The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  “G’night, Smiley,” she says.

  “G’night, Junebug,” I say.

  THE WIDOW

  RIO YOUERS

  Rio has already made his mark on the horror genre with his moving and dark novella Westlake Soul (ChiZine Publications, 2012) and continues to make an impression with a slew of incisive short stories. What follows is Youers at his best, displaying his horrific sensibility with a gift for characterization that makes ‘The Widow’ a compelling read.

  “WHAT ARE YOU doing?”

  “I’m stopping you.”

  The man drew whistling breaths and his chest strained against the rope that bound him. Blood trickled from his nose and mouth. Harsh light washed him, emphasizing every bruise and abrasion. Had she thought him immortal... supernatural? Here he was now, weak and bleeding all over her floor. His ancient skin could break, after all.

  “Stopping me?” He blinked and shook his head. “From what, exactly?”

  She stepped towards him, throwing her shadow like a blanket. A large woman. Not fat, but solid. Her thick arms were packed with toil and angst. She had a prominent brow and square shoulders. Very little could be described as feminine. Not her military surplus jacket, nor her scuffed leather boots. Only her fingernails, perhaps, painted – incongruously – bubblegum pink.

  “By my count, you have killed a total of fifty-three people.” Cloud-coloured eyes peered through unkempt hair. “Fourteen of them were children. I can only go back to when records began, of course, so the actual number may well be greater.”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “And now it ends.”

  “This is madness.” He fought the rope again, twisting his upper body; it chewed into his arms and chest. No give. He pushed against the wooden post he’d been bound to. It creaked, but didn’t budge. More blood leaked from his nose.

  There was a workbench against the back wall, strewn with tools. Various wrenches and screwdrivers. A handsaw. A nail gun. A claw hammer. She turned and walked towards it, her heavy boots kicking up dust.

  “Timothy Peel,” she said.

  “What? What?”

  “One of the men you killed... Timothy Peel.” Her hand moved from the handsaw to the nail gun. Back to the handsaw. “He was my husband.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I swear I don’t.”

  “We’d only been married eleven months.” She selected the nail gun. Cordless, 15-gauge, loaded with two-inch finish nails. Her fingers curled around the handle. “I loved him very much. He was my... my balance.”

  No one would hear him scream. Not here, in the basement of her house, fifty yards from the road, and a quarter of a mile from her nearest neighbour. And scream he did, looking at the nail gun in her hand. A shrill and desperate effort. Eyes wide. Body jerking. His throat turned dark with the strain, like a bruise.

  She let him expend both voice and energy, until he was left rasping and drooling. Tears soaked his shirt. His upper body sagged against the rope. He’d been tied in a sitting position. His legs were splayed. She kicked them closer together, then straddled them. The muscles in his calves tensed, but he couldn’t move. Another weak sound, and he looked at her with shattered eyes.

  “You’re making a terrible mistake,” he said.

  “Seventh of April, 2009. Almost four years ago. To the day.” She pressed the nail gun’s nose piece against his left kneecap and he squirmed and struggled, but was held tight. “Timothy wasn’t just an accomplished driver, he was a careful driver. Yet, mysteriously, he flipped his car one morning on his way to work. Conditions were perfect. No wind. No rain. Good visibility. He died while emergency services worked to cut him from the wreckage.”

  “A car accident.” The man’s voice was cracked. His eyes pleading: blue and large and wet. “He died on the road.”

  The widow smiled. She looped her index finger around the trigger and fired three nails into the cartilage below his kneecap.

  He found the energy to scream again.

  “But, mister,” she said. “You are the road.”

  THERE HAD LONG been concerns about Faye Peel née Lester’s mental stability, but when she decided to have a house built on Thornbury Road – less than one hundred yards from where Timothy was killed, in fact – her friends and family deduced that she had finally come unhinged. Not irrevocably so, but sufficient to warrant professional intervention.

  Her father was a worrisome rabbit of a man with fleet gestures and small eyes. He rarely finished a sentence.

