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

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  Everything hurts. My back. My chest. I think I’m dreaming most of the time. A fever dream. Or a nightmare. I cannot bear to look at myself, not even as I wash, thinking with each glance another flaw will become evident, another defect Cybele has cursed me with in her unrelenting battle. I’ve given up, dear. I submit. Stop this.

  * * * *

  Winter has come and she sits at the window. Her breath makes a frosty mask before her, but she stares past it at the icy lawn. She’s so weak from lack of food, lack of care, her elbow finds the windowsill to steady her. He piles another quilt on her shoulders, puts one over her knees until she’s a caterpillar in a cocoon. She knows there is no butterfly to break free. No magic wife returning from her spiral towards the end.

  Outside the window, he’s made a snowman with stick arms. Is he mocking her? He whispers that he loves her when he thinks she’s asleep, as if telling her will make her love him back. If loving him could save her. She’s closed now, all of her willed to the thing.

  When he taps his boots on the linoleum floor and tells her he’s off to the store, she closes her eyes. As the door shuts, she smells the clean scent of him in the wind that rushes in. Once it would have invited her to him, made her cling to his ardour. Now it reminds her of what she’ll never have again. Health. Innocence. Nothing to regret. She hates him. Hates him nearly as much as the growth that is slowly eating her life.

  She throws off the blankets and quilts. With the strength she finds in her hatred, she pushes up the window. The cold hits her hard and she reels. It caulks her lungs as she breathes it in. She shivers, teeth clattering so hard she tastes fragments of enamel.

  Her chest tightens and the pain in her arms and legs makes her wonder if she’s having a heart attack. Good, she thinks. If there is no life in me, you die. Take this, you motherfucker!

  * * * *

  She sees them together; her husband stands beside the psychiatrist looking at her from the doorway. She’s lying there as if she’s dead, but her vital signs are only weak, not gone. She’s hooked up to so many monitors and feeding tubes, she thinks she must look like a dying plant in the garden, pinned to the trellis wall.

  The psychiatrist sighs, tells him she’s stabilised, but still delusional. It may be as simple as her lacking calcium. That could affect her nervous system, her thinking. After all, she’s refused to eat. It makes sense. But she may also simply be nervously exhausted. A euphemism for nervous breakdown. Am I broke down, she wonders?

  The psychiatrist asks, will he sign commitment papers? He shakes his head. Why not, she wants to scream! Do it! He tells the doctor that she’s simply not prepared to have a child and they will seek outside counselling. His love has made her strong before, it will again. The psychiatrist shakes his head, tells him he risks losing her. No, he tells him. She just needs a few more days in the hospital. Put her back on solid food. She’ll rally.

  The psychiatrist mumbles something about murder and walks off.

  * * * *

  The thing has stopped moving. The pain subsided. Its children have quit their frantic play. The mother has tired of this body and my embargo on her imports. I can’t yet allow myself the joy of victory because part of me wonders if this is an ambush in waiting. Or I’ve lost my mind. Or I’m already dead.

  I know the ceiling of this room better than I once knew the geography of my husband’s body. I see faces and expressions that change. A Van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’ kind of image. And the cobwebs dance over the window in the early spring breeze. The light fixture is a great frosted globe with the chafe of dead bugs and dust of the attic in its bowel. I imagine the stuff moving, but I am safe from it down here.

  He’ll come in now. I turned off the light. He only comes when he thinks something’s happened. Like it’stime. Or I’ve fallen asleep and stopped breathing because he wasn’t there to breathe for me. When he thinks he can save me. It.

  If he only knew. There is no other choice. My life must take the life of this thing. Maybe then I’ve saved the world. If it’s worked, at least I’ve saved him. My lost boy, my husband. A man I once loved so much, I was the sun. I was the centre of creation.

  Why am I thinking of him now? Because Cybele has ceased her assault? She realises I’ve given up! Yes. I should be thinking of what will come next. Perhaps when all is safe, I can find the sun in me again.

  I’m so cold, though. I shut my eyes but see a vast brightness of congealing hues. There, a Kandinsky, a Klee! The colours and shapes! Now I want to paint, to put all the colours into my work that disappeared. I want to be free!

  * * * *

  She smiles now. She reaches up to the light, feels as if the bed and the earth are being pulled softly down away from her. She senses he’s there, rushing towards the bed, but she doesn’t care. Her work is done here. The best work is ahead of her.

  * * * *

  The blanket and sheet ruffle, her hair ripples about in an unseen breeze, her face is beatific. The fabric obscures her face a moment as she writhes, then a grunt, a sound like ‘aug-huh’, stretches out into a sigh. All is still.

  His fingertips touch her face, too dry, too cool. His heart is tapping quickly, fear makes his breathing shallow, sporadic. He grasps the blanket and peels it back. His tears come quickly, falling onto her. He kneels onto the bed to hold her, beg her to hold on. She grows colder as his quaking quiets, stops.

  He sits up, turns on the light. He wails.

