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

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  Even the walls surrounding the enclosure had succumbed to the onslaught, most of them carpeted in ivy, and Heather pointed to the sleek black shapes perched atop them that watched us or probed for insects under the greenery.

  ‘If anyone tries to clip your wings,’ she called to the ravens, ‘I hope you peck their eyes out!’

  They stopped, heads cocked and beaks stilled. They listened, or seemed to. One squawked with its loud, ugly voice.

  ‘You almost get the feeling they understand,’ I said. ‘It’s that damned Hitchcock movie, you know.’

  ‘Well, as birds go, they’re sure not stupid, ravens aren’t,’ Vanessa said. She wrapped her arms around Heather from behind and regarded the ravens with a wistful smile, and why not - consorts of gods and goddesses, eaters of the dead on sword-strewn battlefields, bearers of arcana, these birds and their mystery and their downright pagan mythos were just the sort of things closest to her heart. In her daydreams, I was certain that they whispered in her ear as surely as they were to have whispered into Odin’s.

  Starting to graduate down to finer details, we converged on a section of the encircling wall that was free of ivy, and, aside from the statues, the only aspect of these gardens-run-amok that alluded to the touch of human hands. Vanessa traced their long-ago labours with her own, fingertips caressing one of several malformed faces that leered from the wall, bulging from the stone in bas-relief.

  ‘God, they look like they could take your hand off in half a second,’ Heather said. ‘They’re worse than snapping turtles.’

  ‘Meaner, maybe,’ I said. ‘But not a whole lot brighter.’

  ‘Hush, both of you.’ Vanessa, doing some snapping of her own. ‘You’ll hurt their feelings.’

  ‘Oh, go hug a tree,’ I said, just to be contentious, only half in play, my elder self swimming up from the depths. In truth, it was still closer to the surface than I would’ve liked, but I really was trying to be a born-again lackadaisical transient.

  The carvings on the wall were the sort of thing I generally associated with churches, and old churches at that - cathedrals, really - mediaeval leftovers from Catholicism’s gaudier heritage, when popes and priests still condoned a discreet nod towards all things heathen that they’d borrowed, burned, or buried beneath a layer of revisionism. Then again, some people just think they look bitchin’. Hard to say how old these particular fellows were, but they certainly didn’t appear to have put up with centuries of weathering. If they’d been carved much before 1900, I would’ve been very surprised to hear it.

  They were almost all head, and their heads almost all mouth. Fierce of eye, they gaped or seemed to bellow. Their arms and legs and compact barrel-bodies looked stumpy by comparison. Some of them reached around to grab their mouths at the corner and stretch them wider still, exposing the depths of their gullets. Giants, I guessed they were, because others grappled with smaller figures of normal human proportion and stuffed these poor unfortunates into their vast maws.

  ‘Fe fi fo fum,’ I whispered into Vanessa’s ear, quietly, so they wouldn’t hear me. ‘I smell the blood of an American.’ Nuzzling her there and nipping at her lobe until she laughed and pushed me away.

  ‘What do they mean?’ Heather asked, defaulting to Vanessa on this one. ‘They’ve got to mean something, don’t they?’

  ‘Oh sure. It’s like pictures in stained-glass, they have a story to tell, a little lesson in them.’ Vanessa shot a playfully bitchy glance at me. ‘For illiterates.’

  ‘So what is it these fatheads have to say to us?’ Heather said.

  ‘If I’m remembering correctly, they’re to remind us that there are always forces out there much greater than we are.’

  ‘Wow, they’re absolutely right,’ I said. ‘For me, it was Microsoft.’

  I expected recriminations from Vanessa, but no - something clearly more important had crossed her mind. She glanced about the gardens, then broke loose with a slow, broad smile as she looked at Heather and me.

  ‘We’ll do it here, right here, tomorrow,’ she told us. ‘Haven’t I been saying all along we’d know the right spot when we found it?’

  And it was fine with me, because the place really was beautiful, and we surely wouldn’t be lucky enough to blunder across another like it anytime soon. Heather looked startled for a moment, as if our intentions had never been genuinely real until this moment, and the truth of it was only now sinking in.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ she said.

  ‘Besides,’ and Vanessa swept her hand toward the devouring heads peering from their wall, ‘if we’re getting married, we really should have witnesses.’

  * * * *

  The money. Oh, right - that.

  There are no better mousetraps any more. These days, if you want the world to beat a path to your door, you’d best come up with something new and improved going on at the other end of the mouse plugged into your computer. While still in college, I founded a little start-up software company called Cerulean Data that grew in surges over the next ten years. Our greatest achievement was developing an applications programming interface that brought the giants calling. Next big leap forward in better-faster-wilder 3D graphics. Simply put, the giants had to have it.

  There arose a mighty tug-of-war over how I should handle this, with my accountants and lawyers on one side, my doctor on the other. The former clamoured in favour of licensing the API, since through me, they’d make far more money that way in the long run. But let it be understood they weren’t the ones with blood on their toilet paper, the trickle-down effect of my ravaging ulcer. My doctor, who had told me more than once that I was killing myself, voted to sell the company.

