The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  Just as I finished that last feathery farewell, the electric light flashed on and the room was flooded with brightness. Whatever was squatting on my chest fled. A wisp of mist, he flew into the cracks and fissures of the walls. The quilt dropped away and was now loose and free. Light had conquered the forces of darkness. I blessed the brilliance that was blinding me and cleansing the room of evil.

  For a long while I was forced to stay where I was, until regular breaths restored the use of my lungs. Gradually, gradually, I was able to get back to a normal rhythm. As soon as I was able, I got out of that bed, determined never to return to it. I had been saved not by God, nor by his son, but by the restoration of the electricity. The power cut had ended just when I needed it to most, the light being already switched on.

  Then I remembered the old joke about the man who refused to be rescued three times, saying God would do it, and when he was drowned by the flood God told him, “I sent three rescue parties for you and you ignored them.” Maybe some deity had heard me after all?

  I left the house and went to the hospital, where they let me have a bed next to my friend James. We exchanged similar experiences, then both slept like tops, though my dreams, at least, were fearful. In the morning, James and I left the hospital and went back to the house, to try to discover its terrible secret. We found it, amongst the papers and files that I had discovered in the hidden cupboard.

  Indeed, Moretta had brought the haunting on herself.

  We went reluctantly to Moretta’s bedroom and under a thin top coverlet we uncovered the blood quilt. There were brown marks still visible on some of its patches. They looked like maps of unknown regions. Not every patch had an old blood stain though, for there were those malefactors who had been hung, and not shot, and others who had suffered strangulation by the garrotte. Still, a good many bore the evidence of their former owners’ executions. Several still had their bullet holes, even now unstitched. Just one patch, from some country which had yet to reach a humane way of executing its murderers, had the jagged rent of a sharp instrument just below the position of the heart.

  In her untiring search for ever more experiences of the macabre, Moretta had made a patchwork quilt. A friend of hers had written to her and told her that she was making a bedspread out of T-shirts purchased in cities around the world.

  I love New York.

  I love London.

  I love Istanbul.

  Moretta went one better. She made a quilt, not of love, but of hate. Moretta had researched and located the shirts and vests of executed murderers. She had then purchased these items from those who had removed them from the corpses, hoping to turn a profit. There are always people in this world who know the symbolic value of evil, to worshippers of religions like voodoo and other cults that follow Satan’s teachings.

  Moretta’s blood quilt became more than a symbol.

  She had fashioned an instrument of execution for the pernicious dead who wanted revenge on the living.

  ELAINE HAD THE quilt burned on a bonfire. Then the house was boarded up and never again rented out to anyone. She called me two years later and told me that the sea had at last claimed yet another victim. A storm had eaten away a chunk of the cliff and Moretta’s house had joined the parts of the town that had fallen under the waves. James and I drove down to look at the spot, but there was nothing to see.

  HORTUS CONCLUSUS

  CHAZ BRENCHLEY

  There’s a beautiful line in Chaz Brenchley’s story that really gets to the heart of the piece: “The dead don’t go away.” And that’s the thing about ghosts, because what they really are is the persistence of memory. In this tale of loss and grief, Brenchley explores how the dead continue to affect us, often hanging on long after we thought we had said goodbye for the last time.

  SOMETIMES AN IDEA is just bad from the beginning, a road that only goes one way.

  Sometimes, a friend phones up with an invitation you really can’t refuse.

  “Johnny. What are you doing, August?”

  “August?” This was April. “I don’t know,” I said, “I haven’t –”

  “Good,” she said. “You have now. Houseparty.”

  “What? Where?”

  “The Rectory, of course. Where do you think? There is only ever one house, and only ever one houseparty, and we are it.”

  “Mel, we can’t just keep on...”

  “Of course we can. We have to. This time it’s the garden, okay? I’ve already said, we’re all going.”

  THAT? WOULD BE Mel, oh yes. Signing people up, making promises on our behalf, committing us all.

