The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  And then, suddenly and shockingly, we saw it. A woman’s ghostly face, impossibly drawn, blank and paper-white, right in front of us, just an inch the other side of the glass, its mouth a dark ‘O,’ hair wild, mad eyes wide – a textbook ghost. And something more – a sense of ancient tragedy, there for a second only and then gone, vanishing into nothing.

  “Whoa!” We fell back off our stools, then packed up and shot up the stairs so fast that we embarrassed ourselves. We were shaken, but after a minute Shape was jazzed and wanted to go back down. “We all saw it, didn’t we? The manifestation? We should go and take another look.”

  “No,” I said, “we have to get the equipment. We can come back tomorrow night.”

  “But what if she doesn’t reappear?” Ali twisted her rainbow-coloured braids anxiously.

  “They’re drawn to the life-force of the living,” said Shape, suddenly the expert again. “Max is right, we’ll come back tomorrow.”

  We returned home and over the next day we collected what we needed. Infra-red equipment, night-vision digital recorder, barometer, EMF detector, hydrometer, spirit wind chime, motion detector, talcum powder, a decent clock. We’d have liked a thermal imaging scope to find cold spots, but they were too expensive. Shape was impressed.

  We arranged to meet at 11:00pm outside Euston station. Ali and I got to carry all the equipment. The rain had died down to a thin, greasy drizzle that made the sodium-yellow pavements slippery. We headed over to the house, and noted that neither of the houses on either side had their lights on, which was a good thing if we were about to take up house-breaking. Luckily, the bad weather had forced the hoodies off the streets.

  Shape had brought a crowbar with him, and led the way down into the basement. He pushed one end under the rotting wood of the window sill and the catch popped, that easy, although we knew it would be harder to shut again. He had trouble opening the window, though, because the wood was damp and swollen, but eventually the three of us managed to work it up a little so that we could slither inside.

  There was enough ambient light from the street to let us see the room in dim form. We put our bags down and took a look around. The basement had been divided from the rest of the house – the whole building had probably been sliced into flats. There was a rank-smelling galley kitchen still filled with dirty pots. No electricity, something green and reeking in the dead fridge. Further along the corridor we found two bedrooms, one devoid of any furniture, the wallpaper damp and hanging down in swathes. The other had a single bed with a pile of eiderdowns on it, and although I couldn’t see much here at the back of the house, it looked like there was something shifting about.

  “Rats,” said Shape. “Don’t go near them.”

  In the main living room (the one by which we entered) there were a few odd items lying around: a khaki bag full of old toys, some framed photographs of a man in uniform, a box of mildewed newspapers, more photos, some women’s clothes.

  We set up the equipment. It was cold in here. “Too cold,” said Shape. “We’re going to have to buy the thermal scope. I need to isolate the low temperature spots.”

  We arranged the motion detectors (which we had swiped from the college) on either side of the lounge, and set two digital cameras in position. We tied the wind chime to the bulb flex hanging from the ceiling rose. Finally, we spread talcum powder over the floor. Then we popped open a few beers and settled down to wait.

  After a while, inevitably, we fell asleep. But it was okay because the motion sensors were alarmed.

  The next thing I knew, Shape was shaking me. “What’s happening?” I whispered.

  “Listen,” said Ali.

  Faint but clear, a small bell was ringing. I sat up. “Is that the chimes?”

  “No, it’s coming from further away,” Shape whispered back. “A classic sign of spirit arrival.”

  “I don’t know, it’s sounds like it’s coming from outside. It could even be an office alarm.”

  “The room’s got colder – can’t you feel it?”

  “Christ, what’s that awful smell?”

  I looked across to the red digital readout on the clock. Midnight. I tried to see into the thick shadows, but maybe one of the street lights had gone out, because it seemed darker in the room now. I had brown spots swirling in my eyes, removing the distinct edges of the room. Ali was kneeling, straining to see. Shape was slowly rising, moving in a careful way that would not disturb the presence. He reached out and turned on the digital cameras. Then we waited. We waited for what seemed like twenty minutes, straining our ears, but nothing happened.

