Without fuss or argument, on the night of Christmas Eve, they broke into work details and set about preparing their ultimate celebration.
Alasdair and Linda worked in the kitchen, finishing what they had started with the turkey, and deciding they would serve it when it was ready to be eaten, not when it was traditionally acceptable to eat.
Stephen Spiller took Milton Bream and Carla Breton, and the three drove out to a late opening garage in his four-wheel drive Mitsubishi, where they bought as much wine, beer, whisky and fruit juice as they could afford.
The young man behind the counter, the peak on his company baseball cap skewed to four-o’clock, whistled as he packed the bags.
“Must be a hell of a party,” he said, glancing with deadpan bemusement to the clock above the door.
On any other day, Milton would have said something in response. Something like “You have no idea”, or “More likely, heaven”. But that evening, it didn’t feel right. Small talk was words wasted, and at that moment they felt like such a precious resource the thought of wasting them on someone else – on someone who wasn’t Penny Moon – frightened him. He paid up, and smiled a thank-you, then the three of them left in silence.
Judy and Penny took the head torches and followed the directions they’d been given to Bryn and Graham’s allotment. The snow continued to fall around them, but it was too heavy and damp to settle in a satisfactory way. But the way the night speckled ahead of them reminded Penny of a documentary she had seen about a village somewhere in North America that had been destroyed by a volcano. There, it had been ashes which had fallen, settling into a blue-grey snowscape that painted the abandoned streets and houses with a melancholic palette that was beautiful in its way: the once bustling streets and squares condemned to a gentle, empty peace.
The two women emptied the allotment of everything they could find. They ignored the cold and the damp, digging briskly, without discussion. They carried the goods back across the field in bulging carrier bags, their faces flushed with a pride so warm it kept the winter well at bay.
Deirdre Spiller had a friend who worked as part of the tech crew for a local theatre. She harried him over the telephone until he arrived with a sound system and lighting in the back of his van.
“This will cost you a fortune,” he said, having been talked into accepting her bank card with her PIN number written on a slip of paper.
“What other time will I have to spend it?” she said.
Monica and the three Spiller kids searched the attic for decorations and found, amongst other things, a crate of spray cans including festive reds and greens and golds. To begin with they were cautious with them, spraying the boughs of oak and pine and the chains of ivy Bryn had cut for them, but Alasdair saw what they were doing and squatted beside them.
“Think bigger,” he said. He took one of the cans of gold and across the kitchen wall, drew a lopsided festive star that glittered brightly as it dripped and dried. The look the children exchanged when he handed the can back to them was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.
Dinner was served at five in the morning and there was more of it than most of those who attended the party had ever seen. It kept coming, on plates and pans and tupperware boxes. Everyone had seconds. Most had thirds. It seemed perversely rude to leave anything behind.
There was music too. There was light and movement, spilling from the windows of the house all through the night. There were no immediate neighbours to worry about. Almost all the neighbours were there after all.
The Spillers danced in the front garden, their children chased around them with brightly coloured torches. The snow turned to rain but nobody cared.
There was singing, dancing, stories and jokes. As the morning subsided into afternoon, everyone clustered together in the lounge because no-one wanted to be alone.
Carla Bretton presented the new chart she had been working on for the street. It was a large piece of blank paper, taped together from a dozen sheets. She spread it out over the floor of the lounge and passed pens around the group so that everyone could write or draw the future they chose.
They slept where they sat.
They woke, they ate.
They slept again.
Two o’clock came and went, but the Dormers didn’t appear.
The evening fell again, the day had moved so swiftly, the sun racing through the sky as though it was in a hurry to be done. The second night was more subdued, but the residents of number seven remained together throughout.
***
Boxing Day
On the morning of Boxing Day, Alasdair was the first to leave the musty nest of the house in more than twenty-four hours. There had been more snow during the night, not much, but enough to dust the tarmac of Hope Street, coating the fields opposite in a way which glittered as though they had been painted with precious stones. He crossed the road to get a closer look, and for the first time in years, he was struck by the modest beauty of the place where he lived.
He had a smile on his face as he walked down the road to the Dormers’ house and slotted a card through the letterbox. The Spiller kids had made it themselves. It had been signed by everyone.
When he got back to number seven, he saw at once how the house had become silent and dark in his brief absence, as though the Christmas celebrations had reached their apex point and plunged downwards into an irreversible night. The stereo was still playing. That party album of Suzie’s one of the kids had found. It was jolly and insistent and – at that moment – inescapably sad.
Alasdair Felton steeled himself, suddenly feeling the morning’s cold he had brusquely dismissed only moments earlier. Then he took the path towards the door.
He was surprised to find himself feeling betrayed, and he was disappointed he should imagine such a thing. He was disappointed too, when he stopped well short of the front door, his hand outstretched and impotent. He could feel the weight of the darkness that occupied the house and he remembered how Una had planted the rose bush outside Marlon Swick’s house. How had she got so much closer to the house than he could now?
