The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror
Page 12
It’s all in your mind, he told himself as he set the boy down by the car, batting off his panicky clutching hands while he got the boot open. “In you jump, nice and cosy,” he heard himself saying. He hadn’t thought it possible, to despise himself any more than he already did. One last despairing cry from X: “It’s all dark!” Then, down with the boot, clunk, and Dan was standing on his own in the car park next to his solidly familiar, unambiguously real Cavalier. Nobody there. He’d just come back to the car for cigarettes, or a coat, or whatever. If anyone was looking.
Guiltily he looked around. All clear, it seemed. Breathing heavily, he rested his ample backside against the boot till the panic subsided and his legs felt like teaming up with the rest of the gang again. Then the thought of Molly sitting in the movie wondering where he’d got to hit him like a slap in the face, and he got all out of breath again jogging back over to the multiplex.
“Gosh that was a long one,” whispered Molly as he slid back shamefacedly into his seat. “Thought you’d gone down the plughole.” He could feel her quivering with suppressed laughter; she felt no more and no less real than had X.
“Sorry,” he whispered. Eloquence is the proud preserve of all the top writers.
“I used to smoke myself,” she told him, pinching his Pinocchio nose between two bony knuckles. “Don’t worry.” Despite the extremity of his plight, Dan still found the time to appreciate this. Silently, he offered thanks to whatever gods looked after these things. Like, how brilliant a date was Molly—I mean, really? Look, Molly, it’s like this. I’m a walking disaster area, my wife chucked me out, I can’t get a book published to save my life, and I think—it’s a strong supposition, mind you—I think I might be going crackers, because I’m starting to hallucinate and shit. Yeah, never mind, big hug, don’t worry.
And maybe that was the answer, platitudinous as it seemed: not to worry. Maybe, if he’d worried a bit less in the first place—if he hadn’t spent the last few months ripping himself so methodically into shreds—then he might not have ended up in quite such a state as he was clearly in right now. So, probably good advice then, if only he could take it. Under the circumstances, it might be a little difficult; but then Molly took his hand again, and that helped more than anything possibly could have.
In the movie, eeriness proliferated. The children were playing by the lake under the watchful eye of their governess, the by now comprehensively frazzled Naomi Watts. As Dan tried to slip back into the screen world, Molly sighed happily, shifted in her seat and cuddled up against him. With a relief so complete you could almost cast it in plaster, Dan slipped his arm around her shoulders. One hand went somewhere extremely naughty, just for a playful little second, then scurried for cover like cheeky cartoon mice.
Molly gave a rich chuckle, and tilted up her face to be kissed . . . and temporarily at least, Dan’s qualms about the unsettling episode outside—the hallucination, as he’d decided to think of it—slid into the background. On screen, the jittery governess screamed at the sight of her dead predecessor, reflected in the waters of the lake. In their seats, Dan and Molly didn’t even notice.
A mutually gratifying regression to the teenage ensued, with both partners left feeling slightly dazed and confused when the auditorium lights went up and people started walking past them. Snogger’s cramp, at their age? Unbelievable. Walking as if on a dance floor sprung with air, Dan left the cinema hand in hand with Molly.
Outside, the hallucination began to play on his mind once more, especially as they approached the Cavalier parked away from the other cars in the rapidly emptying lot. For an instant he was convinced that, when he put his key in the door and deactivated the central locking, the boot would spring open and his dirty little secret would come to light. He would stand revealed—in front of a Molly whose outrage could be taken as read—with a strange kid locked in the boot, a kid for whom there was absolutely no accounting.
But no, that wasn’t going to happen, because this was a hallucination, wasn’t it? As in, an idea or belief to which nothing real corresponds. The apparent perception of an external object when no such object is actually present. So he would be fine; so get on with it. Mental breakdown is often characterised by a withdrawal from social activity and the occurrence of delusions and hallucinations—so there you were. He needed to get out more.
