The Year's Best Horror Stories 15

by Karl Edward Wagner (Ed. )

  Mrs. Telford had aged considerably since Daniel had last met her. Loss of weight had sharpened the birdlike quality of her angular face, while her hair was thinner and paler as though it had died. Between her chair and the door, occupying half of the small room, was a black wooden handloom. Her hands, which, like her son’s, were long-fingered and slender, perched on the shuttles. Squares of completed cloth, their pattern lost in the dimness, hung from several of the wires. After the brief interruption, her hands slipped back into the involuntary routine of movement. The clicking of the shuttles synchronized with her words: “So you’re Danny Carr, I remember you.” As they talked, Peter shifted uneasily at the door. “Peter told me about meeting you at this job, a strange coincidence, don’t you agree?” She sniffed. “Have you two been drinking?”

  “Only a little,” said Peter. He moved clumsily around the room; the contrast with his mother’s appearance made him seem heavier than before. Daniel watched the alternating shuttles, nearly hypnotized.

  “You know how it is,” Mrs. Telford said to Daniel, “when they grow up you’ve got no authority any more. He doesn’t listen, doesn’t even hear me. And when he’s been so ill—” Her eyes focused on a point somewhere in front of Daniel’s face; he remembered that she was shortsighted.

  “Just some kind of allergy,” Peter muttered to no one in particular. The abstraction that had been noticeable in the pub was taking possession of him. He drew away from his phantom image in the window and occupied himself with coughing quietly. “Must have been the dust in the factory. It was only the first day.”

  “Well, why not spend all of your money on poisoning yourself?” Her hands increased in pace; she glanced at Daniel as if to say can’t you see the joke? The patches of finished cloth shifted in position, like draughts on a board. “Can you stay for dinner?”

  “No, thank you. I’ve got to get home soon.” He was glad that this was true: eating in strange company made him feel stupidly clumsy. But Peter had behaved as though he wanted to discuss something. He felt guilty about leaving now, while his friend was off balance.

  “Why don’t you show Danny your music room?” Mrs. Telford said. Peter stepped forward, his face still in shadow. He reached out a hand as though to touch her bent shoulder, to make a link, but drew it back. “You’ll excuse me for not coming with you,” she continued to Daniel, “I don’t walk around much these days. My arthritis is getting worse.” For the first time, he noticed a pair of dull aluminum crutches leaning against the far wall, next to Peter.

  The music room was upstairs, between the two bedrooms. It had clearly once been a child’s bedroom, perhaps Peter’s; the wallpaper, tacky with mingled dust and moisture, was the same sickly pink as the cotton curtains. Two gray metal bookcases stood to left and right, one erratically packed with books, the other bearing heaps of music scripts, some in box files, most in loose bundles. “Most of the music was my father’s,” Peter said. In the middle of the room stood the large piano that Daniel remembered from the front room of the Telford’s former house. Behind it, a dull brass Christ was dying on the wall, small as a pinned insect.

  “You still play the piano?” he said. Memories jabbed him: Peter in music lessons at school, in the junior-school assembly hall, at home in the evening. The wooden mouth jerked open to reveal the pattern which he had been reminded of several times lately, though he couldn’t recall what by. Peter sat down on the stool and bent his head low over the keyboard, as though trying to read it. From downstairs Daniel could hear the insistent click of the loom; and from along the street, he heard the crunch and scrape of demolition.

  Peter had been playing for what must have been half an hour when the lights went out; Daniel had listened in a kind of confused trance that was more submission that attention. The player seemed to draw life out of the keys into his fingers, while his body and head remained fixed as a fetal statue. One of the keys struck dully—the wire was slack—and he drew in breath abruptly whenever he touched it, or when he played an occasional wrong note. Every few minutes he either switched to another tune or waited for Daniel to suggest one. When the house suddenly went dark, he carried on playing; perhaps his eyes were closed. Daniel remembered that the local papers had carried warnings about the likely effect of coal shortages on Midland power stations. He wondered whether there were any candles in the house. In the dark the piano, a cold and painful voice, limped on regardless; so, he realized suddenly, did the even click of the handloom downstairs. There was a quality both reassuring and slightly threatening in these sounds that kept him, silent, in his chair and listening. Gradually his friend’s profile defined itself out of the gray.

  He could see the piano and its hunched player with detailed clarity, though the rest of the room was blurred; and no light came from the window. He could even distinguish the black from the white keys, and follow Peter’s fingers on them. The tune was familiar, though he couldn’t put a name to it. There must be a draught from somewhere, turning the room cold; the walls were invisible, and he could imagine himself to be in a vast open tunnel. The figure in front of him was smaller and more sharply featured than before. There was less of a curve to the mouth, and the eyes were wider open. The thought let a few words loose from the tune: and the every, every time that I look into his eyes, he reminds me of the fair young maid ... But he didn’t want to look into the eyes, for this was the face that Peter had worn perhaps seven years ago. He hoped that the illusion would dissolve before this image could turn toward him a face of terrible perfection. If only Peter would cough, falter or play a false note, it would set him free. But the notes plucked at him, drawing his eyes to the piano, where he could now see the strings and the hammers forming the skeleton of a chessboard, one square vibrating at a time. Dust surged back and forth on the squares, almost making figures—the draught was coming from the piano, he realized. That was why its teeth were chattering. He suspected that if he looked downward, he would be able to see the loom, the hands riding the shuttles, even the pattern on the finished squares. He did not look downward, but tensed in his chair, captured by vertigo.