  She has curled into a waxen foetal rose, all bones, and dry flesh. There, nestled against her buttocks in a ragged circle of blood is a dark mass of tissue. It’s huge, bulbous, with large blue veins and yellow-white strands like long pale fingers, soft bones beneath a thin membrane. He can see faces in the thing, as if there are tiny children trapped in silvery rose bags of jelly, their hair wrapped around their heads. Embryonic cherubs. Horrible and yet benign. Their child. Children. From her. This softens him.

  He moves down beside it and tenderly rests his hand on the side. It’s warm and moist, like her skin right out of a hot shower. He senses a slight trace of movement. An eye in one of the faces searches. When it finds him, all the eyes settle there, watching him. Waiting. He thinks he sees mouths grinning. The mass shivers and purrs beneath his touch. He smiles. He’s a father.

  Roberta Lannes lives in Los Angeles with her British husband. She published her first horror story, ‘Goodbye, Dark Love’, in the 1986 anthology Cutting Edge, edited by one of her writing teachers at UCLA, Dennis Etchison. Since then her many acclaimed short stories have been translated into more than ten languages, and her debut collection,The Mirror of Night,appeared from American independent publisher Silver Salamander Press in 1997. As to her inspiration for the preceding story, the author candidly reveals: ‘When I was approached to do the filming of Clive Barker’s A-Z of Horror as commentator on the letter “U” for Unborn, I was intrigued that I could speak to the profound effect Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby had on me. I read it long before I considered getting married, let alone pregnant. It horrified me and tapped into the very core fear a mother has during her pregnancy of giving birth to something imperfect and, at its worst, possibly monstrous. It was the best birth control imaginable for me. Years later, whilst married, I had to face the real thing. Now, with the end of my childbearing years having arrived, remembering the trauma of a very difficult pregnancy and the child I lost in 1984 at six months, “Pearl” sort of took hold of me.’

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  * * * *

  Beauregard

  ERIC BROWN

  He came back into my life on the evening of the first snowfall of winter. In retrospect, the advent of bad weather might have been seen as something of a harbinger. The phone call that interrupted my work - I have never been able to consider the shrill ring of a phone as a summons, only an alarm - was unwelcome, as I was beginning the final chapter of a novelisation that had to be finished by the end of the week. More unwelcome still were the words that greeted me.

  ‘Simon Charring
ton?’ It was my name, spoken in a voice marinated over the years in a fatal combination of whisky and tobacco smoke. ‘Simon? Are you there?’

  ‘Beauregard? Christ, is it really you?’

  ‘I’m in the village,’ he said by way of a reply. ‘How do I find you?’

  Numbed, I gave him directions.

  He was as laconic as ever. ‘See you soon.’

  I sat in the armchair in the darkened study, illuminated only by the aqueous glow of the computer screen, and contemplated what I had done. I told myself that I should have lied, said that Simon Charrington had moved away from the village years ago - but then I recalled that you could not lie to Beauregard: he saw through dissimulation and deceit. Such was the acuity of his mind that I fancied, back then, he could read my every thought.

  Back then. Was it really twenty years since we had shared a room at Cambridge? In my memory the events of that last term were at once paradoxically clear and maddeningly vague: that is, I have impressions of what happened, but I am unsure, to this day, as to quite how they happened.

  I cannot recall how I first met Beauregard, which, considering his singular character and appearance, I consider a strange failing. He seemed to be around our group, hovering on the periphery, for about a term before he introduced himself.

  He was a mature student in his late twenties, though he struck me as being even older: he wore a soiled greatcoat, always buttoned, and his aquiline face was emphasised by the recession of his hairline.

  He gave the girls the creeps, and even Paul and Dave found his company repellent. He had about him an aura of mystery and dissolute pathos that I considered intriguing. I had recently decided that I wanted to devote my life to the writing of great novels, and I made the beginner’s mistake of assuming that I had to actively seek my subject matter, rather than allow it to come to me.

  I soon became obsessed with Beauregard. He was that which I had never before happened upon: a true original in a world populated by jejune copies. Although he never said as much in conversation, he disdained the modern world and all its meretricious and commercial trappings: while we were reading Fowles and Pirsig, he would immerse himself for days at a time in crumbling and dusty tomes he brought back from forays to antiquarian bookshops in London and Edinburgh. He was studying mediaeval history, and laboriously compiling a thesis on mysticism of the twelfth century, and in consequence he seemed to inhabit the world in body only: in mind, he was forever elsewhere.

  Long into the early hours he would regale me with the results of his studies: he would tell me of worlds within the world we know, of realms that existed in the minds of philosophers, an onion skin series of realities that for him existed because they had been granted brief if incandescent life in the dreams of obscure thinkers and persecuted mystics.

  I cannot recall my exact reaction to his hushed, late-night monologues describing the lore of alchemy and abstruse magic. In the company of my other friends I played the sardonic sceptic; with Beauregard I came fleetingly to perceive the disturbing possibility of a truth that existed independently of my quotidian perceptions.

