The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Dark Terrors 05]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  She pushed Jules away and stood up. To her surprise, Jules launched himself at her and pinned her down on the couch with his body. Renata cried out, more in anger than anything else. The worst part about it was that no one else in the room had moved, no one, not to help her, not to help Jules, not to do anything, and all the while her father’s voice went on and on and on, talking and talking and talking. Dead Man Talking, she thought, and bit her lip to keep from laughing hysterically.

  ‘. . . to treat my beloved daughter in such a hideous fashion. I don’t know what drove me to it, to act out my vile needs on your innocence, to soil and betray your trust in me as your father, your protector . ..’

  ‘What?’ Renata said, trying to push Jules off her. ‘What? Stop that! Turn that fucking TV off.’

  But no one moved, and her father’s voice whined on, ‘. . . and you, so pure, so loving, so unwilling to believe that life would have such ugliness in it that you completely repressed all memory of what I had done to you. It was as if your sweet little mind said, “All right, then, if he won’t be a father to me out here, then I will create the loving father that he isn’t in my mind—”‘

  ‘What?’ She arched her back, trying to buck her brother off but he seemed to get heavier and heavier.

  ‘“—and if I can’t get anyone to protect me or help me out here, then I will create the support group that I need in my mind—”‘

  Support group? Had her father just said support group? Renata was beyond disbelief. This was some kind of horrible joke, it had to be. Some kind of absurd practical joke put on by Jules and her mother. They had been driven mad with grief, they—

  ‘—hypnotic regression to recover my memories, we’ve determined that I’ve observed you displaying at least thirteen different personalities, just to help you cope with the terrible things I’ve done to you—’

  ‘What?’ Renata looked from her father’s earnest image on the TV, babbling away about abuse and multiples and recovered memories to Jules’ tormented, painful face above her. ‘Julio, what in God’s name is he talking about?’

  He turned to look at Dan. ‘This must be the one Dad referred to as “Cleo.” She always denied all knowledge of anything that was going on.’

  ‘Who’s Cleo?’ Renata demanded. ‘What are you talking about now?’

  ‘Cleo,’ Jules said to her. ‘Short for Cleopatra. Queen of Denial?’ Pause. ‘You get it?’

  ‘No, wait a minute. And get off me, goddammit—’ Renata arched her back again, trying to throw him off.

  ‘Careful!’ Dan called. ‘Maybe that isn’t Cleo, it could be Lilith just pretending to be Cleo so she can molest you—’

  Jules made a disgusted noise, started to get off her and then didn’t, instead planting his knee in the centre of her stomach without letting go of her wrists. ‘What do we do?’ he asked, frightened.

  Dan was at his side in a moment. ‘Well, the first thing we do is, we keep our heads. Remember, I told you that doing an intervention can be an incredibly emotional experience. You can’t start panicking as soon as things get hairy. It’s going to get worse before it gets better, it’s going to get a lot worse, and Renata needs all of us to be strong and calm for her—’

  ‘Hey, asshole,’ Renata said angrily, ‘I’m right here, not in the next room. Now get my crazy brother off me and stop talking about me in the third—’

  ‘Should I call an ambulance?’ asked one of the twins in a tight, anxious voice.

  ‘Not yet,’ Dan said. ‘Some of these personalities can be incredibly strong, we don’t want any innocent paramedics to get hurt. As soon as she’s calmer, we’ll call a private service and have them take her out to Wood Grove.’ He knelt down beside the couch and brushed Renata’s hair out of her face. ‘I want to speak with Renata, please. Or The Boss. That’s what your father always called her,’ he added to Jules. ‘The Boss was the one who always took charge when things got a little loose around the edges and threatened to fall apart’ He turned back to her and spoke clearly into her face, over-enunciating as if she were stupid.

  ‘I said, send out Renata right now. We want to talk to Renata.’

  ‘Dan,’ she said, trying to sound calm but hearing the shakiness in her voice. ‘Dan, stop a minute. What are you doing? At least, tell me what you think you’re doing? We’ve known each other all our lives. We played together, went to the same school. Hell, you even took me to the Christmas dance one year when my boyfriend came down with shingles.’ She swallowed hard. ‘Remember that?’

  Dan’s face took on an expression so sad that she wanted to cry for him. ‘You see, Jules? You see how insidious this thing is? She remembers going to a dance she never went to, because it’s far better than remembering what really happened that night, that her father forced me to bring her to that motel where he was meeting with that group he called The Sex Club—’

  ‘Dan, there are pictures, photos of us together at the dance—’

  ‘Faked,’ Dan said, with authority. ‘All faked. So you’d go on believing that you’d had a happy childhood and a good life, and not the horror that you really had to live with.’ He bowed his head for a moment. ‘And so I could repress the memory of my part in what you suffered.’

  The rest of them had gathered around the couch now, even her mother, sniffling and dabbing at her eyes and clutching Mrs Anderson for support. They all looked down at her as if she were some kind of strange, unidentifiable creature that had somehow landed, injured and frightened, in the middle of an ordinary, suburban living room.

