A HAZY SHADE OF WINTER

by Simon Bestwick

  ‘Course.’ I showed her to the door, then plucked up my courage. ‘Um, Alison?’

  ‘Yeah?’ she glanced back.

  ‘Er . . . would you like to have a drink sometime? Or a meal maybe?’

  I was already braced for the inevitable rejection, or the news that she had a boyfriend, but I was determined to at least make the effort now. Otherwise I’d be left with one more memory of not even having the guts to try. And that, after the afternoon’s reading and rubbing, was something I wanted to avoid. I could still taste the bitter residue it left behind.

  Still smiling, she nodded, not even hesitating. ‘Sure. When?’

  ‘Oh. How about . . . Tuesday night?’

  ‘Love to. What do you fancy?’

  I bit back the obvious answer. ‘Well, I know a couple of good restaurants. Or I could cook something.’

  ‘Yeah? Like?’

  A man’s got to have a hobby and mine’s cookery. ‘How about . . . sizzling Mongolian lamb? Or chimichangas? Bulgogi?’

  ‘Bull-what?’

  ‘It’s a Korean dish . . .’ I reeled off a few details of how it was made, and for a moment thought I was being an anorak, but she didn’t look bored; in fact she looked as though she’d like me to start cooking it then and there. ‘Sounds great,’ she said when I’d finished. ‘I’ll definitely see you Tuesday.’

  ‘Great,’ I grinned.

  We swapped phone numbers and she turned back to wave as she went through the garden gate. I didn’t close the door until she was gone from sight. When I went back into the kitchen to wash the mugs, a scent of sandalwood still lingered in the air.

  From upstairs, there came a sudden thump. It wasn’t the pipes or the wind; I’ve lived in the same house for several years and know its ways as intimately as a lover’s flesh. It was the sound of something hitting the floor.

  V. Further Reading

  I went still, holding my breath. Outside, it was still raining; it ticked against the windows, hissed through the air, pattered on the stones and concrete and drenched the garden’s earth. There was no other sound in the house. With a soft swish, a car passed on the road outside. Then silence again. I tried to swallow. I succeeded on the second attempt. ‘Hello?’ I called.

  Silence greeted me.

  I swallowed again and went to the foot of the stairs. ‘Hello?’ I called a second time, feeling stupid. I took a deep breath and went on up.

  I was being stupid. The pictures Alison had shown me—especially the one that looked like a hand on my shoulder—had got to me. An active imagination’s never a good thing if you live alone. That was all. There was a rational explanation. I knew that and told myself so every step of the way. By the time I reached the top, I almost believed it.

  I went into the spare bedroom and looked. The copy of Old Bones had fallen out of the bookcase. I must not have put it back in as firmly as I’d thought. That was all. I was getting jumpy in my old age.

  The book had landed open, pages down. I picked it up and turned it over to make sure they weren’t crumpled.

  I blinked for a couple of seconds. What I saw looked so familiar, but it had to be a different story, one where I’d somehow missed the page. Because I knew for a fact that it couldn’t be the one it looked like. Couldn’t be. There had to be another reference to Ella Fitzgerald there somewhere, had to be. In exactly the same position, at the top of the page. With those poisonous, crabbed little letters above it like a sneer: ugh horrid nigger squawks!

  I felt the blood drain from my face; I literally felt that. A tight numbness slithered down over my skin from crown to throat like a veil drawn down. My scalp stirred, every hair rising. I knew the truth, but still I turned the pages backwards. The numbers confirmed what I already knew but I had to do it, had to turn back to the first page of the fourth story and read the title for myself.

  Ever found yourself doing something you don’t want to? Smokers will understand this, alcoholics, comfort-eaters, anyone who’s ever bought themselves something they know to be too expensive or plain unnecessary. Inside you, a small voice squeaks no, no, no, like a trapped mouse. It’s wrong. It’s bad for you. You promised yourself, or someone else, that you wouldn’t. You can’t afford it. All the good, sane, rational reasons. And yet for all that your hands reach for the cigarettes, or the bottle, or the food, or your wallet as if they belong to somebody else, as if you’re watching a film shot from somebody else’s point of view.

