Naine realised with a slight jolt she had been convincing enough to convince even the doctor.
‘No. I don’t think so.’
‘Some men,’ he said. He looked exasperated. Then he cheered up. ‘Never mind. You’ve got the best thing there.’
When she was walking to the town bus-stop, Naine felt weary and heavy, for the first time. The heat seemed oppressive, and the seat for the stop was tormentingly arranged in clear burning yellow light. Two fat women already sat there, and made way for her grudgingly. She was always afraid at this point of meeting the awful, cheery, nosy woman. Because of the awful woman, Naine no longer pegged out washing, and had kept the postman waiting on her doorstep twice while she peered at him from an upstairs room, to be sure.
Somehow, to see the awful woman again would be just too much. She might start talking about Alice Barterlowe. Naine was sure that her child, in its fifth month, was generally visible by now. That would set the awful woman off, probably. No use for old Alice, then. No. No.
When the bus came, the journey seemed to last for a year, although it took less than half an hour. All the stops, and at every stop, some woman with a bag. And these women, though not the awful woman, might still sit beside her, might say, Oh, you’re at Number 23 in the lane. The lane where the abortionist rode by at midnight on her nag.
Exhausted, Naine walked down from the main road. She made herself a jug of barley water and sipped a glass on the shady side of her garden. The grass had gone wild, was full of daisies, dandelions, nettles, purple sage and butterflies.
‘I’m so happy here. It’s so perfect. It’s what we want. I mustn’t be so silly, must I?’ But neither must she ever speak her fear aloud to her child. Of all the things she could tell the child - not this, never this.
And round and round in her head, the idiotic rhyme, compounded of others that had gone wrong...
Clip clop, clip clop.
She must have been courageous. Alice. To live as she did, and do what she did. Especially then. It took courage now. Naine could recall the two girls caught kissing at school, and the ridiculous to-do there had been. Did they know what they weredoing? Dirty, nasty. They had been shunned, and only forgiven when one confessed to pretending the other was a boy. They were practising for men. For their proper female function and role.
Naine, of course, was properly fulfilling both. Naine must like men, obviously. Look at her condition. It was her husband who was in the wrong. She had been faithful, loving, admiring, aroused, orgasmic, conceptive, productive. But he had run off. Oh yes, Naine was absolutely fine.
She did not want any dinner, or supper. She would have to economise, stop buying all this food she repeatedly had to throw away.
But then, she had to eat, for the sake of the child. ‘I will, tomorrow, darling. Your mother won’t be so silly tomorrow.’
She had told the doctor she could not sleep, made the mistake of saying ‘I keep listening—’ But he was ahead of her, thank God. ‘The pressure on the stomach and lungs can be a nuisance, I’m afraid. Ask Nurse to give you a leaflet. And you’ve only moved out here recently. I know, these noisy country nights. Foxes, badgers rustling about. Whoever said the country was quiet was mad. It took me six months to get used to it.’ He added that sleeping pills were not really what he would advise. Try cutting down on tea and coffee after five p.m., some herbal infusion maybe, and honey. And so on.
After the non-event of dinner, Naine watched her black-and-white eighteen-inch TV until the closedown. Then she went next door and had a bath.
She had never been quite happy with the bathroom downstairs. It could be grim later, when she was even heavier, lumbering up and down with bladder pressure, to pee. Maybe when things were settled anyway, she could move the bathroom upstairs, put the workroom here.
The child’s room, the room the child would have; she had been going to paint that, and she ought to do so. Blue and pink were irrelevant. A sort of buttermilk colour would be ideal. Pale curtains like her own. And both rooms facing on to the lane. It would not matter about the lane, then. By then, Naine would laugh at it, but not the way the awful woman had laughed.
Clip clop. Clip clop.
After the bath, bed. Sitting up. Reading a novel, the same line over and over, or half a page, which was like reading something in ancient Greek. And the silence. The silence waiting for the sound.
Clip clop.
Turn on the radio. Bad reception sometimes. Crackling. Love songs. Songs of loss. All the lovely normal women weeping for lost men, and wanting them back at any cost.
At last, eyes burning, lying down. We’ll go to sleep now.
But not. The silence, between the notes of the radio. A car. A fox. The owl. The wind. Waiting...
Clip clop, clip clop.
It was the horse she couldn’t bear. It was the horse she saw. Not old Alice in her dirty labourer’s clothes, with her scrubbed hands and white nails. The horse. The horse whose hoofs were the sound that said, Here comes Alice, Alice on her horse.
Old horse. Try to feel sorry for the poor old horse, as try to feel proud of courageous Alice. But no, the horse’s face was long and haggard, with rusty drooping eyes, yellow, broken, blunt teeth, dribbling, unkempt. Not a sad face. An evil face. The pale horse of death.
‘I’m sorry I can’t sleep, baby. You sleep. You sleep and I’ll sing you a lullaby. Hush-a-bye, hush-a-bye.’
But the words are wrong. The words are about the white pale horse. The night-mare. The nag with the fine lady, the old lesbian. Clippity-clop—
Clip clop clip clop
Clip clop clip clop
It was coming up in her, up from her stomach, her throat, like sick. She couldn’t hold it in.
