House of Fear

by Joe R. Lansdale

  Finally, he decided, he was inside.

  He stands in the middle of a room at the top of the house. He knows it’s at the top of the house in the way that you know things in a dream. But he also knows he is not dreaming.

  It is dark.

  Scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch.

  He feels bare boards beneath his stockinged feet. He is shaking.

  He can see a pale shape in the corner, facing the wall. The faintest glimmer coming off the hair.

  “Judy?”

  Scratch, scratch.

  “JUDY!”

  His voice is shockingly loud in the confined space, but flat. No echo. He listens to the thump of his heart. He takes a step forward and stops, unable to approach any nearer, incapable of turning away. He becomes aware of a faint square outline on the wall to his left. Curtains or a blind. Against the opposite wall, barely visible only when he doesn’t look directly at it, is what appears to be a large quadruped – big head, long body, short legs – or possibly a man on his elbows and knees.

  He smells something sharp and sour. Meaty.

  From behind him comes a small noise.

  Then a hand on his shoulder.

  FADE

  He comes to, curled up on his bench by the New River, teeth chattering. He slides round and sits up, staring blankly at the bright green weed that covers the surface of the water. He pulls his thin jacket around him in an effort to get warm. His shoes, he notices, are undone.

  The streets are quiet, mid-morning lull. He walks slowly, more of a shuffle, his shoes still unlaced. He remembers how one of the first impressions he formed of the Japanese was that they shuffled rather than walked. They didn’t pick up their feet. It annoyed him at first, and then he got used to it, and soon he didn’t mind it. After a few years he no longer noticed it.

  Approaching the house from Newington Green, he sees the green door before the red door. He stops in front of it and knocks twice. He remembers putting the door on the snib. He waits a few moments, then pushes on the door. It opens easily. He removes his shoes as he enters and places them just inside, then pushes the door to.

  He looks around the room. It takes a moment to register. The place looks different – and not just because he is seeing it in daylight. The sofa is different. Less squashy, it has clean lines and looks firmer, smarter. He walks across the room and places his hand on the sofa. It does not feel gritty. He frowns, backs away, turns to the kitchen. Dualit toaster, Bosch fridge.

  He steps into the hall, checks out the framed photo on the wall, which is the same. He recognises the street now as the one he is on – block of flats, wide pavement – only the house he is standing in is not present in the shot. It should be, but it’s not.

  He faces the stairs and climbs to the half-landing. He feels the walls with his hands – they are clean and smooth. He places his stockinged feet with care, becoming aware of a faint smell of chocolate and ammonia – or something – something acrid and smoky. He turns the corner and continues to ascend. He touches his hand to the wall, which is neither cold nor damp. Stepping on to the landing, he peers into the first of the two rooms directly opposite. Sparsely furnished, it looks like the bedroom of a single woman. He walks softly across to the far wall, which is papered and painted. There are no marks on the wall.

  Back on the landing, where the smell is stronger, he can hear a noise, not a scratching but a low murmur. He climbs the stairs. The murmur is a woman’s voice. It stops when he reaches the top landing. There are two rooms, just as on the lower floor. He can see into the room on the left. The boards have been stripped and polished, as on the landing itself. In the room, which is flooded with light from the uncurtained, open window, there is a long, low couch like a chaise longue. It is positioned alongside the right-hand wall, exactly where he had thought he had seen some kind of animal. Lying on it, on her back, her blonde hair streaming out over the couch’s single arm, is Judy. Standing beyond her with his back to the couch is a man of average height, but, as he starts to turn, well-above-average body mass. He holds a lit cigar in the stubby fingers of his right hand.

  “Judy?”

  She looks towards the door.

  The man with the cigar gives a loud laugh and then says, “Are you conducting a survey?”

  “Judy?” he says, ignoring the man with the cigar.

  She raises her head and upper body off the couch and rests on her elbows, looking amused.

  “Judy,” he says, “what’s he doing here?” He points to the man with the cigar. “You go to him. I’ve seen you. Every Monday. What’s he doing here?”

  The man with the cigar laughs again.

  “I think someone came in the wrong door, Madeleine,” says the man with the cigar. “Don’t you?”

  “Madeleine?” he says. “Where’s Judy?”

  “Next door, of course,” says the man with the cigar.

  “Judy,” he says, hearing the pleading tone in his own voice.

  “Next door,” says the man with the cigar.

  “What do you mean next door? There is no next door. Just an abandoned pub.”

  “The room next door, dummy.”

  Madeleine laughs and doesn’t raise her hand to cover her mouth.

  He starts to back out of the room as Madeleine reclines once more and the man with the cigar turns his back to her again, as if they are about to resume an interrupted session.

  On the landing he takes a breath. The stairs down are in front of him. He turns to his left and stands in front of the door to the other room. He sees his hand reach out and grasp the knob and twist it. The door opens on to more stripped pine floorboards. He enters the room and closes the door behind him.

  The room is about ten foot square with cream anaglypta wallpaper. There’s a sash window, which is open. Standing in the middle of the room, facing him, is Judy. Her hair curls up under her chin on one side, sticks out endearingly on the other. Her lips part. He sees her teeth glinting. A filament of saliva, pulled taut. He leans forward, closes his eyes.

