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

by Edited By Stephen Jones

So I pressed, feeling I was taking a chance though of what I couldn’t have said. ‘Alicia. You know where Todd is. Tell me.’

  ‘Driving.’ Now she sounded like someone in a trance, or someone pretending to be. I thought of drugs, of course, and of practical jokes.

  ‘Driving where?’

  ‘Here,’ she said, and sat bolt upright. Her eyes were glazed. Her chest heaved. She didn’t seem really to know I was there. Her face was set in sheer determination, a look characteristic of her since toddler-hood but alarming now in this distilled form.

  I risked grabbing her by the upper arms. Her skin was very warm, her strong young muscles clenched. ‘How do you know he’s driving here?’ Now I did indulge myself in a small, hard shake, which dislodged her from her altered state.

  She looked straight at me and, somehow, I was compelled to let go of her, though I didn’t want to. She pushed me aside and was at the door of her room when the front doorbell rang. On her way out, though, she did pause long enough to turn and say to me, ‘Because I sent for him. Cool, huh?’

  Todd and his mother, Alicia and her father and I, plus both her sisters who’d heard the commotion, sat in our living room nearly until dawn. The story had many variations, and I still don’t know which if any was the whole truth, but the gist of it was this:

  Todd had been having trouble sleeping for weeks, and that night he’d been unable to sleep at all. He’d been tossing and turning, listening to music, thinking of Alicia. His blush at this last admission seemed to me more shame than embarrassment; I saw a little smile cross Alicia’s lips, and I thought she looked proud of herself.

  Then, Todd said - and this took a long time and many false starts to emerge - he’d felt her calling him. Not heard; felt. He said it was like being famished and having to get something to eat, or - more furious blushes - like having to go to the bathroom really bad. Except that there were words to it: ‘Todd. I love you. Go get your mom’s car keys and drive over to see me. Right now.’

  To which Alicia simply said calmly, ‘I was asleep. I was in bed asleep,’ which the others seemed to take as irrefutable proof of her innocence in the matter.

  When it seemed we’d gathered all the information there was to gather - or, at least, all that was accessible to us - my husband wrapped things up. ‘Alicia,’ he began, glancing at me for confirmation but then fixing her with his most level gaze, which she met unhesitatingly. I knew what he was going to say and I could have intervened with a dissenting opinion, but I didn’t disagree. Looking back now at that portentous moment, I still don’t see what reasonable alternatives we had. ‘You and Todd will not be seeing each other any more.’

  Alicia sat up straighter, and her face glowed dangerously, but she said nothing. It was Todd who looked stricken and gave a pitiable little cry of protest. His mother started to say, ‘I’m not sure—’

  My husband, though, was sure. He got to his feet, an imposing figure, to continue. ‘They are twelve years old. They’re too young for this. It’s gone too far. She’s not to see him any more. Todd, you’re not to call here or come to the house. It’s over. Do you understand me?’ Todd was crying. Alicia was not. ‘Alicia? Do you understand me?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said sweetly, ‘I understand you, Daddy,’ and the back of my neck tingled.

  The next day, our VCR and camcorder were stolen. The doors and windows were locked and there was no sign of forced entry. The detective asked if anyone could have got hold of a key. Though we didn’t say so to him, my husband and I shared gut-wrenching suspicion of Alicia, but she’d spent the night at a friend’s across town and she didn’t have her own key. The detective said it was probably kids, in and out in a hurry, taking whatever they could grab quickly. Probably somebody who’d been in our house and knew what we had.

  Then a pet mouse that Alicia said was Todd’s appeared on our doorstep, slashed throat encircled with a blood-soaked pink ribbon to which was attached a disturbing love-note: ‘I love you more than I love myself.’

  My daughter and I stood together on the porch looking at the bizarre offering. I could hardly speak. ‘Alicia, is this from Todd?’

