The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 (Mammoth Books)

by Jones, Stephen

  The old lady soon grew bored with Cornelia, whose cries had grown weak and feeble before she finally lost consciousness. Her baleful gaze swept the room and fell for a moment on Krauss and Anna, who stood calmly by the window.

  The remaining needles clicked together as the old lady moved her fingers in the air like skewered spiders. “Snick snick snick,” she mumbled. Then she turned back to where the butler had been. Seeing he had escaped, she smiled like a child at play and crept after him. From the corridor came the sound of a struggle. There was a shout, then the sound of gurgling, moaning, then silence.

  Alone at last, Krauss turned Anna to face him. A slow grin spread over her features and she placed her bloodstained hands on either side of his face.

  “Apparently I’m the daughter of a clergyman,” she said. “And you’re in league with the Devil.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I suspect the Dalrymples have already made his acquaintance.”

  Krauss nodded. “A few drops in the jug of water by their daughter’s bed earlier this afternoon. If she isn’t dead by morning she’ll wish she was.”

  From somewhere outside, Frédérique began to scream.

  “Let’s go somewhere quieter,” Krauss said.

  He led Anna up the stairs and into the master bedroom. Once there, he undressed her slowly and laid her naked on the fourposter bed. She writhed in anticipation, her hands leaving streaks of blood on the white silk sheets. Krauss kissed her gored palms.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked.

  “Oh yes,” she said, breathless. “But not nearly enough.”

  He withdrew a knife from his pocket. It gleamed like a smile in the candlelight. “Where shall we begin?” he asked.

  She guided him to the soft skin of her abdomen and lifted her hips, pressing herself against the tip of his blade. “Here,” she said. “Sign your name.”

  JOHN AJVIDE

  LINDQVIST

  The Music of Bengt

  Karlsson, Murderer

  Translated by Marlaine Delargy

  JOHN AJVIDE LINDQVIST WAS born 1968 and grew up in Blackberg, a suburb of Stockholm. He is probably the only Swedish person who makes his living from writing horror.

  A former stand-up comedian and expert at card tricks, Lindqvist’s first novel, Let the Right One In, has sold over half-a-million copies in a country with nine million inhabitants. The book has been published in thirty countries and been made into two movies, one Swedish and the other American (under the title Let Me In).

  The author’s other novels include Handling the Undead and Harbour, both of which are in the process of being turned into films, and Little Star. A collection of his short fiction, Let the Old Dreams Die (which includes sequels to both Let the Right One In and Handling the Undead), was recently published in the UK by Quercus.

  The following novella is Lindqvist’s first story written specifically for an English-language market and, as he explains: “The idea for ‘The Music of Bengt Karlsson, Murderer’ came to me four years ago, when my son was ten years old and started taking piano lessons.

  “The disjointed, unharmonic notes coming from his room gave me the thought, What if he would accidentally hit on a series of notes that . . . summoned something? I wrote down the idea and waited for that critical second idea that could turn it into a story. It never came by itself, so the original idea just lay slumbering in that special file on my computer.

  “When asked for a contribution to an anthology, I opened the file, shook life into the notes-that-summon idea and examined it more closely. Originally I had a vague plan of some Cthulhuesque monster being attracted by the music, but that didn’t work out. Then the idea of a father and son being alone and isolated clicked together with the image of mylingar, the ghosts of murdered children . . . and the rest was the usual sweat and tears to forge those images into a story.

  “It might be the one story I have written that has scared me the most. It plays deeply on my own fears of losing all I love. Especially towards the end, I wrote on in a state of mild but constant horror.

  “It was a relief when it was over.”

  I’M ASHAMED TO admit it, but I bribed my son to get him to start learning to play the piano.

  The idea came to me one night when I heard him sitting plinking and plonking away on the toy synthesiser he’d been given for his birthday two years earlier. He’d actually taken a break from playing computer games – imagine that. So I went into his room and asked if he’d like piano lessons.

  No, he would not. No way. I hinted that an increase in his pocket money might well be on the cards if he agreed. Eighty kronor a week instead of fifty. Robin must have realised how desperate I was, because he refused even to come and look at the community music school unless we were talking about doubling the amount. A hundred kronor a week.

  I gave in. What else could I do? Something had to change. My son was sliding towards unreality, and if a piano lesson now and again could bring him back to the IRL-world to some extent, then fifty kronor a week was a cheap price to pay.

  IRL. In real life. I don’t know what the other world is called, but that was where Robin spent almost all of his waking hours when he wasn’t in school. Online. Wearing a headset and with a control in his hands, he had surfed away to a coastline where I could no longer reach him.

  Not too much of a problem, you might think. Completely normal, the youth of today, etc. Well yes. But he was only eleven years old. It just can’t be healthy to sit there locked inside an electronic fantasy world for five, six, seven hours a day at that age. So I bribed him.

  And what would an eleven-year-old do with the hundred kronor a week he had managed to extort from a father who was completely at a loss? What do you think? Buy new games, of course. But I couldn’t work out what else to do. Anything that could divert him from slaying monsters and conversing with invisible friends felt like progress.

