Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories

by Clive Barker

  She would go to the Walk now, she decided, and give herself time to savor each fearless step she took along it, jubilating in her victory over history. She drove around the side of the quarry and slammed the car door with a smile on her face as she climbed the three steps that led off the pavement onto the footpath itself.

  The shadow of the brick wall fell across the Walk, of course; and its length was darker than the street behind her. But nothing could sour her confidence. She walked from one end of the weed-clogged corridor to the other without incident, her whole body high with the sheer ease of it. How could I ever have feared this? she asked herself as she turned and began the journey to the waiting car.

  This time, as she walked, she allowed herself to think back on the specifics of her childhood nightmares. There had been a place—halfway along the Walk and therefore at the greatest distance from help—that had been the high-water mark of her terror. That particular spot—that forbidden few yards that, to the unseeing eye, were no different from every other yard along the Walk—was the place the thing in the quarry would choose to pounce when her last moments came. That was its killing ground, its sacrificial grove, marked, she had fervently believed, with blood of countless other children.

  Even as the taste of that memory returned to her, she approached the point. The signs that had marked the place were still to be seen: an arrangement of five discolored bricks; a crack in the cement that had been minuscule eighteen years ago and had grown larger. The spot was as recognizable as ever; but it had lost its potency. It was just another few of a hundred identical yards, and she bypassed the spot without the contentment on her face faltering for more than an instant. She didn’t even glance behind her.

  The wall of the Bogey-Walk was old. It had been built a decade before Miriam was born, by men who had known their craft indifferently well. Erosion had eaten at the quarry face beneath the teetering brick, unseen by Council inspectors and safety officials from the Department of the Environment; in places the rain-sodden sandstone had crumbled and fallen away. Here and there, the bricks were unsupported across as much as half their breadth. They hung over the abyss of the quarry while rain and wind and gravity ate at the crumbling mortar that kept them united.

  Miriam saw none of this. She would have had to have waited a while before she heard the uneasy grinding of the bricks as they leaned out against the air, waiting, aching, begging to fall. As it was, she went away, elated, certain that she’d sloughed off her terrors forever.

  That evening she saw Judy.

  Judy had never been beautiful; there had always been an excess in her features: her eyes too big, her mouth too broad. Yet now, in her mid-thirties, she was radiant. It was a sexual bloom, certainly, and one that might wither and die prematurely, but the woman who met Miriam at the front door was in her prime.

  They talked through the evening about the years they’d been apart—despite their contract not to discuss the past—exchanging tales of their defeats and their successes. Miriam found Judy’s company enchanting; she was immediately comfortable with this bright, happy woman. Even the subject of her separation from Donald didn’t inhibit her flow.

  “It’s not verboten to talk about old husbands, pet; it’s just a bit boring. I mean, he wasn’t a bad sort.”

  “Are you divorcing him?”

  “I suppose so; if I have a moment. These things take months, you know. Besides, I’m a Libra; I can never make up my mind what I want.” She paused. “Well,” she said with a half-secret smile, “That’s not altogether true.”

  “Was he unfaithful?”

  “Unfaithful?” She laughed. “That’s a word I haven’t heard in a long time.”

  Miriam blushed a little. Was life really so backward in the colonies, where adultery was not yet compulsory?

  “He screwed around,” said Judy. “That’s the simple truth of it. But then, so did I.”

  She laughed again, and this time Miriam joined in with the laughter, not quite certain of the joke. “How did you find out?”

  “I found out when he found out.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “It was all so obvious, it sounds like a farce when I tell it; but he found a letter, you see, from someone I’d been with. Nobody particularly important to me—just a casual friend, really. Anyway, he was triumphant; I mean, he really crowed about it, said he’d had more affairs than I had. Treated it all like some sort of competition—who could cheat the most often and with whom.” She paused; the same mischievous smile appeared again. “As it was, when we put our cards on the table, I was doing rather better than he was. That really pissed him off.”

  “So you separated?”

  “There didn’t seem to be much point in staying together; we didn’t have any kids. And there wasn’t any love lost between us. There never really had been. The house was in his name, but he let me have it.”

  “So you won the competition?”

  “I suppose I did. But then, I had a hidden advantage.”

  “What?”

  “The other man in my life was a woman,” Judy said, “and poor Donald couldn’t handle that at all. He more or less threw in the towel as soon as he found out. Told me he realized he’d never understood me and that we were better apart.” She looked up at Miriam and only now saw the effect her statement had had. “Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry. I just opened my mouth and put my foot in it.”

  “No,” said Miriam, “It’s me. I’d never thought of you . . . ”

  “ . . . as a lesbian? Oh, I think I’ve always known it, right back to school days. Writing love letters to the games mistress.”

  “We all did that,” Miriam reminded her.

  “Some of us meant it more seriously than others.” Judy smiled.

  “And where’s Donald now?”

  “Oh, somewhere in the Middle East, last I heard. I’d like him to write to me, just to tell me he’s well. But he won’t. His pride wouldn’t let him. It’s a pity. We might have been good friends if we hadn’t been husband and wife.”

  That seemed to be all there was to say on the subject; or all Judy wanted to say.

