He drew comfort from that thought. He even began to wish he had stayed a little longer in Murdock’s back room and even considered returning to take another look, but decided not to.
And he wouldn’t mention anything about his visit to Barbara, apart from telling her that he had not been able to contact Murdock at all. No point in upsetting her even more.
He went back to the main road and drove home.
THE PHONE RANG twice that evening, but Franz did not answer it. He felt guilty and slightly irritated about not doing so but his mind was not sufficiently calm to deal with his sister and her worries. He was certain it was her who was calling, as hardly anyone else ever did.
Next day, Monday, he worked on his computer at home, and in the afternoon returned to the library to continue his research on his project. When the library closed, he went to a supermarket to buy supplies. He was loaded down with bags of food as he approached his front door, behind which he could clearly hear his phone ringing. Flustered by the urgent sound, he tried his best to get to it in time, but fumbled with his key and almost dropped some of his bags. Meanwhile, the phone stopped ringing.
He knew he ought to call his sister but was still unready to do so. No doubt she would call back.
She did, almost an hour later. This time he picked up the receiver.
“Hello, you’re there at last then,” Barbara said, then seemed to whisper something that he didn’t catch.
“Sorry, could you repeat that?”
“No, Franz, it doesn’t matter.”
“I went round to Murdock’s place yesterday. He wasn’t there. No sign of him. Did you know he has a dog, though? That was a surprise. He’s never seemed to me to be a pet-loving sort of person.”
“No, he’s never mentioned a dog to me. What kind of dog?”
Franz realised he had no idea. The boy had run away with the creature so quickly he’d not been able to get a look at it. He explained as much to his sister, who did not sound particularly interested.
“Anyway,” she said, “I’ll be able to ask him about it. He’s back now.”
“What!”
“Yes, it was all a misunderstanding. He’s been ill and he didn’t want to tell us for some reason, so he slipped away.”
“Slipped away?”
“And he’s done it again now. He’s coming to see you. He should be there in ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes.”
“That’s correct. Stop repeating what I say, please.”
“But why would he want to come here? Did you give him my address? He’s never been here before.”
“No, I didn’t need to. He must know it. Anyway, he’s heading in your direction now. He left as soon as you answered the phone and I told him you were in.”
“But Barbara, you shouldn’t have done that.”
“Why on earth not?”
“I don’t want to see him. I particularly don’t. The bastard. What does he want with me?”
“Franz, it’s not like you to talk of anybody like that. He said he just wants to thank you.”
“For what?”
“Oh, I don’t know. For caring enough to take the trouble to call on him?”
“Did you tell him I’d done that?”
“Not that I can remember, no. I didn’t know you had.”
“He was supposed to be ill, wasn’t he?”
“Perhaps he was too ill to answer the door.”
“No, he bloody wasn’t.”
“Franz, what’s got into you? You’re not normally like this.”
Realising he had to end the conversation to prepare for Murdock’s visit, Franz gruffly apologised, said he’d probably call her back later, and put down the phone. He went round his house, checking all the doors and windows were shut and pulled all the curtains on the ground floor. Then he went up to his bedroom to watch and wait.
HE WAITED IN the darkest part of his bedroom and kept watch on the street in front of his house. After about ten minutes, a small unmarked white van drew up against the opposite pavement. The driver turned off the engine but didn’t get out immediately, confirming, somehow, Franz’s guess that Murdock was the occupant of the vehicle. This proved correct when the door suddenly swung open some time later and Murdock’s huge bulk clambered into view. He was dressed in some kind of duffle coat with a hood concealing his face, but Franz recognized the shuffling glide of his feet as he went round to the back of the van and opened the rear door. The dog ran out.
It doesn’t look too happy, Franz thought. It had its tail between its legs and slunk along with its belly almost touching the ground. Murdock closed the back of the van and crossed the street towards Franz’s house with the dog following close behind.
Franz moved backward a couple of steps, fearing he might be visible from the street. Murdock moved up to his front door and Franz expected him to knock or ring the bell, but it didn’t happen.
Guessing that Murdock was reconnoitering his house, Franz waited to see what move his visitor would make next. After a long silence, he heard his letter box squeak. Then Murdock appeared in his little front garden again, pursued by the dog. As he got to the point where the garden ended and the street began, he stopped, turned, looked up to where Franz had concealed himself, and raised an arm in some sort of salute. At the same time the hood fell back and Franz saw that he was smiling broadly, almost laughing. He turned, crossed the street, let the dog in the back of the van, got in himself and drove away.
After waiting a few minutes in the dark, Franz ventured out of his bedroom and went downstairs without turning on any lights. He saw that a folded piece of paper had been posted through his letterbox. There was enough light from the street lamp outside his house for him to see, when he unfolded the paper, that there was nothing written on it at all. But he got the message.
He spent the next half hour going round his house with a little torch and filling his rucksack with essentials for travel. He made sure he had his passport, credit cards in his wallet, and some folding money.
Then, after checking to make sure there was no sign of the white van anywhere nearby, he ran out to his car and drove swiftly away. After parking in the airport lot, he checked the departures board, then walked up to the Scandinavian Airlines stand and bought a one-way ticket. He wasn’t sure how long he was going to be away, but it was definitely time he took a break He’d decided he had a lot to get away from.
