Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  But I felt that Amanda wouldn’t complain this time if I looked or spoke in a certain way.

  ‘From what I’ve heard,’ I said, ‘Rottweilers aren’t exactly reliable. Likely to turn on their owners without warning.’

  ‘Rubbish.’ Bunty sniffed at me just as her dog might sniff before peeing on my leg. ‘A lot sweeter-tempered than most human beings I know. Much more reliable. And loving.’

  I pictured that hefty black and brown beloved turning on her and tearing her apart. Amanda looked at me and went very pale. But we both knew we had an unspoken compact.

  A week later in the park, in front of half a dozen witnesses - and I’m sorry to say I wasn’t one of them - the creature sprang on its besotted owner and sank its teeth into her right arm. By the time it was hauled off, there wasn’t much of Bunty’s arm that remained user-friendly.

  Amanda avoided my eyes when we heard the news, but while I was pouring a drink she said, ‘The way you looked at poor Bunty, and at that dog … anyone would think you’d wished it on her.’

  ‘You weren’t actually wishing her the best of British luck yourself,’ I ventured. ‘I don’t think it could have been done without your collaboration.’

  She said nothing. But she knew what I was talking about. And if she was worried, so was I. When the attack happened, I had felt her full power. No matter how she coyly tried denying it to herself, she was the one with the great gift - the true potency for doing what had to be done.

  I was envious. She looked so demure and uncomplicated. But she had a gift that, once let loose, I couldn’t hope to compete with.

  All would be well if we stayed on the same side.

  One afternoon I got home to find Amanda already there, earlier than usual, unpacking an emerald dress from a box and laying it reverently on our bed. ‘I’ve been invited out.’

  ‘Some office romance?’ I knew it wouldn’t be.

  ‘The big boss. Several important clients coming to dinner, and at the last minute he realised they were short of one lady to make up the numbers. Could I step in at short notice - and buy myself a new dress and charge it to the firm.’

  ‘Have a wonderful time,’ I said as she left. And I meant it. I didn’t begrudge her a treat of this kind, though I hoped she wouldn’t move too far, too fast, onto a different level from the one we had comfortably established for ourselves.

  On the music centre I was replaying, for the fourth time, that bit of the concert pieces from Berg’s Lulu where Lulu is carved up by Jack the Ripper, when the front door opened and Amanda came in, tight-lipped. She had been gone less than an hour.

  I flicked the remote control to cut short the wonderful murderous discords. ‘Something wrong? One tycoon refused to sit down with another?’

  ‘The bastard.’ Amanda was not crying, but her eyes were blinking furiously. ‘The rotten bastard.’

  I had never heard her use language like that before, or speak with such venom. Before I could make any soothing noises, or even decide whether they would be welcome, she raged on. ‘When I got there, it turned out that one of the men wasn’t going to show up, so please I wasn’t needed and please would I go home. Only of course the firm would pay for a taxi and I can keep the dress.’

  ‘The bastard.’ I said it more quietly than she had done, but much more decisively.

  ‘How can they expect me to go back to that place? How can I be expected to work there, having to see that disgusting swine swaggering in and out every day? I don’t think I can bear to be in the same building.’ She collapsed into her usual chair.

  ‘No, I don’t see how you can.’ I sat opposite her, both of us in our usual positions. ‘He’ll have to go, won’t he?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Tony. He’s the boss.’

  ‘And we have to remove him.’

  ‘You can’t be serious?’

  I was very serious, and she knew it.

  In the morning I phoned the lab to say I would be late, and accompanied my wife to her place of work. We didn’t discuss exactly what was going to happen, because we didn’t know. But we did know, deep down, that something would.

  We were there watching, concentrating, when Mr Broderick’s black Merc rolled up and he got out, leaving his chauffeur to ease it round the block to the underground car park entrance. We didn’t even know that repairs were going on in the lift shaft. So we could hardly be held responsible, even by ourselves, for the fact that, thirty seconds after the main door had been held open for him by a uniformed commissionaire, Mr Broderick had somehow stepped into the open shaft just as the lift came down on a test run. Someone had failed to take proper safety precautions.

