But it’s also my first.
To prepare, and also because I can’t help it anymore, I feel my way down to the bathroom, lick what I can off the tile walls of the shower, scraping the rest in with my fingers. Pushing it deep inside.
What’s left of Dell’s ex is black and dried, but that taste underneath, it’s to die for. To kill for. Milk could never be like this, not in a thousand years. Cows got nothing on people.
I wore gloves when I was working on him, yeah, so I wouldn’t catch anything that was catching.
But then I used the same needle on myself, and I went deeper than I had to for just the ink to set.
His blood spiked up and down me. All through me, hungry.
For two hours, between one and three, the sun right above the house instead of slashing in through the window, I’m pretty sure I was clinically dead.
And I kind of still am.
Will he be able to smell it on me right away, through the flannel shirt I’ve put on to cover my new ink, to cover the bluebonnet on my chest that’s now my chest cracking open to reveal the real me, crawling out tooth and claw, or will we wait to do this thing until I’ve driven the needles through his naked eye into what the centuries have left of his brain?
It doesn’t matter.
Either way I win.
There always was a dragon curled up inside me, Dad.
Tonight it’s going to stand up.
Stephen Graham Jones is the author of sixteen books, now. Most recent are Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth and Flushboy. Up soon are The Least of My Scars and The Gospel of Z. He lives and teaches in Boulder, Colorado. More at demontheory.net.
Her daughter’s dream brought back an identical nightmare she herself had experienced in that very room as a girl . . .
GLAMOUR OF MADNESS
Peter Bell
Are there here and there sequestered places which some curious creatures still frequent, whom once on a time anybody could see and speak to as they went about on their daily occasions, whereas now only at rare intervals in a series of years does one cross their paths and become aware of them.—M.R. James
Strange, indeed, are the roots of coincidence—I believe a famous American author wrote a learned book on the subject. Only the other day, having spent the morning ridding the garden of a most irksome weed, I put on the radio only to hear a voice uttering the unruly plant’s Latin name. On more than one occasion a long-unseen acquaintance has entered my mind—then they appear round a corner, call on the phone, or send a letter. Could this be second sight? (Celtic blood runs in my veins, after all.) A wise friend, an eminent professor of mathematics, assures me however that a universe in which there were no coincidence would be far stranger; that it could not, indeed, logically exist, if quantum theory is to be believed, with its elevation of the random to a universal principle . . .
I digress. But it is due to chance—the serendipitous bringing together of two distinct events, one recent, the other immersed in the misty past—that I have been minded to compose the following narrative. The discovery afforded me what I believe mathematicians refer to as a “eureka moment.” What I have to say hardly rivals Einstein’s insights or the resolution of Fermat’s Last Theorem, but it will interest those fascinated by the strange and supernatural. There are, indeed, more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of by those tiresome rationalists who would pit Science—surely no more than measurement of a mystical enigma?—against the inexplicable.
In these frenetic days of mobile phones, iPods, and bleeping laptops, few places remain where quiet prevails. Yet a certain tranquility is still to be found within the confines of our more ancient universities during what our wise predecessors aptly used to call “the long.”
The tale I recount began in the private rooms of a famous Cambridge college.
Professor Silas B. Dewar, though American, had enjoyed a meteoric career within the English academic world, ultimately achieving the Chair of Psychology at the University of Sussex; a post, moreover, that brought him a consultancy with the Home Office, rumored to exceed, at tax-payer’s expense, even his handsome professorial stipend. I was never able to elicit exactly what he did for the Home Office, except that it concerned Broadmoor. Professor Dewar had a particular interest in psychotic behavior, having published a string of eminent papers on the subject, and held firmly to the view that there was a fine line between madness and what our ancestors chose to call possession.
