The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Dark Terrors 05]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  Tell you what, Blondella, Renata thought at her; you don’t notice my tears and I won’t notice your hair-falsies. Is it a deal?

  The woman went on sleeping silently, her breath inaudible in spite of her open mouth. Too bad. A snore as an inadvertent reply would have made her laugh at least inwardly and dried up her tears. She should have known, Renata chided herself, looking down at the ridiculous vacation hotel ad again. Comic timing, like so many other things, was just never there in real life. At least, not in her real life.

  * * * *

  Her surprise at finding her brother waiting to meet her at the airport was almost enough to be honest shock. He was standing at the top of the escalators that slid down to the baggage carousel area, his face sad, worried and portentous, which was even more disconcerting. She had always described Jules to everyone as the sort of person the term even-tempered had been invented for. Unflappable Jules Adrian Prescott, who had raised his voice maybe three times a year, usually to say ‘Ow!’ after stubbing his toe or something. There had been times she had felt like telling him they could trade birth order and he could be the older Prescott kid, as he had always been more mature than she. Sometimes, though, she wondered if he didn’t frustrate the hell out of his wife, Lena.

  The thought of Lena made her automatically look at Jules’ left hand; his wedding ring was gone. Now she was shocked, almost enough to draw back as he leaned forward to kiss her cheek and say something, but he looked so fraught that she shut up instead and submitted. For all she knew, he had accidentally left his ring in the bathroom after showering. Why add a stupid, intrusive, and possibly erroneous question to a time like this?

  A time like what, though? Jules hadn’t been terribly close to their father, either.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked her as he took her carry-on bag and steered her on to the escalator.

  ‘Okay, I guess, Julio,’ she said, using the old childhood nickname, in which the j was pronounced improperly as j and not h. ‘But you don’t look too good—’

  ‘Yeah, well, a time like this,’ he said almost offhandedly, and she felt a frisson as he unknowingly echoed her thoughts. ‘It’s all so—’ he shook his head and a sudden stray breeze rifled his thick brown hair like invisible fingers searching for something concealed there.

  She looked up at him, puzzled. It’s all so what, Julio? she wanted to say, but the pain in his expression stopped her. Maybe if the non-relationship with their father saddened her, she thought suddenly, it was even more so for Jules. Maybe he’d been reflecting on everything he hadn’t had as his father’s son, on memories that should have been there to comfort and reassure but were not, never could have been, never would be. Did Lena understand? she wondered, anxious for him now.

  They collected her one small bag from the carousel and then followed a silly, over-complicated route made even more convoluted by detours around awkwardly-placed areas of renovation hidden behind impassive wooden walls. Signs warned of dangers hidden behind their featureless facades. Apparently there were things back there that could maim you, cripple you, kill you without warning. But nothing reached out to harm them or so much as scare them as they made their way to Jules’ car in the parking garage. The walk took a good twenty minutes and during that time, Jules never did manage to complete the sentence that had ended with everything being so and she thought again that he was probably suffering from the realization that it was all just So what?

  * * * *

  Her first thought was that her mother needed heart pills. Everything about her was grey, in a way that went beyond old age. Her skin looked as if it had been dusted with ashes only a few shades lighter than her hair, her lips might have moved a doctor to pronounce her cyanotic, and even the pupils of her eyes seemed to have lost all pigmentation. She sat, or rather sagged on a chair at the dining-room table, while Renata’s Aunt Daisy stood over her like a sentinel or a household servant waiting for instruction, occasionally squeezing one of her mother’s plump, rounded shoulders.

  Daisy’s name was one of those ridiculous mistakes people sometimes made in christening their children. For Renata, the name Daisy had always suggested capriciousness and whimsy to the point of complete foolishness. But Daisy was serious, often humourless, and almost never emotional in any way. The only remotely daisy-ish thing about her was her yellow hair which was actually natural and looked dyed. It gave Renata another pause. Did anyone in her family ever get anything right? she wondered.

  Jules had allowed her to carry in her own suitcase. Now he had vanished into another part of the house or into thin air, Renata wasn’t sure which. Daisy’s twin daughters were both there, one with her husband, the other with her female partner. The four of them were huddled near the antique sideboard where the good china and crystal sat safely in the dark of the cabinets most of the year, emerging only for Christmas-season dinners. On the mirror-shiny surface, kept that way by her mother’s monthly polishings, a collection of photos of various family members gazed out over the room as if the frames were actually funny little windows in so many sizes and shapes that each subject had just happened to wander up to, and were now staring through with vague unease at all that went on.

  Renata’s own vague unease snapped into precise clarity. There were no pictures on the sideboard now. Someone had removed them, every single one, and she had never known that to happen, outside of her mother’s regularly scheduled cleaning sessions. She put her bag down where she stood and looked around, unease beginning to mutate into suspicion.

