“I never heard that,” Stu told her passengers. “I never heard any of it. It’s not true, none of it. What’s wrong with you?” He scarcely knew whom he was addressing, let alone how high his voice had risen; his wives would have been covering their ears by now and telling him not to screech. They’d managed to incite him to put on the wrong kind of show—the guide had. She wouldn’t think it was so funny when he told her employer.
The tour was out of sight by now, but who else had it started talking about him? How many of his neighbours might be? Even with the window open as wide as his shoulder could heave the sash, he was unable to decide if the muffled voices were on television. They seemed to be repeating one another’s words, but was he the subject they were agreeing about? He shivered whenever he craned out of the window, to be met by another faceful of frosty air. Eventually the dawn became daylight that was just about as grey, and he began phoning Vin’s Vintage Vinyl.
If Vin was there he wasn’t owning up to it, and the tour firm didn’t answer. Stu had been trying both of them for most of an hour by the time Vin made his weariness audible. “What’s up now, Stew?”
“It’s Stu.” Having established this, Stu said “It looks as if I’ll have to be late.”
“What’s keeping you? Don’t say your tour.”
Stu wasn’t going to admit that until he’d dealt with it, and so he said “I think I’m a bit sick.”
“You’re not telling me anything. Anyway, don’t go rushing back. I’m working on a girl like I said.”
She wouldn’t replace him, Stu promised himself. Nobody could. He cut Vin off without replying and tried the tour firm once again. He was answered so immediately that he almost forgot he didn’t want to be identified—not yet, at any rate. He did his best to elevate his voice even higher than the woman’s that had greeted him. “Can I ask about someone you’ve got on your tour?”
“Someone who works for us, do you mean?”
“Not her, no.” In some haste Stu added “Somebody you talk about. Stu Stewart.”
“Who’s that, sorry?”
“Me,” Stu was almost provoked by her tone to blurt. “The drummer with Scotty and the Scousers,” he said aloud.
“He isn’t part of our tour.”
“You can’t tell me that. You’ve always gone along my, gone along his road and now you’re talking about him.”
“Which road is that, sir?”
Her last word nearly robbed him of speech. When he named his road and then told her where it was, hiking his voice higher still, she said “We’ve never used that route. We don’t come within a mile of it.”
She’d recognised him, of course. By calling him sir she’d betrayed that she had. He didn’t need to hear her start to laugh as he cut her off. How much of an idiot did she take him for? Did she really believe she could trick him into doubting the evidence of his own senses? She and the other one would have even less of a chance when he took the tour. He would have to go downtown to catch it from the terminus, and he hurried to the bus stop on the main road. A bus was approaching, and Stu hadn’t finished fumbling for his travel pass when the doors opened to him. “You’re all right,” the driver said. “We’ll let you on.”
For an instant he thought she meant because he was Stu Stewart, and then he recognised her voice. Her accomplice must have been in touch with her, and now they were trying to convince him that he’d caught an ordinary bus. He didn’t need to scrutinise the passengers to see they knew better. “That’s kind of you,” he said through his teeth, and sat behind her as the bus swung into his road.
She wasn’t going to deliver her commentary. That was obvious as soon as he met her eyes in the mirror. Perhaps she had already ridiculed him; in fact, when he twisted around to peer at the passengers he was sure she had. The knowledge brought him to his feet, and he grabbed a seat on each side of the aisle as he faced his audience. “Now you’re on my part of the tour,” he declared. “Stu Stewart, as if you didn’t know.”
They needn’t try to look as though they didn’t. The guide who was posing as merely a driver demolished all the pretence by saying “Can you sit down, sir.”
Could he have spoken to her on the phone? It hardly mattered; they were all the same. “Ringo’s favourite drummer and don’t let anyone tell you different,” he said louder and higher. “People came to see me right enough, but it wasn’t for a laugh.”