  Or the precautions had been mysteriously overridden.

  That evening we silently watched a television programme dealing with the extirpation of garden pests.

  The following Tuesday I happened to see Deborah in the street with her little boy wriggling in his pushchair. She was preparing to smile at me, even solicit my congratulations, and I could imagine the twee remarks that would come gushing out. I kept walking straight ahead, and before we drew closer she swung the pushchair perilously across the traffic towards the opposite pavement.

  One day she would surely shove it straight under a bus.

  Could I make her do that, simply by looking at her? Not that I’d wish any such tragedy on her, of course. It was over long ago; I had nothing to do with her any more, or she with me.

  But suddenly the sun was shining, catching the weather vane on the town hall tower, and I laughed, and the day was bright with hatred - honest, invigorating hatred, good for the bloodstream and for striding out…and meditating.

  One evening Amanda insisted that we throw a dinner party to celebrate the anniversary of two of her group graduating, or one getting married or remarried, or something equally trivial.

  ‘And you won’t give them any of your looks, will you?’ It was only half a joke.

  There were three of her friends - Marjorie, Christine and Penelope - and their husbands: the pimply one, the confident third-level quango administrator who sweated more liberally and grew noisier with each glass of wine, and the weaselly little bank manager. One thing the three men had in common: they all looked sheepish as their wives burbled on about the famous occasion when the loo had overflowed, or the utterly ghastly day when that dreadful girl from Shrewsbury had brought not just her dreadful father but his awful floozie blind drunk to prizegiving; and that simply frightful Emma something-or-other who had ruined the school choir’s performance of chunks from Hiawatha because she couldn’t read music but couldn’t be chucked out after her father had just presented the school with a new gym.

  The women’s voices rose half an octave in the squawking ecstasy of reminiscence. I watched their lips twisting, pouting, gushing out banalities, and thought how lovely it would be to petrify each of those faces just as they had reached their most grotesque grimace. Like the old childhood threat about pulling faces just as the wind changed.

  As usual, one of them decided it was her turn to dominate the conversation. This time it was Penelope Bibby, whose husband was the quangocrat. On a basis of nudge-nudge secrets which he had confided to her, she liked to do her own bit of nodding and winking, keen to air her knowledge about the workings of insurance companies and investment analysts being given a hard time by a Sunday business-supplement investigation.

  ‘I mean, I ask you, some of the things these companies bury in the small prints! I mean, look at our policy. Do you have a smoke alarm, do you have a fire escape, do you smoke in bed, do you make love at too high a temperature?’ She sniggered. ‘I suppose you meet all the right criteria, Amanda? Still got the rope ladder? Always had it,’ she confided to the rest of us, ‘in the dorm. Scared stiff of being burned alive. Not that they ever pampered us with a proper fire. But Amanda insisted on keeping her rope ladder coiled up under the bed.’

  Amanda had gone very pink and wasn’t laughing. I knew it was true, but it wasn’t one of the memories she lik
ed to toss to and fro. I tried to turn it against the others by asking what each of them was most scared of.

  All the women started babbling at once, as if proud of their lovable little fears and failings. Penelope, anxious to cover up her gaffe, was the loudest of all in her eagerness to tell us of her nightmare of a car windscreen shattering in her face while driving. ‘Broken glass,’ she wailed. ‘My eyes, I’m so sensitive about my eyes. Can’t even bear to have a doctor examining them.’

  Tom Bibby said, ‘Modern windscreens don’t shatter like that.’ The weariness in his tone made it obvious that he had told her this a dozen times before.

  Christine admitted to a terror of moths and butterflies. Her husband looked embarrassed. I said breezily that he ought to take her to the butterfly farm ten miles away and shake her out of it.

  Christine shuddered and glared at me.