  Now I know better. Now I wish I’d spent the money on a faster Internet connection, a cordless headset, a new computer, anything at all. Perhaps then the darkness wouldn’t have got hold of me. I’ll never know.

  It started well. Robin turned out to have a natural inclination for playing the piano, and after spending a few weeks playing “Frère Jacques” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” with one finger, he had grasped the basic principles of the notes and was able to play his first chord. His achievement was all the more praiseworthy because there was no help to be had from his father.

  I am completely useless when it comes to music. I’ve never sung, nor played any instrument. Robin must have inherited that gene from his mother, and she should have been the one sitting beside him on the piano stool. But one of the few things we have left of her is in fact her piano. Perhaps that was why I insisted on Robin playing that particular instrument. To maintain some form of . . . contact.

  When Robin started piano lessons it was almost two years to the day since Annelie got in the car and never came back. An icy road, a bus coming from the opposite direction. Only a month later they erected a central barrier separating the two carriageways. About bloody time. I came to hate that barrier, its wire structure like a wound across my field of vision every time I drove past the spot. Because it hadn’t been there then.

  Six months after Annelie’s death, we moved. There were too many rooms in the old house. Rooms meant for more children, for Annelie’s loom. Rooms just standing there like empty memorials to a life that might have been. Rooms where I could get trapped, sitting there hour after hour. And on top of all that: rooms which together made up a house that was far too big and far too expensive to run on one income.

  I decided to try to come to terms with all the dreams that had died, and got a job 300 kilometres away in Norrtälje. We moved from the house in Linköping to an eighty-square-metre windblown shack in the forest. The house was five kilometres from the town, where I didn’t know a soul. The property was surrounded by coniferous forest on three sides, and in the winter you hardly ever caught a gl
impse of the sun.

  But it was cheap. Extremely cheap.

  I carried out the move in a state of agitation. After six months, during which my grief had taken on a physical form and squeezed my throat at night, tangled me up in the sheets and thrown me out of bed, I saw the chance to breathe in at least a little light. I would start afresh in a new place. For Robin’s sake, if nothing else. It wasn’t good for him, living with a father whose only companion in bed was death, and who never slept for longer than an hour at a time.

  So I cleared the place out. Anything we didn’t need for our new life on the edge of the forest went into a skip. Annelie’s clothes, her hand-woven rugs. Piece after piece of furniture that belonged to a life for two, and carried its own memories. Out. I smashed up the loom with an axe and took it out in bits.

  The night after the skip had been taken away, I slept well for the first time in six months, only to wake up in absolute terror.

  What had I done?

  In my feverish enthusiasm I had thrown away not only things that Robin and I could have made use of (but I just couldn’t keep the kitchen table where she still sat with her cup of coffee, or the lamp that still illuminated her face, casting dead shadows), but also things that I would have liked to keep. The cushion she used to hug to her stomach. Her hair slides, with a few strands of hair still attached. The odd talisman. But everything had been crushed to bits at some rubbish dump.

  The only thing that remained was the piano. The lads who came to pick up the skip had refused to touch it, and I couldn’t manage to drag it out on my own. So it stayed where it was, with her fingerprints still lingering on the keys.

  That morning . . . oh, that morning. If it hadn’t been for the piano I might have lost my mind completely, and Robin would have ended up calling the emergency services instead of being driven to school to say goodbye to his classmates. It’s a paradox, but that’s just how it was: that piano kept me from sinking.

  And so it came with us to our new home, and the only place we could find enough space was in Robin’s bedroom, and that’s how it came about that Robin started to play the piano, and after six weeks was able to try out his first hesitant chord.

  I can’t say he practised much, but enough to get by. He liked his piano teacher, a guy who was a few years younger than me but had already settled for a cardigan and Birkenstocks. Robin wanted to please his teacher, so he did his exercises, which meant at least an hour or two away from the games.

  Since I had nothing to offer in musical terms, Robin didn’t want me in the room when he was practising. Instead I would sit at the kitchen table reading the paper, listening as his plinking became more assured each time he went through “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”.

  Then the roars and explosions of Halo or Gears of War took over again, and I would move into the living room and the TV, pleased with how things had turned out in spite of everything.

  If I remember rightly it happened in the eighth week. I had just driven Robin home from his piano lesson and settled down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the newspaper, while he started practising in his room.

  Since I had got used to the sound, I was able to concentrate on my reading without being distracted. But after a while I began to feel uneasy, for some reason. I looked up from the paper and listened.

  Robin was playing the piano. But what was he playing?

  I listened more carefully and tried to pick out a melody, something I recognised. From time to time I heard a sequence of notes which at a push could be linked to an existing tune, only to fall apart again. I assumed Robin was just messing around on the keyboard, and I should have been pleased that he’d reached this point. If it hadn’t been for that strange sense of unease.

  The only way I can explain it is to say that I thought I recognised the notes, in spite of the fact that I had no idea what it was, and in spite of the fact that it didn’t sound like a melody. It was like knowing that you know something, but at the same time being incapable of expressing it. That feeling. That sense of unease.

