Strangers at the Door: Twelve unsettling tales of horror

by Christopher Henderson

  The man smiled, waiting for a reply. John didn’t much fancy looking inside the windmill – he just wanted to head home to his warm bed – but how else was he to explain his prowling around the car park? Mumbling an affirmative, he allowed himself to be guided around to the other side of the circular wall, to where light blazed from an open doorway. He hoped this wasn’t going to take too long.

  * * * *

  Inside, the light was dazzling. The air was dry and carried the same sharp tang that surrounded fairground dodgems. It quivered in sympathy with a low rumbling vibration, and from somewhere overhead came a relentless creaking and grinding.

  John peered around, screwing his eyes against the glare. The miller was wearing tinted glasses, he saw. He hadn’t had those on before, had he? In fact, had people even worn shades in Victorian times? Even if they had, surely that pair, with those large wrap-around lenses of impenetrable opacity, was too modern. Perhaps…

  ‘Please, lad, have a drink.’

  Rough hands passed John a narrow but tall glass of ruby-coloured liquid. As the miller stood watching with expectation John raised the glass to his lips. It would, after all, be rude to refuse. He took a surreptitious sniff: rich, a little fruity and definitely alcoholic – something like Pimm’s, possibly? He took a sip and found it delicious. No doubt expensive too. Presumably this was how the heritage folk flattered reporters to give a good write-up of their events in the local rag.

  He took another mouthful, relishing the treacly warmth it spread.

  Thinking of reporters, where was everyone else? Licking his lips, John took in his surroundings in more detail. Now that his eyes were adjusting to the brightness he could see a low wooden ceiling pressing down uneasily close to his head. Emerging through the ceiling in about the middle of the room was a hefty metal rod that must have been about as large around as one of his legs. It thrust down towards a large vertical-standing wheel cast from sullen grey metal; this wheel was slowly rotating, its cogs meshing into and turning other, smaller wheels, which in turn were powering a pair of massive stone grindstones on the floor to either side of the machinery.

  On the far side of the room, eight or nine large hessian sacks stamped ‘Flour’ were piled against the wall, with another hanging from a rope hoist in what was clearly a staged display. Despite the dusty haze hanging in the air the bare wooden floor was clean, swept no doubt by the old witches’ broomstick propped up near the sacks.

  The miller smiled, humming a folky sounding tune to himself.

  It was warm inside, and John fought to control a yawn, not wanting to appear rude. He found his gaze drawn back towards the machinery in the centre of the floor. The wheels continued their revolutions, round and around and around, grinding and whirring and droning. The energy driving them must come through the smooth metal rod, he supposed, which must continue up through the ceiling, through the body of the mill to connect in turn with the great sails outside. Wind moving sails, turning the rod, powering the gears and rotating the heavy grinding, rolling wheels to, to ….

  John frowned. There was that feeling again, that sense that something was wrong. But what?

  He drained the last of the delicious liquid and stepped closer to the machinery. He looked more intently at the mechanism, unable to grasp quite how the various parts fitted together. Every time he shifted focus from one detail to another, any understanding of how they were connected felt as if it were sliding off the surface of his brain.

  This was ridiculous! How could a basic piece of engineering put together a hundred years ago be too complicated for someone in the 21st Century to understand? Struggling to control his irritation he tried again. There was the rod rotating, and there the wheel was turning. The gears were meshing. The mill was creaking and groaning and rumbling – but how was the rod from the sails powering the wheel? It ran straight down through the centre of the machinery to stop a good 20 centimetres from the floor, and John could see no point at which it physically connected with anything at all. It made no sense!

  Suddenly light-headed, he rocked back. He tried to focus on the curve of the walls ahead. They seemed so far away. How was that possible in such a confined building? His eyes stung. Why was it so bright in here? And where was the light coming from anyway? The air itself appeared to be ablaze with it.

  And where the hell was everybody?

