As I was lighting the second cigarette I realized someone was approaching. My heart sunk. The glass of champagne I’d thrown back had topped me up to pretty-drunk level, and I didn’t want to undergo a stilted conversation with a fan.
“Can I bum one of those?”
It was Greg. I held out the pack. He took one and accepted a light. Stood for a moment, looking along the dark street. Shook his head. “Sorry I was such a cunt.”
“I enjoyed it. Reminded me of the old days.”
He laughed. “You win that one.”
“Well, I’m a winner, to the bone.”
This had been a catchphrase of Greg’s, thirty years ago. He remembered. “Yeah yeah, fuck you. Look, seriously though. And this is important. Why are you actually here?”
“What difference does it make?”
“I wasn’t kidding earlier. During that whole dumpster fire four years back, after I was dumb enough to try to sell a fake to a celebrity and wound up being the poster boy for pricks everywhere, it was you coming to my defense that pushed me over the edge. I spent the next three years raging drunk.”
I started to speak but he rode over me. “I know, I know. I’m sure you did it with good intentions, because you’ve always been a good boy, but that’s what happened. My shit is closer to being back together now. And so I just want to know how much charity is involved here.”
“Not at all,” I said. “If you want to know, it’s this. Punching a hole. Remember that?”
He did, and the act of recollection made him look much younger for a moment. “Of course. What I used to say we were going to do. Or should do. Not just put rectangular shit on people’s walls. Make things that changed the world. Things would be remembered forever.”
“Right. Did you bring the champagne out with you?”
“The Finns are open-minded, but not that open-minded,” he said. “However.” He pulled a small flask out of his coat. I unscrewed it and took a long pull. “But I don’t get what you’re saying.”
“I was at a dinner this evening,” I said. The vodka felt good and warm inside me. It did what ill-advised drinks always do, which is make you want to have a dozen more. “At the home of the biggest collector of my work in Finland. Whole of Europe, in fact. Roasted boar. Appetizers with seven different types of smoked fish. Champagne that was older than the pert little things who were serving it.”
“I went to McDonald’s.”
“Whatever, Greg. Just listen. The Festival committee was there. A couple of super-fans. The freakin’ mayor. And this collector and her husband, of course. And before the food is served we were all led—with great ceremony—to a separate wing they’ve had built to showcase their art. One room of which, the main room, the reason the wing was built, is specifically for me. I hadn’t realized how much of my stuff she had. It was like seeing my entire life nailed to the walls. And there, at the end of this gallery, is a huge space dedicated to a single painting from my Dark Side series. It’s very big. I used nearly a bucket of burnt umber on that one alone. Spot-lit, in full glory, probably the best thing I’ve ever done. And the hostess stands there and regales everybody with how, in the nine months since the wing was built, she’s made sure every guest comes and sees this work of mine, and how they all tell her how marvelous it is. And she raised her glass to me, and then to the painting, and the assembled company spontaneously broke into applause.”
Greg was looking down at the sidewalk now. I knew how he’d be feeling, and also that we were running out of time.
“So what’s your point?” he muttered.
“It’d been hung sideways,” I said.
As we walked back to the building I saw the festival organizer waiting in the doorway. She looked relieved to see us.
“Everybody is downstairs,” she said. “Waiting. It’s amazing. There’s over three hundred people.”
“Cool,” Greg said. “Let them get settled. Five minutes. You not going down?”
She shook her head apologetically. “I don’t like the dark.”
I followed Greg into the big antechamber room, which was now empty. “So what is this thing of yours anyway?”
“Borderline plagiarism,” Greg said, looking slightly embarrassed. “Which is why you were in my mind, and probably why I dissed you to that woman earlier, if I’m honest. Actually, I’m pretty sure we talked it into shape together, some long drunken night of yesteryear. But the initial idea was yours.”
“Idea for what?”
“‘The Scariest Thing in the World.’”
For a second I had no idea what he was talking about. Then I remembered. “Christ,” I said.
He rolled his eyes. “I know, right? The years go by.”
I nodded, though he’d misunderstood. I hadn’t meant how long it was since we’d talked about a “psychological horror” installation—though yes, it had to be a quarter of a century. I’d meant how dumb and sad it was to go ahead and actually do it.
It had seemed grown-up and cool back then, before we were real adults. Get people down into a confined space. Turn off the lights, deaden the sound, close the door so that nobody can find their way out, and make them stay there for half an hour. The idea being to demonstrate that it wasn’t horror, or the fantastical, that was truly frightening. That those are merely entertainments, distractions, safe spaces, crèches for our anxieties—and the real and oldest horror, the scariest thing in the world, is being alone in the dark.
Very big, right? Very deep.
Back then. Now it felt woefully simplistic and juvenile, cool and edgy only before you’d had to deal with grown-up stuff like the lingering death of parents or marriages exploding into bloody shards: before you’d learned that the deepest pit is not the dark, but our own fears and doubts, regrets and wrong paths and mistakes: before you’d found yourself looking around in panic and not understanding where you are or how you got there, or in which direction—if any—a meaningful future lies. All Hallow’s Eve is supposed to be when the walls of reality come down, and the dark spirits walk abroad and knock on doors.
