“I know what it’s like for your type, I’ve housed so many of you! All of you squirreling away in your rooms, scribbling away in those dark libraries! You’re all the same, as quiet as little mice!”
The can opener was moving, moving, and turning ever so slowly. And it was hard. The metal stubbornly resisted. Nora had to work at it. She had to shove her weight behind it. She was gasping, panting with the effort. Her fingers cramped and twitched. There was blood on her wrist from where the jagged metal of the coffin bit into her skin. And perhaps it took hours, it felt like it was hours, but she turned the screw, and she turned it again, and she turned it again until she could see the trail it left behind, the way the lips of the coffin were opening up to her like an enormous mouth.
“This is what you want, isn’t it?” Mrs Moreland asked. Her voice was kind, she was really a very sweet old lady. And Nora couldn’t help but find herself nodding along.
“Do you feel tired, Miss Higgins?”
“I do feel tired,” she said. Her hands were heavy and bruised. Her Mount of Venus ached from the imprint of the handle. Nora stared at the coffin, stared at the reflection of herself in it. The black line cut across the surface, like it had been gnawed by teeth. Like it had been cut open by a lobster claw. And wasn’t that a strange thought! Nora wanted to laugh.
“I know you feel tired, Miss Higgins. You must. But it’s all right, dear. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Good,” Nora said. There was blood running down her wrist, dripping off her index finger. “Thank you. That’s really very kind.”
And the lid was lifting up very slowly. Mrs Moreland was huffing and puffing, throwing all of her tiny, fragile frame into the effort of opening that lid. Then—there, it was open! And inside it wasn’t black at all, it was white, a pure white satin.
And, of course, there lay Sean, nestled cosily on the pillows. He had been a handsome boy, Mrs Moreland was right. And perhaps he looked like Kitty, but he was so much cleaner than Kitty was. He had a broad forehead, and such pink lips. So lifelike, even now. Like they might tremble and open.
And Nora felt tired. Her eyelids drifted. Opening them took quite a lot of work. It was a Herculean task, but she did it. And there was Sean again. Handsome Sean.
“You don’t want to be alone, do you, Miss Higgins?” Mrs Moreland asked. “Not such a pretty girl as you?”
“No,” she said, “please.”
“Of course,” Mrs Moreland said. “Of course, dear. It’s very easy now.”
Nora climbed up onto the chair slowly. It wobbled underneath her but held firm. Really, it was just like that hostel, wasn’t it? Climbing up those rungs? But this would be nice. The air was cool, not stagnant as it had been there, in that awful place.
“In you go, dear. In you go.”
And it would be quiet, wouldn’t it?
And there wouldn’t be all that touching. All that noise. Those damp, eager hands touching her. Those thick Italian voices, so full of passion.
It would be just as she wanted it.
She lay herself down. She could feel the cold body pressed against her—Sean, the handsome son—but she didn’t mind, it didn’t seem to matter so much. She was so very, very tired.
And the lid came down.
And the darkness.
She would be safe here. She would be happy here.
Her eyelids drifted shut. She let herself relax at last, her whole body slack and nerveless.
Good, she thought. Yes. Just like that. I’ll go to sleep now.
But something was wrong. It was warm in here. It should be cold in a coffin but now it felt warm, so very warm, stiflingly so. The hot air seemed to choke her. Nora pressed against the lid but there was no give, none at all. And the heat began to rise, and there was nowhere to move, she didn’t want to disturb Sean, she didn’t want to writhe around in that narrow, narrow space. She wouldn’t. She would stay perfectly still. She would let the warm air flush her neck, glowing on her cheeks, and she would do her very best to ignore it: the sound of someone breathing beneath her.
SLAPE
Tom Fletcher
“Them stones are slape as fuck.” He gestured at the slabbed path. “Went over on them last week.”
