It had been shortly after his sister, with whom he’d shared the flat since their father’s accidental death, had emigrated to the States. Matthew had been having a particularly harrowing morning and by lunchtime he’d found himself staring at a screen that was almost as blank as his mind, knowing he had just hours left before the final post. All at once, the stress that had been building up inside him for hours had got too much and something in his head had suffered meltdown. He’d started to yell, screaming abuse at the screen as if it were deliberately refusing to display his words. At some deeper level he must have realized that he couldn’t afford to damage his equipment because he’d stormed out of his study and into his sister’s old bedroom. There, he had seized a few neglected soft toys from the top of her wardrobe and proceeded to tear them apart with grim determination. It had taken the better part of an hour for him to calm down. When at last he had, he’d been conscious of Huxley, the family cat, rubbing against his leg, greedy for food, and he’d bent down to stroke him, feeling more at ease than he had for months. It was as if some inner demon had been exorcized, or at least temporarily sated.
Matthew gazed around his cramped study with a curious mixture of pride and self-loathing. The zoo had certainly grown since that day. At first glance, it appeared that every available surface had been filled. The shelving, his desk, the small wooden table by the door, even the top of his monitor – all bore trophies: felt elephant trunks, floppy red monkey arms, furry rabbit paws, each individually sealed in a container. A large plastic jar that had once held pear drops now contained a six-inch long segment of giraffe’s neck, brightly patterned with unconvincing yellow and brown hexagons. Next to it stood a jam jar into which had been squeezed the front portion of an emerald green crocodile’s snout, and just behind that was a tall glass cylinder which held the striped and bloated body of a gigantic bumblebee. There must be close on two hundred exhibits in the zoo now, Matthew thought, each a fragment of a dismembered toy. And each carefully labelled in his precise handwriting. A mark of respect. It was his way of dealing with the pang of guilt he invariably felt once he had relaxed enough to realize that he’d left himself with a carpetful of fake fur and stuffing to vacuum.
His friends considered him slightly odd of course, but they’d grown accustomed to his strange habit and were easy enough about it these days to poke gentle fun at him now and again. In fact, the only one who couldn’t bring herself to understand was Jenny, his girlfriend. It was ridiculous really, when you thought about it. After all, they'd been living together for years – you’d think she’d have accepted it by now. But no, she had to have a moan didn’t she. Every day. Nag, nag, nag. Why do you do it, Matty? Why can’t you act like normal people? What am I supposed to say to our visitors? Visitors! What bloody right did visitors have to go into his study in the first place? That’s what he wanted to know!
Anyway, who did she think she was with her complaining? He kept the money coming in, didn’t he? He paid the bills. And it certainly wasn’t as if Jenny didn’t have irritating habits of her own. Not that he ever told her as much. He was too much of a gentleman for that. He didn’t spend his time criticising others. If it hadn’t been for the fact that he loved her…
The coffee was still too hot for comfort but he finished it anyway. With difficulty, he managed to clear a space on the crowded desk for the empty cup, finally perching it on one corner next to most of a powder-blue hippopotamus. Relax, he told himself, taking a deep breath. Get much more worked up and you’ll find yourself having to spend the rest of the morning clearing up another load of stuffing. Something warm brushed his right ankle and he peered down into the shadows beyond his knees to see Huxley’s green eyes staring up at him longingly. The cat mewed softly in its I’d-very-much-like-you-to-feed-me voice.
‘No,’ Matthew said firmly. ‘You can wait ‘til twelve, same as usual.’
The cat mewed a second time, refusing to break eye-contact. Matthew tried to shoo it away, pushing with his leg, but it wouldn’t budge.
‘No!’ he repeated, louder. ‘Why don’t you just leave me alone? I’ve got work to do.’
Finally, with an arrogant toss of the head, Huxley turned away and slowly padded out of the study, tail raised haughtily in the air. Matthew let out a deep sigh. Now perhaps he could get something done! He returned his attention to the few lines of text he’d managed so far but they seemed lifeless and stilted. It was starting to look as if it was going to be yet another wasted morning. Hardly surprising really, considering the number of interruptions he’d had.
