House of Fear

by Joe R. Lansdale

  I began at the top of the house, with the ebony bureau in Anka’s old dressing room, and worked my way down from there. It was not a pleasant task. Most of the things in Anka’s room had clearly not been touched since her death, and my fumbling among her underwear and jewellery had a feel of grave robbery about it. In any case, the key was not there. Neither was it in my uncle’s games table, nor in the fifty-drawer apothecary’s chest at the end of the hall, nor was it in the bathroom medicine cabinet, nor in any of the dozen or so cupboards or chests or chiffoniers in the three main guest bedrooms.

  I nearly gave up at that point, and had it not been for my dislike of being beaten I almost certainly would have done. In any case, I decided I had been coming at the problem from the wrong angle, concentrating on the where instead of the who. Given that Anka had died before him, the person most likely to have locked the cupboard was my Uncle Denny. It seemed odd and not a little ironic that the one room I hadn’t looked in so far was my uncle’s office.

  I made a cursory search of the bookshelves and the large wooden filing cabinet, and then began to go through his desk. There wasn’t much there, of course. All his legal papers and anything concerning his business activities had been packed up and removed to the Marseilles house a decade before. But if anything that made the things that were left behind seem all the more poignant. There was a stack of my old school reports, a postcard I’d sent to him and Anka during a class trip to the Norfolk Broads, my uncle’s onyx inkwell, the letter opener in the shape of a crocodile that I once coveted so much I stole it, only to smuggle it back into his desk during the black-coated small hours of the following morning.

  And there, in the secret drawer that had stopped being a secret when Anka showed me how to open it by pressing and then sliding a certain piece of the lustrous maple marquetry, were my uncle’s stamps.

  Uncle Denny always used to joke that he gave up serious collecting on the day I first outbid him at an auction.

  “This is where I throw in the towel,” he said. “Time to leave it to the professionals.”

  We were drinking champagne at the bar of some hotel in Knightsbridge, celebrating my Trinidad Red. Uncle Denny was still based mostly in London then, still living at Southshore. Anka was still alive. I laughed, and protested he had taught me everything I knew, that the game would be no fun without him.

  “But it’s not a game for you though, is it, Johnny? That’s where you and I differ, and that’s why I’m getting out now.”

  He was right, in a way, I suppose. Philately had always been my uncle’s hobby, a break from the jet-powered world of international investments, a place where he could occasionally be foolish and let down his guard. Whereas I had chosen to pour my own modest accretion of what Anka called the Gouss instinct for moral suicide into the peculiar business of buying and selling stamps. It was true that Uncle Denny had taught me a lot. But at some point it was inevitable that I would overtake him.

  I felt sad when I found the album, but at the same time it made me smile. I always liked to think that Uncle Denny had not given up the game entirely, that he still made the occasional purchase on the sly. Now it appeared that my suspicions had been correct.

  It was just a slim album, and the most of what it contained was if not second rate then unexceptional, issues my uncle had kept, I suspected, more for sentimental reasons than out of any hope that their value would increase.

  There were a couple of nice things, though: a Gagarin first day cover displaying the famous ‘yellow Vostok’ error, a Hitler skull stamp that I thought was almost certainly genuine, a strip of three fifty-cent McKillips, an artist’s commemorative that showed the complete New York skyline including the twin towers, issued at the end of August 2001 then hurriedly recalled on September 12th.

  It was an odd little collection, with something of the macabre about it. I turned the page, curious about what else might have taken his fancy. There was a yellow Romanian beetle stamp with three torn perforations, an unfranked Limoges Bleu, and a stamp with Anka’s face on it.

  I did not recognise her at first. What caught my attention was the sight of a stamp I had never seen before. I leaned forward to get a closer look, then examined it through the magnifying loupe I always carry in my right breast pocket.

  The stamp was Danish, and of a relatively scarce denomination. Its design featured the face of a woman, a detail from an oil painting. The woman looked familiar, and because I was seeing her out of context I wondered at first if it was some opera singer or minor film star that I was looking at. Then suddenly I realised it was Anka, her exact likeness.

