The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  “Mum, you don’t sound fine.”

  “It was a long drive, that’s all, dear. And you know me, I haven’t driven that long in...” Ever, Penny thought. I’m further from home than I’ve ever been. She felt suddenly sick, and sat gently on the second stair.

  Take a rest, Peter says, tough voice soothing. Take the weight off.

  A shadow filled the doorway and Mr Gough paused, as if waiting for her permission. She waved without looking, and the shadow entered her house.

  “So. The house?” Belinda asked.

  “Beautiful. He’ll love it.” There was an awkward silence.

  “Russ and I will bring Flynn down for a visit next weekend. See if you’re settled all right, look around. Russ says to make a list of any jobs that need doing.”

  “I still won’t have it that he’s dead,” Penny said. “You know that.”

  “Mum, it’s been over seven years. He’s been declared –”

  “I don’t care what some strangers declare about my husband. I’d know if he was dead, and I say he isn’t. He’s... gone somewhere else, that’s all.”

  “What, for a long walk?”

  “Bindy.”

  “Sorry, Mum. But don’t talk as if you and Dad had some kind of special bond. We both know that isn’t really true.”

  “It’ll be lovely to see Flynn,” Penny said. “The garden’s big enough to kick his football around. And can you ask Russ to bring some stuff for cleaning windows?”

  “I will, Mum.” Belinda’s voice was heavy with concern and frustration, but Penny was here now. She had made the break. Left her own home, bought somewhere unusual, twelve miles from the nearest town and without bringing her TV with her. The furniture was coming the following day, but she had been careful to bring particular things herself – walking boots, a coat, a map. She loved the symbolism in that.

  “It’s not much, dear,” Penny said. “I know that. It’s not Cancun, or China, or an Antarctic cruise, or the Northern Lights, or any of those things he always wanted to do with me. But it’s something. It’s a small step on a longer journey. He’d be very surprised at me and... proud, I think.” She glanced up at Mr Gough, listening and trying to appear distracted. And then she looked around the large hallway, three doors leading off into new rooms, timber floor scuffed, ceiling lined with old beams. “He’ll love it here.”

  “Okay, Mum. Just... call me if you need anything. Will you do that?”

  “Of course. Give my love to Russ and little Flynn.”

  “Love you, Mum. Really.”

  Belinda hung up first, and Penny could tell that her daughter was starting to cry. She hated hearing that. Which was why she had yet to tell Bindy that she was dying.

  “Would you like a tour?” Mr Gough said.

  Penny shook her head. “Just the keys, please.”

  “But you really should look at the tower, it’s a remarkable feature, makes the house –”

  “Really, I’m fine. Very tired.” Penny stood, wincing at the pain in her hips from the long drive. Her bones ached from the other thing.

  “Okay, then,” the solicitor said. Smile painted on, now. He handed her a bunch of keys, then a smaller set. “Spares.” He glanced around. “Lovely old place. You’re very lucky, Mrs Summers.”

  As he turned to leave, a sense of such profound terror and isolation struck Penny that she slumped back against the stair bannister, grabbing hold as the house swam around her. She tried to call out, but her mouth was too dry. Help me! she thought, feeling a great weight of foreboding bearing down upon her. Up there, there’s something above, a terrible thing that is pressing down on me now I’m inside. Dusty windows, a trick of the light, but I can hear it up there, I can almost smell it, and I wish I was back in my garden with the roses and rhododendrons.

  Then the feeling started to filter away, and she knew that this was an important moment. She could give in to the terror and run. Or she could remain in her new, temporary home.

  There, there, Peter says, his rough working-man’s fingers stroking her cheek with infinite care and softness. Come on, my little rose. Don’t be afraid. You never have to be afraid when you’re with me. He has not spoken to her like this since they were in their twenties, madly in love and obsessed only with each other. I’ll never let you be hurt.

  “Thank you, Mr Gough,” she whispered. The departing solicitor waved a hand without turning around, indicating that he must have heard. As he climbed into his Jeep, he glanced back at the house just once.

