House of Fear

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Holly and Katie pored through them looking for versions of their own names. Holly found Holland, it’s meaning unambiguous: named after the Netherlands. And Katie failed to locate anything close to her own name although she did pour scorn on a number of Janelles and Cherelles, which she thought sounded chavvy. Ken pointed out that these names were originally French and had been appropriated by the British working classes, thus cheapening them. “Whatever,” said Katie.

  “Oh, look,” said Holly. She held up a nameplate.

  Ken looked. Adrienne, it said.

  “That’s our caravan’s name,” Katie said.

  “I know,” said Holly. “What does it mean?”

  Ken translated the simple definition beneath the name.

  “Oh,” he said.

  “What?”

  Ken replaced the nameplate on its stand. “It’s not as glamorous as it sounds,” he said. “It means ‘black earth.’”

  Ken carried the bags back to camp. The girls trotted along ahead of him. The road was dusty and the edges of the pavements were bordered by narrow strips of dun-coloured stones. Already it was warm, but there was nobody about. The beachfront was deserted; the sails of the windsurfing boards and small boats ranked along the front fluttered and thrummed in the breeze, and somewhere a line had come untethered and rattled its clips against a mast.

  Ken watched the girls as they ran shadowless in the early morning light. The bags weren’t heavy but he ached from yesterday’s drive and a poor night’s sleep. He hoped he hadn’t made a mistake bringing the girls away on his own. They were at a strange, baffling age and although his love for them was immeasurable, often he felt as detatched from them as he was from images on a screen.

  He imagined Elaine’s response. Just persist, she would have said. Just keep going. Do normal things. Have fun.

  Ken stopped and looked out across the bay. He could see a bridge, so distant on the horizon it was no more than a misty thread, linking the mainland to an island. He sighed; the emptiness of the beach and the whitewashed promenade was suddenly unbearable.

  Ken turned and hurried after his girls.

  They hadn’t been back long and there was a knock at the door.

  It was Steven. He was holding a small cardboard box.

  “I found this,” he said, offering Ken the box.

  Ken reached out and took the box and then he noticed what appeared to be fresh burns on the backs of Steven’s hands. He looked down and saw more, nasty-looking pink scabs on the boy’s ankles. They couldn’t be new, but how had he failed to notice them last night?

  “Steven,” he said, and against his better instinct: “Let me look at those burns.”

  Steven reacted with an immediate and unexpected refusal. He stumbled backwards and collided with the balustrade surrounding the veranda, his hands held high above his head.

  Ken was stunned by the reaction.

  “I’m fine, I’m fine.” Steven said. Somehow he kept a sickly salesman’s grin on his face. “Really, I’m cool.”

  “I’m a doctor, Steven. I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Steven backed away. “I don’t need a doctor, thanks. All’s well. Just enjoy your holiday.” He stood on the grass beneath the veranda. He stared up at Ken, his arms hanging by his side. There were dark smudges on the collar of his CampEuro shirt. His bike was leaning up against the side of the mobile home.

  Ken looked down at the box he was holding. It was about the size of a shoebox. Ken lifted the flaps that loosely covered the contents.

  “Oh,” he said. The girls would be pleased.

  Boggle.

  Ken looked back to where Steven was standing. He was gone.

  “Bloody hell,” said Ken.

  Later, he made them all carbonara for lunch, using the fresh ingredients they had bought from the Super-U. It was very good, very rich and filling. The girls were in their dressing gowns and lay next to him on the sofa playing Boggle. Ken thought about going for a beer at the bar. They’d be safe enough for half an hour. He felt the need for some adult company, even if it was just a stranger serving cold beer. He looked at his watch. It was nearly eight o’clock. The girls laughed, the dice clattered. Where had the day gone? Ken wondered. They’d done nothing but laze about on the site today. Normally Ken would have considered this a waste, but right now he was glad to do nothing, glad to just relax and enjoy the time with his girls. Tomorrow they could hit the beach.

  iii

  Elaine had been a concert pianist. She had been due to play a Chopin recital at the Rudolfinum in Prague, but on the night she arrived there had been a fire at her hotel and she had died.

