From midway across the field, the line of twelve pointed roofs looked like a row of filed teeth bordering the woodland. From the top floor of the number 16 bus as it swooped up the hill every twenty minutes towards Brenthwaite, they looked like a large picket fence that had been subsumed by the surrounding farmland.
From ground-level, the street was quiet and pleasant, curving gently to the west and out of sight from the Brenthwaite road. The tarmac had seen better days, but the pot holes were easy to avoid if you knew where they were and many an estate agent had mistaken them for character. And while the low stone wall that separated the road from the fields had collapsed in a number of places, there was something about it which connected deeply to the middle class investor. It was neither completely urban nor completely rural. It was both, and it was neither, and when the wind picked at the trees of St Crispin Wood and made them roar, it sounded as though it could have been the sea.
THE RESIDENTS’ COMMITTEE
The community of Hope Street prided themselves in their strength and their support. Together, they considered themselves a text-book example of how people could work together, even if individually they were less idealistic, and certainly less confident in the motives of their neighbours.
The residents’ committee met on the first Thursday of every month, cycling through the houses from number one to number twelve, from January through to December. It was a neat system and a consistent one. Every January, Bryn Purbrick hosted the meeting in his open plan lounge, which his partner Howard would redecorate each year to an agreed theme, and every December, Daniel Dormer would use the opportunity to host his annual Christmas-tree party, in which the residents would be invited to help decorate the family tree, while drinking sherry and eating Kelly’s mince pies.
Attendance at the meeting was certainly not compulsory, but several years earlier, Carla Bretton had taken it upon herself to record non-attendance in her little Moleskine notebook, arguing that those who paid more attention to local affairs should rightfully have more say. On the morning Marlon and Julia died, she poured over her findings to try and determine a correlation between the houses which had become unliveable and the residents who had the poorest attendance record at the monthly meetings. She was disappointed to find there was none at all.
Over the past few years there had been only few major incidents that the committee had been required to address. There had been a handful of planning applications, but few were contentious and most were modest in scope, each being passed with the minimum of attention. A council proposal to build a new recycling depot opposite the Hope Street turn-off was successfully petitioned against, as was the council’s decision to remove the Hope Street bus stop, even though none of the residents of Hope Street used the bus which sped past twelve times a day.
Crime was also low. There had been a brief spate of burglaries some six years earlier, but nothing since the Neighbourhood Watch initiative had been instigated. There was a half-way house on the Brenton Road Estate, and one of its residents occasionally found their way into the cul-de-sac, but on the whole it was a quiet and peaceful little street; one the authorities rarely needed to venture into, let alone trouble.
Perhaps this was why nobody moved the bodies of Marlon and Julia when they died. A vague sense of unreality made the incident look perversely gauche in the neatly-trimmed street. It was something people struggled to engage with, it felt too unlikely to be genuinely tragic. The other reason was easier to explain: nobody dared. The house was unliveable after all, and the bodies proved it to anyone who would look.
Milton Bream got the closest. He was frustrated that no one thought to try and move the bodies. It was disrespectful, it was unkind. Marlon’s foot had fallen across the threshold, so he imagined it might be possible to reach it and pull them both free from the house that had ended them. A small crowd gathered to watch him edge up the driveway of number eleven as though it were a steepening hill, his arm outstretched as though he might draw the couple towards him with some telekinetic will.
Later, he told Penny Moon how he’d felt a dense pressure growing heavy in his chest the closer he got to the house. It felt as though he was pushing himself through successive curtains of something viscous and suffocating. He said he saw how Marlon’s body had landed. Not on Julia’s, but beside it, his arm draped around her waist as though he were still holding her to him and would continue to do so.
It felt like desecration, he said, justifying his retreat without admitting to the fear which had driven him away; and Penny reached across to him in the bed they now shared and slid her own arm over his. He took it and held it too tight. Over the past few nights, he’d been subjected to the same nightmare. That he’d looked through the window of number eight and seen Jemima inside, lying across the sofa in the same way that she used to when she watched that dancing programme on Saturday nights, but also very much not in the same way at all. In his dream, her head lolled too far to the side, her mouth hung rudely agape, and her legs were splayed and awkward. He’d rapped on the glass until his knuckles had split and the glass had smeared red so he couldn’t see her at all.
On this occasion, the authorities did arrive but they didn’t stay long. They’d seen this sort of thing before, they said and they milled around the garden of number eleven from a safe distance then went on their way again, leaving only a stern admonishment that no one else go near the affected houses. They promised that they’d be back to build a barrier of some sort, but they never did.
“It’s probably happening all over,” someone said, but no one really thought to find out.
