The New Uncanny

by Priest, Christopher

  In the end fingers were not enough. He needed to see. He could not ask.

  It took him nearly two years to work it out. Then one day while the blind servant was in charge, he stole into Nanny’s bedroom and borrowed the mirror from her dressing table. He took it into the bathroom and began to experiment. His father had by now taught him both some physics and how to play billiards. There had to be a way of angling the light, like angling a delicate in-off with the ivory billiard balls. If he looked in a mirror into another mirror at the right angle, he calculated that perhaps it might be possible. It was awkward. The bathroom was not designed for the purpose and its mirror was fixed to the wall.

  Then, almost unexpectedly, with Nanny’s mirror propped a little precariously on a tooth-mug on the windowsill, he turned his head a little and he saw what it was he was trying to see. The face was paler than his face and had no proper chin so that the mouth was angled slightly too much downwards; but he could see that its nose was very like his and its eyelashes were longer. It was prettier than he was, and it was not a painting or a picture; it was real. It opened its eyes and they were blue, as blue as the summer sky, as blue as his mother’s were in her painting. Its eyes met his and it smiled, a cunning triumphant smile. It was not an it, but a She.

  All women have double mouths, he thought and then he thought that he did not know where the thought had come from.

  After that he could hear her voice. She whispered to him. She used his brain to think her thoughts. She used his breath to be alive. He was never alone. And he could not tell anyone.

  Sometimes it was fun – She was his friend and he had never had a friend before. They played games together, and usually he won because their feet and hands were under his management; but when he tried to run away She would come with him, following close behind, though looking in the other direction, and he could never get away.

  Sometimes it was not fun – She thought thoughts he did not want to think; She said words he did not want to hear and he could never get away.

  He could not have any secrets. He made his life a secret from Daddy and Nanny, but they were not real secrets because She always knew and he could never get away.

  Adolescence. That was what Daddy and Nanny called it, affectionately usually, even proudly. But She called Daddy ‘Papa’ in a sweet little voice, which Daddy would have loved if he could have heard it; and She was mean about Nanny and refused to understand how much he needed and loved her. She complained when he wore a hat; She would wriggle and protest if he tried to lie on his back, to sleep or to look at the sky; She loved the light, and the sunshine, to which he did not like to expose her.

  She hated it when he masturbated. His fingers, now well practised in delicate explorations, had new plans of their own, plans which sometimes he found appalling and sometimes found intriguing and occasionally found absolutely the most fascinating and delightful and demanding and consuming ideas in the whole wide world. She would distract him with loud noises, silly giggles, filthy words and a scathing contempt at his ineptitude, both physical and manual. He was to her both pathetic and disgusting. She was always there, and he could never get away. She had to be kept secret but he was allowed no other secrets, or privacy or silence.

  When he was seventeen he fell in love. A new maid came who sang like a bird in the early morning and was soft and round with dimply cheeks, big breasts, orange hair and a merry smile. He never spoke to her, but he watched and yearned and dreamed and hoped. He wanted without knowing what he wanted. Sweet first love, or first lust without knowing the difference. But She was having none of it. She was jealous and mean and set up a shrieking in his head. Over and over again she shouted, ‘Freak, freak, freak. That one will never love you – she’ll only want to see me.’

  When he tried shouting, ‘freak’ back at her like a little boy, she giggled spitefully and said, ‘No, no. I don’t exist. I am just the freak in you. I don’t have a me. I have a you. I’m not a someone. I’m a part of you. Ask Papa.’

  She said, ‘That little trollop won’t love you; she won’t spread her legs with a Lady watching.’

  ‘Never?’ He asked her plaintively.

  ‘Never,’ She said with undisguised glee.

  ‘I’ll kill you,’ he threatened.

  ‘You can’t,’ she said, ‘You can never get away.’

  So one evening, just as the day began to fade, he left his rooms very quietly so as not to disturb Nanny and went along the passage, but not to find his father. As he passed the bottom of the stairs that went up the attic he remembered the train set with which he and his father had not played for years. It was not enough. He opened various doors into various rooms all heavy with dust and cold. Then he went downstairs to the gun room, wrote a short note for his father and shot Her through the mouth; his mouth because he couldn’t get the shot gun into the back of his head.

  The Underhouse

  Gerard Woodward

  I FIRST GOT the idea for The Underhouse when, as a child, I would stand on my head in a corner of the living room, and thereby find myself in a different house entirely, one where the furniture hung from the ceiling rather than stood on the floor, where light bulbs grew at the tops of tall, thin trees, and where doors had to be passed through like stiles, one leg at a time. I desperately wanted to explore this exotic house, and was profoundly disappointed every time I uprighted myself (at the behest, usually, of my exasperated parents, ‘the blood will pool in his head!’) to find that it had vanished.

  Then, as a grown-up with my own house, I noticed how the cellar, which was underneath only one room (the living room), exactly matched, in shape, the room above it. And then I thought how the horizontal boundaries of rooms, unlike their vertical counterparts, change their essential nature depending on which side you are viewing them from. To put it more simply, a wall is a wall no matter which side of the wall you are. But a floor, when viewed from underneath, becomes a ceiling, which is a very different thing. Do you follow?