  Penelope challenged me. ‘And what about you, Tony? What scares the pants off you?’

  ‘Women,’ I said. ‘Only it’s not so much a matter of scaring them off me…’

  Penelope made a face, but the others laughed thinly, and the moments of tension were over. For the time being.

  When Amanda went out to the kitchen to bring on a fruit pudding she had slaved over after reading the recipe in the back of her gardening magazine, I took some plates out to clear the table. I kissed her. She looked startled. We didn’t usually get demonstrative out of bed, but I felt something reaching between us, coming to fulfilment. I welcomed the sensation, but she was trying to keep it at arm’s length.

  Clasping her hands round the fruit bowl as if to steady herself, she said, ‘I suppose Penny really is getting a bit of a bore.’

  We went back in. Neither of us looked at Penelope, who was still rattling on.

  Tom Bibby was uneasy. I could tell he wanted his wife to shut up, but he wasn’t going to say so in front of the rest of us.

  That night Amanda and I made love more fiercely than either of us had been used to. When it was over, she panted, ‘You were thinking of Penny.’

  ‘Penelope? Good God, I’ve never fancied—’

  ‘Not fancying her. I mean, you’re thinking of how to…wipe her out. And I don’t want anything to do with it.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure.’

  My arm was around her damp shoulders, my lips close to her left ear. ‘If you don’t want to, it won’t work. And it already is working, just the way it did with your boss.’

  ‘That was an accident.’

  ‘One that you willed.’

  She was trembling in the darkness, only it wasn’t really dark. The bedroom was filled with a wonderful light. ‘Tony, what’s going to happen?’

  ‘We’ll have to wait and see.’

  The trouble was that we didn’t actually see it. All we got were garbled but colourful reports a week later.

  Tom and Penelope had been at home, having a candle lit dinner. Very romantic, I’m sure. They didn’t notice one of the candles burning down faster than the other until the glass candlestick cracked. Slivers of glass exploded into Penelope’s face, one of them long enough and sharp enough to reach her brain.

  And I wasn’t even there to see it.

  At the funeral we all shook hands in a silly, solemn way. The women had taken the opportunity to look very chic in their sadness. Christine was wearing a fine black veil. ‘Charming,’ I said. ‘Just like a butterfly net.’

  If she could have spat at me through the veil, I think she’d have done so.

  Her husband was at my elbow. ‘Haven’t you done enough damage?’ He snapped out that he had been stupid enough to listen to me, and had taken her to the butterfly farm. ‘She’s starting treatment with a psychiatrist. Going to cost me a bloody fortune.’

  It was funny. Of course it had to be funny. There’s no pleasure in creating horror for anybody else if you’re horrified yourself. It has to be a superb joke, so private and overwhelming that you don’t want to share it with anybody else.

  Except with a partner who can contribute.

  Late at night, in bed holding hands while Amanda kept sobbing, ‘No … no, please no, Tony,’ as if I were raping her, we found ourselves concentrating on Christine. In spite of all the girlish matiness, between them there must be old scores to settle from way, way back. So together we flooded Christine’s mind with a whirl and swirl of butterflies, and when she screamed and reached out to turn the light on, we willed a squadron of moths towards the bulb.

  Two days later we heard that Christine had gone away for ‘a rest cure’, as Marjorie half fearfully, half gloatingly, put it.

  ‘Tony, that’s enough.’ Amanda flinched when I put my hand on her arm. ‘It’s got to stop. We’re pushing them into things they’re terrified of.’

  ‘More fool them.’

  One Saturday afternoon we went out for a walk. If we hadn’t been together, our minds not concentrating on anything in particular, but free to interlock if triggered, things might not have worked out as they did.

  On the slope above the supermarket we saw Deborah pushing her little boy uphill in his pushchair with a load of groceries in the basket. She glanced at me and looked away.

  Amanda said, ‘Isn’t that the girl you used to … I mean, before we …’

  ‘Yes, that’s her.’

  ‘What right has she got to have a child?’

