by Неизвестный
The bus had almost reached the station when Charlie’s father turned to him. “I know something else you’ll like.”
He meant the fair. It had a roundabout Charlie went on twice, and a dog with a ruff around its neck, prancing on two legs while its front legs clawed at the air. There was a target gallery where neither Charlie nor his parents could shoot quite straight enough, and a stall where you flung wooden balls to knock grinning faces backwards, leaving dark holes. He didn’t want to try that, and he hurried past to an attraction screened by trees. At once he wished he hadn’t seen it, but his parents already had.
Two life-size figures were painted on a board taller than his father. No doubt they were meant to be comical. The man sported a clownish costume so baggy it made him look puffed up by gas, while his partner wore a spangled dress that bared her bony hirsute legs. They had no faces, only holes for them, filled just now by the dark swollen sky. Charlie was about to thank his parents for the treat and flee towards the road when a man bustled over, gesticulating with a camera. “Go on, Charles,” his mother said. “Put your head through, then at least we’ll have one photograph.”
The surge of dread was worse for being undefinable. The prospect of causing an argument between his parents dismayed him as well. “You and dad first,” he said in desperation.
As soon as they stepped behind the board he felt he’d risked them to save himself. They seemed unconcerned when they put their faces through; they even produced grins, though his mother’s resembled her habitual patient expression, while his father’s looked hopeful. The boy was able to respond, having thought of an excuse not to go near. “I won’t reach.”
“Of course you will,” his mother said, letting her grin subside now that the camera had whirred twice. “Lift him up, Edward.”
She pulled her face out of the hole to watch until he had to venture behind the board, to see only his parents and its unadorned back. His father took Charlie’s waist in both hands and raised him like an offering to the hole in front of them. “Gosh, there isn’t much of you,” he murmured. “We’ll have to feed you up.”
Charlie saw his mother give them both a resentful look. He kept his head back until the photographer motioned vigorously for him to bring it forward. As the edges of the skull-sized orifice loomed around his face he saw the blurred misshapen body he’d acquired. The camera whirred and whirred again, and he thought the ordeal was over until his mother said “I’ll take him, Edward. You deserve a turn.”
He couldn’t let her see him hesitate to go to her. “You aren’t so skinny,” she said as she hoisted him with her arms under his armpits, so that he wondered if she’d just wanted an excuse to weigh him. When his head came level with the hole she said “Don’t do what you did with your face.”
Had she noticed his reluctance? He jerked his head forward and did his best to grin. As he realised that his body had become the scrawny thing in a dress, the camera went off. He struggled to hold his face still while the shutter sounded once more, and then he made himself heavy so that his mother put him down. The photographer beckoned them all to a caravan, where he indicated a printer and moved his hands apart to specify the size of photograph. The machine quivered and rattled and eventually disgorged six large prints. Only the pictures of Charlie’s parents were clear. In the rest, presumably because nervousness had made him move without realising, the boy’s face was an indistinct bulge with a bony slit for a mouth.
“I think that’s quite enough expense,” his mother said when the photographer flourished the camera. His father paid and was handed the pictures in an envelope. The way out of the fair led past the painted board, and Charlie almost managed not to look, but couldn’t resist glancing over his shoulder. Although nobody had been behind or even near the board, two swollen blotchy faces were dangling through the holes. They looked as if the process of emerging had come close to pulling them apart, given how much of them drooped over the edge of the holes. In the instant before he succeeded in wrenching his gaze away, Charlie saw that the effort had bared not just their teeth.
He clutched both his parents by the hands, apparently to their surprise, and dragged them towards the road. On the train he sat next to his father, away from the window, and couldn’t tell where it was safe to look. The walk to the hotel felt like an omen of worse – the pavement market where the dog with its head in a hole might be lurking, the church with the box for faces to peer from, the restaurant where a head ducked towards the O of the engraved sign to grin out at him. He just managed to suppress his cry, having recognised the waiter who’d befriended him.