  Ali rose and stretched her back. “Well, that was a waste of –” she began, when something rushed into the room with a banshee shriek, a white-wreathed, hunched apparition with a white screaming face and the wide black ‘O’ mouth and bony claw arms raised above its head, and all hell broke loose. The thing rushed up to Ali and she screamed and suddenly there was a slash and a shocking red cut had crossed the left side of her face, and Shape was backing up and knocking over one of the digital cameras. And then the apparition screamed something that sounded like words but its voice was so distorted that we couldn’t understand, and we were bricking it and just wanted to get out of that awful reeking room. And just as quickly the apparition vanished, and we were on our knees shovelling everything back into bags, and clambering out of the window and gone.

  The next day we met in the student bar at St Martin’s and ran the camera footage, but the cameras hadn’t been pointing in the right direction and all you could see was a few frames showing a blur of white. The soundtrack picked up the creature’s voice, though. We played it over and over, filtering it until we could understand. It was saying something that sounded like “Alanafga – terror” again and again, until Shape’s shouting drowned it out.

  “We need to do some research,” said Shape with an air of determination, “and find out what these words mean.” Shape had a lunch date arranged at his father’s club, so he couldn’t do the legwork, which meant that Ali and I had to head up to the London Metropolitan Archive in Clerkenwell to research the history of the house.

  The archive’s a great place. All the documents of London are kept there. There are medical records and high court rolls and maps showing where German bombs fell, but it’s always empty except for a few old dears researching their family history. People don’t seem interested in their own surroundings, or maybe they are but they’re too busy to ever get around to checking them out. We had to leave all our belongings in the red lockers on the first floor, but then we headed upstairs and started looking up the housing history of the Somerstown area behind Euston, where Phoenix Street was located.

  Turned out it was a weird old place. A long history of ghostly sightings in an area that had always been incomplete and on the move. Homes were always being torn down to make way for the railway. Even the newborn and the dead hadn’t been allowed to linger in their cots and burial plots as the train tracks advanced over the land. Graveyards and hospitals torn up, the poor routed, Victorian philanthropists always ready to preach to the unemployed, the elderly and infirm, dumping a few moralizing Christian tracts on them before shoving them into workhouses to die.

  No wonder the grey streets behind the station now housed a largely immigrant underclass. No gentrification here, no luxury lofts and gated communities for this chaotic backstage area of good old London Town, the part the tourists never saw.

  It was Ali who found it in an old newspaper, the story of the jilted bride. Ann Matilda Barbary, due to be married at St Pancras Old Church on July 10th 1856, waited in vain to be collected by her father for the short walk to the wedding service, not knowing that her husband-to-be had been killed in a drunken fight at The Tap Inn, Euston, that very morning. She and her husband were going to live and raise a family in one room. From the picture, it could easily have been the basement room in Phoenix Street.

  “And that’s why she appears in white,” said Shape. “She waits for her groo
m who’ll never come and she screams in pain when she finds out he’s been killed. This is dynamite stuff. We need to get better footage, though, if we’re going to upload it onto a website.”

  “I don’t want to go back there,” said Ali. “There was too much anger in her spirit. It’s dangerous.” The cut on her face was no more than a scratch, but looked livid and sore.

  “Then I’ll go with Max,” said Shape, “it’ll be easier with just the two of us.”

  The next night was a full moon, and although I had no idea why that would make a difference, Shape suggested it was the best time to witness another manifestation. So we headed for Phoenix Street once more, taking only one digital camera with us this time.

  “If we can find out what the creature was trying to communicate,” Shape said, “we’ll have documentary evidence of a link between this world and the next. We could set up a website and make a fortune.” How he intended to do this remained an unexplored subject, but I went along with it.