If everyone else had gone, why should he be the one to be left behind? It was a problem with a very simple solution, he just needed to go home and join everyone. But at that moment, he knew he wasn’t brave enough to follow them so baldly. A fear gripped him, compounding both his isolation and the weight of the darkness. He stepped back and back and back under its influence. Cursing himself as a coward, cursing the street for leaving him so alone.
***
From the upstairs window of number twelve Hope Street, Kelly Dormer saw Alasdair approach up the front path, and she saw her husband step out of the door to intercept him before he reached the house. She didn’t hear what they said to each other. The double glazing installed throughout number twelve had been expensive for a reason. All she heard was the hum of the boiler, the soft breathing of Hilary as he clung to her knees. He seemed so frightened of everything these days, and her hand reached down to touch his hair, a simple act of communion that comforted them both.
When she had first met Daniel, she had thought him to be a quiet, gentle little man. The fourth child of five, he had the look of someone who had been left behind. Back then, the friends they knew had thought of her as the confident one. Back then, she would lead him by the hand, and he would follow after her, a smile on his face as she taught him the way. They had rented a little flat together in Midholme in the early days. A little one-bed place above the chemists on Aston Street; stained carpets, threadbare curtains, but warm and welcome and theirs. Good fortune got in the way as good fortune sometimes does. Unexpectedly, they had come into some money when his father had died – complications and conditions in the will gave Daniel unexpected favour, even as his brothers and sisters disowned him. They bought the house at number twelve. It wasn’t so far from the town, but as the years passed it felt as though it was drifting further and further away. Daniel didn’t mind. It had never occurred to Kell
y how her husband might have considered ownership to be a kind of victory.
Outside, she saw he was doing all the talking, while Alasdair Felton simply watched him. Alasdair’s posture was slouched in resignation and his expression was a sad one. He shook his head at something, then nodded at something else. Finally, he glanced up at the window where Kelly was standing and smiled briefly to acknowledge her before he turned away.
She watched him walk across the road, not looking one way or the other. When he reached the low brick wall, he climbed over it, bouncing to his feet in the mud beyond as though his agility had surprised them both. She saw him brush the dusting of snow off his jeans and jacket and she stayed watching as he set off across the field, painted white, a diminishing figure, a scarecrow, a stick man.
Downstairs, the front door slammed, and she felt the heat of her husband’s fury rising, theatrical, to fill the hall.
“The cheek of it,” he was saying to an audience he could only imagine hung on every word. “The absolute cheek of it.” Then he stopped, his abrupt silence an angry void that left room for the dunk-dunk-dunk of an insistent bass line delivered by distant speakers, its vibration pushing through the double glazing after all.
“And they’ve left the music on!” he said, the pitch of his voice rising to a point. “Can you believe this? They’ve left the fucking music on.”
Kelly closed her eyes. It helped, in a way.
***
Number 12
Three days later, Daniel Dormer woke to find his wife and son had left during the night. They’d taken the Saab, his mother-in-law’s jewellery box and the first edition of Brave New World which they’d found in a second-hand bookshop in Frome during their honeymoon. Kelly had left a note on the kitchen table. Four pages, double sided, in which she laid out exactly why she was not coming back. He read only the first page before consigning the rest to the fire in the living room.
It didn’t make any sense to him. Number twelve was the only house left on Hope Street. He had been right all along. He had done the right thing. He had acted in an exemplary manner and he had absolutely nothing to be ashamed about.
So why was there now this void in his house where his family had once been? It felt inexplicable. It felt unfair.
It was too early to open a beer but he did so anyway, sitting in his armchair in the lounge, the thin sound of the sound system from number seven tapping into focus whenever he allowed himself silence. It seemed to him that the same ten or twelve tracks were cycling over and over. Awful music. Cheap. Poppy. How the power hadn’t been cut off yet he didn’t know. He’d made enough phone calls. Left enough messages. Good god, it was grating.
He stared up at the corner of the ceiling.
This was how it started, he thought. In corners. In clefts. In alcoves where the shadows conspired and bred like spiderwebs. As he stared into the corner of the room, he imagined how the darkness might creep across the contours of the ceiling tiles, snaking across the room like tangles of long black hair.
The thought alarmed him. He leapt to his feet and edged closer, searching for evidence that his home had been compromised. He pulled the foot stool across the floor and climbed onto it so he could peer closer, but he felt nothing. There was nothing there at all.
As the days passed, his paranoia grew. He moved restlessly from room to room, searching for signs. Brushing his fingers across the walls and floors, inspecting his home’s infrastructure, looking for anything that might demonstrate to him how it was destined to fail.
There was a picture in the dining room that Kelly had loved, but which he had never warmed to. In it, a woman sat alone in a cluttered country kitchen, her head turned slightly to look out of the painting, her expression a little arch as though she had only just realised she had been seen, caught in the act of something impossible to prove. He didn’t know the artist, he’d never asked. But on that particular afternoon, he was struck with the idea that the kitchen in the painting was starting to become unliveable in the same ways as the houses on Hope Street.
