She never quite relaxed, his Gran, when she was old. It was always just the one glass of wine—couldn’t possibly have any more—and “You know me, I don’t like a fuss,” before passive-aggressively demanding a fuss. Jason had found it almost entertaining, but her visits had driven his mother mad, and by the end of each one, the smiles through gritted teeth would have been abandoned and his mother would snap responses to his Gran as Jason and his dad stayed well out of the way.
His Gran’s visits made his mother almost as mad as those times that his father had declared—especially in the worst years before he buggered off with the cliche secretary—that she was turning into her bloody mother.
Jason had tried that one on Emily once (even though he quite liked her mother), and the response had been astounding. And not in a good way. It would appear that the one person a woman dreaded growing up like was the one person that had looked after and loved her the most. What did they find to hate so much, he wondered?
*
He came home from a drink after work to find the cupboard open and the slippers at the bottom of the stairs. They weren’t quite as clean as they had been, and on the right slipper, the one tilted upwards so that its toe was resting on the edge of the first stair, there was a small stain from something that might have been Coca-Cola mixed with cigarette ash. It was almost midnight, and all the lights in the house were out. The soft insides of the slippers were bright in the gloom. His eyes moved up the stairs with dread. His mother. They were after his mother!
This time, he took them out into the garden and burned them.
*
For the next week, it became something of a battle. The slippers had intent. Always signaling their presence in the house by the under-stairs cupboard door being inexplicably open—the malevolent footwear was no longer easily confined. Once, Jason found them at the bathroom door while his mother was locked inside having a long soak. He was sure she was crying in there too, although she’d vehemently deny it if he asked. He’d heard it through the door as he’d wrestled the slippers from the carpet and destroyed them once again. They were getting heavier. More stubborn. But he wouldn’t give up. What would happen if he did? Would they drown his crying mother in the bath?
His mother might have liked to keep her crying to herself, but she let her bitterness fly in barbed comments, mainly in his direction. He was there, after all. Why didn’t he stop worrying about her and get on with worrying about his own life? was amongst her favorites. At those moments though, her eyes were red and puffy and he saw through the harshness of her comments. It was hard, this process of watching someone grieve. He hadn’t expected there to be quite so much grief. She spent a lot of time out in the garden, a tight expression on her wan face, smoking furiously. He didn’t know what to say to her. He didn’t really try. Mostly, he was too concerned with the slippers.
*
Each time they came back they were a little dirtier, and the growing smell made it clear that this was grave dirt, not ordinary mud. Maybe one day the dirt would consume them and they wouldn’t find their way back to the house. He hoped so. Because if not, he might die from exhaustion. The slippers seemed tired too. They grew weightier with each visit, and the material was starting to fray at the edges by the soles. He wondered who would give up first—him or the slippers? Thus far, it was a difficult one to call.
It was the times that he wasn’t at home that worried him the most. The days had been slipper-free, but he couldn’t stay in every night, and what would happen if they chose to come back when he was out? What if they reached his mother? He started avoiding using the main house phone, which sat in the hallway on a table a few feet away from the under-stair cupboard, and planned any evening drinks via text on his cell. The slippers probably couldn’t hear—and technically weren’t ever in the cupboard—but he wasn’t taking any chances.
*
When Great-Aunt Edna rang to check in as she did every few days, Jason found that he no longer wanted to lie about the state of his mother. He didn’t have the energy to. He wasn’t ready to share his current situation with his grandmother’s slippers, but if Great-Aunt Edna wasn’t grown-up enough to offer some advice on how he could help his mother, then they were all in something of a pickle.
“I’ve tried talking to her,” he said, “but she just snaps at me. She’s snapping at me a lot. Not that I mind overly. I can cope with that. I’ve been married.” He surprised himself with his use of the past tense. “But she cries at night. When she’s asleep. That worries me.” It was good to share. He couldn’t go quite as far as to say, “What really worries me is what might happen if I don’t get to the slippers in time,” but it was good to pass on the burden of his mother’s grief to someone else, if only for a minute or two.
Aunt Edna sighed. It was a wheezy cigarette rattle in his ear. “You just have to wait, Jason. She needs to make her peace.”
“She keeps going on about not having said goodbye,” Jason said. “Maybe I should take her back up to Scotland to the grave. She could say goodbye there.” And I could bury the bloody slippers once and for all. It was strange how he had separated the slippers from his grandmother in his head. It was as if all the bitterness and impatience and resentment that had been in the old woman now filled them as her corpse rotted. He didn’t have an issue with his grandmother, per se. But her slippers were a different matter.
“It’s not goodbye that’s bothering her, dear,” Great-Aunt Edna said, as if he were a child again. “It’s all the other things she never said. It’s those she has to lay to rest, not your grandmother.”
“What other things?” Jason asked.
“One day you’ll understand,” Great-Aunt Edna said, with the cryptic tone only ever used by the extremely old. He wondered if Edna would understand if he talked about the slippers. Probably not.
