It contains half-a-dozen coins and several folded notes. As he pulls out the notes and smooths them on his palm, the coins rattle together. Surely he has misheard the sound. He leafs through the notes, peering so hard at them that his vision shivers, then he glares at the coins. All of the latter are plastic, and apart from a note in some unrecognisably foreign currency, the notes are from a board game too.
He clenches his fists in helpless rage, crushing the notes, splintering the coins. So the writers’ group never held a collection for him. The man who handed him the envelope must be responsible for its contents, and Mottershead is certain now that the man has been doing his best to drive him mad. When did he begin? He followed Mottershead into the room in the library, but from where? Perhaps from the bookshop where Mottershead found the copy of Cadenza—perhaps from the bedroom which Mottershead thought was a bookshop. The further back he tries to remember, the further and deeper the madness seems to reach; it’s like a black pit into which he’s falling with increasing speed. Then a glimpse of movement jerks him back into full awareness of his situation, and he glares at the mirror.
At first he thinks it may have been only the driver who moved. The man’s face looks more misshapen than ever, the brow drawn further forwards than the chin by the globular mirror. Beyond him, however, Mottershead can just discern the reflection of the lower deck, which is no longer empty. Some way down the aisle there’s a hint of a face in the air, a glimmering of eyes and teeth.
The eyes and the grin must be dismayingly large to be visible at such a distance in the dark. They look deserted by flesh. He can see nothing of the head they occupy except for a pale scrawny blur, but he sees movement below them, in front of them. It has begun to reach two hands towards the stairs.
It’s as though the mirror is a transparent egg inside which an embryo is forming. That image seems to clarify his vision, and he thinks the eyes are about to hatch or otherwise transform. Though neither the head nor the blur which is presumably its body has advanced, the thin white hands are much closer to the stairs. He can’t tell whether the spindly arms or the hands themselves are lengthening, but he feels as if his seeing the shape is allowing it to reach out—as if his inability to look away or to stop seeing is attracting it to him. His fists close convulsively on useless paper and plastic. He shies everything he’s holding at the mirror and scrabbles in his pockets. As the last of the notes flutters to the floor he finds the sharp portions of his broken credit card.
He takes them out and holds them between fingers and thumbs. There’s one blade for each of his eyes. In the mirror the huge unblinking eyes above the knowing grin watch him. He lifts the points towards his face, trying to take aim despite the tremors which are spreading from his fingers to the rest of him. He’ll have to apply the blades one at a time, he thinks. He tears his gaze away from the mirror, from the sight of the driver crouching over the wheel as if determined to ignore the presence in the aisle, the hands which appear to be drawing the rest of it towards the stairs. Mottershead grabs the back of his own head so that it can’t flinch out of range, and poises the first blade in front of his left eye.
The bus has arrived at the brow of a hill, where the houses come to an end. Beyond the last ruins, whose walls are almost buried in refuse, the road snakes down a bare slope into blackness. At the foot of the hill is a looming mass relieved only by a few lit windows. His thinking is so constricted that at first he doesn’t understand why the two lines of windows, one above the other, are identical. The lower rank is a reflection in black water; the windows are those of a boat.
Dare he risk heading for the stairs if that means the shape in the aisle may touch him? He’ll never reach the ferry otherwise. The point wavers in front of his eye, his hand grasps the back of his skull. The bus accelerates downhill, and the sudden movement jerks his head towards the blade. With a choked scream he opens both hands just in time for it to scrape his cheekbone.
The plastic skates across the floor and clatters down the stairs. He still has a weapon, if such a defence will be any use. He mustn’t imagine the worst or he’ll be lost. The bus is more than halfway down the slope. He shoves himself off the seat and turns towards the stairs, bracing himself to confront what may be waiting at the bottom. But it isn’t there, it’s in the aisle behind him.