  The artist’s name, Mikkelsen, was printed in silver along the stamp’s left hand margin. I had never heard of him, but that did not surprise me; it was my uncle that knew about art.

  I fetched my uncle’s Gibbons, still in its old place on the top of the filing cabinet, and began leafing through. It was an old edition, fifteen years out of date at least, but the stamp was not a new issue, and it didn’t take me long to find the listing. The stamp was one of a set of five, issued in nineteen-sixty-six to commemorate the art of Arne Mikkelsen. The other stamps in the set featured a white castle, a raven with a rose in its beak, a flying horse, and a wizened witch with agate-green eyes. The stamps were listed as common. In view of that it seemed odd that they were unknown to me.

  Gibbons had nothing to say about Mikkelsen, of course, but a brief search online told me that he had been an artist and book illustrator, made popular throughout Scandinavia for his representations of subjects from Norse mythology. He died in nineteen-fifty. The centenary of his birth in nineteen-sixty-six was marked by the issue of the five commemorative stamps, together with a lavishly illustrated catalogue of his work, entitled Fantasme.

  It took me a little more time to unearth the original paintings, but in the end I found what I was looking for on a website published by a Danish museum. The woman depicted on what I was coming to think of as Anka’s stamp was Maryane, a beautiful succubus who, according to legend, had enticed and then enslaved a number of powerful merchants and princes in Copenhagen, wearing them away to madness and then to dust.

  The painting was called ‘The Muse of Copenhagen.’ My first assumption was that Anka had been Mikkelsen’s model, but I now knew that this was impossible: Mikkelsen had died before Anka was born.

  Her mother then, or grandmother? I realised I knew nothing at all about Anka’s background. What puzzled me most was why Uncle Denny had never told me about the stamp, had never shown it to me. It crossed my mind that it was this, after all, that my uncle had been wanting to hide from me, that the stamp was the secret. I reached for the idea, but it eluded me. None of it made any sense.

  Suddenly I felt very tired. I switched off the computer and closed my eyes. My head drooped forward on my chest as I listened to the quiet sounds the house made when it was resting: the sighing of the floorboards, the rattle of steam in the hot water pipes, the sly whisper from the open chimney. When I first came to Southshore as a child I was disappointed not to hear the sound of the sea, but Anka told me it was because of the marshes.

  “The water is heavy with sand,” she said. “The sand steals its voice.”

  Her words haunted me for a long time. I found I was unable to rid myself of the image of old father Neptune, his beard clogged with mud, his throat choked with the dark, glistening quicksand of the Blackwater estuary. I dozed where I sat, not quite conscious, the pale fingers of the dying autumn brushing my face. I told myself I mustn’t drop off, there were still things I needed to do before I left.

  A hand was gripping my shoulder. I jerked awake.

  “Johnny,” she said. “You look just like a naughty schoolboy, falling asleep in your seat at the back of the class.”

  She sank to her knees at my feet. Slowly I reached out for her, burying my hands to the wrists in her glass-coloured hair.

  Time passed then, but I don’t know how much. Hours or days, possibly weeks. I know that, on the morning aft
er Anka first came to me, a woman arrived at the house, and that following a moment’s panicked confusion I realised it must be the Mrs Mellors my uncle had employed to do the cleaning. I remembered I had asked to see her but couldn’t recall exactly when that had been. She asked if I would be wanting to keep her on and I said yes. I also asked her if she could get in some shopping. When she asked what I would like her to buy, my mind went completely blank. I knew I probably needed food, but I didn’t feel hungry.

  “Just get what you got before,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. Anything you like.”

  She looked at me strangely but she took the money I offered and returned an hour or so later with three bags of groceries. I don’t remember seeing her again.

