It was knocking midday when he pushed away from the desk and stretched his legs. He’d gone through three pots of coffee, and managed over three thousand words. Good work, too: surprisingly good, considering he’d never done this sort of thing before. Good purely as in “wouldn’t need much editing,” mind you; as to the ultimate literary worth of his MS, Dan was under no illusions whatsoever. This was not the place to prove himself worthy of the awards currently gathering dust on his shelves (MOST PROMISING WORK OF SHORT FANTASY, 1994; BEST CHARACTER IN AN ONGOING SAGA, 1999). Here, two things were necessary, and two things only: the outward appearance of realism, and the jarring dissonance between horror and the everyday. Piece of cake. It was oddly liberating to work in such narrowly circumscribed circumstances. Once your characters were properly established, you could turn out something approaching pure narrative, page after page of what happened next.
Dan crossed the room to the window and lifted the sash, letting the warm fresh morning air flow in on the stale west-facing room. On the wall to his left was the fitted cupboard, a plasterboard relic of indifferent DIY from the ’60s. It filled up the alcove to the right of the chimney-breast: there was a corresponding recess to the left where Dan had put his bookcases. The cupboard boards were warping now, and had Dan owned the place, rather than rented, he’d have torn the lot out and cleared the alcove without a second thought.
Inside the cupboard, behind all the junk left by a previous tenant (mildewed suits, old vinyl albums by Wishbone Ash and Camel) there was a door in the wall, blocked off at the sill with a length of two-by-four nailed to the bare floorboards like a brutalist draft excluder. Dan had seen this sort of thing many times in semis and terraces, back when he was a student in Liverpool. This was what landlords used to do before building regs clamped down on them and emphasized the need for proper fire escapes. It was a fire door: it would open on to a narrow space and then another, exactly similar door which gave access to the adjacent property. In the event of a fire you were supposed to pile through to next door’s bedroom—that is, assuming some previous tenant afraid of burglars (or worse) hadn’t nailed the door shut.
With a grimace—it was horribly musty in there, that was where the stink came from in this room, clearly—Dan peered inside the cupboard door. Next time someone had a skip on the street, he’d chuck the lot out. For now, he was thinking it would do very well as a place for X to hide in. That space in between the two doors. “The smell of old clothes and damp used to make me feel sick,” murmured Dan aloud. “Or maybe it was just the fear—the fear of what would happen when he found me.” Sort of thing.
He was peckish after a hard morning’s work, and thought he’d go into town for a cooked meal in his favorite bistro down by the river. It remained only to name his file. After rejecting, with whimsical regret, Cigarettes Are Harmful to Your Health and A Boy Called X, he typed into the Save As dialogue box the words SAY UNCLE. He could see it now, in messy crayon over a photo of a child hiding in a cupboard. It had a ring to it.
By the end of the week, Dan had almost twelve thousand words of fair copy. It was the sort of work rate he used to reach once he was well embarked on a Nevernesse project, where he knew inside-out the characters and the universe they inhabited. Working in the dark with X and his ne’er-do-well family, twelve thousand inside a week was little short of miraculous. He’d impressed himself.
He had an excellent working image of the house and its inhabitants in his head. There was Liza the gymslip mother, easily cowed, too easily led astray. Jack, the dad, was away with the Merchant Marine eleven months out of twelve. Something very bad was going to happen to him in Manila, thought Dan. He wouldn’t be seeing Newcastle again. And of course there was Bob, Liza’s fancy man, the gruesome alpha male who ruled the roost in Jack’s absence—“Uncle” Bob, that was. Say Uncle. And the lad X, cowering there in his cupboard; mustn’t forget him. Our special little fella; our tiny gold mine.
Actually, that wasn’t the whole truth, not any more. It might have been at the start of the project, when Dan was still envisaging the whole thing purely as a quick, vaguely satirical way to turn a cynical profit. But you can’t stay around people for hours at a time and not become a little sensitized to their suffering, not unless you’re a total pig. Even kidnappers must fall prey to some Stockholm syndrome-in-reverse, and start to feel a kind of responsibility towards their abductees. If you weren’t emotionally engaged with a writing project, then the characters would never come to life—that was Dan’s experience. So while maintaining a healthy perspective on X’s Byzantine travails, he did at least feel a modicum of sympathy towards the poor mite shivering behind the fire door in the cupboard.
