Darker Terrors

by Neil Gaiman

  He’d forgotten they were sisters, the two women who had run the bakery and the adjacent bridal shop. Had they really been twins? They were playing bridesmaids in identical white ankle-length dresses – whitish, rather, and trimmed with dust. Presumably it was muslin as well as dust that gloved their hands, which were pointing with all their digits along the aisle. The dull glints of their grimy eyes appeared to spy sidelong on him. He’d taken only a few steps when he stumbled to a halt and peered about him.

  The next exhibits were disconcerting enough. No doubt the toyshop owner was meant to be introducing his model railway, but he looked as if he was crouching sideways to grab whatever sought refuge in the miniature tunnel. Opposite him the sweet shop man was enticing children to his counter, which was heaped with sweets powdered grey, by performing on a sugar whistle not entirely distinguishable from his glimmering teeth. Trent hadn’t time to ascertain what was odd about the children’s wide round eyes, because he was growing aware of the extent of the museum.

  Surely it must be a trick of the unreliable illumination, but the more he gazed around him, the farther the dimness populated with unmoving figures seemed to stretch. If it actually extended so far ahead and to both sides, it would encompass at least the whole of the street that contained his parents’ house. He wavered forward a couple of paces, which only encouraged figures to solidify out of that part of the murk. He swivelled as quickly as he was able and stalked out of the museum.

  The echoes of his footsteps pursued him across the lobby like mocking applause. He could hear no other sound, and couldn’t tell whether he was being watched from the ticket booth. He found his way down the marble steps and along the front of the museum. In a few seconds he was sidling crabwise along it in order to differentiate the alley from the unlit façade. He wandered farther than he should have, and made his way back more slowly. Before long he was groping with his free hand at the wall as he ranged back and forth, but it was no use. There was no alley, just unbroken brick.

  He was floundering in search of a crossroads, from which there surely had to be a route to his old house, when he realised he might as well be blind. He glanced back, praying wordlessly for any relief from the dark. There was only the glow from the museum lobby. It seemed as feeble as the candle flame had grown in the moment before it guttered into smoke, and so remote he thought his stiff limbs might be past carrying him to it. When he retreated towards it, at first he seemed not to be moving at all.

  More time passed than he could grasp before he felt sure the light was closer. Later still he managed to distinguish the outstretched fingertips of his free hand. He clung to his briefcase as though it might be snatched from him. He was abreast of the lobby, and preparing to abandon its glow for the alley that led to the station, when he thought he heard a whisper from inside the museum. ‘Are you looking for us?’

  It was either a whisper or so distant that it might as well be one. ‘We’re in here, son,’ it said, and its companion added ‘You’ll have to come to us.’

  ‘Mother?’ It was unquestionably her voice, however faint. He almost tripped over the steps as he sent himself into the lobby. For a moment, entangled in the clapping of his footsteps on the marble, he thought he heard a large but muted sound as of the surreptitious arrangement of a crowd. He blundered to the doors and peered into the auditorium.

  Under the roof, which might well have been an extension of the low ponderous black sky, the aisle and its guardians were at least as dim as ever. Had things changed, or had he failed to notice details earlier? The bridal sisters were licking their lips, and he wasn’t sure if they were dressed as bridesmaids or baked into giant tiered cakes from which they were trying to struggle free. Both of the toyshop owner’s hands looked eager to seize the arrested train if it should try to reach the safety of the tunnel, and the bulging eyes of the children crowded around the man with the sugar whistle – were those sweets? Trent might have retreated if his mother’s voice hadn’t spoken to him. ‘That’s it, son. Don’t leave us this time.’

  ‘Have a thought for us. Don’t start us wondering where you are again. We’re past coming to find you.’

  ‘Where are you? I can’t see.’

  ‘Just carry on straight,’ his parents’ voices took it in turns to murmur.

