional vivacity - but when you talked to her at work she sounded like a headmistress.
Her tone mellowed when she realized who it was. She tried to pin him down to a date for a drink, but he avoided the issue. They’d seen each other twice since she’d left him for John Ayer; once while he’d been living with Chris. Chris had been very relaxed about the meetings, but Richard hadn’t. On both occasions he and Susan had spent a good deal of time talking about Ayer; the first time focusing on why Susan had left Richard for him, the second on how unhappy she was about the fact that Ayer had in turn left her without even saying goodbye. Either she hadn’t realized how much the conversations would hurt Richard, or she hadn’t even thought about it. Most likely she had just taken comfort from talking to him in the way she always had.
‘You’re avoiding it, aren’t you,’ Susan said, eventually.
‘What?’
‘Naming a day. Why?’
‘I’m not,’ he protested, feebly. ‘Just, busy, you know. I don’t want to say a date and then have to cancel.’
‘I really want to see you,’ she said. ‘I miss you.’
Don’t say that, thought Richard miserably. Please don’t say that.
‘And there’s something else,’ she added. ‘It was a year today when. . .’
; ‘When what?’ Richard asked, confused. They’d split up about eighteen months ago.
Susan took an audibly deep breath. ‘The last time I saw John,’ she said, and finally Richard understood.
* * * *
That afternoon he took a walk to kill time, trolling up and down the surrounding streets, trying to find something to like. He discovered another corner store nearby, but it didn’t stock Parma ham either. Little dusty bags of fuses hung behind the counter, and the plastic strips of the cold cabinet were completely opaque. A little further afield he found a local video store, but he’d seen every thriller they had, most of them more than once. The storekeeper seemed to stare at him as he left, as if wondering what he was doing there.
After a while he simply walked, not looking for anything. Slab-faced fat women clumped by, screaming at children already getting into method for their five minutes of fame on CrimeWatch UK. Pipe-cleaner men stalked the streets in brown trousers and zip-up jackets, heads fizzing with racing results. The pavements seemed unnaturally grey, as if waiting for a second coat of reality, and hard green leaves spiralled down to join brown ashes already fallen.
And yet as he started to head back towards Kingsley Road he noticed a small dog standing on a corner, different to the one he’d seen before. White with a black head and lolling tongue, the dog stood still and looked at him, big brown eyes rolling with good humour. It didn’t bark, but merely panted, ready to play some game he didn’t know.
Richard stared at the dog, suddenly sensing that some other life was possible here, that he was occluding something from himself. The dog skittered on the spot slightly, keeping his eyes on Richard, and then abruptly sat down. Ready to wait. Ready to still be there.
Richard looked at him a little longer and then set off for the Tube station. He used the public phone there to leave a message at Kingsley Road, telling Chris he’d gone out unexpectedly and might be back late.
* * * *
At eleven he left the George and walked down Belsize Avenue. He didn’t know how important the precise time was, and he couldn’t actually remember it, but it felt right. Earlier in the evening he had walked past the old flat, establishing that the ‘For Let’ sign was still outside. Probably the landlord had jacked the rent up so high he couldn’t find any takers.
During the hours he had spent in the pub he had checked the cuts only twice. Then he had ignored them, his only concession being to roll the sleeve of his shirt down to hide what was now a deep gash on his forearm. When he looked at himself in the mirror of the gents his face seemed pale; whether from the lighting or blood loss he didn’t know. As he could now push his fingers deep enough into the slash on his chest to feel his sternum he suspected it was probably the latter. When he used the toilet he did so with his eyes closed. He didn’t want to know what it looked like down there: the sensation of his fingers on ragged and sliced flesh was more than enough. The pain in his side had continued to condense, and was now restricted to a rough circle four inches in diameter.
It was time to go.
He slowed as he approached the flat, trying to time it so that he drew outside when there was no one else in sight. As he waited he marvelled quietly at how different the sounds were to those in Kentish Town. There was no shouting, no roar of maniac traffic or young bloods looking for damage. All you could hear was distant laughter, the sound of people having dinner, braving the cold and sitting outside Café Pasta or the Pizza Express. This area was different, and it wasn’t his home any more. As he realized that, it was with relief. It was time to say goodbye.