“Sir, if you don’t sit down—”
“What’ll you do? Tell your lies about me, like you haven’t already?” His pitch was rising out of his control, and more than one passenger had covered their ears, though he wondered if they had because they didn’t want to hear the truth. The bus was slowing, and he let go of the seats to demonstrate a few riffs on them. “That’s just a taste. You know what, I think Ringo learned from me,” he said and felt bound to explain the falsetto he couldn’t bring down. “And this is how we used to have to sing.”
He faltered, because his was no longer the only voice. The other one was repeating the tale about John Lennon’s joke at Stu’s expense. As the bus stopped outside his gate Stu lurched at the guide, but her lips appeared to be pinched shut. Was she devious enough to be throwing her voice? “Here’s what you’ve all been waiting to see,” Stu announced, “my house,” but he could still hear the commentary underlying his own. “I’ll find you,” he cried. “I know you’re there. You aren’t hiding from me.”
As he stalked along the aisle he began to recognise the passengers—the man at Jaz’s table in Yesterday’s, the girl who’d been brought into Vin’s shop. He couldn’t see his wives, however many faces he caught hold of. He was well on the way to prying a face wide to grasp the source of the relentless voice before its owner struggled free, having bitten Stu’s fingers, and fled like the rest of them. Several were emitting sounds higher than Stu was making. The guide was the last to flee, and shut him on the bus. He didn’t mind being left when he still had his audience, more of whom were joining them on the pavement. It was completely his tour now, and he took the guide’s seat, but he hadn’t discovered how to start the bus by the time several men drove up to help him.
THE DOG’S HOME
Alison Littlewood
Sometimes, the cruellest thing a creature can give you is love. I get up and Sandy the retriever is there. He comes running when I go downstairs and tries to lick my face. I feel sad, or irritated, depending on my mood, and then I go out and the last thing I see is his head tilted to one side, surprised to see me leaving him all over again. I get back and he’s there, tail wagging—I can hear it, beating the radiator by the door—and it begins again. There’s no end to his love. It’s capacious; it’s infinite. It was the first thing I was told about him, and it was true, and every day I’m surprised to see that it’s true. You’d think both of us would have got used to it by now, but we haven’t. I suppose, in that, I’m more like him than I realise.
“You wouldn’t stand a chance if it wasn’t for the dog,” my mother had said when she raised the question of visiting Aunt Rose. At first I didn’t know what she meant, though I remembered my aunt from when I was small; she’d come on a duty visit. I was about five years old. She’d loomed over me in the hall and dropped her bag next to her feet, which were clad in brown brogues that I could see my snotty little nose in. She’d leaned down, her scrawny hands reaching for me, and she’d touched both my cheeks. Her hands were cold, I remember that too, and then she leaned in closer, pursing her lips. I’d waited for the touch of her tight mouth on my cheek, but it never came. Instead she’d whispered, her voice dry and fierce but her breath surprisingly warm against my skin, “Wash your face before you greet your elders and betters.”
I’m not sure my mum even heard; certainly, I never saw her react. And that was how I remembered Aunt Rose, crone-like, tall, thin, claws for hands and a death rattle voice. I filed her away in a mental box with Do not open on the lid, and left her there. Or so I thought.
“It’ll go to the dogs’ home,�
�� my mother said.
She had no love of my aunt. She had no love for my dad, either. He’d left the two of us a long time ago and I thought we’d managed all right, got along without too many problems; until she’d said that about the dogs’ home.
Aunt Rose had ‘married rich’, Mum always said, and she always had a note of resentment in her voice when she said it. Better still, judging from her tone, Rose had ‘married dead’, the guy popping it soon after, leaving her loaded. A big inheritance with nowhere to go. No wonder Mum had pound signs in her eyes.
