The Dark

by Ellen Datlow

  “Did you really?” she asked, her tone quiet and bleak. “And what about Austen? You think he forgives me?”

  “You need to move on, Claire.”

  “I am moving on, though. I hate it. But I’m doing it.”

  Tears welled up in her eyes, but her expression didn’t change.

  “Claire. Sweetheart. Don’t do this. I need you.”

  Please, this is my life you’re fucking with. Please don’t do this to me again, he thought. There’s got to be some point when I start to matter. But he didn’t say it, fear-sick of her reply.

  “I’m sorry,” was all she said.

  THE APARTMENT LAUGHED at him. He lay in his bed in the dark, sweating and listened to its amusement. The ticks and creaks of the building made words. What an idiot, mistaking a nostalgia trip for redemption. What a sorry prick for wanting his ex-wife back.

  He got up just after midnight and paced from the kitchen through the living room to the front door and back. His whole new, degraded, shitheap life bounded in seven steps. Outside his window, the city glowed and the sky was dark, like the stars had been brought down, screwed into shining over parking lots and needle parks and whore houses.

  A false dawn mocked in the east when he finally fell asleep, curled up awkwardly on the couch. He dreamed of Austen, a little boy barely out of diapers. He dreamed of the smile—trusting, open, joyous—and then he dreamed her child a hundred deaths. Endless variations of the same story spooled through him, pricked at him, delighted in his pain. And at the end of each scenario, the pale lips, the blood-wet hair, the ragged skin of the wound, and the horror, the insistence that it wasn’t his perfect baby who’d died. His boy would never do that; his boy was alive. And from there, back into the dream from the start.

  His phone woke him an hour after he should have been at work. He explained to his manager that he was ill, terribly ill, then sat on the couch, head in his hands. The couch had kinked his back, and he was sticky with sweat. He went to the toilet, vomited un:il his belly ached, and crawled into bed.

  In his next dream, he had found a way to move backward in time by fucking Claire. The past was receding, flowing away behind him like a river, but he was between her legs, pumping into her, clawing his way against the black water. Her cunt was loose and rubbery, but he kept pressing himself into her. Henrietta came back, fat and demanding. His wedding ring slid onto his finger. His back ached, and his thighs felt sticky. He reached almost all the way back. He could see the moment, could see his baby—the blood, the wound, the lips—like seeing someone just underwater. Claire’s pale fish-flesh shuddered under him.

  If he could come, if he could just come, he could get back, he could reach back in time and everything would be right again. Austen would come to life, his wife would never have left, and he could be himself again, a whole man instead of the splintered creature half love, half rage. If he could just get off. He slammed his cock into her, fast and hard, but there was no pleasure in it, only the feeling of being rubbed raw, abraded. He was so close, if he could just come.

  He woke himself sobbing. Even awake, he wept uncontrollably, smothering his own screams in his pillow, clawing at the sheets, bent double in pain. It seemed to go on for years, but exhaustion took him, and he lay silent, staring at the random pattern of cracks in the ceiling. Sweat sheened his skin, like the aftermath of a broken fever.

  His mind felt blank, sandblasted. He got up, went to the bathroom and pissed sitting down, resting his head against the cracked tile of the wall. His legs trembled like he’d been running, and his back still ached from sleeping on the couch.

  He wasn’t hungry, but habit took him to the kitchen. He fried some bacon, and then, while the fat drained off the crisped meat, some eggs in the grease. A cup of coffee, half an apple that had been in the fridge, the brown surface cut off and the white flesh showing. He sat at his table, eating breakfast and watching the sun go down. Another day pissed away. Another chance for something—anything—good to happen gone, and he could no more get it back than pull the sun up over the western horizon.

  He was in the shower when the phone rang, the rushing water almost drowning it out. He killed the water, grabbed a towel and got to the phone by the fourth or fifth ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Ian?”

  Claire’s voice was wrong. Even the single word was enough to tell him that, slow but desperate, like she was fighting to speak and only just succeeding.

  “Claire? What’s the matter?”