When the street was empty he walked quietly along the side of the building to the wall. Only about six feet tall, it held a gate through to the garden. Both sets of keys had been yielded, but Richard knew from experience that he could climb over. More than once he or Susan had forgotten their keys on the way out to get drunk and he’d had to let them back in this way.
He jumped up, arms extended, and grabbed the top of the wall. His side tore at him, but he ignored it and scrabbled up. Without pausing he slid over the top and dropped silently on to the other side, leaving a few slithers of blood behind. The window to the kitchen was there in the wall, dark and cold. Chris had left a dishcloth neatly folded over the tap in the sink. Other than that the room looked as if it had been moulded in an alien’s mind. Richard turned away and walked out into the garden.
He limped towards the centre, trying to recall how it had gone. In some ways he could remember everything; in others it was as if it had never happened to him, was just a secondhand tale told by someone else. A phone call to an office number he’d copied from Susan’s filofax before she left. An agreement to meet for a drink, on a night Richard knew she’d be out of town. Two men, meeting to sort things out in a gentlemanly fashion.
The stalks of Susan’s abandoned plants nodded suddenly in a faint breeze, and an eddy of leaves chased each other slowly around the walls. Richard glanced towards the living-room window. Inside it was empty, a couple of pieces of furniture stark against walls painted with dark triangular shadows. It was too dark to see, and he was too far away, but he knew the dust was gone. Even that little part had been sucked up and buried away.
He felt a strange sensation on his forearm, and looked down in time to see the gash there disappearing, from bottom to top, from finish to start. It went quickly, as quickly as it had been made. He turned to look at the verdant patch of grass, expecting to see it move, but it was still. Then he felt a warm sensation in his crotch, and realized it too would soon be whole. He had hacked at him there long after he knew Ayer was dead; hacked symbolically and pointlessly until the penis which had rootled and snuffled into Susan had been reduced to a scrap of offal.
The leaves moved again, faster, and the garden grew darker as if some huge cloud had moved into position overhead. It was now difficult to see as far as the end wall of the garden, and when he heard the distant sounds from there Richard realized the ground was not going to open up. No, first the wound in his chest, the fatal wound, would disappear. Then the cuts on his stomach, and the nicks on his hands from where Ayer had resisted, trying to be angry but so scared he had pissed his designer jeans. Finally the pain in his side would go; the first pain, the pain caused by Richard’s initial vicious kick after he had pushed his drunken rival over. A spasm of hate, flashes of violence, wipe pans of memory.
Then they would be back to that moment, or a moment before. Something would come towards him, out of the dry, rasping shadows, and they would talk again. How it would go Richard didn’t know, but he knew he could win, that he could walk away back to Chris and never come back here again.
It was time. Time to go.
Time to play a different game.
* * * *
Michael Marshall Smith’s short stories have appeared in many major anthologies and magazines, including Dark Terrors, Dark Voices, Darklands, The Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Omni and Interzone. His first novel, Only Forward, won the British Fantasy Award, while his second, Spares, has been optioned for filming by Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks SKG and has so far sold for translation in eight countries. The author is currently working on his third book, One of Us, and on a movie adaptation of Robert Faulcon’s Nighthunter series. ‘“Walking Wounded” was written - as may be fairly obvious - after moving from a lonely apartment in London’s Belsize Park to a tiny hole in Kentish Town,’ says Smith. ‘While nothing else in the story is even remotely true, my grumpiness at having half of my possessions put in storage and not being able to buy good pates is accurately represented - and I did in fact break two ribs during the move. Since writing the story my attitude to the area has mellowed somewhat - to the point where we have now bought a house just fifty yards down the road. I’m still a bit annoyed about the pate, though.’
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* * * *
The Lost Boy Found
TERRY LAMSLEY
Emma must have been watching out from the window on the fir
st floor and shouted down to the boy. The front door of the house opened before Daniel had reached the garden gate. Marc stepped out, glanced at his father without giving any gesture of recognition, then trudged towards him with his shoulders hunched and his head bent forward, staring at the ground a yard ahead of him. Daniel stopped to wait for him. In spite of the heat of the day his son was wearing the expensive designer-branded woollen hat he had brought him for his birthday on his last visit. The choice of present had been unfortunate; Daniel now thought it made the boy look foolish.
The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Dark Terrors 05] Page 36