  They kiss.

  Finally, he is inside.

  When he opens his eyes, she’s gone and he’s alone in the room. He tries the door, but it’s locked. He goes to the window and looks out. The wide pavement, two storeys down; cars driving by, a taxi and a bus; the other side of the street, which he has walked down but never seen from this angle before. It’s not so interesting. He backs away from the window and approaches the wall to have a closer look at the anaglypta. Right where he’s standing, the textured wallpaper shows signs of having been scored with something sharp – a knife, a pen or, at a push, finger nails. He moves along to the left and finds more deep scratches. And more beyond those. He follows them on to the adjacent wall and so on round the room until he is back at the window, breathing fast and shallow. He leans out. The upper floors of the building immediately across the street have silvered windows. They must be at just the wrong angle, because he cannot see a reflection of the tall, narrow house. He cannot see himself leaning out of the window on the top floor. Just the block of flats behind, and the abandoned pub alongside.

  He thinks of the photograph in the hall downstairs. He had thought maybe the picture had been taken before the house was built, but the house was older than the block of flats behind it. You only had to look at it to see that. You only had to look at it.

  He looked down at the pavement. If the house didn’t exist, jumping from its second floor was hardly likely to kill him.

  THE HOUSE

  Eric Brown

  Eric is best known as a science-fiction writer, but I knew, from the depth and strength of his prose, that he would be able to turn his hand to almost anything. Hence, I asked Eric to write outside of his field and ‘The House’ is the result of that request. If you know Eric’s work, then you know he is brilliant at portraying convincing relationships (check out his superb novel Kings of Eternity for example) and the couple in ‘The House’ show the strength of Eric’s fiction when it comes to
matters of the heart. Here we have two people, fighting to stay together in the face of a very unusual haunting.

  Charles Tudor looked up from his typewriter and blinked. It was a second before he came to his senses and realised the source of the interruption: the phone was ringing in the hall. He pushed his chair back and stood slowly. The summons could only be from two or three people – his agent, his editor, or some pre-pubescent girl in the marketing department at his publishers, Greenwood and Worley.

  He moved into the hall and picked up the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Charles, Edward here. How are you this fine spring morning?”

  He blinked. “Spring?”

  “It’s the first of April, Charles.”

  “And you’ve called to play an April Fool’s trick, hmm?”

  “That’s the Tudor I know!” his agent roared. “Droll as ever. No, no April Fool’s trick this year. I was wondering –”

  Tudor forestalled him. “The answer’s ‘no,’ Edward.”

  “You don’t even know what I’m about to ask.”

  “I can guess. You’d like me to take part in some wretched publicity event.” The third book in the Tides of Time series was due to launch in a couple of weeks, and he would be expected to publicise the title.

  “For Nigel,” Edward wheedled. “You don’t know how he’s bent over backwards to push the series. It’s the least you could do.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Edward laughed.

  “What?” Tudor snapped.

  “You invest that vulgar phrase with such Shakespearian gravitas, Charles.” His agent paused. “You do realise you’re getting a reputation as something of a recluse?”

  Tudor sighed. Is it any wonder, he thought.

  Edward went on, “To be honest, it would be a great favour to me as well as to Nigel. And to your readers.”

  He hadn’t been up to London for years, and it would keep the drones at G&W smiling...

  “You have a massive fan base out there,” Edward said, “all eager to meet the creator of the Tides of Time books.”

  He relented. “One event, Charles. One. No more.”

  His agent chuckled with relief. “That’s all we ask, Charles. A signing at Waterstone’s, Piccadilly, in a couple of weeks.”

  “I’ll need a drink to get me through the bloody thing.”

  “I’ll have the best French red on hand during the signing, and afterwards I’ll take you to lunch.”

  “The Ivy?”

  “Done,” Edward said. “Everyone at Greenwood and Worley will be so excited.”

  “Fuck off.”

  He returned to his study and finished the paragraph, which brought the scene to a close.

  He sat back and looked across the room, to where he knew he would see himself, long and grey, in the mirror propped between the bookshelves. He was sixty-five, he realised with a reaction little short of amazement. Where had all the years gone?

  He remembered a long, hard walk he had done in his twenties, back from the pub to this very house, long before he’d married Emmeline. Three miles through horizontal sleet, frozen to the marrow. He’d looked ahead and told himself that it would soon be over; soon he would be sitting before the blazing fire, looking back at the labour of the walk... An hour later he had done just that, and had known that his life would follow this pattern, too. One day he would be contemplating his existence from the vantage point of old age, and the long cold walk would seem to have passed in an instant.

  The idea had terrified him then, and it was easy to recapture that youthful terror now; though, paradoxically, the terror was temporized by the passage of the treacherous years themselves. The terror had transmuted to bemused acceptance.

  The view through the French windows was little changed in forty years. The lawn stretched to the fulsome willow, and squirrels frolicked, twitching, back and forth. He saw Emmeline run naked from her studio, taken by some impulse of her manic phase to disport herself amid nature... He smiled to himself and blinked and she was gone, a vision of utter beauty alive, now, only in his memories. The image of her was replaced by other, later ones, which he tried to banish.

