“Not when our pathologist saw her. Someone had smeared green paint on her hair and forehead. There was more paint on her hands, but it was different – a kind of blue, like she was cold. Pastel colours. Skin paint, like they use on stage, not industrial paint. What kind of nutter puts make-up on a dead wench?”
“The paper said it might be a weird cult of some kind. Apparently there were two more deaths like that last year.”
“Not around here, there weren’t. But it could be a cult. Some Internet thing maybe. Too few and far between to be connected any other way.”
“This dead woman. What did she look like?”
“Skinny and pale. Her hair was grey. Might have been blonde once.”
“Thanks. It’s not the girl I knew.” He wondered if Darren could tell he was lying. “I’ll see you around, mate. Take care.”
“Stay out of trouble, you.” Jason snapped his hinged phone together. The living-room door was closed, but the house felt colder than before. The faint ringing in his head might be a distant siren, an echo of static on the phone, or just a headache coming on.
After several failed attempts, his virus-ridden computer let him access the web. He searched for the combination of “dead”, “head and hands” and “paint”. Most of the links were to academic websites on religious art, but one led him to a story in the South Wales Evening Post. A body washed up in Swansea Bay last autumn had been identified as that of Mark Page, a businessman in his forties who’d lived in the city for nine years after leaving Birmingham. Police were unable to explain the traces of paint on his head and hands. They suggested it had to do with cult activity or gang warfare. Either way, drugs were behind it.
Jason switched off his computer and sat in the dark for a few minutes. The phone rang, jarring his skull. He stumbled downstairs and picked up the receiver without speaking. It was Darren. “Just spoke to a colleague, Theresa, who knows about one of the other cases. The body of a middle-aged man was found on an industrial estate in Manchester, halfeaten by rats, with green paint in his hair and blue paint on what was left of his hands. About nine months ago. They never did identify him. Don’t suppose you’ve got any idea who it was?”
“How would I know?” Tony Matthews.
“Course not. Silly of me.”
Jason flipped his middle finger violently at the dampstained wall. “Well, see you around.”
His head was aching so badly he thought he was going to throw up. A few minutes’ kneeling over the toilet bowl, the chemical odour of the blue disinfectant scouring his nostrils, produced no offering but a trickle of colourless fluid from his mouth. Mark, Gail, Tony and me. But something was missing. He’d locked away the memories and they’d rotted in the dark. He needed a key.
No, he needed a drink. There was nothing in the house. Jason locked his front door with trembling fingers, stared up and down the narrow road. He didn’t know what for – but if it knew him then surely he would know it.
The pub on the corner was packed, but he managed to struggle to the bar just before eleven. Some pubs had late opening now, but not this one. He ordered a double Scotch and a double vodka, and took them carefully away from the bar before pouring one into the other and gulping the mixture like wine. A cold fire spread through his gut, lighting him inside but making the pub seem darker. An old drunk stumbled into him and backed away, raising his hands in apology. Jason stared at the ruined face, the swollen red nose.
Too few and far between to be connected any other way.
Back at the house, he unlocked the door to the boxroom. Dust was smeared over the cases and boxes he’d shut away here. The grey carpet was littered with mouse turds like tiny black commas, punctuating a story he didn’t want to read. Any suitcase he opened might release blind memories on tattered wings, flying around his head. Just as the fear reached a point where he’d have to curl up and hide his face, the light glinted on the rusty lock of a black briefcase.
He’d long since lost the key, but his claw hammer ripped away the leather flap easily. With the hammer still in one hand, he reached inside and took out the small gun and the clip of bullets. Never used – at least, not on something alive. He lifted it to his mouth, kissed the side of the barrel.