  I gritted my teeth, put my hands over my ears and tried to concentrate on the newspaper. I mean, I knew I ought to welcome this new development, and it would be completely wrong to go and ask Robin to stop. So I tried to concentrate on an article about the expansion of wind power, but failed to read a single word. The only thing that went into my head was the faint sound of those notes vibrating through the palms of my hands.

  I was on the point of getting up and going to knock on Robin’s door after all when there was a short pause, followed by a halting version of “Jingle Bells”. I let out a long breath and returned to my reading.

  That night I had a horrible dream.

  I was in a forest, a dense coniferous forest. Only a glimmer of moonlight penetrated down among the dark tree trunks. I could hear singing coming from somewhere, and I stood there motionless as a weight dragged me towards the ground. When I looked down I could just make out a crowbar. A heavy iron crowbar, which I was holding in my hands. The singing turned into a scream, and I woke up with the taste of rust in my mouth.

  Even though it was the end of November, we still hadn’t had any snow. Robin was practising for the Christmas concert – songs about happy little snowflakes and sleigh rides – while the temperature refused to drop below zero. Dark mornings with the smell of rotting leaves in the damp air, long evenings with the pine trees around the house swaying and creaking in the strong winds.

  One evening I was sitting at the table in the living room with my MacBook, trying to write a job application. I was in charge of the greengrocery department at the ICA hypermarket, but for a long time I had dreamed of being in charge of a smaller shop. Such a position had just come up. The work itself would be more varied, plus my journey would be five kilometres shorter each day.

  So I polished up my set phrases and tried to present myself in as responsible and creative a light as possible, while the wind howled in the television aerial and Robin began to play the piano.

  My fingers stopped, hovering over the keys. It was those notes again. Despite the wind which was making the windows creak and the wooden joints whimper, I could hear the notes as clearly as if the piano had been in the same room.

  Dum, di-dum, dum . . .

  I couldn’t remember whether the notes were exactly the same as the last time, but I always knew exactly which note would come next, even though there was nothing recognisable or logical about the melody. My fingers extended and moved in time with the music, as my thoughts drifted off into space.

  I was woken by the sound I made closing the computer. The clock showed that half-an-hour had passed, half-an-hour of which I had no memory whatsoever.

  Robin had stopped playing the piano, and from his room I could hear the low murmur of conversation as he spoke to some friend on Skype or Live. As usual I wondered what they actually talked about, given that they had no real lives, if you’ll pardon the expression.

  I sat down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and stared out at the swaying trees; I could vaguely make out the shapes in the glow of the outside light. No real lives. But then again, what would people say about my own life?

  My empire during the day was a space measuring some two hundred square metres, where my role was to satisfy people’s need for fruit and vegetables in a way that pleased the eye. No empty shelves, fresh goods on display, arranging the trays in combinations that were dictated by head office, teaching assistants the correct way to handle mushrooms.

  On one occasion when we were running a promotion I had improvised slightly and placed a battery-driven monkey among the bananas. Naturally it had frightened a child so much that the kid burst into tears, and I had received a reprimand from up above, instructing me to stick to the manual issued by head office. It’s like working in an East European dictatorship, but with brighter colours.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table thinking about all this when the fir trees and pine trees suddenly disappeared. All the tiny e
lectronic sounds of equipment on standby were gone, and the house was completely silent.

  A power cut. I sat for a while in the darkness, listening to the silence. As I was just about to get up and find some candles and oil lamps, I heard something that made me stop dead.

  The electricity was off and nothing was working. So how come Robin was still talking away in his bedroom? I turned my head towards the sound of his voice and tried to listen more closely. What I heard made me shudder. Of course it was only a phenomenon created by the movement of the wind through and around the house, but I really thought I could hear one or more voices in addition to Robin’s.

  It’s hardly a father’s job to come up with imaginary friends for his son, but I still couldn’t help sitting with my head tilted to one side, trying to make out what those voices were saying. Faint, almost inaudible utterances, and then Robin’s replies, which I couldn’t make out either. I chewed my nails. Robin wasn’t in the habit of talking to himself, as far as I knew. Perhaps he’d nodded off, and was talking in his sleep?

  I groped my way over to the side of the room to get out the torch. Just as I pulled open the drawer the power came back on, and I let out a little scream as all the everyday objects jumped out of the darkness. The voices in Robin’s room fell silent, and the fridge shuddered as it started up again.

  When I knocked on Robin’s door it was a couple of seconds before I heard “Mmm?” from inside. I looked in and saw him sitting on the piano stool, his body turned away from the instrument.

  “Hi,” I said.

  I was expecting the usual expression of listless amazement at the fact that I was disturbing him yet again, but the look he gave me was that of someone trying to place a face which is vaguely familiar. He said: “Hi?” as if he were speaking to a stranger.

  “There was a power cut,” I said, unable to help myself from glancing around his room to see if I could spot the people who had been talking. The scruffy, peeling wallpaper I hadn’t had the time or energy to change, the vinyl flooring with its gloomy seventies pattern.