Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4

by Helen Marshall

  With hindsight, it had been a rather un-Christian assessment but when she saw them looking so lost in their front garden, her heart went out to them completely. How could it not? The wife (Linda?) was only wearing a towel—the poor thing—but all three of them looked vulnerable. They were a nice family, she decided. And she decided that she’d always thought so.

  She unpeeled her gardening gloves and joined them on the lawn, looking up at the new veneer of darkness their house wore.

  “Oh good heavens,” she said, her sincerity genuine. “Come with me, let’s keep you warm. Let’s see what we can do.”

  They exchanged glances with each other before they followed her, and they saw in each other, the same feeling of being lost they felt themselves. They joined hands and followed Una back up the path to the pavement and along the road, past the untidy lawn of number six to the pristine one at number seven.

  In the lounge, sitting on his favourite armchair, Alasdair Felton looked up from his newspaper, surprised to see his wife bringing guests back into the house without having organised a concerted campaign to make it look a fraction tidier than it already was. Una ignored him—she often did when she had something more pressing on her mind—so he watched and smiled as she fussed around, her frown of concern masking an irrepressible enthusiasm for her newfound purpose.

  “Let me see if I can find you something to wear,” Una Felton said to Lydia, looking her up and down. “My daughter, Suzie, still has clothes here. They’re old, she hasn’t been home in so long. But she’s a big girl, too. Healthy.” She disappeared upstairs, leaving the family slightly shell-shocked.

  Lewis Potterton noticed Alasdair sitting, watching them and nodded to him in wordless acknowledgement. He still held his wife by one hand, his daughter by the other, but in his expression, Alasdair saw a man who was being held. A look of weightless panic behind his eyes, grounded only by those around him.

  Alasdair nodded back. His smile, he hoped, was an encouraging one. He pushed himself to his feet.

  “I was going to make some tea,” he said. “I’ll use the large teapot.”

  He went to the kitchen and filled the kettle, still oblivious of the purpose behind the Potterton’s visit. He knew his part was to simply act as host for as long as it took.

  It took longer than anyone anticipated. The Pottertons squeezed into the Felton’s spare room, the neat little loft conversion Una had thought to use as an art room, had she ever found the time. There were other rooms, bigger ones, but the closeness of the space under the eaves felt more important to them. They unfolded the futon and spread out an inflatable mattress so they could all stay together.

  In the master bedroom on the floor below, Alasdair Felton sat down beside his wife, who looked tired but flushed with the day’s charity. She had reclothed them all and put the washing machine on. She had fed them and kept them warm, and now, although tired, she seemed to hum with a bristling energy he remembered from Suzie’s childhood. He took her hand and he smiled at her like he hadn’t done for years.

  “What a beautiful thing you are,” he said.

  NUMBER EIGHT

  The second house to become unliveable was number eight. Milton Bream had not been home since his divorce from Jemima had finally reached its conclusion at the magistrates’ court earlier in the week. When he pulled up in front of the house, he knew it was the only thing he had left in the world and for a precious, fleeting moment, he felt as though all the screaming and shouting and tears and grief had been worth it after all.

  His lawyers had spoken to Jemima’s lawyers and, after much back and forth, they had agreed that, despite everything, she should be free to go home “one last time” to pick up her belongings. Brimbley, his solicitor, had advised Milton he should go home first and put away anything of value, but Milton wasn’t interested. He just wanted the whole thing over and done with and he wasn’t sure he would want to keep anything that Jemima had set her sights on anyway. He knew from experience how her glassy-eyed desire had the power to corrupt anything in its path.

  Standing outside the front door for the first time in just under a year, Milton was under no illusion that there would be anything of value left behind. Certainly not his collection of first edition Harry Potter books he had diligently collected and shrink-wrapped for posterity. Certainly not the binders of first-day covers his uncle had left him in his will. Certainly not those gold and ivory cufflinks his grandfather had worn when he got married.