There was nothing to support this hypothesis. The painting hadn’t changed in any meaningful way. The colours were still vivid and bright. But Daniel’s fear was irrational and untamed, he only needed to see the picture from a slightly different perspective to assume it had become the breach he had been looking for. He took it with both hands and tore it from the wall, throwing it to the floor.
Staring at the discoloured rectangle it left behind, his fear was compounded as it dawned on him just how little of his house he could actually see, and the realisation made him stagger backwards, inadvertently stamping on the glass frame and making it splinter under his heel.
Over the next few days, he worked his way through every room, clearing each of furniture, pictures, carpets, light fittings, as though the corruption could breed in the spaces they had occupied. Out went the computers, the accounts, the family photographs. Out went the flat-screen television, the hi-fi, his wife’s paperbacks, his son’s toys. Out went everything with gaps and nooks and spaces where shadows could be smuggled in.
He stacked everything in the front garden, the pile teetering dangerously until it spilled into the road. He didn’t care. He had too much work to do. He emptied cupboards in the kitchen, tipped out the drawers. He retrieved his Makita drill from the shed and pulled down the internal doors. He tore up the carpets and fought them through the doorway. He hacked away at the laminate, exposing the real wooden floorboards beneath. They looked bald and dusty, unused to being seen.
He bought paint, white paint, and worked through every room, every wall, leaving them as bright and blinding as he could. He surprised himself when he started to sing along to the hum of the music from number seven. He’d heard the songs so often now, he knew all the words.
They would see. His wife, his son. When they came back, they would see. Layer after layer after layer, he painted, as though he might ward off the darkness by making the whole house shine.
***
This is Malcolm Devlin’s fifth story for Interzone. He also has a novelette in the current Black Static, with other stories recently published in Nightscript 2 and the anthology Aickman’s Heirs. His first collection, You Will Grow Into Them, is due to be published by Unsung Stories in June 2017. Current house status: liveable.
BOOK ZONE
STRANGE MONSTERS: A MUSIC & WORDS COLLABORATION
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam & Peter Brewer
THE WOLF IN THE ATTIC
Paul Kearney
BODIES OF WATER
V.H. Leslie
REVENGER
Alastair Reynolds
SUMMERLONG
Peter S. Beagle
SPARROW FALLING
Gaie Sebold
THE RISE OF IO
Wesley Chu
THE ROOT
Na’amen Gobert Tilahun
DECADE 1: THE BEST OF ALBEDO ONE
edited by John Kenny
STRANGE MONSTERS: A MUSIC & WORDS COLLABORATION
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam & Peter Brewer
Easy Brew Studio, 56 minutes, download $7.99/CD $9.99 (cdbaby.com)
Ian Hunter
It seems apt to me that the day after I caught poet Ryan Van Winkle read in Glasgow that I should settle down and listen to Strange Monsters. Apt because Van Winkle has performed around the world inside his portable poetry room, a room filled with ephemera that the listener can pick up, flick through, read, while Van Winkle reads his poems almost in the background and lets the words wash over you, hoping that some might stick in your mind. If you haven’t guessed by my mention that I listened to Strange Monsters and that it’s available from places like CD Baby…yes, Strange Monsters isn’t a book, it’s a collaboration between short story writer and poet Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam and Peter Brewer, and is available on CD, or some of that download stuff that I don’t understand. Stufflebeam provides the words, and occasionally she reads them too, although there are times when that is left to some actors to bring her
stories and poems to life. Likewise, composer Brewer has written the music and seven other musicians join him to provide the contemporary jazz soundtrack to five stories and a selection of poems from Stufflebeam’s back catalogue.
Readers of Interzone and Black Static will know Stufflebeam from her appearances in those pages where ‘Sleepers’ and ‘The Devil’s Hands’ were published, and her stories have also appeared in magazines like Lightspeed and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. She’s perfected that useful trick of having a story published and then reprinted, and possibly appearing again in audio form. Thus, one of the stories in this audiobook, ‘Skeletons’, was published elsewhere, reprinted, and had an audio outing before appearing here – but not like this, I’ll bet, not with actors speaking the words and some jazz scratching in the background or lulling you into a false sense of security. If you know Stufflebeam from her poems, there are six collected, all read by the poet herself, and it is interesting to note that practically all her published poems are here, and some of those like ‘The Ferryman’ and ‘Strange Monster’ received favourable mentions from Ellen Datlow in her Best Horror of the Year anthologies.
The audio collection starts with ‘The Stink of Horses’, a four-hander as Stufflebeam and three actors perform the piece, giving voice to their encounters with the mysterious Marina Golovina, a cursed Russian ballerina who hopefully didn’t stink like a horse after dancing, a remark and observation attributed to Chekhov. Mind you, given the jealous and obsessive attentions of others, body odours are the least of Marina’s worries. Brewer maintains the classical connection, drawing on Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty for his jazz accompaniment.
Interzone #266 - September-October 2016 Page 14