Quite how we got on to the supernatural I do not recall, but as an excellent sherry lowered in the bottle at a bemusing pace, my esteemed colleague told me a curious tale concerning a niece on his wife’s side (she being, by the way, English). It ended, sad to relate, in tragedy. Dewar did impart to me the names of the people involved and the location (not so very far from here). Out of respect for surviving relatives, however, I substitute pseudonyms and remain silent about the place. I summarize the professor’s anecdote with as much authenticity as memory allows; which, as may be imagined, proceeded in the meandering manner of two middle-aged academics imbibing that most remarkable sherry, whose name, alas, eludes me, but which certainly bettered the Tío Pepe served in the Senior Common Room.
Our conversation occurred not that long ago (though these days never has the phrase tempus fugit sounded so apposite, and it may be longer than I recall). The events described took place in the closing years of the last century.
“My niece,” Dewar began, “couldn’t believe her luck when she acquired the Old Rectory. A rather grand old house, it was in a habitable condition, though in estate agent talk, in need of some upgrading. Ninety-one-year-old Mrs. Seymour had spent the last two years in a care home, and a degree of negligence was apparent—gray squirrels had taken possession of the attic, starlings had torn the roof-felt, there was rising damp in the unheated rooms and so on . . . But it was a snip. Susan’s husband, Martin Travers, a merchant banker, easily afforded it out of the year’s generous bonus.”
Dewar laughed, “Not that we academics would resent him that!”
It occurred to me that the professor probably did very nicely for himself, better than the average academic, much less a humble librarian, but I bit my tongue.
“Friends and relations—envy, of course—asked why Susan needed so spacious a house with only one child. There were mutterings about upkeep, draughts, keeping on top of the garden, the cost of heating and so on. As a matter of fact, Susan would have liked another child but, following a difficult confinement at the age of forty, it was out of the question. So, her eight-year-old daughter, Emma, became the recipient of a form of neurotic maternal over-indulgence.
“A pleasing child, by all accounts, but she had a side that was almost certainly a consequence of that pampering: a propensity towards nervous debility and an over-vivid imagination. This was a source of constant anxiety to her mother. Martin, who inhabited a rarefied plane of high finance, showed little patience towards his wife on this score and maybe he was right. Susan’s fussing was no doubt infectious; her obsession, maybe, was creating the very things in the child’s mind she sought to pre-empt. The problem was that Susan no longer needed to work. She had given up her career as a music teacher. She had all the time in the world to think while her husband spent twelve hours a day, weekends as well, at the bank or traveling to foreign countries.
“At first, though, the new place was a godsend. There was so much to occupy her time, especially the huge garden. And, enclosed by a high wall, it provided just that security Susan wanted for Emma. But there was another reason why Susan was so delighted to have become mistress of the Old Rectory.
“It was in this very house, you see, that Susan, as a child, had frequently stayed during summer holidays. Mr. Seymour was a cousin of her father. The visits ceased when she was eleven, following a dispute between her mother and the eccentric Mrs. Seymour. Those days, tinged with nostalgia’s golden glow and layered with the indelible patina of childhood recollection, Susan always said, were the happiest of her life. N
ow, as an adult, she had reclaimed her long lost paradise—or so she believed.
“She loved the vastness of the place, so different from her parents’ terraced house in Ealing—the spacious rooms and corridors; the grand front staircase, the backstairs by the kitchen, the attic, reached by another stair: a child’s fantasy of unending space. Later, when I spoke to her after the tragedy, these memories were the only things that brought animation to her face. Most of all she loved the rambling garden that surrounded the house. She described it to me in detail. The heady scent of the rose bed, she said, lingered in her mind decades later. Coming to live in the house brought all those fine childhood memories flooding back. As we shall see, this was not a good thing. She was pining for a security that would ever stay out of reach.
“Of course, the house and the garden appeared to her adult eye half the size.
And signs of neglect were everywhere. The roses had gone wild, a tangle of thorns with a few sickly blooms; but still, she said, exuding the familiar scent which touched her to the quick. She felt, as often happens when going back years later to a once familiar place, a sense of melancholy running parallel with her elation—though not the disquiet that was in due course to intrude. ‘There is about the quality of melancholy,’ she said to me, ‘a suffusion of its very opposite: happiness in a minor key, like a string quartet by Mozart.’ Needless to say, when she tried to convey such sensitive impressions to her husband, they fell on stony ground. Her confidante was always Emma.
