“No you don’t,” Shone protested in a rage at everything that had led to the moment, but Unity swooped at him. She closed her bony hands around his cheeks and held on tight far longer than seemed reasonable before undoing the bow of the hood with her right hand while gripping and stroking his chin with the other. “Now it’s your turn to go in the dark.”
“I think I’ve had enough for one day, if you’ll excuse—”
This brought a commotion of protests not far short of outrage. “You aren’t done yet, a young thing like you.” “She’s older than you and she didn’t make a fuss.” “You’ve been caught, you have to play.” “If you don’t it won’t be fair.” The manager had retreated into the doorway and was pushing air at Shone with his outstretched hands as Daph mouthed, “It’s supposed to be the old lot’s time.” Her words and the rising chant of “Be fair” infected Shone with guilt, aggravated when Unity uncovered her reproachful eyes and held out the hood. He’d disappointed Ruth; he didn’t need to let these old folk down too. “Fair enough, I’ll play,” he said. “Just don’t twist me too hard.”
He hadn’t finished speaking when Unity planted the hood on his scalp and drew the material over his brows. It felt like the clammy bodies of the puppets. Before he had a chance to shudder it was dragging his eyelids down, and he could see nothing but darkness. The hood molded itself to his cheekbones as rapid fingers tied the cords behind his head. “Not too—” he gasped at whoever started twirling him across the room.
He felt as if he’d been caught by a vortex of cheering and hooting, but it included murmurs too. “He played with me in the bath.” “He wouldn’t let us in there.” “He made me miss my cartoons.” “That’s right, and he tried to take the control off us.” He was being whirled so fast he no longer knew where he was. “Enough,” he cried, and was answered by an instant hush. Several hands shoved him staggering forward, and a door closed stealthily behind him.
At first he thought the room had grown colder and damper. Then, as his giddiness steadied, he understood that he was in a different room, farther towards the rear of the house. He felt the patchy lack of carpet through his slippers, though that seemed insufficient reason for the faint scraping of feet he could hear surrounding him to sound so harsh. He thought he heard a whisper or the rattling of some object within a hollow container level with his head. Suddenly, in a panic that flared like white blindness inside the hood, he knew Daph’s last remark hadn’t been addressed to him, nor had it referred to anyone he’d seen so far. His hands flew to untie the hood—not to see where he was and with whom, but which way to run.
He was so terrified to find the cord immovably knotted that it took him seconds to locate the loose ends of the bow. A tug at them released it. He was forcing his fingertips under the edge of the hood when he heard light dry footsteps scuttle towards him, and an article that he tried to think of as a hand groped at his face. He staggered backwards, blindly fending off whatever was there. His fingers encountered ribs barer than they ought to be, and poked between them to meet the twitching contents of the bony cage. The whole of him convulsed as he snatched off the hood and flung it away.
The room was either too dark or not quite dark enough. It was at least the size of the one he’d left, and contained half a dozen sagging armchairs that glistened with moisture, and more than twice as many figures. Some were sprawled like loose bundles of sticks topped with grimacing masks on the chairs, but nonetheless doing their feeble best to clap their tattered hands. Even those that were swaying around him appeared to have left portions of themselves elsewhere. All of them were attached to strings or threads that glimmered in the murk and led his reluctant gaze to the darkest corner of the room. A restless mass crouched in it—a body with too many limbs, or a huddle of bodies that had grown inextricably entangled by the process of withering. Some of its movement, though not all, was of shapes that swarmed many-legged out of the midst of it, constructing parts of it or bearing away fragments or extending more threads to the other figures in the room. It took an effort that shriveled his mind before he was able to distinguish anything else: a thin gap between curtains, a barred window beyond—to his left, the outline of a door to the hall. As the figure nearest to him bowed so close he saw the very little it had in the way of eyes peering through the hair it had stretched coquettishly over its face, Shone bolted for the hall.
The door veered aside as his dizziness swept it away. His slippers snagged a patch of carpet and almost threw him on his face. The doorknob refused to turn in his sweaty grasp, even when he gripped it with both hands. Then it yielded, and as the floor at his back resounded with a mass of uneven yet purposeful shuffling, the door juddered open. He hauled himself around it and fled awkwardly, slippers flapping, out of the dark part of the hall.