  ‘This is wrong,’ Renata told them desperately. ‘This is wrong, this is not what happened. Can’t you hear me, don’t you understand me? None of this is true. It didn’t happen. It didn‘t happen!’

  One of her cousins reached down and touched her shoulder gently. ‘I know it’s hard to believe. The human mind is so amazing, there are all sorts of things that it can do, including repressing memories that are too horrible for us to live with. But don’t worry. Wood Grove is a good place. They’ve got a great staff there, including Dan—’ she paused to smile over at him. ‘And it’s completely covered by insurance. They helped me. They and Dan helped me.’

  ‘And me,’ said the other twin, and put her hand on Jules’ shoulder. ‘And they’ve performed miracles with your brother. His personalities will never be integrated the way ours were, but he’s learned how to manage them better than a traffic cop in New York rush hour.’

  Everyone gave a polite titter at her joke and Jules’ expression was an impossible combination of pride and nausea.

  Dan leaned forward and put his hands on both sides of her face, turning her head gently so he could stare into her eyes. ‘The important thing to do right now,’ he said, ‘is relax. You’re among friends, you’re safe, you can stop denying and pretending. You’re a bad subject for hypnosis? Don’t worry, I can fix that. I can make you a good subject. I can. I’m very good at what I do.’

  She tried to draw back but there was nowhere to go.

  ‘Next month at this time,’ Dan said gently, ‘next month, you’ll remember it all. You’ll have all those memories and you’ll be able to take them on and cope with them. I promise.’ He looked up at one of the twins. ‘You can phone for the ambulance now.’

  * * * *

  Pat Cadigan’s short stories have recently appeared on the Omni website, and she contributed a quarter of Omni’s first round-robin story, ‘Making Good Time’. Anthology appearances include Killing Me Softly edited by Gardner Dozois and two edited by Ellen Datlow, Little Deaths and Lethal Kisses, while upcoming stories are due in Dying For It and David Garnett’s re-revived New Worlds. ‘ “This Is Your Life (Repressed Memory Remix)” was a direct result of my having read the book Victims of Memory: Incest, Accusations and Shattered Lives by Mark Prendergast,’ says Cadigan. ‘Prendergast’s book is exhaustively documented and researched, a scholarly investigation not of incest accusations per se, but of incest accusations that come strictly from what is commonly cal
led “recovered memory therapy”. While Prendergast does not assume that everyone accused is innocent, he shows the horror of having your life suddenly torn apart by accusations that come seemingly from nowhere, that not only persist, but spread like a virus even when there is hard evidence to the contrary. In one particularly tragic case, a woman managed to convince her entire family that they had been Satanists who had abused her sexually throughout her childhood. Her father went so far as to turn himself in to the police as a child molester and served time in prison before the daughter had second thoughts about what she thought she remembered. The father never actually did manage to remember anything, but decided that he was in denial, or just suppressing - after all, why would his daughter accuse him unless it had actually happened? As a parent, I find this bloody chilling. I’d rather face a vampire or a zombie, thank you. And then it occurred to me that all of the people who recover memories always remember as victims - no one ever recovers a memory of being a victimizer, a perpetrator. And then I decided that maybe there was a horror story that might match the prospect of having your offspring accuse you of the unspeakable - the idea of your parent suddenly “remembering” years of abusing you, and the rest of your family deciding to help you remember it, too.’

  <>

  * * * *

  Little Holocausts

  BRIAN HODGE

  There must’ve been signs first. There always are -- subtleties we’re afraid to imagine go any deeper than one day’s mood. So I don’t suppose it was until our latest funeral that I broke down and admitted that something inside Jared was truly changing, and not for the better.

  This one had been particularly rough on Jared. Neither of us had been strangers to funerals over the past few years, but this time it was for an earlier lover of Jared’s, amicably parted from after a growing realization that all he and Terry had in them was the honeymoon.

  People -- lovers, especially -- have a million ways of changing on you, most of them bad. Not inherently, maybe, but bad for you. Because you couldn’t or wouldn’t follow along.

  You’ll hear people say that only the dead don’t change, but obviously they’ve never thought this through, because to the dead change comes naturally, as they seek their return to earth and air and water, while we survivors who loved them manage to forget all the flaws that kept things interesting. Remake them into idealized versions that we’d never be able to tolerate if they came walking back through the door this way, so perfect we’d eventually want to kill them all over again. You...you’ve changed, we’d accuse them, feeling somehow betrayed.

  Terry had died at home -- the virus, what else? -- his current lover helping the nurses and hospice volunteers care for him. It’s where we gathered after the funeral, his brownstone apartment with vintage wood as solid as a bank vault and laid out shotgun-style, one long chain of rooms full of friends, acquaintances, strangers. Everybody was welcome, except for those righteous fuckers who’d showed up at the cemetery to gloat in the distance, toting picket signs.

  SODOMITES REPENT, that was one of the gentler ones. Some of them got almost as ugly as the faces underneath, eyes frightened and angry, prissy mouths crinkled tight like drawstring purses.