“Emma took to the place with the same alacrity as her mother. She seemed eminently happy. Susan was pleased at the way it brought back her own infancy.
Little details, pointed out by Emma, triggered whole chains of recollection; things Susan had locked away without realizing in the attic of her mind.” Professor Dewar paused and replenished his glass, then proceeded to extemporize on the complexities of psychiatry. Whilst I hesitate to cast aspersions on a field of scholarship so far removed from my own, nevertheless I cannot help feeling with this sort of thing that, behind a veil of the abstruse, little more is being imparted than could otherwise be worked out by common sense—indeed, in my opinion, frequently departing from common sense.
“You will, understand,” Dewar continued, “that we already detect here, beneath a veneer of idyllic bliss, a clear case of infantile regression. Susan, wandering round the garden, bemused at her regained Shangri-la, in fact felt deeply isolated. Her husband, outer-directed towards his work, did not understand her. There was no shortage of cash, but as with many of these nouveau riches, material wealth disguised spiritual poverty. Affording the rectory was a material triumph, but it could not buy back Paradise. She sought solace from her isolation by ever thinking back to her childhood; and this explains also her perception of Emma as her only confidante. Over-protective of a child conceived late in life, condemned to be the only one, this fuelled anxieties of loss, making it all the more important to over-mother her; hence the attraction of the self-contained world with its high surrounding wall. This kind of over-protection, you know, manifesting itself in excess love and solicitude, can easily turn into quite the other. The mother, maybe, subconsciously resented the daughter, blaming her for the fact that she could bear no further child.”
I stifled a yawn, eyeing him skeptically.
The professor drained his sherry and in defiance of the college’s rules and, I suspect these days, the law, lit up a cigarette, and blew the foul effusion in my direction. He fixed me with a knowing look.
“They had been in their new domain about a year when the idyll ceased. It transpired there was a region of the garden which Emma avoided. It was only when pressed that she admitted to a sense there of being watched. The area concerned was near the rear perimeter wall, where a gate led into a plantation of oaks and fir trees. Here, she claimed, she had on occasion seen a cloaked or hooded figure; and once a horrid face peering at her from the gate; that of an oddly dressed woman. ‘All pink with pop-out eyes,’ she described the face, ‘with something white on her head, like maids wore a long time ago.’ Each time, she declared, the day had grown dark, ‘as if something terrible was going to happen.’
“Anyway, as autumn drew in the incident receded; Emma did not mention the figure again and, outwardly at least, it passed from her mind. It left Susan, however, very jittery. A sense of déja vu had seized her when Emma first described her encounter, as did her daughter’s premonition of imminent doom. It was, moreover, unsettling to realize the property’s inviolable seclusion was compromised, and she pressed her husband to install state-of-the-art security. Henceforth, Emma was discouraged from going into the garden on her own.
“All might have been forgotten had not, towards the end of the winter, a fresh anxiety emerged. I should explain first that Emma’s bedroom was at the back of the house, rather a large one for a child. Susan had suggested a smaller room—the very one Susan had slept in as a girl—but Emma had been insistent. Her chosen room had a wide aspect over the garden where it sloped up towards the plantation. Towards the end of February, Emma had the first of several dreadful nightmares. It happened during a stormy night. Susan had been kept awake by the gales and heard her daughter screaming. When she reached her room she found Emma in a distressed state; never had she seen her so terrified. The essence of the dream was thus: Emma believed she had awoken and, looking out of her window, perceived a figure in a cloak stealing across the lawns; then came the sound of plodding up the backstairs and along the passage, followed by a twist of the door-knob. ‘She was coming for me, she wants to kill me,’ she cried to her mother. When asked to whom she referred, she replied, ‘The lady from the wood with the horrid face and the thing on her head.’
