She smiled roguishly at Lucy and Jo.
“You two must wait for the ringing of the little silver bell.”
When they were alone, Jo jumped up and said, “I always thought you had a lot of nerve for a girl.”
His manner was desperate and strange; she knew he was asking for her help.
“Here,” he said. “Read this page from Papa’s letter. Read it to them. If you can’t figure it out, Harald sure as hell will.”
He had another present, a smallish cardboard carton clumsily wrapped in American Christmas paper.
“This is for the whole family,” he said.
“Jo,” she said, “Jo, if this is running away, it is truly a very dumb thing for you to do.”
“It’s not running away,” he said. “Just the opposite. You can come too . . . where I’m going. Oh, I almost forgot . . . For Aunt Helga.”
He fished in the pocket of his sports coat and drew out the bunch of keys. Then he snatched up Mom’s beautiful vicuna lap robe and ran out of the room. Lucy heard him go upstairs. She began to read the page from Letter Twelve, which was dated November 1941.
“I have hidden away a great many books,” wrote Papa, “to save them from the fire that is devouring our country. I think of all the secret places, in garden colonies, in the deep woods, in attics and cellars throughout the land, where men and women of goodwill have hidden those who are persecuted.
“A mother and her three children are hiding in our house, which I hope you still remember. I hardly know the children’s names. When there is the least threat of danger they are hidden in a little room high up under the slates. They have learned to sit very still.
“I think of the oversized and inhuman monuments which this Warlord and his henchmen have set up in Germany. These vainglorious monuments will fall into dust and ashes. Only the secret places will abide, and the memory; the spirits of the men and women and the children who sheltered in these places will remain in them forever.”
Lucy was puzzled and terrified. She was standing at the brink of an abyss. A sound began to penetrate . . . it was the ringing of the little silver bell. She walked slowly across the hall carrying Jo’s package but she could not slip into the dining room unnoticed. Everyone was waiting, even Papa. Lucy received the full impact of the beautiful tree, just as she remembered it, blazing with real candles. She saw the strips of silver lammetta, the lovely baubles of colored glass, the legions of wooden angels and the silver star at the top.
“Where is Jo?” they cried. “But where is Jo?”
“He had to go to the toilet,” said Lucy. “He was nervous.”
Everyone laughed. Aunt Helga had a very suitable proverb: “Eine schöne Bescherung,” which meant “a fine howdy-do” as well as a fine sharing out of gifts at Christmas time.
“Lucy,” said Harald, “what’s the matter?”
Lucy still stood there, unable to move, clutching the messily swaddled package. The scene began to unfold in slow motion, so smoothly that she could almost believe in the intervention of some higher power.
Papa and Mom stood beside their chairs at the dining table, which was covered with plates of sweets, oranges, and nuts, one for every member of the family. Aunt Helga was the only one seated, fanning herself with a paper fan, warding off another nervous collapse after her exertions. Harald snatched the carbon of the letter from Lucy.
“Jo said you would understand,” she whispered.
She went forward slowly to keep from sinking down onto the carpet. She placed the bunch of keys before Aunt Helga, and then put the package in the very centre of the table. She began stripping off the paper, and found that her guess was correct. The package smelled awful; it stank of dust and corruption. She wanted to rub her hands and arms where they had touched the wrapper. Her voice was loud, out of control.
“This is from Jo . . . for all the family”
“A key is missing!” said Aunt Helga.
“What in the name of God. . . ?” said Papa.
Lucy folded back the top of the carton, but she could only take out one thing and set it on the damask cloth. It was old and horribly stained, and there were dark threads adhering to the plush; it was a toy tiger. Harald uttered some growling sound and swiftly emptied the carton. There were six vile reeking dusty objects upon the table top.
“The children’s overshoes. Their overshoes!” said Harald, his voice rising to a shout.
He felt among the overshoes and discovered that some of them were not empty. He snatched up a napkin and wiped his fingers. Then he handed Papa his own letter.