  “And those are the ones with the nerve to claim they’re made in God’s image?” Jared had whispered hoarsely in the cemetery.

  “I’d always pictured God as better looking,” I said. “That doesn’t make much of a case for omnipotence, does it?”

  He appeared not to have heard me, staring at this wretched Greek chorus. “But what if they are? What if they really are?”

  At Terry’s apartment we threw our coats atop the pile already on the bed, Jared lingering over all the sleeves that seemed caught up in some pointless struggle for supremacy. I wondered if he was remembering being in this same bed three years earlier, maybe recalling a conversation or some good night’s love.

  “Déjà vu?” I said.

  Or maybe he was thinking that here was where Terry must have died. Jared pushed hair back from his eyes, saying, “It’s felt like déjà vu here all afternoon. I’m just getting way too familiar with days like this.”

  “We’re here, we’re queer,” I murmured, “we’re dropping like flies.”

  “And you’re not helping any, with your laughter from the gallows,” he said, so I just held him, limp and unresponsive even when I squeezed along the back of his neck, where he liked it, and would ordinarily flex back into my hand like Voodoo, our cat. “Was it this way for you when Serge died?”

  I stiffened. “What way?”

  “Remember that picture from Vietnam? Of that Buddhist monk? He’d set himself on fire in the middle of a street and just sat there burning. Didn’t move? Well... like I wish I had the kind of control he must’ve had, not to feel the flames,” Jared said into my neck. “That way.”

  “Serge was different. You can’t compare the two.”

  And Jared knew better. Serge and I weren’t broken up; not exactly. Serge hadn’t been sick. I felt something stir down deep, like the rusty scraping open of a hatch on a ship long sunk, and hurried to slam it shut again. In its saltwatery grave.

  “Serge... Serge wasn’t the same at all.”

  “This isn’t a good day to split hairs,” Jared said. “Not if they’re both dead when they shouldn’t be.”

  We joined the others, who wandered from room to room in a kind of subdued humor, by turns warm, then mordant, everyone here instinctively craving each other’s company and heartbeats. I’d not known Terry, never even met him, and so spent awhile staring at a picture that Jared pointed out, contrasting the vibrant guy on Kodak paper with the one I’d first encountered in his coffin. Had I not had Jared’s word on it, I doubt I’d’ve made any connection.

  An hour later I went looking for Jared after I hadn’t seen him for a while, and found him alone in the middle of the kitchen, the final link on the chain of rooms.

  “You doing okay?” I said to his back.

  When he finally turned, he had a look on his face I wasn’t braced for, a look that balled up its fist and sucker-punched me right in the heart. He pointed across the room, where he must’ve been staring for too long, toward the floor along the back wall, near the door, where you’d probably set something too large to fit in the trash can until you could run it out to the dumpster. It was an unused box of Depends. The way Jared pointed it out, looked at it, the box embodied all the loss and sorrow and indignity that had ever escaped Pandora’s.

  “Diapers,” said Jared, like an accusation. Approaching tears. “That’s what it comes down to? Goddamn diapers.”

  Whenever he came to the next town, the stout man in the soot-gray top hat spent a few days getting to know it from the inside out before plying his varied trades. By strolling its streets and alleyways, by poking amongst piles of rubble with his lacquered walking stick, by sniffing over puddles of spilt blood, both psychic and sanguine, he made of each town a lover from whom he could ferret out prizes most delicious. In tipping his nose to a breeze he might sort its complex mélange into component threads: here, garlic; there, despair; further along, mingled excrements of men and machines.

  Such habits served sentiment more than utility now. The world held no more surprises for him, and frontiers were illusory. Cities all smelled the same, the populace of one burning and burying, pissing and shitting, in equal measures to those of the one before and the one to come. He could expect nothing else so long as they in their millions sucked from the same monstrous tit.

  He missed the land’s Byzantine variety of the old days, or as he remembered them to be -- time did possess a peculiar gilding. Three hundred years hence, he might very well look back on these present days with nothing but fond nostalgia. Great gods! he would marvel, but back then how they knew how to suffer!

  And they did. Boom times, these, everywhere he went.

  He’d trod here before, fuzzy on how many decades ago, but enough such that he scarcely recognized it now. How the city had grow
n; how the city continued to do so, beyond all sensibility, a body sprouting brick and iron tumors in frantic abundance, beyond the needs of healthy expansion. Arteries of thought and commerce met, only to choke one another. Idled factories sat scabbed with corrosion, dead hearts presiding over the decay of a system they’d once nourished, while tenements suppurated, spilling infections into the streets.

  As they had sown, so would they reap, and reaping time had come.

  The pack which set stealthily upon him one evening he likened to maggots squirming from the fetid cavity that had hatched them. He listened to them jeer him, his appearance, his obvious differences. It was English they spoke, but no English he’d heard the last time he’d walked these lands, a newer dialect sprung up that would set the Queen to spinning in her grave.