  On the other side of the room, Mrs Anderson from next door was standing by a tall bookcase with the O’Briens from across the street. The three of them looked exhausted, as if something - her father’s death, or something unrelated except for timing? - had been draining them of every bit of energy and endurance. It was how another of her co-workers, a pretty young woman in accounting services, had looked after seeing her sister through a long and terrible death from AIDS.

  But if Mrs Anderson and the O’Briens had been through something similar, it couldn’t have been with her father, Renata thought. Her father’s final heart trouble had dragged on a bit, but it had not been that kind of ordeal. Even if it had been, she couldn’t imagine that these people would have been involved to such an extent.

  The O’Briens’ son Dan was sitting on a stool by the television, his elbows on his knees and his big hands folded under his chin. Dan was her age and looked about the same as he had the last time she had seen him several years before, except there was a little less of his greying, light brown hair and a little more round softness in his face. He was watching her with an intensity that almost frightened her, that would frighten her if he kept it up.

  If he does keep it up, she decided, I’ll go over there and give him one upside the head, as the kids say. Knock that stupid look right off his face.

  Her Aunt Daisy was watching her with almost the same expression, she realized suddenly. They all were. They were watching her, as if they expected her to do something strange and dangerous. A chill spread out over her scalp and down her neck, and she knew that if her hair could actually have stood on end, it would have.

  She thought absurdly of the woman on the plane. Too bad I don’t have that hair to stand on end - that would really give them something to stare at. And now she was staring right back at all of them, each and every one in turn, and the fact that they weren’t the least bit put off by this, that not one of them felt compelled to look away or even blink, was the worst of all.

  ‘What?’ she said finally, trying to force down the panic that was lifting so rapidly inside her that she had to gasp for breath. ‘What? What is it? What the hell are you all looking at me like this for?’

  There was a moment of utter silence, not long, but if it had stretched out any longer, she would have screamed into it. Abruptly, Dan O’Brien got up from the stool over by the television and gestured at it. ‘Renata, there’s something you have to see before the funeral.’

  She gave h
er head a quick, minute shake. ‘What - an old re-run of Masterpiece Theater?’’

  ‘Please,’ he said, and his voice was as frightening as everything else, because it was so damned calm. ‘This hasn’t been easy on your mother or Jules, it isn’t easy for any of us, and it won’t be easy for you. But you have to see this. You do. And after you see it, you’ll understand. Everything will be clear.’

  Renata looked to her mother for some sign but her mother had buried her face in Daisy’s waist, while Daisy held her, stroking her hair and glaring at Renata as if she were to blame. ‘Where’s Jules?’ she asked Dan, glancing at her twin cousins and their respective partners.

  ‘Jules has seen it,’ Dan said, suddenly sounding prim.

  She wanted to make a smart remark about how they all had cable where she lived, so she had probably seen it herself, but something in her gave out and she sat down on the stool instead. Just get it over with, she told herself firmly. If it’s something utterly horrid, just leave. Don’t even stay for the funeral.

  Dan put on the TV and then reached down to the VCR on the shelf underneath. Renata had a glimpse of a greasy man standing in front of a chat-show panel of even greasier people and then her father was looking earnestly out at her from the television screen. She jumped, putting one hand to her chest. God, but it looked and sounded so much like him, it was positively scary.

  Then she suppressed a groan. It was one of these ghoulish videotaped will things that people knew would be played back after their deaths. So ghoulish. She felt her stomach turn over. Didn’t anyone ever consider what it would be like for the survivors to watch something like this? No wonder Jules was hiding out.

  ‘My darling Renata,’ her father said, folding his hands and leaning forward, as if he really were seeing her in the lens of the camera focused on him. He had been videotaped sitting at the head of the dining-room table. How much she and her father had resembled each other, she thought, much more than her father and Jules, or even herself and Jules. There was no missing the similarity of the shape of their faces and eyes, and even their voices shared a certain timbre. ‘My darling daughter Renata, this is the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Harder, in some ways, than dying, really. I know I am dying. I can feel my heart becoming weaker every day. If my hearing were good enough, I would probably hear the blood in my veins and arteries slowing down, swashing and gurgling, getting ready to stop.’

  Renata took a deep, careful breath to control her nausea. Maybe her father did know what sort of effect this would have and he was doing it on purpose, some kind of weird revenge of an angry, dying man on his still-living relatives.

  ‘So I must - must - make a clean breast of things. I cannot die carrying the guilt and the shame of what’s happened between us any longer.’

  Her nausea melted into bewilderment. ‘The guilt and shame of what had happened between them?’ Being a distant, mostly absent father figure was a source of guilt and shame? The poor man, she thought in a sudden rush of pity. Then her bewilderment returned, along with a dash of irritation. If it had bothered him that much, he could have apologized, in person, while he’d still been alive.

  ‘No parent should ever put a child through the terrible things I put you through,’ he continued. ‘When I think of the hell you endured, I want to—’

  ‘Stop it,’ Renata snapped suddenly and jumped up from the stool. ‘Stop it right now.’

