Best New Horror 27
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“I…well…it was a long time ago,” Mawde said, in a colder tone than she intended.
Meredith blinked in a nonplussed manner, clearly unsure what to say.
Mawde made a vague gesture with one hand, looked away, fiddled with her computer bag. “Family thing. There was a rift…”
“Ah.” Meredith sighed, then ploughed on bluntly. “Can’t say I’m surprised. They had a terrible time with her, terrible. So sad for the parents, having to move away and virtually take on new identities.” She offered a pitying expression. “But of course, you must know that.”
Mawde grimaced, which she trusted would indicate she didn’t wish to speak further on the matter, although part of her was itching to interrogate this stranger. The problem was, she didn’t know anything. This childhood acquaintance of Jeryl’s knew more.
“Are you still in touch with the family?” Mawde asked, as lightly as she could muster.
“My mother is,” was the reply.
“I wonder…” Mawde now spoke impulsively. “Jeryl and I had no say in…becoming estranged when we were children. I wonder whether I should contact her?”
The woman gave Mawde a glance that was full of meaning, bursting with it: a keen arrow of a glance. “That’s up to you,” she said carefully, “but…she’s a very troubled person, Mawde.”
Polite euphemism, Mawde thought. She nodded. “Yes,” she said, “I expect she is. Cut in two.” She hadn’t meant to say those last few words, but Meredith Jones nodded.
“Yes, you could put it like that,” she said. “Tragic.”
Mawde muttered a hasty goodbye and fled the room. Outside, it was thundery, the lawn beyond the office building oozing and mulchy. Mawde saw a brief image before her mind’s eye of Jeryl crouching in the dirt, glancing up, her smile as secretive and cruel as that of the fairies in which she believed. There were insects on her skin, like a living tattoo. Then she sank into the wet earth until only her eyes remained, peering out.
STEVE RASNIC TEM
IN THE LOVECRAFT MUSEUM
STEVE RASNIC TEM’s last novel, Blood Kin (Solaris, 2014), won the HWA Bram Stoker Award. His next, UBO (Solaris, January 2017), is a dark science fictional tale about violence and its origins, featuring such historical viewpoint characters as Jack the Ripper, Stalin, and Heinrich Himmler. He is also a past winner of the World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards.
A handbook on writing, Yours To Tell: Dialogues on the Art & Practice of Writing, written with his late wife Melanie, is due from Apex Books. Further into the future, Colorado-based HEX Publications will bring out his young adult Halloween novel, The Mask Shop of Doctor Blaack.
“The initial seeds for ‘In the Lovecraft Museum’ were planted in 1988 on my first trip to the UK. Our son had died earlier that year and frankly I was no longer quite sure who I was anymore—life had become something strange and absurd. I was fascinated by the British, particularly by how they seemed to have come up with different solutions for such basics as electricity, plumbing, foods, and yet they spoke English!
“Even at the time I realised this was a pretty naïve and unsophisticated way to look at cultural differences—chalk it up to trauma, but Britain felt like an alternative universe. At our first B&B I started looking behind things, taking things apart, lifting up rugs, examining fixtures, bolts, fasteners, and taking off the lid of the toilet tank to see what lay within—I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a creature wedged in there, tubes leading in and out. When I started to remove one of the electrical plates to peer behind it Melanie stopped me, quite rightly pointing out that it would ruin our vacation if I electrocuted myself.
“Someday I knew I would write about this—I wrote down the title ‘Flying to England’ in one of my notebooks. Subsequent trips (including one early morning arrival at a Gatwick under new construction, walking down an endless series of halls with no one else in sight) solidified the idea.
“Years later, after writing a number of Lovecraft-themed stories, it occurred to me how strange he must have felt at times, how vulnerable, how alienated. I felt I understood that feeling, and recognised how oddly it was manifested in others—their paranoia about the government, their belief in secret causes and dynamics, the cosmologies they manufactured to explain it all. ‘Flying to England’
“The most merciful thing in the world…is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”
—H.P. Lovecraft
“Paranoia is just having the right information.”
—William S. Burroughs
I. The Park
THE YOUNG MAN at the front door looked wall-eyed and fish-faced through the peephole. Even knowing that if he opened the door that distortion would disappear, Jamie sensed that what he saw through the peephole was in some way the truth, and that everything else was a lie and a disguise.
But he was being uncharitable. Jamie was never as kind as he wanted to be, and if people liked him it was because they didn’t understand him. He didn’t want to let the fellow in—he suspected that people who travelled door to door had nothing good in mind—but he didn’t want to be one of those old men who spoke to people only from the other side of a wall. He turned the knob and dragged the slab of heavy door inside. The sudden glare of sky against his face was painful.
“Hello!” the skinny young man said, too eagerly. “Sorry to bother you.” And of course that was a fib. “But are you registered to vote?”
Jamie didn’t answer because he wasn’t sure. But he doubted it. He never signed things because when you signed things you were put on a list. It wasn’t that he thought all politicians were monsters; he just didn’t trust any of them. He looked at the young man’s scrawny chest, bejewelled with buttons. The names were unfamiliar, perhaps, maybe not. Without thinking of the consequences, he blurted out, “Who’s running this time?”