  Not at Penny. At the tower. His constant smile had vanished.

  SHE GAVE HERSELF a tour of the house and wondered what she had done.

  Belinda and Russ had been stunned when she reached a decision to sell the family home. But they had become increasingly supportive as Penny stuck to her guns and insisted that this was just what she wanted. “Maybe your father is right and I am just stuck in my ways,” she said, and the worry niggled at her that this was hardly a big step. Moving from the home she had shared with Peter for forty years, out into the country, to a hamlet where fewer than a hundred people lived, the house Grade II listed and an architectural oddity that occasionally attracted visitors... it was nothing, really. The sort of change some people welcomed every couple of years of their lives.

  But to Penny, it was the world.

  The house was incredibly quiet. So much so that as she strolled through its corridors and rooms, she heard a high, lonely aircraft passing over the landscape outside. You’ll never get me on one of those, she’d said to Peter when he suggested a simple flight to the Channel Islands to get her used to flying.

  Penny opened the back door and paused, head tilted. She smiled. “One step at a time.” The garden was wild and overgrown, awaiting her attention. She probably wouldn’t have time to do much with it, and that made her sad. But she would make her mark.

  The rooms inside were not decorated to her taste, but neither were they worn enough to require immediate redecoration. There was oak flooring throughout and she would have to get used to that, being more at home with patterned carpets. The house smelled unusual, and the sounds were strange – creaks, groans, taps – and she had no real sense of its shape and the space it occupied. It was nowhere near home, and she felt something like an intruder.

  When the furniture and boxes arrive tomorrow everything will change, she thought. Everything she owned was packed in a lorry somewhere right now, ready to be transported across the country and deposited in this strange place. In her old house, her belongings had been a network of memories and safety, creating an environment she knew. Packed away, they were just luggage. Home is where you are, she’d said to Peter once, but he’d scoffed and gone into a quiet sulk. Later, he’d said, You’re rarely where I am.

  “Everything I have will be here, apart from him,” Penny said. Her voice was loud. A bird sang somewhere in the garden, as if in response.

  A steady tap, tap, tap came from somewhere that did not feel like part of the house.

  Penny walked from the kitchen to the hallway, unconsciously matching the rhythm with her own footsteps. She paused at the staircase, one hand on the bannister, looking up. The sound was more distant than the bedrooms or bathroom on the first floor. More hollow, and sadder. She knew the sound. Peter, sat in his armchair with a glass of whiskey in one hand and his eyes distant, while she sat on the sofa and watched the next episode of some TV series she was already losing interest in, and his foot would tap against the wooden leg of his chair. Just a gentle impact, as if he were ticking away the seconds of his life. She would hear, but had never, ever said anything. He was always like this after an argument – a screwed up travel brochure beside his chair, and a dead dream floating in his glass.

  He would usually go anyway, but never with his wife.

  Tap, tap, tap...

  “Peter,” Penny breathed. The noise ceased. She held her breath.

  Keys in hand, Penny walked slowly upstairs. Each tread had its own feel and sound, and probably
its own memories.

  Spooking yourself, Peter says. You always worry too much, my rose.

  Penny reached the landing and stood before the doorway that led to the tower. She had not looked inside on her first walk around the house. Had passed it by, truth be told, because it had felt like the last place she wanted to see. Too dusty up there, she’d thought, and she decided that was the one place she’d send Russ when he and Belinda came over the following weekend. Up into the tower, to clean those windows and see what else was there.

  “Silly,” she said. She reached for the door.

  “YOU’RE JUST STUCK here,” Peter says. “Don’t you see that?”

  “But I like it here.”

  “You used to enjoy travelling. All those weekends we spent down in Cornwall when we were courting. The tour of Scotland in the motor home. Don’t you want to do all that again? Don’t you ever think about how time just...”

  It always goes the same way.

  So Peter packs a bag and leaves. He says he is going hiking for a weekend in the Lake District, but he never comes back. His body is never found.

  Penny persistently insists that Peter is still alive somewhere, and that drives a rift between her and her daughter. Because there was never any tension between Belinda and her father, and if he is still alive, she says, he would contact her.