“What if Frau Rothmeier was picked up alone?” Harald said. “She went out to meet her brother, and left the children in their hiding place . . .”
“It’s not possible,” said Mom. “What you are saying is not possible. The children . . .”
After a long silence Papa said very gently:
“Helga. . . ?”
There was a sudden loud splashing sound, it went on and on, then a stink of hot urine filled the room. Aunt Helga turned brick-red and went into hysterics, half laughing, half crying. No one dared to slap her face. Lucy stepped backwards from the damp carpet; a red ball fell off the Christmas tree.
“I was going to August,” said Aunt Helga. “My bags were packed. It had taken so long to get the permit . . .”
Lucy kept on walking backwards until she was at the door. Papa and Harald began to speak, both at once. She slipped out of the room and began to run up the stairs, softly, lightly, as if she were flying. She climbed up and up and the attic door was open, the key in the lock. She went in, breathing the mothball reek; the attic was bitterly cold; the skylights were crusted with frost flowers. Jo had candles stuck to an old plate; the couch was covered with a rug and the lap robe. She sat there quietly, and the door of the wardrobe moved. Jo came out. He sat beside her, and, without embarrassment, they held hands.
“There was a door covered with wallpaper,” said Lucy. “She moved the wardrobe in front of it.”
“Maybe they always did that,” said Jo.
“You stole the key today or yesterday,” she said. “How did you get in before that?”
“From the roof,” he said. “Out the landing window and in through the skylight. It was always a secret clubhouse.”
He might have fallen, she thought. He came here all alone and found his way into the hidden room. He found the children. He grew thin and old and said nothing.
“. . . got a board off the back of the wardrobe,” Jo was saying. “Then I broke into the room. It wasn’t so hard. I was just looking for the box of toys.”
“Solomon Stein figured out where they were,” said Lucy. “He was trying to save them. He was trying to get in.”
Lucy began to weep at last; she felt hot tears running down her cold cheeks.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I can’t help thinking . . .”
The icy cold. The darkness. They were very good, very still, but at last they began calling, tapping, scraping, like mice gnawing at the fabric of the house . . . the empty house.
“Is it very bad in there?” she asked. “Could I. . . ?”
What did she mean? Could I get in through the narrow door? Could I bear it? She thought of her dream or vision of Jo sitting at a table with a dead look. In the end, she opened the wardrobe and peered through the small opening behind it. Jo had broken the door off its hinges. Inside, he had made a small heap of tannen branches covering the bodies of the two older children, Rosa and Benny, and a smaller heap for the baby on its moldering pillow. The air was still very foul. The room was no bigger than a cupboard; it shared a corner of one large skylight. Looking into the room, you could almost feel what it must have been like for them . . .
“She knew their mother would never come back,” said Jo. “She left them there and went away to take care of Papa, and never told anyone.”
“Oh yes,” said Lucy, “I think she did.”
She turned her head to look at the poor dressmake
r’s dummy; Jo had draped the field grey army tunic around its shoulders.
“I think she told Uncle Markus.”
She remembered what Harald had said. Markus Krantz was a decent fellow, and had committed suicide soon after returning home from the Russian front.
Presently, Jo said, “What will happen? What will they do?”
Lucy shook her head. She had lost the power to predict the actions of any of the adults. She could only identify with Jo and with the dead children.
They sat in the candlelight, waiting for a step upon the attic stairs.
STEPHEN GALLAGHER
The Horn
A GROUP OF travellers trapped by a snowstorm and lured into the night by something both beautiful and deadly . . . It’s a classic horror scenario, and here rising star Stephen Gallagher enhances the tension with a bleak atmosphere of dread.
Born in Salford, Lancashire, and currently living in Blackburn, he became a full-time writer in 1980, scripting two adventures for BBC-TV’s popular Doctor Who series. His short fiction has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Fantasy Tales, Ripper!, Shadows 9, Night Visions 8 and Winter Chills.
