by Johnny Mains
It was then that I got a shock. I was confronted with a black and white engraving. It showed a creature standing in front of a cleft in a rock with the winding stair within going up into the darkness. I say ‘a creature’ because it was half-human half-spider, and it appeared to me to be a ‘she’, mainly because the head bore a quite shocking resemblance to Aunt Harriet. There was the same longish nose and wide shapeless mouth; above all, the bulging eyes had the same predatory stare. The head was fixed, without a neck, onto a great bloated, bulbous body, again rather like Aunt Harriet’s. From the base of this sprang two long, thin legs that sagged at the knee joints as if the great body was too heavy to be held upright. From the body – or thorax, I suppose – came four almost equally thin arms, two from each side. The muscles on the arms were as tight and wiry as whipcord, and what passed for hands at their extremities were more like crabs’ pincers and looked as if they could inflict terrible pain.
Standing in front of this monstrous creature, its back to the viewer, was what I assumed was the fly, though it barely resembled one. It looked more like a very tall, thin, young Victorian dandy. Its wings were folded to form a swallow-tailed coat, one thin arm rested on a tasselled cane and a top hat was set at a jaunty angle on top of its small head. It looked a feeble, doomed creature.
The picture and the poem seemed to me all of a piece, at once surreal and yet frighteningly vivid, inhabiting a world of its own, full of savage, predatory monsters and enfeebled victims. I read on until the inevitable ending.
With buzzing wings he hung aloft, then near and nearer drew, Thinking only of his brilliant eyes, and green and purple hue – Thinking only of his crested head – poor foolish thing! At last, Up jumped the cunning Spider, and fiercely held him fast.
She dragged him up her winding stair, into her dismal den,
Within her little parlour – but he ne’er came out again!
There were some moralising lines after that, something about ‘to idle, silly flattering words, I pray you ne’er give heed.’ But that was just a piece of nonsense put in to give the poem respectability. It was the image that remained, and the torturing fear of being seized and carried up a winding stair into the darkness.
I barely slept that night, and when I did it was worse than being awake. Waking or sleeping there was the sense that something was in one corner of my room. I saw it – if I saw it at all – only on the edge of my vision, and not when I looked at it directly: a bloated thing with a head but no neck, and with several arms or legs that waved at me in a slow way, like a creature at the bottom of the sea. This torment lasted until the frosty dawn when light began to filter through my thin window curtains. At last I managed some untroubled sleep until, hardly two hours later, I was summoned down to breakfast.
On Boxing Day afternoon my parents had a party for neighbours and their children. Aunt Harriet was less than enthusiastic about the affair and went out for a walk immediately after lunch so as not to involve herself in the preparations. On her return, just as a cold sallow sun was setting, the party had begun. She sat among the guests in the sitting room sipping tea and smiling on the proceedings as if she were a specially honoured guests. Occasionally she would condescend to talk to some of our older friends. Various games were organised for the children who came, including Hide and Seek. When this was proposed Aunt Harriet beckoned me over and said: ‘I give you permission to hide in my room. They’ll never find you there.’
The idea did not appeal to me at all, but it stayed in my head. Those of us who were to hide began to disperse about the house and I remember finding myself in the passage outside my aunt’s room. It was a moment when the temptation to enter her room seemed unconquerable as I heard the numbers being counted inexorably down to one in the hallway below. I entered her room.
I did not turn the light on. The room was warm and had that familiar musky smell. In the dim light I felt my way across to a walk-in cupboard which I entered and then shut behind me. I was now in utter darkness and silence. The noise and bustle of the house had vanished and the only sensation to which I was alive was that of touch. As I sat down on the floor of the cupboard, my face was brushed by the soft cool tickle of my Aunt Harriet’s fur coat. How did she reconcile the possession of this article with her vegetarianism? That was a question that only occurred to me long years later.
At first I felt a curious exhilaration. I was alone, unseen and quiet. I had myself to myself and no one would break in on my solitude for a long while. I was free of the importunings of my little sister or the more serious demands of my parents. Moreover, the house, heated generously for once by central heating, Christmas candles and company, had become a little stuffy. In here it was exquisitely cool. I allowed my undistracted thoughts to slow to a standstill; I may even have fallen asleep.
Darkness is a strange thing: it is both infinite and confining; it holds you tight in its grasp, but it holds you suspended in a void. Silence operates in a similar way. Slowly the two combine to become a threat. I had no idea how much time had passed before I began to feel that it was time that someone found me, but how could they? I was so well hidden. It was then that I decided to open the cupboard door and let myself out. But it would not open.
My heart’s thumping was suddenly the loudest noise in the universe. I was trapped forever in darkness and silence. I banged and kicked at the cupboard door, but to no effect. It seemed to have the strange unyielding hardness of a wall rather than a piece of wood. I shouted as loud as I could, but my voice was curiously close and dead as if I had entered a soundproof studio at midnight.
It was then that I became aware that the space I was in was not entirely dark. Yet, I was confused because, though I knew the cupboard I was in to be about three feet by six feet square, the light that I saw seemed to be coming from a great distance. It was an indeterminate blue-green in colour, a rather drab hue, I thought. I stretched out my hand towards it in the hope of touching the back of the cupboard, but I felt nothing but the faintest brush of cold air, as if someone were blowing on my hand from beyond my reach.