  He faltered before lurching between the first exhibits. Beyond them matters could hardly be said to improve. He did his best not to see too much of the milkman holding the reins of a horse while a cow followed the cart, but the man’s left eye seemed large enough for the horse, the right for the cow. Opposite him stood a rag and bone collector whose trade was apparent from the companion that hung onto his arm, and Trent was almost glad of the flickering dimness. ‘How much further?’ he cried in a voice that the place shrank almost to nothing.

  ‘No more than you can walk at your age.’

  Trent hung onto the impression that his father sounded closer than before and hugged his briefcase while he made his legs carry him past a policeman who’d removed his helmet to reveal a bald ridged head as pointed as a chrysalis, a priest whose smooth face was balanced on a collar of the same paleness and no thicker than a child’s wrist, a window cleaner with scrawny legs folded like a grasshopper’s, a bus conductor choked by his tie that was caught in his ticket machine while at the front of the otherwise deserted vehicle the driver displayed exactly the same would-be comical strangled face and askew swollen tongue … They were nightmares, Trent told himself: some he remembered having suffered as a child, and the rest he was afraid to remember in case they grew clearer. ‘I still can’t see you,’ he all but wailed.

  ‘Down here, son.’

  Did they mean ahead? He hoped he wasn’t being told to use any of the side aisles, not least because they seemed capable of demonstrating that the place was even vaster than he feared. The sights they contained were more elaborate too. Off to the right was a brass band, not marching but frozen in the act of tiptoeing towards him: though all the players had lowered their instruments, their mouths were perfectly round. In the dimness to his left, and scarcely more luminous, was a reddish bonfire surrounded by figures that wore charred masks, unless those were their faces, and beyond that was a street party where children sat at trestle tables strewn with food and grimaced in imitation of the distorted versions of their faces borne by deflating balloons they held on strings … Trent twisted his stiff body around in case some form of reassurance was to be found behind him, but the exit to the lobby was so distant he could have mistaken it for the last of a flame. He half closed his eyes to blot out the sights he had to pass, only to find that made the shadows of the exhibits and the darkness into which the shadows trailed loom closer, as if the dimness was on the point of being finally extinguished. He was suddenly aware that if the building had still been a theatre, the aisle would have brought him to the stage by now. ‘Where are you?’ he called but was afraid to raise his voice. ‘Can’t you speak?’

  ‘Right here.’

  His eyes sprang so wide they felt fitted into their sockets. His parents weren’t just close, they were behind him. He turned with difficulty and saw why he’d strayed past them. His mother was wearing a top hat and tails and had finished twirling a cane that resembled a lengthening of one knobbly finger; his father was bulging out of a shabby flowered dress that failed to conceal several sections of a pinkish bra. They’d dressed up to cure Trent of his nightmare about the theatre performance, he remembered, but they had only brought it into his waking hours. He backed away from it – from their waxen faces greyish with down, their smiles as fixed as their eyes. His legs collided with an object that folded them up, and he tottered sideways to sit helplessly on it. ‘That’s it, son,’ his mother succeeded in murmuring.

  ‘That’s your place,’ his father said with a last shifting of his lips.

  Trent glared downwards and saw he was trapped by a school desk barely large enough to accommodate him. On either side of him sat motionless children as furred with grey as their desks, ev
en their eyes. Between him and his parents a teacher in a gown and mortarboard was standing not quite still and sneering at him. ‘Mr Bunnie,’ Trent gasped, remembering how the teacher had always responded to being addressed by his name as though it was an insult. Then, in a moment of clarity that felt like a beacon in the dark, he realised he had some defence. ‘This isn’t me,’ he tried to say calmly but firmly. ‘This is.’