The young man stared at him, looking shocked or embarrassed—Jamie could no longer tell the difference between the two. Then the fellow recovered, said, “I’m supporting…” and rattled off a list of names and elective offices.
Jamie thought he might have heard of one or two of the gentlemen, one of the women. Or perhaps it was simply the last names. Politics ran in families, it seemed. He looked past the young man at the street, looking for partners, fellow travellers, mob. He leaned slightly forward to try to get a glimpse of the park where his son Henry used to play, to see if shadowed figures were waiting there, or just people staring at his home, but saw no one. The nearby buildings and the pavement looked even shabbier than he remembered, purposeful or accidental gaps in the concrete and asphalt permitting earth and vegetation to show through, the occasional ragged pedestrian stumbling down the walk like a refugee from a disaster, vehicles belching smoke and rattling as they negotiated the poorly maintained lanes. He thought about how inappropriate the human presence was on this planet.
“Unopposed, are they?” Jamie asked. This time he recognised the embarrassment (or was it frustration?) in the campaign worker’s face. He obviously didn’t want to say the names of the ones on the other side of his arguments. No doubt they were evil, sinister characters who plotted the destruction of everything good and holy about America.
As the young man visibly perspired, Jamie noticed the skin tag at the side of the thin neck, obvious now as it grew and elongated and began feeling its way toward the Adam’s apple, which seemed oddly shaped for an Adam’s apple, actually, being too rectangular, too sharp-edged, too blue beneath the thin skin of the throat. The tentacle of flesh probed and stroked, then straightened and swung away from the neck and toward Jamie like some sort of alerted pseudopod. Jamie stepped back and pushed the door closed, retreating into the dim interior of his house. Sometimes all it took was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time to see something you never wanted to see, to watch your life change around you.
He’d wanted to be both a good husband and a good father, but he’d learned long ago that the universe did not care what he wanted.
Jamie stumbled as he tried to rush through the rooms. It wasn’t safe, but he wanted more house between him and the front door. Everything had filled with even more clutter since he’d retired. Everything had filled and overfilled, and he’d been swallowed up by too much of everything. His health could withstand the tide no longer.
Henry had been small like him, but raven-haired, pale, and quite unable to resist whatever illnesses passed through their crowded urban neighbourhood. He did not appear to mind, however, and would cough and read for hours, sniffle over his drawings, and drip clouded fluids onto the page. He rarely slept late, seemingly eager to get up and explore even from the small chair by the bay window, crowded together with his collection of broken vehicles, stuffed creatures with odd modifications, and stack upon stack of old books and papers altered with paint, glue, and miscellaneous scraps, and all of it layered over with his incessant, unreadable scrawl.
Jamie had always thought their house singularly unsuited for a child, even though it was the kind of house he’d always hoped to live in. Too many bookcases, too many books, tomes crashing down at random because he’d constructed the bookcases so poorly. There had always been a spill of papers across some passageway or another, patterned with shoe prints and travelling along beneath their feet because nobody ever bothered to gather them up.
Chloe had been a meticulous housekeeper before they were married. But each day of their marriage she’d become more like him.
He had to move several pieces of home-made taxidermy—a squirrel, a rabbit, a bat, the back half of a deer (or some other, less familiar creature; it was hard to tell now)—and several boxes of disintegrating pulp magazines to get to the desk he’d made for himself out of a small, re-purposed bathroom door. It was piled high with correspondence from Clarence, his British pen pal and founder of the British Lovecraft Appreciation Society. (Jamie had no idea how many members there were, but sometimes suspected the entire roll consisted of Clarence.) An old computer precariously balanced along one edge, for research and the rare e-mail. Like Jamie, Clarence was old-fashioned enough to prefer hand-written correspondence mailed in fine, personalised envelopes.
He sat down on the wobbly kitchen chair and tried to catch his breath. His collection of outdated medical devices loomed over him from an alarmingly leaning nearby bookcase. Henry had last played with them how long ago? Henry’s own childhood collection of natural specimens—shells and dried plants and bottles of bugs—was scattered among the mix. Jamie hadn’t the heart to dispose of them, or even to touch them. The overall effect was like the shabby remains of some abandoned museum.
When he was little, Henry had sympathised with Jamie’s interests. It had been that way almost from the beginning. “I think I know this one,” he’d say, again, moving some odd-looking fossil back and forth between his small hands. “It’s some sort of erect—walking, I believe—amphibian.”
“An erect amphibian?” Jamie would shudder. His son would nod enthusiastically.
Henry had played very little with the neighbourhood children. Jamie knew this was partly his fault—he’d never really encouraged those interactions, and he himself had been a poor example, with few friends, and none were ever invited to the house. But Henry was also a solitary child by nature, his rich imagination no doubt far more stimulating than a room full of similarly aged children.
By this time, Chloe had begun to complain. “I’m afraid for him. Did you know he talks to himself?”
“I talked to myself when I was his age.”
She stared at him oddly for a moment. “I’ve been paying attention, Jamie.” Did she mean he wasn’t? “Some days he murmurs to himself almost constantly. And in the back garden he talks to the plants, or to the ground, or to the air. And he digs.”