His early books included novelisations of his Doctor Who scripts and the movie Saturn 3, and were followed by Chimera (recently filmed as a four-part mini-series for television), Follower, Valley of Lights, Oktober, Down River and Rain.
EXTRACT FROM THE COURT RECORD, Crown v Robson, 24th September 1987:
Counsel:
You lured her to this quiet spot on the pretext that you were going to run away together.
Robson:
I never promised anything.
Counsel:
Then you beat her senseless and left her for dead.
Robson:
Hold on, chief! I tapped her once to calm her down, that’s all.
Counsel:
Are you now saying that you weren’t responsible for her murder?
Robson:
She was fit enough when I left her.
Counsel:
So how do you suppose that she died?
Robson:
That wouldn’t be until the next morning.
Counsel:
When, exactly?
Robson:
Around the time they poured the concrete in, I expect.
“We’ve got heat, we’ve got light, we’ve got shelter,” Mick said. “The lads even left us some dirty books. We’ve got everything we’ll need to ride out the bad weather, so why don’t we just sit tight until it all blows over?”
It was just then that the lights flickered and failed and the coal effect on the two-bar electric fire went terminally dark. The bars themselves went more slowly, and the three of us could only watch their fading glow with a kind of bleak desperation. Sub-zero winds were still hammering at the walls of the little roadside hut, and I felt about as well-protected as a mouse under a shoebox in the middle of a stampede. I was cold already. It was quickly going to get worse.
The single flame of Mick’s gas lighter put giants’ shadows on to the walls and ceiling. “Winds must’ve brought the line down,” he said.
The other man, whose name was David something or other, said, “Anything we could fix?”
“Not me, pal. I’d rather live.”
“What do we do, then? Burn the furniture?”
“Then we’d have nowhere to sit.” The big man who’d told us to call him Mick held the flame higher, and our shadows dived for cover. “Look, there’s still candles and a gas ring. Nothing’s altered. We can even have a brew.”
“The kettle’s electric and the water pipes are frozen,” David said promptly. Mick looked at him, hard.
“I could really go off you,” he said. “D’you know that?”
The candles were the dim, slow-burning kind in small tin dishes, and they’d been used before. The gas ring ran from a bottle under the table, and a kinked hose gave us a momentary problem in getting it going. The candles burned yellow, the gas burned blue, and our faces were white and scared-looking in the light that resulted.
Mick, David, me. Three separate stories of blizzard and breakdown and abandoned vehicles, three lifelines that probably wouldn’t otherwise have crossed but which had come together in this fragile cabin at the side of a snowbound motorway.
“Well, here goes nothing,” Mick said, and he grabbed a pan and went outside to get us some snow. The one called David went over to try the dead phone yet again.
I’d been the last to find the place, and I’d known immediately on entering that these two hadn’t been travelling together. They were an unmatched and probably unmatchable pair. Mick weighed in at around eighteen stone and had the look of—well, there’s no kind way of putting it—a slob, however you might dress and groom him. If you had to guess his line of work you might well place him as one of those vendors who stand with their push-along wagons near football grounds, selling hamburgers and hotdogs that have the look of having been poached in bodily fluids. David (he’d told me his second name, but it hadn’t stuck in my mind) was more like one of those people you’ll often see driving a company car with a spare shirt on a hanger in the back; he’d said that he was “in sales”, which I took to mean that he was a salesman. He was about my own age, and had reddish-blond hair so fine that he seemed to have no eye-lashes. The story, as I understood it, was that Mick had been aiming for the big service area about two miles further along the road, but had found his way blocked and had been forced to abandon his van-load of rubber hose in order to walk back to the only light that he’d seen in miles. When he’d made it to the hut he’d found David already there, crouched before the electric fire with a workman’s donkey jacket that he’d found and thrown around his shoulders. I’d joined them about half an hour after that, and no one had arrived since; the weather was worsening by the minute and it seemed unlikely that anybody else was going to make it through. The motorway must have been closed for some time now.