  The girls were in the shower. Ken sat on the edge of his bed and listened to the sound of them shrieking beneath the jet of water, and the thumps and creaks of the moulded plastic walls giving beneath their weight as they bumped against them.

  He looked at his suitcase. He hadn’t unpacked; rather he would select items from it as he needed them. He sighed, lay back on the bed and closed his eyes.

  He must have dozed, because when he became aware of his surroundings again it was quiet. He sat up. He couldn’t hear the girls.

  Beneath the mobile home, amongst the leaves and litter and darkness, something moved.

  Ken lifted his feet off the floor and sat cross-legged on the edge of the bed. He peered down at the strip of floor between the end of the bed and the chest of drawers.

  Again, furtive movement. And then a bump, as if someone had tried to stand up and hit his head on the underside of the mobile home.

  Ken stood, slipped on his shoes and went out into the hallway.

  “Hi, Dad,” Katie said, looking up from the sofa. Her hair was damp and tied back in a ponytail.

  “Where’s Holly?” he asked.

  Katie shrugged and went back to her magazine. “Dunno,” she said.

  Ken pushed the girls’ bedroom door open and looked in. The beds were empty. He knocked on the bathroom door and went in. Holly wasn’t in there, either.

  Ken strode into the lounge. “Has she gone out?” he demanded.

  “She might have,” Katie said, still vague. “She didn’t say.”

  “Katie! It’s ten o’clock at night. Where is she?”

  “Look,” said Katie. She was staring past Ken, towards the hall. Ken turned around and saw that the door leading out onto the veranda was open.

  Ken frowned and went to the door. There was no moon tonight, just low racing clouds like smoke from a factory chimney. He could smell meat burning on a barbecue. It was still very warm.

  “Holly!” Ken shouted.

  Something moved to his left. Ken crossed the veranda and peered over the balustrade. In the darkness beneath the mobile home he could just make out the curved shoulder of the gas cylinder that fed the cooker and water heater.

  Ken went to the car and got a torch from the glove compartment. He crossed the grass, stepped around the barbecue and knelt down and played the torch beam beneath the mobile home.

  Something was under there. Ken leaned further into the darkness, his shoulder brushing against the pipes that fed the gas up into the mobile home. Suddenly something rolled away from behind the gas cylinder. Ken flicked the torch beam to the right and it slid across the back of something glistening and black. It looked flaky, crinkled, like a bin liner rolled up and melted by a blast of heat. Ken jumped and banged his head on the underside of the building.

  He withdrew and stood brushing the dirt from his knees. It had looked like a bin bag; that was probably all it was. There were a few bags, filled with rubbish and loosely tied, still lying in a pile at the side of the barbecue.

  Then Ken heard Katie cry out.

  He ran around the veranda and up the steps. In the lounge, Katie was sitting with her legs drawn up on the sofa and one hand pressed to her mouth. She was in tears.

  “What is it? What’s the matter, Katie?”

  Trembling, Katie extended her other hand and pointed at the table.

&
nbsp; “I don’t like it, daddy. Make it stop.”

  Confused, Ken walked over. Katie was pointing at the dish of lettered dice sitting amongst pencils and bits of scrap paper. He frowned. “Is this a joke?”

  Katie shook her head, tears running down her pale cheeks. “It keeps doing it. Every time I shake them they say the same thing.”

  Ken was about to ask her to demonstrate, to prove what she was saying, but then he heard Holly call from outside.

  “Daddy, look. She’s coming!”

  Ken looked up. From where he stood, he could see through the wide window at the back of the mobile home, along the lane leading back beneath the canopy of trees. A figure was approaching.

  With a slow tread, and a tightening in his chest he recognised, Ken walked out onto the veranda. Holly was standing there by the picnic table. She smiled up at her dad, came over and took his hand.

  Together they watched as the figure resolved itself out of the dark tunnel of trees. A streetlamp delineated her features, her black dress, and the spray of white lilies she carried in her arms.