  ‘Let me take your jacket, lad.’

  No, John tried to say, but the sound slurred out without sense.

  The miller reached for the zipper on John’s jacket. John tried to pull away.

  ‘Wha’re you doing? Gerroff.’

  The miller was behind him, tugging his jacket down. His right sleeve came free. The other caught on John’s wrist.

  ‘No!’

  John pulled forward, hard. The caught sleeve spun him on his heel and as he struggled to keep his balance his flailing free hand met the miller’s chest. John pushed, and the two stumbled away from each other; he felt rather than heard the ripping of stitches as his jacket sleeve came free in the miller’s grip.

  Released, John fell sideways against the grey metal wheel. The machinery shuddered. The slowly rotating wheel faltered. High above, the creaking and grinding became a rasping wheeze. All around, the low rumble started to rise in pitch, and the buzzing, humming electrical thrum John hadn’t realized until now he could hear inside this room dropped away. The glare dimmed and silence spilled into the shadows it left.

  Dizzy, John lifted himself away from the wheel. As his weight was released the wheel began to rotate freely once more. The humming returned and the rumble deepened, and as the lights blazed back into their full blinding intensity John toppled forward, a whirlpool of unconsciousness pulling him under as he fell….

  * * * *

  Cold.

  Thick waves of pain rolled up against a dam of numbness.

  Miles distant, the tingling of stirring nerve-endings warned that the dam would not hold forever.

  He sensed roughness below the sleeping flesh of his naked back. Harsh light stabbed him as he opened a gap between his eyelids, and it took an effort to blink away tears, to allow his eyes to focus on what resolved into a heap of clothes on the floor below.

  He was on a table, on his back. His clothes were on the floor. He was naked, and his body felt wrong: absent and at the same time too big.

  He heard himself whimper, an inarticulate moan of bewilderment and growing panic. What was happening? He stretched his fingers, flexed his wrists. He tensed the muscles along his forearms, a little feeling returning to his body now. His legs, heavy though they were, responded.

  Twitching and rocking away the edges of his paralysis, he struggled to make his body move. With agonizing slowness, he was able to swing himself around until he sat hunched at the side of the table. He tried to stand. His legs gave way and he collapsed.

  But there was more movement now in his muscles. Although still unable to feel his arms he succeeded in using them to shovel his clothes in towards his chest, and with his prize he pushed himself, slug-like, towards the doorway.

  A shadow fell across him.

  Through John’s watering eyes the miller was a blurred grey shape. His sunglasses had blobbed into enormous dark eyes and there was no longer any detail in his attire; the cloth cap seemed every bit as grey as his shirt and trousers and even the bright red neckerchief was no longer visible. His fingers were long and spindly against the glare as they lifted a glittering tool. That too was long, of a shape that reminded John of a pair of needle-nosed pliers he kept at home, in the rarely opened toolbox by the wardrobe.

  He longed to be home now.

  The pointed ends of the object parted and closed like hungry jaws, snapping with diamond-hard clicks.

  The shadows deepened as the miller bent down, reaching towards John, who tried to wriggle away.

  A sigh moved through John’s mind, non-sounds shushing out a sense of half-amused murmurings, of noises one might make to comfort a startled pet. The words
that followed were not spoken but came as an insinuation that slid into his awareness.

  ‘Drinkers. So hard to judge their tolerance. Never mind, we’ll get you some more soon. Then you’ll sleep.’

  John kicked.

  His leg took an age to respond. It was heavy, clumsy, and it did not move as he had intended. Perhaps that was why the miller did not anticipate the foot that caught his lowered face.

  The miller reeled back, and a connection snapped inside John’s brain. A rush of unexpected freedom poured into his head. He closed his still-numb fingers around as much of his clothing as he could and used the injection of new energy to clamber to his feet. He had almost managed to get into a crouch when his legs gave out.

  Beside him, the miller was starting to stand.