As his father unlocked the room Bobbie looked out of the one across the corridor. “Having a good last day?”
“I’d say so,” Charlie’s father said.
“We’ve an early start tomorrow. If you two want some time to yourselves after dinner we’ll be in our room.”
“You can ring us if there’s any problem, son,” Bobby said.
“You don’t mind, do you, Charlie?” said his father.
Admitting his fears out loud seemed likely to make them more real. Perhaps only his silence about them was keeping them away. Besides, he felt responsible for the tension between his parents, especially since they couldn’t discuss it in front of him. “I’ll be all right,” he prayed aloud.
“He’ll behave himself, don’t worry.” He gathered Bobbie meant her husband. To Charlie’s parents she said “We’ll keep an eye.”
He was unwillingly reminded that the faces in the holes hadn’t been too good at keeping theirs. Once he was in the room he knew he wouldn’t be able to lie still; trying would only make him shiver. “Can I read?” he pleaded.
“I said he ought to have brought some of his books, Edward.”
“Can’t I read the one about here?”
“I certainly don’t see why not,” his father said not even mainly to him, and passed him the guidebook.
Charlie was looking for reassurance, but there wasn’t much. Spartacus had been a rebel slave who’d set up camp on Vesuvius six years before it erupted. Lot’s wife in the Bible had probably been turned into a kind of mummy by a volcano. Charlie could have lived without learning this, never mind that some of the headless remains in the catacomb had been painted on the walls where the bodies used to be. Even if this explained the uneven outlines he’d mistaken for stains, it made the figures far too reminiscent of the ones at the fair, and what had happened to the bodies? The guidebook left that out as if it would do people no good to know. He was gazing at the page rather than read on when his father said “Too much for you, Charlie? Time for a feed.”
In the restaurant the task of grinning at the waiter made the boy’s face feel as constricted as it had by the board at the fair. He managed to avoid looking whenever anything loomed at the oval in the window. He took all the time he could over the meal the waiter assumed was his favourite, and succeeded in eating some of it as long as he forgot how the mirrors could be hiding an intruder. Eventually his mother said “Time to say goodbye, Charles.”
The other couple must have heard them come upstairs, because Bobby called “Ready” as if he were playing hide and seek. Charlie hurried to the bathroom, hoping to outdistance his mother’s night-time phrase, but she called through the door “Face and teeth.” At the sink he shut his eyes so as not to see his bulbous face in the magnifying mirror. His parents delivered their signs of affection and waited for him to climb into bed. “We won’t be any longer than we need to be,” his mother said.
As soon as he couldn’t hear their footsteps Charlie lurched out of bed to switch on the nearest light and then the rest of them. He tried watching television with the sound turned low, but he couldn’t find any programmes in English, which made him feel as if the people on the screen were saying things it was vital for him to understand. They reminded him of his parents and the secrets he suspected were about him. He didn’t want to read the guidebook in case it contained more information he wouldn’t want to be alone
with, and the sight of the photographs from the fair would be worse. He read every word in the folder about the hotel and tried to avoid looking at the spyhole in the door; every glance at it felt too much like inviting a response. He’d lost count of how often he’d read through the folder by the time he heard a fumbling at the door.
Was it one of his parents? Whenever they drank a lot they seemed to have trouble climbing the stairs at home – but the noise was too shapeless, almost not there and yet more present than he liked. With more reluctance than he’d ever previously experienced Charlie tiptoed to the door and stretched up to peer through the spyhole. When he glimpsed a shape so ill-defined it looked incomplete, vanishing from sight like a worm withdrawing into the earth, he managed to stay at the door long enough to jam the end of the chain into the socket. Once he’d shot the bolt as well he retreated to his bed and dragged the quilt over the whole of himself.
