by Tanith Lee
‘Jason Arnold?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. Jason Arnold used to play with us here when we was kids, and his little brother used to tag along. He was even younger than Jodie, a real toddler. After a while, they moved out of the flats and to somewhere up by Baker Street and didn’t come here to play anymore, but we still all went to the same school. About a year after they moved, Jason Arnold’s little brother disappeared. He was taken out of their house in the middle of the night. There was a lot of the usual talk but no one ever really figured out what had happened.
‘When Jason came back to school he was different. Once I asked him if he was okay and he got all shaky and whispered that it was what we’d heard in the park that did it. And I don’t know why because it made no sense but something about that totally freaked me out. I was only nine. I didn’t understand then.’ She lit another cigarette. ‘I never spoke to Jason Arnold again after that the whole time we were in that school.’
More children were leaving and but I didn’t pay them, or the encroaching twilight, any attention. This was far more interesting, even if my brogues weren’t doing much to keep the cold away from my still feet. ‘And what does this have to do with little Courtney?’ I asked, pulling a couple of milk bottles out of the bag.
‘Courtney was manic.’ She continued. ‘Like me, sugar wasn’t good for him. Sent him hyper. But that didn’t stop Jodie letting him have sweets and coke. She found it hard to say no to him. And he was a good kid, not mean or angry like some, but he wasn’t the kind of kid that would sit still for long. Not even in front of the telly. He needed to be running around, chasing things, playing loudly right up until he’d collapse into sleep.
‘But that night, two years ago, he was quiet. Really, really quiet. I didn’t notice until Jodie had gone, ’cause we’d been giggling and having a glass of wine and picking her outfit and laughing about the men she was going to pull, all that kind of stuff. But once she’d gone, I realized that all that time he’d been sitting on the sofa, totally still like a little statue, just staring at the telly. And it was Eastenders or something else grown up, not cartoons.
‘I asked him if he was feeling sick or anything but he said no and eventually it was time for his bed. He wanted the small light left on. I remember that. But I said no. I said he was a big boy and he shouldn’t be afraid of the dark, but that I’d leave the hall light on for him in case he needed to go to the loo. I thought I was doing the right thing. I’d forgotten what it was like being a kid. I was at the door when he called my name. His voice was soft, I remember that. And I remember how small he looked in the bed, his wide eyes peering over the top of the duvet.
‘“Monsters have shadows,” he said and the words stopped me. I hadn’t realised that his stillness, his quiet, was because he was terrified. But I knew it then. I could hear it in the terrible sadness of his little voice.
‘“Sometimes the shadows are more dangerous than the monsters. That’s what they say.” He didn’t sound like a five year old. Not like our Jodie’s little Courtney.
‘I remember staring at him, one foot in the brightness of the hall, and one in his small dark tatty bedroom covered with Buzz Lightyear wallpaper left over from whoever’d had the flat before Jodie.
‘“Don’t be silly.” I said to him. “There’s no such thing as monsters.” I remember that my throat was tight, even under the wine buzz I had. I remember he was scaring me and I wasn’t sure why but I knew I wanted him to shut up. I wanted him to be Courtney again. Not this scared kid that was making me feel like a scared kid. But he didn’t shut up.
‘“Shadows are real though.” He said. “If you say words at them they’ll show you the monster.”
‘I told him that was enough. I told him to go to sleep’
She let out a long sigh.
‘And those were the last words I ever said to him. I didn’t tell him I loved him or anything. Just ‘Go to sleep’.
‘I was closing the door when he spoke again, and the volume gone from his voice, as if he’d already given up. ‘I wish I didn’t know them. Those words.’ That’s what he said.’
She paused, taking a long pull on her cigarette, which I found slightly over-dramatic. Sometimes there was something to be said for stiff upper lip. ‘Children are so fanciful,’ I said.