  “No,” Penny says whenever the subject is brought up. “He’s not gone. Not Peter. He’s out there somewhere, waiting for me to join him. And one day, I will.”

  Belinda never believed that she would. In truth, neither did Penny. But discovering that she only had months to live had changed something fundamental about the way she viewed the world. Before, she had felt safe and secure in her own small bubble of existence. Now, she already sensed that everything else was moving on. Leaving her behind. She was a dead woman walking, and she had one more chance.

  SHE PAUSED WITH her hand on the door handle. It was metal, round, and vaguely warm, as if someone gripped it on the other side. It was only a tower, and a room. Perhaps there was a chair up there, and she could sit and look out over the landscape, watch the sun set over a hillside instead of her neighbours’ rooftops for the first time in –

  Tap, tap, tap.

  The sound was closer. Beyond the door, up whatever staircase might have been built within the tower. Peter, tapping his foot impatiently against a chair’s leg.

  Penny gripped the handle tighter, but was suddenly convinced that there was someone directly on the other side of the door, holding the handle, ear pressed to the wood, smiling expectantly as they awaited her decision.

  My little rose, Peter says, sometimes you’re so scared of the smallest things, so fragile and sensitive. It’s a hard world, hardy and impartial. But I’ll look after you.

  She let go of the handle and took two steps back until she nudged the landing balustrade. The tapping had stopped, but the silence was worse.

  “Stupid woman!” she berated herself, and she started singing to fill the space. Still singing, she searched through the set of keys until she found one for the tower door. She locked it, then paused, listening for movement on the other side. But there was none.

  “Of course not,” she said. “Just an empty room, and dust.”

  Hungry, thirsty, a little angry with herself for being so easily scared, Penny went down to the kitchen and switched on the kettle. She’d brought everything she needed to make tea and cook a simple meal, but as the kettle boiled she opened the back door to the wild garden once more.

  She walked outside, fiddled with the keyring until she had removed the key to the tower door. She threw it as far as she could, turning away so that she did not see where it landed.

  “There,” she said. “That settles it. The house is way big enough for me anyway.” She entered the house again, not once looking up.

  And not looking up meant that she felt watched.

  PENNY ATE HER fried egg sandwich. She’d speckled it with cayenne pepper, because Peter used to like that, and so spent the next half an hour sipping milk from the bottle and trying to lick the burn from her lips. And she tried to make sense of the house around her as the light outside changed.

  She missed her little three-bedroomed home. She had always known where she was in that house in relation to every other room. Her awareness had filled the entire place, when Peter was there with her and, later, when he was gone. It had been more than a home, and sometimes she’d forgotten where she ended and the house began.

  Now, the new house hung around her like something waiting to pounce. There was no sense of equilibrium. The first floor felt as though it sought to crush the ground floor. The kitchen was too large, crowding out the dining room, storage room, and pushing into the corner of the quirky living room. Penny felt vaguely dizzy, as if every part of the house was constantly moving, just slightly. Even when she closed her eyes and hung onto the table, the feeling persisted.

  And above it all, the tower.

  Maybe Belinda was right. Maybe he was lying out there somewhere, gone to bones and dust. And he’d have died alone, perhaps with a broken leg or a heart attack, under lonely skies without Penny there with him.

  Don’t be soft, Penny, Peter says, and she looked around, certain that she actually heard those words spoken. The natural direction for her to look was up. I’m fine. You know I am. Fine now that you’ve made the break, and taken the risk. And how does it feel, my rose? How does it feel?

  “I’m not sure yet,” Penny said. Even the way her words echoed was unfamiliar. “I’m a little bit afraid.”

  Don’t be, my darling, Peter says. Penny had not heard such love in his voice for many years.

  DUSK APPROACHED. IN the valley, it was a wild time. The breeze increased, rustling the trees along the edge of Penny’s new garden. Dogs barked from somewhere far off. Birds flitted overhead, and sitting on a stone bench outside, Penny watched them circling the tower. None seemed to land. She could not blame them. There was something so intrinsically wrong there, but she was doing her best to steer her attention away from its upright bulk. To give in to the tower would be to admit defeat.

