New Fears II--Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre
Page 30
* * *
The sun is bright in my room and I bolt upright in bed and I’m in a panic because I can’t miss school, not because I love it (I hate it (and I hate almost everything and everyone there except for Stacey and few other kids and Ms Whiting is cool too, I guess) and my stomach turns into a stinging ball of pain when I’m there most days) but because I stupidly hope doing well in that awful school is my only chance, which isn’t much of a chance at all, and I have no idea what time it is and how could I have slept through my alarm? Then I look at my phone and it’s dead and I remember last night and the hallway and it seems far away and at the same time it’s still there in the room with me because the rest of the house is still and quiet even if I’m running around my room slamming drawers and putting clothes on. Why didn’t Owen wake me up? He’s usually awake before me and watching TV (the morning is pretty much his only chance to have the TV to himself) and then I make him and me breakfast with the two clean bowls and I walk him to the bus stop and it’s all fine because Dad isn’t there to yell at us or do nothing. I go out into the hallway hoping that Owen is out there waiting for me (maybe he didn’t come in to wake me up because he was afraid I’d get mad he was coming into my room when he doesn’t let me go into his), and the hallway and the house is quieter than it was last night, and I tiptoe (afraid to disturb something, and maybe I still should be asleep, like I woke up during some secret hour or time I shouldn’t see, that no one should see) into the TV room and no one is there (just empty beer cans on the floor and chip bags and sunflower seed bags on the couch) and then I dance around the big trash bags and into the kitchen and no one is there (just more trash and dish piles and open and empty cabinets), and then I go back to the hallway, our hallway and the floor near Owen’s door is clear (no broken cereal bowl, no mac ’n cheese, no shoebox) and his door is open halfway, so I walk toward it, and my stomach is in that ball of pain, and I don’t want to go in his room now that it’s open. I whisper-yell.
Owen? You still asleep?
(nothing)
It’s time to get up. We don’t want to miss school.
(nothing)
We’ll get in trouble.
(nothing)
I’m coming in. Okay?
(nothing)
I stand there, listening. Maybe I can hear Owen breathing or turning in the covers if I listen hard enough, and the weakest saddest scardest lost-est youngest part of me screams at me to go get Dad, go get Dad, but I will not, no matter what, and I shimmy through the open door, careful to not make contact with the wood (as my face passes by, I notice there’s no evidence of last night’s mac ’n cheese explosion) and I can’t remember the last time I’ve been in Owen’s room and by the looks of it, maybe it has been since Mom left, maybe it’s been for as long as he’s been alive, and I start crying because as bad as the kitchen is and the rest of the house is, his room is worse, because it smells like an unchanged hamster cage and it smells like a dead thing, and I can’t see the floor through a sea of trash and toys and torn up books and clothes and stained underwear and seeds and seeds and seeds, empty shells spit out everywhere, and half-full plastic cups and over-full cups on the windowsill and seeds and smaller seed-shaped pellets that I’m afraid aren’t seeds and are mouse poops (I’ve seen plenty of those throughout the house) and water stains on the wallpaper, and his elevated bed frame has no box spring and mattress (they must be on the floor under everything else) and there are cans of Coke on the platform where the mattress used to be and some cans are on their sides and caked in seeds and there’s one can upside down stuck in the corner of the bed frame, and I can follow the syrupy stain leading down the frame and splashed black on the walls, and I turn away and I see his closet behind me and it has no door and it’s full of trash and I see empty beer cans and maybe full ones (does Dad hide them in here? Does Owen hide them from Dad?), and I can’t possibly see it all, and now all I’m thinking is that I’m going to pull Owen out of here no matter what it takes and not let him back in this place, and then the smell again, like in the kitchen when he brought in the shoebox and last night in the hallway, and I wade through the room whispering Owen’s name, and to where I think the box spring and mattress must be underneath the pile of bedding and I pull away the blankets and it’s the shoebox but now it’s the size of the mattress and it’s the same colour with the same stains, but it can’t be the same, it can’t be, and without thinking I scream for Dad.
(nothing)
And there’s rustling inside the giant box and so I open the cover, and the cover is heavy but I can handle it and it feels wet and damp and cold, and that cold gets under the skin of my hands, and I hate touching it but I don’t let go, and inside is darkness, is all the darkness collected and saved, and way down inside I can hear noises and they are faint but I can hear the slurping, sloshing, wet noises I heard when I held the box and in the hallway last night, the dead thing noises, and I hold the cover open over my head and look down and down and down.
Owen? Are you in there?
(nothing)
Please, Owen?
(nothing)
We’ll go away, okay? We’ll run away to someplace better? We’ll be okay there.
(nothing)
We won’t get in trouble. I promise.
