House of Fear

by Joe R. Lansdale

  It doesn’t look too happy, Franz thought. It had its tail between its legs and slunk along with its belly almost touching the ground. Murdock closed the back of the van and crossed the street towards Franz’s house with the dog following close behind.

  Franz moved backward a couple of steps, fearing he might be visible from the street. Murdock moved up to his front door and Franz expected him to knock or ring the bell, but it didn’t happen.

  Guessing that Murdock was reconnoitering his house, Franz waited to see what move his visitor would make next. After a long silence, he heard his letter box squeak. Then Murdock appeared in his little front garden again, pursued by the dog. As he got to the point where the garden ended and the street began, he stopped, turned, looked up to where Franz had concealed himself, and raised an arm in some sort of salute. At the same time the hood fell back and Franz saw that he was smiling broadly, almost laughing. He turned, crossed the street, let the dog in the back of the van, got in himself and drove away.

  After waiting a few minutes in the dark, Franz ventured out of his bedroom and went downstairs without turning on any lights. He saw that a folded piece of paper had been posted through his letterbox. There was enough light from the street lamp outside his house for him to see, when he unfolded the paper, that there was nothing written on it at all. But he got the message.

  He spent the next half hour going round his house with a little torch and filling his rucksack with essentials for travel. He made sure he had his passport, credit cards in his wallet, and some folding money.

  Then, after checking to make sure there was no sign of the white van anywhere nearby, he ran out to his car and drove swiftly away. After parking in the airport lot, he checked the departures board, then walked up to the Scandinavian Airlines stand and bought a one-way ticket. He wasn’t sure how long he was going to be away, but it was definitely time he took a break He’d decided he had a lot to get away from.

  Next morning, at about eleven o’clock as usual, Murdock lumbered into Jerry’s room without knocking, with a selection of daily newspapers under his arm. He lit a cigar, sat down close to Jerry’s wheelchair, and spread the papers on the table in front of him.

  “Anything especially grim today?” Jerry asked, genuinely expectant of some entertaining bad news.

  Murdock made a play of searching through the sheets of paper as he said, “Well, not much actually, it’s been a good day for the world, all thing considered, but I did spot one small item of interest. Now let me see… ah, here we have it.” He held up a page of newspaper and said, “It seems a 747 came off the runway in Oslo last night and hit a luggage vehicle.”

  “Much harm done?”

  “A few people hurt in the ensuing fire but only one fatality.”

  “Oh. Hardly worth mentioning, then.”

  “It says here that the dead man was believed to be carrying an English passport but the body was too badly burned to be identified. Next of kin have yet to be informed.”

  “They’ll soon sort that out,” Jerry said, without much interest.

  Murdock, who seemed to be very pleased about something, perhaps just himself, said, “I expect they already have done.”

  Downstairs, sounding faintly mournful and further away than it actually was, a phone began to ring.

  FLORRIE

  Adam L. G. Nevill

  If anybody has proved the persistent popularity of supernatural fiction, then it is Adam Nevill. His three novels, Banquet for The Damned, Apartment 16 and The Ritual, have all received critical and commercial success. Adam’s love for the genre comes through in every one of his tales and the story that follows proves his mastery of the form. The place where Florrie lives is, at first glance, not all that remarkable, but once her story is told, you’ll never forget her.

  Frank remembered his mother once saying, “houses give off a feeling,” and that she could ‘sense things’ inside them. At the time, he was a boy and his family had been drifting around prospective family homes. He only remembered the occasion because his mother was distressed by a house they had just viewed; if not hurried away from, to get back to the car. But all he could recall of the property now was a print of a blue-faced Christ within a gilt frame; the only thing on any of the walls. And the beds were unmade, which also shocked his mother. His father never contradicted his mother on these occasional matters of a psychic nature, though his father never encouraged her to hold forth on them either. “Something terrible happened there,” was his mother’s final remark once the car doors were shut, and it was never mentioned again. But Frank had been perplexed by the incongruity of a house belonging to Christians issuing an unpleasant ‘feeling.’ Surely the opposite should have been true.

  Frank amused himself trying to second guess her intuition about the first home he’d ever owned. He knew what his Dad would say about the 120% mortgage he’d arranged for it. But once it was fixed up, he’d have them down. To his place. His own place, after ten years of shared accommodation.

  The narrow frontage of grubby bricks faced a drab street, cramped with identical terraced houses leaning over a road so narrow that two cars from opposite ends struggled to pass each other. But a final jiggle of the Yale key moved him out of the weak rainy light to enter the unlit hallway, its air thick with trapped warmth. A cloud of stale upholstery, thoroughly boiled cauliflower, and a trace of floral perfume descended about him.