‘Clip clop clip clop clip clop clip clop here comes the abortionist’s horse!’
And then she laughed the evil laugh, and she knew how it had trundled and limped down the lane, its hoofs clipping and clicking, carrying death to the unborn through the mid of night.
* * * *
‘It’s my work that’s the problem. I didn’t realise it would be so awkward.’ She was explaining to the estate agent, who sat looking at her as if trying to fathom the secret. ‘I’ll just have to sell up and get back to London. It really is a nuisance.’
‘Well, Mrs Robert...well, we’ll see what we can do.’
As Naine again sat on the hot seat waiting for the bus, she thought of the train journey to London, of having nowhere to go. She had tried her friends, tentatively, to see if she could bivouac a day or two. One had not answered at all. One cut her short with a tale of personal problems. You could never intrude. One said she was so sorry, but she had decorators in. This last sounded like a lie, but probably was true. In any case, it would have to be a hotel, and the furniture would have to be stored. And then, flat-hunting five months gone, in the deep, smoky city heat. The house had been affordable down here. But London prices would allow her little scope.
It doesn’t matter. I can find somewhere better after you’re born. But for now. For now.
She knew she was a fool, had perhaps gone a bit crazy, as they said women did during pregnancy and the menopause. Even the kind doctor, when she had vaguely confessed to irrational anxieties, said jokingly, ‘I’m afraid that can be par for the course. Hormones.’
To leave the house - her house - how she had loved it. But now. Not now.
No one came to look at the house, however. When she phoned the agents, they were evasive. It was a long way out unless you liked walking or had a car. And there had been a threat of the bus service being cut.
Day by day.
Night by night.
Over and over.
Its face.
The horse.
* * * *
She was dreaming again, but even unconscious, she recognized the dream. It was delicious. So long since she had felt this tingling. This promise of pleasure. Her sexual fantasy.
She was in the darkened room. Everything was still. Yet someon
e approached, unseen.
They glided, behind dim floating curtains. The faint whisper of movement. And at every sound, her anticipation was increasing. In the heart of her loins, a building marvellous tension. Yes, yes. Oh come to me.
Naine, sleeping, sensed the drawing close. And now her groin thrummed, drum-taut. Waiting...
The shadow was there. It leaned towards her.
As her pulses escalated to their final pitch, she heard its ill-shod metal feet on the floor. A leaden midnight fell through her body and her blood was cold.
Its long horse face, primal, pathetic and cruel. The broken teeth. The rusty, rust-dripping half-blind eyes. It hung over her like a cloud, and she smelled its smell, hay and manure, stone and iron, old rain, ruinous silence, crying and sobbing, and the stink of pain and blame and bones.
The horse. It was here. It breathed into her face.
Naine woke, and the night was empty, noiseless, and then she felt the trapped and stifled pleasure, which had become a knot of spikes, and stumbling, half falling down the stairs, to the inconvenient lower bathroom, she left a trail of blood.
Here, under the harsh electric light, vomiting in the bath, heaving out to the lavatory between her thighs the reason the light the life of her life, in foam and agony and a gush of scarlet, Naine wept and giggled, choking on her horror. And all the while knowing, she had nothing to dread, would heal very well, as all Alice’s girls did. Knowing, like all Alice’s girls, she would never again conceive a child.
Tanith Lee lives on Britain’s Sussex Weald with her husband and two cats. She began writing at the age of nine and worked variously as a library assistant, shop assistant, filing clerk and waitress, and had three children’s books published in the early 1970s. When DAW Books published her novel The Birthgrave in 1975, and thereafter twenty-six other titles, she was able to become a fulltime writer. To date she has published more than seventy novels and collections and nearly two hundred short stories. Some of her recent and forthcoming titles include Faces Under Water, Saint Fire, A Bed of Earth and Venus Preserved (the first four volumes in ‘The Secret Books of Venus’ series); White as Snow (an adult retelling of the Snow White legend); a large epic fantasy duet, Mortal Sims and The Immortal Moon,plus the children’s books Islands in the Sky, and the trilogy Law of the Wolf Tower, Wolf Star Riseand Queen of the Wolves.About the preceding story, the author explains: ‘John Kaiine, my husband, came up with the title. Both he and I tend to get titles out of thin air, frequently without a story attached. (And anyone who’s seen much of my work lately, will realise that he has also given me many ideas and plotlines for stories - which, with my own stream of ideas, makes sure I am a seven-day-a-week writing factory.) This title is so threateningly pictorial that of course the story itself arrived swiftly on its heels - or hoofs.’
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* * * *
The Handover
MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH
Nobody moved much when he came into the bar. From the way Jack shut the door behind him - quietly, like the door of a cupboard containing old things seldom needed but neatly stored - we could tell he didn’t have any news that we’d be in a hurry to hear. There were three guys sipping beer up at the counter. One of them glanced up, gave him a brief nod. That was it.
