Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  * * * *

  Poul spent the sunset sitting on the end of the pier, his toes dipping in the lake, surrounded by the watery symphony: aqueous rhythms beating against the wood, lapping against the shore. And fish. He sat quietly, and the fish came: a school of blue gill, scales catching the last light in a thousand glitters swirling in front of him and then were gone. Later, when the sun had nearly disappeared, a long, black shape glided by, its eye as big as a quarter, a long row of teeth visible when it opened its mouth. Poul had finally seen a pike.

  He sighed, pushed himself up and found Leesa in the kitchen. She’d already put Savannah to bed in their room upstairs.

  She looked at her coffee cup dully. It was almost hard to remember what he’d loved about her when they’d first met, then she turned her head a little and brushed back her hair, and for a second, it was there, a picture of Leesa when they were young. Before Savannah. Before coming to the lake had become so reluctant. The second disappeared.

  He pulled a chair out for himself and turned it around so he could lean his arms on the back. She didn’t speak. Poul shut his eyes to listen to the woods behind the cottage. The air there was always so moist and living, but it didn’t penetrate into the kitchen. With his eyes closed, he could swear he was alone in the room.

  ‘I want a divorce,’ Poul said.

  Leesa looked at him directly for maybe the first time in a year. ‘Why now?’

  The low, slanting sun cut through the trees behind the cottage, casting a yellow light in the room. He knew that on the lake, now, it highlighted the waves, but didn’t penetrate the depths. Fisherman would be out, because the big fish, the serious fish, moved in the evening. The evening was the best time to be on the lake, after a hard day of swimming, of hiking in the woods where he’d played with Neal, and just before they went to bed to tell each other stories until sleep took them, two brothers under one blanket lying head to head, and they dreamed.

  Poul said, ‘When you realise a thing is bad, you’ve got to let it go or you’ll drown.’

  James Van Pelt lives in western Colorado with his wife and three sons. One of the 1999 finalists for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, he teaches high school and college English. His fiction has appeared in, amongst other places, Analog, Realms of Fantasy, The Third Alternative and Weird Tales. Upcoming work is scheduled to appear in Asimov’s and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.When he is not teaching, writing or raising kids, he hunts for an agent to represent his first novel. ‘ “Savannah is Six” has some autobiographical roots,’ says the author. ‘When I was young, my family vacationed on an Indiana lake each summer. Although I never tried the sand in the boots trick, the fish fascinated me, and I spent many happy hours with a face mask looking for them. Now I’m a father with three sons. We haven’t been to the lake yet, but I’m stunned by the depth of the relationships between the brothers. All that, a sad divorce, and a love for Ray Bradbury went into the story.’

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  * * * *

  Now Day Was Fled as the Worm Had Wished

  BRIAN HODGE

  We would know it as soon as we got there, Vanessa insisted - and more than once. We would know the right place when we found it and not one moment before, so there was no point in second-guessing ourselves. Stop trying so hard. No formal itinerary and that was just the way we should keep it.

  ‘How about here?’ Heather had suggested a couple of weeks ago at the Tower of London, before we’d left the city for the countryside. Forty-eight hours before that we would’ve still been somewhere over the Atlantic.

  ‘Absolutely not, you can’t be serious,’ Vanessa had vetoed. ’Are you?’

  No reply, just Heather and her puckish little smile, betraying nothing. Even I couldn’t be sure, when I’d known her so much longer. It wasn’t often you could catch Heather giving away anything more than only as much as she wanted.

  ‘It was the ravens, wasn’t it?’ I asked her later, on the Tube, starting to feel as though I might be catching on to the way she was thinking here and now, in this world instead of the one we were trying to leave behind. Not that it looked all that different yet - those butt-ugly American fanny-packs and the murderous stress of business commuters look the same everywhere - but we at least felt the potential unfurling before us.

  Ravens live at the top of the Tower, we had discovered. Live up there under ceremonial guard. Very serious business, those ravens. Tradition holds that the fate of England hinges upon them. Should the ravens ever leave the Tower, fly away, England will be sure to fall.

  ‘Maybe something about them did make me think of my parents’ marriage,’ Heather said.

  ‘I thought you wanted to do this.’

  ‘I do. I just don’t want to do any of it like they did.’

  ‘In that case, I’d say you’re off to a flying start.’

  See, the catch with the ravens is that they can’t soar away even if they want to. The feathers at the ends of their wings are clipped - prisoners, as surely as any heretic or rightful heir to a stolen throne who’d ever been a guest of the Tower when it was operational. It’s possible that if one of them wanted out badly enough, it could tumble off the edge of the parapet and fall like a glossy black stone. But I suppose they’re more apt to simply spend their days pecking at the free buffet and eyeing the sky with longing.

  Naturally I hesitated to share this insight with her - the considerate thing to do, given the way her mother had leapt from a hotel window when Heather was fourteen, half her lifetime ago. Which hadn’t done her father’s political career any favours, coming as it did during a re-election campaign. He’d soldiered on in the race, claiming that this was what his poor beloved late wife would’ve wanted, but even his tarnished silver tongue couldn’t sell that one to anyone who wasn’t already lining his pockets. By election night, the Senator was a historical footnote.