Eel was much bigger than the rest of us and could hold three full milk bottles in each hand, their necks gripped tightly between his sausage fingers. He’d been carrying six bottles in such a fashion when he’d slipped—’slape’ meaning ‘slippery’, I realised—and he’d landed on them, on his hands. His feet had gone out from beneath him, he’d put his hands out to break his fall, and—smash. Milk and blood everywhere. The round bottle necks had driven right up into his palms. He’d shown me the wounds later, back at the yard, laughing. We’d been standing by his van, and the steering wheel and door handle were all dripping with blood. The boss had been furious, because another worker had had a similar accident the month before—really, it happened a lot, especially in spring, when paths and driveways were green with moss, and the showers were heavy—and that worker had severed several tendons. But then, he’d been returning to the van with empties. And everybody knows how milkmen carry empties—with their fingers right inside the bottles. (You can carry up to ten that way, to save time). Also, he was only twenty-one, and his hands were very soft and vulnerable. Whereas Eel was in his sixties and had worked outside all his life, so he had thick skin, literally.
The stones that Eel warned me about were slate slabs forming a narrow, uneven path through a wild thicket of brambles and nettles. It was also covered in broken glass by that point, because Eel hadn’t bothered to clean up the aftermath of his accident, and neither had the owner of the property—our customer. This path, these stones slape as fuck, led us from the van to the customer’s back door.
Eel was teaching me the round, because he was leaving the company. I didn’t know why and I didn’t much care. I didn’t like the man. I was glad he was going. I just wished that it didn’t mean spending two weeks in a van with him as he showed me the route.
After he’d gone, I didn’t think about him except when I was delivering milk to that one particular customer; the one with the particularly slippery path. Even then, it wasn’t so much that I thought about him; it was more as if I heard his voice. I heard him say the words ‘slape as fuck’ every time I stood at the first of those stones.
As I got to know the round, and memorised which customers had which milk on which days, and how much, and I learned where to park the van to minimise walking time, and I familiarised myself with a frankly bewildering variety of garden gate latches, I became quicker, which meant that I arrived at any given customer’s property earlier. As summer became autumn and the days grew shorter, more and more of my round was completed in darkness. Eventually, of course, this meant tackling the slippery path before dawn. That in itself didn’t bother me. But the first time the words ‘slape as fuck’ came to me from out of the impenetrable blackness of that wild and overgrown garden, I nearly had a seizure. For the first time, they felt real and audible; not like the memory that they were. If I wasn’t sensible enough to carry the milk bottles in a crate, I probably would have dropped them all. I think that because it was so dark—because I couldn’t see that he wasn’t there—I felt as if Eel was actually present. I wondered, for the first time, if he’d died immediately upon leaving the company and his ghost was lurking around trying to scare his old co-workers.
On that occasion I delivered the milk without further incident.
I should tell you a little more about this customer. His name was Bacon. He was a widower. All those spring and summer months, I never saw him. His house had once been the parish workhouse, and it still looked like a workhouse. It was large and grey and forbidding. It was set back from the road and had a wall around it. Both inside and outside of the wall was a deep sea of brambles. Driving down the long lane towards it, you’d see the wrecks of old cars submerged in that sea. Eel told me, before he left, that every car Bacon had ever owned w
as in there somewhere. Whenever he bought a new car, he just parked the old one up and left it. There were at least three old Jaguars and an MG being pulled apart by those plants. And close up to the house, it was evident that he didn’t care about the building much more than he did about his old cars. It was tired-looking and it smelled bad. It was overrun by cats, and in the back porch—where I left the milk—there were several bowls of meaty cat food too rotten and writhing for even animals to eat.
Sometimes, I’d find a fire burning in the lane, or even just amongst the brambles. Piles of cardboard boxes, old newspapers and magazines and even books, all just left out burning in the sun, unattended. It was as if Bacon wanted the house to get burned down. Once, a fire was burning on the slippery path itself. I had to hold my breath and jump over it, holding a crate of full milk bottles. Well, obviously, I didn’t. I could’ve left Bacon’s milk at the end of the path. But I didn’t want to risk pissing him off, because he might complain, and that would mean I’d piss the boss off. And that was a far scarier prospect than setting fire to my jeans. The boss was in a terrible mood, generally, because severed-tendon man was taking a long time to finish his round these days, and we were paid by the hour. I was pretty sure that severed-tendon man would be getting the sack soon, and replaced by somebody faster. But anyway; sometimes it seemed like Bacon didn’t even want his fucking milk delivered, it was so difficult to get to the actual porch.