  And this would be us, oh yes, falling into line because she didn’t allow the option and neither did the situation. Mel and Rob, Mark and Catriona and Harriet and me: Charlie’s Angels, people used to call us. And now Charlie was dead and it was his mum who needed angels, and – well. Here we were, come August, all in a minivan together. One party, indivisible.

  The last time we’d done this we called it a painting-party, but we did a lot more than decorate. The Rectory was a classic Victorian pile; it had been Charlie’s home all his life and his parents’ for a decade before that, and I’m not sure any of them had ever thrown anything away. When we first visited, the house seemed comfortably, interestingly full; now, to an elderly widow with burdensome memories, it had become just another burden. Painting was our excuse; we were cheerfully ruthless, clearing rooms and filling skips, and if we all knew we were getting the house ready for the market, at least none of us actually had to say so.

  She would sell, she would move – but not yet, not this year. Which meant that we had time for this too, for a garden party.

  Charlie’s big old teddy bear was ours to keep, to share, to pass around. Today he hugged the gear lever, getting in the driver’s way and in everybody’s eyeline. Charlie’s absence was so explicit, so defined, it was almost a presence in itself. Of course he was the ghost in the machine: benevolent and grateful, or I thought so. Pleased to see his friends looking after his mum. How else should he feel?

  IT WAS MID-AFTERNOON when we pulled in to the Rectory driveway. There might no longer be a rector here, but the house still dwelt in the shadow of the church. Parishioners’ bones had made the bed beneath the gravel drive, where this stretch of land was salvaged from the mediaeval churchyard; the house declared its ecclesiastical interest from the frowning displeasure of its roofline to the iron-studded door and the stone steps that rose up to find it, both liberated from an earlier incarnation of St Jude’s itself.

  The woman waiting to greet us on the top step, she too might have stood for that same broken linkage, something taken away. Age had closed its fist on her since Charlie’s death; she was turning in on herself, harbouring her sorrows. Perhaps a move, a new home, would revive her – but in private, I thought she would dwindle even faster. Loss was something to lean on: what would she do without her morning visit to Charlie and her long-late husband, where they lay side by side just beyond the wall there, under the east window of the apse?

  Still. For now she was bird-bright, sharply pleased to see us: “Mel, dear, peacock blue? For your hair? I don’t know, I give up, I really do... Well, never mind. Give me a kiss and if you’ve had any more tattoos don’t show them to me, nasty disfiguring things... Catriona, put those bags down and leave them for the boys – yes, I know Mark’s just a long streak of water, but at least he has leverage, do you see?... I’ve put you all in the same rooms, of course. No, Rob, I didn’t make the beds, but you’ll find fresh linen waiting. I – oh.”

  Her abrupt silence came on sight of Charlie’s teddy. She held out her arms wordlessly; I handed him across and slipped by her into the cool height of the entrance-hall, my arms full of rucksack and my head full of memories.

  Sometimes I thought we shouldn’t keep coming back; sometimes I couldn’t imagine keeping away.

  CHARLIE HAD NABBED the attics long ago, for himself and his friends. Servants’ quarters and lumber rooms: as a kid he’d run
riot up there. As a teenager – well. For his mother’s sake, discretion ruled.

  In his adulthood, we were the friends he brought. We’d seen him here often and often, drunk or stoned or on a caffeine high, drowsy or electric or giggling with lust. Sex always made Charlie laugh, it was part of that charm he worked, to draw us close and keep us. In his last days we’d moved him to a ground-floor room to save his mother trailing up and down stairs all day, but if his spirit lived on anywhere in this house, it was up here that we’d find it.

  Bare narrow steps, mean chilly rooms: it was odd how welcome we’d always felt here. There were more comfortable guest rooms below, but these were ours. Sloping ceilings and faded wallpaper closed around us like enveloping arms, familiar and homely. Voices echoed down the corridor: the loan of a charging cable, a demand for the bathroom, an offer of jelly babies and a shot of vodka...