  “It’s … in the house. I don’t know what … it is. I can hear it … ripping something.”

  “Where are you? Are you okay? What’s wrong?”

  “Pills. Couldn’t sleep … last night. After we talked. I took three … so I could rest. I’m scared, Ian. It’s in the house. How did it get in the house?”

  In the background, past her pained drawl and the static of the cell phone, he heard something shriek, high and angry.

  “Where are you?” he shouted.

  “Bedroom.”

  “Can you shut the door? Claire? Can you shut the bedroom door?”

  A long pause, something like rustling in the background.

  “No,” she said at last, tears in her voice.

  “Okay, just stay calm. Stay calm.”

  “It’s saying something, Ian. There’s words. Please. Please come. I need you.”

  He thought of her, lying in bed, thought of her bare, familiar flesh and the warm press of her mouth on his. Of her blank stare across the restaurant table as she said it was a mistake. Austen—lips, hair, skin. The dream of pressing himself into her cunt half in anger, half in regret.

  There was a silence on the line, then another shriek closer and louder, and then he spoke.

  “Claire?”

  “Yes,” her voice was barely a breath.

  “Please don’t call me again.”

  “No, no, no. Ian, please,” she whispered, and then, “Oh, Jesus.”

  He thumbed off the phone and pulled on pants, took a shirt from the closet—white button-down—and a good vest. His hair was slicked back wet against his scalp. He stopped to comb it, brushed his teeth. He looked all right. Not young anymore, and not innocent. He was starting to get a tiny patch of gray at the temples. Gravitas, he told himself, and tried smiling. He only looked numb. He wondered whether Claire was screaming yet. Would his boy go for her eyes?

  He picked up the phone again and dialed with his thumb.

  “Dave here.”

  “Dave. It’s Ian.”

  “Mon ami! What’re you doing?”

  “It’s Friday. I need to get drunk,” he said. The apartment seemed to settle back into itself after the day’s sunlight and heat, preparing itself for night.

  AFTERWORD

  When I was young, my father used to read me stories by Enrique Anderson Imbert. Being fluent in Spanish (which I’m not), he’d translate them on the fly. I still remember one scene where a child watched a wave of nothingness move through his father’s eye, and another where a man sunk under the ground reached up to touch the sole of his lover’s shoe. It was years before I understood that these were stories about political disappearances in Argentina. For me, they were just ghost stories.

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL was born in Liverpool, and still lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. He has been described by the London Times as “the nearest thing to an heir to M. R. James.” He was presented with the World Horror Convention’s Grand Master Award and the World Horror Association’s Bram Stoker Award for Life Achievement in 1999. His most recent novels are The Darkest Part of the Woods and The Overnight, and his nonfiction is collected in Ramsey Campbell, Probably. An expanded edition of his erotic horror stories, Scared Stiff was published in 2002. His forthcoming novel is Spanked by Nuns. He asserts that he’s had no significant supernatural experiences and has little inclination to believe in them—but he finds the supernatural imaginatively appealing.

  FEELING REMAINS

  RAMSEY CAMPB
ELL

  I’M WATCHING MRS Hammond’s empty house while I try to think of anything interesting about myself to write for my English homework when I see my mother. She’s walking down the street with two people in track suits, a woman and a boy. I know my mother says you have to see the spirit inside everyone, but any time there are track suits in our part of town it means trouble. The other night a gang of girls in them kept jumping on the cars in our street, but by the time the police came and my parents finished discussing whose fault it was the girls behaved like that, they’d gone. I hope my mother’s showing the people the way out of our suburb, but she holds the front gate open and the boy in roller boots clumps under the rosy arch. I save my homework on the screen and wait till she unlocks the front door and calls “Jeremy, come and say hello.”

  I go to the top of the stairs. When she gives me her look that says she trusts me not to disappoint her, I have to go down. “Jane and Brad, I told you about Jeremy. He’ll be a friend for you, Brad,” she says. “Jane’s one of my students, Jeremy.”