That was when she’d said, “Course, Andrew, you wouldn’t stand a chance if it wasn’t for the dog.” She looked at my blank expression and snapped, “Rose doesn’t like people. But that dog—that dog likes people. So Rose tolerates them. She’ll visit folk just because the dog likes to see them. She’ll stop and chat to people on their walks, because her dog likes their dog. If it wasn’t for that animal—” she clicked her tongue in disapproval. “And now,” she added with a note of triumph, “the dog’s home all alone, isn’t he? The neighbour’s feeding him and that’s about it. So she needs someone to go and stay. She needs you to go and stay.”
I opened my mouth to protest. I saw the look on my mother’s face and closed it again.
“Make sure that dog loves you,” she said. “Make him love you and she’ll decide she loves you too.”
#
Sandy wasn’t at all the kind of dog I’d expected. I’d thought Aunt Rose would have some sniffy little thing, a chihuahua or a peke, but when I collected her key from the neighbour and let myself in, there he was, a flurry of tail, big paws and weight behind them, all joy and enthusiasm. There was a volley of barks but not a second’s hesitation before he was all over me, licking, covering my sweater in hair and drool. I couldn’t reconcile the idea of Aunt Rose and this living, breathing, messy creature; it didn’t seem they occupied the same universe, let alone the same house. But occupy it Sandy did. I could smell him there, a cooped-up smell that was unmistakably dog, and I sighed and set down my bag at my feet. It looked like I wouldn’t just be staying in her house; I’d be cleaning it too. But first, it was time to visit Aunt Rose.
#
The hospital’s antiseptic smell, barely masking what lay beneath, was a sharp contrast to the shut-in, musty house. Rose was in a room of her own and I was thankful for that. I’d never been around illness, not really. I didn’t look at the wards to either side as I went towards number seven and I found it a small, narrow box, a metal bed clearly visible through a large window. In the bed was the collection of bones and skin that Aunt Rose had become. Looking at her there, I had no idea how I could ever have thought of her as tall. She seemed barely larger than a doll, and when she let her head fall to the side, looking at me from hollowed sockets, she seemed to move like one too.
“Hello, Aunt Rose,” I said, and she rolled her head back again with a little grunt. I’d intended to play it carefully, but found myself blurting, “I came to look after Sandy. Mum said you might need some help.”
Some help. I knew, looking at her, how inadequate those words were. She needed more than help, would soon pass beyond the kind of help that anyone could give. But she didn’t appear to think about what I said. She made a brief gesture and I recoiled from it, then realised she had indicated the plastic chair next to her bed. I slid into it. The legs scraped against the tiles and her lip twitched.
Aunt Rose stared at the ceiling. I didn’t know if she was waiting for me to speak, but I tried. I told her that Mum was fine. I said she’d have come herself, but she couldn’t get away from work—I almost found myself saying that Mum couldn’t afford to have her wages docked, but I wasn’t sure how that might sound. I thought of the slight body in the bed in front of me, hidden under a single sagging sheet, and all the money it possessed. It seemed terribly unlikely.
“Sandy’s fine,” I said. “He was happy to see—”
The breath was shocked out of me when she grasped my hand. I looked down. Her fingers, narrow and putty-coloured, held mine, which had turned white under their pressure. I tried to pull away but she held on, moving with me, and I had a sudden image of it being like that forever, her cadaverous hand closed on mine.
“Bring him to me,” she said.
“What?”
Pardon, is what I expected her to say – the remnant of some childhood memory, perhaps—but she did not. “They won’t let him in,” she said, “and they won’t let me out. I want to see my dog.” Her eyes met mine. “It’s all I want. You understand?”
Her eyes were pale blue and weak-looking, but a cold strength shone through them. It didn’t appear natural. I looked away.
“I want to see my dog.” She sank back against the pillows. Her face was blank, as if the life had already gone out of it—already, that was what I thought—and then a nurse came in talking about changing the sheets, smiling at me a little too brightly, in a way that told me it was time for me to go.
#
Sandy greeted me when I got back to the house. It was as if he hadn’t seen me in years. I was surprised by his love. It was capacious; it was infinite. I imagined the look on Aunt Rose’s face if she could see it being bestowed upon me.