  In desperation, John threw his weight forward, allowing his body to fall towards the machinery with its irrational arrangement of gears and grindstones, rotating cylinder and impossibly revolving wheel. He realized now what it had been that puzzled him most about the machine – puzzled him even more than the lack of physical connection. It had been the sounds from above, from what should have been the ultimate source of power for the contraption: the creaking and the groaning of great sails turning in the wind. The great sails that, from the outside, had hung motionless in the still night air.

  Whatever it was, this place he had stumbled into, it was no windmill. And with that instant clarity of knowledge, he very nearly caught a glimpse of the reality masked behind this illusion. The details faded before he could process them, but that single flash seared into his thoughts the certainty that here was the power source. And he knew how to damage it.

  Throwing an arm across the whirring cogs, ignoring the muffled signals of pain as the mechanism gouged flesh from his bicep, John held on, steadying himself upright as he rammed his clothes deep into the heart of the machine. The grey metal wheel took up the material, pulling it deeper into the contraption’s belly. Cloth bunched up ever more solid as the wheel continued to push into it, forcing it further inside. The rumbling in the air rose to a buzz and then to a whine as the machine shook. Incandescent blue sparks flickered across John’s hairs, dancing in the trembling air, and the electrical hum swelled and shrieked in the flickering, pulsating glow.

  The light went out. Silence.

  Colourful afterimages waxed and waned in John’s vision, but in the periphery of the darkness he discerned a hazy door-shaped luminescence nearby, behind which hung the dreamlike image of a familiar pub car park.

  John fell to the floor and crawled towards that image, pulling himself on with his uninjured arm, legs kicking weakly behind like those of a drowning swimmer. From behind came sounds of cloth being wrenched free. The air was starting to thrum again, and a deep rumbling was beginning to shake the floor as he reached the threshold. With one final effort, he clambered to his knees and heaved himself through the opening, falling out into the cool, windless night air.

  Naked and gasping, he lay on the cold tarmac, staring up towards the doorway which once more blazed with light. A featureless silhouette slid into the frame, its limbs spidery extensions against the glare. It carried something in each hand.

  A rueful swell of amusement rippled into John’s shell-shocked awareness. With no apparent effort, the figure raised what must be one of the sacks marked ‘Flour’, and shook it. It rattled and chinked like broken crockery.

  Cocking its head, the figure took one last lingering look at John before tossing the rest of his ruined clothing onto him. Then it slunk back into the light and, chuckling, closed the door between them.

  A second passed. Or a year.

  The world distorted. The reality of a windmill pulled back in on itself, enclosing its essence within a bubble that somehow detached from the surrounding world. Then that bubble was shrinking, or perhaps it was moving away. Away and rising up. Up, into the night sky.

  Normality tuned back in with the shooshing of a passing car on the rain-damp road behind him. John was lying at the foot of the old wall of crumbling red bricks, the circular base of a long-vanished windmill. He shivered, aching too much to huddle into what was left of his clothes.

  Some feeling was returning, and the aches were from more than just the cuts and bruising. His mouth felt wrong.

  With growing horror, he probed his tongue around the inside of his mouth, unfeelingly pushing around a space that had changed, a space that was too hollow. He ran his tongue along the smooth swells of empty gums, and understood what had been inside those sacks misleadingly marked ‘Flour’.

  Far above, as his ruined mouth throbbed with the knowledge of coming pain, a blazing sphere shot up and away, and was gone.

  It might have looked like ball lightning – if you believe in that sort of thing.

  Bone Idol

  ‘I don’t know how you can watch that rubbish,’ he called.

  The kettle clicked off. Andy didn’t pour the water over his teabag straightaway. He didn’t want those little flecks of limescale swirling among the bubbles to get into his cuppa. Better to wait a few moments, do it properly, then he would get back to updating his C.V.