  “Shall I go and make some coffee?” she suggested, and went through to the kitchen, leaving Miriam to toy with the cat and her thoughts. Neither were particularly fleet-footed that night.

  “I’d like to go to your mum’s funeral,” Judy called through from the kitchen.

  “Would you mind?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I didn’t know her well, but I used to see her out shopping. She always looked so smart.”

  “She was,” Miriam said. Then: “Why don’t you come in the lead car with me?”

  “I’m not a relative.”

  “I’d like you to.” The cat turned over in its sleep and presented its winter-furred belly to Miriam’s comforting fingers. “Please.”

  “Then thank you. I will.”

  They spent the remaining hour and a half drinking coffee, and then whiskey, and then more whiskey, and talking about Hong Kong and their parents, and finally about memory. Or rather, about the irrational nature of memory; how their minds had selected such odd details to fix events while neglecting others more apparently significant: the smell in the air when the words of affection were spoken, not the words themselves; the color of a lover’s shoes, but not of their eyes.

  At last, way after midnight, they parted.

  “Come to the house about eleven,” Miriam said. “The cars are leaving at about a quarter past.”

  “Right. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

  “Today,” Miriam pointed out.

  “That’s right, today. Take care driving, love. It’s a foul night.”

  The night was breezy; the car radio reported gale-force winds in the Irish Sea. She drove home cautiously through the empty streets, the same gusts that buffeted the car raising leaves from the dead and whirling them up into the glare of the headlamps. In Hong Kong, she thought, there would still be plenty of life in the
streets this time of night. Here? Just sleep-darkened houses, closed curtains, locked doors. As she drove, she mentally followed her footsteps through the day and the three encounters that had marked it out. With her mother, with Judy, and with the Bogey-Walk. By the time she’d done her thinking, she was home.

  Sleep came fitfully through the blustery night, punctuated by dustbin lids whipped off by vicious licks of wind, the rain, and the scratching of sycamore branches against the windows.

  The next day was Wednesday, December 1, and the rain had turned to sleet by dawn.

  The funeral was not insufferable. It was at best a functional farewell to someone Miriam had once known and now had lost sight of; at worst, its passionless solemnity and well-oiled ritual smacked of frigidity, ending as a conveyor belt took the coffin through a pair of lilac curtains to the furnace and the chimney beyond. Miriam could not help but imagine the interior of the coffin as it shuddered through the theatrical divide of the curtains; could not help but visualize the way her mother’s body shook with each tiny jerk of her box toward the incinerator. The thought, though self-inflicted, was all but unbearable. She had to dig her fingernails into the flesh of her palm simply to prevent herself from standing up and demanding a halt to the proceedings: to have the lid pried off the coffin, to fumble in the shroud, and to pluck that blank body up in her arms one more time; lovingly, adoringly thanking her. That moment was the worst; she held herself in check until the curtains closed, and then it was over.

  As partings went, it was perfunctory, but it clung, in its plain way, to a measure of dignity. The wind was biting as they left the tiny red brick chapel of the crematorium, the mourners already dividing to their cars with murmurs of thanks and faint looks of embarrassment. There were flakes of snow in the wind: too large and too wet to amount to much as they flopped to the ground, but rendering the glum surroundings yet more inhospitable. Miriam’s teeth ached in her head; and the ache was spreading up her nose to her eyes.

  Judy hooked her arm.

  “We must get together again, love, before you leave.”

  Miriam nodded. Leaving was less than twenty-four hours away, and tonight, as a foretaste of liberty, Boyd would ring. He’d promised to do so, and he was sweetly reliable. She knew she’d be able to smell the heat of the street down the telephone wire.

  “Tonight . . . ” Miriam suggested to Judy. “Come round to the house tonight.”

  “Are you sure? Isn’t it a bit of a trial being there?”

  “Not really. Not now.”

  Not now. Veronica had gone, once and for all. The house was not a home any longer.

  “I’ve still got a lot of cleaning up to do,” Miriam said. “I want to hand it over to the agents with all Mother’s belongings dealt with. I don’t like the thought of strangers going through her stuff.”

  Judy murmured her agreement.

  “I’ll help, then,” she said. “If you don’t think I’ll get in the way.”

  “A working evening?”

  “Fine.”

  “Seven?”

  “Seven.”

  A sudden, vehement gust of wind caught Miriam’s breath, dispersing a few lingering mourners to the warmth of their cars. One of her mother’s neighbors—Miriam could never remember the woman’s name—lost her hat. It blew off and bowled across the Lawn of Remembrance, her pop-eyed husband clumsily pursuing it across the ash-enriched grass.

  At the height of the quarry, the wind was even stronger. It came up from the sea and down the river, funneling its fury into a snow-specked fist; then it scoured the city for victims.

  The wall of the Bogey-Walk was ideal material. Weak from the flux of years, it needed little bullying to persuade it to surrender. In the late afternoon, a particularly ambitious gust took three or four glass-crowned bricks off the top of the wall and pitched them into the quarry lake. The structure was weakest there, in the middle of its length, and once the wind had started the demolition, gravity lent its elbow to the work.