By this time I had no sense of where the front, or the back, or the sides of the cupboard were. All appeared to be beyond my reach, and when I felt upwards I could not even sense the cold softness of my aunt’s fur coat. Moreover, the floor began to feel icy and damp. I stood up. Nothing now existed but the distant blue-green light.
The next thing that happened was that the light began to grow. The difficulty was that I could not be sure whether I was moving towards it or it towards me. All I knew was that with each move, the atmosphere became more icy, as if I had been transported out of doors into an Arctic void.
The light began to assume shape, and I started to sense that it was a luminous object that was moving towards me. It came not steadily but in little fits or scuttlings. The thing had six legs or arms and a bulbous body that glowed. The head, smaller but equally round, was darker, though the eyes shone. Their colour was reddish, like amber. It came on and my own body became paralysed with fear, so that I could not retreat from it.
The eyes fixed themselves on me. I tried to raise my hands and found them confined by some fibrous substance, heavy and sticky. In an imitation of my movement the creature stopped and raised two of its forelimbs in the air and began to wave them in front of its face. It appeared to be in the act of communicating with someone or something, but not with me. Then with a sudden leap it was on me and its sinewy, fibrous legs were pawing at my face. I cried out and fell, and when I opened my eyes again I found that I had fallen out of the cupboard into my aunt’s room. I was covered in cobwebs.
When I emerged from her room the house was quiet and for a moment I thought it was deserted, but a faint sound from below reassured me. When I came downstairs, I found that my parents, Aunt Harriet and Louise were there, but all our guests had gone. I was chided for having fallen asleep in my hiding place. My Aunt Harriet smiled, but my mother was looking anxiou
sly at me.
‘You’re shivering,’ she said. ‘You must be sickening for something. Come along. Off to bed with you.’
I was told later that it was flu of some sort and quite serious, but I remember virtually nothing about the next few days. Fortunately, none of the others in the house caught my influenza and Aunt Harriet went home early to avoid infection. When I had recovered some sort of consciousness and was beginning to convalesce, I asked for some books to read. I noticed that the ones provided did not include A Child’s Treasury of Instructive and Improving Verse. I asked after it but was told by my mother that she had burned it in the garden. In the delirium of my fever I had talked about it endlessly, and with apparent terror. ‘And when I looked in it, I could see why. There were the most beastly illustrations in it. Beautifully done, but beastly.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘I don’t know . . . Hobgoblins and demons, and . . . All sorts of horrid things.’
‘But why did you have to burn it?’
‘Oh, I had a book like that when I was a girl. It caused no end of trouble,’ she said, and that was all she would say.
Some weeks later news reached us that Aunt Harriet had died. She had been crossing a busy road near her flat in Victoria late at night and a car had hit her and she had had some sort of heart seizure from which she never recovered. The details are vague in my mind and I have never sought clarity by looking at her death certificate. It is enough to say that in death she was as much trouble as she was in life. It transpired that shortly before that Christmas when she last came to us she had been dismissed from her job in the library service. There were allegations about missing books which were never fully resolved and my parents had to satisfy the authorities that we did not have any stolen books in our possession, nor had we profited from their illegal sale.
With the exception of a small bequest to an obscure animal charity, Aunt Harriet had left everything she possessed to my father. There came a time when both my parents had to go up for a few days to deal with the sale of my aunt’s flat and its contents. I begged to be allowed to come with them and help, but they firmly refused, so Louise and I were left at home in the care of a neighbour. On their return, my parents looked exhausted and somehow haunted. It was only a few months later that my father began to show signs of the illness that later took his life.
Deprived of a sight of it myself I begged my father and mother for details of what they had found in Aunt Harriet’s flat, but they were not forthcoming. My father simply would not discuss it, and all my mother said was:
‘You wouldn’t have liked it. It’s a horrible place. There were cobwebs everywhere.’
The Red Door
MARK MORRIS
‘Let us pray.’
Although Chloe closed her eyes and clasped her hands together, she barely heard the words that her brother Luke was intoning. She had never had a panic attack, but as she stood among her family and her parents’ friends she felt light-headed and jittery; felt her heart-rate increase and sweat break out on her body.
‘Amen,’ Luke said finally, and although Chloe murmured the word along with everyone else, it seemed like a husk in her throat, hollow and dry and hard to expel.
Her problem – if such a cataclysmic life-shift could be termed so mildly – had started even before her mother had been diagnosed with the liver cancer, which had taken most of the last year to kill her. Although her mother’s unbearable suffering had made it even more difficult for Chloe to re-discover the path from which she had strayed, she firmly believed that her London life had been the true catalyst – or, more precisely, the fact that she had finally moved away from home two years ago, thus distancing herself, both geographically and ideologically, from her devout parents.