  Jemima knew where all the treasure was in the house; he imagined her with pirate maps, digging through the attic detritus in her quest to exhume it all. He imagined too how that dipshit Welsh oaf, Barri-with-an-i, would have been waiting with his van in the drive, rubbing his fat steak-like hands in drooling anticipation of a wealth beyond his meagre, stunted dreams.

  It was something of a surprise, therefore, to see the curtains still hung in the margins of the lounge windows, and when Milton squinted through the glass, he could make out the obsidian slab of the plasma TV still mounted on the wall above the fireplace, and the glittering stack of his precious hi-fi neatly embedded on the shelves.

  Maybe they didn’t have the tools to take them down? He wouldn’t have put it past them to act on spite alone and break everything instead.

  With a sigh, he set his key to the lock and only then did he stop, sensing a thick pressure on his chest, a heat behind the ears. He had been so preoccupied with Jemima he almost hadn’t noticed the house had become unliveable in his absence. The irony of this was not lost on him. Thinking of Jemima at the wrong time had led to his first divorce after all; thinking of Jemima had been what had driven him to go home that lunchtime to find her in bed with Barri-with-an-i, who she hadn’t seen since they’d been at school together in Swansea, and for whom she’d always harboured feelings for—even though his middle-aged form was somewhat less athletic than the one she’d lost her virginity to all those years before.

  And now, thinking of Jemima had almost made him walk blindly into an unliveable house. He barked a laugh, an ugly sound even to him, and backed away down the path, staring up at the dead façade in front of him. So hard fought for, so easily lost. He sat on the edge of the rockery and cried for the first time since he was eight years old.

  Milton Bream was rescued from his doorstep by Penny Moon from number nine. Like Una Felton, she took him home and took care of him, and like the Potterton family, Milton accepted her charity with a grace and humility that was new to him, but which he found fitted him well.

  Penny Moon was nearly ten years Milton’s junior but knew exactly what it was like to lose someone you loved to another. She had moved into Hope Street six years earlier to care for her father after a stroke had rendered him housebound. She had set up a bedroom downstairs where the lounge used to be, opening the curtains wide each morning so her father could see the birds feeding in his beloved garden.

  While he slept during the day, Penny had worked hard, making the upstairs rooms of number nine into the apartment she had once thought to have bought with Gary. She pictured a lounge, a bedroom, and spaces for all her books and the paintings she imagined she might one day buy. She made the upstairs rooms into a little box for herself, a nest with four walls and a door she could use to shut herself in. It was a long way away from her friends in London, but they had been Gary’s friends too and she simply didn’t trust them any more. All their concern and advice seemed more for his benefit than hers, so she stopped replying to their messages and answering their calls. Another door left to shut on its own.

  After her father died, she inherited the house but remained upstairs. The rooms downstairs felt both too dark and too bright at the same time. The barbed smell of her father’s final, humiliating hours lingered in the dark patches on the ceiling, in the gaps in the wallpaper, the scuff marks on the floor. She sat upstairs alone in the bedroom she had made a lounge, the curtains closed so she couldn’t see the garden her father had spent his life tending, and which had grown wild and unk
empt without him.

  When Milton moved in, he knew nothing of her history and, in those early days, he didn’t think to ask. When she showed him her father’s room, he didn’t see the history of it, scribbled into the walls and the furniture. He just saw a sanctuary, illuminated by the sort of diligent love he had no experience of himself.

  He followed Penny, docile and silent as she led him to the kitchen and made him a bowl of soup and still-warm soda bread, the same meal her father used to make her when she had been a child.

  NUMBER ELEVEN

  Less than a week after Milton Bream’s house became unliveable, the same happened to the house at number eleven.

  This house was owned by Marlon Swick, and he lived there with his partner of eight years, Julia Prin. It was another Saturday and they had spent the afternoon at his mother’s house in Barnstaple. She spent the whole time they were there talking about children. She’d always wanted grandchildren she’d said, and she’d said it with one of those pointed expressions which was probably supposed to be subtle, but failed.