Apart from anything else, it helped Dan get inside his head, and that was the key to making the finished manuscript halfway readable, he thought. Get the little details right, and you’d smuggle the rest through unnoticed. Come up with a convincingly wounded child, and no one would think to ask, Is it true or is it make-believe? For the period of reading, it would necessarily be true. That was the trick, after all. How eagerly we collaborate in our own hoodwinking. All an author has to do is say: Listen. This is what happened. And we can’t get enough: like fledglings we strain wide our beaks for another mess of regurgitated worms. Not one of the more elegant metaphors for the writer’s craft, but in this case it seemed only too appropriate.
As he hammered out the paragraphs on his humming Powerbook, Dan cast many a glance at the back cupboard, visualizing the tight restricted space between the fire doors, between this flat and the one next door. Having decided that’s where X would hide, he’d tried to work out the internal logic of it, just to see if it was worth persevering with. Perhaps the main feature was an all-pervasive threat, a hazard from either side. X was stuck between two doors, one which opened on a known and terrifying situation, the other on a peril unknown, yet no less scary. Maybe. He might be able to do something with that, when the time came. Symbolism in the second draft, and not before. In the meantime, it felt right, which was good enough for the time being.
He’d gone so far as to remove the piece of wood that blocked the fire door on his side, so he could have a look at the gap in between. A small space, all cobwebs and builder’s dust: big enough for a skinny kid to squeeze inside with both doors shut, but no larger than that. Opening up the fire door might not have been the best idea so far as his own comfort went, though. It seemed to have let a draft through from somewhere, and now the room was not only colder then before, but the cupboard door rattled from time to time, just the wrong side of annoyingly.
The weekend passed as weekends will for men in Dan’s position: indistinguishable from the week preceding it, and from the week still to come. He wrote; he watched TV; he drank slightly more than was good for him, because no one told him not to. On Sunday night, he managed (after several pints of Stella) to screw up his courage and ring the number—Molly’s home phone. She was letting the machine pick up until she heard Dan’s introductory stammer, then all of a sudden she cut through her own voice on the line, gushing in relief. Apparently she’d been scared he wouldn’t ring. She was scared? Clearly this was worth going through with after all. Nobody had been this pleased to hear from him in years.
They arranged a get-together: that was what they were calling it still, just to be on the safe side. Get-together rather than date, no pressure, no sweat. He’d pick her up at her place on Thursday evening, and they’d go to the Cheshire Oaks as agreed for a pizza and a film. As soon as she said yes—which she did immediately, as if she’d been waiting all week just for him to ask—Dan suddenly had a debilitating attack of should-I. He was obliged to counterfeit an incoming call on his other line, just so he could get off the phone and take stock.
Unless he was misreading the situation with an emotional illiteracy bordering on the remedial, he’d cracked it with Molly. But was it the right thing for him at this specific moment? Was it really what he wanted? He lit a Marlboro—and that was something odd, r
ight there. After giving up smoking for five years he’d suddenly gone out and bought a pack that morning after writing. What was that about? He decided it was the absence of Angie, as much as anything. He liked cigarettes, after all, he craved the clarity and the focus they gave him, and the only reason he’d given up in the first place was because she’d wanted him to. Now, he could do whatever he wanted. Smoke. Drink. Date other women. Prostitute his talent. Whatever. Anyway, smoking helped him think, so shut up.
This business, now: this thing with Angie. Molly! Molly. (Had to stop doing that: suppose it happened on their date? Dan grimaced reflexively, caught himself doing it in the mirror, and mentally slapped the other side of his face. If the wind changes, you’ll be stuck like that, Angie used to say.) What was so bad about Molly, anyway? She was highly presentable, in that Cheshire commuter-belt style he’d always assumed was outside his range; she was kind and thoughtful, and she wore her heart pinned bravely on her sleeve. Any other problems? Well, she’s not Angie, is she, pointed out a small mutinous voice from some reactive cranny of his mind.
