The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  Once in a while they’d try to escape the doll’s house. But they couldn’t find the exit. They took their dead daughter on a holiday to Tenerife, but there was no exit there, not even as far away as Tenerife. When their dead daughter was older, and wanted holidays of her own, with disreputable-looking dead boys who had strange piercings and smelled of drugs, Cindy and Steve took their very first holiday alone. They went to Venice. They drank wine underneath the Rialto. They were serenaded on a gondola. They made love in their budget hotel, and it felt like love, too. It felt like something they could hold on to. And sometimes, back at home, when Steve cried at night, or during the day when Cindy stared silently at the wall, they might think of Venice, and the memory made them happy.

  This account focuses too much upon the negatives, maybe. They had a good time in the haunted doll’s house, and the ghosts were very chatty, and some of them were kind.

  v

  “HELLO, HELLO!” BEAMING smiles all round. “Well, here we are! Here we all are again!” A clap on the host’s back, hearty and masculine, a kiss on the hostess’ cheek just a little too close to the mouth. “So good to see you both, I’m not even kidding! I brought some wine, where would you like it?”

  They showed him the house. He made appreciative noises at the sitting room, the kitchen, the bedroom. He admired the toilet, Steve pointed out to him the flush, and how he’d fixed it with all the DIY he’d learned. They settled down at the kitchen table and ate Cindy’s casserole, and they all agreed it was really good.

  “Well. Well! Here we all are again.”

  God was wearing a sports jacket that was meant to look jaunty, but it was two sizes too big for him; God looked old and too thin; the jacket was depressing, it made him look diminished somehow. The wine he’d brought was cheap but potent. The conversation was awkward at first, a series of polite remarks, desperate pauses, too-big smiles and eyes looking downward. The wine helped. They began to relax.

  Cindy asked if they could return to the garden.

  “Go backwards?” said God. “I don’t know if you can go backwards. You crazy kids, what will you think of next!”

  They laughed, and shared anecdotes of mazes and apples, of fairy tales told long ago.

  God mused. “I think the idea is. If I think about it? I think, the older you get, and the more experienced you get. And the more you realise how big the world is, and how many opportunities are in front of you. Then the smaller the world becomes. It gets smaller and smaller, narrowing in on you, until all that’s left is the confines of a wooden box.” He coughed. “You could say that it’s a consequence of maturity, of finding your place in the world and accepting it, of discovering humility and in that humility discovering yourself. Or, maybe. Ha. It’s just a fucking bad design flaw. Ha! Sorry.”

  He drank more wine, he farted, they all laughed, oh, the simple comedy of it all.

  “But,” God said, “this world isn’t all there is. It can’t be. There must be a way out. At the very centre of the world, there’s a dark space. Don’t go to it. Don’t go. It isn’t a law. I’m not, ha, forbidding you. But I think,” God said, and his voice dropped to a whisper, and he looked so scared, “I think there are ghosts there. I think the dark space is haunted.”

  “Well,” said Steve, eventually. “It’s getting late.”

  “It is getting late,” said Cindy.

  “No doubt you’ll be wanting to get back home,” said Steve. “Back to your garden and whatnot.”

  “Back,” said Cindy, “to your maze.” She took away God’s wine glass, put it into the sink with a clatter.

  God looked sad.

  “I’m dying,” he said.

  “Oh, dear,” said Steve.

  “That’s a shame,” said Cindy.

  “I’ve been mucking about with too many cancers. I’ve got nobbled by the ebola virus, I’ve come down with a spot of mad cow disease. It’s all the same to me. I’ve been careless. Too careless, and about things that were too important.” He coughed again, gently wiped at his mouth with a handkerchief, looked at the contents of the handkerchief with frank curiosity. He blinked.

  “Shame,” said Cindy again.

  “And I wanted to see you. I wanted to be with you, because we’re family, aren’t we, you were always my favourites, weren’t you, you’re my favourites, did you know that? I’m crazy about you crazy kids. I miss you. I miss you like crazy. We never had a cross word. Others before you, others after, well. I admit, I got angry, plagues, locusts, fat greasy scorchmarks burned into the lawns of the Garden of Eden. But I love you guys. I love you, Cindy, with your big smile and your deep eyes and your fine hair and your huge norks and your sweet, sweet-smelling clit. And you, what was it, Steve, with your, um. Winning personality. If I have to die, I want to die with you.”

  His eyes were wet, and they couldn’t tell if he were crying or rheumy.

  “This world can’t be all there is,” he breathed. “It can’t be. I have faith. There must be a way out.” He opened his spindly arms wide. “Give me a hug.”

  So they did.

  “Because,” said God. “You loved me once. You loved me once, didn’t you? You loved me once. You loved me. Tell me you loved me. Tell me you loved me once. You loved me. You loved me. You loved me.”

  THEY BURIED THEIR father in the back garden that night. It wasn’t a grand garden, but it was loved, and Cindy and Steve had planted flowers there, and it was good enough.

  Then they went indoors, and they began looking for the dark space at the centre of the world. They’d been to Tenerife and to Venice, they’d seen no dark spaces there. So they looked in the kitchen, they cleared out the pots and the pans from the cupboard. They looked in the bathroom behind the cistern. They looked in the attic.