  Then he met Sabine, a German girl as strange in her own way as Beauregard: a slim, introverted Classics student, almost pathologically shy. They were seen together setting out on, or returning from, long walks, though they never frequented the usual student haunts. I cannot recall ever saying above a dozen words to Sabine - perhaps I was resentful of her having taken my friend - and I cannot claim to have known her. The others of my group were secretly gratified that his liaison with the German student, as they called her, meant that he had less time for us.

  I could not claim to have been griefstricken when Sabine was found hanging from an oak tree in the ancient forest beyond the college buildings, though naturally I was shocked. I tried to talk to Beauregard, but he was even more withdrawn than usual. He left Cambridge not long after, and it was ten years before I saw him again. He called at my flat in London, having obtained the address from a mutual university acquaintance, drank all the alcohol I had in the house and said little: it seemed that the years had built between us an insurmountable barrier. I tried to talk of our time at university, but he had gestured with his hand-rolled cigarette, as if to say the memories were too painful; I questioned him about what he was doing, but elicited little response. He spoke drunkenly of a book he was writing, though his description of its subject made little sense to me. I felt that he despised my materialism, and the shallow books I wrote at the behest of publishers eager for competent prose from someone who could meet a deadline.

  That was ten years ago, and I had never seen him since: I had thought of him, though, often wondered what a man so unsuited to the modern world might be doing to get by. It seemed, now, that I might at last find out.

  * * * *

  If I considered a phone call more of an alarm than a summons, then a knock at the door was tantamount to an intrusion. I jumped as the hollow thumps echoed through the house. I must have been daydreaming for longer than I thought. It seemed only a matter of a minute or two since I had spoken to him on the phone.

  Taking a breath, I moved to the hall and opened the door. The first thing I noticed was not Beauregard, but the fact that a rapid snowfall had lain down a thick sparkling mantle beneath the light of the stars.

  Then he stepped from where he had been trying to peer in through the window, and against the effulgent snowfield he bulked taller than I recalled, more stooped; his hair had receded further and his face seemed even more attenuated.

  ‘Simon,’ he greeted. He held out a hand, and I shook it. It was icy. I ushered him inside, only then noticing that he was wearing a greatcoat - though surely not the greatcoat of twenty years ago?

  He stepped past me and paused on the threshold of my untidy study. His gaze seemed to take in everything with a silent though censorious regard, and I was transported back twenty years, to the time when I could not help but feel unworthy in his presence. He seemed to look upon those about him with silent disdain that antagonised many people. Perhaps it was a measure of my own lack of confidence that I felt his censure, then as now, was not wholly unwarranted.

  I gestured to an armchair and turned on a nearby lamp. Beauregard winced at the sudden illumination, dumped his battered rucksack into the chair and sat upon the arm, where he proceeded to roll himself an impossibly thin cigarette.

  I made some ill-judged comment, along the lines that he reminded me of a dissolute Withnail, though of course the popular cultural reference was lost on him. A line from Horace he might have acknowledged; of film lore he was ignorant.

  I babbled smalltalk, asking him how he had travelled here, how he was keeping. As was his wont he made no reply, merely fixed me with an occasional sardonic half-smile.

  In the light of the lamp I could see that the passage of years had not left him unscathed. His eyes were rheumy and the skin around them had the thin blue translucence often seen in alcoholics and the ill. His fingers, as they painstakingly manufactured the roll-up, trembled as if afflicted by more than just the cold he had escaped.

  ‘Can I get you something? Tea? Coffee?’

  He looked up, fixed me briefly. ‘Tea. Black. Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Of course. Black tea. I’ll be back in a second...’

  It was with relief that I took refuge in the kitchen. The reality of Beauregard was coming back to me, the essence of the man that was impossible to recreate fully when considering him at a remove of years: he was so unlike anyone else I had ever met, so impossible to locate in terms of where he stood as regards culture and values, that I had the eerie sensation of being in the presence of an alien; that is, of someone not of this world. It was a feeling I had forgotten over the years, but as it returned now I began to sympathise with my friends at university, Dave and Paul, Cathy and Sue, who detested Beauregard and could not abide his presence.

  I returned with the tea-tray. He had slipped down into the armchair, his long legs, encased in baggy brown cords, str
etched out towards the open fire.

  He accepted the mug without a word, took a mouthful, and topped it up with alcohol from a silver hip flask.

  I fetched an ashtray as his roving eye sought a place to deposit the foul-smelling ash of his cigarette.

  ‘So...’ I said, ‘it’s been a long time - ten years?’

  He ignored me. His eye had alighted on the glass-fronted bookcase in which I kept copies of my published work. ‘Still writing, Simon?’ he asked, as if it had been a passing phase out of which I might have grown.

  I nodded. ‘Keeps the wolf from the door,’ I said, and immediately regretted it. I recalled the disdain with which he regarded those who compromised in order to get by.

  He was rapidly thawing out before the dancing flames, and the process brought back another aspect of the man I had conveniently forgotten over the years: Beauregard had a body odour as distinctive as it was strong. I recalled debating with Dave and Sue as to the exact essence of the perfume: I think I described it at the time as something like the reek of an old jungle temple, leaf mould and guano. Now this compost odour filled the room.