Oh, excuse me? he wanted to say. Not who again? Angie who dumped me? Angie who lobbed the ten years we spent together right down the fucking pan? Angie who moved another bloke in on the exact same weekend I packed up and moved out? To show the voice exactly what he thought of that argument, he redialed Molly’s number on the spot, apologized for the hiatus (“Nothing important”) and firmed up the details of their get-together, specifying time and place. Thursday, then, and he’d be at hers for seven: fine. She seemed genuinely glad he’d rung back—absurdly so, in fact. It was remarkable.
In the end it seemed easier to drink a few more cans of Stella Artois than to analyze matters. Action first, as with writing. Think about it later. He’d got lucky for once, that was all—don’t start picking holes in it, not yet for God’s sake. Nodding to himself with the lumbering owlishness of the drunk, he fell asleep on the sofa, and woke up around three with a crick in his neck, an urgent need to pee, and a dismal suspicion he wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. And lo, it came to pass.
Submitting around four a.m. to the inevitable, he shuffled yawning into the back room, dressed for bed still in tracksuit bottoms and T-shirt. In one hand he clutched a carton of orange juice, in the other a monster mug of coffee. The juice helped stave off dehydration, and cut the stale nasty taste in his mouth, while the coffee helped him form legible sentences—or so he hoped. He lit up a cigarette (ash, he noticed with a throb of shame, was already accumulating between the keys of his Powerbook) and flipped open the lid.
By now, rather than sitting at the desk, he’d taken to propping his laptop on a padded tray, like an invalid’s dinner, and making himself comfortable in the recliner by the window. This arrangement allowed him not to turn his back on the room, which was handy if he needed to check some feature or other, and it was much more comfortable. Now, with the Say Uncle file open on screen, he leaned back, narrowed his eyes, and did some more visualizing. The eideteker’s gift requires mental space, and a sensitivity to nuance not everyone possesses, but once the connection is established it’s surprising—alarming, to some—how real everything will seem.
Here was X with the cupboard door closed, in the space between the fire doors. The business with the cupboard being his place of escape: he was happy with that, wasn’t he, by the way? Easy enough to write it out at the first draft, otherwise. It wasn’t too The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, for instance, was it?
“I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe books,” he told himself in X’s reedy voice, like a bad ventriloquist—his lips moved on the Ws, but everybody’s did, a bit. “I used to imagine that, if I could make myself very small and very thin, I wouldn’t have to go through either door—I could squeeze through the space in between, and come out somewhere else entirely.” That was good. That wasn’t a bad angle, actually. One door, in this reading, would symbolize his current plight: his blighted childhood, his bad uncle. The other would symbolize, er, something else—his future, probably, adulthood yet to come, as represented by the normal people next door who didn’t know anything about what was going on (wasn’t too sure about that, exactly, just yet. Did he want to get the neighbors involved? On the whole, Dan’s instinct was rather against bringing the neighbors into it). The space between, now: that was actually quite interesting. Child’s flight into something or other. The crack in between. Escape.
“Escape,” he said aloud, and heard X repeat it, lisping slightly on the sibilants in that childish way of his. His voice was muffled, barely audible from his hiding place. But the cupboard door was open—had he left it open? He’d thought it was shut. No wonder the room smelt so fusty. And the fire door, he’d opened that up days ago, hadn’t he? Poor old X, there in the cobwebs. Cobwebs on his striped pyjamas. “Help, Danny.” He looked like a little murder victim, bless him, crouching in the confined space, trying to flatten himself into the crack between the houses, the damp-course in the brickwork. Like one of Christie’s lodgers, wrapped up in a blanket and forgotten. Like a little Belsen horror. Look at him, his granny in Ponteland used to say, He’s so pale and thin. Like a little Belsen horror, aren’t you? And a pinch of his cheek. If only she’d known.