  A mass of figures hovered, inside or beyond the piano. They were houses in a street plan. As Peter used the loudness pedal in two harsh chords, the houses disintegrated. Some burned like newspaper, some were simply flattened. Others remained in place as charred shells, standing without roofs or windows. They could all have been card houses in the wind. Human figures struggled in them like insects being tortured by children, until they had no limbs left to struggle with. Even when the jagged ruins were softened by drifting gray snow, a few people wandered over the mounds, perhaps wondering where their homes were. One made a cross of sticks and left it stuck at an angle in the snow—was it snow or ashes? Whatever it was, it blew into people’s faces and shriveled them. Kings and knights turned to pawns and were captured. The curled bodies glowed faintly, like their own ghosts, until the gray covered them entirely. The piano’s cold notes fell into the vacuum, while the loom continued to mark the time, a perpetual metronome. Daniel squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his hands over his ears. He would not let this instrument draw the life out of him on its wires—but he could feel the response growing in him like unexpelled breath; tears formed behind his eyelids. The despairing reached out for him with arms that stretched harder even as the flesh dripped from them. Their faces were lost, but photographs of his family were stuck over the skulls. Before he could find his own among the faces, Daniel stood up and fumbled for the wall. Almost blind, he made his way by touch to the door. He searched for words. “Good-bye,” said Peter, setting him free.

  “Good-bye.” The movements that took him downstairs and outside felt arbitrary. The streets were lightly smeared with mist; he felt warmer in the open air. There was a space in his thoughts where the edges itched like healing tissue; what continually seemed worst to him was how the feeling from within himself had suddenly closed off. It had been too easy to walk away, there should have been more sense of decision. On the
horizon, street lamps were reduced to slanted eyes. The road-menders had packed up for the night; their trenches by the pavement appeared bottomless. It was some time before he happened to find the bus stop. Every vehicle that passed was transformed into anonymous gray. As Daniel finally stepped onto the bus it occurred to him that he had forgotten to say good-bye to Mrs. Telford. He would apologize when he saw Peter at work on Monday.

  There was no work until the following Thursday, however, and the group that Daniel found himself in was mostly different from that of the first week. Peter was not among them. “I’ve no idea,” the foreman said when Daniel asked, “probably he found another job.” Another van almost indistinguishable from the first ferried them to a series of small factories where they packed boxes with sawdust, polished machinery until it shone like bone. Daniel eventually became fascinated by the pattern that the company’s activity was forming in the city. He was reminded of a novel that he had once read which suggested a hidden meaning in the architecture of San Francisco; the idea had so many applications that at times only a growing insecurity could pull him out of speculation. In a similar way, he began to find that he could listen to the radio for hours while he tried to link the underlying threads in the music. He played his records until he could hold every note and space in his mind, where he replayed them at different speeds. The language of musical notation was surely not adequate. It might conceal another language, he realized, that contained messages. Perhaps a way in which ghosts could communicate. A dead language. Daniel knew that these patterns were illusory, but it didn’t matter. At least they responded to minds, which no object could. Weeks went past while he placed abstractions between himself and Peter; and nothing changed, except that the day shrank like a window between the curtains of night, and the patterns of leaves on the sky and the pavement became simpler.

  One night he dreamed an idea and lay awake, thinking it out, while the moon appeared and vanished. If he cast a grid over a map of the city and used it as a chessboard (playing against himself, as he was used to doing), the movements of the winning pieces would tell him where the company’s influence was directed. The losing king’s position would tell him where Peter’s house was; he had forgotten the address, and their name was not in the phone book. He was shivering in a dressing-gown, searching through his shelves for a nonexistent town plan, when the pattern allowed him to admit that he could find Peter’s house quite easily by memory. He hurried back to bed and pressed his eyes into the pillow before they could project the previous night’s dream. He had been lying in the middle of a small bedroom, with pink curtains and a dull crucifix on the wall. A man had stepped toward him in the half-light; his face was invisible, but his outstretched hands were dark with soot. Just before touching him the hands had drawn back to peel off thin gray gloves, which he had hung up like paper bags on the crucifix. But when they had fluttered back to him the hands were still gray.