  “She’s still so sad, daddy.” Holly said. Ken squeezed her hand.

  “So am I,” he said.

  “Me, too.” Holly squeezed back.

  Ken and Holly watched for a little longer as the woman approached their mobile home. The ache in Ken’s chest became unendurable, and he wept as she placed the bouquet on the ground at the foot of the steps.

  “Mummy didn’t die in a fire, did she, Daddy?” said Holly, and Ken felt some small comfort for a moment; just a moment.

  “I don’t think she did, baby,” he said.

  Inside, Katie called: “Steven’s here.”

  They went inside.

  They were sitting together in the lounge. The curtains were drawn. Steven, their courier, was standing before them. His arms were spread wide and Ken could see the burns on his forearms. They had grown, consuming the flesh of his biceps and underarms.

  On the table their game of Boggle was still underway. The lettered dice were in their grid and a pen and paper lay beside them. Ken drew his eyes away from Steven and looked at the sixteen dice and at what they spelled:

  B U R N

  U R N B

  R N B U

  N B U R

  Ken closed his eyes.

  “You come here all the time,” Steven said. “All your holidays are here.”

  “No,” Ken said.

  “You have your own key!”

  Ken’s hand went to his trouser pocket. He felt the shape against his leg.

  Steven was nodding. Now his face was gone; his baked-fish eyes looked down at Ken from the black smouldering flesh of his skull.

  “I wish I could have saved you,” he said, grotesque now, those blind, boiled eyes unable to intimate any of the emotion carried in his voice. “But I’ll always be here; I’ll always keep trying to warn you.”

  Warn us? Ken thought, but of course there was no memory of the explosion, of the fire that followed the gas leak from the rotten valves around the pipes beneath them. Pipes that had been knocked loose by Holly, playing under the mobile home while Ken fixed the barbecue. No memory of the lighter fluid, the embers; because they hadn’t happened here yet. Not yet.

  Ken felt despair crawl through him. He turned to his right and his face crumpled, twisted into a grimace by what he saw sitting propped up next to him. Their heads were together and their fingers were interlocked. His girls, like scorched china dolls, their skin curling off their muscles like newspaper lifting from a bonfire.

  Ken raised his hand and looked at what it held, what was melted to his fist.

  Villanova 48. Adrienne.

  Black earth.

  Now he remembered.

  He opened his mouth to howl, but the flames had seared his throat to ash.

  WIDOW’S WEEDS

  Christopher Priest

  The character of the stage magician is clearly one that holds much fascination for Christopher Priest; witness the success of his brilliant novel, The Prestige, and the later critically acclaimed film adaptation for example. And just as the magician toys with our perceptions of reality and illusion, Priest plays with the concept of just what constitutes a house and a haunting, to fascinating effect. Priest is a real alchemist of prose and the subterfuge and sleight-of-hand within ‘Widow’s Weeds’ will have you coming back to this complex and rewarding story time and again.

  The elderly Volvo lurched along the frozen ruts of the unmade lane. The driver hunched tensely over the wheel, struggling to keep the car away from the deep ditches on either side. There was no standing snow, but a thick hoar frost clung to every surface. Dark clouds moved overhead. The heater whined at full strength.

  The passenger in the front seat was sitting in a more relaxed way, leaning back with a laptop on his knees. He was scanning his emails, which he had picked up earlier in the day before leaving the hotel in Brighton.

  The car was towing a trailer, painted with bright colours and depicting playing cards, an opera hat and cane, a magic wand, some dice and many stars. Painted in flamboyant letters on both sides, as well as the rear, were the words Oliviera – The Master of Magic.

  The driver halted the car outside two high wrought-iron gates. The trailer skidded as he braked, swinging around at an angle behind the car. The passenger, the master of magic Oliviera, whose real name was Dennis O’Leary, closed the lid of the laptop and put it carefully into his overnight bag.

  “You sure this is the place, Rick?” he said, looking doubtfully through the windscreen, which was smeared with frozen droplets of mud.