As things turned out, it was fine. He unlocked the Cavalier and opened the passenger door for Molly, then took a last quick look around the empty car park. All clear. And nothing whatsoever from the boot. Where there was nothing in the first place, remember?
Back at Molly’s he could very easily have accepted her invitation to come in for coffee and other, unspecified indulgences. That he didn’t was a matter of no little chagrin, but on reflection, driving back the few miles home after a prolonged and thoroughly engaged goodnight kiss with the promise to return the very next evening, he knew it was impossible. It was all to do with the boy. What he needed to do, first of all, was this: he needed to get back home, spark up the Powerbook and see whether the boy X was where he ought to be. Though obviously he would be. How could he not, when that thing earlier on was just, you know, an hallucination? But still, it would be nice to see it happen: to demonstrate to himself who held the whip hand in this relationship. With relief, he turned on to the Hoole Road. Almost home now. Half a mile.
Then, out of nowhere, the knocking started to come from the boot.
Dan’s involuntary swerve almost ran him into the side of the road. It was a dull muffled thumping, and it called into question every rationalization of the last hour or so, blew them effortlessly out of the water. There was something in his boot. That there couldn’t be, because there wasn’t anything there in the first place, didn’t matter, because he knew, because he’d put it there himself. At the first opportunity he pulled over, got out of the car with the engine still running and approached, with a stomach-churning mixture of disbelief and irrational conviction, the rear of the car.
Flashing lights and a siren stab made him catch his breath and straighten up just in time, shielding his eyes from the oncoming headlights. A police car had pulled in behind him, and its occupants, two constables, male and female, were getting out. “Everything all right, sir?” inquired the woman, with what seemed to Dan unnecessarily heavy sarcasm.
“Noticed you seemed to pull over a bit sharpish just now,” said the other one, taking his cue from his colleague. “We were just wondering, what was the matter?”
The WPC was not to be outdone. “It’s gone twelve. Bit late for practicing your emergency stops, eh, sir?” Dan smiled weakly. Yeah, hilarious. What do you want, bitch? Aloud, he said:
“Yes—I, er, I thought I might have run something over. I thought I felt a thump. Just now, while I was turning on to Hoole Road.” Talk normal, the voice in his ear was hissing. Act natural. Proper dialogue. You sound like a right shifty sod. With a mighty act of will, Dan refrained from telling it to shut up.
“Run something over, sir?” Why couldn’t they talk proper? Why, in the twenty-first century, did all policemen and women still think they had to carry on like something out of sodding Z-Cars? “What sort of thing?”
“A . . . cat? I don’t know. A small dog? Maybe a squirrel. I didn’t see.”
“You didn’t see?” As if they were all foreigners talking some mutually understood lingua franca, and they had to keep checking they’d got the vocabulary right. Now the woman was chipping in again.
“So: you thought you’d run something over, a small dog or a squirrel—but you were going to the back of the car? Not to the front, to see if there was any damage . . . ?”
Well done, Juliet Bravo. “I thought I might be able to see it on the road. See if it was badly hurt.”
The woman made a great show of looking out across the empty tarmac, while the man picked up where she’d left off: “But you seemed to be going to open your boot, sir, when we stopped . . . ?”
Dan was on the end of a snide cop/smart-a
rse cop routine, and he wanted very badly to be out of there. Specifically, he very badly didn’t want to hear the words that came next, from the WPC. “I wonder would you mind just going ahead and popping the boot open, sir, so’s we can all have a little look inside?
Oh, shit. Oh Christ, no. “Er . . . the boot?”
“Yes sir,” patiently, as if to a congenital imbecile, “the boot. If you’d just pop it open for us, sir.”
“Just now,” confirmed the policeman, moving to the back of Dan’s car. “If you wouldn’t mind, then we could have a quick shufti, make sure everything’s in its right place.”