  “I might just as well go home,” she said. The overgrown garden dampened her voice, and her words quickly faded to memory.

  She walked around the garden with a glass of wine. She never usually drank wine except on Friday evenings, and then only a glass or two after eight o’clock. Now it was Tuesday, barely six-thirty, and she loved the feel of the glass in her hand, the fruity taste of wine on her lips.

  The garden was larger than she had thought at first. Either that, or the boundaries were poorly marked and she was strolling across open hillside. She always felt the bulk of the house to her left, but most of her attention was directed downwards, at the twisted vegetation, long grass, and exposed tree roots that sought to trip her. She stepped over and around obstructions, and thought perhaps tomorrow she would walk further into the hills. There was a famous trail up on the ridge, so Mr Gough had told her. Popular with walkers. Peter had been a walker.

  “I was a sitter,” she spoke to the garden. “A not-doer. A nothing. A... waste of space.” She hated the term, because Peter had used it referring to her on more than one occasion. “Waste of space.” She looked across at the house, the looming tower, and realised that she now stood in its stretching shadow. The sun touched the hillside beyond, and cast a palette of reds and oranges around the tower’s stark lines. The glazed room was exposed to the sunset. There was a solid shadow within, as if a shape was standing in the centre of the room. And Penny wondered what would change were she to suddenly disappear, and what would fill the space she had left behind.

  She began to cry. It was dislocation and fear, but also a growing sense that time had passed her by. She had never, ever thought like this before, even when Peter had angrily insisted that he only had one life, and he would not fritter it away waiting for her.

  Don’t be sad, Peter says. His voice was stronger than the breeze, brighter than the s
unset, and more meant for her than the hushing trees and calling birds. You’ve done well, my sweet rose. You know not to waste any more time, or time will waste you.

  “Are you coming back to me?” she asked.

  You think I ever left?

  Penny stared up at the tower room, convinced that she would see movement there, or a face, or a sign that this new home was more than just her own. But still it exuded a weight of wrongness, as if the tower and room had been built onto the house long after it had first been constructed.

  “I’m not going there,” she said. “The house is plenty big enough without me ever having to go there.” No one replied, and she saw that her glass was empty. She did not even remember drinking the wine.

  Back in the kitchen, the bottle was empty as well. Penny sat on an old stool and rested her arms on the worktops, her head on her arms. Her bones were full of aches, reminders of mortality. She closed her eyes.

  Tap, tap, tap...

  “YOU NEVER CALL me your little rose anymore,” she says.

  “Huh.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Peter looks across at her from the driver’s seat. They are stuck in traffic on the way home from the supermarket. She bought food, he bought a CD and a book about Eastern European cuisine and a cheap one-man tent light enough to carry on a hike or a bike. “That was a long time ago,” he says.

  “So much just fades away,” Penny says sadly.

  “Huh.” The car pulls forward some more, and Penny watches her husband driving. He remains silent, stern. She wishes he would just throw her a glance, a smile, a cheeky, My rose never fades. But the rot has set in years before, and now they are simply awaiting dead-heading.

  SHE OPENED HER eyes to darkness, and a cruel throbbing against her skull. The house sat around her, quiet, still, and she felt that it was observing her pained waking. The weight of above pressed down against her, almost crushing her into the stool and worktop. How could the tower have not tumbled long before now? How could it stand, so heavy and dense? Even though she could no longer hear the tapping sound, she could feel it through her hands and feet. Transmitted through the body of the house like a secret message from one room to another. All about me, she thought, and she slipped from the stool to the kitchen floor. She unrolled the sleeping mat and sleeping bag, climbed in, ignoring the pressure on her bladder, the need for a drink of water, the fear of what else might be sharing the floor with her in the darkness. She had not been this drunk in decades, but today she welcomed it. Her world swayed. She was protected by numbness, and still feeling that tap, tap, tap touching delicately against the flagstone floor, she was pulled back into the dark.