  They decided to go to bed. It had been a long day. And Steve offered Cindy his hand, and she took it, a little surprised; he hadn’t offered her a hand in years. They both liked the feel of that hand holding thing, it made them seem warm and loved. They climbed the stairs together.

  They looked for the dark space in the bedroom too, but it was nowhere to be found.

  They got undressed. They kicked off their clothes, left them where they fell upon the floor, stood amidst them. They came together, naked as the day they were born. They explored each other’s bodies, and it was like the first time, now there were no expectations, nothing defensive, nothing to prove. He licked at her body, she nuzzled into his. Like the first time, in innocence.

  She found his dark space first. It was like a mole, it was on his thigh. He found her dark space in the shadow of her overhanging left breast.

  She put her ear to his thigh. Then he pressed his ear against her tit. Yes, there were such whispers to be heard! And they marvelled that they’d never heard them before.

  She slid her fingertips into his dark space, and they numbed not unpleasantly. He kissed at hers, and he felt his tongue thicken, his tongue grew, all his mouth was a tongue. They both poked a bit further inside.

  They wondered if they could squeeze themselves into something that was so small. They looked at each other for encouragement, but their faces were too hard to read. They wondered if they could dare. And then she smiled, and at that he smiled. And they knew they could be brave again, just one last time. They pushed onwards and inwards. And they went to someplace new.

  THE MUSE OF COPENHAGEN

  NINA ALLAN

  It’s wonderful to discover a new writer who understands the traditions of supernatural fiction, while bringing something new to the field. There is something Aickman-esque about Nina’s story, but while you can feel the presence of that master of the genre there is also a bold and original voice here. ‘The Muse of Copenhagen’ proves that Nina Allan is an exciting new writer in the genre of the weird.

  I DUMPED MY holdall on the back seat of the taxi and got in beside the driver. When I told him where I wanted to go, he seemed surprised.

  “Southshore?” he said. “I thought Mr Gouss was away?” />
  “My uncle’s dead,” I said. “He died at the weekend. I’m here to take care of the house.”

  I thought it best to get the facts out into the open. People in small communities are invariably curious about each other and if I tried to keep my business a secret it would only make them gossip all the more. Everyone in St Lawrence knew my Uncle Denny. Whether they would remember me, I was less sure. Southshore had been my home throughout my boyhood, but I hadn’t been back to the house for a decade, not since Anka’s funeral. Uncle Denny packed up and left soon afterwards, dividing his time between his houses in Athens and Marseille. I never questioned him about his voluntary exile. Once I was past my teens, we didn’t tend to discuss our personal lives all that much. What we talked about mostly was stamps.

  After Anka’s death, we didn’t see each other so often either, but we kept in touch fairly regularly by letter and then later by email. He usually phoned at Christmas and on my birthday, but his last call came out of the blue. It was a bad line. I couldn’t make out who it was at first. I put that down to the lousy connection, but as the conversation continued I realised it was more than that. Uncle Denny sounded weird. Furtive somehow, as if he was afraid someone might be listening in on what we were saying. He also seemed older. My uncle was getting on a bit, that was true, but he had always been fit and healthy, and the last time I saw him, in a restaurant in Geneva, he could have passed for sixty or even younger. Now suddenly he sounded ninety, and on his last legs.

  “I’ve called to tell you you’ll get everything,” he said. “I’ve made sure you’ll inherit the lot. But I want you to clear the house, Johnny. I want you to promise. And you mustn’t touch anything yourself. Get a firm in. Don’t worry about the money, that’s all been arranged.”

  “Steady on a moment, will you? I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about.”

  “I’m talking about when I’m dead, of course. Get rid of it all. If I had my way, I’d burn the house down, but it’s too late for that.”

  “This is crazy, Uncle Denny. Are you trying to tell me you’re ill?”

  “Not so far as I know. I just wanted to get things settled, that’s all. You never know what’s round the corner, do you? Especially at my age.”

  “You’ll live to be a hundred.”

  “God forbid.” He laughed then, and immediately he sounded more like himself. “How are you, Johnny?”

  I said I was fine, which I mostly was. I’d been working my way around to breaking the news of my divorce, but I didn’t want to do it over the phone and now didn’t seem like the right time in any case. Uncle Denny had been fond of Ginny, and when I received the news of his death a week later my first thought was one of relief, that at least now I wouldn’t have to tell him my marriage was over.

  My second thought was that my uncle had predicted his own death. The thought made me go cold all over.

  SOUTHSHORE WAS NEVER a grand house, but it had a sizeable chunk of land attached to it, and its westerly aspect meant that its narrow, high-ceilinged rooms were always full of the pearlescent, rain-coloured light particular to the estuary, even in summer. During the war, the house was requisitioned as a convalescent home for wounded soldiers; afterwards it was turned into a hotel. The business was successful for a while, but it began losing money in the mid-seventies, and by the time my uncle bought the place it had become run down almost to the point of dereliction.