  It was the first time Amanda had ever mentioned the matter. I couldn’t be sure whether it was her own resentment, or something she had telepathically picked up from me. But we both felt the tug of it, the sudden fierce brightness all round us, and something almost like a halo enfolding the pushchair.

  It broke away from Deborah’s grip and began running downhill, gathering speed. There was nobody close enough to stop it plunging under an artic swinging towards the delivery bay of the supermarket. Somebody somewhere began screaming. And beside me, Amanda was sobbing, ‘No, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t, didn’t. ..’

  It made quite a mess, as if tins of tomatoes in the load had burst and spilled their squashed red contents into the gutter.

  I tried to put an arm round Amanda, but she wrenched herself away. ‘How could you make me do that?’

  ‘I didn’t make you do anything you didn’t want to.’

  Our evenings were no longer so tranquil. At the appointed hour we tried to turn our minds to backgammon or Scrabble, but one evening when she came up with the word MURDER she tried to make out that I had somehow controlled the order of letters. She must have known that it was her own fingers which had selected them. We didn’t go on with that game, or ever start another one.

  We weren’t invited to meals with those of her friends who remained, and we didn’t invite them to our home any more.

  Looking at Amanda across the fireplace one evening, I had a chill feeling that all the joy of hating outwards had been turned inwards. Things I had detested in her friends were deeply ingrained in her, too. How could I ever have married a girl called Amanda? It was such a stupid name. I must always have hated the name Amanda without facing up to the fact. Now it grew daily more and more hateful. Her mannerisms were not just as bad as those of her nauseating clique, but worse. I had never noticed before that when we tried to sit quietly reading, she had a habit of lifting a page long before she was ready to turn it over and scratching the inner edge with a fingernail. And when at last I could bear it no longer and was taking a deep breath before complaining, she said, without looking up, ‘Do you have to keep clicking your tongue against your teeth like that?’

  It dawned on me, almost too late, not only that I hated her and could now feel free to hate her, but that she felt the same about me.

  Who was going to make the first move?

  One Saturday evening I half closed my eyes and willed her to lean forward and fall towards the fire. Like all the others, a straightforward accident. But nothing happened. When she glanced up, I could see in her eyes that she sensed what had been in my mind. He
r defences were primed.

  There was a high wind that night. I heard slates fall on the dustbin and the path beside the back door. On the Sunday morning, Amanda tried to persuade me to fetch a ladder and see to the slates. I said I preferred to wait until Monday and get someone in who was properly qualified for that kind of work.

  ‘You’re scared,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve got no head for heights. You know that.’

  Yes, she knew, all right. But although she concentrated on me, there was no way that, on her own, she could will me up on to that roof. She was stronger than I, and I was growing to envy that and to hate her all the more - all her pretences of unwillingness, of being led astray by me but never quite strong enough if I resisted. Her only chance was if she could catch me unawares.

  And the same went for me and my chances.

  I worked a lot of overtime in the lab, doing simple jobs which required no concentration. Every day was bright now with promise. All the lab equipment shone as if newly installed and not yet stained by use. My mind shone implacably. I was truly alive, made doubly alert by fear and my own power to inflict fear.

  I couldn’t destroy Amanda in anything like the way the others had been destroyed. No remote control this time, and certainly not powerful back-up from her. It had to be close and real. I had to be right there on the spot. This time I wanted to see it happen.

  On the afternoon when I finally made up my mind, I stayed a long time in the Cherry Tree on the way home. I pretended to have had more to drink than I’d really had, blundering into the umbrella stand on the way in and chucking a batch of pages torn from a technical magazine on to the coffee table, grunting as if I had a hard evening’s work ahead of me.

  She hardly bothered to listen to me. She had been turning over the pages of a glossy gardening magazine, scratching each page as she did so. Even if I’d had any doubts, that would have settled it. When she went out to talk gibberish to some seedlings in the greenhouse, I waited a few moments and then followed her.