The rudimentary face grins with delight. The thin white fingers are visibly lengthening, and he has stumbled almost within their grasp. They’re moving not so much like fingers as like the legs of spiders dangling in the gloom. If he hadn’t stood up when he did they would have closed over his eyes. That thought and the sight of them paralyses him, but another swerve of the vehicle throws him forwards. A convulsion of panic sends him sideways, where he manages to duck away from them, onto the stairs. He’s two steps down when they swoop over the banisters and touch him.
They touch his eyes. They feel like tongues composed of material softer than flesh. He hurls himself backwards, colliding with the metal wall, hacking at them with the blade. In the moment before they recoil from his attack he seems to feel a fingertip penetrating the surface of each eyeball. Blinking wildly, he slashes at the fingers as they retreat. Their substance tatters like wet paper, and he wonders if any of it is left in his eyes. As the remnants of the hands shrink back over the banister he staggers downstairs, moaning in his throat. “Stop,” he screams.
If his plea has any effect on the driver, it causes him only to mime indifference. As he leans over the wheel, his features seem to retreat into the hollow between his forehead and chin. Mottershead lunges at the door and wrenches at the handle. Either as a result of his violence or because the driver has released the mechanism, the door folds inwards, but the vehicle maintains its speed. It swerves towards the landing-stage, which consists of no more than a few planks embedded in glistening mud. The bus is travelling so fast that it almost skids onto the planks. The driver brakes, and Mottershead seizes his chance. As the bus slows momentarily, he launches himself onto the stage.
His impetus carries him across the planks at a helpless run. They shift alarmingly, sliding sideways. Some of them aren’t even set in the earth, they’re floating in water which looks thick as mud. Before any of this has registered he’s stumbling headlong onto the ferry as it bumps against the stage. By grabbing at the banister of the staircase which leads to the upper deck, he manages to halt himself. He clings to the rusty metal and stares back.
The bus is veering up the hill. Nothing appears to have followed him or to be about to follow. Though he can’t hear or feel the working of the engine, the boat is drifting away from the stage, several dislodged planks of which are trailing in its wake. He feels hollow with relief, and so the boat is some way out before he notices that it has ceased to show any lights.
Could the crew have abandoned it while he was on the hill? Even being cast adrift seems preferable to his encounter on the bus. All the same, he would like to see where he’s going. He scrambles upstairs to the top deck.
Several benches stand by the rail on either side of the deck. Ventilators rise above them, fat pipes whose wide mouths are turned towards the rail. Two pairs of double doors lead to a lounge below the wheelhouse. The sky and the water might be a single medium, a stagnant darkness which coats the surfaces of the vessel and fills the lounge and wheelhouse. He sits on a bench and watches the ruined suburb on the hill withdraw like a stage set and sink as though the blackness is consuming it, and then he sits and waits.
He isn’t sure what he’s waiting for: perhaps for daylight, or the appearance of another shore, or—best of all—of another boat with a crew to take him on board. He hopes he won’t have to wait long, because it’s beginning to prey on his nerves; he feels as if he isn’t alone on the boat after all. The doors to the lounge keep stirring furtively as if someone is peeping between them. That could be due to the motion of the vessel, though its rocking is imperceptible, but what has he begun to glimpse in the mouths of the ventilators, ducking out of sight whenever he gla
res at them? Whatever is keeping him company, everything seems to conceal it; even the benches, which remind him increasingly of boxes with concealed lids. Perhaps the lids are about to shift. Certainly he senses movement close to him.
He grabs the rail and pulls himself to his feet. As he stares about the deck in the midst of the shoreless water he feels something dodge behind him. He presses his spine against the rail. The deck is deserted, but something is behind him. He’s about to twist around until he catches sight of it, even though his instincts tell him that he won’t succeed, that he’ll go on spinning until he can’t stop. Instead he makes himself stay as he is, and grips the rail to hold himself still. Before long he senses movement at his back.
