A Book of Horrors - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  There was a small padlock on the door.

  He looked back.

  The other man was still standing at the far end of the bridge, looking up at the canopy of leaves above. It wasn’t clear what he was looking at, but it didn’t seem like he was waiting for the right moment to rush over, bang the other guy on the head and steal his wallet. If he’d wanted to do that he could have done it back up at the house. There was no sign of anyone else around - this boy he’d mentioned, for example - and he looked like he was waiting patiently for the conclusion of whatever needed to happen for him to have earned his dollar.

  Miller turned back and fitted the key in the lock. It was stiff, but it turned. He opened the door. Inside was total dark. He hesitated, looked back across the bridge, but the man had gone.

  He opened the door further, and stepped inside.

  *

  The interior of the cabin was cooler than it had been outside, but also stuffy. There was a faint smell. Not a bad smell, particularly. It was like old, damp leaves. It was like the back of a closet where you store things you do not need. It was like a corner of the attic of a house not much loved, in the night, after rain.

  The only light was that which managed to get past him from the door behind. The cabin had no windows, or if it had, they had been covered over. The door he’d entered by was right at one end of the building, which meant the rest of the interior led ahead. It could only have been ten, twelve feet. It seemed longer, because it was so dark. The man stood there, not sure what happened next.

  The door slowly swung closed behind him, not all the way, but leaving a gap of a couple of inches. No one came and shut it on him or turned the lock or started hollering about he’d have to pay a thousand bucks to get back out again. The man waited.

  In a while, there was a quiet sound.

  It was a rustling. Not quite a shuffling. A sense of something moving a little at the far end, turning away from the wall, perhaps. Just after the sound, there was a low waft of a new odour, as if the movement had caused something to change its relationship to the environment, as if a body long held curled or crouched in a particular shape or position had realigned enough for hidden sweat to be released into the unmoving air.

  Miller froze.

  In all his life, he’d never felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. You read about it, hear about it. You knew they were supposed to do it, but he’d never felt it, not his own hairs, on his own neck. They did it then, though, and the peculiar thing was that he was not afraid, or not only that.

  He was in there with something, that was for certain. It was not a known thing, either. It was … he didn’t know. He wasn’t sure. He just knew that there was something over there in the darkness. Something about the size of a man, he thought, maybe a little smaller.

  He wasn’t sure it was male, though. Something said to him it was female. He couldn’t imagine where this impression might be coming from, as he couldn’t see it and he couldn’t hear anything, either -after the initial movement, it had been still. There was just something in the air that told him things about it, that said underneath the shadows it wrapped around itself like a pair of dark angel’s wings, it knew despair, bitter madness and melancholy better even than he did. He knew that beneath those shadows it was naked, and not male.

  He knew also that it was this, and not fear, that was making his breathing come ragged and forced.

  *

  He stayed in there with it for half-an-hour, doing nothing, just listening, staring into the darkness but not seeing anything. That’s how long it seemed like it had been, anyway, when he eventually emerged back into the forest. It was hard to tell.

  He closed the cabin door behind him but he did not lock it because he saw that the man was back, standing once more at the far end of the bridge. Miller clasped the key firmly in his fist and walked over towards him.

  ‘How much?’ he said.

  ‘For what? You already paid.’

  ‘No,’ Miller said. ‘I want to buy it.’

  *

  It was eight by the time Miller got back to his house. He didn’t know how that could be unless he’d spent longer in the cabin than he realised. It didn’t matter a whole lot, and in fact there were good things about it. The light had begun to fade. In twenty minutes it would be gone entirely. He spent those minutes sitting in the front seat of the car, waiting for darkness, his mind as close to a comfortable blank as it had been in a long time.

  When it was finally dark he got out of the car and went over to the house. He dealt with the security system, unlocked the front door and left it hanging open.

  He walked back to the vehicle and went around to the trunk. He rested his hand on the metal there for a moment, and it felt cold. He unlocked the back and turned away, not fast but naturally, and walked towards the wooden steps which led to the smaller of the two raised decks. He walked up them and stood there for a few minutes, looking out into the dark stand of trees, and then turned and headed back down the steps towards the car.

  The trunk was empty now, and so he shut it and walked slowly towards the open door of his house and went inside, and shut and locked that door behind him too.

  It was night, and it was dark, and they were both inside and that felt right.

  *

  He poured a small Scotch in a large glass. He took it out through the sliding glass doors to the chair on the main deck where he’d spent the morning and sat there cradling the drink, taking a sip once in a while. He found himself remembering, as he often did at this time, the first time he’d met his wife. He’d been living down on East Cliff then, in a house which was much smaller than this one but only a couple of minutes’ walk from the beach. Late one Saturday afternoon, bored and restless, he’d taken a walk to the Crow’s Nest, the big restaurant that was the only place to eat or drink along that stretch. He’d bought a similar Scotch at the upstairs bar and taken it out onto the balcony to watch the sun go down over the harbour. After a while he noticed that amongst the family groups of sunburned tourists and knots of tattooed locals there was a woman sitting at a table by herself. She had a tall glass of beer and seemed to be doing the same thing he was, and he wondered why. Not why she was doing that, but why he was - why they both were. He did not know then, and he did not know now, why people sit and look out into the distance by themselves, or what they hope to see.

