The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Dark Terrors 05]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  ‘So then what happened to the baby?’ All sorts of possibilities flashed through her mind, among them that in this world was a cousin utterly unknown to her and that there was an infant’s grave among the others in this hillside plot somewhere.

  But Aunt Maureen wasn’t ready yet to recount that part of the tale. ‘The father,’ she said deliberately, ‘was a business associate of our father’s, a man named William Bradley, a decent man I’d always thought, a good deal younger than Libby. As a matter of fact, at one time I’d considered setting my cap for him myself.’

  Restraining herself from glancing sharply in her aunt’s direction to assess regret, Cecelia listened for it instead and heard none. ‘And he wouldn’t marry her,’ she supplied.

  Aunt Maureen tsked. ‘My sister refused to marry him. William Bradley tried to do the honourable thing by her, and Libby sent him packing. But then, she wasn’t well.’

  The funeral now appeared to have reached what, presumably, was the edge of the Harkness family plot, although boundaries were blurred and Cecelia was still confused about the position of the procession relative to herself and Aunt Maureen. The figures were not only undersized and shadowless but also translucent; the gold light glimmered through them, and the grey light, and the suggestion of objects which, when the figures moved, were revealed as not there.

  With a shock it came to Cecelia that somehow she’d been regarding this as a re-enactment of Aunt Libby’s funeral, and that, because of the motorized vehicles, it could not be. Apparently some aspect of her mind especially suggestible to this ethereal time and place, had readily accepted that a funeral from twenty-three years ago should reappear to her, and only a detail which in fact was irrelevant had made her decide otherwise. That she’d so readily made so ghostly an association gave her gooseflesh, and she found herself pulling her jacket snugly around her in the manner of the Harkness women and tucking her icy hands under her arms.

  The hearse and the other black car stopped. Hearing no cessation of engine noise, Cecelia realized she had not been hearing engines in the first place, nor any other sound from the funeral. Silently, small figures disembarked from the two vehicles, and, together with the straggling pedestrians, formed a little graveside crowd. Six in particularly black coats and black hats lifted a casket from the back of the hearse. The wood of it caught thin sunlight and briefly glowed; fleetingly, metal glinted like the edges of the sky.

  The two individuals who had split off from the rest, one pink- and one black-clad, were some distance away now, though it was hard to tell just where they were in relation to anything else. They danced, floated. Cecelia didn’t know whether to watch them or the group at the grave, where the casket - dull and self-contained, catching no light now - was being lowered. She didn’t know whether she could watch either without losing track of what Aunt Maureen was telling her. Recurring throughout the rest of her life, then, would be the conviction that on that late-autumn afternoon, in a part of the country which otherwise would prove to have no special significance for her, she might have missed something important.

  Doubtless because Cecelia had not asked, Aunt Maureen informed her rather testily, ‘Libby had always been moody and high-strung. Within a few months after the birth of her second daughter, she had a fully-fledged breakdown.’

  At the time, Cecelia thought she had no memory of this, which would have made sense considering her young age when it happened. But later, telling some of the story to Ray who didn’t seem especially interested, two clear images came to her that she suspected might be attached to that time and place: Laughter, song, wails echoing, travelling from room to room she couldn’t see; and a sign she gradually grew able to read after it had been read to her numerous times: black letters painted unevenly on a cut board, nailed to a door jamb well above her head, then not so high: STOP. DO NOT GO PAST HERE.

  Again she asked Aunt Maureen, a bit breathlessly by this time, ‘What happened to the baby?’

  ‘Libby gave her to Helen,’ Aunt Maureen replied without hesitation. ‘Helen raised her as her own.’

  For a split second, Cecelia thought she was being told she had a cousin/sister about whom she hadn’t known, and she felt as much eagerness as trepidation. But then the events of the story abruptly lined themselves up for her, and she stared at her aunt. ‘Aunt Libby was my mother?’

  ‘Libby gave you birth,’ Aunt Maureen said firmly. ‘Helen was your mother.’

  Chills sped through her, and she pulled her jacket snug. ‘My father was William Bradley?’

  ‘Your father is Emil Parmalee.’ Aunt Maureen reached out from under her taut dark sweater, and her hand came startlingly around Cecelia’s exposed wrist. ‘This doesn’t change anything, Cecelia. I just thought you had a right to know.’

  There would be times - moments; decades - when this insistent, imposed interpretation would ring true: her understanding of who she was had not, in fact, been changed by what she’d heard and seen that day in the cemetery on the cusp of the seasons. What she knew about herself remained known, and she’d found out nothing new that mattered in any sustained way.

  There would also, though, be reeling moments and decades of cumulative vertigo - such as when Ray and the children were all, for their various reasons, busy leaving her - when it would seem to her that some fundamental thing had been shaken that day, some profound and still-hidden depth plumbed. Not until Ray had left for good would she think of searching for William Bradley, and then all the trails would turn out to be cold. Not until she was old herself would she come back to Michigan - this time in hot and humid July - to stand again at Libby’s grave. Finding no markers for Aunt Maureen, Uncle Everett, or their two sons also gone by then, Cecelia would conclude that they, like the rest of her own family, must be buried somewhere else, and would muse with acute but indeterminate emotion on the complexities of human connection.

