We stopped walking by the first statue that wasn’t totally covered in green moss and dead leaves. Through the low branches of a tree, we could still see the two naked children, standing together on the stone block. One boy and one girl. They were both smiling, but not in a nice way, because we could see too much of their teeth. “They’s all open on the chest,” Pickering said. And he was right; their dry stone skin was peeled back on the breastbone and in their outstretched hands they held small lumps of stone with veins carved into them – their own little hearts. The good feeling I had down by the gate was completely gone now.
Sunlight shone through the trees and striped us with shadows and bright slashes. Eyes big and mouths dry, we walked on and checked some of the other statues we passed. You couldn’t help it; it’s like they made you stare at them to work out what was sticking through the leaves and branches and ivy. There was one horrible cloth thing that seemed too real to be made from stone. Its face was so nasty, I couldn’t look for long. Standing under it gave me the queer feeling that it was swaying from side to side, ready to jump off the stone block and come at us.
Pick walked ahead of me a little bit, but soon stopped to see another. He shrunk in its shadow, then peered at his shoes. I caught up with him but didn’t look too long either. Beside the statue of the ugly man in a cloak and big hat, was a smaller shape covered in a robe and hood, with something coming out of a sleeve that reminded me of snakes.
I didn’t want to go any further and knew I’d be seeing these statues in my sleep for a long time. Looking down the hill at the gate, I was surprised to see how far away it was now. “Think I’m going back,” I said to Pick.
Pickering looked at me, but never called me a chicken; he didn’t want to start a fight and be on his own in here. “Let’s just go into the house quick,” he said. “And get something. Otherwise no one will believe us.”
But being just a bit closer to the white house with all the staring windows made me sick with nerves. It was four storeys high and must have had hundreds of rooms inside. All the windows upstairs were dark so we couldn’t see beyond the glass. Downstairs, they were all boarded up against trespassers. “They’s all empty, I bet,” Pickering said to try and make us feel better. But it didn’t do much for me; he didn’t seem so smart or hard now; just a stupid kid who hadn’t got a clue.
“Nah,” I said.
He walked away from me. “Well I am. I’ll say you waited outside.” His voice was too soft to carry the usual threat. But all the same, I suddenly couldn’t stand the thought of his grinning, triumphant face while Ritchie and I were considered piss pots, especially after I’d climbed the gate and come this far. My part would mean nothing if he went further than me.
We never looked at any more of the statues. If we had, I don’t think we’d have ever got to the wide stone steps that went up to the big iron doors of the house. Didn’t seem to take us long to reach the house either. Even taking small, slow, reluctant steps got us there real quick. On legs full of warm water I followed Pickering up to the doors.
“Why is they made of metal?” he asked me. I never had an answer. He pressed both hands against the doors. One of them creaked but never opened. “They’s locked,” he said.
Secretly relieved, I took a step away from the doors. As all the ground floor windows were boarded over too, it looked like we could go home. Then, as Pickering shoved at the creaky door again, this time with his shoulder and his body at an angle, I’m sure I saw movement in a window on the second floor. Something whitish. Behind the glass, it was like a shape appeared out of the darkness and then sank back into it, quick but graceful. I thought of a carp surfacing in a cloudy pond before vanishing the same moment you saw its pale back. “Pick!” I hissed at him.
There was a clunk inside the door Pickering was straining his body against. “It’s open,” he cried out, and stared into the narrow gap between the two iron doors. But I couldn’t help thinking the door had been opened from inside.
“I wouldn’t,” I said to him. He just smiled and waved at me to come over and help as he pushed to make a bigger space. I stood still and watched the windows upstairs. The widening door made a grinding sound against the floor. Without another word, he walked inside the big white house.
Silence hummed in my ears. Sweat trickled down my face. I wanted to run down to the gate.
After a few seconds, Pickering’s face appeared in the doorway. “Quick. Come an’ look at all the birds.” He was breathless with excitement.
