by Mark West
In the boot of his car.
The Mortuary attendant leaned in close and calmly explained what was to happen. Dave wasn’t really listening to her. He watched her lips moving but the words made no real impression on him. He just nodded in affirmation whenever he thought it appropriate.
“In your own time,” she finally said. She placed a hand on his shoulder and walked him to the door.
The room beyond was bright with white tiles and gleaming chrome fittings. And in the very centre was a table. The white sheet was already neatly folded back to reveal the head and shoulders of the small prone figure. There was to be no sudden shock as the sheet was drawn back.
He took a few faltering steps forward, the woman keeping a discreet distance to his right. Under the harsh bright lights her white coat shone brilliantly as she hovered at the very limit of his peripheral vision, almost angelic in aspect. Tears fogged his eyes as soon as he looked down at the figure on the table. None of it seemed real to him anymore.
When Katie had been much younger, he had on many occasions slipped into his daughter’s bedroom as she slept. The natural fear of cot-death was ever-present. Many a night he had woken to the static hiss of the baby monitor, listening for some sign that she was okay; he’d always ended up going in to check on her. There he’d look for a gentle, almost imperceptible, movement in the covers or listen for a whisper of breath, assuring himself that she was just sleeping.
It seemed so strange to be reminded of that now.
Dave rubbed the tears from his eyes and tried to compose himself. It would be the very last chance he would ever get to see her, to touch her. He let his hand fall from his face and he looked down at his daughter; his eyes closed almost immediately. He fought back the tears, the howl of despair that was rising within him; he had wanted to be strong for her. She was still his little girl. His hand moved forward until it found hers; the flesh felt cold and unyielding.
Despite the best efforts of the technicians, there could be no disguising the terrible injuries that she had suffered. Though unmistakeably Katie, the face looked strangely asymmetrical, as though what lay here was nothing but a distorted reflection of how his daughter had appeared in life. The eyes were closed, though there could be no confusing this with sleep. The skin, where undamaged, looked hard as wax. The lips were tightly drawn, looking little more than a paper-cut tinged with blue. From the forehead and running down to the neck were irregular red splotches that darkened to purple at the centre. He recalled something of what was said to him outside; that there would be signs of internal bleeding.
The image had burned itself onto his retina. Even with closed eyes there could be no escaping it. He tried to overlay it with some memory of her in life but everything seemed distant and indistinct.
“I can’t even remember what she looked like,” he said, feeling fresh tears on his cheeks. In his mind’s eye he found only one face rising up clear, one laid over the other like a photo-fit, a perfect match.
It was the face of a dead thing in a child’s car seat.
His eyes snapped open and a solitary tear fell and landed on his daughter’s cheek. As he followed its course towards her ear he could feel the room start to spin about him. It was only the pressure of a supporting hand on his arm that prevented him from falling and he was led sobbing from the room.
Debs passed away two days after Katie’s funeral. She had never regained consciousness. The coroner recorded a verdict of accidental death. Though precisely what had caused her to swerve into the path of oncoming traffic was unclear, it was noted that Katie was not wearing a seat belt at the time of the crash. So it may have been this distraction that resulted in Debs veering into the wrong lane.
It was some weeks later that Dave, still numb with the shock of what had happened, took unexpected delivery of the personal items retrieved from his car. They amounted to a handful of CDs, a toolbox and a child’s car seat. As before the seat looked as good as new, the fabric a dazzling pink, every bit as eye-catching as it had been the morning he’d first seen it.
His first impulse had been to get rid of it. This was also the advice of various relatives and friends who saw the thing as a rather morbid trophy. But he didn’t discard it or put it out of sight as he had with the majority of Debs’ and Katie’s possessions. He allowed only a few mementos to remain on view, mainly photographs and Katie’s one-time beloved rag doll. The door to his daughter’s bedroom had not been opened since the accident; the ceramic name plaque upon it seemed to have taken on an almost funerary aspect. He would on many occasions find himself pausing by the door, though he could never bring himself to open it.
The seat he kept and he would spend many hours staring at it until the image of it burnt onto his retina and floated before him like a ghost. But that was to be the closest he came to seeing anything. Any hope that the chair would in some way bring him closer to his dead child soon faded.
It was the start to another sunny day when he returned to the tip. It was already bustling with activity as he reversed the car into the bay. He opened the boot of Debs’ car and paused briefly, taking one final look at the car seat before lifting it out and placing it into the skip. He returned to the vehicle without a backward glance. It was only as he was about to drive away that a movement in the rear view mirror caught his eye. A young man who had been unloading several black bags was reaching towards the car seat. For one brief moment the scene seemed to freeze as the man turned to face him. Dave hesitated for only a second before moving on.
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Afterwords
Waiting For Josh
An earlier version of this story was written and submitted to an American publisher, where it was promptly rejected. The original setting was New England. Although the story wasn’t right for him, the editor had some nice things to say about it, even comparing my writing style to that of Christopher Golden’s! Anyway I allowed the story to ‘rest’ for a while on my hard-drive while I pursued other projects.
In the interim period I managed to write a similar story for an anthology that I was invited to contribute to – Where the Heart Is (Gray Friar Press), if you’re curious – and I borrowed quite a section of the original story for what eventually became Last Summer. Thanks, Gary.
But the central strand of Waiting For Josh (in my mind, at least) was still unexplored. The idea that that old man’s life had been ruined by the loss of his son…I just couldn’t let that go. So I shifted the location to England and altered a few of the other details and Waiting For Josh was born.