She looked over at me and smiled and for a moment I could almost see the pretty person she would have been had her life run along a different route. The edges of her eyes twinkled brightly and I wondered if she ever slept or just survived on nicotine and coffee. I stared right back at her.
‘I don’t think he made it up. Because later that night the monster got him.’ She sighed again. ‘I drank the rest of the bottle of wine dead fast once Courtney was in bed. I’m not much of a drinker really, because of Mum, so it wasn’t long before my eyes were closing and my head spinning a little. I was glad about that. I just wanted to go to sleep or pass out. I didn’t check on Courtney. I didn’t want to go into his bedroom. I kept thinking about Jason Arnold’s little brother James, you see. I kept thinking about him and something kept niggling me, something that I knew deep inside, something that I’d once heard and worked so hard to forget, and I kept thinking about how all those things were linked, but how the most important thing was for me not to remember. Not remembering would keep me safe.
‘I fell asleep on the sofa. I think I woke up once when he screamed. I think I did. I remember seeing a huge shadow out in the hall and then squeezing my drunken eyes shut again. I definitely woke up when Jodie came home and started screaming. She must have seen me sleeping in the lounge and gone to check on him before waking me up.
‘He was gone, you see. There was just a bloody mess left in his bed. His sheets were ripped and the mattress was soaked in red, but all the damage was contained there. No trail on the carpet or out in the hall, but only one smeared handprint on the wall as if maybe he’d been grabbing at something there when the monster took him. And that was it. Nothing left of the little boy at all.
‘Of course the police never caught anyone for it. They questioned me for a long time but in the end they had to let me go. I hadn’t done anything to Courtney. There was no trace of blood on me, or in fact anywhere else other than that bed and the wall. Still, that didn’t stop people looking at me sideways, my own family amongst them, and I haven’t seen Jodie in over a year now.
‘I tried to tell her about what Courtney had said before he went to sleep, about the monsters and their shadows, but she wasn’t having any of it. She hated me. I could tell and I couldn’t blame her. I hated myself.’
Around us, the park lights were slowly coming alive as the gloom turned to a deep blue, grabbing each corner and slowly possessing it. As the bulbs glowed, shadows appeared and hovered in the bushes. The cold was becoming bitter and I thought it was probably time I got home and had a nice cup of tea. It didn’t do for a woman of my age to sit out too late.
‘So what brings you back here now, Melanie?’ I asked her, scrunching up what was left of the sweets and putting them back in my handbag.
‘Jason Arnold.’ She replied, without a second’s hesitation. ‘You see, after what happened, I kept thinking about him and his little brother and Courtney and I tracked him down. It took a couple of months, but I eventually found him in a flat over at Willesden Green. He had a job working the night shift at Tesco and then used to go home and smoke weed until he passed out. He said he was scared of the dark.
‘I told him about Courtney and what had happened. I told him I thought there was something in my head that would make it clearer. He laughed a lot then. And then cried. And then pulled a massive folder out of the cupboard under the sink. We shared a joint as he talked me through all the children that he’d researched that had gone missing in London like Courtney and James. Lots of them had spent time here, in these gardens. And lots of them had talked about shadows and monsters and special words.
‘I asked him if he knew what the words that brought the monster were because, I
said, high on skunk, if we could bring the monster, maybe we could kill it. He cried some more then and said he couldn’t remember. He’d known the words once. He said we’d been together when we were told them, right here in the park when we were little. But when he shared them with James, just to scare him a little, just to dare him to use them, it was like they went out of his head. And then little James used the words. Just like Courtney did, and the monster’s shadow came for him.
‘I let myself in to Jason’s flat yesterday ‘cause his phone was just ringing out. He wasn’t there. There was just a huge red sprawl on his sofa.’ She paused. ‘I guess he remember the words in the end. I just wish he’d waited for me before he used them.’
‘Did you call the police?’ I asked. The evening wind bent the trees as if they were leaning in to listen with me, their thin worn branches jostling for position in the thin light.