  Heather had told me that it was the only justice she’d ever really seen in the world, but wouldn’t you know: it had had to hit so brutally close to home.

  * * * *

  Oscar Wilde referred to England and America as two countries divided by a common language. While it may not be the most conspicuous example, this is no more significant than in those words applied to the land. Words that you really don’t hear in the States, words like heath and hedgerow, glen and dale, moor and weald and bracken. It’s as though in crossing the Atlantic our ancestors undertook some great divestiture, stripping away the luxuriant wealth of how they might speak of what was beneath their feet and tilled by their ploughs. If it could be semiotically reduced, then it might that much more easily be plundered.

  But that’s America for you. Take what you need, then take as much as you can hold or lock away because God forbid anyone else should have it.

  Used to, once upon et cetera, when I thought about Europe and someday travelling there, as soon as I had the time, the only way I could imagine doing the Continent was in as much ostentatious style as possible. Five-star hotels, chauffeurs, restaurants that would break the wallets of everyone I ever wanted to prove I had surpassed, eclipsed, outshone. But now that I could afford it, I found that I couldn’t muster up much enthusiasm for this route. These were the dreams of a twenty-year-old, and a decade later as relevant as the telegraph.

  One decade later, the only thing making sense to me, to all three of us pale, long-boned Anglos - admittedly, at Vanessa’s prompting - was to instead walk this ancestral island of ours, and try to drum up any connection that might still be buried deep in our New World bones, along with the trace elements of cesium and mercury and everything else we ingested without intending to or having much say in the matter.

  And so walk we did. We’d bought rail passes to train our way into whichever area we felt like exploring, but once there, it was England at a grass roots level. Naive dreamers, perhaps, hoping to find something that we feared might no longer exist, if it ever had, but we wanted an England of standing stones and the Cerne Giant and the Uff
ington Horse, not an England trampled by the same old cigar chompers who would just as soon bulldoze a burial mound as look at it.

  And so. We walked. Backpacks on our shoulders, hiking boots on our feet, extra support in Vanessa’s - uncommonly high arches, she has - and, just to make it interesting, an additional agenda in our hearts. Figuring for this one we’d be entirely on our own, and just as well, since most people frowned on the sort of thing we had in mind.

  At least that’s one good thing about lots of money:

  You get to say ‘Fuck you’ like you really mean it.

  * * * *

  A grand place for hikes, rural England, as though the glaciers of the last Ice Age had carved the land for feet and walking staves, and nobody can bear to challenge that. You can go virtually anywhere, cut across great tracts of farmland and tarry as long as you like, and with the farmers’ blessings, too, as long as you remember to shut the gates behind you so the sheep don’t stray out. Just try that in the US without risking buckshot or worse.

  Denied that level of freedom to roam the eastern county of Suffolk, surely we would never have found the old manor house. Well off any road of consequence, a few miles from the nearest town of Lavenham, it sat entirely by itself, surrounded by a quilt of tilled fields and wild meadows and pastures. It was the sort of place that becomes invisible to those who grow up familiar with it, seen but no longer noticed, as much a feature of the landscape as the oldest yew tree or some far-off tor, and given just as much thought. Even from a distance we could see that it was in ruins, bricks overrun with vines and ivy, one end’s outer wall collapsed inwards, and two of its five chimneys crumbled halfway back to the many-gabled peaks of the roof.

  ‘Well, look what we have here,’ Vanessa said. ‘Stumbling onto a place like this can make an eight-year-old out of anyone.’

  And for the moment she reminded me of one, tall and lanky though she was, and older than I was by a couple of years. It was the eager flush of excitement that did it, and how she seemed somehow smaller beneath hair gone mad in the moist air of early autumn. Streaks of colour had been dyed into it these past few months, then thickly braided...one purple, one green, one the same blue shade as her eyes.

  She cupped a hand to her ear and cocked her gaze sideways to the sky.

  ‘Hear that?’ she asked Heather and me. ‘Hear it?’

  ‘What?’ we asked.

  ‘That big booming voice, full of thunderbolts and glee,’ she said. ‘And it’s saying, “Explore...explore!”‘

  She sprinted towards the manor house to oblige, sprinting surprisingly well considering the forty extra pounds’ worth of backpack and sleeping bag.

  Heather and I opted for a more leisurely pace. Because her legs were not nearly as long as Vanessa’s, I knew that Heather was afraid how she might look by comparison, that anything less than reminiscent of a gazelle wouldn’t be worth the effort.

  ‘Just once I’d like to be the first one to hear the voices,’ said Heather. ‘Just once I’d like to be the one to tell her what they’re saying.’

  ‘Well, don’t you think she’s probably been hearing voices her whole life?’

  ‘Life is just so weird,’ and then Heather laughed. ‘All that time you and me thinking we’re regular people and then we both fall in love with Joan of Arc.’