  That needn’t mean she’s an addict like the women my mother brought home from the refuge where she used to work. I thought Brad was bald and my mother would expect me to be sorry about that, but he’s only shaved so he’ll have even less hair than his mother. Mine is saying “I should take off your boots in the house, Brad. I expect we can find you some old Christmas slippers of Jeremy’s.”

  Brad makes his mouth thinner, but Jane grabs his shoulder when he starts clumping out of the porch into the hall. “Do what Willa tells you. Act like you deserve to be let in a house like this.”

  “You’ll have to pay for new ones if they’re nicked,” he tells my mother.

  “We promise they’ll be safe, don’t we, Jeremy? We understand if people who haven’t been as lucky as us value what they have. Of course you’re making your own luck now, Jane, by coming to night class.”

  “They should have made me stay at school when I was these ones’ ages. The advice centre says I should be able to sue the education.”

  “Will you look after your new friend, Jeremy, while Jane and I work out what schedule’s best for her?”

  “I was doing my English.”

  “I’m certain Brad wishes he had homework. You don’t want him and Jane to think we’ve no time for people who need us.”

  I can’t see why they’d think that or feel entitled either. Brad sits on the doormat and yanks his boots off and jumps up to shove past me and sprint upstairs. “Show him your room, Jeremy,” my mother says. “Perhaps he can give you some ideas to write.”

  At least he isn’t wearing any shoes. When he’s finished using the toilet without shutting the door or flushing he steps in the bath and the bidet and then the shower stall in the guest room. He looks around my parents’ room as if he’s memorising everything and runs into mine. I knew he’d head for the computer, but he sticks two fingers up at it when he sees there’s only writing on the screen. He holds onto my desk to poke his face at the window. “There’s the house your mam said some old twat lived in.”

  “It’s where an old lady used to live.”

  “Where’s she now?”

  “Gone.”

  “Where? She live by herself?” Brad says and starts typing on my keyboard. All the words have four letters, and some of them are spelt right. “Leave it alone,” I shout, hoping they can hear me downstairs. “That’s for school.”

  “Your mam said you had to let me do some.” He rests a thumb on the power button and watches me nearly get to him before he switches the computer off. He dodges me and runs downstairs yelling “He won’t tell me about the old woman and he won’t let me go on his pee see.”

  I switch it back on and wait for it to scan the drives. I’d pray if I knew what to pray to. When the screen shows I haven’t lost anything I shut down properly, because my mother’s calling “Come and talk to us, Jeremy. We don’t hide from our guests.”

  They’re in the front room. Mother and Jane are drinking coffee out of Empowered Woman mugs while Brad wanders about picking things up. “You’ll break that,” Jane keeps saying as if she wants him to prove she’s right, and he nearly drops the carving of a goddess my father bought at the African craft shop.

  “You’re supposed to be paying attention to your guest, Jeremy. You’re thirteen and he’s not even at secondary school.”

  “He nearly wrecked my computer.”

  “Things are only things and we shouldn’t get attached to them,” my mother says, though she doesn’t seem too happy with Brad handling her Muslim pictures on the mantelpiece. “People are what matters. Why wouldn’t you tell Brad about Mrs Hammond? I’m sure he’d enjoy hearing how you took care of her.”

  “He likes to know about people,” Jane said. “He never knew his dad before the scum went off and left us.”

  “Tell Brad how you were Mrs Hammond’s little helper after Mr Hammond died.”

  Suddenly Brad’s interested. “How’d he die?”

  “Fluid retention,” my mother tells Jane as if she’s the only one that’s listening. “His heart gave up.”

  “Too much booze, you mean? Sounds like a man.”

  I’m remembering how Mr Hammond’s legs swelled up till they were twice as wide—I used to think they were like balloons and the ankles were knots you could untie to let everything out. “I don’t think his wife ever recovered from,” my mother stops saying, “it took him most of a year. But you did everything you could for her, didn’t you, Jeremy?”