  That was what was happening now. I wanted to throw the book away, drop it. Christ, I wanted to take it outside and hurl it in the bin, or fling it in the sink, douse it with lighter fluid and burn it, which for a bibliophile like me is saying something —but I was gripped by what I could only call pure panic. I couldn’t throw the book away. Only turn the pages, page after page, and confirm over and over what I’d seen, fuelling the panic to greater and greater paroxysms.

  It was all there again; all the venom, all the hatred. It was beyond denial; there was the exclamation point that had made a hole; there was SLAG and the rip in the paper at the lower jag of the Nazi-style ‘S’. The rip gaped wider and I knew how it had happened; it had torn, despite my care, as I’d erased the word from the book.

  The pages blurred past my eyes, but not fast enough. Not fast enough for me to miss the thin grey scribbles in the margins.

  I could almost hear a shrill whining sound build in my ears, the sound of a motor running too fast, overheating, a crescendo. The panic reached overload and exploded; my hands were my own again and I used them to fling the book away from me convulsively. It spun up into the air and came down again. Its pages riffled back and forth before coming to rest. I stepped back from them.

  Someone laughed. Well, less of a laugh, more a giggle, a titter, high-pitched and grating, and all the worse for the fact that somehow I knew it was a man’s. I spun around, but there was nobody there. And then I heard the laugh again. A laugh that came from nowhere. Not like a recording coming from a hidden speaker. That was the worst thing about it; the laugh was right in my ear, as though somebody was standing with their mouth almost touching me and then laughing. I could feel their breath, cold and dank as the wind in a cave, on my ear, my neck, my cheek.

  I cried out, spun, flailed with my arms. The laugh sounded again. Three times full. I blundered out of the spare room onto the landing, gulping air. Waiting for the laugh to sound again in my ear. It didn’t. Mercifully. I don’t know if I could have stood it.

  The book lay in the middle of the floor. Burn it, I thought. Burn it. A thought I didn’t like. I didn’t like book-burnings or the people who carried them out. But it wasn’t the book, it was what had been put in there. It . . . it . . .

  The phone rang. I jumped, shouting. It rang again. I laughed almost hysterically. What an idiot, I thought, gibbering over that. Some writing in a book, for Christ’s sake. I ran downstairs. ‘Hello?’

  ‘John?’

  A woman. ‘Who is this?’ I kept cringing; any moment I expected to hear that laugh again.

  ‘Thanks a bloody bunch,’ she said, but was laughing as she did, ‘forgotten me already?’

  ‘Alison?’

  ‘How many fancy women have you got?’ She was still laughing. I felt a smile crinkle my face in response; when no other laugh came, I began to relax, but then tensed again, convinced I was about to pay for doing so.

  ‘So you’re my fancy woman now?’ I teased.

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said, and I felt warm. ‘Listen, John?’

  Something in her voice made the warmth fade. ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve just remembered—I can’t make it Tuesday. I’m babysitting for a friend. I forgot.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘S’okay.’ I tried to sound like I meant it.

  ‘So I was wondering, could we make it tomorrow night instead? John?’

  ‘. . . yeah?’

  ‘Oh. Thought I’d lost you.’

  ‘No. No way. I’m still here.’
I was beyond warmth now; another two minutes and I’d be cooked.

  ‘So?’

  ‘Mm? Oh! Yeah. Tomorrow night. Yeah. That’d be great. Yeah. I’ll . . . yeah.’

  ‘OK,’ she said brightly. ‘See you then, then. What time, about?’

  ‘Ah . . .’ I seemed to have regressed in less than a minute from a reasonably articulate young male to a drooling idiot. ‘Sevenish, half-past?’

  ‘Half-seven it is. Okay. See you then.’

  ‘Yeah. Bye.’

  ‘Bye.’

  ‘Bye.’

  ‘See ya . . .’

  Eventually one of us hung up. I’ve no idea which one.

  You won’t believe this, but for a whole thirty seconds I’d completely forgotten about what had happened. All I could think about was the fact that an extremely nice and attractive woman (smelling of sandalwood to boot) not only wanted to have dinner with me, but wanted to do so sooner than I’d asked. Or perhaps, if you’re a woman, you’ll have no trouble believing it whatsoever.