“Jesus wept!” Mick gasped when he’d fallen back in through the door three or four minutes later. I’d thought that he’d simply intended to take two steps out to fill the pan and then return and so I said, “What kept you?”
Some of the colour started to seep back into him as he stood over the heat of the gas ring, hands spread like he was making a blessing. He’d have made a pretty rough-looking priest. “I went down for a look at the road,” he said, “just in case there was any sign of a gritter going through.”
“See anything?”
“I’m lucky I even found the way back. I didn’t get more than twenty yards, and it blew up so hard that I might as well have been blind. Nothing else is moving out there. Looks like we’re in for the duration.”
“Oh, great,” David said heavily.
“You want to stick your nose outside before you say that,” Mick suggested. “It’s worse than before—it’s like walking into razor blades, and I’ll tell you something else. When the wind gets up in those wires, it’s just like voices. You listen long enough and honest to God, you start hearing your own name. You know what I reckon?”
“What?” I said.
“It’s all the dead people they’ve scraped up. They’re all cold and lonely out there.” And he winked at me as he said this, I suspect because his back was turned to David and David couldn’t see.
“For Christ’s sake,” David muttered darkly, and he went over to the other side of the hut and started rummaging around in the cupboards for mugs and teabags.
Mick was grinning happily now, but I wasn’t exactly sure why. Lowering my voice so that David wouldn’t hear me—he’d half-disappeared headfirst into one of the cupboards by now—I said, “What’s all that about?”
“Haven’t you seen the noticeboard?” Mick said, and he pointed to the wall behind me. “Take a look. We’ve found a right little Happy House to get ourselves snowed into. Desmond was reading all about it when I got here.”
“It’s David,” corrected a muffled voice from som
ewhere inside the furniture.
Mick said, unruffled, “Of course it is.”
I picked up one of the candles and took it over to the wall where the space alongside some lockers had been papered with old newspaper clippings. There were a few yellowing page three girls, but the rest of them were news stories. Some had photographs, and the photographs were all of mangled wreckage. It took me a moment to realise that they were all motorway crashes, and that the stretch of motorway where they’d taken place was the one that ran by under three feet of snow right outside.
“This must be where the lads wait for a call-out when there’s something nasty,” Mick said from just behind me. He’d come around and was inspecting the collection over my shoulder. “Some of the things they must have seen, eh? Rather them than me.”
Amen to that, I thought, although even in the dim and unsteady candlelight I found that I was browsing through the details in some of the pieces with the kind of detached fascination that I always seem to be able to manage when it’s a question of someone else’s misery. Entire families wiped out. A teenaged girl decapitated. Lorry drivers crushed when their cabs folded around them like stepped-upon Coke cans. An unwanted mistress—this one really got me looking twice—an unwanted mistress dumped, Jimmy Hoffa-style, into the wire skeleton of a bridge piling that had been boxed-up ready to take concrete the next morning. ENTOMBED ALIVE! the headline said, but even that looked kind of pale next to the disaster involving the old folks’ outing and the petfood truck full of offal.
I gathered from the collection that this hut was the base for the clean-up team who worked the road for some distance in either direction, and that they took an honest pride in their gruesome occupation. I imagined them trooping out to their breakdown wagon, whistling as they pulled on their jackets and thinking about next year’s holidays. And then, at the other end of the drive, getting out with their bags and shovels to give their professional attention to the loved ones of some cheap-skate who’d saved the cost of a cabin on the car ferry or skipped a night in a hotel to drive on through and get an extra half-day out of the holiday flat. Where the team would be right now, I could only guess. I imagined that they’d have moved their base along to the service area as soon as the weather had started to clamp down, because the hut was no place to be marooned out of choice. The services would probably be starting to resemble a refugee centre by now, cut off but reasonably self-sufficient, and I wished that I could be there instead of here. The gas ring behind us was running with the valve wide-open, and still I could see my breath in the air in front of me.
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