All of which is to say that by the time I was delivering in darkness, the place was already creeping me out.
On the third dark morning, the moon and stars were intermittently obscured by clouds, and I could see very little. I ignored the ‘slape as fuck’, telling myself that however much it sounded real, it was obviously only a memory, a thought, something interior to me, and nothing to be afraid of. And I took the path slowly.
I crouched down to place the full milk bottles in the gloomy, stinking workhouse porch and reload my crate with empties. There were lots—Bacon got a lot of milk—and they were crusty and unwashed. I noticed light reflecting from the glass; the clouds must have shifted again, letting the moon shine through. I was glad. But then, as I stood, I noticed that the door to the house proper was slightly open, and that there was a face in that shadowed gap, peering at me. The moonlight caught on two big eyes, and on a row of big, yellow teeth, perfectly even, and shaped like a smile. They were the upper teeth. I recoiled against the porch wall. How long had he been there? Bacon, if this was he, did not speak, and neither did I. He maintained his smile. His mouth was slightly open, but I couldn’t see his lower teeth. I wondered if he was wearing dentures, and if they were fitted incorrectly. He had deep creases running straight down from the corners of his wide mouth. He looked utterly delighted about something. I couldn’t speak. I was frozen. I don’t know how long we stood like that. Then, the clouds came back, and the door was closing, and his face—smile unchanged—was hidden from view.
I ran at full speed from that doorway then, rain splattering my face. And of course, on the very last of them slape-as-fuck stones, I slipped. I slipped hard. My feet flew backwards and my face flew forwards. For a brief, hopeful moment, I thought that I might flip right over, three hundred and sixty degrees, and land on my feet again. But I performed only half such a manoeuvre. I tried to break my fall with my hands, but my hands were holding a crate of empty milk bottles. The crate landed on top of my fingers and my face landed in the crate. One bottleneck aligned perfectly with my right eye socket. Glass, bone, skin and cartilage all broke. My knuckles broke. I lay there, shattered, and I was conscious of that face peering at me from out of the darkness once more, still grinning, and fat fingers trying to turn me over.
The boss was not going to be very happy about this, I thought, as I was being dragged away. I was going to become really very slow. And probably too expensive.
THE NIGHT DOCTOR
Steve Rasnic Tem
Elaine said the walk would be good for them both. “We don’t get enough meaningful exercise these days. Besides, we might meet some of the new neighbours.” Sam couldn’t really argue with that, but he couldn’t bring himself to agree, so he nodded, grunted. Although his arthritis was worse than ever, as if his limbs were grinding themselves into immobility, it hurt whether he moved them or not, so why not move?
He would have preferred waiting until they were more comfortable in the neighbourhood—they’d been there less than a week. Until he had seen a few friendly faces, until he could be sure of their intentions. People here kept their curtains open most of the time. He supposed that was meant to convince passersby of their trusting nature, but he didn’t like it. Someday you might see something you didn’t want to see. You might misinterpret something. Since they’d moved in he’d glanced into those other windows from time to time—and seen shiny spots back in the darkness, floating lights with no apparent source, oddly shaped shadows he could not quite identify and didn’t want to think about. He was quite happy not knowing the worst about other people’s lives. He could barely tolerate the worst about his own.
Not that he had justification for much complaint. He’d always known the worst was somewhere just out of reach, so it shouldn’t have affected him. Like most people, he supposed. Human beings had a natural sense for it, the worst that was just beyond the limits of their own lives. The worst that was still to come.
What with one minor annoyance or another—finding pants that didn’t make him look fat, determining what pair of shoes might hurt his feet the least, deciding on the correct degree of layering that wouldn’t make him wish he’d worn something else as the day wore on—they didn’t leave the new house until almost eleven. Sam worried about getting his lunch on time. If he didn’t get his lunch on time his body felt off the rest of the day.
