The Best New Horror 3

by Stephen Jones

  As soon as it was open I reeled backwards from the light and unthinkingly crouched just inside the back hall. Then I realised that it wasn’t even that bright outside: it was late afternoon and the light was muted, but everything seemed very intense, like colours before a storm. Odd, but not odd enough to throw yourself to the ground over, I thought as I stood up. But it had been the milkman after all, for there was our milk bottle holder with four bottles of milk in it. Only they weren’t milk bottles, but large American-style quart containers somehow jammed into slots meant to take pints. And someone had taken the silver tops off.

  Something at the edge of my vision caught my attention and I looked up towards the top of the driveway. There, about thirty yards away, were two children, one fat and on a bike, the other slim and standing. I was seized with a sudden irrational fury and started quickly up the drive towards them, convinced that the clinking sound I’d heard was them stealing the tops off the milk.

  I had covered scarcely five yards when from behind me someone who’d been at my school walked quickly and inexplicably past me up the drive, staring straight ahead. I couldn’t remember his name, had barely known him, in fact. He’d been two or three years older than me, and I’d completely forgotten that he’d existed, but as I stared after him I remembered that he’d been one of the more amiable seniors. I could recall being proud of having some small kind of communication with one of the big boys and how it had made me feel a bit older myself, more a man of the world, less of a kid. And I remembered the way he used to greet my yelling a nickname greeting at him, a half-smile and the raising of an eyebrow.

  All this came back with the instantaneous impact of memory, but something wasn’t right. He didn’t smile at all, or even seem to register that I was there. I felt oddly disturbed and chilled, not by the genuinely strange fact that he was there at all, or that he was wearing school athletic gear when he must have left the school seven years ago, but because he didn’t smile and tilt his head back the way he used to. It was so bizarre that I wondered briefly if I was dreaming, but if you can ask yourself the question you always know the answer, and I wasn’t.

  My attention was distracted on the other side by a reflection in the glass of the window in the back hallway. A man with glasses, a chubby face and blond hair that looked as if it had been cut with a basin seemed to be standing behind me, carrying a bicycle. I whirled round to face where he should have been, but he wasn’t there. Then I remembered the kids at the top of the driveway and, seeing that they were still standing motionless, began to shout at them again, needing something to take my bewilderment out on.

  Almost immediately a tall slim man in a dark suit came walking down the drive. I don’t know if it was a trick of the light in the gathering dusk, but I couldn’t seem to fix on his face. In retrospect it was as if an unnatural shadow hung there but at the time my eyes just seemed to slide off it as if it were slippery, or made of ice.

  “Stop shouting at them,” the man said as he passed me, walking towards the back door. I stared at him open-mouthed. “They’re not doing anything wrong. Leave them alone.”

  The kids took themselves off, the one walking beside the other on the bike, and I turned to the suited man, anxious, for some reason, to placate him, and yet at the same time slightly outraged at his invasion of our property.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just, well, I’m a bit thrown. I thought I saw someone I knew in the drive. Did you see him? Sort of wavy brown hair, athletics gear?”

  For some reason I thought that the man would say that he had, and that that would make me feel better, but all I got was a curt “No”. I was by now looking at his back as he entered the back hallway.

  “Shall we go into your old house then?” asked another voice, clearly talking to the suited man, and I saw that someone else was in the back hall: the man with the blond hair and glasses. And he really was carrying a bicycle, for God’s sake.

  “What?” I said incredulously, and hurried after them, catching a glimpse of the suited man’s face. “But it’s you . . .” I continued, baffled, as I realised that the man in the suit was the man who had been in athletics gear. The two men walked straight into the kitchen and I followed them, quietly, and seemingly impotently, enraged. Was this his old house? Even if it was, wasn’t it customary to ask the current occupants if you fancied a visit?

  The suited man was by now peering round the kitchen, where for some reason everything looked very messy. He poked at some fried rice I’d left in a frying pan on the stove, or at least I seemed to have left it there, though I wasn’t sure when I would have done so. Again I felt the urge to placate and hoped he would eat some, but he just grimaced with distaste and joined the other man at the window looking out onto the drive, hands on hips, his back to me.