“The nightmare, of course, could be dismissed as no more sinister than a throwback to the summer. The noises of the storm had created an illusion of footsteps, stimulating Emma’s memory of her fright—that was all. It was, however, not the end of it; though varying in form and sequence the same dream recurred over many weeks. But what bothered Susan most was that her daughter’s dream brought back an identical nightmare she herself had experienced in that very room as a girl. It had been on the sole occasion she slept there, when her usual room was being redecorated. That it should have faded from her memory was not so odd. It’s not infrequently the mind’s habit in conjuring a lost Eden to remove the vision of a serpent.
“The episode distressed Susan out of all proportion. Was it a case of inherited memory? Could her own anxiety have transferred to her daughter? When she raised such ideas with her husband, he accused her, rather, of allowing Emma’s fantasies to possess her own mind. The incident honed her neuroticism, reviving her disquiet at Emma’s encounters in the garden. Had her daughter perhaps not imagined things but actually espied an interloper? You may recall there had been a lot in the newspapers around that time about the abduction and murder of a child in Epping Forest? Susan began pestering her husband again about installing CCTV cameras around the property.
“Her renewed obsession with security no doubt explained why one afternoon Susan investigated the part of the garden where Emma had been frightened. She looked for the gate, to check it was secure. In the summer it had been partly masked by weeds, but in the bareness of winter it was quite visible. Then she noticed something—something that puzzled her; it seemed inconceivable she had not noticed it before, when they first moved in and certainly last summer. In her childhood, she recalled, a wooden gate had given access to the plantation and beyond into the old Lathom park. Yet there before her was a barred metal gate of relatively late design, though rusting with the years. Obviously, the old one had been long ago replaced. Nevertheless, she could have sworn Emma, too, had specifically referred to a wooden gate. Susan traced the full length of the wall, wondering if she had confused the position, but it was not so.
“Returning to the gate, she found to her dismay that it had no kind of lock at all. It took considerable nerve, she said, but she entered the plantation. She was not su
re what she was afraid of or expected to find, but she told of an atmosphere of dread and a darkening of the sky, ‘as if something terrible was going to happen’—the very same words, note, that Emma had herself used. The plantation came to an end after thirty or forty yards, and there before her was the other gate affording exit from the wood; many a time as a child she had come along this path which led into the Lathom estate. But not anymore. Bland suburbia confronted her. Neat lawns and mock-historic cottages, a middle-class travesty of old rural England. Disoriented, she hurried back, resolving to instruct a contractor to have the gate removed and the space bricked up.
“Now came Susan’s greatest shock. Making her way back, she stumbled on an object in the undergrowth. On inspection it proved to be timber, the remains of the very wooden gate she had, indeed, accurately remembered. More lost recollections came flooding back: there it was, the panel with the curious square aperture, by means of which the catch was disengaged when passing through, where once—just like Emma—she had been scared by a peeking face, and Mrs. Seymour had chided her, saying she had never heard such nonsense. What did it all mean, this strange bequest of fears to her daughter?
“As summer arrived, Susan’s state of mind grew worse. On top of her anxieties about Emma, she began to suspect that her husband, on the pretext of lengthy hours at the bank and frequent trips abroad, was having an affair with his secretary. Acquaintances of hers I spoke to later told of widespread neighborhood gossip—nervous breakdown, mental illness. Susan was considered by many to have become very peculiar. Emma became the object of ever more overprotection. She was escorted to and from school. There was no mixing with local children. Within her own home she was a virtual prisoner, scarcely ever out of her mother’s sight.”
The professor replenished his glass, lit another Dunhill International and lent forward in a melodramatic manner.
“On the eleventh of August, 1999,” he declared, “you will recall there occurred a total eclipse of the sun. It was overcast here, dull and oppressive, with little expectation of the once-in-a-lifetime celestial event being visible.”
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition Page 26