  In a college business course I had learned that during the development of the original Macintosh, one of Apple Computer’s founders gave out T-shirts to his employees that said 90 HRS/WK AND LOVING IT. That’ll never be me, I vowed. Never wear a shirt like that. No. I’m going to have a life.

  Ten, eleven years later, anyone who might’ve heard me back then would have been fully entitled to laugh themselves silly.

  Human beings aren’t meant to live this way, Vanessa told me, because by this time she had moved into our condo and come to realise that Heather wasn’t exaggerating about how little time I actually spent there. Visitor in my own home. Human beings weren’t meant to shit blood either, but it happens.

  Cerulean Data had gone public two years before Microsoft came knocking, with me as the major shareholder, and the last thing the other shareholders’ board of directors was going to do was stand in the way of something like this. All they did was rub their pudgy hands in anticipation, because they knew exactly what would happen with their stock.

  So did I. So did Heather. She brokered the deals for herself and Vanessa, the two of them pulling every penny they had out of the bank and borrowing money from whoever would lend it to them to buy up as much stock as they could, then sit back and wait for the windfall. Insider trading, it’s called, and plenty of people have gone to prison for it. Worth the risk, though, and I don’t know but that only half of it was the money, and the rest of it the thrill of committing a smash-and-grab on a world that each of us wanted less and less to do with...

  Maybe because of everybody we’d found out we had to share the place with.

  * * * *

  Since Heather and Vanessa had their hearts set on a noon ceremony, in which we would each profess our vows to the other two with the sun at its zenith overhead, we planned to spend the night in the manor house. We found a ratty old broom and swept clean an area in front of the fireplace in what might once have been the drawing room. A quick test with dry leaves and scavenged kindling proved that the flue still drew smoke, and so we built a fire and spread out our sleeping bags, and it was as fine a lodging as any hotel or B&B where we’d spent a night, as long as you could overlook the lack of running water and a proper bathroom.

  Food we had, bread and cheese and apples and wine, and as night fell past the windows, the chill de
epened beyond the circle cast by our fire. It was all the light in the world right now, and all we needed. We sat cross-legged or sprawled along our spread sleeping bags and it seemed befitting to tell stories about this place we had found. How it had come to be; how it had got this way.

  According to Heather, its decline dated back to the darkest years of World War II, while the Germans were steadily bombing England and Churchill vowed that the British would never surrender. The house belonged to a charmingly proper couple in their late middle years, distant royalty, almost assuredly, but still very far from the throne. One dark night during the Blitz, a stray bomb had taken out the end of the house, but it just so happened that one of the German planes crashed in the nearby woods. They heard it go down, and for hours they waited, until the break of dawn, when the gentleman donned his tweed hunting jacket and brought the shotgun he used for pheasants, and went looking for survivors. He found the pilot alive but injured, and marched him back to the damaged house. But instead of calling the Royal Air Force, the gentleman and his wife, quietly enraged over what was happening to their country, kept the pilot tied captive in their cellar, where they tortured him to death over the next week. Then buried him in the gardens. Shortly thereafter, they went mad with guilt and shame, and, hollow-eyed and searching for absolution, roamed the hallways of the estate until they died. The end.

  Overwhelming silence; finally:

  ‘My god,’ said Vanessa. ‘I had no idea you could be so morbid.’

  ‘Still want to marry me?’

  ‘Yeah, more than ever.’ Fingers stroking Heather’s inner arm. ‘Only now I want to marry you so I can cure you.’

  ‘Does a plan like that ever work?’ I asked. ‘I mean, wouldn’t there be a lot fewer divorces if women would just forget about trying to change who it is they’re marrying and accept that it can’t be done?’

  ‘Well, we sure changed you, didn’t we?’ said Vanessa.

  ‘Did we ever.’ Heather, backing her up all the way. ‘You used to be this hypertensive workaholic I was perennially on the verge of leaving. And look at you now...unemployed and a permanent member of the leisure class.’

  ‘We made you what you are today Just admit it and adore us.’

  ‘Don’t you have a story to tell us or something?’ I asked Vanessa. ‘Because I’d sure like to hear it now.’

  ‘Stubborn bastard,’ she said to me, but stretched across to kiss me anyway.

  And as Vanessa envisioned the history of this place, it wasn’t surprising that she would focus on the carved heads. Heather, I couldn’t help but notice, had ignored them entirely, but it was only natural that her idea of forces greater than herself should involve things plummeting from above.