  At least he was doing something practical. Not pissing his days away in front of the telly. Wondering what she was watching this time he stepped a little closer to the doorway and peered through the crack between the open door and its frame. Anyway, the water was still settling. It wasn’t as if he were wasting time.

  Somehow Linda sensed him lurking there.

  ‘It’s interesting, innit?’ she replied at last.

  Andy stepped into the room. Linda was too engrossed in the banal twittering of the idiots on screen to turn around. His heart sagged: somewhere among the lump of flesh on the sofa was the slim, pretty young woman he’d married, but she was well buried now beneath the fat. She popped another Custard Cream into her mouth, careless of the crumbs that fell onto her top.

  He was having a hard time adjusting to life after being laid off. He could admit that. This new life seemed to boil down to a pointless existence of enforced leisure, of scrimping and daytime telly that drained the will to live. Perhaps most depressing was the insight his new reality had given him into how Linda whiled away her days. Hour after hour of lounging on the sofa, nibbling away as she gawped at an endless parade of programmes about strangers moving house, garden makeovers and, oh God, those so-called ‘paranormal reality’ shows. He had been genuinely shocked to discover Linda believed in those charlatans who claimed to pass on messages from the dead.

  Then there were the identikit shows like this one, the same self-satisfied faces popping up on numerous barely distinguishable variations on the theme of selling junk to people who should know better. Sorry, not ‘junk’. Antiques. That was the word they used.

  It wasn’t for him. He still had some pride in himself. Okay, he’d taken a bit of a knock but he could get back up again. There was work out there for those willing and able to apply themselves. It was just a matter of getting off your arse and finding it. And you wouldn’t do that by frittering away your life in front of the telly.

  ‘She’s never gonna get 20 quid for that,’ observed Linda sagely as she reached for the biscuit tin again. She was right, smiling smugly as the auctioneer’s gavel banged down at just £10 to the over-acted dismay of the presenters who claimed to be experts in their field.

  ‘So, what is it they have to do on this one?’ asked Andy. Linda wasn’t the only person capable of estimating an item’s value. How hard could it be?

  Linda sighed. Her reply was given in a tone that expressed incredulity that anybody could be so ignorant as not to recognize this show. Andy took that as a compliment.

  ‘They each get given the same amount of money, and they have to buy four items in a car boot sale. Then the things they picked get sold at auction and whoever makes the biggest profit wins.’

  ‘Oh,’ sniffed Andy.

  ‘Except for this bit,’ added Linda, a brighter note entering her voice. ‘It’s the St
ar Pieces. You’ll like this bit.’

  On the screen, the host – a Scottish lady with oh-so-hilariously colourful spectacles – was welcoming a short, stooped man to her stall: a folding table, festooned with the show’s logo, that had been set up in the middle of the car park. Her visitor was elderly and of vaguely Asiatic appearance, although it was difficult to say exactly where he was from. He might have been an Eskimo (not that you could say that these days without being called racist!), or even Native American, and he was carrying something that seemed to be about a foot long. It was wrapped in a cloth the colour of dried blood. The HD screen did the material no favours, clearly showing the ancient stains that covered it.

  ‘Sooo,’ exclaimed the host in her irritatingly exaggerated accent, ‘who are you and what do you have for us under there?’

  The old man grinned wordlessly. His teeth were brown and as stained as the cloth. Behind him, a second man hunched down into shot. Andy recognized him as another of the genre’s resident so-called experts. Expert! If that guy actually knew his trade he’d be out in the real world practising it, instead of taking money to play the fool on this rubbish. Andy could not remember his name – he just knew him as the camp, chubby one. The one who squirmed with fake excitement and whirled his hands around too much.

  ‘Kirsty, I could not believe my luck when I met my new friend here. I didn’t catch his name, I’m afraid – I don’t think he actually speaks any English – but when I saw what he was carrying around under that cloth I simply had to bring him to you!’

  ‘I’m intrigued, Colin. Go on then, give us a look.’