“I’ll buy you some crackers at the drug store if you need them,” she said. “Don’t fret about it.”
“Crackers? What kind of meal is that? You’re always saying I should eat healthier.”
“For heaven’s sake, Sam, let it go. Crackers to tide you over. Wheat, something like that. A lot of small meals are better for you anyway. That’s the way the cave people ate—they grazed all the time.”
“Cave people,” he repeated, as if reading some absurd road sign. He didn’t say anything more. He didn’t want to whine like Bryan, thirty-four years old and he still whined like a little boy. They’d done something terribly wrong for Bryan to be that way, but Sam still had no idea what it was. Parenting was a mystery, like diet, like exercise, like how to still keep feeling good about yourself in this world.
Sam felt uncomfortable most of the time. Physically, certainly. And as much as it annoyed him to think about it, emotionally as well. A walking mass of illogic, and that was no way to be.
After they left the house they turned onto the long lane that meandered through the neighbourhood. When he realised how long the street was, and how far away they were from the tiny mall—not so bad if you were driving, but Sam had stopped driving two years ago—he felt on the verge of tears. Just like some kind of toddler. Humiliating.
As they were starting out a large black bird landed in the street beside him. It threw its head back, shuddering, something struggling in its mouth. Sam glanced at his wife to see if she had noticed this. But her eyes were fixed forward, and he decided not to mention it. He twisted his head around to look at the bird. Still there. Was it a crow? It looked too big to be a blackbird. In fact it might be the biggest bird he’d ever seen up close. Its beak was so sharp. It could take your eyes out and there was nothing you could do about it, it would happen so quickly. Just like they were grapes.
His knees were hurting already. There were tears in his eyes, but at least they weren’t yet running down his cheeks. Birds didn’t cry. He should be like the birds.
He wasn’t sure how it had come to this—he’d always been such an optimist. And he’d always been healthy—no, it was too late in life to exaggerate—relatively healthy. But relatively healthy stil
l meant you could drop dead at any time. So he walked around sore much of the time, each step like a needle in his heels and a crumbling in his knees, and attempted to think about everything but death.
They passed another older couple. Elaine would have said “elderly” but Sam hated that word. Elaine smiled at them and said hello. The couple nodded and said hello back. They had already passed the couple when Sam managed to speak his delayed “nice day!” The man said “oh, yes,” awkwardly turning his head to Sam in order to be polite, but staggering a little, almost falling off the curb. Sam could feel the warmth flooding his face. He’d caused that distraction, and the resulting stumble.
“We should have introduced ourselves,” Elaine said a few minutes later. “They may have been neighbours.” Sam hoped the couple didn’t recognise him the next time they met. “Sam, did you hear me?”
“Of course I heard you, you’re right here.”
“Then why didn’t you say something?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t know it needed answering, I guess.”
“I don’t talk just to hear myself.”
“Maybe they’re not neighbours. Maybe they’re just passing through, taking a walk. They might live several blocks away—they look pretty healthy. They could probably walk that far.”
“Uh huh,” she said, her head down, walking a little faster. It hurt to try to keep up with her. Too late. That’s what she would have said if he asked her what was wrong, so he didn’t. She deserved better—he didn’t understand how he’d gotten so fuzzy-headed. There was probably a pill for that, something to erase a certain percentage of your thoughts, clear out some space so you could pay better attention to the people you loved. So much for the benefits of exercise. Sam was feeling worse and worse.
By the time they reached the drug store Sam was ravenous. He sat on the padded bench and devoured two packets of crackers while Elaine got her many prescriptions. He’d already filled his last week before they moved. The lady across from him frowned. He looked around—he was spraying cracker crumbs everywhere. He didn’t know what to do—he couldn’t very well get down on his hands and knees right there in the store and sweep them up. He closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see either the lady or the crumbs and continued to eat.
The Spectral Book of Horror Stories Page 6