That night, he slept with the loaded gun on the bedside table. He’d find a quiet place to test it. As sleep wove its cobwebs against his face, pulling him down into a stillness where no memory could find him, Jason whispered an old verse silently to himself. He had no idea what it meant. But then, it had never been anything but nonsense:
Far and few, far and few
Are the lands where the Jumblies live
Their heads are green and their hands are blue
And they went to sea in a sieve
Near midnight, the canal was deserted. The moonlight glinted from broken factory windows and outlined shapeless masses of weed and dead leaves on the water surface. There was no colour anywhere. Jason made his way cautiously down the slope from the trees opposite the Yardley cemetery, then followed the barely visible towpath towards Digbeth and the city centre. Across the dull water, the backs of derelict factories were coated with mould. The night air was so cold you had to breathe it in before it released the smell of decay.
The last time he’d been down here, there’d been narrowboats on the water and lights in the factory windows. A generation ago – but he’d made no children to grow up, and neither had Clare. They’d walked this way together, as far as the old church at Bordesley Green. Where the fencing gave way to a cluster of workshops and brickyards, easy to break into from the canal side.
Ahead of him, the city lights hung like a dripping constellation. He thought he could see a faint red light among them, making its way towards him. The gun was a hard weight against his ribs. It had to be Danny Vail – but why had he waited so long? Like water in a barrel, accumulating worms and decay before it finally overflowed. He’d always been mad. A little pale-faced Jewish boy with a hook-nose they’d teased him about, called him “Dong” after the Edward Lear poem they’d read in the first year. The Dong with the luminous nose. But Clare had liked him, and had relieved him of his virginity before deciding she needed something harder. He’d broken up with her when she joined the Yardbirds.
Jason had made a play for her, of course, and she’d gone as far as slow kissing with him in the cinema on the Coventry Road. But that was it. Tony hadn’t got much further, and Mark wouldn’t have dared try anything with Gail around. But Jason had got more and more obsessed with Clare. She was the boldest of the gang: the one who stole for the challenge of it, ran the most dangerous errands, got out of trouble with an innocent smile and a clean pair of heels.
He’d come to believe that the thrill of petty crime was the only kind of sex Clare was interested in. But he’d still taken every opportunity to watch her at a distance, eavesdrop on her conversations. And one night he’d seen her emerging from a garage with Terry Joiner – who was a grownup criminal, one of a serious local gang called the Finish. When they’d gone, Jason had slipped into the unlit garage and seen the evidence. Picked up the used condom and sniffed it, jealousy pulsing through his brain like sheet lightning.
A few days later, the Yardbirds’ main capital – a stash of banknotes and speed wraps worth nearly five hundred pounds – went missing. Only they knew where it had been hidden, in a builder’s yard off the Grand Union Canal. Jason went to Mark and Gail, told them he’d overheard Clare talking about it with Terry. “She said she wants to join the Finish. That was the price of her getting in. That and … whatever else she was giving him. I saw them come out of a garage.”
The five of them walked out from the Swan Centre, on a winter night like this one. Maybe a little colder. There was ice on the black water. Clare wasn’t keen to go, said she was feeling sick. Had she guessed what was coming? Jason avoided looking at her, when usually he couldn’t look at anything else. They reached the unlit yard, crawled through the gap in the chain-link fence. Mark took a torch out of his shoul
der bag, as usual. Then he brought out a coil of rope and a kitchen knife. Clare just stared at him.
She wouldn’t talk. Denied there was anything between her and Terry. Said the Yardbirds was the only gang she’d ever wanted to belong to. Stared hard at everyone else, one by one, when Gail started talking about the missing speed and cash. “Tie her up,” Gail said. And then the beating started. Jason felt sick and excited at the same time. It went too far, they were too young to stay in control. The knife was used. Then Clare broke and confessed to everything. How she was already in the Finish. How she’d handed Terry the stolen stuff. How she’d give the Yardbirds anything they wanted, any way they wanted, if they’d let her go.
And all the exhilaration of victory drained from them, leaving only chill and darkness, when Gail said “We can’t.”