  “Dear God,” he muttered, and the other man grunted in agreement.

  I noticed that I’d picked up the milk from outside the back door, and appeared to have spilt some of it on the floor. I tried to clean it up with a piece of kitchen roll which seemed very dirty and yellowed as if with age, my mind aching under the strain of trying to work out what the hell was going on. I felt that there must be some sense to it somewhere, some logic of the situation that I was missing. Even if he had lived here once he had no right to just march in here with his friend like that, but I realised as I continued ineffectively trying to swab up the milk before he noticed it (why?) that there was something far wronger than a mere breach of protocol going on here. The suited man looked about thirty-five, far older then he should have been if he was indeed the man I’d been to school with, and yet far too young to ever have lived here, as between our family and the people we’d bought it from, the house’s last 40 years were accounted for. So how the hell could it be his house? There was no way. And was it him anyway? Apart from being too old, it looked like him, but was it actually him?

  As I straightened up, having done the best I could with the milk, I staggered slightly, feeling very disorientated and strange, my perception both heightened and jumbled at the same time, as if I was very drunk. Everything seemed to have a nightmarish intensity and exaggerated emotional charge, and yet there also seemed to be gaps in what I was perceiving, as if I was only taking in an edited version of what was going on. Things began to appear to jump from one state to another, with the bits in between, the becoming, missed out like a series of jump cuts. I felt hot and dizzy and the kitchen looked small and indescribably messy and the orange paint of the walls seemed to jump in at me beneath a low swaying ceiling. I wondered confusedly if I was seeing the kitchen as they saw it, and then immediately wondered what I meant by that.

  All the time they just stood there, turning round occasionally to stare balefully at me, radiating distaste and impatience. Obviously they were waiting for something. But what? What was going on? Noticing I still had the piece of kitchen roll in my hand I stepped over all the rubbish on the floor—what the hell had been going on in this kitchen?—to put it in the overflowing bin. Then, squeezing my temples with my fingers and struggling both to concentrate and to stand upright against the weight of the air I turned towards the men.

  “L-look”, I stuttered, “what the hell is going on?” and immediately wished I hadn’t. There was a pause and then the suited man turned his head very slowly towards me and it kept turning and turning until he was facing me while his body stayed facing the other way. I could feel my stomach trying to crawl away and fought against the gagging. He’d done that deliberately, done it because he knew it would make me want to throw up, and I thought he might just be right.

  “Why don’t you just shut up?” he snarled, the words squirming from his mouth like rats out of the stomach of something recently dead, and twisted his head slowly back round through 180 degrees until he was looking out onto the drive once more.

  Meanwhile, the mess in the kitchen seemed to be getting worse. Every time I looked there were more dirty pans and bits of rubbish and old food on the floor. My head was getting t
hicker and heavier and felt like it was slipping away from me. I half fell against the fridge and clung to it, almost pulling it off the wall, and began to cry, my tears cutting channels in the thick grime on the fridge door. I dimly remembered that we’d bought a new fridge the week before but they must have changed it because this one looked like something out of the fifties, but it was hard to tell because it was swimming back and forth and there was a lot of white in my eyes and I couldn’t see past it. They were both watching me now.

  Suddenly a terrible jangling pierced my ear, as if someone were hammering a pencil into it. It happened again and I recognised it first as a sound and not a blow after all, and then as the doorbell. Someone was at the front door.

  The two men glanced at each other and then the blond one nodded. The suited man turned to me.

  “Do you know what that is?” he asked.

  “Yes, it’s the front door,” I said, trying to please him.

  “Yes. So you’d better answer it, hadn’t you? Answer the door.”

  “Should I answer it?” I said, stupidly. I just couldn’t seem to remember what words meant any more.

  “Yes,” he grated and then picked up a mug, my mug, the mug I came down, I remembered randomly, to put tea in, and hurled it at me. It smashed into the fridge door by my face. I struggled to stand upright, my head aching and ears ringing, hearing a soft crump as a fragment of the mug broke under my foot. Then the doorbell jangled again, its harsh sharpness making me realise how muted sounds had been becoming. I fell rather than stepped towards the kitchen door, sliding across the front of the fridge, my feet tangling in the boxes and cartons that now seemed to cover the filthy floor. I could feel the orange of the walls seeping in through my ears and mouth and kept missing whole seconds as if I was blacking out and coming to like a stroboscope. As I banged into the door and grabbed the handle to hold myself up I heard the blond man say,

  “He may not go through. If he does, we wait.”