Understanding that some definite action was required of him, Dan managed to fight off the temptation simply to repeat, ad infinitum, “The boot?” As if underwater, he fumbled the locking mechanism open. As the boot swung up, he turned to the police, his face a white mask. “There you go,” he said, like a trunk murderer exhibiting his handiwork. He didn’t dare look inside, waiting instead for the expression on the faces of the constables to change. Registering after a few seconds their habitual deadpan, he risked a glance.
Of course, it was empty.
They breathalyzed him, naturally, and checked his registration on their handheld data gadget; then, having nothing on which to hold him further, they let him go with a lecture about his driving and an admonition, implied rather than stated, as to his future conduct and general standards of behavior (so just watch it, all right?). To Dan, punchy still from the succession of unexpected events, pleasant and otherwise, over the course of the evening, it was all water off a duck’s back. He drove the remaining few hundred yards home under the baleful eyes of the constabulary, who tailed him back to the flat and didn’t drive off till he’d shut the front door with a guilty little wave and beneath his breath a muttered “Fuck off.”
The boot, of course, had always been empty. Nothing in there, ha-ha, no sir, no indeedy. Ask the police. Under the circumstances it would have been totally unnecessary to have taken a look inside just now when he was parking up, to see what was making that frantic knocking noise he’d heard all the way down the road. For one thing it would have given entirely the wrong idea to the watching plod, and for another, the boot was empty. Had he mentioned that? Nothing knocking, because nothing to knock, nothing there.
The corollary of this, though, was that his hallucinations were clearly no longer confined to the visual, or indeed the tactile. Pouring himself a drink, Dan collapsed on to the sofa and tried to sort out what was going so spectacularly awry in his head. He was way too freaked to even consider writing—not tonight, not even to see if his Prospero grasp on his characters was holding under the strain.
You read about cases like this, he knew. At one time, soon after discovering his particular eidetic gift, he’d been quite interested in the topic. (Privately, he’d always worried that there was something not quite right about it—and, by extension, about him). He was aware that some of these threshhold experiences could tip over into out-and-out hallucinations. Stress, they said, could do it—it didn’t have to be anything more organic than that. So, hey, stress? Bleakly and without enthusiasm Dan picked over the succession of wrecks and forced reverses in his life over the last few months. First Angie, then the house, then the book deal, gone, gone, gone: where did you want to start?
If hallucinations were a denial, willed or otherwise, of objective reality, then just at present Dan found it hard to argue with their basic underlying premise. Denial was only natural, because really, what was there to affirm? He hated his life: he hated this flat, he hated being on his own, he hated losing love when love was all that had bound him to the world in the first place, he hated the publishers who’d dumped him in favor of the sort of idiot spit and dribble that actively devalued the nature of existence on this earth. What was there in this abject perversion of existence to justify him spending any more time there than he had to? Very little. Molly, maybe. Argh. Molly.
He rang her straight away, while he was still slightly breathless from the shock, and had to explain he’d just run up two flights of stairs. When she asked him what the rush had been, he improvised with the fluent desperation of the practiced liar or storyteller and said he couldn’t wait to hear her voice again. This seemed to go down rather well.
“You should have come inside,” she said, “and I’d have whispered sweet nothings in your ear.” It was a lifebelt thrown from the dry land of sanity, and Dan grabbed for it with both hands. He arranged to meet her the following night; she would cook him a meal, and they’d take it from there. On the verge of putting the phone down, all that you first, no you business, he thought he heard her saying “Love you.” But how could he be sure? He couldn’t even trust his own ears any more.
Too many drinks and no significant conclusions later, Dan hit the sack, falling almost immediately into a nauseating, exhaustingly realistic loop-dream in which he ran over a collie dog, again and again. Expiring on the verge in a shatter of blood and fur, the collie would lift its Lassie head to lick his hand, and he’d see etched on its collar the words Bad Dog Dan. Getting to his feet, he’d turn around and there would be Angie, watching from behind the wheel of a fast car with Malcolm in the passenger seat. Before he could explain, they were gone, and he was left with the image of Angie’s well-remembered face, all twisted in loathing and repugnance.