  Standing in my cellar one day, looking up at the boards which provided a floor for the living room, I had the turn-around thought; what if I refused to regard this thing above me as a ceiling – what if I decided to call it a floor also? The thing is, it looked like a floor. It was made of wooden boards supported by joists. The only difference was that the joists were foremost, and the boards were rough, dirty wood, whereas on the floor above they’d been varnished and draped with rugs. Dimensionally the only real difference between the cellar and the living room above it was to do with height. The cellar was a much lower room than the living room. I had to stoop whenever I went in there, though in fact this was an unnecessary precaution, for when I measured it it turned out to be six foot five inches from floor to floor boards (i.e. ceiling), and six foot exactly from floor to joist. At five foot eleven I had plenty of headroom, but still I felt the need to stoop.

  The dissimilarity in height between the cellar and the living room became something of an obsession, and eventually I had to do something about it. It was a very simple thing. All I had to do was to lower the floor of the cellar by exactly thirty-seven inches, and the two rooms, above and below, would be perfect spatial mirror images of each other. I suppose it was something to do with symmetry.

  So I took a pickaxe to the floor of the cellar. It hardly needed it. The floor was a ropy thing made of asphalt under a thin layer or concrete. A garden fork could just as well have done the job. It yielded, under its crisp shell, thousands of sticky, black grains that I had to scoop into a bucket and carry upstairs and out into the back garden. Beneath the asphalt I was into the raw earth of the world under my house, which I dug down into. Then when I had gone far enough, I leveled off and finished with a layer of good cement. It was hard, aching work, and took me several weeks (I’m not as strong as I was). But at the end of my work I had a room, below my living room, that was its proportional twin.

  It occurred to me then to set about duplication of the room above in other ways. Firstly I bought floo
rboards to nail over the joists of the cellar ceiling to form a perfect replica of the floor above. In effect I now had two floors back to back. Onto this upside-down floor I tacked rugs identical to those in my living room, and in the same position. I bought furniture identical to the furniture in my living room, and placed it on the upside down floor of the cellar, in identical positions once again. This was a harder task, and one I could only just manage on my own. Bolting a settee to the ceiling of a cellar is work for a strong man. I will not go into details about how I managed it, except to say that I adapted techniques I read about in an account of the building of Salisbury Cathedral. Nor will I detail the many journeys I had to make in order to find chairs identical to those that furnished the living room. But the exquisite delight I felt when I achieved my aim, when I found my replica suite, my coffee-table’s double, the lamp-stand’s long lost and long-forgotten twin, in some distant junk shop or car-boot, was indescribable. Though perhaps it is not unlike that experienced by an actual twin, who has been deprived of the knowledge all his life, to find himself reunited with his brother from the womb.

  I now had everything on the floor of my living room reproduced exactly upside down on the ceiling of the cellar, bolted fast, the cushions of the seats stitched to them, and all other precautions taken to make a convincing upside-down room, identical to the original.

  And so I began work on the walls. Bare brick in the cellar, I plastered them as best I could (I’m no handyman, really), and after a reasonable period of drying out, papered them with the rose pattern I had so long lived with (and which was very, very hard to find). The paintings that hang on them were also difficult to reproduce, and I had to try my hand at copying one of the simpler ones myself, the result of which endeavour surprised and pleased me. It took me several years of hard work to reproduce everything in the living room. One thing I couldn’t reproduce, of course, was the view from the front bay window. I had to satisfy myself that drawn curtains would do. Eventually I worked out how to make them hang convincingly, which involved a hidden rail at the bottom of the curtain, so that in reality the curtains hang downwards into the pelmet. I succeeded very well, I think, in giving them a convincingly unfastened look.

  The most enjoyable touches were the two light fittings (one a chandelier) that in the real room hang from the ceiling on thin lengths of flex. Again, trompe l’oeil was involved in producing flex that would hang upwards and support a shade; moreover, I fashioned a modest chandelier, just like the one above ground, and managed, with glue and solder, to make the crystals hang upwards instead of downwards. I think if there is any true crowning glory to my upside-down room, it is in the upside-down chandelier, with all its crystals pouring casually upwards as if there was nothing untoward in their world at all. Of course, I wired the lights up to work just like the lights in the real living room.

  Completed, my project gave me many moments of unspeakable joy. Just sitting in my arm chair, knowing that beneath the floor there was another armchair, hanging, in a room where everything else hung that should have stood, and which stood that should have hung, just knowing it was there, was enough to cause delight. It was as though my life was a reflection in a pool, into which I could actually enter. It was as though narcissus could indeed embrace his own reflection.

  The experience of descending the cellar stairs into the inverted world below, to suddenly find oneself the only upright thing in a room turned upside-down, to be given the sense that gravity pushes upwards rather than downwards, to feel oneself floating, in fact, was an experience of delirious, dreamy delight.

  And one I had to share.