  Voices echoed in my head, too, more intimately; shadows flickered in the corners of my eyes. My room had been Charlie’s room, still was.

  By the time we trooped downstairs, we were settled enough already to sweep up our hostess and usher her outside, despite all her efforts to distract us with tea and scones, homemade jam and cream and conversation.

  “It’s the garden we came for, Mrs P. We’ve only got a couple of weeks, and it’s a lot of work. We’d best take a look at it, at least...”

  The front of the house was no concern of ours: trees and shrubs and grass that a neighbour kept trim on her behalf. At the back, though, was a great walled kitchen-garden that must once have fed the Rectory, and half the parish besides. Now it was rank and derelict. She struggled just to turn the key in the lock of the gate: “We always meant to tackle this, but my husband died, the silly man, and Lord knows I’m no gardener. Charlie promised to take it on, but you know what he was like, always another grand plan that never came to anything. And then he got sick himself” – and died himself, though she couldn’t quite bring herself to say that – “so...”

  So we had to lend a shoulder, to drive the gate open against the rust of hinges and the drifts of time: and beyond was a jungle contained, a wilderness in a bottle, nature rampant within boundaries.

  A greenhouse ran all the length of the south-facing wall, not quite an orangerie but the next best thing, steam pipes for winter warmth and the skeletons of fruit trees espaliered against the brickwork. Time or wind or some more deliberate hand had shattered half the glass: no matter. There were six of us, and we’d all fixed broken windows in the past. We could fix this. Beyond the greenhouse, it was only growth. Growth could be uprooted, earth turned over.

  “The sleep of reason breeds triffids,” Rob said, surveying six-foot stems that seemed to be surveying him back. Unflatteringly.

  “But with his nails he’ll dig them up again. When he wakes.” That was Mel, the smallest of us and the most confident. “Don’t worry, pet. I’ll wake you. Tomorrow. We’ll get a start tomorrow. Not right now. Right now is back to the house for scones and cream, right, Mrs P...?”

  LATER WE DRIFTED out again, cool glasses in our hands and the low evening light to draw us, Mrs P chasing us out of the kitchen, Harriet wanting a smoke and all of us wanting something we couldn’t find in the house, something more.

  “I really can’t see Charlie in a garden.” That was Harry, blowing smoke-rings into the breeze. “Well, doing this, of course: getting high on gin and dope and company. But not, you know, not gardening.”

  “No, of course not,” Cat said. “Even his mum knows he never would have done it. He wouldn’t have wanted to. It was his secret garden when he was a kid; you remember he showed us where he used to get over the wall?”

  Showed us and led us, or some of us, one of us, me. I didn’t say so. It had been our own private place, his and mine, when we wanted to escape the party, but the others didn’t need to know that now.

  “He would’ve kept it that way,” Cat went on, “for himself, for his own pleasure, something guarded in his heart; Charlie always wanted things he didn’t have to share...”

  Her voice faltered then, and she glanced at me. I just smiled back at her, all grown up, invulnerable.

  Undergrowth and overgrowth tangled around our legs like something conscious and deliberate, wanting to keep us out or maybe just wanting to keep us.

  Rob said, “What we need, we need men with scythes.”

  Mel snorted under his arm. “Give you men scythes, soon enough we’d have men without feet.”

  “We could get in a rotovator, then?”

  “No, we can’t. We don’t want to bequeath Mrs P nothing more than a ploughed field. There must still be paths and beds under all this, that we can restore. Proper Victorian kitchen garden, I want to leave behind us when we’re done.”

  “In two weeks? Mel, you’re dreaming...”

  Even so, we went from the garden to the garden shed, to see what survived in the shape of tools and equipment. I was last out through the gate, leaving it open behind me, deliberately standing wide.

  It slammed shut at my back, almost before I was safely through.

  Everyone turned to stare; I just shrugged. Maybe I’d tugged it loose after all and a gust of wind had caught it, or its own momentum carried it on. Maybe it just liked to be closed at night.