It was Tony who knocked her out, using one of the bricks that littered the yard. They half-filled a canvas bag with bricks and tried to put her in, but she wouldn’t fit. So they tied the bag around her waist and lowered her into the canal. There was no moon that night, and Jason hadn’t seen her face in the water. That hadn’t stopped him seeing it since.
A few weeks later, most of the body came to the surface. The police talked to the Yardbirds – he suspected Danny was responsible for that – but there was no evidence. How could sixteen-year-olds possibly be involved in that? More suspicion fell on the Finish, who had to clear out of the region for good. The secret broke up the Yardbirds, of course, and Jason lost touch with the others before he’d even finished school. Thirty years of nothing. And now this.
Where the chain-link fence had been, a rusty sheet of corrugated iron was lying flat on the gravel. Beyond it, he could make out a few bags of rubbish and a loose coil of razor wire. A grey rat crept out of the shadows towards Jason, then stopped. Jason pulled out the gun and fired, missing the rat. The sound echoed from the blank factory walls.
He’d bought the gun with the money from his first job, cleaning old car parts in a garage so they could be sold as scrap. It had taken him a long time to raise the money. He’d never used the cash, or sold the powder, that he’d taken from the builder’s yard and hidden in the misshapen stone bridge further along the canal. For all he knew, that package was still there. That was the first real lesson he’d learned: you can never pay back.
*
The house was in Sparkbrook, near the ruins of the Angel pub. Nearly ten years since the tornado had blown a tree into its roof, but no sign of any repair work. Even after midnight, some of the Asian groceries on the Stratford Road were open for business. Jason had parked half-a-mile away to avoid being noticed. He approached the house warily, but there was no light in the windows. The front yard was heavily overgrown with brambles and shrubs. The door needed a new coat of paint. All the curtains were open.
Looking for Danny Vail on the Internet had been a long shot – and finding his name in the Birmingham Mail online had been a shock. He was the contact for an educational theatre company that went to schools in the Midlands. It had to be the same guy – Jason remembered he’d been keen on drama. So he hadn’t been able to leave either. They’d lived within five miles of each other all this time, but Jason didn’t remember seeing him since they’d left school. If he could find Danny, then Danny could find him. It was time to act.
His breaking and entering skills were rusty, but he was well prepared. Down the side alley and through the fence, smashing a few rain-blackened planks. Over the chaotic back garden to a window that hadn’t been cleaned in years. Glue sprayed on the window, a bin bag stuck over the glass. A few gentle taps with a rock hammer and the glass came away like burnt skin. No sound anywhere in the house. The smell of damp and bleach. He drew the gun and walked slowly up the unlit stairs.
In the bedroom, a crumpled single bed with no occupant. There were two flattened cans on a low table. Jason twisted the catch on one. Some kind of paint, was it face-paint? There was more in the other can: one blue, the other green. Narrow fingers had left grooves in the paint.
The next room was a kind of study, with bookshelves and an old wooden desk that even had an inkwell. The walls were covered with sheets of paper. Jason moved his torchbeam over a few of them. They were photocopies of pages from old books – Edward Lear, Lewis Carroll, others he didn’t recognize. Nonsense poems with grotesque Victorian illustrations. The books on the shelves were all children’s books, fifty or more years old. They smelt faintly of decay.
One book was lying on the desk, face down. An antique copy of Lear’s collected poems. Jason sat down and put the loaded gun by his right hand. Then he opened the book. A thin scrap of paper fell out. A cigarette paper, with something written on it in tiny old-fashioned script. He had to hold it against the back cover of the book to make out the words:
There was a young lady named Clare
Who died with green weed in her hair
And her hands that were still
Turned blue from the chill
Alas, there was no one to care
Was that someone moving downstairs, or just the sounds of an old house settling in the night? Jason switched off his torch. There was no light on the staircase. He was still holding the old book. A faint scratching sound – probably mice. Then the door swung open silently. He glimpsed a tiny skull-like face with a red light attached to it. With a dreamlike slowness, he lifted the gun. It was only as his finger curled on the trigger that he realized the barrel was pointing at his own head.