  So that is how I came to bamboozle acquaintances I met at The Earl of Chatham, the rather innocent, almost destitute young men who frequented that once family-friendly place, and who could easily be bought drinks. I would invite them home, after many reassurances that I was not an old queen, and they would accompany me back, usually because they had nowhere better to go, and not much prospect of a roof over their head for the night. I would sit them in the armchair, plying them with Jim Beams and playing Count Basie on the record player, until they passed out in a drunken swoon. Then I would carry them down to the cellar, lay them down on the floor (the ceiling), and leave them alone to wake up, but still with Count Basie playing on the now upside-down record player. I would return to the right-way-up-room, and wait. It could take a long time, but eventually there would come a cry from downstairs. ‘Jesus Christ’ they might say, ‘Holy Jesus, get me down, get me down,’ and I would go downstairs into the cellar, peep at them from round the corner and see them writhing on the floor (the ceiling), petrified at their weightlessness, terrified at their defiance of gravity. At first I would hang from the stairwell and peek at them upside-down, as if I too were part of the upside-down world, to increase their sense of being on the ceiling.

  ‘What’s the matter old chap,’ I would say, ‘feeling a bit light headed?’

  They would stare at me with about-to-be-shot eyes, hyperventilating, unable to find words, pressing themselves to the floor (the ceiling).

  ‘You should be pleased, old chap,’ I would say, ‘you’ve learnt how to fly. Aren’t you the clever one?’

  I would then reassure them that it was simply something they’d drunk. I would tell them to close their eyes and let me take care of them. Then I’d carry them back upstairs, plonk them down in the right-way-up living room, tell them to open their eyes again. From their perspective they had not left the room at all, merely descended from its ceiling to its floor. The look of tender alarm on their faces, as they felt about the arms of the chair, and the floor with their feet, to ascertain whether they really were back on the ground, and the way they looked up at the ceiling, apprehensive of the horrible notion that they might, at any moment, plummet towards it, was something to cherish.

  I have plans for extending my underhouse, so that the whole house, every room including the loft, should be duplicated. It would be a work of many, many years, and one I may not live long enough to complete. To open up so much empty space beneath my own house could be dangerous. I have this peculiar thought that, having completed my duplicate upside-down house, and having weakened the foundations of the right-way-up house, the latter will eventually collapse into the former. If the right-way-up house fell down into the upside-down-house, one must suppose that the two would cancel each other out, and that both houses would simply disappear. And if I happen to be asleep in my bed (right way up or upside down – how would I know?) what would become of me? I would have folded myself out of existence. A rather attractive thought. I’d better start digging.

  The Dummy

  Nicholas Royle

  THE FEATURELESS ROAD. The driving rain.

  White lines, empty fields.

  The endless rhythm of the stop-go shunt, a Newton’s cradle of cars on the motorway heading north-west. The occasional church spire in the distance piercing the dark grey wadding of the clouds. The monotony is relieved by a fizzing spot of fluorescent yellow up ahead. You squint, peer through the windscreen, rub with your sleeve at a stubborn patch of fog on the glass. The view clears. The fluorescent spot grows, elongates, becomes a figure.

  The motorway narrows from three lanes down to two. The traffic slows accordingly. The man in the high-visibility clothing moves his left arm up and down, telling you to slow down further. He’s standing hard by the crash barrier on the central reservation. He’s either suicidal or insane or both. There has to be a better way to warn drivers of impending hazards, you think. Sure, he’s completely covered in hi-vis gear, from the hood of his jacket to the turn-ups of his trousers, but you can’t imagine this man’s UK counterpart happily standing that close to moving traffic on the M1. Maybe the Belgians pay danger money, or perhaps, as seems likely from the standard of the driving, all Belgians are clinically insane. Admittedly this may be the birthplace of surrealism, but still.

  You twist your head for a closer look as you roll past. The planes of his face seem abnorma
lly severe, his skin unnaturally smooth. Do motorway maintenance workers really shave every morning?

  *

  ‘Tell me where it comes from, this love of our country.’

  Asking the question was a striking young woman of slender build and average height, her irregularly cut mahogany-coloured hair framing a face shaped like a warning sign. Eyes that glittered; a short, sharp nose, pointed like the bill of a goldfinch; lips painted a vivid red. When she leaned forward across the hotel breakfast table, peripheral vision gifted me a view down the front of her top.

  ‘What’s not to love about it?’ I said, careful not to let my eyes drop. ‘Beer, chocolate, medieval architecture.’

  ‘In that order?’

  She flashed her teeth; one was chipped at the corner. Either her lower lip was uneven or she twisted it unconsciously while she spoke. I remembered reading somewhere that beauty was all down to symmetry. I’d thought it was rubbish at the time and now here was proof.

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘No, but…’ she started, signalling the switch to serious interview mode by picking up a sachet of sugar and turning it end on end on the tablecloth. ‘The Eddy De Groot novels are bestsellers. You’re not telling me his creator is inspired by nothing more than a desire to sit drinking Duvel at pavement cafés in the Grote Markt.’