  “Your mother and I feel that...” He proffered a sheet of paper, upon which had been printed the particulars of one Dr. Matthew Claridge, MA, MBBS, MRCPsych. His logo was a smiling flower.

  “A psychiatrist?”

  “We’re worried about you, Faye.”

  “Indeed.” She placed the sheet of paper facedown on the kitchen table. Her mother busied herself cooking, humming something, as if she didn’t have one ear – or both – on the conversation.

  “It’s just that, since Timothy...” Her father made half a move to take her hand, but drew back. His mouth twitched. “And all that nonsense about... and now this, with the house...”

  “Thank you for your concern.” Faye smiled, and it was she who reached across to take his hand. It felt small, somehow, and she noted how it trembled. “I’m fine, though. I feel stronger and more focused than I have in years.”

  “But the house... do you really...? Oh, Faye, it’s just so close.”

  She squeezed his fingers gently. Her smile was sure. Her voice confident.

  “I have my reasons.”

  And she did; the ‘nonsense’ to which her father referred was her erstwhile assertion that Timothy’s death had not been an accident, and her subsequent vow to find the man responsible. These claims were met with sympathy, a great deal of love, but very little understanding. Faye eventually let it slide – even professed a misjudgement, for her parents’ sake – although she secretly, passionately, pursued her suspicion.

  It began shortly after Timothy’s death. The first two months had been an emotional blur. She recalled only damp and grey patches, like fragments of cloud snatched from the sky. The funeral was dreamlike. Red flowers. So many red flowers. Timothy’s brother playing ‘Let It Be’ on a guitar the same colour as his coffin. As many hands as there were flowers, all offered in support. The world revolved too slowly, and with a grinding sound that kept her awake at night. She imagined its ancient machinery full of pain, coughing black smoke, and God crippled by the weight of His dead.

  This lassitude fractured, finally, when Faye opened the bathroom cabinet one morning and saw Timothy’s aftershave on the shelf. She’d been with him when he bought it, neither of them knowing that he wouldn’t live long enough to finish the bottle. It occurred to her – and it was like a hand gently leading her through the rain – that she would never again smell that aftershave on his skin, or the vague trace of it on his shirt collar when doing the laundry. She took the bottle off the shelf, unscrewed the cap, and lifted it to her nose. Her tears were copious, but not without healing. As she wiped the last of them from her face, she felt something give way inside her – an internal landslide that left her partly hollow, but with enough space to exist. She poured the aftershave down the sink and disposed of the bottle. She whirled, then, through the house, not removing Timothy, but clearing those possessions too replete with memories. His reading glasses. His favourite cardigan, threadbare and wonderful. The giant bar of Dairy Milk he’d been nibbling on since Christmas. In the end, a chestful of items that had no place in her half-formed life. And even though she still slept at night with her arm thrown across Timothy’s side of the bed, it felt like a huge step in the right direction.

  Another step was to visit the site of the accident. Thornbury Road was a seven-mile pencil-line on the countryside, linking the A4301 at Abbotsea to the Paisley Wood roundabout. It often provided a beautiful drive, with raised banks of daffodils in the spring, and clutches of w
oodland that flared with oranges and reds come autumn. Strings of mist clung to the farmland at dawn, made pink by the climbing sun, and wildlife revelled in the fields that rolled southward, where, on clear days, the English Channel could be seen skimming the horizon. Despite its charm, though, it had, understandably, become a sombre route for Faye. The shadows seemed suddenly denser. The dawn mists obscured secret things. Broken things. It was here – a stone’s throw from where Timothy had died – that she first saw the sideways man.

  He had a condition, she thought. Scoliosis, or perhaps spina bifida. His back was skewed and his head kinked to one side, always looking over his right shoulder. Uneven hips caused him to drag rather than walk, having to correct his direction every several steps. His face, too, sloped to the right, as if sympathizing with his body.

  Faye had parked in a lay-by only a short distance away. She looked at the man through the windscreen. He had no purpose, apparently; he circled towards and then away from where Timothy died. Lank black hair covered his eyes.