(nothing)
I’m coming in. Okay?
(nothing)
THE SKETCH
Alison Moore
Ailsa moved into the light. She held the drawing close to the bedroom window and studied it. She had found it inside her old portfolio case, which she had opened today for the first time since her youth. The rest of the work—a collection of self-portraits and still lifes—was familiar, recognisable as her own, but this piece—she would swear on the Bible—she had never seen before, not until just a minute ago when she had turned over an unfinished head and found this strange thing underneath.
As a girl, she’d had her heart set on art school, on nothing less than the Slade; she had hoped to become an artist, perhaps an illustrator. In the event, further education had not been a possibility, due to her mother’s illness. “You can get that idea out of your head,” her father had told her. The portfolio had been put away then and had not been opened again while her father was alive, although Ailsa had taken it with her when she married Peter, and again when they moved out of their first house and into this flat. She was supposed to have thrown things out before the move, but she had been finding it hard. In the end, she had brought much of it with her, promising Peter that she would, when she’d had a chance to think about it, keep only what was absolutely necessary; she would be brutal.
Now the portfolio lay unzipped and wide open on the unmade bed. The drawing’s heavy pencil lines captured the likeness of some kind of troll or sprite, some devilish-looking creature. This was not something she had drawn, surely. Her own work had been much more conventional. She did not remember making this picture; it did not look like her work. She touched it, as if she might be able to feel those textures suggested by the pencil lines: the roughness, the hairiness. When she looked very closely, at details rather than at the whole thing in one go, perhaps there was something familiar about it; and whether or not it had come out of her, it did speak to her in some way.
The graphite had come away on her fingers; her fingerprints made an ellipsis at the edge of the paper.
* * *
Her father’s funeral took place on a Wednesday. Peter could not be there as he had to be at work, and it was necessary for Ailsa to take the baby with her to the crematorium. Peter needed the car, and anyway, he did not like her to drive it: she had once scraped a wing, scratched the paintwork, and she had a bad habit of letting the windscreen washer reservoir run dry. He accused her of not looking after it properly. Ailsa thought he was being unfair. In recent years, she had taken a car maintenance class for beginners, and she had been a good student—she had paid attention and made careful notes, which she kept in order in a ring binder. On the other hand, it was true that sh
e was sometimes careless with that old car of his.
She caught the bus to the crematorium, with the baby strapped to her chest. It was a cold midwinter day, but fresh and rather lovely, and as she walked through the gates of the crematorium the sun emerged briefly.
She sat at the front, and as the curtains closed around the coffin a distant relative leaned close, laid a hand on Ailsa’s and said, as if to soothe her, though she was not crying, “That’s just his body going. He doesn’t want it any more. He’s free now.” Ailsa looked at the relative’s hand pressing down on her own; it looked like her father’s.
* * *
“Out,” said Peter. He reached back into the cardboard box. “Out.” The discard pile in the flat’s narrow hallway reminded Ailsa of the bonfires they used to have in their back garden when she was little. She always made a Guy to put on top of it, with an old pillowcase for a face and her mother’s tights for limbs, all stuffed with her father’s newspaper. Her father, approaching the bonfire with a box of matches, said that if any hedgehogs were hibernating in there they’d better get out now, and then he lit the twists of paper he’d screwed into the gaps, and Ailsa watched the Guy. She imagined, as the flames rose higher, the Guy’s felt-tipped face turning towards her, seeking her out in the dark, in the firelight, his overlong limbs twitching and shifting away from the heat. Then the nylon and the paper would catch and the Guy would flare and—so soon, so quickly, considering the time and care that had been put into making him—be gone, apart from the fragments that, still burning, blew towards her, and she had to step back so that she would not get holes in her winter coat.
“Keep,” said Peter, putting aside the canvas of tiny handprints and footprints, done when Bella was only a few weeks old.
“Out,” said Peter. He was holding Ailsa’s portfolio. It had not sounded like a question, but Ailsa said, as she came forward and took the portfolio from his hands, “I’m not sure.”
“You can’t hang on to all this stuff,” he said. “We don’t have space for it here.”
“I don’t see how we’re going to manage in this little flat,” said Ailsa. “Not with the baby.”
“We have no choice,” said Peter. “You know that. We have to downsize.”
“All my drawings are in here,” she said.
“But what would you need to keep them for?” asked Peter.
“I might want to look at them,” said Ailsa.
Peter, delving back into the box, adding sheaves of old paperwork to the pile, said, “You haven’t looked at them in twenty years.”