NEXT MORNING, AT about eleven o’clock as usual, Murdock lumbered into Jerry’s room without knocking, with a selection of daily newspapers under his arm. He lit a cigar, sat down close to Jerry’s wheelchair, and spread the papers on the table in front of him.
“Anything especially grim today?” Jerry asked, genuinely expectant of some entertaining bad news.
Murdock made a play of searching through the sheets of paper as he said, “Well, not much actually, it’s been a good day for the world, all thing considered, but I did spot one small item of interest. Now let me see… ah, here we have it.” He held up a page of newspaper and said, “It seems a 747 came off the runway in Oslo last night and hit a luggage vehicle.”
“Much harm done?”
“A few people hurt in the ensuing fire but only one fatality.”
“Oh. Hardly worth mentioning, then.”
“It says here that the dead man was believed to be carrying an English passport but the body was too badly burned to be identified. Next of kin have yet to be informed.”
“They’ll soon sort that out,” Jerry said, without much interest.
Murdock, who seemed to be very pleased about something, perhaps just himself, said, “I expect they already have done.”
Downstairs, sounding faintly mournful and further away than it actually was, a phone began to ring.
FLORRIE
ADAM L. G. NEVILL
If anybody has proved the persistent popularity of supernatural fiction, then it is Adam Nevill. His three novels, Banquet for The Damned, Apartment 16 and The Ritual, have
all received critical and commercial success. Adam’s love for the genre comes through in every one of his tales and the story that follows proves his mastery of the form. The place where Florrie lives is, at first glance, not all that remarkable, but once her story is told, you’ll never forget her.
FRANK REMEMBERED HIS mother once saying, “houses give off a feeling,” and that she could ‘sense things’ inside them. At the time, he was a boy and his family had been drifting around prospective family homes. He only remembered the occasion because his mother was distressed by a house they had just viewed; if not hurried away from, to get back to the car. But all he could recall of the property now was a print of a blue-faced Christ within a gilt frame; the only thing on any of the walls. And the beds were unmade, which also shocked his mother. His father never contradicted his mother on these occasional matters of a psychic nature, though his father never encouraged her to hold forth on them either. “Something terrible happened there,” was his mother’s final remark once the car doors were shut, and it was never mentioned again. But Frank had been perplexed by the incongruity of a house belonging to Christians issuing an unpleasant ‘feeling.’ Surely the opposite should have been true.
Frank amused himself trying to second guess her intuition about the first home he’d ever owned. He knew what his Dad would say about the 120% mortgage he’d arranged for it. But once it was fixed up, he’d have them down. To his place. His own place, after ten years of shared accommodation.
The narrow frontage of grubby bricks faced a drab street, cramped with identical terraced houses leaning over a road so narrow that two cars from opposite ends struggled to pass each other. But a final jiggle of the Yale key moved him out of the weak rainy light to enter the unlit hallway, its air thick with trapped warmth. A cloud of stale upholstery, thoroughly boiled cauliflower, and a trace of floral perfume descended about him.
He assured himself the house would soon exude the scents of his world: the single professional who could cook a bit of Thai, liked entertaining and used Hugo Boss toiletries. Once he’d ripped out the old carpets, stripped the walls, and generally ‘torn the shit out of it,’ as his best friend, Marcus, had remarked with a decisive relish, the house would quickly lose the malodour of the wrong decade, age group and gender.
Enshrouded by weak light about windows begrimed with silt and a thicket of silvery nets, before he managed to place a foot inside the front room, he realised the place had not been cleared of the former owner’s furniture. There had been a mistake. It was like he had mixed up the dates and stepped into what was still someone else’s home; as if she still lived there. “Pure ’seventies Nan,” Marcus had commented with a grin on his face, the evening he’d visited to assist Frank’s purchasing decision between this two-up, two-down terrace, and an ex-council property in Weoley Castle that needed an airstrike more than a first time buyer.
Poking from a Bakelite fitting, he found the chunky light switch, which was the same colour as the skirting boards, kitchen cupboards and the fittings: vanilla ice cream left too long in a freezer drawer, or the plastic of artificial limbs used until the 1970s. The ceiling fixture emitted a smoky glow from inside a plastic shade, patterned with all the colours inside a tin of fruit cocktail.
As he stared at the cluttered room, his distaste and irritation swiftly fashioned fantasies of destruction towards everything inside: the rosewood sideboard; the gas fire grill that resembled the front of an old car, with plastic coals that would glow in the hearth; the ancient television in a wooden cabinet, the small screen concave like a poorly ground lens in a pair of NHS spectacles; the tufted sofa, exhausted and faded from a thing plush and dark four decades prior, but now sagging into the suggestion of a shabby velour glove, dropped from a giant’s hand. It all seemed offensive. An affront to taste. An issued intention to drag him backwards in time, choking him with disenchantment and despair as he went, kicking.
