The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  Holding the match over the doll, she hesitates, Mrs Mulligan staring back at her with those soulless black eyes of hers, the same bitter scowl of disapproval on her painted wooden face.

  The warm afternoon sun is as hot on her face as the match is between her finger and thumb.

  And she hears the housekeeper’s scolding voice once more inside her head.

  CHRIS LEAVES WORK early that night, eager to be home, eager to spend some quality time with his kids, and eager to make amends, desperate to let Jenny understand how much he loves her, how sorry he is, and how much she means to him.

  He stops at the front gate, catching the sweet scent of cooking on the air. Some lucky bugger’s going to eat well tonight.

  He lets himself in, throwing his jacket over the end of the stairs, half-expecting his son to come charging down the hall and throw himself into his father’s arms. But he receives no such welcome. They must be having supper already.

  “Hell-oo! I’m home!” he calls. But his announcement is met by silence.

  They must be in; the car’s parked right outside the house. They must be in the garden.

  But they’re not in the garden. They’re in the dining room.

  Jen’s sitting at the breakfast bar, rocking Emmie gently in her arms, humming what sounds like a lullaby.

  The succulent cooking smells wafting in through the open back door are making his mouth water. Having suffered a stinking hangover for the best part of the day, he now feels like he could eat a horse.

  “Something smells good,” he says. “Are we having a barbeque?”

  But his wife says nothing. She doesn’t even acknowledge his presence.

  “Jenny?” he says, suddenly feeling sick, as if his hangover’s returning. “Is everything alright? Where’s Toby?”

  There’s the doll’s house, sitting on top of his old coffee table – despite Jen’s threats to get rid of it – but there’s still no sign of his son.

  “Where’s Toby?” he asks, his heart pounding.

  He makes for the back door, barely registering the fact that Jenny’s entertaining the baby with the tatty old thing from the doll’s house, or the burns on his wife’s hands.

  Then he goes outside.

  INSIDE/OUT

  NICHOLAS ROYLE

  There are many rooms in Nicholas Royle’s story, both on the inside and the out; all are haunted and it is up to reader to decide on the nature of the ghost therein. If this sounds like something of a puzzle, then that’s exactly what it is, for Royle is adept at constructing beautifully realised, deeply unsettling and deceptively complex stories. ‘Inside/Out’ is a tale that draws the reader into a labyrinth of imagery and symbolism, leading them through the rooms of a house that holds many secrets.

  ‘In its effective development of a surreal atmosphere of Otherness, combined with its imaginative use of the notion of the dream itself, [Natsume Soseki’s Ten Nights of Dreams (1908)] creates a liminal literary world which is clearly that of the twentieth century. It is a world which Freud or Jung would certainly have recognized in terms of its suffocating representation of such peculiarly modern anxieties as crises of identity and free-floating guilt, expressed through archetypal imagery.’

  – Susan J Napier,

  The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature

  HIS FIRST DAY. They gave him the tour. Three floors at the top of a building on the edge of Covent Garden. Hitchcock had shot scenes from Frenzy in a similar building close by, a little over ten years earlier.

  He saw two women at neighbouring desks, both in white tops, both with blonde hair. They both leaned back in their chairs and looked at him at the same moment, with the same gentle arching of the back, the same hair falling away from the same slender neck. He heard two names, but he had no idea which was which, and then he was whisked away to the next office in this warren of tiny spaces and interconnecting staircases with worn lino and rubber tread.

  He would invent excuses to go to her office. He could tell them apart now; Judy was the one who sat nearest the door. She was the one he liked. He didn’t not like Madeleine, her colleague, but the liking he felt for Judy he felt somewhere inside, in his chest, in his stomach. In his chest and his stomach. Her skin was clear, white marble; when she rolled a cigarette, the pink tip of her tongue appeared between her lips. He was both impressed and faintly terrified by her. Rarely was he able to find her on her own, though; Madeleine was generally sat alongside. They didn’t always wear the same clothes, but in his mind they did and they looked alike. Identical.

  He found it hard to picture Judy without Madeleine’s shadowy presence. They were both shy, but Madeleine was shyer. Judy, at least, would laugh at his jokes. She would lean forward over her desk and cover her mouth with her hand because she felt self-conscious about her teeth. He wanted to tell her her teeth were fabulous, which they were, but he didn’t. It would take him twenty years to get to the point where he would feel able to tell her that. Twenty years. Most of that time he would spend in another country on the far side of the world in a culture so alien it might as well have been on a different planet.

  He never really stopped thinking about her, but he thought about her in the way you might think about Grace Kelly or Kim Novak or Tippi Hedren.

  Before he left, before he went to Japan, he contrived to see as much of her as possible, but always in the workplace, always on a pretext, and most of the time with Madeleine as silent chaperone. On one occasion – it must have been Christmas, the office party, oldest cliché in the book – they came into brief bodily contact. She’d had a few drinks, was wearing a dress or a skirt that flared around her wide, strong hips. He wanted to put his arms around her waist. Wanted to, but didn’t. He stood facing her and everything else receded, nothing else mattered. For once, Madeleine was nowhere in sight; the woman he was going out with at the time, who was only seeing him while her boyfriend was away, faded from his mind the moment Judy appeared. They came together briefly and he felt the physicality of her. His legs bumped against hers. Momentarily she allowed him to press his mouth against hers and hers yielded and he felt his lips touch her teeth and then she was gone, smiling, eyes shining, an after-image that stayed with him, imprinted on his retina.

