Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume Three

by Simon Strantzas

  I crossed and uncrossed my legs beneath the blankets. I threw everything off me and then dragged it all back, no longer tucked in by my mother, no more in proper layers. Clarinda was immoveable from the centre of things, and Ronnie was grinning obscenely at the very outer fringe, a changed entity indeed from the hapless youth I had so unwisely tried to aid. To be compelled to play second in life to Ronnie Cassell was the supreme outrage; and the sense of it kept my mind and feelings well in touch with the mystery of why Clarinda had seen fit to cast me away so frivolously, doing herself so singularly little good in the process. The fundamental madness of life, suspected since earliest days at my prep school, was for me finally confirmed that dreadful first night after I knew of Clarinda’s death.

  I suppose I must have dropped off, none the less; as insomniacs, they say, usually do, and usually sooner rather than later. I do not wish to suggest for a moment that what follows was anything but a second dream; though for a dream it was very convincing. There was nothing irrational about it, apart from the fact of its happening at all.

  I seemed once more to be awake, and once more to be half listening to that throbbing. But this time the explanation came to me at the point where things do explain themselves in dreams: the throbbing was that of my own heart. The sound, frightening enough at the best, was probably magnified by the expectation, the virtual certainty, of something strange that was about to happen. I drew myself tightly together and gazed at the three bedroom windows, one after another. Was something of this kind going to happen to me every night?

  I doubt whether there had ever been separate panes in these windows. I think that single sheets of plate glass had filled all the sashes from the outset. I knew very well, as I have said, that the house was not of a good period, even though inconceivably worse have followed everywhere. In addition, the three equally sized windows were of course far, far larger than the single one at my lodging in Trotters Park. My dream image of Clarinda would never fill one of these huge windows. What should I make of the message or messages she would be trying to force through the thick glass?

  But I could see no-one. I was unable to make up my mind whether to glimpse fleetingly and through half-shut eyes, or to stare steadily. I felt very cold. Normally, I make a point of never feeling cold. Normally, it is quite unnecessary. I have made that clear already.

  I suspected that everything was rising to a climax, for which my inability to sleep had been a preparation. No-one, we must remember, has ever been able to define the relationship between dream and non-dream.

  Then I saw that Clarinda was merely standing quite near my bed: not, this time, outside the room, but inside. Well though I knew it was a dream, I could not stretch out my arms to her, because tonight I knew she was dead, whereas last night I had at least supposed her to be alive―as, indeed, at the exact hour, and for all I knew, possibly she still had been. In any case, I could not stretch one muscle, owing to the paralysing cold.

  I had to leave it to Clarinda to speak first. My jaws were not chattering, as in a children’s comic, but rigid, as one day they would be forever. I remember appreciating that at the time, quite clearly.

  “It’s the snow,” said Clarinda.

  She smiled a little, and I managed to force a response.

  “It’s too early for snow,” I said.

  I could see that same faint luminousness round her head; perhaps round much or all of her. The dream had vouchsafed it so that I could see her at all.

  “Let me in, Richard. I take back what I said about you.”

  “You’d better,” I rejoined. “All things considered.”

  “Take me in your arms, Richard.”

  But that was precisely what I could not do: not that second time. In the first place, though I had managed somehow to speak, perhaps not with my normal and ordinary voice, I remained seemingly unable to move at all. It is a condition of things that most of us know very well; though mainly in dreams. In the second place, Clarinda’s costly nightdress, if nightdress it really was, was visibly splashed and smeared. There was somehow enough light for me to see the marks quite clearly; fresh marks, and in no definable colours at all. I only report the facts as I experienced them; the facts of this surely remarkable dream.

  On the previous night, of course, there had been no real opportunity for me to look. And then it will be remembered that I had expressly and consciously decided to waste no time. On this second occasion, it was as if there were an element of complicity between Clarinda and me; as if I had been supposed to understand all along.

  “Richard!” said Clarinda very quietly. Then again, “Richard! I’m cold. Let me in, Richard. I’m sorry for what I said. I’ve told you.”

  But there had risen within me the memory of that unspeakable scene in the room at Hilltop. The distinctive lucidity of nightmare was surging through me: the nightmare lucidity that destroys the safeguard barriers of time, place, and all things like them, that anticipate death. I saw everything at the same moment, as, during life, one only does in nightmares, and then normally only for seconds; one supposes, because normally in seconds one wakes up.

  “I’m sorry for what I did, Richard. Forgive me, Richard. I’m cold. It’s the cold snow.”

  This time there was a faint petulance in her speech; such as I had occasionally noticed before in her. The spoilt little rich girl, I had supposed, despite all her tragedies.

  I even responded quite vehemently.

  “There’s no snow,” I cried. “It’s only October. There’s no snow.”

  “Richard, there is!”

  Now she was being sophisticatedly childlike; always one of her most appealing devices. I doubt whether I could have stood out much longer; but what happened was that we were interrupted.