Beneath his feet the dark red carpet swirled with green fronds that reminded him of chameleon tongues. He looked down at it, into it. The carpet absorbed most of the dim electric light. And it also seemed to suck the emotion out of Frank. In the dusty gloom, he felt chastened. Embarrassed and feckless, as if he had made an inappropriate remark in polite company. He steadied himself against a wall, the paper old and fuzzy against his fingers; the vine pattern no longer lilac on cream but sepia on parchment. About him the warmth and powerful fragrance of the room intensified, as did his curious guilt. Momentarily, he was overwhelmed with remorse too, as if made to observe the additional distress his destructive thoughts had inflicted upon someone already frightened and long persecuted. He wanted to apologise to the room, out loud.
Only the sound of a delivery truck, reversing and beeping outside, stirred him out of his inexplicable shame. The unpleasant feelings passed and he surveyed the room again. Where to start?
Before he could pull up a single carpet tack, the furniture would have to be removed. All of it. He reached for his phone. This also meant the terrible Formica dining table with extendable flaps would be in the second downstairs room, along with the hideous quilted chairs. He checked: it was. “Fuck’s sake,” he whispered, then wondered why he’d kept his voice down, as if told to by an adult.
He jogged up the narrow stairwell to expel the onset of fatigue, presumably caused by the stifling air. Or because his limbs demanded reparation for the accumulation of stress he’d endured for months preceding the exchange of keys.
The master bedroom remained choked by the immense walnut-veneered wardrobe he’d seen on repeat viewings. Beside the towering wardrobe stood the teak dresser in defiance. A bed that had survived the Luftwaffe’s bombing of munitions factories on the nearby Grand Union Canal appeared implacable and vast enough to fill most of the floor space.
One quick look around the door of the second bedroom confirmed a total repudiation of the estate agent’s promise that the house “would be emptied by the time of your possession,” because the room was still being used in absentia by the previous owner as a depository for cardboard suitcases, Christmas decorations from the 1970s, candlewick bedspreads, candy-striped linen, and knitting paraphernalia.
On the tiny landing under the white hardboard loft hatch, he went cold and wondered if the old woman had moved out, or maybe even come back. “Went to a retirement home, I think,” the wanker that was the estate agent, Justin, of Watkins Perch and Manly, had said when Frank had asked about the former occupant. So why hadn’t her relatives collected her things?
Because she had no one at the end.
An unwelcome notion of age, its indignities, and its steady erasure of who you had been, and the recycling of the tiny position that had been your own in the world, overwhelmed him. The same tragic end game might befall him. One day. Right here. A sudden acute empathy with a loneliness that was absolute disoriented Frank. And it took a conscious effort to suppress the awful feeling. He went downstairs, quickly, wiping at his eyes.
To listen to an answer machine at the estate agents. He left a curt message. Then turned about in the living room and forced a change of tack in his thoughts, by visualising the renovation he and Marcus intended: wooden floors, white walls, wooden blinds, minimalist light fittings, dimmers, wall mounted TV, black and white movie stills in steel frames on the walls, leather furniture, a stainless steel kitchen, a paved yard for outside dining, a spare room for his gadgets, guests and neat closet space, and nothing in the master bedroom but a bed and a standing lamp. Danish stylings throughout. Clean lines, simple colours. Space, light, peace, modernity, protection.
He had his work cut out.
ON THE FRIDAY of his first week in the house, the former resident’s furniture was still in place, as it had been for long enough to leave the carpet dark beneath the sofa and solitary armchair in the living room. He hadn’t been able to begin stripping the walls of the living room or bedrooms. Until the furniture was hauled away, the kitchen was the only part of the house he could dismantle. Though he had become fon
d of using the kitchen to make egg and chips, which he’d not eaten since he was at school, and he also liked to listen to the radio in there. So he’d staved off pulling down any of the old wooden cabinets with their frosted glass doors. There was something cosy and confirming about the cupboards and the little white stove. And anyway, Marcus would arrive the next morning, Saturday, with his tools, so Frank had decided to postpone the destruction until then.
He needed groceries too, for the weekend. Hadn’t organised himself enough to conduct a proper shop at a supermarket, so he’d been dipping in and out of the local shop, called Happy Shop, at the end of the road to feed himself. This would be his fourth trip up there in a week. Or was it more than that? Didn’t matter. And he was due a treat. Which might just be the Arctic Roll he’d been eyeing up in Happy Shop the day before, or was it on Wednesday? He couldn’t be certain; nothing really defined any one day during his first week in the house. They’d all been slow and reassuringly pleasant.
And he found himself looking forward to his excursion to the strip-lit cave that was Happy Shop, run by a smiling Hindu man, that hoarded forgotten treasures from any seventies childhood. Going round the local shops was the furthest he’d ventured all week, too, because the house was immensely warm and safe and he’d come to consider the world outside the front door as not being either.
After six months without annual leave, he’d quickly slumped into a routine of slouching on the sofa each morning to watch the greenish TV screen, too. It was his first opportunity to relax in months, which must have accounted for his torpor. The house untied his knots wonderfully; he slept like he was in a coma for an hour after lunch, until his shows came on. Not that he’d ever seen any of them before, due to work, but he’d quickly discovered preferences on the five terrestrial channels available.
The Future of Horror Page 7