“I looked at them yesterday,” said Ailsa. “There was one drawing in there that I don’t even remember doing. It’s nothing like the others. It’s peculiar, rather horrid, but I think in a way it’s better—more vivid and realistic and affecting— than anything else I’ve done. It looked like if I touched it, I’d be able to feel the textures—dirty hair and stubble and ragged nails. And its eyes look right back at you, I swear they do. I’m going to show you.” She went to the kitchen table, moving the baby’s things to make space for her portfolio. She opened it up. “It’s here,” she said, “in amongst the self-portraits, just under these heads.”
Peter came and stood at her shoulder, waiting.
“It’s here,” she said again, “somewhere…”
“Ailsa,” said Peter.
She rummaged through the sheets of paper, going all the way down to the bottom of the pile. “It was…”
“Ailsa,” said Peter. “We’re all having to make sacrifices. Even Bella is having to make sacrifices. She’ll have to manage with less stuff, less space, no garden.”
Ailsa looked at Bella, who everyone said had her eyes, but the baby’s eyes were blue while Ailsa’s were dark. Perhaps the baby’s eyes would change; Ailsa expected that they would, in due course. Bella was still so young—too young, Ailsa thought, to even see her across a room, to see anything more than a murky blur where Ailsa was standing.
The picture of the troll, the sprite—the devilish-looking whatever-it-was—was not there. She would swear that she had put it back inside the portfolio, but now it was gone. In between the heads and the fruit, she found a sheet of paper that was blank except for the fingerprints at the edge, one so clear that you could see the pattern, like ripples in water. She tried to match it to her own. The others were just smudges.
* * *
Ailsa saw Peter’s face contort; she watched him spit his tea back into his mug. Holding it at a distance, he said, “Is there salt in this?”
“There shouldn’t be,” she said.
“I know there shouldn’t be,” he said, “but is there?”
“Mine’s fine,” said Ailsa, but she did not take sugar anyway; she drank her tea black, with lemon. “Perhaps the sugar and salt got mixed up during the move.”
“And the mug’s dirty,” complained Peter, putting it down heavily and pushing himself away from the kitchen table. Ailsa looked and saw that the mug was indeed dirty: there was a smudge on the side, just where it said BEST DAD. She wondered who had bought that mug. She had not bought it for him, and of course the baby had not; had he bought it for himself? As a joke, perhaps.
When she had cleared the breakfast table and given Bella her milk, she went to look for her portfolio. She had to make some decisions today; she had to decide which of her belongings to keep and which to discard. She called to Peter, “Where’s my portfolio?”
“I put it out,” said Peter.
Ailsa looked at the pile that remained in the hallway. “Out where?”
“I put it out for the dustmen,” said Peter.
Still in her dressing gown, Ailsa hurried out of the flat and down the stairs. At the bottom, she pushed open the front door. The world was bitterly cold.
The bins had been emptied. Ailsa heard the distant screech of the bin lorry.
* * *
There was a lot of work to be done on the flat, to make it habitable. The kitchen in particular was disgusting. Ailsa remembered her mother saying that the kitchen was the most important room in a home; the kitchen was its heart.
Ailsa sat the baby in a rocker in the doorway and set to tearing up the old lino, which she despised—it looked like a vast and foul chessboard. She was halfway through the task before it struck her that the tiles revealed beneath were just the same as they’d had at home when she was young. For a moment, looking at these childhood tiles, it was as if it might be possible to go back and start over again, make a fresh start, have another go. Then she saw the dirty marks on the doorframe, and she thought of her father, home from the workshop, slouching in the doorway, a small man with grime on his hands, in the whorls of his skin, oil under his fingernails.
When Peter came home from work, he stopped in the kitchen doorway and looked at her. Looking back at him with red-rimmed eyes, she told him, “I don’t want to live here,” but her voice seemed thin, whispery, and she was not sure he heard her.
“You’re a state,” he said. “Some women are like this after having a baby.” He reached down and lifted Bella out of the rocker. “Sssh…” he said to her. “Sssh…” To Ailsa, he said, “Do you think you should see a doctor?”
* * *
Ailsa was often woken at night by Peter’s snoring. When it reached a crescendo, his breathing seemed to stop altogether, before starting again. But this was different. Ailsa had woken to find Peter lying there with his hands around his own throat; she had been woken by the choking noises he was making. His eyes—she saw, as she got herself up onto her elbows to see what was going on—were very wide. As she turned on the bedside lamp, he finally managed to draw in a breath, a desperate, shallow gulp of air, and then another. When he could speak again, he whispered, “I couldn’t breathe.”
“I expect it’s this flat,” she said. “All the old dirt and dust has got into your lungs.”
“It felt like something was sitting on my chest,” he said.
In the lamplight, Ailsa looked at his chest, but the T-shirt
that he wore in bed was black—there was no evidence that anything had been there; she could see no tell-tale marks.