It was nine-thirty by then. There were five other men in the place, each sitting at a different table, nobody talking. Some had books in front of them, but I hadn’t heard a page turn in a while. I was sitting near the fire and working steadily through a bowl of chilli, mitigating it with plenty of crackers. I’d like to say Maggie’s chilli is the best in the West, but, to be frank, it isn’t. It’s probably not even the best in town: even this town, even now. I wasn’t very hungry, merely eating for something to do. Only alternative would have been drinking, but just a couple will go to my head these days, and I didn’t want to be drunk. Being drunk has a tendency to make everything run into one long dirge, like being stoned, or living in Iowa. I haven’t ever taken a drink on important days, on Thanksgiving, anniversaries or my birthday. Not a one. This evening wasn’t any kind of celebration, not by a long chalk, but I didn’t want to be drunk on it either.
Jack walked up to the bar, water dripping from his coat and onto the floor. He wasn’t moving fast, and he looked old and cold and worn through. It was bitter outside, and the afternoon had brought a fresh fall of snow. Only a couple of inches, but it was beginning to mount up. Maggie poured a cup of coffee without being asked and set it in front of him. Her coffee isn’t too bad, once you’ve grown accustomed to it. Jack methodically poured about five spoons of sugar into the brew, which is one of the ways of getting accustomed to it, then stirred it slowly. The skin on his hand looked delicate and thin, like blue-white tissue paper that had been scrunched into a ball and absently flattened out again. Sixty-eight isn’t so old, not these days, not in the general scheme of things. But some nights it can seem ancient, if you’re living inside it. Some nights it can feel as if you’re still trying to run long after the race is finished. At sixty-four, and the second youngest in the place, I personally felt older than God.
Jack stood for a moment, looking around the place as if memorising it. The counter itself was battered with generations of use, as was the rest of the room. The edges of chairs and tables were worn smooth, the pictures on the walls so varnished with smoke you’d had to have known them for forty years to guess what they showed. We all knew what they showed. The bulbs in the wall fixings were weak and dusty, giving the room a dark and gloomy cast. The one area of brightness was in the corner, where the jukebox sat. Was a big thing when Pete, my old friend and Maggie’s late husband, bought it. But only the lights work these days, and not all of them, and none of us are too bothered. Nobody comes into the bar who wouldn’t rather sit in peace than hear someone else’s choice of music, played much too loud. I guess that comes with age, and anyway the 45s in the machine are too old to evoke much more than sadness. The floor was clean, and the bar only smelt slightly of old beer. You want it to smell that way a little, otherwise it would be like drinking in a church.
Maggie waited until Jack had caught his breath, then asked. Someone had to, I guess, and it was always going to be her.
She said: ‘No change?’
Jack raised his head, looked at her. ‘Course there’s a change,’ he muttered. ‘No one said she weren’t going to change.’
He picked up his coffee and came to sit on the other side of my table. But he didn’t catch my eye, so I let him be, and cleared up the rest of my food, rejecting the raw onion garnish in deference to my innards. They won’t stand for that kind of thing any more. It wasn’t going to be long before a cost-benefit analysis of the chilli itself consigned it to history alongside them.
When I was done I pushed the bowl to one side, burped as quietly as I could and lit up a Camel. I left the pack on the table, so Jack could take one if he had a mind to. He would, sooner or later. The rest of the world may have decided that cigarettes are more dangerous than a nuclear war, but in Eldorado, Montana, a man’s still allowed to smoke after his meal if he wants to. What are they going to do: come and bust us? The people who make the rules live a long ways from here, and the folk in this town have never been much for caring what State ordinances say.
One of the guys at the bar finished his beer, asked for another. Maggie gave him one, but didn’t wait for any money. Outside, the wind picked up a little and a door started banging, the sound like an unwelcome visitor knocking to be let out of the cellar. But it was a ways up the street, and you stopped noticing it after a while. It’s not an uncommon sound in Eldorado.
Other than that, everyone just held their positions and eventually Jack reached forward and helped himself to a cigarette. I struck a match for him, as his fingers seemed numb and awkward. He still hadn’t taken his coat off, though with the fire it was pretty warm in the room.
Once he was lit and he’d stopped coughing, he nodded at me through the smoke. ‘How’s the chilli?’
‘Filthy,’ I confirmed. ‘But warm. Most of it.’
He smiled. He rested his hands on the table, palms down, and looked at them for a while. Liver spots and the shadow of old veins, like a fading map of territories once more uncharted. ‘She’s getting worse,’ he said. ‘Going to be tonight. Maybe already.’
I’d guessed as much, but hearing it said still made me feel tired and sad. He hadn’t spoken loudly, but everybody else heard too. It got even quieter, and the tension settled deeper, like a dentist’s waiting room where everyone’s visiting for the first time in years and has their suspicions about what they’re going to hear. Maybe ‘tension’ isn’t the right word. That suggests someone might have felt there was something they could do, that some virile force was being held in abeyance, ready for the sign, the right time. There wasn’t going to be any sign. This night had been a while in coming, but it had come, like a phone call in the night. We knew there wasn’t anything to be done.
Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 21