I peered through the gap at a big, empty hallway and could see a staircase going up to the next floor. Pickering was standing in the middle of the hall, not moving. He was looking at the ground. At all the dried-up birds on the wooden floorboards. Hundreds of dead pigeons. I went in.
No carpets, or curtains, or light bulbs, just bare floorboards, white walls, and two closed doors on either side of the hall. On the floor, most of the birds still had feathers but looked real thin. Some were just bones. Others were dust. “They get in and they got nuffin’ to eat,” Pickering said. “We should collect all the skulls.” He crunched across the floor and tried the doors at either side of the hall, yanking the handles up and down. “Locked,” he said. “Both of ’em locked. Let’s go up them stairs. See if there’s summat in the rooms.”
I flinched at every creak caused by our feet on the stairs. I told him to walk at the sides like me. He wasn’t listening, just going up fast on his plumpish legs. I caught up with him at the first turn in the stairs and began to feel real strange again. The air was weird; hot and thin like we were in a tiny space. We were both all sweaty under our school uniforms from just walking up one flight of stairs. I had to lean against a wall while he shone his torch up at the next floor. All we could see were the plain walls of a dusty corridor. A bit of sunlight was getting in from somewhere upstairs, but not much. “Come on,” he said, without turning his head to look at me.
“I’m going outside,” I said. “I can’t breathe.” But as I moved to go back down the first flight of stairs, I heard a door creak open and then close, below us. I stopped still and heard my heart banging against my eardrums from the inside. The sweat turned to frost on my face and neck and under my hair. Real quick, and sideways, something moved across the shaft of light falling through the open front door. My eyeballs went cold and I felt dizzy. Out the corner of my eye, I could see Pickering’s white face, watching me from above on the next flight of stairs. He turned the torch off with a loud click.
It moved again, back the way it had come, but paused this time at the edge of the long rectangle of white light on the hall floor. And started to sniff at the dirty ground. It was the way she moved down there that made me feel light as a feather and ready to faint. Least I think it was a she. But when people get that old you can’t always tell. There wasn’t much hair on the head and the skin was yellow. She looked more like a puppet made of bones and dressed in a grubby nighty than an old lady. And could old ladies move so fast? Sideways like a crab, looking backwards at the open door, so I couldn’t see the face properly, which I was glad of.
If I moved too quick, I’m sure it would look up and see me. I took two slow side-steps to get behind the wall of the next staircase where Pickering was hiding. He looked like he was about to cry. Like me, I knew all he could hear was his own heartbeat.
Then we heard the sound of another door open from somewhere downstairs, out of sight. We knelt down, trembling against each other and peered around the corner of the staircase to make sure the old thing wasn’t coming up the stairs, sideways. But a second figure had now appeared down there. I nearly cried when I saw it skittering around by the door. It moved quicker than the first one with the help of two black sticks. Bent right over with a hump for a back, it was covered in a dusty black dress that swished over the floor. What I could see of the face through the veil was all pinched and as sickly-white as grubs under wet bark. When she made the whistling sound, it hurt my ears deep inside and made my bones feel cold.
Pickering’s face was wild with fear. I was seeing too much of his eyes. “Is they old ladies?” he said in a voice that sounded all broken.
I grabbed his arm. “We got to get out. Maybe there’s a window, or another door ’round the back.” Which meant we had to go up these stairs, run through the building to find another way down to the ground-floor, before breaking our way out.
I took another peek down the stairs to see what they were doing, but wished I hadn’t. There were two more of them. A tall man with legs like sticks was looking up at us with a face that never changed because it had no lips or eyelids or nose. He wore a creased suit with a gold watch chain on the waistcoat, and was standing behind a wicker chair. In the chair was a bundle wrapped in tartan blankets. Above the coverings I could see a small head inside a cloth cap. The face was yellow as corn in a tin. The first two were standing by the open door so we couldn’t get out.