#
“He’ll understand,” she said, the next time I went to see her. I tried to tell myself I didn’t know what she meant, but I did.
“They’ll think he’d jump all over me,” she said, “but he won’t. He’ll know. He’ll take one look at me and he’ll know.” Her head lolled, her gaze moving towards—but not quite meeting—my own.
“He’s a smart dog. He always knew me and I knew him. He just needs to see me, so he knows—he knows I haven’t—”
Abandoned him, I thought. In my pockets, my hands curled into fists. I’d spent the morning cleaning out her fridge. The smell had been indescribable. Then I’d started on the cupboards, but not before I’d walked the dog; her dog.
He was too joyful a creature to be her dog.
I told myself that Sandy wouldn’t give two shits if he thought she had abandoned him, not now, but how could I know that was true? A dog is not a person.
A dog is not a person. I curled my fists tighter when I remembered what I’d found in the cupboard in the lounge. I scowled, just as I might have when I was five years old, but she didn’t notice.
“I thought I’d have to make an awful choice for him one day,” she said. Her throat was working, as if she was holding back tears. “That’s the only thing that makes it bearable now. Going first, I mean. I know I won’t have to do that. I’ll never have to look at him while he goes to sleep. And he’ll forget, won’t he? After he’s seen me. He can move on.”
You’re damned right he can, I thought. That morning I’d taken him to the park. He’d gone scurrying after all the sticks I threw.
She grasped my hand again. This time her grip was weak. “Please,” she said. “If you do anything for me. Do this.”
#
That night Sandy curled up on the floor and stared up at one of the chairs. No one was sitting in the chair. I scowled at him. I went and sat in the chair. After a while, he came and sat at my side and rested his head on my knee. I whispered to him while his eyes closed and he slept like that, the breath catching noisily in his throat.
#
How easy it is for a dog to love you. How hard it is, for a person. Sometimes people don’t even love their own family. It just isn’t in them. It wasn’t in Rose’s small, wasted body; it never had been. I knew that from the letters I found. Not hers, of course; I never saw whatever answers Rose had sent, but I know we never received anything more than words.
I always thought we’d got along all right, me and Mum. But I was a child, and children don’t always know. They aren’t like dogs. They can’t take one look and understand. I wasn’t even sure I understood after I’d read the letters I found stashed out of sight in Rose’s cupboard.
He grows so fast, Mum had written. He already needs new shoes. The tr
ousers I got him last month are too short already. He looks a bit like Dad, have I mentioned that? You’d love him if you saw him now. I don’t suppose you might be able to…
But she never had, had she? Aunt Rose hadn’t helped us. She never helped her own sister. She’d read these letters and she didn’t love me. She’d seen me when I was five and she didn’t love me then and here I was taking care of her house and her dog and visiting her in hospital because that was what family did, and she hadn’t even noticed. Mum had been right, but she had been wrong too. The dog may have got me in, but I never had stood a chance, not really. There was only one way Aunt Rose was ever going to notice me; one way I might be able to persuade her to help.
#
Aunt Rose was right. She’d never actually said it, but it’s true. A dog can break your heart.
#
“Five minutes,” I said. “Five minutes, or maybe not even that if anyone finds out.” The papers shook in my hand. My fingers had dug into them, claw-like, gripping too tightly. “But you have to sign first. And it has to be witnessed. We’ll find a couple of nurses to do it.” She stared at me. Mostly she stared at the ceiling, but this time she never took her eyes from mine. Hers were small, the pupils constricted, the pale blue almost blending with the greyish whites of her eyes. It was horrible to see, but I didn’t look away. She was family, after all.
If there’s any way you could help—he has to start school next week. He needs a uniform. I’ve been offered more hours but it means I can’t be with him. I’ll have to leave him with a neighbour, and he screams the place down when I’m not there…
The Spectral Book of Horror Stories Page 3