  He pulled his gaze from the lawn and regarded the bookshelf beside the mirror. Seventy books bearing the by-line of Charles Tudor filled the four shelves, all of them for children. His first three books, reading editions of his early plays, he had long ago taken out into the garden and burnt along with a trunk of Emmeline’s clothes. He told himself that the ranked titles did not make him bitter, did not denote a lifetime of wasted effort that would have been better spent writing serious plays.

  But that would have been impossible, he told himself.

  He sighed and brought his flattened palms down, once, on the arms of the chair, then stood.

  Lunchtime.

  Tudor had hated the stultifying routine of book-signings in his early years as a children’s writer, the embarrassment of events attended only by his editor, agent, three sheepish shop staff and a couple of kids disappointed that their favourite writer should turn out to be so... boring. Now he abhorred signings because they were so bloody popular.

  The children’s section of the store teemed with what seemed like a hundred noisy ten-year olds, shepherded by harassed staff who themselves seemed not much older.

  He sat behind a low desk and scrawled his distinctive looping signature, personalising the title page to the shy, hesitant Ellas and Bens and Joes who filed past, so many unlined faces with all their lives to live. He could see, in their eyes, something like shock that their favourite author should prove to be so old.

  He was half a bottle of pinot noir to the good, his glass topped up from time to time by Charles in grinning attendance. Earlier, Nigel, his editor, had pumped his hand, “You don’t know how much I appreciate this, Charles...” before rushing off to a ‘prior engagement.’

  One hour later, the last of the children had left and he was busy signing the remaining stock. A young thing in a Waterstone’s tee-shirt danced up, thanked him, and announced they’d shifted over two hundred units.

  Tudor exchanged a glance with Edward.

  He was about to suggest they bugger off to the Ivy – he wanted to discuss his next project with Edward – when a woman in her fifties approached the desk, clutching a slim volume to her chest. She had evidently been waiting for the children to depart, and then for him to finish signing the stock, before she bothered him.

  She wore her five decades with elegance and grace; she was small and trim, with whitening hair and the pale oval face of an emeritus ballerina. He smiled at her, and thought that something about her face was familiar; he wondered if he’d met her once, years ago.

  Even her hesitation, as she proffered the book to sign on the title page, was becoming.

  He saw with a shock that it was his third play, The House.

  His hand shaking, he took the book.

  “I hope you don’t mind...” the woman said.

  He gathered himself. “No... Not at all. To...?”

  “To Caroline,” she smiled.

  He passed back the slim play-script. “First time I’ve seen the thing in years...” And hopefully the last. Even the sight of it, in its uniform binding, brought back the terror.

  “I hope you don’t mind, Mr Tudor... I’m a journalist, and I was wondering if you might consent to an interview.”

  He was tempted to tell her that he didn’t do interviews, that he had nothing he wanted to say about anything. But something about the woman’s smile, her grace, her becoming trepidation, made him relent.

  He said, “I don’t see why not. But right now I have a meeting with my agent. I don’t know... I rarely come up to London. Perhaps, if you wouldn’t mind the journey to Suffolk?”

  She beamed, and the gesture irradiated her face with something very much like youth. Ridiculously, Tudor felt his pulse quicken.

  “That would be wonderful.”

  He passed his card. “If you give me a ring, we could arrange
a date.”

  “I’ll do that. Thank you again, Mr Tudor.” And clutching the play-script, she hurried away.

  On their way to the Ivy, Edward gave Tudor a lecherous nudge. “You old dog, Charles.”

  “You know what I’m about to say.”

  Edward laughed.

  He spent the next hour over lunch wondering why the woman had asked him to sign, of all his many titles, The House.

  He finished writing for the day, poured himself a glass of wine, and stepped through the french windows.

  He walked across the lawn towards the willow, the late afternoon sun warm on his back. A squirrel fled at his approach. At the hem of the willow, he turned and looked back at the house.

  It had been in the family for almost a hundred and fifty years, an early Victorian mansion with ten bedrooms, a small ballroom, library, billiard room and a dozen others to which he had never ascribed a function. He had grown up here, and the house had easily accommodated his family and that of his uncle. Their respective families had grown and fled the nest over the years, until the late ’sixties when, on his father’s death, the house had been left to him. His first thought had been to sell it, despite the many happy memories he associated with the commodious building. Then he had met Emmeline and she had fallen in love with the place, and after that there had been no way he could sell the house.

  They had moved in, closed down all the rooms not needed, and lived in the west wing.

  The room adjacent to his study, which had been the billiard room, Emmeline turned into her studio; it was south facing and airy, the perfect place, she said, in which to paint.

  He stared across the lawn to the studio’s long windows, still draped with the sheets he had placed there the day after his wife’s death.

  He heard a sound behind him – he was sure it was a burst of laughter – and turned.

  He thought he saw a sliver of naked flesh between the swaying fronds of the willow, but knew that he was mistaken. He felt tears spring to his eyes.