Running up the stairs into an even hotter darkness on the next floor, my whole body felt baggy and clumsy and my knees chipped together. Pickering went first with the torch and used his elbows so I couldn’t overtake. I bumped into his back and kicked his heels. Inside his fast breathing, I could hear him sniffing at tears. “Is they comin’?” he kept saying. I didn’t have the breath to answer and kept running through the long corridor, between dozens of closed doors, to get to the end. I looked straight ahead and was sure I would freeze-up if one of the doors suddenly opened. And with our feet making such a bumping on the floorboards, I can’t say I was surprised when I heard the click of a lock behind us. We both made the mistake of looking back.
At first we thought it was waving at us, but then realised the skinny figure in the dirty night-dress was moving its long arms through the air to attract the attention of the others that had followed us up the stairwell. We could hear the scuffle and swish as they came through the dark behind us. But how could this one see us, I thought, with all those rusty bandages around its head? Then we heard another of those horrible whistles, followed by more doors opening real quick like things were in a hurry to get out of the rooms.
At the end of the corridor, there was another stairwell with more light in it that fell from a high window three floors up. But the glass must have been dirty and greenish, because everything around us on the stairs looked like it was underwater. When he turned to bolt down them stairs, I saw Pick’s face was all shiny with tears and the front of his trousers had a dark patch spreading down one leg.
It was real hard to get down them stairs and back to the ground. It was like we had no strength left in our bodies, as if the fear was draining it through the slappy, tripping soles of our feet. But it was more than the terror slowing us down; the air was so thin and dry it was hard to get our breath in and out of our lungs fast enough. My shirt was stuck to my back and I was dripping under the arms. Pick’s hair was wet and he was slowing right down, so I overtook him.
At the bottom of the stairs I ran into another long, empty corridor of closed doors and greyish light, that ran through the back of the building. Just looking all the way down it, made me bend over with my hands on my knees to rest. But Pickering just ploughed right into me from behind and knocked me over. He ran across my body and stamped on my hand. “They’s comin’,” he whined in a tearful voice and went stumbling down the passage. I got back to my feet and started down the corridor after him. Which never felt like a good idea to me; if some of them things were waiting in the hall by the front doors, while others were coming up fast behind us, we’d get ourselves trapped. I thought about opening a door and trying to kick out the boards over a window in one of the ground-floor rooms. Plenty of them old things seemed to come out of rooms when we ran past them, like we were waking them up, but they never came out of every room. So we would just have to take a chance. I called out to Pick to stop. I was wheezing like Billy Skid at school who’s got asthma, so maybe Pickering never heard me, because he kept on running toward the end. I looked back at the stairwell we’d just come out of, then looked about at the doors in the passage. As I was wondering which one to pick, a little voice said, “Do you want to hide in here!”
I jumped into the air and cried out like I’d trod on a snake. Stared at where the voice came from. I could see a crack between this big brownish door and the doorframe. Part of a little girl’s face peeked out. “They won’t see you. We can play with my dolls.” She smiled and opened the door wider. She had a really white face inside a black bonnet all covered in ribbons. The rims of her dark eyes were bright red like she’d been crying for a long time.
My chest was hurting and my eyes were stinging with sweat. Pickering was too far ahead of me to catch him up. I could hear his feet banging away on loose floorboards, way off in the darkness and I didn’t think I could run any further. I nodded at the girl. She stood aside and opened the door wider. The bottom of her black dress swept through the dust. “Quickly,” she said with an excited smile, and then looked down the corridor, to see if anything was coming. “Most of them are blind, but they can hear things.”
I moved through the doorway. Brushed past her. Smelled something gone bad. Put a picture in my head of the dead cat, squashed flat in the woods, that I found one time on a hot day. But over that smell was something like the bottom of my granny’s old wardrobe, with the one broken door and little iron keys in the locks that don’t work any more.
Softly, the little girl closed the door behind us, and walked off across the wooden floor with her head held high, like a “little Madam” my dad would say. Light was getting into this room from some red and green windows up near the high ceiling. Two big chains hung down holding lights with no bulbs, and there was a stage at one end with a thick greenish curtain pulled across the front. Little footlights stuck up at the front of the stage. It must have been a ballroom once.