The title of the original story was ‘The Heartbreak Kid’, named after a song by a band called Icehouse. The story is set in North Yorkshire, up on the east coast; one of my favourite places in the UK to holiday. The original version of the story didn’t work because it relied on a plot device involving a massive coincidence – something that didn’t occur to me at the time, but soon became apparent when I started to revise the story. I stripped that out, beefed up some of the motivational content and altered the pace of the thing. I think the end result is much closer to what I originally set out to achieve.
The themes of redemption, guilt and long-buried secrets (no pun intended) are things which have interested me for some time. I’m a sucker for mystery and psychological suspense just as much as horror. I hope this story is a fitting vehicle for those themes.
- Stephen Bacon
Come See My House In The Pretty Town
As with most of my stories, this was sparked from one key image, when I suddenly saw a man being pursued down a corridor by clowns (which is why this had the working title of “david & the clowns”). I’m one of those poor unfortunates who is a bit coulrophobic, so the idea of three clowns running after you would be quite terrifying, whilst the Chelsea smile (a chilling image, I think) is from the Heath Ledger version of The Joker. Once I had this locked in, the rest of the story fell into place quite nicely (and became the main thrust of the narrative). As an in-
joke, I used the names of my pre-readers for another short, “Mr Huxton”, for the main characters (and village) and the cottage belongs to my friend Nick. The village is based on a generic idea of those little hamlets you drive through and the fair is a mixture of Rowell Fair and Rushden Fair. The community centre though, with its assumed operating room, is a complete invention.
When I realised that the story was going to be set down south and would be fairly oblique (I needed that, for the final reveal and I also liked the idea of drip-feeding information about the affair), I decided to do some research around Dartmoor and Olde English variations on words. “Geblot” means sacrifice, which I thought was quite apt and “Aerning” means a “running riding racing flow of blood”. I was originally going to go further into the sacrifice, which would have been to the Spriggans, though I also researched the “Dartmoor devil footprints”, which had terrified me as a kid in the Arthur C Clarke mysteries book. Finally, the Roberts’ cottage is named for Dr E H Helby, who died in 1921 as part of the bizarre ‘Hairy Hands’ phenomenon between Postbridge and Two Bridges in Dartmoor.
This seemed to take ages to write, as I suffered my typical problem of needing to show myself a lot of what happened when David arrived, most of which was excised for the second draft. I procrastinated terribly once Billy had got loose, but once I started writing inside the community centre, the climax wrote itself pretty quickly.
- Mark West
Closer Than You Think
There is a point in Closer Than You Think where the story ceases to be the one I set out to write.
The idea for the scene in the supermarket had set me on my way and I wanted the otherworldly elements of the story to intrude in the most mundane of places. Several months earlier I’d written a story that used a similar conceit where I made the conscious effort to avoid using the kind of language I associated with the genre; that included excising any mention of the word ghost.
Both stories are essentially about a father/daughter relationship, though in this story there is an undercurrent of resentment by Dave, the father, to a life with children. It was when writing the key scene in the car, where Dave finally comes face to face with what has been haunting him that I realised it was this resentment that would determine how the story had to end.
It had started as a simple ghost story, and I thought the idea of a haunted car seat was a quite a novel one. I wrote the story with no firm idea as to where it was going to take me, and it was only when I discovered, along with Dave, what was waiting in the seat that this was going to be a different story altogether. The word ‘ghost’ appears in the story seven times, but I don’t see it as a ghost story anymore.
- Neil Williams
Writer Biographies
Stephen Bacon was born in Nottinghamshire in 1971, and lives in South Yorkshire with his wife and two sons. He started submitting short fiction in 2006 and has published two dozen short stories in various magazines and anthologies over the past few years including The Horror Library Vol II, The Sixth Black Book of Horror, Where the Heart Is, Dark Horizons, and the final three editions of the Nemonymous series.
2011 promises to be a busy year. He has short stories appearing in Dark Minds edited by Ross Warren, The Eighth Black Book of Horror edited by Charles Black, Alt-Dead edited by Peter Mark May, The Monster Book For Girls edited by Terry Grimwood, and Murmurations – An Anthology of Uncanny Stories About Birds edited by Nicholas Royle.
You can visit his website at www.stephenbacon.co.uk
Mark West was born in 1969 and lives in Northamptonshire, England with his wife, Alison and their young son Matthew. Writing since the age of eight, he discovered the small press in 1998 and since then has had almost sixty short stories published in various magazines around the world. His first collection, Strange Tales, was published by Rainfall Books in 2003 and they also published his short novel, Conjure, in 2009. His debut novel, In The Rain With The Dead, appeared from Pendragon Press in 2005 and following this - and the birth of his son - he spent two years wrestling with writers block. This was broken when his novelette The Mill, which Mark Morris called ‘one of the most moving pieces of writing I have read in a long time’, appeared in the acclaimed five-author collection We Fade To Grey, edited by Gary McMahon for Pendragon Press. Conjure was republished as an eBook in 2010 through Generation-Next Publications.
Future publications include an eBook version of The Mill, two print novellas (The Lost Film and Drive), a short story appearance in Alt-Dead, edited by Peter Mark May and What Gets Left Behind, a chapbook from the acclaimed Spectral Press.
West is currently working on a novel and can be contacted through his website at www.markwest.org.uk
Neil Williams was born in Cheshire where he still lives with his wife and young daughter. He only started submitting short fiction in 2010 and has so far seen two of his stories appear in Estronomicon eZine from Screaming Dreams. This summer his story Pestfurlong Hill will appear in Our Haunted World, an anthology of ghost stories from around the world, published by Whitlock Publishing.
Neil has also produced cover artwork for Spectral Press and Pendragon Press.