A week later, Una Felton planted a small Anne Harkness rose in the front garden of number eleven. Years before she had planted the same variety in her back garden at number seven. Suzie had chosen it from the display at Hawsham’s Nurseries like she was picking her favourite colour from a paint catalogue. They had planted it together, a pleasant afternoon made more-so with hindsight, and to Una it represented a connection lost, the promise of potential left cruelly unexplored. She hoped its beautiful, apricot colours would have pleased Julia, and how that in turn, would have pleased Marlon. Despite Alasdair’s concern, she planted it as close to the house as she dared. It didn’t block the view. Its scent was too subtle to mask the smell of the bodies as they turned, but it was a gesture, and sometimes that was all that was possible, sometimes that was enough.
When she got home and washed the dirt off her hands in the utility room sink, she turned to Alasdair who was standing watching her from the doorway, and to Lewis and Lydia who were waiting behind him.
“I think someone needs to do something,” she said, her tone underlining how she didn’t trust anyone else to do so on her behalf.
The first emergency meeting of the Hope Street resident’s committee was called for the following weekend. The Felton’s had hosted the meeting only the previous month, but Milton’s house was now unliveable and so they volunteered, given the strangeness of the circumstances, to host it again. The feeling that things had changed irrevocably was impossible to ignore, but there was still a sense amongst some, that in calling the meeting without consultation, and by calling a second meeting at her own house, Una had done something vulgar and untoward.
As such, the faces that greeted her in the living room at number seven were not, she judged, entirely receptive to what she had to say. She centred herself and began.
“People are losing their homes,” she said. “People are dying. We have a responsibility to act. We have a duty to help.”
She outlined her hypothesis that other houses in the street would become unliveable, that other families would become homeless; that others might die.
“We have to watch out for one another,” she said. “The only way we can get through this is to do what we do best. To watch our neighbours, to notice when something looks wrong. To open our doors when their own becomes closed to them.”
The faces that looked back at her were blank, denting her confidence en
ough to make her falter.
“We can’t stand by,” she said. “We simply can’t.”
Her neighbours—those who had lost their homes and those who had not—looked at her impassively. There was no agreement, no argument. No one had anything to say in reply to her.
She wanted to tell them how she and Alasdair had started to work on the house so more people could stay. They’d cleared out the dining room, they’d emptied Suzie’s room, even the lounge could accommodate a family should the need arise. She wanted to tell them how Alasdair had been working in the shed at the bottom of the garden, making box-bed frames and futons to a design Una had found on the internet. But she didn’t tell them that. The faces that looked up at her reminded me of the children she used to teach before she’d retired, the same looks of insolent defiance she remembered when she took the whole class to task for whatever minor infraction.
She sighed.
“Also, I made biscuits,” she said instead.
To this at least, there was a murmur of appreciation.
“Oh, thank god for that,” Daniel Dormer said. Una Felton’s biscuits were legendary, after all.
NUMBER TWO
The next few months passed by without further incident and it felt for a time as though the crisis may have passed by entirely. Certainly it didn’t look as though the houses already affected might revert to normal again, but there didn’t seem to be any signs that the problem would continue. Over the course of the next three committee meetings, Una’s passionate concern seemed increasingly hyperbolic. The consensus of the other residents of the street was that what occurred already had been tragic, but it was time to move on, to look forward.
Despite this, the November meeting of the Hope Street residents committee took place at number two Hope Street, and the jarring disorder of this was more than enough to make the residents feel uncomfortable; a stark reminder that there were fewer houses in the street than there used to be.
But Daniel Dormer was adamant.
“It was like a storm,” he said, sitting comfortably in the high wing-backed armchair Carla Bretton’s husband used to favour. “It passed over us, it took its toll. It’s gone now.”
He smiled at Kelly, sitting beside him on one of the folding dining chairs.
“It certainly seems that way,” she said.
Carla Bretton leaned across Kelly to top up Daniel’s cup of tea from her Portmeirion teapot. She nodded in vigorous agreement.
“I made up a chart for the whole street during the last week,” she said, “and it says we’re home free. The stars never lie. They say the weather will be good for the next few months too.”
Una didn’t say anything. She’d humoured Carla’s “gifts” in the past, allowing her to make one of her star charts for Suzie after she moved out. It was all nonsense of course: Carla didn’t foresee how Suzie would drop out of her economics degree. She didn’t foresee the pregnancy or the termination, and she certainly didn’t predict how she would chase some square-jawed surfer halfway across the world to move in with him in some beach hut in Sydney. Of course she didn’t. And of course, Una hadn’t believed a word of it at the time either; she’d invited Carla over as a courtesy. She was being neighbourly, she was being nice. Considering her argument with the committee, perhaps it was ironic that she could now see how niceness was a weakness that could be perceived as a trap. How typical that by being accommodating more than twenty years ago she should risk exposing herself as a hypocrite in the present.
She cleared her throat.