Jenny had started at him first thing, even before he’d sat down. All he’d done was reach out to switch on his word processor, and the nagging had begun. Try not to lose your temper today, dear. Maybe you should go to bed earlier, then perhaps you wouldn’t be so ratty during the day. Try to relax more. Hah! Maybe he wouldn’t be under quite so much pressure if Jenny would help out herself occasionally. When was the last time she’d fed the cat for example? God knows. No, she was happy enough to leave him to do everything, wasn’t she? And then she acted surprised when he got worked up about it!
A few hours ago, in fact, he’d told her exactly that. She’d just looked at him with contempt before lapsing into one of her long sulks. She hadn’t said a word since. Well, that suited him. Now if only the bloody cat would leave him alone he could have a bit of peace and quiet for a change.
Actually, now that he thought about it, it had been the mention of the cat that had sparked off this morning’s argument. Jenny had been baiting him, making snide comments about his ‘creepy’ collection and telling him that he ought to see a shrink before things got out of hand. She’d been worried that he might one day find himself dismembering Huxley in one of his rages. Well that was ridiculous. It anything it said more about Jenny than him. If she honestly believed him capable of hurting another living creature then she was the one who needed her head examined!
The handful of words on his monitor vanished with a quiet ‘ftzz’ as the screen saver cut in. Had it really been that long since he’d typed anything? He’d have to get cracking soon – there was a lot to do today. At that particular moment, though, he didn’t really feel inspired to write anything so he just stared at the blank screen. His reflection showed he’d not been sleeping well. He looked rough. He was trapped in the classic vicious circle of being too tired to get much done during the day and too worried to sleep at night because he had left so much to do the next day. He’d been here before and knew what the outcome would be.
‘Matty, dear, Huxley wants his din-dins.’
Out of the corner of his eye, Matthew noticed the cat had returned. He turned his head to see Jenny simpering at him, a hard glint in her ice-blue eyes. So, she was talking to him again, was she? Only because she wanted something done that she couldn’t be bothered to do herself! The rage that had been simmering away inside him exploded. He leapt to his feet, his chair spinning to the floor.
‘Well, why don’t you damn well feed him yourself for a change!’ he yelled. ‘You never do anything in this flat! Just sit on your arse all day, giving me orders! I've had enough! You hear me!’
‘But Matty,’ Jenny pouted, using her full red lips to their greatest effect. ‘You know that’s your job.’
‘Not any more. He can bloody starve for all I care. You want him fed, you feed him!’
Matthew turned back to his desk, leaning forward and resting his head on his arms. He took deep breaths, fighting to calm down. In … out … in … out …. Nice and slow. He could feel the pulse throbbing in his temples.
‘Now, now, Matty. You’re not going to lose your temper again, are you? I said you should have had an early night last night.’
Huxley mewed impatiently, twining himself around Matthew’s leg.
‘Matty, look at him. He’s hungry. He needs feeding.’
‘Enough!’ Matthew swung round, sweeping his hand across the desk. His fingers caught in the coffee cup’s handle, sending it smashing into
the wall. ‘Shut up!’
‘Why do you always get so angry, Matty?’
‘I’m warning you …. Shut up!’
‘Maybe you’d better go see a doctor.’
‘No!’
Matthew grabbed Jenny by the throat, shaking her violently. Her blue eyes began to bulge.
‘Shut up! Shut up!’
‘I knew this would happen one day,’ Jenny said sadly.
Matthew slid his left hand across her face and into her curly blonde hair, seizing a handful and yanking it back viciously. Then he twisted sharply with his right hand and tore her head away from her body. Chunks of yellow foam spilled from the wound, covering the carpet. As he watched them fall, Matthew felt his anger ebb away and he began to regret what he’d done, even though Jenny had deserved it. He gently placed the decapitated doll on his desk and walked into the kitchen to feed Huxley. He would look for a suitable jar in which to keep Jenny’s head and write out the label later, after lunch. Then he’d try to get some work done.