  She’d given up on the two of them getting married by that point, and while both Marlon and Julia had tried to explain to her how they both very much wanted children too, their own subtlety was missed entirely.

  And so, while Julia patiently washed the dishes after lunch, Marlon’s mother stood close behind her.

  “Tick tock,” she said, a benign twinkle in her voice. “Tick tock.”

  They excused themselves from the evening meal which Marlon’s mother had lovingly prepared. Marlon lied to her, faking a phone call and explaining something had happened back home which they absolutely had to attend to, and he had looked away while his mother cried. He would call her later on. He always did find it easier to deal with her over the phone.

  She shouted at them a little, she screamed a little more. Everyone was miserable by the time they finally left.

  On the way home, they stopped at a country pub and ordered the most enormous meal they could afford: three courses, artisan bread, a jug of wine which Julia was too upset to enjoy.

  Marlon ran a small office cleaning company from a pair of stacked Portakabins on the south side of Midholme. Business had been slowing since he’d lost out on a few contracts over the last few years, but his mother’s influence had left him well versed in the tactic of allaying sadness with food, no matter what the cost.

  Back in the car, he turned to Julia and smiled at her in the most encouraging way he knew how.

  “When we get home,” he said, “we should go to the Oak and get drunk like teenagers. We should absolutely make fools of ourselves.”

  Julia laughed, but Marlon knew she would probably rather just go to bed and forget the afternoon happened at all.

  Unlike Milton Bream’s experience, Marlon and Julia knew something was wrong with Hope Street as soon as they turned off the Brenthwaite Road. The whole street felt darker than it should have been, and for a brief moment of intense clarity, Marlon saw how there were three nodes along its length where the night was most clenched and dangerous. One was the Potterton house, one was the Bream house and one was their own.

  “Oh, baby,” he said.

  Julia was asleep on the passenger seat beside him. He parked by the kerb and arranged a coat over her to keep her warm, then sat back beside her, watching the house until dawn.

  Daniel Dormer lived in number twelve with his wife, Kelly and their six-year-old son who, to Kelly’s consternation, he had insisted be named after his father, Hilary.

  On the morning after Marlon and Julia’s house became unliveable, he walked out his front door to greet the morning, as had become his custom of late, and saw his neighbours asleep in their car.

  *

  Daniel Dormer had very strong views regarding neighbourhood aesthetics. The cars on Hope Street should, he believed, be parked in the driveways provided, or better still, in the garages provided. He’d heard somewhere that Julia was an artist of some sort and that she and Marlon had converted their garage into a studio. To Daniel, this seemed like a terrible waste of time, more-so, given that his neighbours’ ageing and tatty Volvo estate was just the sort of vehicle that suburban garages had been invented to conceal.

  He tapped on the driver’s side window, clearing his throat as he mentally prepared himself to make a speech, a speech that would be both reasonable, concise and fair. Churchillian, if you will.

  Marlon rolled down the window and nodded at him. Before Daniel could utter a word, Marlon pointed past him to number eleven, which still looked dark in the early morning sun.

  “The house has gone wrong,” he said. “We can’t go home.”

  Daniel had heard about the Potterton house, of course. He’d also heard about Milton Bream. But his own house at number twelve was the closest to the junction with the Brenthwaite Road, and Daniel had little reason to traverse Hope Street to its far end, so he’d never actually seen how the houses could change so utterly.

  Seeing the shadows that overcast number eleven, he was stuck with a stark and inexplicable sense of horror. Objectively, the house looked little different; its window frames were still in need of repainting and the lawn was rough and overgrown. But there was something else about the house which felt wrong to him, a deep almost-imperceptible vibration that made his blood worry, and his bones scrape inside of him.