  We climbed down into the basement area and found the window still open, so we climbed inside and set up the camera once more. The moonlight had increased our vision in the musty room, and while we waited for a manifestation I went through the photographs in the one of the boxes. I turned over pictures of a couple married in the nineteen thirties, a man in a WW2 uniform, children, grandchildren – an entire family genesis left to warp and molder. The family name of Morgan kept cropping up in thin handwriting on the backs. Jack, Katie, Sally, Sam, Nick, cousins, sisters, aunts.

  “The magnetic lines of the earth are holding her here, trapped at the spot where she died,” said Shape. “We have to release this poor woman’s spirit and set her soul free. Then we can blog about it.”

  I could never tell if he was joking when he said things like this. Shape hardly said anything that wasn’t intended as irony, so you never quite knew where you stood with him.

  I turned over more photographs, some clearly recent. Soldiers messing around with a football in a sharp lunar landscape, except that it was brilliantly floodlit. Mailed from –

  “I was raised an atheist, but you know, we could find proof of Heaven, how cool would that be?” said Shape, and suddenly I realized he was just doing this to try and upset his parents again. He was thinking how annoyed they would be if he turned in a project based on proof of spiritualism in his degree show. That was all he really cared about.

  I turned over another damp photograph of a young man in a sand-coloured uniform, squinting into harsh sunlight. Flipped it to the back and read, ‘Alan Morgan Territorial Army Afghanistan.’ Alanafga – terror.

  “Shape, I think you should see –”

  And here she was again, wrapped in white, hurtling into the room, disturbed from her sleep, screaming in panic. “Alan – Alan – my son is in Afga –” but she couldn’t pronounce the word.

  “Your grandson Alan is in the Territorials,” I said. But she couldn’t hear, whirling insanely around the room. “Mrs Morgan?” And she was running back to her bed on crippled arthritic legs, half-blind and deaf and crazed with fear.

  “Not a ghost,” I told Shape, “just an old woman. We’re in an old woman’s home. I think her grandson was looking after her but he’s in Afghanistan now.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Shape slammed the camera shut and grabbed his bag. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “No, can’t you see she needs help? Something’s happened. For some reason nobody knows she’s here. Or if they do, they’re not doing anything about it. She’s been abandoned. Maybe her son failed to notify the Social Services before he left.”

  Shape brought his face close to mine. “Who gives a fuck? She’s just some old bitch. A waste of time, a fucking waste of time.” He grabbed me and pushed me toward the window.

  “You’re the one who makes a big deal about caring,” I shouted at him.

  “I don’t care about her, she’s alive. What good is that?” He climbed from the window and headed back to the street.

  I wanted to stay and see that she was all right, but I didn’t.

  I didn’t.

  I couldn’t call the Social Services either, not without leaving some kind of trace. If they tracked us down we could be arrested. I didn’t know what to do. And in hindsight I did the wrong thing, I know that now. Instead of finding a way to leave an anonymous trail to Mrs Morgan’s door, I thought I’d help her directly. Every evening on the way home from the college, I stopped at the Indian takeaway in Phoenix Street and bought her a curry in a plastic tray, and left it just inside the basement window, together with a bottle of soda water. I pulled the window down as far as I could to stop the room from getting too cold, and every night when I came down again the tray from the previous visit had been emptied, so I just carried on doing it.

  One night, I waited by the window to see if she would appear. After a while she shuffled into the room, still wrapped in the dirty sheets from her bed, and grabbed at the tray. Her bony arms were covered with suppurating sores. She dropped the plastic knife and fork on the floor and ate greedily with her fingers. I could not bear to watch a second longer. I was ashamed and confused by my own inaction.

  Then, about a week after I had started bringing the food, the hoodie gang returned to the street and stood in front of me at the gateway to the basement, blocking my path. One of the Indian boys glowered from within his blue shiny track suit. He had huge brown eyes, and looked angry. “You’re not going down there with that,” he said with soft menace.