  But it didn’t mean anything to me. None of it did.

  Stepping clumsily over more piles of rubbish I headed for the front door. The chime of the doorbell had pushed the air hard and I could see it coming towards me in waves. Ducking, I slipped on the mat and almost fell into the living room on hands and knees. But it was getting dark in there, I could see, really dark, and I could hear the plants talking. I couldn’t catch the words, but they were there, beneath the night sounds and a soft rustling which sounded a hundred yards away. The living room must have grown, I thought groggily, picking myself up and turning myself to the front door as the bell clanged again. It should be about four paces across the hall from the living room door to the front door but I thought it was only going to take one and then it took twenty, past all the panelling and over the huge folds in the mat. And then I had my hand on the doorknob and then the door was open and I stepped out of the house.

  “Oh hello Michael. I thought someone must be in, because all the lights were on.”

  “Wuh?” I said, blinking in the remnants of sunlight, breathless with the feeling of my mind soaring up towards normality like a runaway lift. Then “Sorry?”

  “I hope I didn’t disturb you?” the woman standing in front of me said, and I now recognised her to be Mrs Steinburg, the woman who brings us our catfood in bulk.

  “No, no, that’s fine. Fine,” I said, looking covertly behind me into the hall, which was solid and unpanelled and four paces wide and led to the living room which was light and about ten yards deep. Good. Think about that later. Deal with the cat woman.

  “I’ve brought your delivery,” she said. “Look, are you all right?”

  “Yes. I’m fine,” I replied, smiling broadly. “I . . . er . . .” I . . . er . . . what? “I . . . er . . . just nodded off for a moment, in the kitchen. I still feel a bit, you know . . .”

  “Of course.” Mrs Steinburg smiled. I followed her up the drive and heaved the box of catfood out of the back of her van, looking carefully back at the house. There was nothing to see. I thanked her and then carried the box back down the drive as she drove off.

  I walked back into the house and shut the front door behind me. I felt absolutely fine. I walked into the kitchen. Normal. It didn’t even occur to me to wonder if the two men would still be there. They weren’t. I must just have fallen asleep making tea, and then struggled over to the front door to open it while still half asleep. I could remember asking myself if it was a dream and thinking it wasn’t but that just showed how wrong you could be, didn’t it? It had been unusually vivid, and it was odd how I’d been suddenly awake and all right again as soon as I stepped out of the front door. Odd, and a bit disconcerting. But here I was in the kitchen again and everything was normal, clean and tidy, spick and span, with all the rubbish in the bin and the pans in the right places and the milk in the fridge and a smashed mug on the floor.

  Suddenly I didn’t feel quite so good. It was my mug, and it was smashed, on the floor, at the bottom of the fridge. Now how had that happened? Maybe I’d fallen asleep holding it (fallen asleep standing up with a mug in my hand? Now how likely was that?), maybe I’d knocked it over waking up and incorporated the sound into my dream (better, better, but where exactly was I supposed to have fallen asleep? Just leaning against the counter, or actually stretched out on it with the kettle as a pillow?). Then I noticed the fridge door.

  There was a little dent in it, with a couple of flecks of paint missing. At about head height.

  That wasn’t good. That wasn’t good at all. In fact it felt as if someone had just punched a hole in my chest and poured icy water into it. But everything else was all right, wasn’t it? I cleared up the mug and switched the kettle on and while it was boiling wandered into the hall and the living room. Everything was fine, tidy, normal. Super. Back into the kitchen. The same. Great. Apart from a little dent in the fridge door at about head height.

  I made my cup of tea, though not in my mug of course, and drank it standing looking out of the kitchen window at the drive, feeling unsettled and nervous, and unsure of what to do with either of those emotions. Even if it had been a dream, it was odd, particularly the way it had fought so hard against melting away. Maybe I was much more tired than I realised. Or maybe I was ill. But I felt fine, physically at least.