Looking for a way out – behind me, to the side, up ahead, everywhere – I followed the little girl in the black bonnet over to the stage and up the stairs at the side. She disappeared through the curtains without making a sound, and I followed because I could think of nowhere else to go and I wanted a friend in here. The long curtains smelled so bad around my face, I put a hand over my mouth.
She asked my name and where I lived. I told her like I was talking to a teacher who’s just caught me doing something wrong, even giving her my house number. “We didn’t mean to trespass,” I said. “We never stole nothing.” She cocked her head to one side and frowned like she was trying to remember something. Then she smiled and said, “All of these are mine. I found them.” She drew my attention to the dolls on the floor; little shapes of people I couldn’t see properly in the dark. She sat down among them and started to pick them up one at a time to show me, but I was too nervous to pay much attention and I didn’t like the look of the cloth animal with its fur worn down to the grubby material. It had stitched up eyes and no ears; the arms and legs were too long for its body. And I didn’t like the way the little, dirty head was stiff and upright like it was watching me.
Behind us, the rest of the stage was in darkness with a faint glow of white wall in the distance. Peering from the stage at the boarded-up windows down the right side of the dance floor, I could see some bright daylight around the edge of two big hardboard sheets nailed over patio doors. There was a breeze coming through. Must have been a place where someone got in before. “I got to go,” I said to the girl behind me, who was whispering to her animals and dolls. I was about to step through the curtains and head for the daylight when I heard the rushing of a crowd in the corridor that me and Pickering had just run through – feet shuffling, canes tapping, wheels squeaking and two hooting sounds. It all seemed to go on for ages. A long parade I didn’t want to see.
As it went past, the main door clicked open and something glided into the ballroom. I pulled back from the curtains and held my breath. The little girl kept mumbling to the nasty toys. I wanted to cover my ears. Another crazy part of me wanted it all to end; wanted me to step out from behind th
e curtains and offer myself to the tall figure down there on the dance-floor, holding the tatty parasol over its head. It spun around quickly like it was moving on tiny, silent wheels under its long musty skirts. Sniffing at the air. For me. Under the white net attached to the brim of the rotten hat and tucked into the high collars of the dress, I saw a bit of face that looked like skin on a rice pudding. I would have screamed but there was no air inside me.
I looked down, where the little girl had been sitting. She had gone, but something was moving on the floor. Squirming. I blinked my eyes fast. For a moment, it looked like all her toys were trembling, but when I squinted at the Golly with bits of curly white hair on its head, it was lying perfectly still where she had dropped it. The little girl may have hidden me, but I was glad she had gone.
Way off in the stifling distance of the big house, I then heard a scream; full of all the panic and terror and woe in the whole world. The figure with the little umbrella spun right around on the dance-floor and then rushed out of the ballroom toward the sound.
I slipped out from behind the curtains. A busy chattering sound came from the distance. It got louder until it echoed through the corridor and ballroom and almost covered the sounds of the wailing boy. It sounded like his cries were swirling round and round, bouncing off walls and closed doors, like he was running somewhere far off inside the house, in a circle that he couldn’t get out of.
I crept down the stairs at the side of the stage and ran across to the long strip of burning sunlight I could see shining through one side of the patio doors. I pulled at the big rectangle of wood until it splintered and I could see broken glass in a doorframe and lots of thick grass outside.
For the first time since I’d seen the first figure scratching about the front entrance, I truly believed I could escape. I could climb through the gap I was making, run around the outside of the house and then go down the hill to the gate, while they were all busy inside with the crying boy. But just as my breathing went all quick and shaky with the glee of escape, I heard a whump sound on the floor behind me, like something had just dropped to the floor from the stage. Teeny vibrations tickled the soles of my feet. Then I heard something coming across the floor toward me – a shuffle, like a body dragging itself real quick.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17 Page 37