They hung up and he watched through the kitchen window as his mother sat on the garden bench and smoked some more. The past few months had aged her, and somewhere inside that made him feel sad. He wondered how to put it into words, but found that he couldn’t; so he left it there, in a small space in his heart.
*
It was supposed to be a reconciliation dinner—that’s what Emily had called it when she’d phoned him. She had sounded excited.
It turned out, despite her best efforts otherwise, to be a divorce dinner. Life could be ironic like that. It was she who had demanded that he leave, and now it was he that found he didn’t really want to go back.
Emily had cried, and he’d been as pleasant about it as he could, but there was nothing really more to say. The marriage was over. Life was too short to fight the inevitable. The presence of death had been too strong in his world of late to imagine spending the rest of his life, however long or short that might be, with someone as uptight as Emily.
He didn’t tell her that, of course. He told her that he would always love her (even though he wasn’t, in fact, sure that he ever had), but that it was time for them both to move on.
*
He was surprised at how much better he felt by the time he got back to his mother’s house, even though it was nearly midnight and he had been shattered before he’d even gone out.
The moment broke, however, as soon as he was home. The door clicked closed behind him and he was locked within a silent stillness. Three things hit him, almost immediately. The first was that, once again, the under-stairs cupboard door was open. Wide, this time. Determined. The second was the awful stench of rot that gushed out from that dark void, filling the entire downstairs. But the third was what disturbed him the most—the imprint of footsteps on the stairs. Dirty. Foul. Dragging.
He gripped the banister. His heart in his mouth, he started to climb, following the footprints all the way to the top. Ahead, his mother’s bedroom door was open a crack. He crept towards it, his palms sweating. The house was silent. This close to her room, he should have been able to hear her soft, sobbing, half-words mumbled through jumbled grief-ridden dreams
.
He looked down. The muddy footprints that crossed the doorway taunted him as, with his heart in his mouth, he pushed the door open wider.
*
He gasped silently, sucking air in rather than expelling, and then he held it. Tears sprung in the corner of his eyes, and for the first time since he’d opened the cupboard door, he understood.
He saw his grandmother for only the briefest moment. The blue slippers on her feet looked new and matched the dressing gown buttoned up to her neck. How could he have forgotten that dressing gown? Her hair was curled like it used to be when Jeannie did it, and although old, she was still healthily thick at the waist.
She was sitting on the edge of the bed, one hand stroking his mother’s sleeping head. She looked up at him and smiled, and in that moment she was so real that he wondered if perhaps he’d got it all horribly wrong and that he was the ghost.
He backed away, pulling the door closed behind him, and headed to his room… leaving them to say the things they wished they had, and for the first time feeling a pang of grief for his Gran and the slippers she’d worn when he was only a boy.
<
*
The Mystery
PETER ATKINS
PETER ATKINS was born in Liverpool, England, and now lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of the novels Morningstar, Big Thunder, and Moontown, and the screenplays for Hellhound: Hellraiser II, Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, Hellraiser: Bloodline, Wishmaster, and Prisoners of the Sun.
His short fiction has appeared in such best-selling anthologies as The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Museum of Horrors, Dark Delicacies II, and Hellhound Hearts, while a new collection of his stories, Rumours of the Marvellous, was recently published by Alchemy Press/Airgedlamh Publications.
‘“The Mystery’ first appeared in Spook City,’’ explains Atkins, “a three-author anthology also featuring fellow Liverpudlians Clive Barker and Ramsey Campbell and edited by another, Angus Mackenzie.
“I grew up about two hundred yards from The Mystery—a real park in South Liverpool—and this piece came about when my wife wondered how I could possibly have avoided using such an evocatively named place as the basis for a story.
“Which made me wonder, too…”
“For upwards of two hours, the sky was brilliant with lights.”
—The Liverpool Daily Post, Sept. 8th, 1895
THERE’S ACTUALLY no mystery at all.
Not if you went the Bluey, anyway.
It used to be the grounds of a house, a big one. No Speke Hall or anything, but still technically a Stately Home. It had been called The Grange and was pulled down in May of 1895.
Four months later, minus an ornamental lake which had been filled in, the grounds were opened as a park for the children of Liverpool by the city council. It was officially named Wavertree Playground but was almost immediately dubbed “The Mystery” by local people, because the person who bought the land and donated it to the city had asked for anonymity.
The Bluecoat School, a boys’ grammar, backed onto The Mystery, and if you were a pupil there, even seventy-five years later, it was made pretty damn clear to you that it was one of our old Governors who’d forked up for the park. Philip Holt—one of our four schoolhouses was named for him—was a maritime magnate in the days of the great ships and the Cast Iron Shore. The money needed to clear the land and create the park was probably no more than loose change to the man whose Blue Funnel Line practically owned the tea trade between Britain and China.
So. No mystery there.
*
I’ll tell you what was a mystery, though. The fucking state of the Gents’ bogs.