Thin Walls
God, these walls were thin! They did nothing to muffle the racket being made by the bin-men – or ‘Refuse Collectors’ or ‘Recycling Technicians’, or whatever the hell it was you were supposed to call them these days.
Barely half five in the morning and they were outside already, rattling around wheelie bins that doubtless wouldn’t be collected until late this afternoon. Hard plastic wheels rumbled over uneven pavement and containers crashed into their appointed collection point at the end of the cul-de-sac.
And for appointed collection point, read directly below Paul’s bedroom window.
Above the banging and clanking, and incongruous amid the accompanying south London banter, an American accent bellowed instructions, then erupted into raucous laughter at a companion’s reply. The men seemed to lack the slightest awareness of how their noise impacted upon those who lived here: the poor bastards stuck in these box-like houses.
Paul seethed. They had no right to treat decent people this way, people who simply wanted a bit of peace and quiet in the security of their own homes. He imagined himself tearing downstairs and throwing open his front door, shouting righteous abuse at them, shaming them into astonished submission as his neighbours broke into applause. But the fantasy dissolved into self-disgust, as it always did, as acknowledgement of his true timid nature returned.
As did the discomfort of his dry mouth. His tongue felt as if it were mummified. He sipped from his bedside glass and instantly spat it back. The previous day’s summer heat was still trapped in the bedroom and it had made the water stale and warm. Claire would have dealt with this all so differently.
Paul made his way downstairs to the kitchen taps. Claire had always been the strong one in their partnership, the one ready to take on the world. She would have had no qualms about confronting the bin-men. She would simply have told them with bare-faced friendliness that they were taking the piss. Most likely she would have settled the matter there and then with a joke and a chat, and the effortless establishment of friendly relations from that moment on. Christ, he missed her. How could someone with so much vitality be simply snuffed out of existence like that?
It had been nearly five months already. They’d been flying back from the States, tanned, relaxed and as happy as either had ever been after finally taking the holiday they’d promised themselves for so long. It had been a celebration of their fourth anniversary.
They had met by chance in (of all places) a Waterstones bookshop, where Paul had thought Claire an astonishing figure to find leafing through the horror section: an attractive woman who shared his passion for the weird fiction of American writer H. P. Lovecraft! They had got chatting over a new anthology illustrated with evocative black-and-white depictions of ancient, witch-haunted Arkham, the setting for so many of Lovecraft’s masterful tales. During their first meal together they were already joking about how, one day, they would make a joint pilgrimage to New England, to the area they termed ‘Lovecraft Country’, to see for themselves the locations that had inspired such fantastic stories.
Somewhere along the line, the joke solidified into a plan. The trip would be costly though, and so they put it off for years until at last, after finally pooling their resources and moving together into this small two-storey house in Purley (okay, technically, Croydon but it was right at the southernmost edge), Claire realized they should delay no longer. If they didn’t seize the initiative, she pointed out, the endless mortgage repayments would take over for good and they would fall into the trap of deferring their holiday for the rest of their lives.
So they saved as hard as possible, cutting out every luxury they could bear to live without. Even so, they were lucky to find that bargain online.
‘Experience the Great Outdoors – As Never Before!’ screamed the link that popped up in Google, but it was the company’s name – HPL Travel – that caught their eye, tricking them for a moment into thinking it was reference to ‘their’ HPL: Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
Or maybe it was a deliberate cheeky reference after all. Holiday Packages (Un)Limited turned out to offer specialist tours for enthusiasts of various niche genres and, lo and behold, one of their packages was a trip to explore ‘Lovecraft Country’. The very expression Paul and Claire had always used themselves, not realizing it had a wider currency.
They read on, their already piqued interest titillated further by the company’s promise to let people escape their ‘own mundane reality’.
‘There are entire worlds of new experience out there,’ ran the advertising copy. ‘Let them into your life!’