  I must have shouted out quite loudly, because, suddenly, my mother was in the room. She was soothing me, offering me a warm herbal drink which she always had by her in a flask, retucking the messed up bed. There would now barely have been lodging for Clarinda, even had she remained, even had I not merely been dreaming.

  I say that I must have shouted, because my mother’s room was a fair distance away. I realise, however, that quite probably she had been listening for a cry, and either not sleeping at all, or sleeping as mothers sleep.

  We could still hear the sound of my father’s rather old-fashioned calculating machine downstairs; and glanced at one another with understanding.

  “My own sweet darling cuddly possum,” said my mother, kissing me tenderly in many different places. “Here’s something will make you sleep.” She fished for it in the pocket of her penoir. “My grandmother told me, and her grandmother told her, and back and back we go to the days of the whispering sisters.”

  I took the thing, but not very eagerly.

  “What about the smell?” I asked.

  “That helps you to sleep,” my mother said. “Where do I put it?”

  “Against your skin and keep it there every night you are in the house, which I hope will be lots and lots of nights, and every night after that for a long long time.”

  “How long?” I asked. Then I wavered. “Well, approximately. How long in all?”

  “Until I ask for it back, sweety-pie. It’s only a loan. Remember it’s mine and don’t you lose it.”

  Naturally, I promised.

  ###

  I suppose I was hanging about in my dear mother’s care for at least three weeks on that occasion; and, whatever the reason, I have to admit that I did not dream of Clarinda again. In fact, I did not resume dreaming about her for nearly a year, though ever since then I have done so frequently, and glad I am of it.

  Some time during the three weeks, I had a letter from a firm of solicitors. I knew about them. They were Bream & Ladywell’s solicitors. Clarinda, raised in finance and in disaster, had not omitted to make her will; and she had left me £100 and a little box from Goa, whence, as she had told me, her real family had long ago come, for all her pale hair and fragile frame. I hardly knew what to t
hink. But not even that incident made me dream again of Clarinda; not yet awhile.

  However, there was something else that happened; something that would have given anyone a turn. Among other things, it showed how swiftly the word could get about, and not only the mere word.

  As the days passed, I had taken to strolling about the local roads and woodlands, partly because my mother said it would be good for me and I wished to please her, partly in order to think hard about what it would be best for me to do next in my life. It was November now, with snow imminent but never quite falling, and my mother wrapped me up so tightly that I could hardly have strolled at all if I had not each afternoon surreptitiously discarded the half of it in my father’s small, disused shed before I set out.

  I had to stroll alone. My mother’s friends were elderly, and of course the youth of the district were normally hard at it during my strolling hours, when they were not laid up themselves. My father liked only precise and purposeful activity, as on the Cowholt golf course, or in the Coolins. My mother could not go out for long, as my father, like many men in retirement, did not like it. Fortunately, I had no objection to strolling alone. I took it that I could think better.

  The immediate neighbourhood was made up of huge houses, in many different styles, which people could no longer afford fully to maintain, so that they were two-thirds shut up, or which had already been divided and sub-divided, or sold out to the bureaucrats. One of these, six or seven houses down the hill from Scarsdale, and on the same side of the road, was a particularly fine edifice in the Dalmatian style, or perhaps the Illyrian, which seemingly had never been occupied at any time during the short period I had known the district. The crenellations were crumbling, and the elaborate stackpipes parting from their ornamental cramps. Such desolate structures were also a common feature of the area by that time: no-one quite knew what was happening to them. The particular house I describe was named Umberslade. I see no reason why I should not impart that. Perhaps it had not been the original name.

  I had always liked to include a glimpse at Umberslade in my strolling itineraries. The building was full of suggestions as to what my future career might be. Ornamental brickwork, ironwork, and stonework were the coming thing, if they could be marketed in small enough lots.

  On one of those afternoons during my rest cure, and for the first time ever, I heard a sound in the house. It was the sound of a piano being played, and I could hear it even though the house was set well back and none of the windows seemed to be open. At first, I thought, as one would, that it was the radio turned on by the cleaner; but what I thought next, as I stood there, was very different. I knew whose playing it was. There could be no mistake. It was a distinctive as the playing of Mark Hamburg or of Myra Hess: all three in their different ways, of course.

  The curious thing was that I did not turn aside immediately and retreat the short distance up the road to the home-made teacakes that were awaiting me. On the contrary, I entered the actual grounds of Umberslade for the first time in my life, and stole quite rapidly, though gingerly, up to the nearest groundfloor window. I had not even needed to open the heavy gate, because the heavy gate was always open; indeed, impossible to shut, almost certainly.

  The windows, more or less as in a villa by the sea at Ragusa or Fiume, were set so high in the stuccoed wall that I could not see through them without standing on a brick; but there were plenty of bricks lying about on the lawn, all dank and black. One additional trouble was that the fairly wide horizontal gratings which admitted light to the servants’ quarters below, were so cracked and rusted that I had to stand well back from them, which made interior inspection unreliable. No doubt this fact should be borne in mind. And all the time of course I could hear the unintermitting, clattering melody: the unforgettable music.