The last time round, the collie bit him, and he woke in a thrashing panic. The alarm clock showed four-fifteen, the very worst time at which to wake. No real chance of getting off again; and why would he want to? Enough trauma for one night, thank you very much.
Instead he hauled his aching middle-aged frame out of bed and through to the kitchen. Black coffee. Pasteurized orange juice. These things would help, presumably. Cigarettes—now you’re talking. Ohh, the first of the day, how it rasped and solaced all together. Fag dangling from his lips, coffee steaming in his big black mug, Dan lumbered through to the study, a grizzly roused from hibernation before the spring thaw.
Opening his Powerbook, it hit him: crunch time. The confrontation he’d ducked last night was now back on, for better or worse. Bringing up the Say Uncle file he quickly read over the last few paras to bring him up to speed, and then typed the words “I stayed in the cupboard the whole night.” Involuntarily he glanced up. Nothing there.
Okay, don’t panic. What, now? Let’s see. “It was so dark in there. No one could see me, and I couldn’t see anything, but that was fine by me.”
But even when it’s pitch dark you know if someone’s there, and he wasn’t, X, not any more. Dan wasn’t seeing it, he wasn’t feeling it.
“I came out around half four.” Except he didn’t; that was Dan saying it, not him actually doing it. Just words, dead words crawling on a screen. He might as well have typed in adlg jt’wegjj. How could you believe what you didn’t see? And why couldn’t he see him any more?
“Mister.” Over by the hall door. Dan had to grab hold of the Powerbook on its cushioned tray: the whole lot almost went over. “Hey, mister.”
There he was at the door, faint light from the hallway spilling around his silhouette: the original eidetic boy wonder. X from the story; X the child whose uncle did him bad. Whose mummy didn’t love him enough. Whose biographer tried to keep him in a cupboard, then locked him in the boot of the car. X, who’d finally made his move.
“It was horrible in that boot.” So matter-of-fact, yet infinitely reproachful. It was all Dan could do to type it without wincing. “I felt sick, it stank of petrol. Why did you put me in there?”
“You weren’t in there! I looked!” You don’t have to take that sort of guff from a kid. Where would it end up, if you let them get the whip-hand?
“I was too. You put me in there. You locked me in the boot.”
“I had to!” The golden rule with children is, assume superiority. Don’t let then sense your vulnerability. Dan, who’d never had children of his own, was losing this one already. “You didn’t belong there in the first place—it was
a grown-up’s night, it wasn’t for little boys. How did you get there, anyway?”
“I followed you out. I was in the car all along.” Of course. So X was following him outside now.
“Listen.” Dan struggled to find the right tone. “Listen. You can’t go around the place tagging after me. You belong in here. In there,” as one might indicate a favorite playpen, gesturing towards the cupboard.
“But I don’t like it in there.” That quaver in his voice again, precursor to hot tears and adult panics. “There’s spiders.”
“Spiders are all right!” Yeah. Even Dan didn’t think he’d fall for that one. “Sammy Spider!”
“I don’t like it.” Something new: a mutinous edge to the voice, now. Something Dan hadn’t bargained for. “I’m not going back.”
“Well, you’ve got to, and that’s that.” When reason is a bust, there’s always because-I-said-so. And when authority fails, you have to back up words with deeds.
“No I don’t,” insisted X stubbornly. “I found the way out. In between the middle.” He still said “miggle”. He was only seven, remember. “When you come out, it’s different outside to when you went in. Uncle Bob can’t get me, here. He can’t get through. He doesn’t know how stories work.”
Was that it, by God? Escaped? Run away from his bad uncle? Well then, there was nothing for it but to play his trump card. “What about your mummy? She must be frantic, wondering where you’ve gone . . . ” He did his best to make it sound genuinely concerned, poor mummy, poor X.