  But all good things come to an end, and my half-minute was up all too soon. I was paralysed for a few moments more; then I was rushing up the stairs, only able to think about one thing. Well, three: the book, matches, and that can of lighter fluid.

  I threw open the bedroom door. But the book was gone. I ran to the bookcase; found only a gap where Old Bones had been.

  There was no laughter this time, and nothing in my ears, but I heard someone humming a tune. It sounded as though it was coming through the walls, as if one of the neighbours was humming it, except that I knew for a fact they were out that day. And they didn’t like the Rolling Stones.

  A few seconds only, ten or fifteen at the most; fading slowly, gone. Then silence, except for the hissing rain.

  I searched through the house, but the book was gone. After a while, I let myself breathe easily.

  There was no more laughter, or humming, that day or night, but for all that it took some time to get to sleep later on. Whenever I came close to it, I’d blink awake, convinced I’d heard something, or was about to. Still, I kept my eyes shut wherever possible—afraid of what I’d see—and no doubt that helped me drift off when I finally did.

  But I still dreamed. Murky dreams that I couldn’t remember when I woke. Except that in them somebody had been humming; the same as they’d been last night, and in the spare room before.

  Humming ‘Paint it Black’.

  PART TWO: THE WALKING SHADOW

  VI. Whispers

  Chicken breast . . . fresh ginger . . . garlic . . .

  I’d been up with the lark the next morning, and had almost forgotten the rum events of the weekend by the time the train got into Manchester. The day at the office was incident-free; no laughter in my ear, no nothing. Which suited me down to the ground.

  Bottle of wine . . . bottle of brandy . . . filter coffee . . .

  Half past five came at last, and I caught the train back home, detouring on the way back from the station to the supermarket, to stock up on a few supplies.

  Rice . . . soy sauce . . .

  That Monday was payday, hence my splashing out following the comparative poverty of the weekend, although I’m not rich, nor, normally, extravagant; only when I’m trying to impress. And I very much wanted to impress Alison Davis.

  Condoms? Or was that jumping the gun? What kind? Plain? Ribbed? Flavoured? And what exactly did they mean by ‘novelty’?

  None of the shopping took long. I got the marinade ready and set the meat in it. There wasn’t much else to do.

  It hadn’t rained that day; the sun blazed, falling slowly in an almost-cloudless sky. I stood at the sink, gazed out of the kitchen window, and for the first time that day let myself think about the events of the weekend.

  Two possibilities. The first was that it had been some kind of episode: brief and, I hoped, finished. Maybe a hallucination brought on by stress, overwork, serial drunkenness, lack of sleep. (But that didn’t explain the missing book; just about everything else you could put down to those causes, but not the vanishing. Unless I’d had some kind of fugue where I’d destroyed it or thrown it out, then blanked it from my memory.) The other was . . .

  Well, the other explanation was pretty obvious. I wondered for a moment if there were any psychotics banging their heads against padded walls who’d actually been misdiagnosed after experiencing something defying rationality, or left unable to distinguish fact from fantasy by the same. It wasn’t a particularly comforting train of thought. I consoled myself with the reminder that the weirdness had come with the book; with the book gone, the weirdness had too. No book today; no weirdness today—no erased messages rewriting themselves, no laughter, no humming, no books moving themselves around or making themselves disappear. QED.

  My doorbell rang just before 7.25, making my spirits soar even higher than previously—which I’d thought impossible. I was used to people being late for meals or scheduled drink-ups; I’m one of those people who always gets there first in an effort not to be late. It was nice to know that someone else was either as punctual (or anal-retentive) as I was, or genuinely eager to see me, so much so they couldn’t wait five minutes more. . . .

  I opened the door and let her in. She’d changed into jeans and a t-shirt after work, just like me.

  ‘Phew,’ she said. ‘Thought I was underdressing. Didn’t know if it was going to be formal.’

  I shook my head. ‘Want some wine?’

  She waggled her eyebrows. ‘Trying to get me drunk?’

  I waggled mine right back. ‘Damn right.’

  ‘Okay, mister. Let’s see who falls down first.’

  Dinner was duly served around half-eight. Not that dak bulgogi takes that long to prepare, but we were having far too much fun chatting to think about food.