‘No,’ she said, her husky voice empty. ‘I just took his folder of children and left. They wouldn’t have believed me anyway. Or they’d have arrested me again. Either way wouldn’t help.’
As the lamp above us slowly brightened, I pushed myself to my feet. My hips roared with stiffness, my joints clicking angrily straight. I slid my handbag up to my elbow and clasped my hands across my waist. ‘Well thank you for such an interesting story.’ I smiled at her. She didn’t look as if she was planning to move. I wondered what she thought she could gain by sitting on that cold bench all night. Other than a nasty chill. ‘I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for, dear.’ I almost added, Before it finds you, but managed to resist the melodrama. I was, at the end of the day, far too middle class for that.
Leaving her there, I turned and headed back to the lights of Paddington Street and All Bar One. I was at the exit when she called after me.
‘Wait! Wait!’
I turned. Her huge shape was black in the darkness, her face a blur.
‘How did you know my name? I didn’t tell you my name?’
I smiled, even though she probably couldn’t see it. ‘It was nice seeing you again, Melanie. It’s been a long time.’
I crossed the road and didn’t look back.
Back in the warmth of my flat, I put the kettle on before taking my overcoat off and hanging it on the old-fashioned coat stand in the small hallway. I rested my hands on the radiator for a moment, enjoying the heat in my old bones. Back in the lounge, a shadow slipped away from the wall and out under the windowsill and into the night. I wondered where it would go tonight. I could feel the monster purring inside me, its excitement rising. I thought of Harry and his brother, the Arnold boys, and Melanie and Courtney. Children never really changed. Not deep down inside, in the places where fear and superstition lived.
I’d have a nice cup of tea by the fire to warm up, and then I’d file my teeth, just in case.
Because they all remembered the words in the end, no matter how long it had been since I whispered to them.
Indicating the Awakening of Persons Buried Alive
Liz Williams
“But Richard, of course I am entirely sure that she was dead!” my brother Jonathan informed me. “Just like all the others.” He twisted his top hat between his hands, crushing it in his agitation. “You surely do not think that I would have sent someone still living to their grave?”
“Isn’t there a particular disease that mimics the processes of demise?” I asked. I was vague about such matters: Jonathan was the undertaker, the respectable son who had shouldered the burden of the family business, whereas I was merely a starving poet and, as such, regarded by our aged father with contempt. There was little that I could do to assist my brother in his difficulties, I thought. But the next few moments were to prove me wrong.
“No,” Jonathan said, sinking onto the divan. “I have spoken to the doctor. They all died of different illnesses. Simon Anders succumbed to a wasting sickness, Sarah Thorne to pneumonia. And Nathan Lyme died as a result of shock after a dog bit him. Yet all of these people appear to have become revitalised once buried – and these are only the ones who have been exhumed. Indeed, they would have remained below ground had it not been for the need to remove them to the new cemetery. Who knows what other torments might have been taking place beneath the earth? It is putting the wind up my clients, Richard, and one can hardly blame them. Folk are naturally unwilling to commit their loved ones for burial with us if there is a chance that they are not in fact deceased. I shall be ruined! The business is everything to father, to myself.”
“I can see how it could be a cause for some apprehension,” I remarked. “But a cadaver cannot be kept indefinitely upon a mortuary slab; internment is ultimately necessary.” I considered the matter, my imagination reeling from the horror of waking only to find oneself in one’s grave clothes, nailed inside a coffin. It would make a good verse – I forced my unruly mind back to the matter in hand.
“One really needs some reliable means of rescue once one is in the ground.”
Jonathan regarded me with more respect than he had accorded me for years. “Pray continue,” he said.
It was at that point that The Hugo Patent Device for Indicating the Awakening of Persons Buried Alive was truly born.
Jonathan set our coffin-maker, one Eben Frame, to work, and a preliminary device was created. Frame threw himself upon the challenge with gusto, but the developmental process was not without its difficulties.
