First of all, let me set your mind at rest, and tell you Emily got through all right—she survived, she’s alive to this day. She and her husband live in Poole, where they run a gallery. As for myself, I visited High Thornhays on several more occasions during my time at college, but nothing extraordinary ever happened. I never bagged myself a Headley gal, and I never met anyone worse than myself, as the old saying goes. I made a special point of inviting myself up to Dartmoor the following spring, on May the twenty-third—I took my dream, or whatever it was, that seriously, at least—but as luck would have it, Emily had knocked pony club on the head by then. In fact, she’d started going out with a boy from Newton Abbot, and we saw very little of her that weekend. She was there to wave me off on the evening of my departure, as cheerful as ever.
Once that particular date had passed, and the charm had been broken, I rarely if ever thought about the man in the armchair again. Life has a way of filling in the empty places, if you let it. I’m one of those people who hardly ever remember their dreams, and those I do remember haven’t featured the party guest, not for a long time now. Life settled into its everyday groove, which was fine by me. I wasn’t looking for anything deeper. As Bertolt Brecht said, in a poem I once knew off by heart, but seem to have forgotten most of now, nothing could be harder than the quest for fun.
In 1984 the quest took me from Exeter up to London, where I made good use of my 2.2 in English lit playing roadie for a shambling indie band called the Stellar Gibbons. Off the back of that I got a job in a rehearsal studios near Clink Wharf, and within ten years I was running the place—not bad for someone with my essentially adolescent approach to career-building. It was there I first met Lee Oliveira.
Lee came highly recommended from the temping agency, and even though I’d already filled the vacancy, her interview lasted twice as long as the woman’s who actually got the job. She was interested in music, and I was interested in her; one thing led to another, and we’ve been together the best part of a decade now. We have our own place in Islington, and Lee’s expecting at last. All those years of sperm tests and fertility clinics, and then everything fell into place a month or two ago quite naturally. We were knocked out. Lee’s folks came over from their retirement pad on the Algarve, my mum and dad drove up from Weston, and there was a get-together. It was nice.
Lee’s second scan was on the morning of July the seventh. I’d been up all night in the studio with a band getting ready for their first big national tour, but there was no way I was missing that appointment. I met her in the doctor’s waiting room at half eight; I held her hand while they moved the sensor across her belly and we watched the magic images on the screen. Afterwards, she went into work and I caught the bus home.
The doctor’s was in Munster Square, near Regent’s Park. I walked as far as Euston and jumped on a number 30. No sooner had I sat down than I was fishing my copy of the scan out of its manila envelope. The woman next to me saw me holding it up to the light (Now, which bit is the head again?) and smiled before popping the buds of her Walkman into her ears. I fished out my iPod and followed suit, thinking to listen through some live-in-studio rehearsals from the night before. The first track opened on amplifier hum and the plugging-in of jacks. But then instead of the drummer’s count-in there came a voice:
“A significant proportion of birth defects don’t necessarily show up on scans, Mike. The really nasty ones, too. Should they do an amniocentesis, be particularly sure to ask—”
That was all I heard. I’d already ripped off my headphones and lurched up out of my seat. The gray daylight of a mild July morning in London was overlaid with a flashbulb burst of white, and for the first time in over twenty-three years I remembered the fleeting impression, that blood-red retinal afterimage that I’d blinked away, that night in the long room at High Thornhays when Dave turned on the light. The man in the armchair, the flicker of glowing coals in his eyes, the terrible tiger’s smile . . .
The bus was just pulling up at the next stop, and without thinking I barged my way off. I couldn’t stay in that confined space, not now the panic had sunk its hooks so deep into my crawling skin. My iPod—an engraved present from Lee—was still on the seat, along with the ultrasound scan of our unborn baby. The police returned them to me later, when they allowed me to leave the scene. Because this was exactly nine forty-five am on Thursday the seventh of July, 2005, near the junction of Tavistock Square and Upper Woburn Place, and not two minutes after I’d got off the bus an eighteen-year-old on the top deck, Hasib Hussain from Leeds, set off the explosive device in his rucksack, killing thirteen of my fellow passengers. Across London, more bombs were already being detonated.
The rest of that morning was a blur, really, the bad news filtering through from across the capital while we waited behind police cordons to be told what to do. Mobile phone networks were all down, and we had to make do with rumors and Chinese whispers and whatever the coppers would let on, which wasn’t much at first, and all the time we were smelling it on the air: Death, in a leafy London square. The simplest things—buses, tube trains—stood revealed as agents of potential chaos. Everything had the capacity to harm you. Everything you thought you knew.
I wasn’t scared for me, not really; only for Lee, and the baby. She, of course, was horrified, and there was a lot of crying and pledging of love that evening, when I finally got home. As we lay in bed hugging each other, I remember her saying, “This feels like such a turning point for us, Mike; it’s like a second chance. Like we’ve been spared. We’ve been so lucky—first the baby, and now you getting off that bus at exactly the right time.” Of course, I hadn’t told her why I’d got off the bus. How could I? “I just feel”—she wiped her nose on a tissue and squeezed my arm—” I just feel as though it’s time to do all the things we’ve ever wanted to do—do them now. There’s no point in putting anything off any more—don’t you feel that way? We should just go for it, full-on, live each day as if it’s going to be our last. Don’t you think?’