Every room was shut. Other than the scratching of nails or of the ends of fingers at the door behind him, there was silence. He dashed along the hall, striving to keep the slippers on, not knowing why, knowing only that he had to reach the front door. He seized the latch and flung the door wide and slammed it as he floundered out of the house.
The rain had ceased except for a dripping of foliage. The gravel glittered like the bottom of a stream. The coach he’d heard arriving—an old private coach spattered with mud—" parked across the rear of his car, so close it practically touched the bumper. He could never maneuver out of that trap. He almost knocked on the window of the television lounge, but instead limped over the gravel and into the street, towards the quiet hotels. He had no idea where he was going except away from the house. He’d hobbled just a few paces, his slippers growing more sodden and his feet sorer at each step, when headlamps sped out of the town.
They belonged to a police car. It halted beside him, its hazard lights twitching, and a uniformed policeman was out of the passenger seat before Shone could speak. The man’s slightly chubby concerned face was a wholesome pink beneath a street lamp. “Can you help me?” Shone pleaded. “I—”
“Don’t get yourself in a state, old man. We saw where you came from.”
“They boxed me in. My car, I mean, look. If you can just tell them to let me out—”
The driver moved to Shone’s other side. He might have been trying to outdo his colleague’s caring look. “Calm down now. We’ll see to everything for you. What have you done to your head?”
“Banged it. Hit it with, you wouldn’t believe me, it doesn’t matter. I’ll be fine. If I can just fetch my stuff—”
“What have you lost? Won’t it be in the house?”
“That’s right, at the top. My shoes are.”
“Feet hurting, are they? No wonder with you wandering around like that on a night like this. Here, get his other arm.” The driver had taken Shone’s right elbow in a firm grip, and now he and his partner easily lifted Shone and bore him towards the house. “What’s your name, sir?” the driver enquired.
“Not Thomson, whatever anyone says. Not Tommy Thomson or Tom either. Or rather, it’s Tom all right, but Tom Shone. That doesn’t sound like Thomson, does it? Shone as in shine. I used to know someone who said I still shone for her, you still shine for me, she’d say. Been to see her today as a matter of fact.” He was aware of talking too much as the policemen kept nodding at him and the house with its two lit windows—the television lounge’s and his—reared over him. “Anyway, the point is the name’s Shone,” he said. “Ess aitch, not haitch as some youngsters won’t be told it isn’t, oh en ee. Shone.”
“We’ve got you.” The driver reached for the empty bellpush, then pounded on the front door. It swung inwards almost at once, revealing the manager. “Is this gentleman a guest of yours, Mr. Snell?” the driver’s colleague said.
“Mr. Thomson. We thought we’d lost you,” Snell declared, and pushed the door wide. All the people from the television lounge were lining the hall like spectators at a parade. “Tommy Thomson,” they chanted.
“That’s not me,” Shone protested, pedaling helplessly in the air until
his slippers flew into the hall. “I told you—”
“You did, sir,” the driver murmured, and his partner said even lower, “Where do you want us to take you?”
“To the top, just to—”
“We know,” the driver said conspiratorially. The next moment Shone was sailing to the stairs and up them, with the briefest pause as the policemen retrieved a slipper each. The chant from the hall faded, giving way to a silence that seemed most breathlessly expectant in the darkest sections of the house. He had the police with him, Shone reassured himself. “I can walk now,” he said, only to be borne faster to the termination of the stairs. “Where the door’s open?” the driver suggested. “Where the light is?”
“That’s me. Not me really, anything but, I mean—”
They swung him through the doorway by his elbows and deposited him on the carpet. “It couldn’t be anybody else’s room,” the driver said, dropping the slippers in front of Shone. “See, you’re already here.”