  After a couple more drinks he went over and introduced himself. Her name was Catherine and she worked at the university. They got married eighteen months later and though by then - his business having taken off in the meantime - he could have afforded anywhere in town, they hired the Crow’s Nest and had the wedding party there. A year after that their daughter was born and they called her Matilde, after Catherine’s mother, who was French. Business was still good and they moved out of his place on East Cliff and into the big house he had built in the mountains and for seven years all was good, and then, for some reason, it was no longer good any more. He didn’t think it had been his fault, though it could have been. He didn’t think it was her fault either, though that too was possible. It had simply stopped working. They’d been two people, and then one, but then two again, facing different ways. There had been a view to share together, then there was not, and if you look with only one eye then there is no depth of field. There had been no infidelity. In some ways that might have been easier. It would have been something to react to, to blame, to hide behind. Far worse, in fact, to sit on opposite sides of the breakfast table and wonder who the other person was, and why they were there, and when they would go.

  Six months later, she did. Matilde went with her, of course. He didn’t think there was much more that could be said or understood on the subject. When first he’d sat out on this deck alone, trying to work it all through in his head, the recounting could take hours. As time went on, the story seemed to get shorter and shorter. As they said around these parts, it is what it is.

  Or it was what it was.

  *


  Time passed and then it was late. The Scotch was long gone but he didn’t feel the desire for any more. He took the glass indoors and washed it in the sink, putting it on the draining board next to the plate and the knife and the fork from lunch. No lights were on. He hadn’t bothered to flick any switches when he came in, and - having sat for so long out on the deck - his eyes were accustomed, and he felt no need to turn any on now.

  He dried his hands on a cloth and walked around the house, aimlessly at first. He had done this many times in the last few months, hearing echoes. When he got to the area which had been Catherine’s study, he stopped. There was nothing left in the space now bar the empty desk and the empty bookshelves. He could tell that the chair had been moved, however. He didn’t recall precisely how it had been, or when he’d last listlessly walked this way, but he knew that it had been moved, somehow.

  He went back to walking, and eventually fetched up outside the room that had been Matilde’s. The door was slightly ajar. The space beyond was dark.

  He could feel a warmth coming out of it, though, and heard a sound in there, something quiet, and he turned and walked slowly away.

  *

  He took a shower in the dark. Afterward he padded back to the kitchen in his bare feet and a gown and picked his Scotch glass up from the draining board. Even after many, many trips through the dishwasher you could see the ghost of the restaurant logo that had once been stamped on it, the remains of a mast and a crow’s nest. Catherine had slipped it into her purse one long-ago night, without him knowing about it, and then given the glass to him as an anniversary present. How did a person who would do that change into the person now living half the state away? He didn’t know, any more than he knew why he had so little to say on the phone to his daughter, or why people sat and looked at views, or why they drove to nowhere on Saturday afternoons. Our heads turn and point at things. Light comes into our eyes. Words come out of our mouths.

  And then? And so?

  Carefully, he brought the edge of the glass down upon the edge of the counter. It broke pretty much as he’d hoped it would, the base remaining in one piece, the sides shattering into several jagged points.

  He padded back through into the bedroom, put the broken glass on the nightstand, took off the robe and lay back on the bed. That’s how they’d always done it, when they’d wanted to signal that tonight didn’t have to just be about going to sleep. Under the covers with a book, then probably not tonight, Josephine.

  Naked and on top, on the other hand …

  A shorthand. A shared language. There is little sadder, however, than a tongue for which only one speaker remains. He closed his eyes and after a while, for the first time since he’d stood stunned in the driveway and watched his family leave, he cried.

  Afterward he lay and waited.

  She came in the night.

  *

  Three days later, in the late afternoon, a battered truck pulled down into the driveway and parked alongside the car that was there. It was the first time the truck had been on the road in nearly two years, and the driver left the engine running when he got out because he wasn’t all that sure it would start up again. The patched front tyre was holding up, though, for now.

  He went around the back and opened up the wooden crate, propping the flap with a stick. Then he walked over to the big front door and rang on the bell. Waited a while, and did it again. No answer. Of course.

  He rubbed his face in his hands, wearily, took a step back. The door looked solid. No way a kick would get it open. He looked around and saw the steps up to the side deck.

  When he got around to the back of the house he picked up the chair that sat by itself, hefted it to judge the weight, and threw it through the big glass door. When he’d satisfied himself that the hole in the smashed glass was big enough, he walked back along the deck and around the front and then up the driveway to stand on the road for a while, out of view of the house.

  He smoked a cigarette, and then another to be sure, and when he came back down the driveway he was relieved to see that the flap on the crate on the back of his truck was now closed.

  He climbed into the cab and sat a moment, looking at the big house. Then he put the truck into reverse, got back up to the highway and drove slowly home.