  “Why not?” I asked, but they remained silent. “Why not?”

  Finally one of them spoke up. “It’s got nothing to do with you.”

  “She needs the food, she’ll die if she doesn’t eat.”

  “Walk away, man, there’s nothing for you. Forget what you saw.”

  “She’s an old woman. What did she do wrong?”

  “Not her, the grandson, disrespectin’ us, innit.”

  “What did he do to you?”

  “Fuckin’ us off, man. Shouldn’t be here, should he? Wrong postcode for a white army boy, man. You shouldn’t be here neither. Less you wanna get cut.” Their fists were in their pockets, but they were obviously carrying knives. I knew she was waiting in the basement room. I knew I was her lifeline. But there was nothing I could do. I could no longer reach her.

  I went home and tried to forget, to shut out the sight of her desperate face. I tried not to smell that awful smell. I tried to pretend I had never seen her. I told myself it was nothing to do with me.

  Two weeks later I picked up a copy of the local newspaper on the bus, the Camden Journal, and on page 14 I found a small article about her entitled ‘Wartime heroine found dead in flat.’

  The piece explained that Mrs Kate Morgan had been presented with an award for her outstanding work in a nursing unit of the WRAF in 1945 and had spent a lifetime caring for others. It said that her only living relative, her grandson, had recently been killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. It went on to say that she had been dead for a week before her body was found. Local boys were being questioned. A woman from Social Services trotted out the usual line, that this was a failure of the system and must never be allowed to happen again.

  I left St Martin’s. I could no longer sleep. I dreaded the nights. Every time I lay in the dark and closed my eyes, all I saw was her terrified face. I never saw Shape or Ali again. If I’d have run into Shape, I don’t know what I would have done. Something bad. Later someone told me he was running his parents’ bank.

  I was twenty-one when this happened. I am thirty now. The nightmares have lessened, but they never go away.

  They say ghosts appear because of an injustice. Mrs Morgan was not a ghost before, but she is now. And all my life, she’ll continue to destroy my sleep.

  THE ROOM UPSTAIRS

  SARAH PINBOROUGH

  Sarah Pinborough’s horror fiction often grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go until you’re battered, bruised and utterly terrified (go and read A Ma
tter of Blood to see what I mean) but for the story that follows Pinborough instead instils a sense of quiet unease that leads to something that is altogether rather moving. ‘The Room Upstairs’ is a beautifully haunting tale and one that is bound to follow you into your dreams.

  “THERE’S A BASIN and jug in your room, but you’ll find the main facilities at the end of the corridor. Use them as you like, of course, but please adhere to the line marked on the bath in order that we don’t run out of hot water. I currently have one other guest, Mr Marshall-Jones, and you’ll share the bathroom with him. I’m sure you can work out the logistics of timings between you. I hope that’s acceptable.”

  She walked up the stairs with a precision in her movements, as if the approach to each step had been carefully thought out. Jack had an eye for these things. He was sure that if he studied the carpet closely enough he’d see where it was worn from each of those sensibly-clad feet landing in the same place on each trip she took to the second floor. That would, however, take more light than was currently available from the dim bulbs in the wall sconces, that simply cast shadows around them and would leave Jack with the start of a headache were he to look too hard at any given detail of his new surroundings. She paused ahead of him, a prompt to answer.

  “That’s perfectly fine, Mrs Argyle. No problem there.” He smiled, and she moved on briskly, the lining of her skirt rustling against her tights. “I only take a bath every other day. I’ll have a good scrub in the basin on the alternates. We kept clean enough in the army that way. No baths then!”

  “Where did you serve?” A slight hitch in her pace and then she rounded the corner and continued her march along the straight of the corridor; a sharpness in the tone. Jack followed her, keeping his small suitcase close so that its hard edges didn’t scuff the wallpaper as he turned.