  His fingers were almost too unmanageable to deal with the briefcase. He levered at the rusty metal buttons with his thumbs until at last the catches flew open and the contents spilled across the desk. For a breath, if he had any, Trent couldn’t see them in the dimness, and then he made out that they were half a dozen infantile crayon drawings of houses. ‘I’ve done more than that,’ he struggled to protest, ‘I am more,’ but his mouth had finished working. He managed only to raise his head, and never knew which was worse: his paralysis, or his parents’ doting smiles, or the sneer that the teacher’s face seemed to have widened to encompass – the sneer that had always meant that once a child was inside the school gates, his parents could no longer protect him. It might have been an eternity before the failure of the dimness or of Trent’s eyes brought the dark.

  Ramsey Campbell is described in The Oxford Companion to English Literature as ‘Britain’s most respected living horror writer’. He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild. Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain, Ghosts Know, The Kind Folk, Think Yourself Lucky and Thirteen Days by Sunset Beach, and he is working on a trilogy, The Three Births of Daoloth. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, Just Behind You and Holes for Faces, and his non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably. His novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain. His regular columns appear in Dead Reckonings and Video Watchdog, and he is the President of the Society of Fantastic Films. According to the author, ‘“The Retrospective” grew from the idea of the museum in an unfamiliar town. It feels to me somewhat like my tribute to Thomas Ligotti.’

  The Two Sams

  GLEN HIRSHBERG

  for both of you

  WHAT WAKES ME isn’t a sound. At first, I have no idea what it is: an earthquake, maybe; a vibration in the ground; a 2:00 a.m. truck shuddering along the switchback road that snakes up from the beach, past the ruins of the Baths, past the Cliff House and the automatons and coin-machines chattering in the Musee Mechanique, past our apartment building until it reaches the flatter stretch of the Great Highway, which will return it to the saner neighbourhoods of San Francisco. I lie still, holding my breath without knowing why. With the moon gone, the watery light rippling over the chipping bas-relief curlicues on our wall and the scuffed, tilted hardwood floor makes the room seem insubstantial, a projected reflection from the camera obscura perched on the cliffs a quarter mile away.

  Then I feel it again, and I realise it’s in the bed, not the ground. Right beside me. Instantly, I’m smiling. I can’t help it. You’re playing on your own, aren’t you? That’s what I’m thinking. Our first game. He sticks up a tiny fist, a twitching foot, a butt cheek, pressing against the soft roof and walls of his world, and I lay my palm against him, and he shoots off across the womb, curls in a far corner, waits. Sticks out a foot again.

  The game terrified me at first. I kept thinking about signs in aquariums warning against tapping on glass, giving fish heart attacks. But he kept playing. And tonight, the thrum of his life is like magic fingers in the mattress, shooting straight up my spine into my shoulders, settling me, squeezing the terror out. Shifting the sheets softly, wanting Lizzie to sleep, I lean closer, and know, all at once, that this isn’t what woke me.

  For a split second, I’m frozen. I want to whip my arms around my head, ward them off like mosquitoes or bees, but I can’t hear anything, not this time. There’s just that creeping damp, the heaviness in the air, like a fogbank forming. Abruptly, I dive forward, drop my head against the hot, round dome of Lizzie’s stomach. Maybe I’m wrong, I think. I could be wrong. I press my ear against her skin, hold my breath, and for one horrible moment, I hear nothing at all, just the sea of silent, amniotic fluid. I’m thinking about that couple, the Super Jews from our Bradley class who started coming when they were already seven months along. They came five straight weeks, and the woman would reach out, sometimes, tug her husband’s prayer-curls, and we all smiled, imagining their daughter doing that, and then they weren’t there anymore. The woman woke up one day and felt strange, empty, she walked around for hours that way and finally just got in her car and drove to the hospital and had her child, knowing it was dead.

  But under my ear, something is moving now. I can hear it inside my wife. Faint, unconcerned, unmistakable. Beat. Beat.