  She surmised his challenges went beyond the physical. The poor man was lost, obviously, and confused. Thinking she could help, she stepped out of her car and onto the road. He looked up, alerted. A breeze blew back his hair and his eyes glimmered. They were notable not in their colour or shape, but in the way they regarded her. She felt suddenly naked, both body and soul laid bare. It was as if he touched – probed – her with those eyes, and examined her history. Every smile. Every tear. Every hope and sadness exposed. Faye shivered. She crossed her arms over her bosom and took a step back.

  She was about to get back into her car – return another day – when the man dragged himself sideways, onto the bank, and behind a cluster of evergreens. She saw his jacket sway between their narrow trunks, then he was gone. Faye staggered into the middle of the road and waited for him to emerge one way or the other, or to see him shuffling sideways across the field beyond the point where he had disappeared. She adjusted her position and peered through the branches.

  Nothing.

  “Hello.”

  Gone.

  She shivered again, composed herself. Several deep breaths, focusing on Timothy and the reason she’d come here. She walked to the site of his death. Planted both feet firmly upon it. She thought she’d experience... something. A chill. A vision. A memory. There was nothing. The road felt the same here as anywhere else – as any other road. The broken glass had been swept away. The blood, too. As far as this unspectacular patch of Thornbury Road was concerned, it was as if Timothy Peel had never existed at all.

  She cried again, deeply, and with a great pain in her chest. She got into her car and drove away. Too fast. Moving forward, or so she hoped. What else was there to do?

  THE NEXT SIX months were better. The pain never went away, but she could fold her hands around it. Contain it. She went out with her friends and smiled more often. She even regained the weight she’d lost after Timothy died. Her parents remarked on how well she was doing, and how proud they were. One morning in December, Faye awoke with her left arm curled beneath her pillow, rather than clutching Timothy’s side of the bed. She gasped – feeling both delighted and guilty – and sat up quickly. Early sunlight seeped through a crack in the curtains.

  That very day, a family of four was killed on Thornbury Road. Faye saw the wreckage of their Vauxhall Astra on the six o’clock news. Folded in the middle like paper. Roof pried away to get the bodies out. She saw the pulsing lights of the emergency services. She saw the POLICE ACCIDENT signs and solemn-faced officers at the scene. And she saw the sideways man, standing in the background like a large, stooped vulture.

  From that moment, everything started to unravel.

  SOMETHING THE REPORTER said picked at Faye’s mind and wouldn’t let go – that Thornbury Road had claimed eleven lives in the last ten years. An interesting choice of words that gave the seven-mile stretch of asphalt a certain character. She imagined it breathing, elongated lungs pounding beneath its surface, occasionally whipping snake-like to send some luckless vehicle spinning out of control.

  Ridiculous, but it picked at her. Then it gnawed at her. Then it started to tear. She lay awake, night after night, grinding her teeth and imagining the road moving slickly beneath the stars. She often drove out there, stopping her car every two or three hundred yards, on hands and knees with her ear pressed to its gritty skin ...

  No heartbeat. No movement. No life.

  She researched the road. More particularly, its nature. She was intrigued to find out just how many lives it had claimed over the years. She spent what amounted to months at the library and on her home computer, scrolling through links and news stories. Tracking deaths within the last forty years was easy enough. Most of them got front-page coverage in the Abbotsea Echo. Beyond 1965, though, it became more difficult. The library’s files were incomplete, and search engines provided only the more notable stories. She persevered, though, following every thread, however tenuous. Sometimes she worked through the night, with her eyes stinging and her worn body slouched across the desk. When she wasn’t digging for information, she was cruising Thornbury Road, daring – almost willing – it to come to life.

  She saw the sideways man twice. A different place each time. He scuttled along the edge of the road, and always disappeared before she reached him.

  “Faye, what’s happening? You haven’t been...”

  “You worry too much, Dad. You always have. Both of you.”

  “We love you.”

  “Then leave me alone.”