  A young man, cycling home, was just about to reach the middle of the footpath when he heard a roar of capitulation and saw a section of the wall buckle outward in a cloud of mortar fragments. There was a diminishing percussion of bricks against rock as the ruins danced their way down to the foot of the cliff. A gap, fully six feet across, had opened up in the wall, and the wind, triumphant, roared through it, tugging at the exposed edges of the wall and coaxing them to follow. The young man got off his bicycle and wheeled it to the spot, grinning at the spectacle.

  It was a long way down, he thought as he stepped toward the breach and cautiously peered over the edge. The wind was at his heels and at the small of his back, curling around him, begging him to step a little farther. He did. The vertigo he felt excited him, and the idiot urge to fling himself over, though resistible, was strong. Leaning over, he was able to see the bottom of the quarry; but the face of the stone directly beneath the hole in the wall was out of sight. A small overhang obscured the place.

  The young man leaned farther out, the icy wind hot for him. Come on, it said. Come on, look closer, look deeper.

  Something, not a yard below the yawning gap in the wall, moved. The young man saw, or thought he saw, a form—whose bulk was hidden by the overhang—move. Then, sensing that it was observed, freeze against the cliff wall.

  Get on with it, said the wind. Give in to your curiosity.

  The young man thought better of it. The thrill of the test was souring. He was cold; the fun was over. Home time. He stepped back from the hole and began to wheel his bicycle away, a whistle coming to his lips that was part in celebration of escape and part to keep whatever he felt at his back at bay.

  At seven, Miriam was sorting through the last of her mother’s jewelry. There was very little of value in the small perfumed boxes, but there were one or two pretty brooches nesting in beds of greying cotton wool that she had decided to take home with her, for remembrance. Boyd had rung a little after six, as he had promised, his voice watery on a bad line, but full of reassurance and affection. Miriam was still high from his conversation. Now the telephone rang again. It was Judy.

  “Lovey, I don’t think I ought to come over this evening. I’m feeling pretty bad at the moment. It came on at the funeral, and the pains are always bad when it’s cold.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “I’d be lousy company, I’m afraid. Sorry to let you down.”

  “Don’t worry; if you’re not well . . . ”

  “Pity is, I might not get to see you again before you go back.” She sounded genuinely distressed at the thought.

  “Listen,” Miriam said, “if I get this work finished before it gets too late, I’ll wander round your way. I hate telephone farewells.”

  “Me too.”

  “I can’t promise.”

  “Well, if I see you, I see you; we’ll leave it at that, eh? If I don’t, take care, love, and drop me a line to tell me you got home safely.”

  By the time she stepped out of the house at nine-fifty, the gale had long since blown itself out, only to be followed by a stillness so profound, it was almost more unnerving than the preceding din. Miriam locked the door and took a step back to look at the front of the house. The next time she set foot here (if, indeed, she ever did), the house would be re-occupied and, no doubt, repainted. She would have no right-of-way here; the pains of remembrance she had experienced in the last few days would themselves be memories.

  She walked to the car, keys in hand, but decided on the spur of the moment that she would walk to Judy’s house. The gale-cleansed air was invigorating, and she would take the opportunity to wander around the old neighborhood one final time.

  She would even take the Bogey-Walk, she thought; she’d be at Judy’s in five or ten minutes.

  There was a long, deceptive curve in the Walk as it followed the rim of the quarry. From one end, it was not possible to see the other, or even the middle. So Miriam was almost upon the gap in the wall before she saw it. Her confident step fal
tered. In her lower belly something uncoiled its arms in welcome.

  The hole gaped in front of her, vast and inviting. Beyond the edge, where the meager light from the street had no strength to go, the darkness of the quarry was apparently infinite. She could have been standing on the edge of the world; there was neither depth nor distance beyond the lip of the path, just a blackness that hummed with anticipation.

  Even as she stared, morsels of cement crumbled into space. She heard them patter away from her; she could even hear their distant splashes.

  But now, entranced by her sudden dread, she heard another noise, close by, a noise she had prayed never to hear in the waking world, the grit of nails on the stone face of the quarry, the rush of caustic breath from a creature that had waited oh, so patiently for this moment and was now slowly and purposefully dragging its way up the last few feet of the cliff toward her. And why should it hurry? It knew she was frozen to the spot.

  It was coming; there was no help to be had. Its arms were splayed over the stone, and its head, dark with grime and depravity, was almost at the rim of the Walk. Even now, with its victim almost in view, it didn’t hasten its steady climb but took its awful time.

  The little girl Miriam had been wanted to die now, before it saw her, but the woman she was wanted to see the face of her ageless tormentor. Just to see, for the horrid instant before it took her, what the thing was like. After all, it had been here so long, waiting. It had its reasons for such patient malice, surely; maybe the face would show them.

  How could she have thought there could ever be escape from this? In sunlight she’d laughed off her fears, but that had been a sham. The sweat of childhood, the night tears (hot, and running straight from the corners of her eyes into her hair), the unspeakable terrors, were here. They had come out of the dark, and she was, at the last, alone. Alone as only children are alone: sealed in with feelings beyond articulation, in private hells of ignorance whose corridors run, unseen, into adulthood.