I didn’t doubt that this was how they’d spent a fair portion of their time, back when it was linear. Having a little chat and preparing some eight-year-old victim for a good battering. They’d probably done it before, and more than once. Done it regularly, perhaps, until their belief in the very predator they used as bait had become their undoing.
“Take a look at this,” I said and took something out of my pocket to show them.
A few minutes later, back on the main footpath, I took a look back over my shoulder. It was very dark now and neither the toilets nor the boys were anywhere in sight. The moon had risen in the cloudless sky and I took a glance at my watch. It was an old-fashioned watch and its dial was un-illuminated, but I was fairly certain it said it was still four in the afternoon.
I’d kept up a brisk pace while checking the time and, when I looked up again, the house was directly ahead of me, though I hadn’t noticed it earlier. Its size alone suggested it was probably magnificent in the daylight, but its lawns were unlit and its windows shuttered and it appeared simply as a great black shape, a mass of deeper darkness against the midnight blue of the sky.
Just outside its black iron gates, half-open as if in tentative invitation, a little girl was standing on the gravel of the driveway.
She was dressed in a simple knee-length smock dress and didn’t look up at me as I walked towards her. She was concentrating on her game, her mouth opening and closing in recitation of something. It was a skipping song, as best I remembered it, but she was using it as accompaniment for the rapid bouncing of a small rubber ball between the gravel and her outstretched palm.
“Dip dip dip,
My blue ship.
Sailing on the water
Like a cup and saucer.
O, U, T spells—”
Oh, that’s right. Not a skipping song at all. A rhyme of selection or exclusion, a variant of “eeny meeny miney mo.” The little girl, long and ringleted hair pulled back from her forehead by a wide black ribbon, seemed to remember that at the same moment I did and, just as she mouthed the word out, her hand snapped shut around the ball, her eyes flicked up to meet mine, and she thrust her other hand out to point its index finger dramatically at me. Her eyes were jet black and her now-silent mouth was pulled in a tight unsmiling line.
“I’m out?” I asked her.
She didn’t say anything, and nor did her fixed expression waver. I let the silence build for a few moments as we stared at each other, though I blinked deliberately several times to let her know that if it was a contest it was one she was welcome to win.
“Your concentration’s slipping,” I said eventually. “Where did the ball go?”
Her little brow furrowed briefly and she looked down at her empty hand. She pulled an annoyed face and then looked back at me.
“Are you going into the house?” she asked.
“In a manner of speaking,” I said.
She gave a small tut of derision. “Is that supposed to be clever?” she said.
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
“Good,” she said. “Because it’s not clever. It’s just stupid. Are you going into the house or not?”
“The house isn’t really here,” I told her.
“Then where are you standing?” she said. “And who are you talking to?”
Without waiting for an answer, and keeping her eyes fixed on mine, she began to lean her head sideways and down. Keeping her unblinking eyes fixed on mine, she continued the movement, slowly and steadily, with no apparent difficulty or discomfort, until her pale little cheek rested flat against her right shoulder and her head was at an impossible right angle to her neck. At the same time, in some strange counterpoint, her hair rose up into the air, stately and unhurried, until the ringlets were upright and taut, quivering against the darkness like mesmerized snakes dancing to an unheard piper.
I grinned at her. She was good at this.
We exchanged a few more words before I walked through the gates without her, following the wide and unbending path to the house itself. The imposingly large front door was as unlit as the rest of the exterior and was firmly closed. But I knew that others had come to this house before me, and that the door, despite its size and its weight and its numerous locks, had opened as easily for them as it would for me.
*
The rest of the vast reception room was pretty impressive, but the portrait over the fireplace was magnificent.
The picture itself was at least eight feet tall, allowing for some grass below and some sky above its life-size and black-suited central figure, who stared out into the room with the confident Victorian swagger of those born to wealth and empire. A foxhound cowered low at its master’s feet and, in the far background, which appeared to be the grounds of the house, a group of disturbingly young children were playing Nymphs and Shepherds.
The room, like the long hall along which I’d walked to come to it, was illuminated by many candles, though I’d yet to see anyone who might have lit them. Through a half-open door at the far end of the room, though, I could see a shadow flicking back and forth, back and forth, as if somebody was about their business in a repeated pattern of movements.
As I came into the anteroom, the young woman who was pacing up and down looked up briefly from the clipboard she was holding. She appeared to be barely twenty, dressed in what I guessed to be the kind of nurse’s uniform women might have worn when they were dressing wounds received in the Crimea, and the stern prettiness of her face and the darkness of her eyes said she could have been an older sister of the little girl I’d met outside the gates.
There was a single bed in the room and, though it was unoccupied, its sheets were rumpled, as if the woman’s patient had just recently gone for a little walk. There were wires and cables and drip-feeds lying on the sheets, and the other ends of some of them were connected to a black-and-white television monitor that attempted to hide its anachronism by being cased within a brass and mahogany housing of a Victorian splendor and an H. G. Wells inventiveness.
The young woman, having registered my presence with neither surprise nor welcome, was back to her job of glancing at the monitor and then marking something on her clipboard.