  THE HOUSE IS narrow and long – tall – with an unusually squarish footprint for a house of that age, often deeper than they are wide. Three storeys – tall and thin. The window on the first floor has a modest bay. What’s strange about the house – and it is strange – doesn’t strike you the first time you see it. Perhaps not even the second or third time.

  There’s a large block of flats behind it; social housing, as it’s now called. One of those unknown streets you walk down in Hackney because there’s no Tube and you need to get somewhere else. Hackney is a walker’s borough.

  He doesn’t know what to do, what to say, after so long saying nothing, doing nothing. Or almost nothing. The kiss is long forgotten, he suspects, although not by him. He kept it in a room in his mind, a room at the top of a house with cream anaglypta wallpaper and stripped floorboards and a sash window. It felt like a safe space, even though he didn’t know where it came from. He would visualise it regularly and it would help him to perceive the sensation of the kiss, the physical pressure of it, the considered yield and sudden departure. It’s like it happened yesterday, not twenty years ago. But he imagines that for her it never happened at all. He was the one who went away; she stayed behind. He was the one who went to a country where he didn’t speak a word of the language, where foreigners – gaijin, he soon learned – were openly stared at in the street, where the culture continually fucked with your head. Where, for instance, the distinction between inside and out revealed itself gradually, over the years, to be less a quirky social custom, more a pathological obsession. He was unlikely to forget walking into the changing room in the clothing store in Shibuya and being pursued by an angry shop assistant shouting at him for not removing his shoes. “I didn’t have to take them off to enter the shop,�
�� he argued, but the man just shook his head impassively. How was he supposed to know that shops were an exception to the rule, or that they counted as outside, while the changing room was inside? Even his host had been unsympathetic, his host whose house he never entered without taking his shoes off first.

  The red front door opens and she emerges on to the street. He watches her walk, this morning like every other morning, head down, in the direction of Newington Green. He watches her now, he reasons, because he’s been watching her for years – from afar even when close up, and then in the intimacy of his memories on the other side of the world. In a sense it’s all he’s ever done. Watched. From a distance. From the outside. He doesn’t feel he has the right to get any closer now, especially now that he is even further away despite being so much closer. He follows fifty yards behind her on the other side of the street. She walks around the north side of Newington Green, crossing only at zebras and traffic lights, where she waits for the green man. She turns right off the west side of the green, as he knew she would, and then, because it’s a Monday, cuts through to reach a quiet street of Victorian terraced houses – four- or five-bed houses, decent-sized houses – with profusions of wisteria and rambling rose and honeysuckle, only the former no longer in flower. He waits at the end of the street and watches as she turns up a garden path. He watches her black-and-white-checked coat disappear into an open porch.

  Every Monday the same. An hour later she will come out, coat on, and turn right out of the front path and walk to the Tube at Highbury & Islington.

  While she remains in the house, he walks down to St Paul’s Road, following the course of the New River, which is not a river but still somehow runs underground beneath his feet, and he crosses over to reach the gardens where it emerges into daylight. He walks along it until he reaches his bench, where he sits and waits. He looks at the narrow, shallow navigation and wonders how it could ever have fulfilled its intended function of providing Londoners with drinking water. He watches a mallard that appears stranded, unmoving in the middle of a stretch of vivid green weed, and two crows as they hesitate on the very edge of the bank, as if uncertain whether they will be able to walk on that verdant carpet. At ten to the hour, he leaves the bench and walks back across St Paul’s Road. He loiters in the vicinity of Canonbury station until he sees her walking down towards the mini-roundabout and turning right into Grosvenor Avenue, which will take her towards Highbury & Islington. She walks with a slight bias to the right, neither quickly nor slowly, watching the pavement. As always on a Monday, she appears preoccupied. One time, her make-up ran, as if she had been crying. He waits until she is out of sight and then walks up the way she came, turning right into the street of Victorian terraces. When he reaches the house she had gone into, he stops, looking up at its blank windows. There is an empty window box on the first-floor window ledge. The second-floor windows are dirty, as if that floor of the house isn’t used. The ground floor allows a view right through the house to the back garden, which seems crowded with mature trees. The front garden resembles a parody of a Japanese garden with dwarf azaleas, wooden furniture, bonsai trees, beds of slate and an isolated stand of bamboo.

  He walks up the path and rings the doorbell. After a few moments a large shape appears through the frosted glass and the door is opened to reveal a fat man of average height in late middle-age with fleshy features, bulldog eyes and thinning hair combed back from his forehead. The buttons of his shirt strain over a large belly. Nondescript trousers, lace-up shoes.

  “Yes?” he says. “Do you have an appointment? I don’t remember…”

  “I’m conducting a survey.”