The shot echoed in the still house. Danny thought the whole district had blown up. The intruder’s face tore off like a mask, exposing the ruin behind it. The desk was coated with blood. Danny stood for a while, shaking. He’d got to phone the police. But there was something he needed to understand first. Why had the burglar been sitting in the dark? He’d known there was someone here from the shattered living-room window. But the power cut had stopped him putting the light on. Instead, he’d found the face-torch that he wore for cycling after dark.
He didn’t know why the intruder had shot himself. Nor could he explain the green paint in the dead man’s hair or the blue paint on his hands. It looked rather like the makeup he’d been using for the new children’s show. Could this be one of his colleagues? He couldn’t recognize what was left of the face. And despite the horror of the situation, he was conscious of real anger. The madman had got blood all over his book. His special book – the one he’d read aloud from every night for thirty years, as if it were a book of prayers or spells.
REGGIE OLIVER
Come Into My Parlour
REGGIE OLIVER HAS been a professional playwright, actor and theatre director since 1975. Besides plays, his publications include the authorized biography of Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed, published by Bloomsbury in 1998, and six collections of stories of supernatural terror, of which the fifth, Mrs Midnight (Tartarus, 2011) won the Children of the Night Award for Best Work of Supernatural Fiction in 2011 and was nominated for two other awards.
Tartarus Press has also reissued his first and second collections, The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler, in new editions with new illustrations by the author, as well as his sixth collection Flowers of the Sea (2013). The author’s novels include The Dracula Papers I – The Scholar’s Tale (Chômu, 2011), Virtue in Danger (Zagava Books, 2013) and The Boke of the Divill (Dark Renaissance, 2014). An omnibus edition of his stories entitled Dramas from the Depths is published by Centipede Press, as part of its “Masters of the Weird Tale” series. His stories have appeared in more than fifty anthologies, including five previous volumes of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror series.
“Some of my first childhood memories are of books,” Oliver recalls, “mostly old ones which had been passed down through my family for generations. There was one in particular which both fascinated and terrified me. It was a Victorian book of children’s verse which contained Mary Howitt’s poem, ‘The Spider and the Fly’.
“But it was not so muc
h the poem itself as one of its illustrations that gave me nightmares – so much so that my mother destroyed the offending page in the book. She later told me that both she and her father before her had, as children, been given the creeps by the same picture.
“The image stayed with me over the years and formed the nucleus of this story. After I had written the tale I found the illustration in question on the Internet. It was not quite the grotesque horror that my childhood imagination had made of it, but it was still distinctly troubling.”
“Will you walk into my parlour?” said the Spider to the Fly,
“’Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;
The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,
And I’ve a many curious things to shew when you are there.”
—“The Spider and the Fly”
by Mary Howitt (1799–1888)
S OMEHOW I ALWAYS knew that there was a problem with Aunt Harriet.
She was my father’s only sister – step-sister, as it happens – and older than he was by eleven years. She was unmarried and her work was something to do with libraries; that much was clear, but the rest was rather a mystery. She lived in a small flat near Victoria Station in London, which we heard about but never saw, but she often used to come to stay with us – rather too often for my mother’s taste. In fact, the only time I ever remember my parents “having words”, as we used to say, was over Aunt Harriet yet again coming down for the weekend.
“Yes, I know, I know, dear,” I heard my father say. “But I can’t exactly refuse her. She is my sister.”
“Exactly,” said my mother. “She’s only your sister. You can say no to her occasionally.”
But apparently my father couldn’t. Fortunately she did only stay for weekends, that is, apart from Christmas, but I’ll come to that later.
At that time we lived in Kent and my father commuted into London by train every weekday morning. Where we lived was semi-rural; there were places to walk and wander – there were woods and fields nearby. I like to think that my younger sister and I had a rather wonderful childhood; if it were not for Aunt Harriet.
Best New Horror, Volume 25 Page 19