Both Paul and Claire found much of the ad overblown, but as fans of Lovecraft’s writing they had developed a high tolerance to excessive wordiness. In any case there was a subtle humour dancing through the text, lightening it with sly hints that the author (allegedly a New Englander by the unlikely name of Al Hazred) was a fan too.
Paul looked at their bank statements. Claire clicked away at the keyboard, getting an estimate. The price would be high, they calculated, but for what was on offer the holiday seemed too perfect an opportunity to pass up.
They booked. It would be their ‘real’ honeymoon, they agreed: a hard-won gift to themselves to make up for what had been a less-than-glamorous original in a damp Brighton guesthouse. But if the English weather back then had been predictably unpredictable, the New England weather four years afterwards surprised everyone, locals just as much as tourists. From the day Paul and Claire arrived until the day they left, it was unseasonably hot, the sun beating down with an unrelenting intensity that drove most folk indoors and gave the suddenly abandoned towns and landscapes a hostile, unearthly beauty that only the young English couple seemed to appreciate.
After a fortnight baking in that heat, it seemed funny at first when Claire woke with a sneeze the morning after their homecoming. Welcome back to ‘Old England’, land of grey rain and the common cold, they joked. Only it hadn’t been a cold. At some point, probably while still in the States, a microscopic airborne virus had invaded Claire’s body and, once inside, had begun to replicate itself.
Claire stayed in bed all day, complaining of a dull thudding headache and aching limbs, and by the evening she was shivering despite having developed a raging temperature. Realizing she’d caught a form of ‘flu, Paul promised he would take her to see their GP the next day. He never did. By morning Claire Wood – the perkily pretty 31-year-old who had twice completed the London Marathon in under four hours – was dead: unspecified ‘complications arising from a previously unsuspected heart condition’, Paul had been told later.
The water made hollow splashing sounds as it fell from the tap into his glass. He downed half a glassful, refilled, and was making his way back to the foot of the stairs when the letterbox snapped. Half a dozen glossy flyers sank through the heat to land on the mat. They looked to be from various companies, but on top of the pile was a phrase that shouted to Paul with cruel familiarity: ‘Experience the Great Ou
tdoors – As Never Before!’
His anger flared again. Could no-one in this bloody country read anymore? Was the phrase ‘No Junk Mail’ on the metal plate screwed to the outside of the door really beyond the comprehension of these morons? And who the hell went around delivering leaflets at this time of the morning anyway? He should write to the companies sending out this crap and complain.
But he couldn’t be bothered to examine the other flyers to see where they had come from, and as he stood gazing at them, his rage dissipated. What, he wondered, was happening to him?
Over the last two months he’d become increasingly reclusive, every day finding less reason to leave the house. After Claire’s death, his friends had tried to convince Paul he would slowly learn to accommodate the pain, and his colleagues at the office had all pretended to be pleased when he’d returned to work. Andy, his boss, had played the sympathetic role particularly well, even managing to keep up the act when, three weeks after his return, he’d very sympathetically told Paul he would have to ‘let him go’, that finances were tight and, as sorry as he was, he simply couldn’t afford to pay someone to come in and stare vacantly at a screen all day. Paul didn’t blame him. He knew how pathetic he’d become, how worthless.
The bin-men were laughing in the street outside. Somewhere, a car door slammed, followed a moment later by a second door. An engine choked into life, and then the almost subsonic doom-doom-doom of a mindless bass line was pulsing the warm air. Long moments stretched out before the car pulled away on its journey. The music eventually faded with distance but it left an unwelcome residue hanging in the hallway.
Nearly six. Paul took another mouthful of water and wandered back to bed. It was going to be another hot day. As hot as those days in New England had been.
* * * *
The phone trilled, dragging him up into begrudging wakefulness. He made no effort to reach out to the nearby handset, simply letting the call go through to the answerphone. After five rings it did just that, but the caller clicked off without leaving a message. More automated marketing, no doubt. They’d been coming ever more frequently over the last few days.
Strangers at the Door: Twelve unsettling tales of horror Page 10