  Brad is opening and shutting the doors of an icon as if he hopes it’ll change into something better than a Greek saint with gold around his head. “Just you listen, you,” Jane says. “This is how you’re meant to behave. What did he do, Willa?”

  My mother opens her eyes wide at me to make me answer and looks disappointed when I can’t. “Shopping and housework and just sitting and talking to her,” she says.

  That was the worst part—listening to her and feeling how afraid she was. It felt as if all the dimness of her house had crawled inside my head and started filling up my chest as well. Maybe the dark was meant to help her stop seeing herself, but I thought it made things worse. I’m willing my mother not to go on about Mrs Hammond, and surely Jane and Brad have to leave soon, because I can smell dinner, lentils again. But my mother says “Our guests are dining with us, Jeremy, and then I said you’d keep Brad with you while Jane and I go to my class.”

  “I haven’t finished my homework.”

  “You didn’t seem too busy when we came along. You seemed to be concentrating on Mrs Hammond’s house.”

  Maybe Brad will be so rude about dinner she won’t want him to stay. He stares at his chunk of her lentil loaf and says he wants a burger. Jane isn’t too impressed either when she hears how we never eat anything that injures the rainforest or puts us higher up the food chain than anybody else or with additives in. She tells Brad to be grateful and get on with eating, though she doesn’t do too much of that herself. When he won’t, my mother makes him a sandwich of the ham my father says he needs for a balanced diet, but Brad hasn’t finished his first bite when he starts wanting to watch television and not sit at the table. My mother persuades him to take his plate with him and sends me after him without mine. I’m watching him spill crumbs from his plate and his mouth while he plays with the remote control and keeps asking why we’ve got no sex channels when my father comes in.

  He gives Brad the kind of blink he’s started giving anyone my mother brings home, the kind that says he’s tired and now he’ll be more so. She meets him in the hall and just about puts a kiss on his cheek, as if she doesn’t want Jane to see. “Jane, this is Leslie,” she says, and tells him “Plenty left for you in the oven. We’re off to my class now and the boys are staying here.”

  “There aren’t likely to be ructions, are there? Only I’ve brought home quite a wodge of work.”

  “I’m certain you’re man enough for everything,” she says with a wink at Jane. “Are we ready
? The boys can wash up.”

  “You do what Leslie says since they’ve let you in their nice house,” Jane tells Brad.

  “What does Jane stand for?” my mother asks her as they walk arm in arm along the hall.

  “I don’t stand for anything.”

  “Darn right, and what does your name stand for?”

  “Justice Against Naked Exploitation.”

  “That’s what we need. I got all my students to empower their names,” my mother tells my father as she leaves.

  I wonder if he’s thinking they’re all women when he comes to frown at me and Brad at the kitchen sink. The second time Brad drops a plate in it to see how much noise it makes if it won’t smash, my father hurries to him. “Please, allow me.”

  Brad flinches out of the way in case he’s touched. “Willa said I could watch your telly.”

  “Then you must, of course,” my father says and helps me finish washing up. By then Brad is turning the sound up and down and changing channels as fast as he can. My father goes in the office, where his desk is smaller than my mother’s, but soon he opens the door and calls me. “Do you think you might take your friend along to the play area for a while?”

  “I didn’t want to stay here anyway,” Brad shouts and runs out of the house.

  “Go with him, Jeremy,” my father says with even more of his usual worried look. “He’s our responsibility.”

  I don’t see why he has to be, but if I say I’ll get a disappointed lecture and a worse one from my mother. I go after Brad as my father shuts himself in the office. Brad’s across the road in Mrs Hammond’s front garden. “You can’t go in there,” I tell him.

  “You mean you can’t, soft twat,” he says and dodges round the back.

  There’s nothing to be afraid of, I try and think. There never really was for Mrs Hammond, so how can there be for me? I don’t want Brad doing anything I’ll be blamed for not stopping. I hurry down the path with weeds sticking out of all its cracks into the back garden, where the hedge hides me and Brad from the neighbours. He’s trying to see into the kitchen. “Dirty cow, was she?” he says.