  We ate, and talked, and talked and ate. After that, we finished off the wine, started in on the brandy, and smoked a few cigarettes. I played a couple of CDs; Alison admired my vinyl collection and we had a laugh over the absence of a record player.

  The brandy helped; I’m not quite sure exactly how we got there, but after what seemed a few minutes (though in reality it was close to midnight by then) we were on the sofa together, faces a few inches apart. Alison was stroking my cheek. I ran my fingers over her face, marvelling at it as though I’d never seen one before; the silkiness of her warm skin, the glossiness of her hair, the delicate bone structure, the wide depth of her eyes. . . .

  Then I was kissing her. Or was she kissing me? We were kissing each other; leave it at that. By then I hadn’t a clue who’d started it, and didn’t particularly care.

  We carried on the kissing and cuddling a while longer, and then it began to grow more serious. In the end, without a word to one another, we got up and climbed the stairs.

  I dozed off afterward, but woke again in the early hours of the morning. There was a brief period of muzziness. I groped at the sheets as I remembered what had happened, wondering where she’d gone, then saw her back, a white blur in the room’s dark. We’d fallen asleep in one another’s arms, which is very romantic but never very comfortable after a while. Gently, so as not to wake her, I ran my fingers down her bare back, tracing the bumps of her spine with my fingertips. Like someone who’s just won the lottery, or found they’ve inherited a whopping great mansion and a title, I couldn’t believe my luck and had to keep reassuring myself it was real. Apart from anything else, I’d never gone from meeting a woman to going to bed with her this quickly.

  I snuggled up closer to her. She was vibrantly warm, smooth, soft. I nuzzled her hair and breathed in: sandalwood. Wow, I thought. And with that thought, I was fully awake.

  Alison stirred in her sleep and mumbled faintly. I eased away from her and rolled onto my back, glancing sideways at her now and then. I sighed a little, and then smiled. Oh well. I could kiss slumber goodbye until the dawn came now, I reckoned—I knew myself and my sleeping habits too well to believe otherwise—but on the plus side, I had Alison to admir
e for the duration.

  I wondered how early on you were allowed to say I think I’m in love. Come to that, how early on could you think it? How well can you get to know somebody in an evening—two if you counted the one before? Then again, how well can anyone ever know anybody? I grunted under my breath and ground at my gritty eyes with the heels of my hands; it was far too early in the morning for that kind of thinking.

  I couldn’t sleep, and in any case, nature called. I padded into the bathroom. Afterwards, I splashed cold water on my face.

  I stared in the mirror and grinned. What the hell, I thought; might as well try it out for size. ‘I think I’m in love,’ I murmured softly to my reflection.

  ‘Rubbish,’ said a cold male voice in my ear.

  I jumped, letting out a startled yelp, and fell back against the sink, hands instinctively shielding my privates. There was, of course, no one there. Nobody in sight, anyway.

  I waited in breathless silence. There was no sound from the bedroom, so at least I hadn’t woken Alison. I wondered if I’d imagined the voice. Maybe I wasn’t as awake as I’d thought.

  ‘Oh, she isn’t unattractive, I’ll agree,’ the voice went on. I jumped, but not as violently; familiarity breeds contempt. A man’s voice, an older man’s. Thin. Harsh. Bitter. I couldn’t feel any breath in my ear, except when he spoke. ‘Worth a quick tumble if nothing else. But love? There’s no such beast on the earth. It’s the pretty ones you have to watch most of all, you know. Have you wrapped round their little fingers before you know it.’

  Again, it was as if his lips were almost touching my ear; despite myself I turned round and round, trying to catch a glimpse of him. He laughed again, that grating, gloating titter. Now that I’d heard the voice, the laugh seemed even more grotesque.

  ‘Who are you?’ I said. I kept my voice down to a hiss. ‘What do you want?’

  Again the laugh. ‘Questions, questions.’

  I clenched my hands into useless fists and stood there a little longer. After a while, the voice spoke again. ‘It’s better to get them like that. Young and tender. Ripe and juicy. Before they start sagging with age.’ I heard a noise like saliva being sucked back through teeth; as if he’d been dribbling. ‘She has a good face, too. Some girls have attractive bodies but the faces . . . ugh. But her . . . oh, yes. Very nice. Can’t wait to get my hands on her.’