He knows where it is. He might have known sooner, he thinks, if it hadn’t been infecting his perceptions. He shoves himself away from the rail and strides to the middle of the deck, an expression which feels like a grin breaking out on his face. Planting his legs wide to steady himself, he shrugs off the rucksack and dumps it on the end of a bench. As he unbuckles it, the contents stir uneasily. He pulls it wide open and stoops to peer within.
There’s no book inside. The only contents are a naked doll about two feet high. Though it’s composed of whitish mottled plastic, it looks starved and withered. He inverts the rucksack, and the doll clatters in two pieces to the deck, the unscrewed top of the skull rolling away between the benches, the limbs twitching as the rest of the doll sprawls. What has emerged from the head scuttles into the depths of the rucksack and tries to burrow into a corner. Mottershead slams the rucksack onto the deck and stamps on it until the struggling inside it weakens and eventually ceases, then he kicks it and the doll overboard.
He hangs onto the rail and gazes at the water. Something is reluctant to let go of him. It feels like teeth buried in his brain, gnawing rat-like at its substance. As sluggish ripples spread through the water the teeth seem to burrow deeper and to lose their sharpness. The ripples fade as the doll and the rucksack sink, and he feels as if a toothless mouth has lodged in his skull, its enfeebled tongue poking at the fleshy petals of his brain. The ripples vanish, and so does the kiss in his brain, as if the mouth has starved of brain matter. Now that his mind is clear he turns to see where the boat is approaching.
It’s an island covered with trees and illuminated faintly by a crescent moon. Is it the place which feels as much like a dream as a memory? He has dreamed of being guided through the forest, following shafts of sunlight which appear to be both marking out his path and lingering on secrets of the forest: trees inscribed with messages of lichen; a glade encircled by mounds composed of moss and tiny blossoms as if the processes of growth are performing an arcane ritual; an avenue of pines whose trunks, which are straight as telephone poles, are surrounded by golden flakes of themselves as though sunlight has solidified in the piny chill and settled to the earth. Surely all this is more than a dream, despite his impression that the forest never ends—and then he sees that the ferry has brought him home.
The prow is pivoting towards the stage where he embarked before dawn. He can just see the avenue of poplars which leads to his house. Couldn’t the forest which seems to cover most of the island be the source of his vision? There’s no telling in the dark. At least the vessel isn’t drifting aimlessly; someone is in the wheelhouse after all, steering the boat to the shore.
As the ferry nudges the stage Mottershead descends the stairs. Since there’s nobody to moor the craft, he waits until the hull scrapes the tyres at the edge of the stage, then he runs at the gap where the gangplank should be, and jumps. The ferry swings away at once and sails into the blackness, but he has time to glimpse the helmsman. Is it the bearded sailor from the earlier ferry? He’s wearing a balaclava, though he seems to have pulled it down over the whole of his face. If its dim silhouette represents the outline of the skull, then surely Mottershead ought to have noticed how odd the shape was. It’s the fault of the darkness, he thinks, or else his perceptions aren’t as undistorted as he has allowed himself to hope. He’ll feel better once he’s home. He turns away from the water and strides towards the house.
The poplars creak and sway as though they’re about to collapse beneath the burden of the low thick sky. All the houses among the trees are unlit, and he can’t locate any of them by the glow of the moon, within whose curve he seems to glimpse a hint of features. He feels as though he can sense the growth of the forest around him; he keeps his gaze fixed on the tarmac for fear of straying once again into the woods. When he sees the lights of his house ahead he sprints towards them.
It doesn’t matter that he can’t recall leaving the lights on. He runs up the overgrown path, fishing for his keys, which rattle out of his pocket like the chain of a miniature anchor. He’s almost at the front door when he hears a voice beyond the curtains of the lounge: his own voice.
Worse yet, it sounds terrified. He feels as if he isn’t really outside the house—as if only his terror is. He’s tempted to flee into the woods rather than learn what the voice may have to tell him, but if he takes to his heels now he knows he will never be able to stop. He aims the key at the lock and grips his wrist with his other hand to steady it. At last the key finds the slot, and he eases the door open.