But the truth is, they’re already inside.
The idea we’d once nurtured was adolescent and naive, and I knew that when people left the venue tonight, Greg’s career would be over forever.
“Well, good luck,” I said, however. “And the funny thing is, I remember the idea being yours anyhow.”
He looked at me with an expression I’d never seen on his face before. Or anybody’s, probably. Only someone pretty close to the very end of their tether lets emotions like that out of the back of their mind, far enough to show in the eyes.
Bitter gratitude, mangled with utter desperation.
“Your stuff’s okay,” he said, quietly. “You know that. And I know you didn’t actually sell out.”
“You don’t think?”
“No. You just choked.”
He said this with offhand authority, and for a moment I was back to being the twenty-three-year-old I was when I first met Greg. A couple of years older than me. Far more self-assured. Better-connected, part of the scene. Already making waves. Confident he was going to carve his mark on the world.
“Of all of us,” he said, “You were the one who could have punched a hole. I knew it then. Which is why I was kind of an asshole to you at times.” He shrugged. “Ah well. That ship sailed, I guess. Too late for any of us now.”
“Life goes on.”
“For better or worse.” He smiled, genuinely. And gestured with his head. “Show time.”
I followed him to the big door in the corner of the room, and started down the stairs after him into the lower area. Basement, crypt, whatever it was. All the lights down there had been turned off. There was a distant rustle of all the people wandering around the corridors, in the pitch-dark, waiting for this thing to start, not yet knowing what it was, but the sound was soft, deadened. Dead.
Before we were even at the bottom of the stairs I realized Greg wasn’t as dumb as I’d thought.
This was a place where, like everybody else, I’d be forced to look inside. To think about a world in which I’d stuck with what I’d been doing, and turned out to be the same kind of genuinely interesting footnote to history Greg was, and possibly even remained his friend. Or where I’d parlayed the TV show into one on a bigger network, maybe even taken up one of several offers to direct a movie, instead of listening to the quiet inner voices that told me I’d screw it up. Where I’d had the courage to turn down endless commissions and instead spend sufficient time on the woman I loved, giving her enough attention to still have her, instead of losing her to a broken heart.
But I didn’t. I choked each time. I got to the edge but couldn’t make myself jump over. Couldn’t take the risk of stretching my soul until it broke, and instead failed my way into something that only looked like success from the outside.
The scariest thing in the world is the widening gap between who you are and who you wanted to be, and the truth was that Greg wasn’t the only faker here tonight.
That was a fact worth learning. But I didn’t have to spend half an hour having it hammered home.
“I’ve got to take a piss,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
“Sure,” Greg said, face blank. “Close the door on the way out. And keep having a great life.”
He walked away into the darkness, dismissing me. He knew I wasn’t coming back. I hesitated. Maybe it would be good for me to confront myself, to stumble those interior corridors for a while, trying to find a way out. But I didn’t want to.
I turned and walked back up the stairs.
The festival organizer was standing outside on the street. She looked around quickly when I came out of the building, caught in the act of having a cigarette break.
“Your secret’s safe with me,” I said.
Surprised, and side-lit by the uplighter by the door, she actually did look kind of like Elsa Lanchester, or close enough. She smiled gratefully. “You’re not staying?”
“It’s been a long day. And I don’t want there to be any distractions after the show. It’s going to be a big success, and I want to make sure Greg gets all the credit. He’s going to get what he always wanted.”
“And what was that?”
I just smiled and walked away.
After a few minutes I found a cab and got in and sat in the back, not listening as a chatty driver took me to the Hilton through dark, wet streets: back to another hotel in yet another city, back to my great life.
I was glad that I had not stayed for the show, that instead of following the path of least resistance I had made a decision and done something. I was glad that I, for once, had not choked.
And I felt fine about the fact that, before securely closing the heavy door to the basement, I’d held my lighter down to the nearest bundle of straw, waited until it caught alight, and then watched as the flames started to spread.
THE NATURE OF THE BEAST
SHARON GOSLING
Sharon Gosling is the author of such middle-grade children’s books as The Diamond Thief, The Ruby Airship, and The Sapphire Cutlass, along with a number of nonfiction books about television and film (The Art and Making of Penny Dreadful, Wonder Woman: The Art and Making of the Film, and Tomb Raider: The Art and Making of the Film).
Her most recent titles are the Scandinavian-set young adult horror novel FIR, which was shortlisted for the Centurion Award and Lancashire Book of the Year, and a novel set in the world of Victorian stage magic. She is also working on a full-length horror novel set in the wild and empty borderlands between Cumbria, Northumberland, and Scotland.
For the author’s first foray into adult horror writing, she recalls: “I first had the idea for a child with pitch-black eyes and saw-blades in her mouth about ten years ago, while I was standing on a dismal, packed London Underground platform waiting for a delayed train.
“Then a few years ago I wrote a short scene in which she is discovered as part of a murder investigation, although at that point the setting was a fairly standard one in the city. It wasn’t until I moved to where I live now—a remote village in Northern Cumbria—that the idea really found its home.