Shone looked where the policemen were gazing with such sympathy it felt like a weight that was pressing him into the room. A photograph of himself and Ruth, arms around each other’s shoulders with a distant mountain behind, had been removed from his drenched suit and propped on the shelf in place of the telephone. “I just brought that,” he protested, “you can see how wet it was,” and limped across the room to don his shoes. He hadn’t reached them when he saw himself in the mirror.
He stood swaying a little, unable to retreat from the sight. He heard the policemen murmur together and withdraw, and their descent of the stairs, and eventually the dual slam of car doors and the departure of the vehicle. His reflection still hadn’t allowed him to move. It was no use his telling himself that some of the tangle of wrinkles might be cobwebs, not when his hair was no longer graying but white. “All right, I see it,” he yelled—he had no idea at whom. “I’m old. I’m old.”
“Soon,” said a whisper like an escape of gas in the corridor, along which darkness was approaching as the lamps failed one by one. “You’ll be plenty of fun yet,” the remains of another voice said somewhere in his room. Before he could bring himself to look for its source, an item at the end of most of an arm fumbled around the door and switched out the light. The dark felt as though his vision was abandoning him, but he knew it was the start of another game. Soon he would know if it was worse than hide-and-seek—worse than the first sticky unseen touch of the web of the house on his face.
No Story in It (2000)
‘Grandad.’
Boswell turned from locking the front door to see Gemima running up the garden path cracked by the late September heat. Her mother April was at the tipsy gate, and April’s husband Rod was climbing out of their rusty crimson Nissan. ‘Oh, Dad,’ April cried, slapping her forehead hard enough to make him wince. ‘You’re off to London. How could we forget it was today, Rod?’
Rod pursed thick lips beneath a ginger moustache broader than his otherwise schoolboyish plump face. ‘We must have had other things on our mind. It looks as if I’m joining you, Jack.’
‘You’ll tell me how,’ Boswell said as Gemima’s small hot five-year-old hand found his grasp.
‘We’ve just learned I’m a cut-back.’
‘More of a set-back, will it be? I’m sure there’s a demand for teachers of your experience.’
‘I’m afraid you’re a bit out of touch with the present.’
Boswell saw his daughter willing him not to take the bait. ‘Can we save the discussion for my return?’ he said. ‘I’ve a bus and then a train to catch.’
‘We can run your father to the station, can’t we? We want to tell him our proposal.’ Rod bent the passenger seat forward. ‘Let’s keep the men together,’ he said.
As Boswell hauled the reluctant belt across himself he glanced up. Usually Gemima reminded him poignantly of her mother at her age - large brown eyes with high startled eyebrows, inquisitive nose, pale prim lips - but in the mirror April’s face looked not much less small, just more lined. The car jerked forward, grating its innards, and the radio announced ‘A renewed threat of war—’ before Rod switched it off. Once the car was past the worst of the potholes in the main road, Boswell said ‘So propose.’
‘We wondered how you were finding life on your own,’ Rod said. ‘We thought it mightn’t be the ideal situation for someone with your turn of mind.’
‘Rod. Dad—’
Her husband gave the mirror a look he might have aimed at a child who’d spoken out of turn in class. ‘Since we’ve all overextended ourselves, we think the solution is to pool our resources.’
‘Which are those?’
‘We wondered how the notion of our moving in with you might sound.’
‘Sounds fun,’ Gemima cried.
Rod’s ability to imagine living with Boswell for any length of time showed how desperate he, if not April, was. ‘What about your own house?’ Boswell said.
‘There are plenty of respectable couples eager to rent these days. We’d pay you rent, of course. Surely it makes sense for all of us.’
‘Can I give you a decision when I’m back from London?’ Boswell said, mostly to April’s hopeful reflection. ‘Maybe you won’t have to give up your house. Maybe soon I’ll be able to offer you financial help.’
‘Christ,’ Rod snarled, a sound like a gnashing of teeth.
To start with the noise the car made was hardly harsher. Boswell thought the rear bumper was dragging on the road until tenement blocks jerked up in the mirror as though to seize the vehicle, which ground loudly to a halt. ‘Out,’ Rod cried in a tone poised to pounce on nonsense.
‘Is this like one of your stories, Grandad?’ Gemima giggled as she followed Boswell out of the car.