He was in a nervous fitful doze when he heard the fumbling again. He pressed the quilt against his ears so hard that he didn’t hear the voices and the rapping on the door until they must have gone on for some minutes. He floundered off the bed and ran to let his parents in. Bobbie and her husband were watching from across the corridor. “Who on earth do you think you are, Charles?” his mother demanded. “This is our room.”
He thought of an answer he hoped would placate her. “I didn’t want any robbers to get in.”
She only shook her head as if she had an insect in her hair and gestured him into the room, not even glancing at the other couple as his father murmured to them. From his bed Charlie heard his parents muttering at length in the bathroom. If they’d resolved their differences while they were without him, he’d spoiled that now. He heard his father declare “I’m not saying what I think has made him like this.”
Eventually his parents went to bed. Their silence felt as ominous as the cloud above Vesuvius, and weighed on the dark. Charlie listened for signs that they’d fallen asleep, which might relieve at least some of the foreboding even if it left him by himself, but he didn’t know whether they’d drifted off by the time he did. He dreamed they were at the door again, although when he managed to unchain it and open all the bolts and locks, the faces that poked at him out of his parents’ heads weren’t theirs. He clutched at the pillow to blot out his screams as his jolt awake almost flung him off the bed. The quilt dragged the pillowcase back so that the pillow bulged into his face. The pillow was lumpier than he remembered, and the irregular padding that covered the lumps was unhelpfully thin. Feathers must be spilling out of the pillow to make it feel as though fragments were flaking off. Charlie was pulling his head back, disliking the dry sour taste, when his thumbs dug into the contents of the linen sack – into something hinged, where an object stirred like a worm. In the faint light from the corridor he saw that his bed-mate had widened its withered eyes and bared its mottled teeth.
His shrieks brought Bobby to pound on the door while Bobbie blinked across the corridor. “Just a nightmare,” Charlie’s father said, perhaps with desperate optimism. Charlie’s mother rubbed the boy’s shoulders with more vigour than affection, not looking at his face. There was nothing in his bed or under it, which only made him wonder where the extra guest had gone. His mother shook the pillow when it was clear that she thought it was time he lay down. He almost hoped some unexpected contents would appear for his parents to see.
Even when he held the end of the pillowcase shut with both hands under the quilt he was afraid something would wriggle forth if he slept. Whenever he jerked awake from a few seconds’ forgetful doze he clutched the pillowcase harder. At last it was time for breakfast, where he felt as if Bobby and Bobbie had left early because of him. He took as little from the buffet as he thought he could get away with taking while everyone in the room seemed to be aware of him, but he couldn’t even eat that much. “I expect you’re eager to be home,” his father said, not really as if he believed it himself.
The day was so sunlit Charlie might have thought it was celebrating his departure. The light was pretending there was nowhere anything he dreaded could hide. In the taxi to the airport a face spied on him through the mirror. Knowing that it was the driver didn’t comfort him, any more than the way the women at the checkin desk and the boarding gate scrutinised him. Very eventually he and his parents were allowed to shuffle onto the plane, where he stared at everybody seated further down the cabin until his mother said “Sit down, Charles. That isn’t how you’ve been taught to behave.”
He watched people filing along the aisle to sit behind him and in front of him. The procession was slow enough for a funeral, and made him feel breathlessly trapped. The face that had followed him out of the catacombs could hide anywhere – wherever his parents wouldn’t believe it was. He craned around to peer between the seats at his mother, hoping she’d forgiven him for causing last night’s scene, but she met him with a frown. “Turn round, Charles, please. You’ve shown us up enough.”
“Look out of the window,” his father urged, and Charlie couldn’t let them sense his fear. As he ducked towards the cramped pane a blotch of a face swelled up to meet him – his own. At once he understood everything. His mother kept telling the truth about him, about the face and teeth, and his father didn’t want to say what had made him how he was. The past was indeed part of him. The ground began to move before his eyes as the plane headed for the runway, and when he sat back the blurred face retreated into hiding – into him. He closed his eyes in the hope his father wouldn’t make him look again, but it didn’t help him forget. He couldn’t leave behind the horror his parents were bringing home.