“Our tiny village is in the foothills of the Pennines. (Incidentally, it is also home to one of the oldest vampire legends in the UK—every Halloween we still get people braving the churchyard, thinking it’s the one from the legend.) There is nothing beyond us but Northumberland: wide stretches of high fell littered with abandoned dwellings, the wreckage of crashed planes, and whatever can eke out a living on rough pasture or smaller living things.
“I’d like to think that the girl and others like her have been thriving up there amid the ancient landscape since time immemorial. I just wouldn’t want to meet them when they’re hungry.”
CASSIE SPIED THE doughy bulk of Evans, visible through the wet windscreen of his worn silver Honda. She pulled to a halt beside him, glancing at the time—barely 7:00 a.m.—then slipped on her stab vest. Swinging open the door, she stepped out, pulling her heavy wool coat along with her. Dragging it on, she turned the collar up against the rain as her skipper hefted himself out of his driving seat, clutching a radio in one hand.
It wasn’t until Evans glanced at her and then did a sharp, scowling double take that Cassie remembered the need for sunglasses. She ducked back inside the car, pulling them from the cupholder between the seats and jamming them on, kicking herself. The dim world grew dimmer still.
“Christ on a bike, Wish,” her DI said, as she shut the door again. “Tell me you at least punched the bugger back.”
“Not really advisable, sir.” At his raised eyebrow, she shrugged. “Neighbor’s toddler got a bit free with a toy fire engine, that’s all.”
Evans grunted. “Boy’s a top shot then. That’s the third bullseye he’s scored in a month, by my count.”
“It’s a girl, actually,” Cassie said, blithely.
He regarded her silently with shrewd eyes. Then he turned away, jerking his chin at the farm.
“This place came out of last night’s appeal,” he said.
It was derelict, squatting miserably in wet fields thick with mud and empty of livestock. A farmhouse connected to two barns, forming a U shape around three sides of a courtyard. The roofs of the buildings were sagging under the weight of years, their windows smashed, their doors splintered. The open end of the courtyard was cut off by three support vans, parked in a semicircle with their riot shields up.
Ten disappearances at the rate of two a month for the past five, though it had taken a while for the police to realize what they were dealing with. There was no obvious connection between the victims other than their proximity to Carlisle and the kind of bad luck that goes with vulnerability. Drug dealers, drug addicts. Runners on the fells, old people going out for morning papers, children failing to return from games with friends: people disappearing into the uncertain light of dawn and dusk.
As the list of missing had increased, so had the media frenzy surrounding it, the sense of panic and paranoia spreading like mold across a damp wall.
Press conferences had followed, along with recreations and harrowing public appeals from distraught parents and lovers. The only common factor came in the mention of a straggly looking man with a crossbow who had been seen in the proximity of several disappearances. It was a detail that Evans had insisted on leaving out when talking to the press, seeing it as the only possible identifier that could help navigate the high tide of calls the incident room received after every public appeal.
The last disappearance had been three days ago: a twelve-year-old girl called Kelly Stevens had failed to arrive home from an after-school club. Cassie knew Evans hadn’t slept since, covering his exhaustion with a nonchalant bravado she neither believed nor could find it in her heart to blame.
But then, she always had been softhearted. It made up for other, less obvious deficiencies. Not even Nick had noticed those yet, and they’d
have been married two years come December.
“First team’s gone in,” Evans told her. “If the tip’s a good ’un, we’ll find him. I’ve got the rest of them on the perimeter in case he makes a run for it. You got your vest on under that monstrosity?”
“Yes, sir.”
Evans gave a brief nod and turned to look toward the buildings. He shivered a little, a frown creasing lines across his weathered face. “This is the place, Wish. I can feel it.”
Cassie silently agreed. The crumbling farm had a feel of death about it that reached beyond the obvious signs of age and neglect. There were plenty of places like this dotted about on the Cumbrian fells, returning gently to the landscape as they tumbled into themselves, but this was different. There was a pervasive sense of hopelessness to the place, a heaviness that had nothing to do with the low sky and the persistent misery of the weather as October twisted its face toward November.
A shout echoed from somewhere inside the buildings, followed by another and then a brief scuffle. A couple of minutes later, another shout, louder this time.
“Clear!”
The sodden, empty courtyard was suddenly a bustle of activity. The response team filled it, pouring like black oil from the fractured doors. In the midst of the flow of guns and uniforms was a foreign piece of flotsam, a thin figure forced forward, arms held behind his back. One of the officers holding the suspect also had a crossbow dangling from his left hand. It had no arrow fitted to its shaft.
The apprehended man had greasy gray-brown hair the length of his jaw, falling in straggly lines that half-obscured his down-turned face. He seemed emaciated—his shoulders bony, his fingers thin, tapering into grimy, broken nails bitten to the quick. His face sagged like the folds in a sack of flour, rheumy eyes sinking into etiolated skin. He was barely Cassie’s height—five-three—and weighed less. She’d put him at forty if he were a day, though he looked worn down by years beyond his own.
The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories Page 31