  Her parents tried to coax her from her mania, using increments of support that were dwarfed by their lack of understanding. They saw her desk buried beneath notes and old newspaper clippings, and files with headings like NON-FATAL and DRUNK DRIVERS stacked in teetering piles. They saw the magnified image of Thornbury Road taped to the wall, with coloured push-pins marking accident locations. They saw her too, of course, having derailed from whatever forward-moving track she’d been riding. Their concern was evident.

  “What exactly,” her mother sobbed, “are you hoping to find?”

  “Connections. Evidence.” Faye shrugged. “Maybe a motive.”

  “But it’s a road.”

  “It kills people.”

  Her many hours of work were not without reward. She learned that the road claimed its first victim in 1877. Clyde Tummond, forty-three years of age, died of massive internal injuries after being first thrown and then trampled by his horse. Before passing away, he recounted how Dolly, normally so stalwart, had been spooked by a man lurking at the edge of the road – one ‘of frightful countenance’. Faye was willing to accept this as a chilling coincidence... and then she uncovered a photograph from 1928. Its subject was a battered Austin Seven lying on its side, with its deceased driver sprawled nearby, covered by a sheet. The caption read, WEEKEND TRAGEDY. Harold Leggatt, 32, was killed Saturday evening after his vehicle overturned on Thornbury Road. The photograph was as grainy as one would expect of the era, but the crooked figure standing in a field to the left of the frame was unmistakable.

  She searched, then – and with a frantically beating heart – every photo hitherto discovered, studying the periphery for anything she may have missed. She spent further weeks unearthing more photographs, and found three instances of the sideways man. Two were, admittedly, inconclusive – faceless smudges that could be anyone, if not for that crippled stance. One was definite. From a May 1957 copy of the West Country Voice (she hadn’t found it before because they’d misspelled ‘Thornbury’), the grim wreckage of a Ford Anglia wrapped around a tree, with the sideways man hovering in the foreground. He was staring at the camera, perhaps caught off-guard. Looking into his eyes, Faye again found herself laid bare to him, the strands of her life unravelled for him to paw among like a cat.

  “Who are you?”

  She arranged the photographs on the floor. From 1928 until the most recent: a screen grab of the mangled Astra news footage. She studied the sideways man in each. Ne
ver changing. Never aging.

  “What are you?”

  Faye sought reason – an explanation so obvious she would flush with embarrassment. Every lucid argument felt desperate, however... that it wasn’t the same man, how could it be? Or maybe it was a hoax; photography as fake as that of the Loch Ness Monster. Having exhausted logic, she was left with hypotheses that could only be described as paranormal. She pondered them, and found they had substance. They took root in her mind and grew.

  Countless nights were lost to nightmarish thoughts. She envisioned this man – this creature – scuttling along Thornbury Road in search of victims. A scourge that spanned generations. She wondered if every road in Britain had its own sideways man. The idea was ludicrous, but it felt right. She couldn’t look at a map of the UK without imagining the motorways as arteries, the A- and B-roads as veins, all teeming with infection. A virus in the blood.

  “FAYE, SWEETIE, YOU’VE been under a lot of stress lately.”

  “Don’t patronise me, Megan. Just tell me what you see.”

  Faye had, delicately, taken her findings to her parents, and received the response she expected: a concern so deep it drowned any vestige of open-mindedness. So she called upon her friend, Megan, who deodorised with alum crystals and practised Reiki – an alternative disposition that would, Faye hoped, make her more accepting.

  “Car crashes,” Megan said, flipping through the photographs that Faye had handed her. “On Thornbury Road, no less. Oh, Faye, what is this all about?”

  They were in Costa. A quiet Tuesday morning, with few of the tables and chairs occupied, and the occasional sound of the coffee machines grinding and steaming in the background. It was the first time Faye had been anywhere other than the library and Thornbury Road in so long, and she felt self-conscious, decidedly unattractive. She wore a too-big sweater and her hair was greasy. It didn’t help that Megan was so pretty, with her swirl of chestnut hair and green eyes, and just a hint of patchouli on her skin.