  When he made the turn into his own drive later, he saw the STOP sign was still there. Didn’t matter how many times he told the boy, the sign was still there.

  He drove along the track to the house, parked the truck. He opened the crate without looking at it and went inside.

  *

  Later, sitting on his porch in the darkness, he listened to the sound of the wind moving through the tops of the trees all around. He drank a warm beer, and then another. He looked at the grime on his hands. He wondered what it was that made some people catch sight of the sign, what it was in their eyes, what it was in the way they looked, that made them see. He wondered how the man in the big house had done it, and hoped he had not suffered much. He wondered why he had never attempted the same thing. He wondered why it was only on nights like these that he was able to remember that his boy had been dead twenty years.

  Finally he went indoors and lay in bed staring at the ceiling. He did this every night, even though there was never anything there to see: nothing, unless it is that sad, dark thing that eventually takes us in its arms and makes us sleep.

  MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH is a novelist and screenwriter. Under that name he has published seventy short stories and three novels: Only Forward, Spares and One of Us, winning the Philip K. Dick Award, International Horror Guild Award, August Derleth Award and the Prix Bob Morane in France. He has won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction four times, more than any other author.

  Writing as ‘Michael Marshall’, he has also published five international bestselling thrillers, including The Straw Men, The Intruders, Bad Things and, most recently, Killer Move. The Intruders is under series development with BBC Television.

  He is currently involved in several screenwriting projects, including a television pilot set in New York and an animated horror movie for children. The author lives in North London with his wife, son and two cats.

  ‘This story came directly out of a locale and its atmosphere,’ reveals Smith. ‘The Santa Cruz Mountains are stunning, with picturesque creeks and as many redwoods as you could shake a stick at, but drive up or down some of those shadowy country side-roads and you’ll soon find yourself in the kind of woods that are very quiet and very still and announce on some inaudible wavelength that you’re here under sufferance, and that you should not push your luck.

  ‘This particular story probably wouldn’t have been written had not a friend emailed me one day with three words he’d seen somewhere, saying it sounded like a great title for something.

  ‘He was right, and it’s the title I’ve used. The story fell straight into my head - I love it when they do that.’

  <>

  *

  Near Zennor

  -ELIZABETH HAND-

  H

  E FOUND THE LETTERS inside a round metal candy tin, at the bottom of a plastic storage box in the garage, alongside strings of outdoor Christmas lights and various oddments his wife had saved for the yard sale she’d never managed to organise in almost thirty years of marriage. She’d died suddenly, shockingly, of a brain aneurysm, while planting daffodil bulbs the previous September.

  Now everything was going to Goodwill. The house in New Canaan had been listed with a realtor; despite the terrible market, she’d reassured Jeffrey that it should sell relatively quickly, and for something close to his asking price.

  ‘It’s a beautiful house, Jeffrey,’ she said, ‘not that I’m surprised.’ Jeffrey was a noted architect: she glanced at him as she stepped carefully along a flagstone path in her Louboutin heels. ‘And these gardens are incredible.’

  ‘That was all Anthea.’ He paused beside a stone wall, surveying an emerald swathe of new grass, small exposed hill
ocks of black earth, piles of neatly-raked leaves left by the crew he’d hired to do the work that Anthea had always done on her own. In the distance, birch trees glowed spectral white against a leaden February sky that gave a twilit cast to midday. ‘She always said that if I’d had to pay her for all this, I wouldn’t have been able to afford her. She was right.’

  He signed the final sheaf of contracts and returned them to the realtor. ‘You’re in Brooklyn now?’ she asked, turning back towards the house.

  ‘Yes. Green Park. A colleague of mine is in Singapore for a few months; he’s letting me stay there till I get my bearings.’

  ‘Well, good luck. I’ll be in touch soon.’ She opened the door of her Prius and hesitated. ‘I know how hard this is for you. I lost my father two years ago. Nothing helps, really.’

  Jeffrey nodded. ‘Thanks. I know.’

  He’d spent the last five months cycling through wordless, image-less night terrors from which he awoke gasping; dreams in which Anthea lay beside him, breathing softly then smiling as he touched her face; nightmares in which the neuro-electrical storm that had killed her raged inside his own head, a flaring nova that engulfed the world around him and left him floating in an endless black space, the stars expiring one by one as he drifted past them.

  He knew that grief had no target demographic, that all around him versions of this cosmic reshuffling took place every day. He and Anthea had had their own shared experience years before, when they had lost their first and only daughter to sudden infant death syndrome. They were both in their late thirties at the time. They never tried to have another child, on their own or through adoption. It was as though some psychic house fire had consumed them both: it was a year before Jeffrey could enter the room that had been Julia’s, and for months after her death neither he nor Anthea could bear to sit at the dining table and finish a meal together, or sleep in the same bed. The thought of being that close to another human being, of having one’s hand or foot graze another’s and wake however fleetingly to the realisation that this too could be lost - it left both of them with a terror that they had never been able to articulate, even to each other.