  ‘Get out Tom’s old records …’ I sing, so softly, into Lizzie’s skin. It isn’t the song I used to use. Before, I mean. It’s a new song. We do everything new, now. ‘And he’ll come dancing ’round.’ It occurs to me that this song might not be the best choice, either. There are lines in it that could come back to haunt me, just the way the others have, the ones I never want to hear again, never even used to notice when I sang that song. They come creeping into my ears now, as though they’re playing very quietly in a neighbour’s room. ‘I dreamed I held you. In my arms. When I awoke, dear. I was mistaken. And so I hung my head and I cried.’ But then, I’ve found, that’s the first great lesson of pregnancy: it all comes back to haunt you.

  I haven’t thought of this song, though, since the last time, I realise. Maybe they bring it with them.

  Amidst the riot of thoughts in my head, a new one spins to the surface. Was it there the very first time? Did I feel the damp then? Hear the song? Because if I did, and I’m wrong …

  I can’t remember. I remember Lizzie screaming. The bathtub, and Lizzie screaming.

  Sliding slowly back, I ease away toward my edge of the bed, then sit up, holding my breath. Lizzie doesn’t stir, just lies there like the gutshot creature she is, arms wrapped tight and low around her stomach, as though she could hold this one in, hold herself in, just a few days more. Her chin is tucked tight to her chest, dark hair wild on the pillow, bloated legs clamped around the giant, blue cushion between them. Tip her upright, I think, and she’d look like a little girl on a Hoppity Horse. Then her kindergarten students would laugh at her again, clap and laugh when they saw her, the way they used to. Before.

  For the thousandth time in the past few weeks, I have to quash an urge to lift her black-framed, square glasses from around her ears. She has insisted on sleeping with them since March, since the day the life inside her became – in the words of Dr Seger, the woman Lizzie believes will save us – ‘viable’, and the ridge in her nose is red and deep, now, and her eyes, always strangely small, seem to have slipped back in their sockets, as though cringing away from the unaccustomed closeness of the world, its unblurred edges. ‘The second I’m awake,’ Lizzie tells me, savagely, the way she says everything these days, ‘I want to see.’

  ‘Sleep,’ I mouth, and it comes out a prayer.

  Gingerly, I put my bare feet on the cold ground and stand. Always, it takes just a moment to adjust to the room. Because of the tilt of the floor – caused by the earthquake in ’89 – and the play of light over the walls and the sound of the surf and, sometimes, the seals out on Seal Rock and the litter of woodscraps and sawdust and half-built toys and menorahs and disembowelled clocks on every table-top, walking through our apartment at night is like floating through a shipwreck.

  Where are you? I think to the room, the shadows, turning in multiple directions a
s though my thoughts were a lighthouse beam. If they are, I need to switch them off. The last thing I want to provide, at this moment, for them, is a lure. Sweat breaks out on my back, my legs, as though I’ve been wrung. I don’t want to breathe, don’t want this infected air in my lungs, but I force myself. I’m ready. I have prepared, this time. I’ll do what I must, if it’s not too late and I get the chance.

  ‘Where are you?’ I whisper aloud, and something happens in the hall, in the doorway. Not movement. Not anything I can explain. But I start over there, fast. It’s much better if they’re out there. ‘I’m coming,’ I say, and I’m out of the bedroom, pulling the door closed behind me as if that will help, and when I reach the living room, I consider snapping on the light but don’t.

  On the wall over the square, dark couch – we bought it dark, we were anticipating stains – the Pinocchio clock, first one I ever built, at age fourteen, makes its steady, hollow tock. It’s all nose, that clock, which seems like such a bad idea, in retrospect. What was I saying, and to whom? The hour is a lie. The room is a lie. Time is a lie. ‘Gepetto,’ Lizzie used to call me before we were married, then after we were married, for a while, back when I used to show up outside her classroom door to watch her weaving between desks, balancing hamsters and construction paper and graham crackers and half-pint milk cartons in her arms while kindergartners nipped between and around her legs like ducklings.

  Gepetto. Who tried so hard to make a living boy.

  Tock.

  ‘Stop,’ I snap to myself, to the leaning walls. There is less damp here. They’re somewhere else.