  ‘Dad said I can’t see Todd any more, remember?’ There were flashes of purple and silver as she cut her pretty grey eyes at me; her irises had always picked up and incorporated ambient colours.

  ‘Something’s going on,’ I said, an understatement.

  ‘Like what?’ It was a challenge.

  ‘I don’t know. But I think you need to see a counsellor.’

  ‘No way.’ She backed off. ‘Not a chance.’

  Not expecting much in the way of support or ideas on how to handle this, I nevertheless tried to call Todd’s mother again. Their number was now unlisted.

  I asked Alicia about that, too. ‘I’m not allowed to talk to him on the phone, remember?’ Her pinked upper lip was drawn back in the subtlest of sneers. ‘Why would I have his number?’

  For a week or so then, Todd seemed to have been effectively banished from all our lives. Alicia never mentioned his name. I kept thinking about him, hoping he was all right; he’d unexpectedly touched my heart. Alicia’d been too much for him, I feared. Girls notoriously mature faster than boys; he just hadn’t been ready for her.

  Then Todd set fire to our house. Alicia was in school when it happened; I called later and was able to verify that she’d been in every one of her classes that day. I came home from work to find the firefighters already there, and my husband holding Todd, who was so ravaged I thought at first he’d been burned. His body, always thin, was positively gaunt, his skin mottled. His hair hung scraggly over his face, with actual bald patches at the temples and crown. His clothes were torn and dirty; I’d often noted how carefully he’d dressed. He was hysterical, not trying to escape but clinging and sobbing, ‘I didn’t mean to do it! I swear, I tried not to do it! But she made me!’

  The damage to the house turned out to be structurally minimal, though the contractors declared it complicated and therefore exorbitantly expensive to repair. Nobody was hurt. Most upsetting was the loss of my husband’s tulip tree, burned to the ground. Once shortly after the fire, Alicia and I happened to both be standing at the kitchen window at the same time, and we saw him crouched by the charred stump, mourning. ‘Sometimes,’ she observed dreamily, ‘you have to make sacrifices for love.’

  ‘Alicia,’ I said, as steadily as I could, ‘he’s your father.’ I wasn’t entirely clear about everything I meant in saying that, but Alicia nodded as if she knew perfectly well.

  Todd killed himself on Alicia’s thirteenth birthday. It was a cloudy, chill spring morning, streetlights still on when she came down to breakfast, all of us groggy and rushed. The hyper-vigilance I’d developed over the past year alerted me the instant she came into the room and took her place at the table that something had happened, but I’d learned not to ask directly, instead to watch and listen and create cautious openings until she divulged whatever she had already decided to divulge.

  ‘Todd’s dead,’ she said, and took a long, shaky drink of orange juice.

  Her father said, ‘Jesus.’

  Her sister said, ‘Alicia, you are too weird.’

  I said, ‘How do you know?’

  Her face glowed with tears now, but her weeping had a soft, romantic quality eerier than if she hadn’t been crying at all. ‘It’s for my birthday,’ she told us, her voice breaking. She stopped short of anything like, ‘Isn’t that beautiful?’ or, ‘I told him it was what I wanted for my birthday,’ but I heard those things as clearly as if she’d said them aloud, and I thought her father did, too.

  He sprang around the table and jerked her out of her chair. She made no noise and didn’t fight back, just clenched her fists against his chest and narrowed her eyes. He shook her. ‘What’s going on, young lady? You tell me right now what’s going on!’

  ‘Todd’s dead!’ Now she collapsed into his arms, sobbing like a child, and after a moment of blatant bewilderment he held her, soothed her, stroked
her hair.

  I couldn’t watch. I left the room, left the house, considered leaving altogether but was held back by commitment to my family, which included my youngest child.

  Todd had asphyxiated himself in the family car in the locked garage. Beside him on the seat was a note: ‘Happy Birthday, my love.’ I read about it in the paper.