  Maybe I hadn’t really felt any sense of animus behind me, and it was just imagination feeding on twilight and absence at the end of a strange day.

  NEXT MORNING WE were up astonishingly early, fed and coffee’d and outside before the sun had risen above the high garden wall. Armed with spades and shears and a single instruction from Mel: “Hack and slay. No quarter.”

  All day we did that. We started out cheerful, pleased with ourselves, amused by our own industry; banter died slowly in the sunlight, and by day’s end we were a grim crew at a laborious task.

  Mrs P came out with a tray in the last of the light: “Enough now, you’ve done enough for one day. I can’t believe the difference already. Girls, you can use my bathroom to clean up, leave the other for the boys; but I thought you’d be glad of a glass of – oh, dear Lord,” she broke off, looking at me. “What in the world have you been doing to yourself?”

  “Your garden hates me,” I said, shrugging. “Don’t worry, it’s only scratches. Thorns, mostly.” I was wearing my scars with pride, stripped to the waist and now suddenly wishing that I wasn’t. She’d seen me in less, but not streaked with blood.

  “This wasn’t a thorn,” she said, taking my hand irresistibly, frowning at where the ball of the thumb was torn open.

  “No, that was a nail on an old rotting bit of wood, buried in the leaf-litter.”

  “A nail? You should see someone about that. I’ll call Dr Farjeon...”

  “No need,” I said. “He gave us all tetanus boosters when we were nursing Charlie.” She knew that; we’d made her have one too.

  “Well, mind you wash it out properly, and disinfect it too. Have Rob dress it for you, you’ll only make a mess if you try to do it yourself.”

  “Yes, ma’am...”

  AFTER DINNER, CAT sprawled on the sofa with her feet in Mark’s lap. Mel said, “I’ll play martyr tonight, if someone else does it tomorrow. One of us has to keep Mrs P company, and those two will be asleep in ten minutes, you know they will.”

  I did know it. And I knew her too, how tired she was, how determined not to admit it. I was weary and sore myself, but even so I headed off with Rob and Harriet because somebody had to, this was what we did. What Charlie had taught us, the pattern he’d set. However we spent the days here, evenings we wound up down at the Blue Boar. Even when he was sick and we were nursing, there was a pub shift. That mattered to him, and so we did it; and now? Well, now it mattered to us, apparently, because it had mattered to him. Or else for some deeper reason, pattern recognition, something.

  We sat in the old settle below the window, and I drank Guinness because I’d given blood that day; and the others teased me about being clumsy or unlucky or just a lousy gardener; and
we did our duty by Charlie until the landlord grew bored with us, threw us out, closed up at our backs.

  We rambled back along the lane, three abreast and daring the world to send traffic at us, defying it, staring it down. And came crunching up the Rectory drive at last, unaccountably safe, feeling wonderfully protected; and Harry said, “Anyone up for a joint in the garden before bed?”

  “Not me,” Rob said quickly. “Mel needs rescue.”

  I was fairly sure that he’d find Mel fast asleep; I was fairly sure, too, that he just wanted to join her. Emulate her. I could have done the same myself, but Harry needed to smoke, the dope was her excuse for the tobacco, and leaving her alone would only rub her face in it.

  So I heaved the garden gate open and the two of us went through, to squat on an upturned wheelbarrow and survey our handiwork by moonlight.

  “I hope Charlie doesn’t mind,” she said slowly.

  “Mind what, that we’re helping his mum?”

  “That we’re helping her leave, maybe – but I was thinking about this.” A waft of a glowing red end, to indicate the ruin that we’d wreaked. “This was his playground, and he always kept it private. We went everywhere together, but he never brought us in here.”

  He brought me. I didn’t say so, of course; only, “I don’t think he’d mind. I really – ow!”

  “Oh, God, sorry, was that me?”

  She shifted the joint conspicuously to her other hand, but I shook my head. “Not a spark. Something, though. A mosquito, maybe.”