  During the days, I sorted through my uncle’s possessions, arranging his letters in date order, cataloguing his pictures. These tasks absorbed me while I was engaged in them, but afterwards I often had the sense of working in circles, repeating a thing incessantly with no hope of ever bringing it to completion. Anka was both there and not there. Sometimes she was physically present, at other times I was aware of her only as a kind of itching in the back of my mind, the sense that she was close by but could not be seen. Sometimes she brought me tea in the porcelain mugs, and when I mentioned that it tasted odd she said it was fennel tea, made from the herb in the garden that she liked to chew.

  “It’s good for you,” she said. “It will clear up those scabs on your arms.”

  I told her there were no scabs on my arms, but when I took off my shirt that night I saw she was right, that the skin of my forearms had become dry and abraded, its surface busy with small red lesions.

  “It’s the damp climate,” Anka said. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

  As the days grew shorter I felt listless and sad, but in bed with her I never seemed to tire.

  In the afternoons I dozed on the book room sofa. One afternoon towards the end of November I awoke out of troubled dreams to the knowledge that I was in the house alone. I opened the kitchen door and looked out, certain that I would see Anka down by the water as I often did, foraging for herbs or simply standing with folded arms, gazing out over the estuary.

  I asked her once if she was looking towards Denmark, but she just laughed and said she had been in England so long she had more or less forgotten what Denmark was like.

  On that day, though, there was no sign of her, there was just the grey water – the grey water and the grey sky, folded together like one grey blanket on top of another.

  I should go, I thought, but the idea refused to take hold. I closed the door and came back inside. There on the table in front of me was the missing Ravilious, the little steam train crossing its viaduct in the winter twilight. I picked it up, mystified as to how it had got there, then turned it over to look at the back. The picture itself appeared undamaged, but someone had scrawled some words on the hardboard backing. The felt tipped marker that had been used to write them was lying uncapped on the floor under the table.

  ‘Johnny,’ I read. ‘The key.’

  The key to what? I thought. Key to the problem? Key to the road map? Key to the door?

  It was my uncle’s writing, I knew that. But Uncle Denny was dead. He had been dead for weeks now, for months. Possibly years.

  Like a mud dredger churning the sands of the estuary I scoured my mind for a memory, the memory of my search for the key to the locked store cupboard. The cupboard had not been locked before, but now it was. I never did find the key. I had stopped looking when I found Anka’s stamp.

  I went groggily up the stairs to the half landing, convinced that when I reached the little store room I would find it open. It wasn’t, though; it was locked, just as before. I took hold of the handle and shook it, rattling the door in its frame. The lock held firm. I stood back from the door, aiming a hefty kick at its lower panel. Pain coursed up through my leg, curling itself in a ball when it reached my knee. I felt weak from fatigue, as if I had just climbed a mountain. Aside from my ferocious couplings with Anka it had been a long time since I attempted anything more strenuous than changing my location from one silent room to another.

  I retraced my steps to the kitchen. In the cupboard under the sink there was a rubber plunger and a small assortment of household tools: a pair of pliers, a steel claw hammer, two screwdrivers. I took the hammer and the heavier of the screwdrivers and went back up the stairs. Somehow I managed to jam the flattened tip of the screwdriver into the narrow space between the door and its frame. I worked it into the crack until it held firm, then struck out with the hammer as hard as I could. It missed the screwdriver by a couple of inches, bludgeoning the doorframe with a resounding crack. A long pale splinter of wood dropped to the floor. I froze, terrified that Anka would sense what I was doing and appear at my side. When nothing happened, I tried again, this time bringing the hammer down squarely on the handle of the screwdriver. There was a tense, splintering sound, and after a couple more blows the lock gave way.

  I was drenched in sweat, my shirt clinging to my back in damp patches. I remembered stories that had thrilled me as a boy, adventure yarns by Rice Burroughs and Rider Haggard in which men left for dead and half blinded by madness stumble on an oasis in the desert, outrunning the demons of sunlight and thirst by a hair’s-breadth miracle.