  “What? A survey. Oh, no, I’m busy, I’m working.” He steps back, waving a dismissive hand. The door starts to close.

  “It will only take five minutes of your time.”

  “No, no, no, no,” he says. “I don’t have time.” And the door closes.

  What kind of man closes the door on you before you have gone? Before you have even started to turn away? What kind of man does that?

  The kind of man, perhaps, who affects a Japanese garden but wears outdoor shoes inside.

  He turns and walks away.

  THE HOUSE SHE leaves every morning, the house she spends the night in, the house she lives in (safe to assume). That house. That house is tall and thin and has doors on adjacent sides of the building. At the front of the house there is a red door, which opens directly on to the street, and on the adjacent side of the house there is a green door, which opens on to the pavement. It’s a wide pavement. The next building, an abandoned pub, is set back from the road. Hence the wide pavement. There’s no path to either door, no front garden. She always comes out of the red door. Every morning she comes out of the red door.

  So this is the strange thing about the house. The two doors in adjacent walls. One at the front, one at the side. But there’s no room in that house for two entrances to two different dwellings. The house is three storeys high, but it’s not a big house. It’s a narrow house, a shallow house. She always comes out of the red door and walks the same way towards Newington Green. He follows her so far and then lets her go. She’s going to work. Except on Mondays, when she goes first to the street of Victorian terraced houses.

  ONE NIGHT AFTER dark he goes to the house – he doesn’t normally go to the house at night, but he’s had enough of outside, wants to get inside – and knocks on the door. The red door. It moves under his hand. It’s not closed. He pushes it open a bit further.

  “Hello?”

  No answer.

  “Hello?”

  It’s very quiet and his voice lands without echo. It’s as if it lands on the floor and clings to the walls and the various other surfaces he imagines, the chairs and tables and desks and the tops of dressing tables and wardrobes, as if it sinks into gaps and cracks and tiny holes and into the dust and the grease and it just sinks and dies there.

  He steps into the hall, looks down at his feet. He bends down and unties his shoes and removes them. He stands them next to each other in the narrow hall. He advances. The carpet is thin, no underlay. He can feel hard boards or concrete beneath. The walls of the hall are papered with woodchip, painted white. There’s a picture on the wall, a cheaply framed black and white photograph of a street scene. Block of flats, wide pavement. Just after the picture, the door into the room beyond, standing open. He stands in the doorway and looks around the room, which is lit by street lighting filtering through a net curtain. An old, squashy sofa on his right, pushed up against the wall. Adjacent to that, a wall with a large window divided into four long separate panes. This is the window that faces the street, the one with the net curtain. An armchair in the corner. The next wall has a door in it. The door that’s painted green on the outside. And at the back of the room, a small kitchen, a kitchenette, various reflective surfaces glimmering in the shadows. Old appliances, charity shop toaster, second-hand fridge.

  “Hello?” he says.

  Still no answer.

  He enters the room, allowing his fingers to trail over the old sofa, which feels gritty, as if the windows had been left open, admitting dirt from passing traffic. He walks across the room to the door on the far side. There are deadbolts top and bottom, but each is pulled back. There’s a key in the lock and a simple catch. He turns the key and opens the door. Out of habit, having locked himself out of buildings once too often, he operates the snib. The night is still, the road temporarily empty, no one walking by. The street light casts an ivory glow. He is about to step outside when he remembers his shoes in the hall.

  A noise behind him.

  He turns, alert.

  “Hello?”

  Nothing.

  He pushes the door to behind him. It fits neatly in the frame.

  “Hello?”

  Still nothing.

  He feels his heart rate increase and walks back across the room and into the hall. He turns to face the stairs. They creak beneath his feet. He reaches the half-landing a
nd turns through a hundred and eighty degrees. As soon as he does that, it gets darker. He feels his way up the next flight, the walls cold and damp to the touch. When he reaches the landing, he waits for his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom. While waiting, he becomes aware of a noise ahead of him. A scratching. Four short scratches and a break, then another four, or five, and another break. It sounds loud in the darkness, which, as he stands still and peers ahead of him, gradually starts to lessen in intensity. He can make out two door surrounds, a short distance apart. The landing is only small and narrow, the stairs, behind him to his right, leading up again to the second floor. The door on the left is open, he can now see, and within he can make out a light patch that is vaguely distinct from the darkness.

  “Hello?” he says again.

  No answer. The scratching continues.

  From his pocket he takes out his mobile phone. He presses the button that activates the back light and he points it at the interior of the room. A woman who looks like Judy from behind is standing at the far side of the room facing the wall. Blonde hair, white top, green skirt. She is standing right up close to the wall. He can only see her back, but there’s no question in his mind that it’s her. The scratching noise is coming from her. He starts to walk slowly towards her. The light goes out, but her white top remains dimly visible.

  He says: “Judy?”

  She doesn’t stop scratching. There’s no sign that she has heard him. He’s close to her now. He doesn’t need the phone. Her blonde hair falls to her shoulders, curtains the sides of her face. He moves round to one side. Scratch scratch scratch scratch. As he moves closer to that side, she turns away from him.