  * * * *

  Libby would wake up in the night or, worse, in the middle of the day, alone, and she would bring with her out of fitful sleep that faint bittersweet odour. Sometimes there would be a voice and sometimes not.

  ‘Libby, Libby, you don’t have to stay here.’

  ‘I’m not well. Papa says if I won’t stay here he’ll have to put me in the state hospital.’

  ‘You can get out. There are windows in every room.’

  ‘They don’t open. Papa nailed them shut from the outside.’ She’d gone with him from window to window, she on the inside and he on the outside, glass between them. He was too old to be climbing so high and working so hard. But she’d stayed with him, and in their companionship had been solace and strength.

  ‘Glass breaks.’

  ‘This is the third floor.’

  ‘I will catch you.’

  Libby was distressed that she even considered it, but there was no question that her resolve was greater than her suggestibility. ‘No,’ she said, and kept saying so.

  Then she was freed and the signs were taken down. She had not known there were signs, and the discovery of them gave her a peculiar little thrill as rapid-fire fantasies rocked her of who might have read the warnings, whom they might have been posted for, who might or might not have heeded them. Otherwise, though, her life didn’t change much.

  Over the years, she took care of her father and he took care of her; when he died she found him, and wept, and made the arrangements. Always she kept a place in her house for Frances to come home to, and Frances required a larger and larger place. She welcomed her sisters and their families on their annual visits, and was only a little sorry to see them off. Once in a while, taking a tiny stitch in another intricate quilt design, she would flinch as the needle, suddenly, pierced her heart with longing for her younger daughter and worry for her elder.

  ‘Take your daughter back. She’s yours. Helen isn’t her real mother.’

  Having held her breath against him as long as she could, Libby took a heady gasp of him. ‘Could I?’

  ‘Sure. I’ll help you. She’s yo
ur child.’ But it wasn’t right, and Libby refused. ‘At least tell her,’ he urged, exasperated. ‘Tell her who you are.’ But Libby, tempted, refused.

  ‘What do you want with me?’

  He leaned over her as if to kiss her, but still it was only his insinuating voice that touched her, and the odour of him, and his intense body heat. ‘You know what I want, Libby. You want it, too.’

  She did. ‘Surely there are other girls. Younger. Prettier.’ To her horror, she was envisioning Frances for him, offering her daughter to him in her mind.

  He said, ‘Frances is fine enough,’ and Libby caught her breath, although she ought not to have been surprised. ‘A fine girl. But I want you.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ she demanded with a laugh, then waited anxiously for him to tell her. Was she Uncle Clyde’s girl? Frances’s crazy mother? The woman who had given away her child?

  ‘Yes, darling. I’m afraid you are all those things.’

  Or was she - perilous thought - the woman who, more than once in her life, had made a hard, right choice?

  Hastily, he murmured, ‘Be mine, Libby, and I’ll show you who you are.’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  * * * *

  They talked about other things until Uncle Everett came for them. Cecelia said a little about Ray. Aunt Maureen told about how close Libby and Frances had been - unhealthily close, she declared, which was the impression Cecelia had already had; during the months Libby was locked for her own safety in her suite at the back and top of the house, Aunt Maureen said with a shake of the head, Frances had even stayed in there with her for days at a time. Cecelia said it was getting really cold; Aunt Maureen predicted the first snow out of those heavy clouds.

  Disappointingly, the two of them seemed to Cecelia no closer than ever. Wistfully she wondered whether Aunt Maureen would come to her wedding. As it turned out, Aunt Maureen and Uncle Everett would agree to take care of their grandchildren that weekend, but they would send a quilt that had been in the family for a long time; a note pinned to it said Aunt Maureen wasn’t certain which of her sisters had made it, but she thought Cecelia should have it.

  As they wended their way to the road where Uncle Everett waited with the car, Cecelia caught sight once more of the two figures spun loose from the miniature funeral procession, which otherwise was lost now in the thickening mist and twilight gloom. The one in pink stood still. The one in black moved away until she couldn’t see it at all any more. A peculiar fragrance, not quite autumnal - vaguely bitter; wrongly sweet - lingered in her nose and on the cold skin of her hands as they drove away.

  * * * *

  Melanie Tem’s novels include Prodigal (winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement), Revenant, Desmodus, Wilding, Tides, Black River and, in collaboration with Nancy Holder, Making Love and Witch-Light. Her short fiction has appeared in Colorado State Review, Worlds of Fantasy and Horror, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Cemetery Dance, Black Maria, Peter Beagles Immortal Unicorn, Dark Angels and High Fantastic, among other magazines and anthologies. Stories are forthcoming in the anthologies Gargoyles, The Hot Blood Series 9 and 10, Going Postal and Snapshots. She has also published numerous non-fiction articles. About ‘Aunt Libby’s Grave’ she explains: ‘It is a chapter from a novel-in-progress, Round the Earth, Roaming About. Told as a series of interconnecting chapters/stories that span the life of Cecelia, one of the protagonists of “Aunt Libby’s Grave”, the novel concerns the moral decisions we are all faced with in our daily lives; if it’s true that “God is in the details”, then so, I think, is the Devil.’