The Liverpool of the mid-1960s was a city suffering a dizzying drop into recession. No more ships, no more industry, no more Beatles— Tara, Mum. Off to London to shake the world. Don’t wait up—but even so, the public toilets at the northwest comer of the Mystery were astonishingly disgusting. “Derelict” didn’t even come close.
They’d been neither bricked up nor pulled down. It was more like they’d been simply forgotten, as if a file had been lost somewhere in the town hall and nobody with any responsibility knew they even existed. Utterly unlooked after in a third-world sort of way and alarming to enter, let alone use. No roof, no cubicle doors, no paper, what was left of the plaster over the ancient red bricks completely covered with graffiti of an obsessive and sociopathic nature, and last mopped out sometime before Hitler trotted into Poland.
But, you know, if you had to go you had to go, and I’d had many a piss there back in the day. If you didn’t actually touch anything, you had a fighting chance of walking out without having contracted a disease.
But to see that soiled shed-like structure still there on an autumn afternoon thirty years later was more than a little surprising.
I had some business to attend to and shouldn’t really have allowed myself to be distracted, but I felt a need to check it out. The boys appeared just as I approached the stinking moss-scarred walkway entrance.
There were two of them, both about thirteen, though one at least a head taller than his friend. Although they weren’t actually blocking the path—standing just off to the side, ankle-deep in the overgrown grass—they nevertheless gave the impression of being self-appointed sentries, as if they were there to perhaps collect a toll or something.
“Where are you going, then?” The first one said. His hair was russet and looked home-cut and his face was patchily rosy with the promise of acne.
“The bog,” I said.
They looked at each other, and then back at me.
“This bog?” said the first.
“Fuckin’ ‘ell,” said the second. He was the shorter one, black Irish pale, unibrowed and sullen.
“You don’t wanna go in there,” said the first.
“Why would you go in there?” said his mate.
I shrugged, but I wasn’t sure they noticed. They were staring at me with the kind of incipient aggression you’d expect, but weren’t actually meeting my eyes. Instead, they were both looking at me at about mid-chest height, as if looking at someone smaller and younger.
“Why wouldn’t I?” I said.
“He might get ya,’’ said the black-haired one.
“Who?”
“The feller,” said the redhead.
“What feller?” I asked him.
He looked surprised. “Yerav’n ‘eard of ‘im?” he said.
“No.”
“Fuckin’ ‘ell,” said the shorter one.
“He’s there all the time,” his friend said. “Nights, mostly.”
“Yeah,” Blackie nodded in support. “Nights.”
“Yeah?” I said to the taller one, the redhead, who seemed to be the boss. “What does he do?”
“Waits there for lads,” he said.
“What for?”
“You know.”
I didn’t. He shook his head off my blank look, in pity for my ignorance. “He bums them,” he said.
“Shags them up the bum,” said his companion helpfully.
“Why?”
“Fuckin’ ‘ell,” said the first one, and looked at his friend with a we’ve got a right idiot here expression. “Because he’s an ‘omo, that’s why.”
“A hom,” said the second.
The first looked thoughtful. Came to a decision. “We better go in with ya,” he said.
“For safety, like,” said the second, with only a trace of his eagerness betraying itself. “He might be in there now.”
“Oh, I think I’ll be all right,” I said. “If he’s in there, I’ll tell him I’m not in the mood.”
My tone was confusing to them. It wasn’t going the way it was meant to, the way it perhaps usually did.
“Yeah, burrit’s worse than we said,” the first one told me, as if worried some opportunity was slipping away. He looked to his friend. “Tell him about the, you know, the thing.”
“Yeah, he’s gorra nutcracker,” Blackie sai
d. “You know warramean?” He mimed a pliers-like action in order to help me visualize what he was talking about. “After he’s bummed ya, he crushes yer bollocks.”
I remembered that. It was a story I’d first heard when I was much younger than them. An urban legend, though the phrase hadn’t been coined at the time, conjured into being in the summer of 1965 and believed by nearly every nine-year-old boy who heard it.
They were still looking at my chest, as if staring down a smaller contemporary.
“How old am I?” I asked them.
“You wha’?” the redhead said.
“How old do you think I am?”
They shared a look, and the taller one shrugged. “Dunno,” he said. “About eight?”
“Might be ten,” the other one said, not to me but to his friend, and the redhead shot him an angry look as if he didn’t want to be bothered with details or sidetracked by debate.
I snapped my fingers loudly, close to my face, and drew their eyes upwards.
They looked confused. Their eyes weren’t quite focusing on mine, and I still wasn’t sure they could really see me. There was something else hovering behind their confusion; an anxiety, perhaps, as if they feared they might be in trouble, as if something would know they were being distracted from their duty and wouldn’t be very pleased with them. As far as they were concerned, this was a day like every other and needed to be a day like every other, and any disruption in the pattern was alarming to them, in however imprecise a way.
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