I agreed with her, and squeezed her back and told her I loved her. I believe I also told her everything was going to be all right, which is a thing we all do, I suppose, a lie we all tell. In times of crisis we crave parental reassurance, an order of protection unavailable in the grown-up world. Somehow or other we got off to sleep, and the panic went away for the space of a few hours. No dreams—not that I remember—but on waking it was his words that were running through my head, the voice that had cut through my headphones on the bus. Without thinking I reached across and laid a hand across Lee’s stomach.
It wasn’t until teatime that next day that Lee told me the first of the things she was planning to do, the one big thing she’d been putting off for God knows how long. It was so important to her now, she said, now that she was going to have a child of her own. I was uneasy even before she told me, and afterwards . . . this was when the panic kicked in, for real this time; and it’s never gone away, not once, in all the days and weeks since.
Lee was adopted, you see; she never knew her birth parents. The Oliveiras had shortened her birth name to Lee, and when she’d asked what the full version had been her parents had told her, “Never you mind.” Now, she did mind; she felt it was a necessary step towards self-knowledge. She didn’t want to involve her folks, so instead she was going to get hold of her adoption file from the council. Already she’d been in touch with the General Register Office, and they’d told her what to do, who to see, what forms to fill out. She told me all this over dinner that Friday evening, and ever since then I’ve been waiting in a kind of daze for the axe to fall.
It’s August now, a hot brassy afternoon heavy with the threat of thunderstorms and downpour. I’ve been home from work since lunchtime; I had a feeling it would have arrived, and of course it had, punctual as any bad news and as impossible to ignore. It was waiting on the doormat with the flyers and the junk mail, a big white envelope with the council’s logo on it, for the personal attention of “Lee Oliveira.” I hav
en’t opened it; it’s lying in front of me on the kitchen table. I know what it’ll say. I know the name inside—I never forgot it. Lee for Alethea; seems all too obvious. Poor Mrs. Kakoulis; though I doubt she was a Mrs., somehow. Did he visit her as well, the uninvited party guest, the bad man in the dark? Which of the forking paths did he push her down, to which dizzy cliff-edge?
And now, as the clock ticks on against the wreck of the day and the last assurances of rationality fall behind like flotsam on a sea deceptively calm for the time being, I sit at the kitchen table with no protection from my nightmares and wait for Lee to come home. Our baby, too—our gorgeous, impossible baby girl—nestled inside her and growing, getting bigger every day. In my head there’s the ringing of static, the numbing feedback whine of blank horror and tireless malevolence. I don’t know what I’ll say to her, when she opens the envelope and tells me what’s inside. I don’t know what I can say. There is only one question I have, and I can’t ask it of any living being, Lee least of all:
Will it be before the birth, or afterwards? When will it happen?
When?
About the Author
Steve Duffy’s stories have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies in Europe and North America. His third collection of short supernatural fiction, Tragic Life Stories, was launched in Brighton, England, at the World Horror Convention 2010; his fourth, The Moment of Panic is due to appear in 2011, and will include the International Horror Guild award-winning short story, “The Rag-and-Bone Men.” Steve lives in North Wales.
“Certain Death For A Known Person” began as a phrase jotted in a notebook some time in the late 1980s, and became a story some twenty years later. It was written in a rented cottage in the Welsh countryside, one cold week in the deep midwinter; the author would like to thank his sister, Kathy Hubbard, for being as generous with her encouragement and advice during its writing as she is in so many other ways. Thanks are also due to editors Michael Kelly (who published the story in his anthology Apparitions), and Barbara Roden (who oversaw its inclusion into Tragic Life Stories), for helping to present this nasty little tale in the best possible light.
Story Notes
“Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre” offered us the horror of having no choice. The narrator of Steve Duffy’s “Certain Death For a Known Person” is forced to make a choice, and is warned there will be repercussions. We suspect—since this is a story, of course—young Mike will have to confront them in a personal and painful manner. Unless, of course, he—and we—can deny, without doubt, that there “is a balance in all things . . . though it may not be immediately apparent. Interconnections, synchronicities.”
Well—can you?
THE ONES WHO GOT AWAY
STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES
Later we would learn that the guy kept a machete close to his front door. That he kept it there specifically for people like us. For the chance of people like us. That he’d been waiting.
I was fifteen.
It was supposed to be a simple thing we were doing.
In a way, I guess it was. Just not the way Mark had told us it would be.
If you’re wondering, this is the story of why I’m not a criminal. And also why I pick my pizza up instead of having it delivered. It starts with us getting tighter and tighter with Mark, letting him spot us a bag here, a case there, a ride in-between, until we owe him enough that it’s easier to just do this thing for him than try to scrounge up the cash.
What you need to know about Mark is that he’s twenty-five, twenty-six, and smart enough not to be in jail yet but stupid enough to be selling out the front door of his apartment.