  When he got off the bus the fixed, cloudless brightness of the November day made the facades of houses resemble postcards. Gaps made by demolition punctuated the series. Daniel tried to ignore the sequence of missing buildings; the pattern might lead him astray. If this was the right way, they must have filled in some of the trenches and dug new ones. He was becoming certain that he had lost his way when a Watneys pub held up the black weight of its name on a sign: The Anvil. On a bench outside, two men sat asleep, cocooned in layers of frayed clothing. He could recognize some of the posters on the boards—somebody had scratched out the middle of the word WORKERS to expose a pop star’s face—but the dissected house whose red staircase he had seen was now a patch of rubble-strewn ground where weeds were already growing. On the off-white side wall of the next house, graffiti were interlaced so densely at the eye level that one could read anything into the scribbling. Surely this was the road, where a young boy in cut-off jeans was running across to bowl a tennis ball into the passageway between two houses. Dodging the airborne stroke that followed, he walked down and examined each house for signs of familiarity. Unexpectedly, he found himself looking through a line of railings; below, a drowned-looking black barge was adrift on the canal, its curtains drawn. Neither the boat nor the litter of leaves and twigs on the surface appeared to be moving. It was the next house, he remembered; but it had a ragged privet hedge instead of a wall, enclosing rose bushes stripped down to thorns. He must be in the wrong street, he realized, but recognized the house opposite as he turned. One of its upper windows wore a board like an eye patch; the result of vandals, he supposed.

  There was no answer to his knock, but the flaking door creaked open at the pressure. The inner door was ajar; he pushed through it. “Hello? Mrs. Telford?” Then he coughed at the sharp dust which the draught loosed from the carpet. Damp painted a forest in the hall. Dust filled in the angles of the stairs. Obviously this house, whatever it was, had not been lived in for years.

  From the unlit front room there came a regular clicking sound.

  “Hello? Come in.” It was her voice. The carpet felt puffy underfoot. In the front room he could hear water dripping onto the ceiling. The window where Peter had flinched from his reflection had been smashed also, but not boarded. The draught took the door from his hand and slammed it. “Oh, Danny. It’s you.” Mrs. Telford’s bright eyes did not focus at all. She was running the shuttles back and forth on the loom as efficiently as ever, though the wood seemed darker and warped out of true. There were no threads attached to the shuttles.

  “Is Peter here?” Daniel said, and sneezed painfully.

  “I’ve finished the cloth, look!” She pointed to a thick roll on the tea-table. Daniel repeated his question.

  “He’s upstairs. In the music room.” Daniel made his way cautiously up the Uneven stairs, holding on to the banister until it suddenly lurched away from the wall. The door to the music room was open. He looked in at the figure hunched over the piano. Peter’s hands ran over the keys, but no sound came. Daniel shivered; was he deaf? Sweat tickled his back like a cold wire. There was a strong antiseptic smell in the room. He sneezed again, and heard it.

  “Peter. It’s Danny, what are you doing?” The silent performance continued. Daniel crossed the floor toward the helpless Christ, then turned to the piano. Peter’s eyes were closed; he did not appear to be breathing. Tiny clouds of dust appeared from between the keys as he played. Now that he was close, Daniel could make out an almost entirely muffled thud from within the piano at each note. He realized that it was choked up with dust. In the middle of a tune, Peter stopped and opened his eyes.

  “Peter. What’s wrong?” The player looked at his hands. They were scrubbed pink and recently scarred with scratches. Dust was beginning to smear the fingertips. Some black material was lodged under the nails. Slowly, he began to rub his hands, like a Lady Macbeth in a silent film, and then to rip at the skin with his nails. Blood ran down onto the piano keys. Daniel’s face flushed, but he could not cry, he was not capable of it. When his hands were red-gloved, Peter reached down under the stool and lifted a large bottle and a wad of cotton-wool. He dabbed antiseptic solution from the bottle onto his hands, wiped away the diluted stain, and swabbed the skin clean with fresh solution. His expression had still not changed (indeed, he wore no expression at all) as he put away the bottle and the cotton-wool and, closing his eyes, commenced to play what looked like the same tune as before.

  Descending the stairs less carefully than he had climbed them, Daniel stood for a while in the hall, then went back into the front room. Mrs. Telford looked up at him and smiled. Her hands still shifted the vacant shuttles. “Look at the tapestry, go on. It’s finished.” He picked up the bundle of cloth and unrolled it. The material was soft and light, pleasant to the touch. He held it up to the light: the pattern was composed of innumerable tiny black and white squares. “Stand back from it,” she said. “Then you’ll see what it is.” Daniel spread it on the floor and looked down. He stared for some time. Then he looked straight up at Mrs. Telford.

  “I ca
n’t see anything in it.” He rolled up the cloth tightly and set it back on the table.

  “Then you’ll be all right,” she said. “It can’t hurt you.” She watched the nonexistent threads on her loom. Her hands slid back and forth, regular as a pendulum. A few minutes later, she said: “That’s all, you’ve nothing to do here. Goodbye.”

  Daniel was outside and anesthetized by the cold, sharp winter air before he realized that, for the second time, he had forgotten to say goodbye to Mrs. Telford. He continued to walk toward the bus stop, still wondering quite what had changed in him. But it was too difficult to know. He found himself wishing it would rain, though the sound would be entirely drowned out by the rush hour traffic.