  Daniel Dormer did not intend to take Marlon and Julia into his family’s home. It was a decision he made too soon and with too little thought. Even as they stepped over his threshold, looking and acting as humble and docile as the others in the street who had been taken in by their neighbours, Daniel felt a sudden panic that he was doing the wrong thing, a nagging sense that they were infected by the same careless toxicity which had made their home unliveable: an infection they might carry with them, an infection they might spread to the military orderliness of number twelve. The others in the street had been hosting the homeless for weeks now, months. He wondered how he would ever get rid of the couple now they had moved in.

  Despite the fact that Kelly Dormer was delighted by her husband’s decision to invite the couple into their home, despite the fact that Hilary was excited to have visitors he could show off his toys to, Marlon Swick and Julia Prin only stayed one night at number twelve Hope Street.

  As they lay awake in the spare bedroom—a pristinely ordered room that had been barely used—Julia stared at the shadows of the thin curtains which streaked the ceiling and made it marble.

  “Perhaps our luck is a limited resource,” she said, “and so far, we’ve invested it all in one part of our lives and not another. We’ve been so lucky living here on Hope Street, but that’s gone now. So perhaps the luck will work on something else now? Maybe we’ll be lucky where we’ve been unlucky before?”

  And she turned to him and traced her hand over his chest and down his abdomen.

  They made love in a stranger’s house that night. They were slow and careful and as silent as they could be, surrounded by floral wallpaper, lace and perfume. Every feeling was bitten back, friction dulled, movement muted.

  And on the other side of the wall, while his wife slept beside him with an eye-mask over her face, Daniel Dormer listened hard, hearing every distended breath. He smiled to himself greedily because, good neighbours that they were, Marlon and Julia had given him an excuse to become himself again.

  *

  The following morning, Marlon and Julia were asked to leave number twelve and find their own accommodation elsewhere. Daniel told them this without malice, acting simply as though his offer to host them had only ever been for one night.

  Marlon didn’t want to make a scene, Julia looked as though she was preoccupied by other concerns. Outside, they stood by the car, listening to Kelly Dormer raising her voice for the first time in her marriage, saying things she would later regret, because regret was easier to manage, easier to accommodate.

  Julia took Marlon’s hand.

  “I want to go home,” she said. And Marlon nod
ded, as though deep down part of him wanted the very same thing.

  They ignored the darkness of number eleven, seeing only the sunlight in each other. Marlon unlocked the door and they kissed on the threshold, a long, deep and beautiful kiss. Julia took Marlon’s hand and guided it down to her abdomen.

  “Lucky,” she said.

  “Lucky,” he agreed and opened the door.

  Together, they stepped inside. Together, they fell. Together, they died in the unliveable house, their feet splayed across the doorstep. To the casual observer, they looked peaceful and content, a couple who loved each other very much, holding each other until the end.

  SOME VALUABLE CONTEXT

  Hope Street was a line of neat detached houses situated nearly halfway between the town of Midholme to the south and the village of Brenthwaite to the north. It lay with its back to the outer seam of St Crispin Woods, and faced sixteen acres of farmland, sloping downhill before it, separating the line of houses from the Brenton Road Estate on the northern edge of Midholme.

  Geographically and psychologically, Hope Street was neither part of the town to the south (except for administrative purposes) nor part of the village to the north, (except for the few who patronised St Joseph’s church.) It was its own little world, a holloway between the wood and the field, between the town and the countryside.

  There were twelve detached houses built side by side with neat apex roofs and ruddy red tiles. Each had originally been constructed to an identical design in the late 1960s, with the expectation that the farmland would ultimately be sold to developers and the road, cheaply procured at the time, would find itself at the vanguard of the town. Nearly fifty years later, the farmland, still mired in complex negotiations, continued to cycle wheat and rape seed, while Hope Street had gone from cheap and isolated to exclusive and private, the individual houses evolving independently to reflect the change. Each now diverged from its original schema in its own particular and distinct manner: number three had a new front porch; numbers six, eight and twelve had loft conversions; most now had conservatories of various sizes and designs; and number four had a new double garage and a swimming pool.