Like we were geniuses ourselves, yeah.
As these things go, what started out as a custody dispute took a complicated turn, and whoever Mark was in the hole with came to him for a serious favor, the kind he couldn’t really say no to. The less he knew, the better.
What he did know, or at least what he told us, was that somebody needed to have the fear of God placed in them.
This was what he’d been told.
In his smoky living room, I’d looked to Tim and he was already pulling his eyes away, focusing on, I don’t know. Something besides me.
“The fear of God,” though.
I was stupid enough to ask just what, specifically, that might be. Mark narrowed his eyes in thought, as if considering the many answers. By ten, when I knew it was time to be home already, what the three of us finally hit on as the real and true proper fear of God was to think you’re going to die, to be sure this is the end, and then live.
We thought we were helping Mark with his dilemma.
Sitting across from us, he crushed out cigarette after cigarette, squinched his face up as if trying to stay awake. Every few minutes he’d lean his head back and rub the bridge of his nose.
The trick of this operation was that there couldn’t be any bruises or cuts, nothing that would show in court.
Of all the things we’d thought of, the knives and guns and nails and fire and acid and, for some reason, a whole series of things involving the tongue and pieces of wire, the only thing that left a mark on just the mind, not the body, was tape. Duct tape. A dollar and change at the convenience store.
This is how you plan a kidnapping.
Mark’s suggestion that it should be us instead of him in the van came down to his knowledge of the law: we were minors. Even if we got caught, it’d get kicked when we turned eighteen.
To prove this, he told us his own story: at sixteen, he’d killed his stepdad with a hammer because of a bad scene involving a sister, and then just had to spend two years in lock-up.
Our objection—mine—was that this was all different, wasn’t it? It’s not like we were going to kill anybody.
So, yeah, I was the first one of us that said it: we.
If Tim heard it, he didn’t look over.
The second part of Mark’s argument was What could we really be charged with anyway? Rolling some suit into a van for a joyride?
The third, more reluctant part had to do with a tally he had in his head of bags we’d taken on credit, cases we’d helped top off, rides we’d bummed.
Not counting tonight, of course, he added. Because we were his friends.
The rest of it, the next eighteen hours, was nothing big. Looking back, I know my heart should have been hammering the whole time, that I shouldn’t have been able to talk to my parents in the kitchen, shouldn’t have been able to hold food down, shouldn’t have been able to stop fidgeting long enough to concentrate on any shows.
The truth of it is that there were long stretches in there where I didn’t even think about what we were doing that night.
It was just going to be a thing, a favor, nothing. Then we’d have a clean tab with Mark, and Mark would have a clean tab with whoever he owed, and maybe it even went farther up than that.
Nicholas, of course—it was his parent’s front door we were already aimed at—he was probably doing all the little kid things he was supposed to be doing for those eighteen hours: cartoons, cereal, remote control cars. Baseball in the yard with the old man, who, then anyway, was still just a dad. Just catching bad throws, trying to coach them better.
At five after six, Tim called me.
Mark had just called him, from a payphone.
We had a pizza to deliver.
On the pockmarked coffee table in Mark’s apartment was all we were going to need: two rolls of duct tape, two pairs of gloves, and an old pizza bag from a place that had shut its doors back when Tim and me’d been in junior high.
The gloves were because tape was great for prints, Mark told us.
What that said to us was that he wasn’t setting us up. That he really would be doing this himself, if he didn’t want to help us out.
Like I said, we were fifteen.
Tim still is.
The van Mark had for us was primer black, no chrome, so obviously stolen that my first impulse was to cruise the bowling alley, nod to Sherr
y and the rest of the girls, then just keep driving.
If the van were on a car lot in some comedy sketch, where there’s car lots that cater to bad guys, the salesmen would look back to the van a few times for the jittery, ski-masked kidnappers, and keep shaking his head, telling them they didn’t want that one, no. That one was only for serious kidnappers. Cargo space like that? Current tags? Thin hotel mattresses inside, to muffle sound?
No, no, the one they wanted, it was this hot little number he’d just gotten in yesterday.
Then, when the kidnappers fell in with him, to see this hot little number, one would stay behind, his ski-mask eyes still locked on the van.
The reason he’s wearing a ski mask, of course, is that he’s me.
What I was thinking was that this could work, that we could really do this.
Instead of giving us a map or note, Mark followed us out to the curb, his head ducked into his shoulders the way it did anytime he was outside, like he knew God was watching, or he had a bad history with birds. He told Tim the address, then told Tim to say it back.
2243 Hickory.
It was up on the hill, a rich place.
“Sure about this?” Mark asked as we were climbing into the van.
I smiled a criminal smile, the kind where just one side of your mouth goes up, and didn’t answer him.
2243 Hickory. A lawyer’s house, probably.
We were supposed to take whoever answered the door. Nothing about it that wasn’t going to be easy.
To make it more real, we stopped for a pizza to put in the pizza bag. It took all the money we had on us, but this was serious business. Another way to look at it was we were paying twelve dollars for all the weed and beer and gas Mark had burned on our undeserving selves.
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, 2010 Page 38