The image on the monitor—grainy and distorted, washed-out like a barely surviving kinescope of some long-ago transmission—was a fixed-angle image of moonlight-bathed waves, deep-water waves, no shore in sight, as if a single camera were perched atop an impossible tower standing alone in some vast and distant ocean.
I looked at the image for a moment or two while she continued to pace and to make check marks on her clipboard.
“So what does that do?” I asked eventually, nodding at the monitor.
She stopped pacing and turned to look at me again. Her expression, while not unfriendly, was conflicted, as if she were both grateful for the break in routine and mildly unsettled by it.
“It used to show his dreams,” she said, and turned her head briefly to look again at the endless and unbreaking waves. “But it’s empty now.”
She looked back at me and tilted her head a little, like she was deciding if I was safe enough to share a confidence with. “It’s frightening, isn’t it?” she said.
“Frightening?” I said. “I don’t know. Perhaps it just means he’s at peace.”
“No, no,” she said, her voice rising in a kind of nervous excitement. “You’ve misunderstood. That isn’t what I meant.” And then she caught herself and her voice went flat as if she feared lending emotion to what she said next. “I mean we might be having his dreams for him.”
She looked at me half-expectantly, her eyes wide, like she was hoping I might tell her that she was wrong, but before I could answer a bell began to ring from a room somewhere deeper in the house.
“Teatime,” she said. “You’d best hurry.”
*
The children sat at trestle tables and ate without enthusiasm and there were far too many of them.
Their clothes were a snapshot history lesson: tracks
uits and trainers, pullovers and short pants, britches and work-shirts, smocks and knickerbockers. The ones who’d been here longest were an unsettling monochrome against the colors of the more recent arrivals, and it wasn’t only their outfits that were fading to grey.
Despite the dutiful shoveling of gruel into their mouths, I knew that they weren’t hungry—there was only one inhabitant of this house who was hungry—and I wondered briefly why they even needed to pretend to eat, but figured that habit and routine were part of what helped him chain them here. Not a one of them spoke. Not a one of them smiled. I decided against joining them and headed back down the corridor to which the nurse had pointed me.
I saw something unspeakable in one of the rooms I passed and felt no need to look in any of the others.
The reception room was still empty when I got there. Patience is encouraged in these situations but, you know, fuck it. I decided to break something. There was an exquisite smoked glass figurine resting on top of the piano. I didn’t even pick it up, just swept it away with the back of my hand and listened to it shatter against the parquet floor.
I hadn’t intended to look, but a rapid skittering caught my eye and I bent down, barely in time to see a tiny something, wretched and limbless, slithering wetly beneath the sofa. I was still crouched down when there was a noise from somewhere behind me, unusually loud for what it most sounded like: the sticky gossamer ripping of a blunder through an unseen spider’s web.
I stood up quickly, turning around to look. There was still nobody in the room but, though the large picture over the fireplace was intact and undamaged, its central figure was missing.
“You’re a little older than my usual guests,” the master of the house said from immediately behind me.
I span back around, very successfully startled. There was nothing overtly threatening about his posture, but he was standing uncomfortably close to me and I wasn’t at all fond of his smile.
“A little older,” he repeated. “But I’m sure we can find you a room.”
“I won’t be staying,” I said. My voice was steady enough, but I was pissed off at how much he’d thrown me and pissed off more at how much he’d enjoyed it.
“You’re very much mistaken,” he said. “My house is easy to enter but not so easy to leave.”
I understood his confidence. He had a hundred years of experience to justify his thinking that I was one of his usual guests. He could see me, so I had to be dead. Just as most ghosts are invisible to people, most people are invisible to ghosts. But, just as there are a few anomalous ghosts who can be seen by people, so are there a few anomalous people who can be seen by ghosts. And he’d just met one.
“Do you know what this is?” I said, and brought the tesseract out of my pocket. They’ve been standard issue at the department for the last couple of years. Fuck knows where they get them made, but I have a feeling it isn’t Hong Kong.
I let it rest in my palm and he looked at it. He tried to keep his expression neutral but I could tell his curiosity was piqued. It always is.
“What does it do?” he said.
“Well, it doesn’t really do anything,” I said. “It just is.”
“And what do you want me to do about it?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Just look at it for a while.”
I gave it a little tap and it slid impossibly through itself.
The room shivered in response, but I don’t think he noticed. His eyes were fixed on the little cube and its effortless dance through dimensions.
“There’s something wrong with it,” he said, but the tone of his voice was fascinated rather than dismissive. “I can’t see it properly.”
“It’s difficult,” I agreed. “Because part of it shouldn’t be here. Doesn’t mean it’s not real. Just means it doesn’t belong in the space it’s in.”
The metaphor hit home, as it always did. I don’t know why the tesseract works so well on them—I mean, it’s utterly harmless, more wake-up call than weapon—but it’s definitely made the job easier. He looked up at me. His face was already a little less defined than it had been, but I could still read the fear in it. He was smart, though. Went straight for the important questions and fuck the nuts and bolts.
“Will I be judged?” he said.
“Nobody’s judged.”
“Will I be hurt?”