  Dan O’Brien looked startled but obediently pointed a slender remote control at the VCR. Her father’s face froze in mid-word. Everyone in the room was looking at her as if she were displaying the worst manners possible, except for her mother who was slumped against Daisy and sobbing softly into a wad of tissues.

  ‘I refuse to listen to another moment of this travesty,’ Renata said angrily. ‘Obviously Dad went a little wonky before he died. I’m awfully sorry about that, it’s a terrible thing to happen. But now he’s gone. His troubles are over, and there’s no good reason to torture ourselves with this kind of thing.’

  There was no answer except the sound of her mother’s sobbing.

  ‘Where’s Jules?’ Renata said, disgusted. ‘I want my suitcase. I’m going. If Jules won’t drive me back to the airport, I’ll take a cab or I’ll even walk if I have to, but I’m not going to stay here—’

  ‘Please,’ Dan said and she turned to him in surprise. ‘You don’t know how important this is.’

  ‘You’re probably right about that. You’re not family to me, however—’

  ‘Well, no, I’m not. Though in some ways, I may be even closer.’ Dan’s face was frighteningly sincere as well as serious. ‘I’m your father’s therapist. I treated him for two years before he died.’

  Renata turned to her mother for confirmation, but her mother wouldn’t look at her. Her gaze went to the O’Briens to see what their reaction was. They had none, or none that she could see, except for the same strange quiet that everyone except her mother was hell-bent on maintaining. She turned back to Dan. ‘I didn’t know you were a doctor. I thought you went to business school.’

  ‘I did, but I switched direction a little while ago. Now I’m a therapist. Not a doctor in the sense that I could prescribe medications, but most of that stuff is poison anyway.’ Renata was sure that Dan’s smile was meant to look benevolent, but to her it seemed more vacant than anything. ‘I do a lot of work with hypnosis.’

  ‘Fine,’ Renata said. ‘But don’t expect me to make an appointment just because my father did. I’m a lousy subject for hypnosis, I just don’t have the attention span.’ She raised her voice. ‘Jules! Jules, dammit, where are you, I want to—’

  Dan caught her arm as she was about to walk out of the room. ‘Renata, you’re making a hard situation all but impossible. Sit down and watch the tape, and then you’ll understand everything.’

  Her gaze went from his face to his hand, still gripping her upper arm just a little too tightly and back again several times. Astoundingly, he failed to get the message. ‘Let go of my fucking arm,’ she said finally. He glanced over at his parents, who turned as one to Mrs Anderson. Mrs Anderson’s gaze went to the twins, who passed the look to their respective partners before raising their eyebrows at their mother.

  They were all crazy, Renata realized suddenly. She didn’t know what brand of psychosis they were sharing, what it involved or whether it was dangerous, but they were nuts and she wasn’t and by God, she was getting out of there. She bolted for the door, deciding she could live with the loss of her overnight bag and collided with someone else, someone too strong for her to twist away from, who struggled her back from the doorway, bruising her forearms with a hard grip, and forced her down on to the couch in front of the television set.

  ‘Jules! What—’

  He grabbed the stool she had been sitting on and planted it just to her left, sat down on it and seized her arms again. ‘Shut up!’ he bellowed into her face, so close that she could feel how hot his breath was. It was that sensation more than anything that shocked her. She could not remember ever being that physically close to her brother.

  ‘Now, listen,’’ he growled at her and she was horrified to see tears welling in his eyes. ‘Listen and watch. The suffering is—’ He stopped, breathing hard and deep through his nose, glaring at her.

  And again he left the sentence unfinished. At a time like this. Everything is so. The suffering.

  Then her father was speaking to her from the television again, the live man performing the task that the dead man had delegated.

  ‘. . . to punish myself in more hideous ways than the state would, I think. I had thought of turning myself in, as a matter of fact, but your mother talked me out of it. She said that a man in my health, so many years later - well, the only thing that would really make a difference would be if we could - if I could, actually - try to make it up to you in some way. To get you the help that you’re going to need, for the rest of your life.’

  Renata made a disgusted noise. ‘Oh, Christ, what is it? Was t
here a trust fund and he embezzled—’

  ‘Shut up,’ her brother warned her quietly.

  ‘—can never give you back those years of your childhood that I stole. Her father’s voice was beginning to sound whiny. ‘All I can do is tell you I was wrong, beg for your forgiveness from here, beyond the grave, and assure you that you will get only the very best counsellors, doctors, hospitalization when you need it—’

  ‘‘Hospitalization?’ Warning bells went off in her head to the point where she could not have told the difference if she had been hearing them outside. Abruptly she remembered a basic self-defence move Vinnie had taught her, a way to twist your wrist to get out of a man’s grip so that no matter how big and strong he was, he would have to let you go. My brothers taught me this one, Vinnie had said, they told me that if any guy was gonna beat me up, it would be them, not some stranger. Of course, they never did beat me up, not that I recall, anyway -