by Lee Thomas, Gary McMahon, S. G. Browne, Michael Marshall Smith
While sliding out of bed, the odor of you follows me. Judgment wouldn't accept you full of waste and water, so you expelled it on our sheets. I know you'd be embarrassed to have anyone find you soiled, so I pull on my robe and walk to the bathroom. I clean you like a child, roll you so I can collect the sheets and then ease you onto your back.
Even now, so many years from youth, you are beautiful to me. Strong.
Your death confused you; I see that. It's carved on your face. You must have woken knowing what was happening because you stare at the ceiling in wonderment. And I'm staring at you, your white hair, your brown skin, the soft wisps of down covering your chest. The hairs smooth under my palm as I comb them in neat waves, arcing their pattern over your nipples.
I notice that your nose hair has grown too long, so I search the nightstand drawer for the manicure kit. I find the leather pouch and the tiny gleaming scissors within. With them, I cut the stray hairs. They collect above your lip and seem to float in the black field of your nostril. Gently, I blow them away and a hollow tone sounds in your nose. I smile.
Your ears need trimming, too. I snip them, careful not to cut you especially when I trim the awkward bulb. A damp towel collects the threads, and finally, I close your eyes so that the lashes weave in two neat lines.
Peaceful now? Are you?
I run my hand over your belly, and the skin is rigid but oddly comforting in its chill. Your sex does not respond to my touch, so I hold it. After so many years between us, I'm surprised to find that it has never felt quite this way before. I try to explain this to you, try to make you understand that I've felt you hard and soft and at every stage between, but never have you felt like this.
You move.
Startled, I release you and step away. Your shoulder raises and then falls; the other does the same. I expect your eyes to flash open but they do not. I expect you to speak or grunt your continued participation in life, but you make no sound.
Again you try to move, but rigid arms and legs are useless so you roll back and forth on the mattress. Your struggle is that of a man trapped in cloth, wrapped in bandages.
Bound.
And I remember the scars on your neck; the scars I put there.
You were in Miami with one of your women. Not your first infidelity; not your last. But this was somehow different. You made so little effort to hide it that I felt you wanted me to know; you wanted me to admire the weapon you drove through my chest. So, I walked alone, wandering through the streets looking for something, escaping the beautiful cage you'd bought and told me to furnish, to paint, to clean.
My legs carried me in random directions – first south and then east and then back to the north. Anger was my engine; sorrow the navigator. I stopped in a bar on the other side of the city, a dark place that held the kind of wisdom we considered beneath us. The elegant crone in the tattered mink coat waited for me, or so I believed. She knew me and my need. Her lips parted in a terrible smile of black gums and violet tongue, more like the slit belly of a rat than the mouth of a woman. Speaking with a twinkling whisper, she pushed a small book toward me across the damp, pocked tabletop.
She called it The Book of Wives, and in its pages, I found the design that would bind your soul. I traced the arcs and the crosshatched lines to memorize the pattern while you were at your office or your club or out entertaining clients and mistresses. Two months later I was drawn to the park, book in hand. A sobbing girl, barely out of her teens, sat on a bench, face in hands. Without a word, I placed the book on the bench beside her, walked away and returned to my opulent cage, where I began the work of wives.
Late at night, when you were exhausted from your infidelity or simply too drunk to wake, I drew on you. A scratch here, a gouge there. I worried the lines, made them bleed but slowly and over the course of many years. You never once noticed, or if you did, you never said.
Late in life, I let the fancy go, another souvenir of aspiration to be stored in a crate and never opened. My emotions healed, numbed and callused. I barely felt you any longer. So, I left the design incomplete.
You always said that I never finished anything.
Your body bucks on the mattress and the bed collides with the nightstand. The shiny chrome scissors rock on the edge and then fall to the carpet. Frantically, you try to sit up, but your muscles are petrified.
I know your struggle will loosen them and break death from sinew.
And you frighten me. Your unnaturalness makes me tremble and cry out.
I crouch low and come to your side. Reaching down with fingers made clumsy by haste and fearful palsy, I slap at the scissors on the carpet. Their tip jabs my finger and makes me bleed. The bed groans under your weight, and I grip the silver handle. On my feet, I shove with every ounce of me to get you turned over but age and gender have weakened me. When you were still, turning you was a simple task, but your struggles defy my strength. I'm nothing but an old woman now. Three times I try, and each time you convulse and land on your back.
On the fourth attempt you roll onto your stomach, face deep in my pillow, and you writhe like a landed fish, your arms and legs still immobile, but the rest of you frantic. My mind struggles to remember the final lines of the symbol from the book's page, and I drive the scissors into your neck, just below your neatly trimmed hair. I drag the point toward your shoulder then back up in a jagged check.
Your body lies quietly on the bed. There is no blood to stain the pillowcase.
With the scissors back on the nightstand, I roll you onto your back. Your hair is disheveled; it sticks out in wisps like torn cotton gauze. In the bathroom, I grab a brush. I fix your pillow, adjust your head at its center and brush your hair down so that it's smooth and you are handsome again.