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  * * * *

  The Horror Under Warrendown

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL

  You ask me at least to hint why I refuse ever to open a children’s book. Once I made my living from such material. While the imitations of reality hawked by my colleagues in the trade grew grubbier, and the fantasies more shameful, I carried innocence from shop to shop, or so I was proud to think. Now the sight of a children’s classic in a bookshop window sends me fleeing. The more apparently innocent the book, the more unspeakable the truth it may conceal, and there are books the mere thought of which revives memories I had prayed were buried for ever.

  It was when I worked from Birmingham, and Warrendown was only a name on a signpost on a road to Brichester - a road I avoided, not least because it contained no bookshops. Nor did I care for the route it followed a few miles beyond the Warrendown sign through Clotton, a small settlement which appeared to be largely abandoned, its few occupied houses huddling together on each side of a river, beside which stood a concrete monument whose carvings were blurred by moss and weather. I had never been fond of the countryside, regarding it at best as a way of getting from town to town, and now the stagnant almost reptilian smell and chilly haze which surrounded Clotton seemed to attach itself to my car. This unwelcome presence helped to render the Cotswold landscape yet more forbidding to me, the farmland and green fields a disguise for the ancient stone of the hills, and I resolved to drive south of Brichester on the motorway in future and double back, even though this added half an hour to my journey. Had it not been for Graham Crawley I would never again have gone near the Warrendown road.

  In those days I drank to be sociable, not to attempt to forget or to sleep. Once or twice a month I met colleagues in the trade, some of whom I fancied would have preferred to represent a children’s publisher too, for a balti and as many lagers as we could stay seated for. Saturdays would find me in my local pub, the Sutton Arms in Kings Heath. Ending my week among people who didn’t need to be persuaded of the excellence of my latest batch of titles was enough to set me up for the next week. But it was in the Sutton Arms that Crawley made himself, I suppose, something like a friend.

  I don’t recall the early stages of the process, in his case or with any of the folk I used to know. I grew used to looking for him in the small bare taproom, where the stools and tables and low ceiling were the colour of ash mixed with ale. He would raise his broad round stubbled face from his tankard, twitching his nose and upper lip in greeting, and as I joined him he would duck as though he expected me either to pat him on the head or hit him when he’d emitted his inevitable quip. ‘What was she up to in the woods with seven little men, eh?’ he would mutter, or ‘There’s only one kind of horn you’d blow up that I know of. No wonder he was going after sheep,’ or some other reference to the kind of book in which I travelled. There was a constant undercurrent of ingratiating nervousness in his voice, an apology for whatever he said as he said it, which was one reason I was never at my ease with him. While we talked about our week, mine on the road and his behind the counter of a local greengrocer’s, I was bracing myself for his latest sexual bulletin. I never knew what so many women could see in him, and hardly any of them lasted for more than an encounter. My curiosity about the kind of girl who could find him attractive may have left me open to doing him the favour he asked of me.

  At first he only asked which route I took to Brichester, and then which one I would follow if the motorway was closed, by which point I’d had enough of the way he skulked around a subject as if he was ready to dart into hiding at the first hint of trouble. ‘Are you after a lift?’ I demanded.

  He ducked his head so that his long hair hid even more of his ears and peered up at me. ‘Well, a lift, you know, I suppose, really, yes.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘You won’t know it, cos it’s not much of a place. Only it’s not far, not much out of your way, I mean, if you happened to be going that way anyway sometime.’

  When at last he released the name of Warrendown like a question he didn’t expect to be answered, his irritating tentativeness provoked me to retort ‘I’ll be in that square of the map next week.’

  ‘Next week, that’s next week, you mean.’ His face twitched so hard it exposed his teeth. ‘I wasn’t thinking quite that soon . . .’

  ‘I’ll forgive you if you’ve given up on the idea.�
�

  ‘Given up - no, you’re right. I’m going, cos I should go,’ he said, fiercely for him.

  Nevertheless I arrived at his flat the next day not really expecting to collect him. When I rang his bell, however, he poked his nose under the drawn curtains and said he would be down in five minutes; which, to my continuing surprise, he was, nibbling the last of his presumably raw breakfast and dressed in the only suit I’d ever seen him wear. He sat clutching a small case which smelled of vegetables while I concentrated on driving through the rush hour and into the tangle of motorways, and so we were irrevocably on our way before I observed that he was gripping his luggage with all the determination I’d heard in his voice in the pub. ‘Are you expecting some kind of trouble?’ I said.