The bulb above the L-shaped hall is lit. The hall and the uncarpeted staircase look faded with disuse. Beyond the door to the lounge his voice is babbling incomprehensibly as if it’s unable to stop. He retrieves his key and creeps into the hall, inching the door shut behind him.
He isn’t stealthy enough. The voice is suddenly cut off, and he hears the whir of a speeding videotape. He slams the front door and, racing across the hall, flings open the door to the lounge.
Three people are sitting in the slumped armchairs: a woman who may be about his age, a younger woman, a man her age or slightly older. All have greying hair, which seems premature in at least two of them, and faces so wide that their foreheads appear lower than they should. As Mottershead strides into the room the man jumps up and snatches a tape out of the video recorder while his sister clears away a board game strewn with plastic coins and toy notes. “Darling,” the woman says to Mottershead, “we were just coming to fetch you.”
“We’ve been wondering where you’d got to,” says her daughter.
“Have you been working all this time, dad?” the man says gently, as if Mottershead isn’t already beset by enough questions of his own. Have they come to visit him, or are they living with him despite what he told the writers’ group? Were they somewhere in the house when he left it, or did they let themselves in later? “I’ve been using my mind all right,” he tells his son, to get rid of at least that question.
“Then I should put your feet up now,” his wife advises.
“Take it easy,” says his daughter. “You’ve earned the rest.”
“Try and get some sleep,” his son says. “We’re here.”
Why isn’t Mottershead reassured? Part of him yearns to embrace them, and perhaps he’ll be able to once he has watched the video cassette—once he no longer feels that they’re keeping a secret from him. He knows they’ll try to dissuade him from watching if they realise he means to do so. “Aren’t we eating?” he suggests.
“If you’re ready to put some flesh on yourself,” says his wife.
“I’ll help you,” his daughter tells her, and they both go out. His son has slipped the video cassette into its case and is trying to pretend he isn’t holding it. “I’ll put that away,” Mottershead informs him, staring hard at him until he hands over the cassette and trudges out of the room. “Close the door,” Mottershead calls after him. “I’d like to be alone for a while.”
The cassette has been recorded from a television broadcast. Handwritten on the label is the title, Out of His Head. Does that refer to the creative process? Might he just have heard himself reading one of his stories aloud? Again he seems to remember cameras and lights surrounding him, but now he has the disconcerting notion that it isn’t the memory which is
vague—it’s rather that he was unsure at the time whether the crew and their equipment were actually present. He shoves the cassette into the expressionless black mouth of the player and turns the sound of the television low as the image shivers into focus.
The cassette hasn’t been rewound completely; the programme is under way. One of his books is hovering in space. Postpone the Stone—of course that was a title of his; why couldn’t he have called it to mind when he needed to? A trick of the camera flips the book over like a playing card and transforms it into another of his novels, Make No Bones, and then into Cadenza. He’s about to run the tape back to remind himself of his work when he hears what the commentary is saying about him.
“—speculate with an intensity best described as neurotic,” an unctuous male voice is saying. “In one of his stories a man who’s obsessed with the impossibility of knowing if he has died in his sleep convinces himself that he has, and is dreaming. Another concerns a man who believes he is being followed by a schizophrenic whose hallucinations are affecting his own perceptions, but the hallucinations prove to be the reality he has tried to avoid seeing. The reader is left suspecting that the schizophrenic is really a projection of the man himself.”
Did Mottershead write that? He’s reaching out to halt the tape, so as to have time to think, when he sees himself appear on the screen. The sight freezes him, his hands outstretched.
He’s walking back and forth across a glade—whether in the forest on the island or behind his old home isn’t clear—and muttering to himself as rapidly as he is walking. Now and then he lurches at trees to examine the bark or squats to scrutinise the grass, and then he’s off again, muttering and scurrying. His grin is so fixed, and his eyes are so wide, that he looks afraid to do anything but grin. Every few seconds he digs his fingers into his unkempt scalp as if he feels it slipping.
The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories Page 41