  I knew that Uncle Denny had been married before, very briefly, to a woman named Lily Betts, but I was scarcely more than a toddler at the time and I had no memory of her. It was Anka, of course, that I remembered. Anka was Danish, and some twenty years younger than my uncle. I don’t know if Uncle Denny left Lily Betts to be with Anka, or whether his first marriage was over anyway. It was something that was never talked about. But my uncle often repeated the story of how Anka fell in love with Southshore at first sight. They were driving back to London after a day in the country and Anka saw the house out of the window. She made my uncle stop the car, telling him this was the house she wanted to live in and that they had to buy it. Less than two hours later Uncle Denny was putting his signature on a draft contract in an estate agent’s office in Maldon.

  I think Anka loved eastern Essex because its level greenness and eroded coastline reminded her of Denmark. You say Essex and people think immediately of Ilford and Romford, the commercial wastelands of the London commuter belt. But the country around the Blackwater estuary is a flat, watery spread of narrow inlets and offshore islets, salt marshes and open grassland. Because of the constant steady ingress of tidal erosion, there is no coast road, and three of the four railway branch lines from Maldon were closed down during the Beeching reforms. The place bears a mantle of secrecy. Anka used to refer to it as her haven.

  I never questioned what drew her to my uncle. Linden Gouss was a handsome man, generous and sharp-witted. He was also a highly successful businessman. It was only after Anka died that I wondered why they’d never had children of their own. I supposed there must have been some physical obstacle, some gynaecological complication. The idea of asking my uncle for details made me wince with embarrassment.

  I PULLED MY suitcase out of the car and on to the gravel. A playful breeze was tripping in off the mudflats, bringing with it the familiar dense reek of bladder wrack. The sky was wide, clouded with bands of cirrus, opalescent as a late Turner. The house reared up before me like a mirage, like a faded Polaroid, and suddenly I felt emotions rising in me, a wave of feeling that could have been to do with my uncle’s death or with Ginny leaving, but that seemed to be connected with neither, that seemed to come from much further back, from that sun-drenched afternoon in late August when I was summoned to the headmaster’s office and told that both my parents had been drowned in the Victoria ferry disaster.

  I paid off the cabby and stood with my back turned as he drove away, not wanting him to see how shaken I was.

  Only when the taxi had passed completely out of earshot did I continue on up the drive and into the house.

  What with the place having been unoccupied for so long I suppose I’d been prepared to find it in a bit of a state, but it was quite the opposite. The parquet looked recently polished, the air was filled with the scents of furniture wax and fresh chrysanthemums. There was a small stack of post on the hall table, all of it addressed to me, the various bills and legal permissions sent on to the house as promised by my uncle’s solicitor in Maldon. Everything looked cared for, pristine, and I remembered that as well as the annual heating and plumbing inspections Uncle Denny had employed a cleaner, some local woman from the village, to come in once a week to run a vacuum cleaner and a duster around and generally keep an eye on the place.

  It must have cost him a small fortune over the years. It would have been cheaper to keep a pied-á-terre in London, not to say a great deal more convenient. I found myself wondering for the hundredth time why my uncle hadn’t just sold the place and been done with it.

  I placed my luggage at the foot of the stairs and went through to the back. I felt on edge rather, starting at the slightest sound, although what I was expecting to encounter I had no idea. My uncle’s body had been cremated in Marseille, under the strict instructions that there should be no funeral service. He left a letter for me, apologising for his strange request but pleading for my understanding.

  ‘I can’t stand the thought of it,’ he wrote. ‘All those vultures standing around saying things they don’t mean and polishing off the last of my Sauternes. I don’t want it, Johnny. And you and I know that the important things have already been said.’

  I guessed that when he spoke of the important things he was referring to our final telephone conversation. Once more I felt that odd frisson of disquiet, that after calling me he had sat down and written that letter, knowing in some mysterious manner that we had talked together for the last time.

  I supposed the mystery was all in my head. There was nothing that unusual about an old man coming increasingly to re
alise that time was running out on him. If so-called psychic premonitions were what you were after, you only had to turn on the television or open a newspaper. What was harder for me to admit was how pleased I had been, not to have to drag myself all the way down to the south of France, to make stilted small talk with a bunch of strangers, to do all of it alone, without Ginny.

  It wouldn’t have surprised me to discover my uncle had somehow known about that too, after all, and that his most likely reason for not wanting a funeral had been to spare me the trouble of attending it.

  The back rooms were as clean as the hall. In the kitchen, the pedal bin under the sink was fitted with a fresh liner, and the fridge and one of the overhead cupboards had been stocked with a small store of basic provisions. Had my uncle informed the cleaning woman that I would be coming? I put on the radio, tuning it to a jazz station I liked, then filled the kettle and spooned sugar and instant coffee into a mug. The mug was one of Anka’s, the Royal Copenhagen beakers she always used for hot drinks at bedtime, or for Bovril when I was ill. The mugs were simple in form – straight white porcelain cylinders with a narrow gold band at the rim – but they were functional and elegant and I had always loved them. The very act of handling one of them gave me a sense of coming home, though I had forgotten all about them until now. I waited for the kettle to boil, thinking how these few small acts of ownership – playing some music, making coffee – had already altered the atmosphere of the place, shifting it from the past into the present.