Somewhere behind your eyes, you know I'm doing this. You feel the soothing stroke of the brush and appreciate the care and love of my efforts.
Conscious inside your failed body, you can feel every touch to your skin and hear every word I say. That was the promise of The Book of Wives, and now, the design is done, and you are bound. Your soul fills the skin of you, the meat of you, and the bones of you. Silently, without help or hope, you fight, but to me and all of the world, you look peaceful and beautiful.
I couldn't bear to watch you suffer.
Perhaps you're afraid now. I'll stroke your brow and calm you a bit.
But when they take you away…
They will take the blood out of you with a cold metal wand. They will shove it into your body, and you will lie there and accept it because that is what is expected of you, because you are capable of nothing else. They will do an autopsy because it is my right to demand one. Your sternum will be cut and split and their hands will tear into you, fondling your organs indelicately before shoving them aside. And when they bury you in the ground and the worms get through the box, and the beetles get in, you will feel them nesting and feeding, taking little bits of you with their mouths. In the end, having served and submitted, you will rot.
And you will feel every moment of it until the meat of you has fallen away and dissolved completely.
I run the brush over your chest to neaten the fan of hair. Licking my thumb, I smooth down your eyebrows before I kiss your lips this last time.
Now, you're presentable, and I can call the ambulance.
But I have some things to say first, and you will listen; you will hear me, and you won't interrupt. I have a lot to tell you before you go.
«-ô-»
About Gary McMahon
Gary McMahon's fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.K. and U.S and has been reprinted in both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror.
He is the British-Fantasy-Award-nominated author of Rough Cut, All Your Gods Are Dead, Dirty Prayers, How to Make Monsters, Rain Dogs, Different
Skins, Pieces of Midnight, The Harm, Hungry Hearts, and has edited an anthology of original novelettes titled We Fade to Grey.
Current and forthcoming are several reprints in "Best of" anthologies, a story in the mass market anthology The End of the Line, the novels Pretty Little Dead Things and Dead Bad Things from Angry Robot/Osprey and The Concrete Grove trilogy from Solaris.
Website: www.garymcmahon.com
Creep
By Gary McMahon
You receive the first call when you are sixteen years old.
It is Saturday night; you are in the house alone. Your parents are out at some golf club dinner and your friends are spending time with their boyfriends. You don't have a boyfriend. You are small and dumpy and don't know how to make yourself stand out in a crowd. You aren't unattractive – you are bright enough to realise this fact – but you simply do not "pop" when so many of your friends do. The clothes you wear are all wrong. The words you use never sound as cool as everyone else's. Nothing you do seems to put you in a good light.
You are sitting in front of the television, a glass of coke and a half-eaten sandwich on the coffee table. Freddie the cat is sitting at your side, eyeing the popcorn in the bowl balanced precariously between your bare knees. You are stroking the cat's head, barely even watching the programme – some crappy game show – and wondering if the rest of your life will be made up of similar lonely Saturday nights, similar crappy TV shows, and similar scruffy cats.
When the phone rings you glance across the room, blinking your tired eyes. Pushing a slowly advancing Freddie away from the popcorn bowl, you rise slowly to your feet. The front of your dressing gown is gaping, exposing your oversized Zombie T-Shirt. Black cotton. Green face. Grasping hands. Red blood.
You cross the room and pick up the receiver. "Hello."
At first there is no voice on the line, just the weird rushing sound of empty air. Then, gradually, a faint, murmuring voice fills the space and creeps into your ear.
"Sorry, I can't hear you. This is a bad line."
The low voice keeps mumbling. You can't make out any words.
"Hello? I can't hear what you're saying. You'll have to speak up."
Then, as if someone has flicked a switch to stop the whisper of static and reveal the words hiding beneath, you begin to understand what the voice is saying. It is male; a man's voice. The voice is low and husky, with little trace of a recognisable accent.
"I know what you want."
Then whoever is on the other end of the line hangs up the phone to end the call.
You have seen all the films – those silly American chillers where the babysitter is stalked though the house by a crazed killer. It always starts with a spooky phone call; it always ends with the babysitter being stabbed or beaten or strangled to death.
You run out of the room and check the front door.
Locked.
You go into the kitchen and tug on the latch.
Secure.
Then you climb the stairs, turning on all the lights and making sure the windows are shut tight and the curtains are closed.
You are safe inside. There is no way in. Whatever is outside should stay there.
Feeling slightly more at ease yet still afraid, you go back downstairs and turn down the volume on the television. The game show is over. The popcorn no longer appeals. Freddie the cat eyes you with suspicion from the floor. You wait up until your parents arrive home, tired and drunk and acting just a little bit silly, like they always do after a boozy night out. Then, when everyone else retires to bed and the house is filled with darkness, you hear that voice from the phone call inside your head, repeating those words. For reasons that you cannot understand, you want the mystery caller to phone again. That moment – filled with an exquisite terror – made you feel alive in a way that nothing else ever has.