“Nobody’s hurt.”
“Will I be—” He stopped himself then, as an unwilled understanding came to him, and he repeated what he’d just said. Same words. Different stress. “Will I be!”
I looked at him.
“Nobody’ll be.” I said.
It was too late for him to fight, but the animal rage for identity made him try, his imagined flesh struggling against its dissolution and his softening arms reaching out for me uselessly.
“You know who hangs around?” I said. “People with too little will of their own, and people with too much. Let it go. We’re just lights in the sky, and their shadows.”
“I’ll miss it!” he shouted, his disappearing mouth twisting into a final snarl of appetite and terror.
“You won’t miss a thing,” I said, and watched him vanish.
*
I’d been in there longer than I thought and, as I walked back through the park towards the Hunter’s Lane gate, true night was falling. But it was far from dark. There’d been so many souls in the house, young and old, predator and prey, that the cascade of their dissolution was spectacular and sustained.
For upwards of two hours, the sky was brilliant with lights.
Like an anniversary. Like a half-remembered dream. Like a mystery.
<
*
Poison Pen
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER was born in Greenwich, London, and currently lives in the King’s Cross area of that city. He is the award-winning author of thirty novels and ten short story collections, and creator of the Bryant & May mysteries.
His memoir, Paperboy, won the Green Carnation Award. He has written comedy and drama for the BBC and has a weekly column in the Independent on Sunday. Fowler is also the crime reviewer for the Financial Times, and has written for The Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Daily Mail, Time Out, Black Static and many other periodicals.
His latest books are an homage to Hammer horror called Hell Train, The Memory of Blood, and a two-volume collection of twenty-five new stories entitled Red Cloves. Forthcoming are two further novels, Dream World and The Invisible Code.
“This supernatural tale has its origins in a factual event,” Fowler reveals. “A few years ago my best friend became sick. Knowing he was going to die, he had taken great pains to distribute his worldly goods fairly, but a number of unexpected events changed the rules as he lay dying.
“He passed away, and I was made the executor of his will. The complexities and ramifications of this task slowly spread to engulf two families, two homes in different countries, several cars, a boat, and five companies. Trying to remain objective and impartial was virtually impossible.
“It soon felt as if his memory was being sullied by the intrusion of so many accumulated objects—as if they were taking on a life of their own and turning those who were fighting to possess them into monsters. It was a grotesque and shattering experience, and has still not quite concluded.
“Perhaps I wrote the story to remove the bitter taste from my mouth. The moral, for me, was this: revere the person, not the belongings.”
ANDREW BAYER
UNCLE ANDREW PLAYED the Stock Exchange and used his gains to fund his passions—but what were his passions? Nobody knew. He told his friends that he was a collector, but there were no collections at his Buckinghamshire mansion or his London flat.
Now he was in southern France, tearing along the Grande Corniche in his classic white 1968 Mercedes convertible, and the curving emerald hills had just parted to reveal the port of Monaco below. The autumn air was cool and smelled of pine and lavender. The morning sky was the sam
e aching azure as the Mediterranean, and a few thin, grey clouds still hung like spiderwebs in the trees below the road.
Andrew pushed his speed to fifty, the most he could risk on a road with a forty-meter drop on one side and no crash barriers. He was late for lunch with Lycus Gerolstein, his lawyer, who would be waiting for him at the Salon Des Etoiles, ready to celebrate their latest purchase with a glass of fine champagne.
Coming from the opposite direction, a Niçoise estate agent was lighting her cigarette with one hand and arguing on her cell phone with the other, which didn’t leave her any way of controlling the wheel of her Porsche Boxster. She was trying to arrange for some Russians to view a pieds dans l’eau property in Fontvieille, but they were being very difficult about the appointment times. She argued, threatened, and cajoled but they wouldn’t come earlier, and she sensed she was losing the sale.
What she should have been doing was watching the central divider as she rounded the bend, because moments later she blithely crossed it, forcing the car coming from the opposite direction—a classic white convertible Mercedes—off the tarmac and out into the clouds.
The great vehicle sailed as gracefully as a galleon for a few seconds, then seemed to realize that it weighed over a ton, and dropped into the valley below. Andrew might have been able to get out, except that his hand-stitched 1968 seat belt had not been manufactured for speedy removal. He was still trying to unbuckle it when he hit the cliff face and bounced all the way down to the roof of the rococo Banque de Grimaldi building on the Avenue des Citronniers in Monte Carlo. The noise was so loud that it made diners briefly stir themselves from their lobster salads.
Andrew Bayer’s classic car was stuck out of the bank’s roof with its rear wheels still spinning. Inside the grand financial institution, his corpse, tethered by the effective seat belt, dripped blood over piles of bank notes. The accident made the front page of Nice Matin next day, right next to a car insurance advert. The irony did not go unnoticed.
In England, twenty-three-year-old Mark Bayer heard about the death of his favorite uncle, happy-go-lucky Andrew, and was heartbroken. He had been closer to Andrew than he was to his own father, who had worked in loss adjustment all his life and treated Mark as if he was a failure, just because he had chosen to become a graphic designer and get some pleasure from his career.
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