  In Vanessa’s firmament, the house belonged to a renowned sculptor whom the world has long since forgotten. This was during the ‘20s, in that more optimistic period after the Great War, the War to End All Wars, before the shadow of the next and even greater war began to fall across Europe. Suddenly the sculptor withdrew from his adoring public and the world at large, for reasons he would share with no one, not even his wife, because, well, men are like that. All she knew was that it seemed to follow some mysterious encounter he’d had while walking in the woods, about which he steadfastly refused to say a word. Over the years to come, he spent his days chiselling ancient faces into the garden wall, recreating carvings whose origins were shrouded in the mists of time. And even though he’d turned his back on greater fame and greater fortune, he was much happier now, and then one day he simply walked into the woods and was never seen again, although his wife said that during their final breakfast together he seemed to be holding onto a secret that brought him both joy and sorrow. And so for years and years afterwards, she simply couldn’t abide noise, in case she might hear him calling for her to reunite with him at last, at the edge of the trees, and together they would walk into the forest and slip into that much older England, where only a privileged few were now allowed to tread, and where they would join with the elder spirits of the land.

  Overwhelming silence; finally:

  ‘But eventually she remarried, right?’ said Heather. ‘And then some Nazi asshole dropped a bomb on the house?’

  ‘No!’ cried Vanessa. ‘Just see if I tell you any more bedtime stories.’

  Me, I was just glad I hadn’t been the one to say that.

  ‘Beautiful story, Vanessa,’ I said instead, and meant it, wondering if she really could hear voices; if ravens whispered in her ear after all; if, even though she’d made up the details, every word might nonetheless be true.

  ‘And you’re absolutely, positively sure you want to marry me?’ Heather asked her.

  ‘You know, I’m really not liking the way you keep steering the conversation around to that,’ Vanessa said. ‘Now what’s wrong?’

  Heather, rolling onto her back: ‘Hasn’t the irony of the situation hit you yet? I mean, with the example I had set for me, way back when, I’ve always thought of matrimony as a kind of prison sentence.’ Hands laced behind her head now as she stared at the ceiling. ‘And what am I doing? I’m doubling the usual number of jailers.’

  * * * *

  Until Vanessa, my idea of other worlds, other realms, had always tended to begin and end with cyberspace - nebulous enough to imbue with a reverential awe, yet ultimately the creation of a binary number system, and therefore not impossible to grasp.

  Such arrogance. Such blinkered vision, no better than a horse allowed to see only what stands directly before its eyes.

  And my idea of a power greater than myself tended to acknowledge death and only death. Veterans of wars talk of the bullet with their name on it, but since I had no wars to fight, I thought instead of that graveworm underfoot, the worm with my name on it, keeping pace with me through the soil, wherever I might go, patiently waiting for the twilight of my life so that it could begin its work at last.

  In moments of insight, of honesty, I would wonder if Heather and I hadn’t sucked Vanessa into our lives because she made it easier, somehow, to believe in things we otherwise never would have. Like purpose. Like reassurance that we had not squandered our lives chasing articulated goals only to end up well-fed slaves. Like the existence of doorways to someplace, anyplace, better than those places that had shaped us as children and younger adults ... a new and welcoming place that had withstood the test of time because time could not permeate it.

  And while I was starting to believe in these, that didn’t mean I understood the keys that might unlock their doors. Was it faith? Longing? Or need? Was it the energies released before a blazing fire by the Saturnalian couplings of three people whose mouths and loins were so eager to violate the taboos of the only god others had tried to ram down their throats?

  Or were the keys never ours to turn at all, those doors opening only for the ones who were most desired by those on the other side?

  Fickle and capricious, maybe. Yet since when has life been anything but?

  * * * *

  When Vanessa and I awoke, we woke up alone, Heather’s spot between us on the sleeping bags empty. At first we thought nothing of it. I’d last roused to tend the fire during the wee hours, while it was yet pitch black outside, and she’d still been there, curled onto her side. Vanessa recalled being awakened briefly sometime after dawn, Heather stepping over her and whispering that she had to go outside to pee.

  Smouldering embers now, and chilly mists and morning dew.

  We checked the house, calling down its hallways and into its forsaken rooms. Checked the garden, both sides of the wall. Perhaps she had strayed beyond, towards fields or treeline; gone for a walk with a craving for solitude or an impulse to watch border collies run sheep.

  ‘Or maybe it’s wedding day jitters,’ Vanessa said.

  An hour, then two, and after packing and repacking our gear we had done as much as we could to kill time, unless we were to grab the broom and start sprucing up the house as a whole.

  Such a peculiar thing, when s
omething feels amiss and you’re trying not to allow your imagination to play the worst tricks it knows, the way the obsessions and compulsions take over. A plan of helpless desperation begins to hatch: if you can just dial the same phone number enough times, or look out a window, or down a street, you can eventually materialise someone out of thin air.

  With me, it was the garden, patrolling its blossoms and fronds and leaves every twenty or thirty minutes. Had Heather walked here, stood there? What had I missed a half-hour ago that was in plain view? All along envying the ravens their undipped wings and their sharp eyes.

  While walking past a section of the wall, for a moment it was tough to say who had startled whom more - me, or one of the ravens. With a harsh squawk and a flurry of shiny black wings, it came bursting out from behind a veil of ivy, at the same level as my knees, and it was only after it had rejoined its clan along the top of the wall, some tattered morsel glistening in its beak, that the unlikeliness of this struck me: from behind the ivy?