  The first room was empty. Distanced as I was, I could not even make out the decorations, let alone describe them. I moved my brick. The second room was empty. I moved my brick again, though wormcasts were now adhering to it. The third room was empty, and this time there was some kind of unpleasant mist inside. That mist upset me considerably. But I moved my brick once more, and, through the fourth window, I hit the jackpot, or relatively so.

  Now I have emphasised that it was impossible for me to see anything inside Umberslade very clearly. None the less, I am perfectly certain that there, inside that fourth room, were not merely the pianist brother, evenly hammering out the same black-and-white notes (and by God knows whom, till hell freeze or the Flying Dutchman turn up; not merely the glamorous Vera, whose hair was now quite white, sitting close behind the brother, presumably on a second stool; but also the languid husband, spattered forever against a wall, obviously with hardly a bone in his body; and, worst of all, worst at least as far as I was concerned, the shifting cloud of black female rags that might or might not have an independent existence, but that, according to the publicity, executed tricks, and that had already made me take to my heels once, to my fleetest form as a one-time amateur quarter-miler.

  Vera’s dank hair was yellow as rotted vegetation; or as far as I could make out through an uncleaned window. Perhaps the marks on the brother’s face were different too. It was hard to say. I clutched hard at the thing my mother had given me to make me sleep, and which I found I was now carrying everywhere.

  I have said that I could discern only the vaguest hints of interior fittings anywhere, but I was as sure as I could be that the Z― family was occupying unfurnished accommodation, as always: in the strictest sense of the term. A piano could be readily hired in Suddington, and this one was a mere tinkly upright. As for friends such as themselves, it took time to find congenial people in Suddington, as the experience of my own, perfectly normal and ordinary, flesh and blood had confirmed.

  ###

  I did, to a certain extent, speak up over the teacakes.

  “Everyone says the house has been empty for years,” said my mother, “but, now you mention it, Theresa Baldock told me that there was to be an entertainment for charity. She gave me a leaflet. I’ll see if I can find it.”

  “How do you know Mrs Baldock?” I asked rudely.

  “Only because she’s a friend of poor Mrs Ground.”

  “Who’s Mrs Ground?”

  “She’s a good friend of Muriel Ransome’s. Susan Halston’s friend. You remember.”

  We both paused. I myself was trying to swallow a hot teacake at a moment when my throat muscles were like metal sheets.

  My mother spoke again. “How do you know Mrs Baldock, lambkin?”

  “Only charitably,” I mumbled. “And long ago.”

  “There’s no long ago for you, pet, yet awhile, and thank God for it.”

  I cleared as best I could the muscles needed for speech. “Are you thinking of being there?” I asked.

  My mother tumbled her locks. “Nowadays your father goes mad if he’s left quite alone all the evening.”

  When making such an observation to a son, a mother either looks brassy or she looks conspiratorial. My own mother looked conspiratorial. We might almost have exchanged a wink.

  “I sometimes think we’re all mad,” I said vaguely. “Everyone in the world, I mean.”

  “That shows it’s beddybyes time for you again,” said my mother, dimpling.

  “Try to finish the last two before you go up. I’ll watch quietly.”

  ###

  The specific re-entry of the Z― family into my life was far too much to be explained by coincidence. I admit that I panicked. Or not far short of it. Should I ever cast them off? Even if I became a mountaineer, like my father; or a polar explorer, like my father’s one-time friend, the captain? Neither of which had I any intention of becoming? It was a very natural question.

  What I actually did was withdraw to a certain town in our own sleepy West Country. I had answered an advertisement for a qualified auctioneer’s assistant.

  And, years later I had built up my own successful art rooms and sale galleries: not equal as yet, I admit, to
Satterthwaite & Organblack, nor likely to be while Dalton Pinemould remains in control there; but far ahead (and this is the truth) of at least nine out of ten of even the better provincial establishments, and with vastly more education than most can offer at the bottom of the detailed work. It is a type of business in which education can be very advantageous, though many seem to thrive without it.

  I admit that I took to reading in a bigger way than before, and precisely because of what had happened to me. For a spell, I was not so keen as I had been on taking different women out in the evening. In any case, all the women in that particular town were identical. I know that matters very little to many men.

  I myself became more normal and ordinary again before very long. I am sure of it. Though never completely so. My business gained accordingly. My state of soul lost. It is an old story.

  In the end, I was even composing little brochures of my own; one brochure about those iron, steel, and plastic discs that hold buildings up, and that come in an amazing variety of sizes and patterns, where an investigator cares to go into the matter; another about firebricks, in all the many forms that find their way on to the market. And now comes this narrative of my own experiences at a period of my earlier life: a decisive period. I once read all the novels of Sir Walter Scott, but I doubt whether even he went to more trouble than I have.

  Ultimately, as I have stated, I began to dream about Clarinda once more; and quite often. But I never again lighted upon the Z― family after my eavesdropping at Umberslade. Not knowingly, that is. I feel there could be other ways.