You stare at the phone but it does not ring.
Your fear recedes to a manageable level; the energy it leaves behind is almost pleasant. Now you are intrigued. How could anyone possibly know what you want when you have no clue yourself? You realise that you want something (because surely everyone does) and you know without a doubt that your life is so much emptier than those of the people around you – but you have no idea what that something might be, or where you are supposed to find it.
The thought that someone else might possess this information, especially a person – a man – you don't even know, fills you with a sense of dread that is almost erotic in its intensity. You have always lived with the certainty that sooner or later something would happen to you – an event over which you would have no control, possibly some kind of disaster. For years you pushed the thought right to the back of your head, where it couldn't hurt you. But now that thought is out in the open, and it has been given a voice.
* * * * *
The next time you are twenty-one.
The partitioned Victorian house you share with your University friends is large, spacious: you have an attic room to yourself. It is a Monday evening, late autumn. The streets outside are littered with crisp brown leaves. The sky is dark, a vast charcoal sketch that seems to strain at the edges, as if it is about to rip open and reveal whatever lies beyond.
You are working on your essay – something about a feminist reading of 19th Century literature – and wishing that you could call it a day and open that bottle of wine in the fridge, the one your parents left behind the last time they came for a visit. They always try to buy you off with expensive gifts. It's the only way they know to show their love.
You chew the end of your ballpoint pen. Your eyes are closed as you listen to an old Hank Williams song on the radio. Bored now, distracted and looking for an excuse to forget about the essay, you maximise the browser window on your laptop screen and check your emails. The result makes you feel even lonelier than before. There is a single new message in your inbox. The address line is blank. The message line contains a series of dots: ……………………
Spam email: the curse of the internet age. Your cursor hovers over the little digital envelope, and then you double-click the left button on the mouse, opening the message. It contains five words. You know what they are before you even see them – a trigger has been pulled inside your head. Feeling nothing, thinking nothing, you read the words on the screen.
I know what you want.
You had almost forgotten the first time – almost but not quite. It comes to you in dreams, a trace memory; a vague echo of something you might only ever have imagined, or secretly hoped for.
But you did not imagine the long ago phone call. That voice was real. Here is the proof. Not that any proof were needed, because deep down inside, locked within the folds of your heart, there is a special emotion that fits neatly around this moment, completing it.
You turn around, glancing at the door. It is closed, just as you left it. There is no one else in the room, yet you feel watched. You sense eyes upon you; a hidden observer is eating you up with his gaze. You close down the browser and leave the room, needing the company of your housemates.
The stairwell is much darker than usual. The walls were never that close before. Your world is growing smaller, the minutes and seconds clenching around you like a fist.
"Sally," you say as you enter the living room. A single lamp sheds meagre light. A figure stirs in the gloom.
The girl – slim, tall, with a black spider tattoo on the right side of her throat – looks up at you, smiling around a beer can. "Hey, you finished?" She pulls out her earphones, turns off her iPod, and adjusts her position on the sofa, propping herself up against the worn, faded cushions.
You shake your head. "Nah. Couldn't settle. Something…something weird happened."
Sally sits up, her long, bare legs sliding across the battered leather seat. "Weird? I like weird." Her wide eyes urge you
to continue.
"Years ago, when I was sixteen, I got this phone call. It was a man."
"Oh, yeah?" Sally giggles.
"No, not like that. A man's voice on the line. Soft, toneless. He said that he knew what I wanted and then he hung up." You realise that the tale sounds trite in the telling. What was frightening once now seems slightly absurd, a child's bad dream.
"That is weird." Sally smiles encouragement.
"It's happened again. I got an email a few minutes ago. He still knows what I want."
The room grows cold. Sally's humour vanishes and her face goes ashen. "Fuck. That's creepy." She gulps from her can, and then licks her lips. "Like, really creepy." Her eyes are glazed; she is at least half drunk. "Have you ever told anyone else?"
You lower your gaze, feeling guilty for reasons you are unable to express. "No. It only happened that once – twice now, I guess. And there's nothing to tell, not really. A voice on the phone. An email. A feeling that something bad is going to happen. That's all.
You could say so much more, but you are afraid that it might jinx you, drawing out the shape of your fears until a grinning figure is formed on the upstairs landing, the downstairs bathroom, or in the cramped hallway cupboard. The twitching movement at the corner of your eye is simply the shadows near the door, but you don't want to look too closely in case you see something else crouching there, waiting to stand and greet you as your scrutiny gives it substance, adding flesh to its bones.
"But still…it's creepy." Sally pulls a face, curling her bottom lip.
You nod, hug yourself against the chill. "Got any more of that lager?"
"It's in the fridge. Help yourself."
But you don't want to go out there, into the dark kitchen. Somehow this room feels like the only safe place in the house, and you are glad that you are not alone. You remember sitting up to wait for your parents that first time, and how relieved you were when they finally got home. You move closer to Sally on the sofa and stand by her side. She reaches up and takes your hand. You smile, but it freezes on your face.