  I carried the box of catfood into the pantry, unpacked it, and stacked the cans in the corner. Then I switched the kettle on for another cup of tea. Suddenly my heart seemed to stop and before I had time to realise why, the cause repeated itself. A soft chinking noise outside the back door.

  I moved quickly to the window and looked out. Nothing. I craned my neck, trying to see round to the back door, but could only see the large pile of firewood that lay to one side of it. The noise again.

  Clenching my fists I walked slowly into the back hallway and listened. Silence, except for the sound of blood beating in my ears. My stomach knotting and hands moist with perspiration. Then I grabbed the knob and swung the door open. Stillness. Just a rectangle of late afternoon light, a patch of driveway, a dark hedge waving quietly. I stepped out into the drive.

  A very faint crunching noise. And then again. Sounded almost like pebbles rubbing against each other. Again. I looked more closely at the drive, peering at the actual stones, and then noticed that a very small patch about ten yards in front of me appeared to be moving slightly, wriggling, almost. As I watched they stopped, and then the sound came again and another patch, about a yard closer than the first, stirred briefly. As if registering the weight of invisible feet. I was so engrossed that I didn’t notice the whistling straight away. When I did, I looked up.

  The blond man was back. Standing at the top of the driveway, carrying a bicycle with the wheels slowly spinning in the dusk, whistling the top line of two in perfect harmony, the lower line just the wind. As I stared at him, backing slowly towards the house, the crunching noise got louder and louder and then the suited man was standing with his nose almost touching mine.

  “Hello again,” he said.<
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  The blond man started down the driveway, smiling.

  “Hello again indeed,” he said. “Come on, in we go.”

  Suddenly I realised that the very last thing in the world I should do was let those two back into the house. I leapt through the back door back into the hallway. The suited man, caught by surprise, started forward but I was quick and whipped the door shut in his face and locked it. That felt very good but then he started banging on the door very hard, ridiculously hard, grotesquely hard, and I noticed that to my right the kitchen was getting messy again and the fridge was old and I could barely see out of the window because it was so grimy and a slight flicker made me think that maybe I’d missed the smallest fraction of a second and I realised that it really hadn’t been a fucking dream and I was back there, and I was back there because I’d come in through the back door again. As I backed into the kitchen I tripped and fell, sprawling amongst the cartons and bacon rind and the dirt and was that puke, for Christ’s sake? The banging on the back door got louder and louder and louder. He was going to break it. He was going to break the fucking door down. I’d let them back and they had to come in through the back door. I’d come in through the wrong door . . .

  Suddenly realising what I must do, I scrambled up and kicked my way through the rubbish towards the door to the front hall. The fridge door swung open in my way and the inside was dark and dirty and there was something rotted in there but I slammed it out of the way, biting hard on my lip to keep my head clear. I had to get to the front door, I had to open it, step out, and then step back in again. That was the right door. And I had to do it soon, before the back door broke and let them in. As I ran out of the kitchen into the front hall I could already hear a splintering quality to the sound of the blows. And the back door was about two inches thick.

  The hallway was worse than I expected. I came to a halt, at first unable to even see the front door. Then I thought that I must be looking in the wrong direction but I wasn’t, because there it was over to the left where it was supposed to be, but the angles were all wrong and to see it I had to look behind me and to the right, although when I saw it I could see that it was still over there to the left. And it looked so close, could it really be less than a yard away, but when I held my hand out to it I groped into nothing, my hand still in front of the door when it should have been past it. I stared wildly around me, disorientated and unsure somehow even of which way to go. Then the banging behind me got even louder, probably as the blond man joined in, and this helped marginally to restore my sense of direction. I found the door again, concentrated hard on its apparent position and started to walk towards it. I immediately fell over, because the floor was much lower than I expected, and in fact must be tilted in some way as one of my legs reached it easily enough, although it looked flat and level. I pulled myself up onto my knees and found I was looking at a sort of sloped wall between the wall and the ceiling, a wall which bent back from the wall and yet out from the ceiling. And the door was still over there on the left, although to see it I now had to look straight ahead and up.