  Alicia is eighteen now, though with her model’s carriage and worldly self-possession she seems much older. There have been numerous other boys since the hapless Todd, none of whom seemed to make much of an impression on Alicia, more than a few of whom hung around long after it was obvious she’d utterly lost interest. One of them, while he was still in hopeless desperation calling, sending letters, ringing the doorbell, parking by our curb for hours at a time, was arrested for raping another girl; Alicia gave every appearance of having known about it before her sister told her, and when my older daughter demanded to know if this guy had been a creep with her, she answered readily that he’d never seemed interested in anything like that. Then she added, ‘Guess this’ll teach him,’ and her sister and I could not meet each other’s eyes.

  Then there was a girl named Molly whose devotion to Alicia was quite unrequited. My curiosity as to whether the relationship was sexual seemed almost irrelevant. For a time Molly virtually lived at our house, doing Alicia’s bidding so thoroughly and eagerly that it was hard to watch. She’d get her a glass of ice water. She’d clean her room. She’d fix her hair in beautiful, elaborate styles, while her own hung stringy and untended. At first Alicia would issue orders, no less direct for being phrased politely: ‘Go get me a large ice tea with lots of lemon, would you, Molly?’ Then she had only to express a preference: ‘It’s chilly in here,’ and Molly would rush to close the window my husband had just opened for fresh air. As time went on, their need for ordinary communication was extinguished altogether and Molly would do what Alicia wanted without being prompted in any way apparent to anybody else. This accomplished, Alicia got bored. From one day to the next, Molly vanished from our lives.

  ‘What’s happened to Molly?’ I ventured to ask.

  Alicia shrugged. ‘I guess she dropped out of school. I haven’t heard anything else.’

  ‘I thought she was your friend.’

  My daughter gave a crisp laugh. ‘What made you think that?’ Molly’s name has never been brought up in our house again.

  Molly and the boys were just diversions. Practice. Alicia’s real quarry was more intimate and her pursuit of him, I see now, all but lifelong. It was subtle, though, and subtly cumulative; every time I thought I saw something worrisome, a half-dozen reasonable explanations came into my mind at the same time. She was the youngest child. It was good for a girl to be close to her father. And what if I had understood what was happening? Alicia always had been Daddy’s girl.

  Always interested in all the girls, my husband gradually became obsessed with Alicia. He hung on every word she deigned to say to him. He brought her little treats. He began leaving work to pick her up from school, and I began to suspect he often didn’t go back. He took to buying her impulsive, expensive presents - a brand new white sports car, real diamond earrings - without consulting me, always swearing we had discussed it and I must have just forgotten. It became easier and easier for her to manipulate around every rule we’d ever set for her - curfew, chores, provocative attire, minimally civilised behaviour - and she did it for sport, because he couldn’t bring himself to discipline her; when I complained, which for a while I did bitterly, he’d talk about choosing your battles and keeping your priorities straight.

  I’d enter a room where they were together and there’d be the strong aura of a conversation abruptly suspended, though I wouldn’t have heard them talking. On the increasingly rare occasions when she went out, he’d always wait up for her, and I had the impression they spent time alone together before either of them went to bed. Each of us had always made a point of doing things alone with each of our kids; eventually Alicia and her father were going out every Saturday night, and the time he and I had together devolved from seldom to never.

  Alicia graduated from high school last June. She has no career or educational goal, though it wouldn’t be accurate to say she has no plans. She’s never asked if she could stay here; we’ve all just accepted the ongoing arrangement, Alicia as though there’d never been any question, I with decidedly mixed feelings, my husband with palpable, even pitiable relief. I doubt she’ll ever leave.

  I miss my husband. I scarcely recognise him any more; he acts hardly at all like the man I thought I knew, and he’s aged, paled, greyed. He takes interest now in nothing but Alicia. He lost his job some time ago, is nothing more than dutiful towards anybody else in the family, doesn’t garden or read or even watch television. We haven’t shared a bed in a long time; I couldn’t say exactly when he started using the guest room at the end of the hall, next to Alicia’s. Often I hear footsteps at night, but there seems no point in rousing myself to investigate.