  “I entered the postcode in the satnav. Can’t fail.”

  “Oh, yeah.” O’Leary wound down the window on his side and craned out to see beyond the gates. The cold air gripped him about the face. There was a glimpse of a steep slate roof, part of an upstairs window reflecting the sky.

  “Last chance,” Rick, the driver, said. “Are you really going to go through with this?”

  “Ten thousand pounds will last us until summer. That’s the guaranteed minimum.”

  “Rather you than me.”

  “Yes, but you haven’t seen her photograph,” O’Leary said, who had.

  He climbed out, opened the rear door. He put his overnight valise on his shoulder, then pulled out a larger case. He set the case on the ground next to the car, slammed the door, and walked across to the gates. Peering through, he could see a display board just beyond, mounted beside the driveway. It was supported on two stout timber legs, had a border of astronomical signs, and was fronted with a sheet of clean glass.

  At the top, in clear cursive lettering, were the words: The Atchievements of Mme Louisa de Morganet. Beneath were several more lines, but a gust of cold wind sent down a shower of frost particles from the tree above, and he backed off. O’Leary returned to the car to collect the case.

  “What do you suppose an ‘atchievement’ is?” he said. “With an extra ‘t’?”

  Rick was leaning across towards him, from the driver’s seat.

  “A spelling mistake? Look, close the bloody door. You’re making the car cold.”

  O’Leary slammed it, but the window was still open. He leaned down beside it.

  “The pub is about a mile further on,” he said. “The Shepherd and Dog. Keep the expenses down, okay? You might yet be right about this being a scam.”

  “You’re seeing sense at last.”

  “Come on, Rick. You stand to gain too.”

  The two men gripped hands through the window, but they were too familiar with each other to make it seem forced. O’Leary backed off and stood away as the car and its trailer resumed the erratic course down the icily furrowed lane.

  O’Leary carried his luggage to the gate and went through. The drive curved between the trees. On each side were lawns, under the frost for now, but they and the flowerbeds around them were neatly maintained. He paused by the display board to read it properly. Beneath the large heading was the following:
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  Mme de Morganet is well qualified in, and a skilled tutor of, the following atchievements. Please enquire for more information, and the rates that apply.

  Musicianship (including Composition), Foreign Languages (including Translation and Interpretation), Literary Endeavour, Oil Painting, Saddlery and Equestrianism, Astronomy, Aquatic Sports, All Domestic Accomplishments (including Kitchen Skills, Crochet, Needlepoint, Embroidery, Knitting, Sewing), Oratory, Marksmanship, Actuarial Calculations, Tax Returns, Law of Probate, Law of Property, Law of Torts...

  Finally certain that he had come to the right place, O’Leary continued along the drive, chilled by the wind. The house was a large one, probably Victorian, but in good condition and with up-to-date features. The windows had been tastefully double-glazed, and on the far corner there was an outlet for a central heating boiler. White condensation was whisked away by the wind. He pressed the bell button beside the door.

  There was a long wait, longer than he expected, while the chill wind blustered around him, sweeping down from the overhanging hills. The house was situated at the foot of the South Downs, but in this weather the hills gave no shelter at all. Flurries of fine snow were seeding the wind, stinging his cheeks. Uncertainties ran briefly through him: the right address but maybe the wrong day; perhaps he should have phoned ahead...? Finally the door eased open, giving a glimpse of a hallway, a flight of stairs. Warm air flowed out at him.

  A woman was there, wearing a thick pullover and jeans and a tweed cap.

  “Mr O’Leary, I believe? Otherwise known as Oliviera, the magician?”

  “I am,” said O’Leary.

  “You are most welcome, Mr O’Leary. Madame is expecting you, and has asked me to show you into the drawing room. She will join you as soon as possible.”

  While she said this she held the door open wide, and O’Leary stepped in. She closed the door swiftly behind him, sealing the house against the wind. A feeling of comfort and welcome swirled invisibly around him. The woman took his coat and his overnight bag, but O’Leary kept hold of his case of magic materials. He never let it out of his sight.