“Help, Granny,” pleaded X. That was what he meant to say, thought Dan dreamily, firming up the connections in his mind. He wanted to ask her for help, but he couldn’t. Uncle Bob would kill him. “He’d kill me,” amplified X, bruised eyes saucer-wide in his drawn white face, following Dan’s train of thought exactly. “He’d kill me mam first, then he’d start on me. There’d be no one left to protect me then, he says. He’d have me all to hisself, he could take as long as he wants, and afterwards he’d put me down a hole. Please help.”
“Help,” echoed Dan, nodding with satisfaction. It was there. It had long since stopped being words on screen; now, it was coming to life. Slowly, warily, X emerged from the cupboard, brushing the cobwebs from his hair with a sleeve caught up in his fist. Turn him around, view him in 3D like one of Spielberg’s CGI dinosaurs. Real as you like. “Help me,” he begged distressingly. Across the keys Dan’s fingers danced to life. “But there was no one there to help me. I was on my own. I had to keep on hiding, and hope he wouldn’t find me. But he always would.” “He always would,” agreed Dan, out loud.
Slowly, almost reproachfully, the little figure shuffled back into its hiding place. Dan, never once looking up from the screen, never needing to now, typed on. Make that “throw me down a well”, he thought, erasing “put me down a hole” with the backspace key. Glumly, obediently, the little boy mouthed the words with him. Another couple of thousand, before they called it a day.
Into the second week of his new project, Dan realized he was going to bed earlier and earlier, and getting up for work while it was still dark. He seemed to do his best work in the hush before dawn, sitting in the recliner with an unobstructed view of X’s hiding place. The doors were open all the time now: he hoped it would help air the cupboard out, get rid of the moldy smell. It was taking a while to shift, and he had to keep the study door shut in case the stink permeated the whole flat. Not so much for his sake—he’d got used to it—but in case anyone came round. Molly, for instance. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Haven’t even had that first date yet. Get-together.
The great day was approaching. On Thursday morning Dan woke at some absurd time, four o’clock, it was dark still outside, rain against the window. He made coffee and fetched it through to the study, where its aromatic steam helped cut the must from the cupboard. X was in his usual place, peering out fearfully from his dusty recess, arms hugging his bony knees. Casting a perfunctory glance his way for reassurance, Dan set to work.
Liza was on her way out—the beehive freshly cemented with Elnett, the lashes stuck into place, the strappy microdress barely hiding the bruises on her thighs. Liza was about as hard to pull as a cistern chain: Dan had to admit there was something about her slutty availability that was perilo
usly tempting. You could see why Bob would be sniffing around like a farmyard dog. Occasionally, when she got sloshed and demonstrative and gave X tearful hugs after falling in late from the pub, it was enough to make Dan slightly jealous. In fact, he was half-wondering whether there might not be some way of writing in a surreptitious yet lingeringly explicit love scene between Liza and Bob, pretty much entirely for the fun of it. It could be witnessed, he grudgingly conceded in the name of the plot, by a hiding X: some squalid encounter on X’s bed while the tot squirmed uncomfortably in his cupboard, peering through a crack in the door at the funny funny wrestling match between Mummy and the nasty man. Not now, anyway; Liza was on her way out, and Bob had volunteered to babysit. Just X and Uncle Bob, then (and Dan watching, of course).
“Don’t go out. Stay in with us.” He sounded frightened. Surely Liza was getting that? She was his mother, wasn’t she?
“Divven be soft,” mouthed Dan, lips moving unconsciously. “It’s bingo the neet up the Mecca, and us gorls are gannin oot afta.” He’d decided quite early on not to transcribe all the dialogue in cod Geordie—thank God. It was hard work on him and the reader both, and ran the risk of being irrevocably comic where comedy was least of all required. Anyway, it made it more universal in a way if he didn’t. “Don’t be soft,” he typed. “It’s bingo tonight up the Mecca, and us girls are goin’ out after.” Clipping her speech was okay; that suggested the looseness of the idiom, its laxity. Lax was the word, above all others, he associated most with Liza: she was undeniably lax around the fellers, treacherously so. Her mouth, he knew, would feel so soft and lax as it opened, yielding helplessly to a rough and tonguing kiss . . .
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror Page 10