  ‘Don’t forget, I fell in love with you first,’ I told her, and hoped that this would always be enough to sustain us through whatever else we might be lacking. As though, deep down, I didn’t suspect that each of us knew better.

  Heather’s mother, zoned on tranquillisers and launching herself nine floors towards the limousine that had glided up in front of the hotel to whisk her husband to a campaign appearance...

  That was love too. Or at the very least the end result.

  * * * *

  Realistically I cannot say that I was expecting this arrangement, this trinity we had formed, to work for a lifetime, or even for a decade. I’d never heard of these things lasting for any duration, everyone’s love and affection and ardour bifurcating equally. Such a delicate balance to maintain, able to tip so easily, someone beginning to feel that they’re getting the lesser end of the bargain, then demanding one partner or the other make a choice. All right, so there was the poet Ezra Pound, with a wife and a mistress who were crazy for each other, but I couldn’t shake this feeling, the laudable attributes of Heather and Vanessa notwithstanding, that I had used up my personal share of good fortune already.

  Heather and I had been together for years before Vanessa entered the picture. Heather was the one who met her first, Vanessa temping for a receptionist out on maternity leave at the brokerage firm where Heather gambled on the Dow Jones with other people’s money. This was one of Vanessa’s quote/unquote respectable phases, when five mornings a week fiscal realities sent her to the end of her closet that she didn’t really like to visit, and impelled her to leave her hair one colour, an alien amongst people she could fool into thinking she was no different.

  It was talk of suicide that nailed together the bridge between them, the first commonality that they’d realised they shared. Heather’s mother, of course, and a couple of years ago Vanessa’s younger brother had hung himself two months after his university commencement. He’d run up nearly thirty thousand dollars in credit card debt while a student, more and more companies sending him new cards or raising his limits, and he saw no other way out from under the burden. Ever since, Vanessa had been attempting to sue the banks for wrongful death. As though she could get anywhere in a system so beautifully designed to indenture its slaves at ever-younger ages.

  All of which comprised a strange, even morbid, basis for the two of them to start going out for lunch together, but there you go, and as so often happens between co-workers who’ve begun looking at each other over menus, one thing led to another, and, rather abruptly, a few nights each week Heather started working extra hours. That old euphemism.

  Once living the lie ballooned up with too much pressure at home - four or five weeks, something like that - she burst into tears and told me what had really been going on. It was far less a confession than a great avalanche of bewilderment, half or more of all the assumptions she’d taken for granted about herself now being called into rigorous question.

  And I tried, really tried, to react the way I was supposed to, to get enraged over the betrayal, and had it been another man I might’ve found it easier, but I couldn’t, just couldn’t summon the fury, because I was intrigued and it wasn’t so much out of base prurience as suddenly feeling as though I’d spent our years together with my eyes half-closed and now they were beginning to open, and when I looked at Heather and her tears and her confusion all I could think was I didn’t have one clue you had this in you. But neither had she, so at least we were even.

  ‘I’m not supposed to want her, this isn’t the way I’m supposed to be,’ Heather said.

  ‘Yeah, who told you that?’ I said, but hardly had to ask, so then I said, ‘Well, just about everything your parents told you about themselves and each other was a lie, so what makes you think they knew what they were talking about when it came to you?’

  Which upset her further for a while, because she was the only one allowed to bad-mouth her family.

  ‘So you’re not mad?’ she asked later, once this lesser storm had passed.

  ‘I’m too tired to be mad,’ I said, and wondered if maybe that wasn’t a huge part of all the problems we’d never even stopped to realise we had.

  * * * *

  We caught up with Vanessa inside the manor house, this ill-kept hulk gone far down the road to ruin. High-ceilinged and dank within, it was now a home fit for little else but mice and ghosts, although rather than diminish its grandeur, the state of the place only took that grandeur and turned it tragic. You could look at the staircase, dingy and splintered, and envision what it had once been, polished and gleaming in the mellow sunlight from the tall leaded windows. Could look at one of the cold fireplaces, filled now
with leaves and grit, and imagine a blazing log that had taken four strong hands to wrestle onto the grate.

  ‘Charming starter palace for young royal newlyweds,’ said Vanessa, to no one in particular. ‘Needs a little work.’

  She’d temped for a real estate agency, too. Have to assume she learned how to read between the lines.

  We wandered about, spotting the occasional evidence of prior squatters and steering clear of the unstable end where the wall had collapsed. A yawning, broken-timbered fracture now framed a ragged view of lawn and trees, but the pile of rubble looked too trifling to refill the hole, all the bricks worth salvaging long since hauled away by some frugal herdsman.

  It was the gardens out back, or rather what had become of them, that really seized our fancy. Season after season, year upon year, hedges and flowerbeds and ferns had been abandoned to run riot over a couple of acres enclosed within a high stone wall. Vines had woven treacherous mats over flagstones and pathways; moss and lichens had crept up from the bases of statuary and birdbaths. A small fishpond, replenished solely by the frequent rain, had grown thick with algae, resounding with the plop of frogs when we came near. I couldn’t remember when I’d ever seen so many shades of green.