“Observe,” he remarked, as we stood in the echoing confines of his warehouse. He made a gesture with one of his crutches. “The lid of the coffin is spring loaded; should you awake in the mortuary and find yourself incarcerated, you merely touch this switch and the lid will open. So!”
He pulled a small string, connected to the coffin’s interior. The lid shot forth as if fired from a cannon, immediately felling my unfortunate brother. When we had ascertained that he was not in imminent danger of becoming the coffin’s first occupant, and had brought him round with the application of smelling salts and water, Jonathan informed us angrily that the device must undergo modification.
“Besides,” he pointed out. “It is useless if one is already buried when one discovers the sorry fact of incarceration. Not even a force sufficient to render a man unconscious can shift six feet of earth.”
Eben Frame sighed. “I fear you are right. I suspect that will also be a difficulty with my second patent.”
We went to look at the alternative model. This coffin possessed the addition of a spring-loaded hammer which, when set in motion via a small knob, would smash a glass panel on the front of the coffin, thus allowing the influx of air. The drawbacks were immediately apparent.
“But this is no good either,” I protested. “The occupant, in addition to his mental distress, will receive not only a shower of glass into the face, but a forceful blow between the eyes. And again, as you have noted, it is only of use whilst the coffin is still above ground. No, what is needed is a rope, attached to a bell or a whistle. Or a little flag. So that if you woke and found yourself in your coffin, you could pluck the rope and be assured of rescue. Some kind of air hose might also be necessary – after all, one might awake in the middle of the night. I am sure such a device would be popular – set the public mind at rest, so to speak.”
A week later, Frame had come up with a third device: a coffin attached to a flag, with a loud electric bell and an air hose running up through the earth to the base of the flagpole. After some trivial modifications, we felt that this was the most effective variant, and production commenced. We placed advertisements in the Times, sat back, and waited.
Gradually, orders began to trickle in, and soon they grew to a flood. Jonathan had his practice to run, but he tried to persuade me to take over the business side of the Device. He was somewhat put out when I refused to do so: I did not endure all the hardships of becoming a poet, I told him, merely to take up a post as a salesman.
“But your work –” Jonathan began, then stopped short.
“What of it?”
“The penny papers, monthly poetry journals – it is hardly great literature, Richard. Could you not put your talents to some more lucrative end? Could you not try to be more – well, respectable?”
“A poet lies beyond common society and everyday morality,” I replied, stiffly. And Jonathan sighed, but did not say anything more. We hired a keen young gentleman by the name of Sayers to run the day-to-day dealings of the business, and returned to our respective professions.
There came a week near to the end of November, however, when Richard took to his bed with a filthy chill and Sayers pleaded for a day off. He had an aged mother in Bognor, he said, and he wished to visit her. With extreme reluctance, I agreed to mind the funeral parlour for a day or so. And it was upon that day that I first met Madame Greco.
She was waiting for me, so the housekeeper told me, in the parlour; she had requested it especially, claiming that she felt the cold. When I entered the room, she was sitting in front of the fire with her hands folded in her lap. I had the impression of an elegant figure, clad in the appropriate purple and black of mourning, necklaced with jet. The only curious note was the lily that she wore in her bonnet: it, too, was black and velvety and at first I thought it to be no more than a lifelike ornament, until I realised that the strong sweet perfume that filled the air of the parlour was emanating from its petals.
“I do hope you’ll forgive me for imposing upon you,” the woman said. She rose, offering me a black-satin hand. “My name is Madame Greco; I have recently become a widow.”
Behind the gauzy darkness of her veil her eyes were luminous and huge. It was impossible to tell her age, or her origins; she spoke with something of an accent, but it was not one that I recognised. I was, however, immediately captivated. Something about the timbre of her voice and the almost narcotic fragrance of the lily entranced me. I bent over her hand.