‘No,’ her father said through his teeth and flung the boot open. ‘This is real.’
Boswell responded only by going to look. The suspension had collapsed, thrusting the wheels up through the rusty arches. April took Gemima’s hand, Boswell sensed not least to keep her quiet, and murmured ‘Oh, Rod.’
Boswell was staring at the tenements. Those not boarded up were tattooed with graffiti inside and out, and he saw watchers at as many broken as unbroken windows. He thought of the parcel a fan had once given him with instructions not to open it until he was home, the present that had been one of Jean’s excuses for divorcing him. ‘Come with me to the station,’ he urged, ‘and you can phone whoever you need to phone.’
When the Aireys failed to move immediately he stretched out a hand to them and saw his shadow printed next to theirs on a wall, either half demolished or never completed, in front of the tenements. A small child holding a woman’s hand, a man slouching beside them with a fist stuffed in his pocket, a second man gesturing empty-handed at them...The shadows seemed to blacken, the sunlight to brighten like inspiration, but that had taken no form when the approach of a taxi distracted him. His shadow roused itself as he dashed into the rubbly road to flag the taxi down. ‘I’ll pay,’ he told Rod.
* * * *
‘Here’s Jack Boswell, everyone,’ Quentin Sedgwick shouted. ‘Here’s our star author. Come and meet him.’
It was going to be worth it, Boswell thought. Publishing had changed since all his books were in print - indeed, since any were. Sedgwick, a tall thin young but balding man with wiry veins exposed by a singlet and shorts, had met him at Waterloo, pausing barely long enough to deliver an intense handshake before treating him to a headlong ten-minute march and a stream of enthusiasm for his work. The journey ended at a house in the midst of a crush of them resting their fronts on the pavement. At least the polished nameplate of Cassandra Press had to be visible to anyone who passed. Beyond it a hall that smelled of curried vegetables was occupied by a double-parked pair of bicycles and a steep staircase not much wider than their handlebars. ‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Sedgwick declared. ‘It’s like one of your early things, being able to publish from home. Except in a story of yours the computers would take over and tell us what
to write.’
‘I don’t remember writing that,’ Boswell said with some unsureness.
‘No, I just made it up. Not bad, was it?’ Sedgwick said, running upstairs. ‘Here’s Jack Boswell, everyone...’
A young woman with a small pinched studded face and glistening black hair spiky as an armoured fist emerged from somewhere on the ground floor as Sedgwick threw open doors to reveal two cramped rooms, each featuring a computer terminal, at one of which an even younger woman with blonde hair the length of her filmy flowered blouse was composing an advertisement. ‘Starts with C, ends with e,’ Sedgwick said of her, and of the studded woman ‘Bren, like the gun. Our troubleshooter.’
Boswell grinned, feeling someone should. ‘Just the three of you?’
‘Small is sneaky, I keep telling the girls. While the big houses are being dragged down by excess personnel, we move into the market they’re too cumbersome to handle. Carole, show him his page.’
The publicist saved her work twice before displaying the Cassandra Press catalogue. She scrolled past the colophon, a C with a P hooked on it, and a parade of authors: Ferdy Thorn, ex-marine turned ecological warrior; Germaine Gossett, feminist fantasy writer; Torin Bergman, Scandinavia’s leading magic realist...‘Forgive my ignorance,’ Boswell said, ‘but these are all new to me.’
‘They’re the future.’ Sedgwick cleared his throat and grabbed Boswell’s shoulder to lean him towards the computer. ‘Here’s someone we all know.’
BOSWELL’S BACK! the page announced in letters so large they left room only for a shout-line from, Boswell remembered, theObserver twenty years ago - ‘Britain’s best SF writer since Wyndham and Wells’ - and a scattering of titles: The Future Just Began, Tomorrow Was Yesterday, Wave Goodbye To Earth, Terra Spells Terror, Science Lies In Wait...‘It’ll look better when we have covers to reproduce,’ Carole said. ‘I couldn’t write much. I don’t know your work.’
The Collected Short Fiction Page 134