“This isn’t about how things are now,” she said, “this is about what might happen in the future. It’s household insurance. If you had a power cut and spent the night in darkness, you would buy candles the next day so you won’t be caught out a second time. All I’m arguing is that we offer the same compassion to others as we might hope to receive ourselves. We each put a candle in reserve for each other should we need it.”
She looked around the room sternly.
“Because you can never tell when it will happen again,” she said.
Carla cleared her throat to say something. Her expression was one Una had seen before: part persecuted, part condescending. It was the expression she wore when someone quoted science at her, the expression she wore before she launched into a defence of the gift she claimed to have inherited from her grandmother.
On this occasion, Lydia Potterton got there first.
“I think we should all leave,” she said. “I think we should all leave right now.”
She was staring up at the corner of the room where Carla’s fuchsia-striped wallpaper met the moulded coving which ran the circumference of the ceiling. There was nothing there to see, but there was an unshakeable sense that there would be. The sense that, under scrutiny, the paint would darken and peel and the wallpaper would bubble and blacken.
Milton Bream was on his feet first.
“I’m sorry,” he said, bundling for the door, Penny Moon close on his heels. The remaining residents heard the front door open and slam shut before they thought to do anything themselves, they heard footsteps diminish on the garden path.
It was like something out of a cartoon, Una thought. That coyote running out over the edge of a cliff. And he’s doing fine until he notices how casually he’s breaking the laws of physics. He only falls when he realises that he should. The safety of ignorance before understanding, the precious calm before the fall.
The calm in number two Hope Street lasted all of fifteen seconds before the panic muscled in and took its place. In the very same moment, everyone was on their feet. A moment later and everyone was at the lounge door. The houses in Hope Street were built during a time where smaller doorways were preferable because it meant the rooms would be easier to keep warm, and so the crowd quickly bottle-necked, frustration and fear flaring like wildfire.
Una and Alasdair were near the back of the crowd, seated by the window. Una had found herself unable to overcome her habit of stepping aside to let others go before her. She glanced up at the corner of the room and, while it had not changed in any visible manner, she felt the threat of it had intensified, like a magnifying glass focusing the late autumn sunlight.
“If everyone just goes one at a time,” someone said. It sounded like Bryn, his voice far too reedy to carry any weight or credence, no matter how good the advice was. Everyone was pushing towards the door. Whenever they relaxed just a moment to consider the logic of the situation, someone else pushed from behind and that only made them redouble their efforts.
The fear was animal. The smell of it seeped into the room, made it dense and primal.
Una heard the door clatter open as the neighbours fought to free themselves, popping out into the hallway like champagne corks. She heard their footsteps faltering on the path outside.
She felt Alasdair’s hand in hers and felt his own impatience coiled up tight within it.
“We’re going to be too late,” he said. He looked behind him at the window. Then he kissed Una on the cheek and stepped across the room to examine it closer.
The window was locked. Alasdair recognised the residents’ committee approved window fasteners bolted to the levers on both opening panes; they were the same model he had himself and he had a key for them somewhere, probably at home in the glass jar where he and Una kept such domestic ephemera. Instead he picked up the dining chair that Kelly Dormer had been sitting on, and thrust it legs first towards the glass. It took a few attempts before the glass gave way, more with a creak and a crack than with a satisfying shatter.
“That’s my window!” Carla Bretton squeaked from the front garden, apparently having been one of the first to escape from the house. Alasdair ignored her. He hammered away the remaining shards of glass with a broken chair-leg, and tore down the curtain to cushion the jagged teeth they left behind in the frames.
“You can’t break my window!” Carla said. “When this is all over I’ll have to fix it. You’re paying for it, Alasdair Felton. I tell
you right now, you’re paying for it all. Otherwise my lawyers will hear of this, you mark my words.”
She hovered on the other side, her hands flapping. Behind her, the crowd of residents watched from a safe distance.
“And those are my best curtains,” Carla said. “You have no respect for other people’s property. Those were my mother’s curtains. She had them made after she got married and I kept them as a reminder of her. Those are precious things. You can’t treat them like that.”
“Carla,” Alasdair said, “please step out of the way so my wife can get out of your house.”
But a polite request was not enough to move Carla.
“This is an outrage,” she said and she started pulling the curtain away, her little fists grasping the fabric and ripping it over the remains of the broken glass.
Alasdair shot a glance to his wife, then to the door which remained blocked by the dwindling jumble of remaining residents.
“One moment, dear,” he said. He vaulted out of the window with a deftness that belied his years, then took Carla by the shoulder and gently guided her away from the window. She was still arguing, still flapping her arms as Penny Moon stepped in with an apologetic expression to lead her away.
Una approached the window and smiled. She set her hands on the ledge, made soft by the curtain, and watched as Alasdair hurried back across the garden to help her.
“What a wonderful thing you are,” she said.
And then the house became unliveable and she died.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4 Page 32