JOEL LANE
By Night He Could Not See
JOEL LANE’S FINAL collection of short fiction, Where Furnaces Burn from PS Publishing – a book of supernatural crime stories set in the West Midlands – won the World Fantasy Award in October 2013. Less than a month later, the author died in his sleep. He was just fifty years old.
His stories appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies including Black Static, Weird Tales, Cemetery Dance, Crimewave, Gutshot, Psycho-Mania!, Evermore, Gathering the Bones, The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime and no fewer than five previous volumes of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. His other publications include the shortstory collections The Earth Wire, The Lost District, The Terrible Changes and Do Not Pass Go, along with the acclaimed novella, The Witnesses Are Gone.
Joel Lane was one of a new generation of British horror writers that included Nicholas Royle, Michael Marshall Smith, Mark Morris and Conrad Williams, who began their careers in Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s and came to dominate the field with stories that combined traditional horror themes with the social, sexual and political upheavals of the time. Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, Joel’s fiction continued to rally against the system and prick our conscience beneath a deceptive veneer of genre fiction.
It is with great pride, tinged with obvious sadness, that I am able to present here what will probably be his final contribution to this series …
THE FIRST JASON knew about it was a story in the Express & Star. A forty-six-year-old woman had been found dead on a train between Walsall and Aldridge. Cause of death unknown. The only sign of violence was the paint on her face and hands, which might have been daubed on before or after her death. The police wondered if it was linked to cult activity. They gave her name: Gail Warner. There was no photo. At the end of the brief report, the journalist noted that in the last year, two other dead people in the UK had been found smeared with paint in the same way.
It wasn’t such an unusual name. He wasn’t even sure the age was right, though it was close. If it was the same person, did Mark know about it? They probably hadn’t stayed in touch – teenage lovers never did. Jason might have stood a chance with Gail if she hadn’t been wrapped around Mark like a pale ribbon. A few times they’d turned up late for a meeting of the Yardbirds, looking flushed and gratified. Jason had bitten through his lip thinking about it, still had t
he scar. But then Clare had come along and it had ceased to matter.
The gang’s name came from Yardley, where they’d all lived. It seemed very distant now, like a film he’d seen in his teens. The Swan Centre, their main stamping ground, had recently been knocked down. The knot of reeking subways in front of it had been replaced by a concrete walkway over the Coventry Road that trembled from all the cars passing through. Yardley felt more like an airport than a district now. You couldn’t stand still without getting vertigo.
Jason felt restless. Being reminded of the past wasn’t good for him. But it was too cold to go out for a walk, and he had work tomorrow so the pub wasn’t a good idea. He walked around the house, mentally listing the repair tasks that needed his attention, knowing they wouldn’t happen any time soon. What you can’t sort out, you have to walk away from. But why had he stayed here? The posters he’d put up to cover the damp in the hallway were looking bruised.
The gang hadn’t been that bad. Clapton’s Yardbirds were probably guilty of worse crimes. At least on record. Most of it was running: handling stuff for the big boys, passing on messages, occasionally breathing down some unwashed neck or helping some no-mark to have a small accident. Nothing to give Richard Allen sleepless nights. Like the Krays, they’d only hurt their own. The hurting had got out of hand. It always did.
Four cigarettes later, he phoned his old mate Darren in Walsall. They’d worked together in a security firm back in the nineties, driving cash and prisoners across the region. Then Darren had joined the police force. He knew about the Yardbirds – at least, he’d heard the radio edit – but he wasn’t the type to moralize. It was all just work to him.
Darren took the call on his mobile. They swapped greetings. As usual, Jason had no recent news. Darren had got divorced, and something bad had happened in Aldridge that he couldn’t talk about. Then Jason asked him if he’d heard about the dead woman on the train. “I think I used to know her. Was she blonde?”