“Digs? What do you mean? Boys dig—they enjoy getting dirty.”
“It’s not like he’s digging holes or anything. It’s like he’s sculpting, making art. But not really. More like—I don’t know—tracing? He’s very deliberate about it. But I can’t make sense of the designs, whatever. It’s not like he’s playing—he’s just so serious. I think some of the designs are still out there in the garden. Come on, see for yourself.”
He felt silly, but he could hardly say no. He followed her into the small plot back of the house, dense with vegetation dripping from the recent rain. He winced involuntarily as she crouched into wet leaves and spread them with her hands. The damp had coagulated into something like a cloudy bodily fluid that dripped and stained and ran across everything. Random bits of dead vegetation stuck to the backs of her hands like broken, angular insects.
“Here, what do you make of this?” She twisted her head around awkwardly and stared up at him.
The furrows in the dirt with the slightly rounded areas between them looked like tubes, or veins. They appeared to go everywhere, crossing back over themselves now and then like fossil images of garden hose. “I can’t really make out anything,” he lied.
She stood up, slightly bent, somewhat frantically wiping her wet, dirty hands and forearms on her blue-jeaned thighs. “Well, I’m really worried.”
“Well, then.” He actually felt no alarm, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. “What do you suggest?”
“He needs more exercise. He needs to be away from this house more.”
This was probably true, but the idea made him uncomfortable. “I don’t believe this neighbourhood is entirely safe.”
“Just an occasional afternoon in the local park. I’ll go with him,” Chloe said.
And so it began, the daily visits to the park, many of them hours long, just Chloe and Henry. They always came back looking happy but subdued.
Jamie’d never visited that park while Chloe was still alive. He’d considered it, thinking it his responsibility to check out his son’s favourite playground. It wasn’t right that Chloe had to do everything, including taking care of her own husband. “You wouldn’t dress, bathe, or eat properly if I weren’t around to tell you when and what,” she’d always said. And she’d been right.
He really should have escorted Henry sometimes. It wasn’t as if the park were inconvenient. One corner with its tall, leaning trees was actually visible from the house. Double doors opened from their upstairs bedroom onto a balcony attached to the ornate front façade. Some Saturday mornings he would sit on that balcony sipping his tea and reading some odd bit of fiction populated by eccentric and lonely characters, watching below as Chloe walked Henry to the diminutive park for an hour or two of play. If they were later coming back than he had anticipated he might stand up on the balcony and lean in that direction, trying to make his eyes see what they could not. He would see the edges of those trees, and perhaps a bit of the wall that enclosed a portion of the grounds, but little else. He was never able to leave the balcony until his wife and son returned.
Over time, the existence of this park only a short distance away became an unreasonable challenge to his coping skills. What was he afraid of? Other people walked about in city parks all the time with no untoward results. Why should this park be any different? But disaster was without logic or morality. The terrible mechanics of the universe were beyond both our control and our understanding. We were not a consideration.
Leaving their son’s outdoor play completely in Chloe’s hands had been irresponsible. And certainly once she’d shown the initial symptoms of her illness, he should have insisted on taking their son to the park himself. After his wife died he told Henry he was sorry but he could never go there again.
“That is all very interesting,” the man in the rumpled suit and sloppy tie said. “But what does any of this have to do with the events which occurred in the Lovecraft Museum?”
He felt embarrassed, as if he’d made a terrible mistake. But of course, he had made many terrible mistake
s. “I’m just trying to be as co-operative as possible. You asked me to relate anything I thought might be relevant to your inquiries. Well, this is where it all started for me—those visits my wife and son made to the park, and my wife’s illness, her death. Everything started then. I don’t understand, but I thought you would. That’s your specialty, isn’t it? Figuring things out? Making them fit?”
The man in the suit conferred with the soft-spoken man in uniform. The man in the suit took out a pack of cigarettes, removed one, brought it partway to his mouth, then put it back. Apparently he was trying to quit and hadn’t found anything to replace it. We all need something that relieves the tension, Jamie thought, but he himself had never had anything. He had always been out there exposed with nothing to comfort him.
The man in the suit looked unhappy. “Please continue. Anything you can think of. Anything you think might help us understand. I apologise for my previous question. Please don’t hold anything back.”
Jamie looked up from his chair, felt his face. He’d been weeping without even realising it. He gazed around the room—so much evidence of Henry, of Jamie’s own obsessions, but nothing of Chloe’s. All these years he’d been so consumed by Henry’s disappearance that his memories of Chloe had been overwritten.
Jamie’s first conscious exposure to his wife’s illness had occurred on a Friday, when she remained in bed, sending Henry with the news that “Mother doesn’t believe she can join us today.”
His wife’s message alarmed him. Her habits had always been exact and predictable—if she had been sick at any other time in their marriage, she’d certainly not told him about it. Jamie sent Henry to his room while he went to his wife’s door.
“Come in.” Her voice was like dry wings against her pillow.
At first he wasn’t completely convinced that was his wife in the bed. Her head seemed too small, her hair like old straw scattered across the sheet. “Chloe?”