  At the same time, I have come to feel closer than ever to Alicia. This is odd, but I am too pleased to allow myself real worry. She has been concentrating on her father, and I’ve been occupied with a new grandson, our middle daughter entering college and a job promotion of my own, so we’re rarely in each other’s company, but when we are I am caught, not to say trapped, in the warm beam of her attention. Gradually I’ve come to crave it, even as I sense in it something beyond a normal mother-daughter bond.

  She works me. I ought to feel manipulated, I suppose, but what I feel is chosen. From the other side of a room crowded with family, I’ll suddenly feel her gaze on me and, as if on command, raise my eyes to hers. She smiles. My breath catches with something I can only call gratitude, though why I should be grateful to my own child for nothing more than smiling at me I couldn’t say.

  ‘I’m glad you’re my mom,’ she’ll say in passing, just touching the small of my back, and I’m aglow for days.

  This morning, my husband and I were in each other’s presence without her, a rare thing and, for some reason, dangerous. He looked at me with haunted, sunken eyes and whispered, ‘What’s happened to us?’

  ‘Ask Alicia,’ I heard myself say.

  ‘I don’t mean to do these things. I don’t want to. She makes me.’ I affected incredulity and concern for his mental and physical health, but I knew what he meant.

  We heard Alicia coming down the stairs then, and I had to get to work. It was with a certain savage relief that I left them alone together.

  But throughout the workday, I’ve been able to think of little else. Restlessness vivified by jealousy has been building. I hear my daughter’s voice in my mind, no words but with inflection and timbre whose intent is unmistakable. I feel a persistent tug, as though her hands were on me, or her gaze. She wants me. Alicia wants me. There are knives in the kitchen; I feel the heft of the butcher knife across my palm, and revulsion only adds an erotic limn. Alicia wants me. I’ll go home at lunchtime and get rid of the man who’s between us, and Alicia will be pleased.

  Melanie Tem is a writer and social worker who lives in Denver, Colorado, with her husband, author and editor Steve Rasnic Tem. They have four children and three grandchildren. Her novels are the Bram Stoker Award-winning Prodigal, Blood Moon, Wilding, Revenant, Desmodus, The Tides, Black River and, in collaboration with Nancy Holder,Making LoveandWitch-Light.Several dozen of her short stories have appeared in various anthologies and magazines, and she has published numerous non-fiction articles. The author was awarded the British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer in 1991. ‘“Alicia” was inspired by my own experiences as the mother of teenage girls,’ reveals Tem. ‘The story came to me in the mother’s voice; I wasn’t interested in Alicia’s experience so much as in her effect on other people as observed by her mother, and especially her effect on her mother, who after all was once a teenage girl herself. Teenagers can sometimes seem, to themselves and to people around them, like creatures of another species - humanoid, struggling t
o be fully human, but with thought processes not quite like ours and powers they can’t control - and in our society girls often play this out through sexuality. Adolescence can be such an exhilarating and terrifying time of life, for the teenager and for those who come into her orbit, that it didn’t take much metaphorical extension to cast this story as a dark fantasy.’

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  * * * *

  The Haunted Bookshop

  BRIAN STABLEFORD

  I was putting the final touches to the introduction to a new edition of C. D. Pamely’s Tales of Mystery and Terror when the phone rang. I picked it up with my left hand while my right forefinger finished pecking out the last few words of the sentence.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Brian? Lionel, Cardiff.’

  Lionel Fanthorpe rarely uses his surname when identifying himself to his friends in outward calls, preferring his place of residence.

  ‘Hi, Lionel,’ I said, attempting - unavailingly, of course - to match the cheerfulness and ebullience of his tone. ‘How’s fame treating you?’