Not that her mother and father had been fire and brimstone types, intent on indoctrinating Chloe and her siblings with the notion of a vengeful and belligerent God. On the contrary, the God that Chloe had grown up with had been a merciful and loving one; a God that gave comfort and succour. As a small child she had thought of Him as a seventh member of the family – a kindly grandfather figure, whose influence was overwhelmingly benign. He was someone to whom she felt she could pour out her problems, someone who could always be relied upon to make things better.
It distressed her greatly, therefore, that she had recently begun to have doubts, not simply about the nature of God, but about His very existence. Back home in Buckinghamshire for her mother’s funeral, she decided to confide in Joanna, her older sister.
On the night following the funeral, the two girls found themselves sleeping in the bedroom which they had shared as children, the bedroom in which they had swapped secrets and gossip, and in which they had done so much of their growing up. Chloe found it nostalgic and yet at the same time, now that their mother was gone, desperately sad to be sleeping in her old bed, with Joanna in her old bed, just a few metres away. When the two girls had been small, their mother had tucked them in every night after listening to their prayers. She had kissed them on the forehead and whispered, ‘Sleep well, sleep tight, may God protect you through the night.’
The only thing whispering to Chloe now was the harsh wind in the branches of the denuded apple trees in the back garden. She listened to them scraping and rustling as she worked up the courage to speak, and then finally she whispered, ‘Jo? Are you awake?’
‘Yes,’ Jo said immediately, as if she had been expecting the question.
‘Can I ask you something?’
‘If you like.’
She was only two years older than Chloe, but Jo, who had always been considered the practical, pragmatic one, often acted as if the gap between them was much wider.
‘Have your views changed at all since you left home?’ Chloe asked.
‘About what?’
‘Well . . . about anything? God, for instance.’
‘No. Have yours?’
The response was blunt, and threw Chloe for a moment. Finally she admitted, ‘I think they have.’
‘In what way?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose I’m not as . . . certain as I used to be.’
‘You mean you don’t believe any more?’
‘It’s not that, it’s . . . well, I’m not sure.’
Jo paused for less than a second, and then she said almost crossly, ‘Well, either you do believe or you don’t. Which is it?’
Chloe felt dismay seize her, felt herself shrivelling inside. I’m not going to cry, she told herself. But when she again said, ‘I don’t know,’ her voice cracked on the last word, and all at once she was sobbing.
Lying in the dark, she half-expected Jo to move across to her bed, to offer comfort, but the older girl remained so still that Chloe might have believed she was suddenly alone in the room. Eventually Jo asked, ‘Have you spoken to Dad about this?’
With an effort Chloe swallowed her tears. ‘No. I don’t want to worry him. Especially not now, when he’s got so much to contend with.’
‘Probably wise,’ said Jo. Silence settled between them again, albeit one filled with the frenzied scraping of the tree branches outside. Then Jo asked, ‘What’s made you have doubts?’
Chloe struggled to put it into words. ‘It’s not one thing. It’s an accumulation. I suppose when I was at home I saw evil as . . . I don’t know . . . the Devil’s work. Something separate from humanity. I knew it existed, I knew people did terrible things to one another, but it was as if it was this separate thing that bubbled up every now and again like . . . like lava from a volcano.’
‘And now?’ said Jo.
‘Now I realise that it isn’t like that. Living in the city I suppose it’s made me realise that evil isn’t always big and grand and uncontrollable. It’s petty and vicious and banal. It’s there in everybody. Every day, in one way or another, I come up against cruelty or cynicism or selfishness or envy or ind
ifference. I was sitting on the tube the other day, and the day before there’d been delays on the District Line because a girl had thrown herself under a train, and this couple were griping about her, saying what a selfish bitch she was because she’d made them late for the pub.’
‘Welcome to the real world,’ Jo murmured.
‘But why is the world like that?’ protested Chloe. ‘Why, if God exists, has he let things get in such a state? A girl where I work was mugged the other week by two guys outside Ladbroke Grove tube station. People just walked past while one of the guys held a knife to her throat. And I read in the paper that a fifteen-year-old girl at the local school had been beaten up, and that even while she was lying on the pavement unconscious her attackers had carried on punching and kicking and stamping on her while other children laughed and filmed it on their phones.’
She subsided into silence, aware that her voice had become stretched and almost whiny. Jo’s response was as cool and considered as ever.
‘God gave us free will,’ she said. ‘How we choose to live in this life will determine our role in the next one.’
‘But why?’ Chloe asked. ‘Why give us free will if so many innocent people suffer for it?’
‘We all need to be tested,’ said Jo.
‘But why? That’s what I don’t understand. If God is all-good and all-powerful, why does he need to make us suffer? Why put us through this at all?’
‘To test our faith, of course. If we can suffer the hardships of life and still have faith in God, then we will prove ourselves worthy of sitting at His right hand. We have to earn our place in the Kingdom of Heaven, Chloe. If we didn’t suffer the hardship and misery of our earthly lives we wouldn’t appreciate the ultimate glory of life everlasting. We would be complacent, selfish beings, with no concept of good and evil, no perspective.’
‘But what about good people who don’t have faith in God?’ Chloe said. ‘What about people who don’t believe in Him, but who are still kind and generous and loving to their fellow men? Don’t they deserve their place in the Kingdom of Heaven?’