  But this was no oasis, this was a cupboard, and the inside of the cupboard was as I remembered. There was one small window, high in the exterior wall. Watery light ran through it, revealing to me a stack of mildewed suitcases, the cardboard packing cartons I had been so keen to get my hands on, and the large blanket chest that had always been used for storing spare bedlinen. The blanket chest was made from antique pine. Anka had brought it with her from Copenhagen.

  I lifted the lid. The body of the chest was filled with dried fennel stalks, a deep layer of them. An odour rose up, the pungent, aniseed scent of the tea Anka made, but intensified to the point of foulness. Nestled side-by-side in the straw were two humped, pale objects, each about the size of a melon. I picked up the one nearest to me. It was dry to the touch, and light as balsa. As I lifted it closer, the rank smell of the fennel intensified.

  It was an animal of some sort, or at least it had been. What remained was a desiccated husk, the shrivelled limbs drawn up, bunched together like the limbs of a foetus. The skin crackled where I touched it, like cellophane, a mass of parched wrinkles.

  I turned it over. The thing’s mouth was partly open, revealing a horde of pointed yellow teeth. They seemed too many, those teeth, and needle-fine, crammed inside the mouth like splinters, the teeth of some small but particularly unpleasant carnivore. The thing’s face was shrunken as a raisin and mottled with liver spots, but still I found no trouble in recognising the face of my Uncle Denny.

  As I stood there gazing down at him, one tiny foot kicked out feebly, blood-warm against the hollow of my palm.

  I sprang back, horrified, hurling the thing to the ground. It rolled rapidly away from me, disappearing beneath the mound of suitcases. A moment later I heard it scrabbling frantically for purchase as it tried to right itself. I shoved the chest backwards against the wall, trapping the loathsome creature in the space behind.

  I began shifting the cardboard boxes, using them to form a barricade around the blanket chest. Then I went downstairs to fetch some kindling. There had been a stack of newspapers in the kitchen but they seemed to have disappeared and I supposed Mrs Mellors had taken them for recycling. In the end I used what remained of my uncle’s papers, tearing them into strips and stuffing them into the spaces between the cartons. I worked as quickly as I could. I knew I didn’t have much time.

  I left the house by the back door, cutting down through the garden and striking out across the water meadows. I struggled over the unkempt ground for a mile or so then rejoined the road. My shoes were sodden through, the lower portion of my trousers streaked with mud. The sun was going down, by then, a glaucous orange, glistening on the still water of the estuary like spilled syrup
. The light of the rising fire was small by comparison, although I had no doubt that as the darkness deepened its power would grow.

  I managed to hitch a lift as far as Maldon, where I spent the night in a bed and breakfast before travelling back to London the following day. Late in the afternoon I received a phone call from my uncle’s solicitor, informing me that Southshore had burned to the ground.

  “I’m afraid it looks like arson,” he said. “Local youths, probably. I know this must be very upsetting, but I’m happy to tell you at least you’re still fully insured.”

  I wanted to ask if anything had escaped the conflagration but I did not quite dare. I hoped the silence from my end of the line would be taken for shock.

  A week before Christmas I attended a stamp fair in Basel, where I was able to acquire a complete set of the Mikkelsen commemoratives. The dealer was Danish. We discovered we had acquaintances in common – the stamp world is a small and sometimes uncomfortably intimate one – and quickly found plenty to talk about. He seemed fascinated by my interest in the Mikkelsen painting, and invited me out to stay with him and his family in Copenhagen the following summer, so that he could take me to the National Gallery and show me the original.

  “The Muse is really very powerful,” he said to me. “She has this energy about her, you know, an internal fire. I visit her quite often, actually. Sometimes I think she’s going to step right out of the painting.”

  He laughed, and I laughed too. I thanked him for his invitation, and told him I would be delighted to accept.

  AN INJUSTICE

  Christopher Fowler

  There are forgotten parts of London, and it is in these places that the most extraordinary stories are often found. In the remarkable and powerful tale that follows, Christopher shows us what happens when an urban legend – a story of spirits and the power of the supernatural – evolves into something far more sinister and much more dangerous.