  He assured himself the house would soon exude the scents of his world: the single professional who could cook a bit of Thai, liked entertaining and used Hugo Boss toiletries. Once he’d ripped out the old carpets, stripped the walls, and generally ‘torn the shit out of it,’ as his best friend, Marcus, had remarked with a decisive relish, the house would quickly lose the malodour of the wrong decade, age group and gender.

  Enshrouded by weak light about windows begrimed with silt and a thicket of silvery nets, before he managed to place a foot inside the front room, he realised the place had not been cleared of the former owner’s furniture. There had been a mistake. It was like he had mixed up the dates and stepped into what was still someone else’s home; as if she still lived there. “Pure ’seventies Nan,” Marcus had commented with a grin on his face, the evening he’d visited to assist Frank’s purchasing decision between this two-up, two-down terrace, and an ex-council property in Weoley Castle that needed an airstrike more than a first time buyer.

  Poking from a Bakelite fitting, he found the chunky light switch, which was the same colour as the skirting boards, kitchen cupboards and the fittings: vanilla ice cream left too long in a freezer drawer, or the plastic of artificial limbs used until the 1970s. The ceiling fixture emitted a smoky glow from inside a plastic shade, patterned with all the colours inside a tin of fruit cocktail.

  As he stared at the cluttered room, his distaste and irritation swiftly fashioned fantasies of destruction towards everything inside: the rosewood sideboard; the gas fire grill that resembled the front of an old car, with plastic coals that would glow in the hearth; the ancient television in a wooden cabinet, the small screen concave like a poorly ground lens in a pair of NHS spectacles; the tufted sofa, exhausted and faded from a thing plush and dark four decades prior, but now sagging into the suggestion of a shabby velour glove, dropped from a giant’s hand. It all seemed offensive. An affront to taste. An issued intention to drag him backwards in time, choking him with disenchantment and despair as he went, kicking.

  Beneath his feet the dark red carpet swirled with green fronds that reminded him of chameleon tongues. He looked down at it, into it. The carpet absorbed most of the dim electric light. And it also seemed to suck the emotion out of Frank. In the dusty gloom, he felt chastened. Embarrassed and feckless, as if he had made an inappropriate remark in polite company. He steadied himself against a wall, the paper old and fuzzy against his fingers; the vine pattern no longer lilac on cream but sepia on parchment. About him the warmth and powerful fragrance of the room intensified, as did his curious guilt. Momentarily,
he was overwhelmed with remorse too, as if made to observe the additional distress his destructive thoughts had inflicted upon someone already frightened and long persecuted. He wanted to apologise to the room, out loud.

  Only the sound of a delivery truck, reversing and beeping outside, stirred him out of his inexplicable shame. The unpleasant feelings passed and he surveyed the room again. Where to start?

  Before he could pull up a single carpet tack, the furniture would have to be removed. All of it. He reached for his phone. This also meant the terrible Formica dining table with extendable flaps would be in the second downstairs room, along with the hideous quilted chairs. He checked: it was. “Fuck’s sake,” he whispered, then wondered why he’d kept his voice down, as if told to by an adult.

  He jogged up the narrow stairwell to expel the onset of fatigue, presumably caused by the stifling air. Or because his limbs demanded reparation for the accumulation of stress he’d endured for months preceding the exchange of keys.

  The master bedroom remained choked by the immense walnut-veneered wardrobe he’d seen on repeat viewings. Beside the towering wardrobe stood the teak dresser in defiance. A bed that had survived the Luftwaffe’s bombing of munitions factories on the nearby Grand Union Canal appeared implacable and vast enough to fill most of the floor space.

  One quick look around the door of the second bedroom confirmed a total repudiation of the estate agent’s promise that the house “would be emptied by the time of your possession,” because the room was still being used in absentia by the previous owner as a depository for cardboard suitcases, Christmas decorations from the 1970s, candlewick bedspreads, candy-striped linen, and knitting paraphernalia.

  On the tiny landing under the white hardboard loft hatch, he went cold and wondered if the old woman had moved out, or maybe even come back. “Went to a retirement home, I think,” the wanker that was the estate agent, Justin, of Watkins Perch and Manly, had said when Frank had asked about the former occupant. So why hadn’t her relatives collected her things?

  Because she had no one at the end.

  An unwelcome notion of age, its indignities, and its steady erasure of who you had been, and the recycling of the tiny position that had been your own in the world, overwhelmed him. The same tragic end game might befall him. One day. Right here. A sudden acute empathy with a loneliness that was absolute disoriented Frank. And it took a conscious effort to suppress the awful feeling. He went downstairs, quickly, wiping at his eyes.

  To listen to an answer machine at the estate agents. He left a curt message. Then turned about in the living room and forced a change of tack in his thoughts, by visualising the renovation he and Marcus intended: wooden floors, white walls, wooden blinds, minimalist light fittings, dimmers, wall mounted TV, black and white movie stills in steel frames on the walls, leather furniture, a stainless steel kitchen, a paved yard for outside dining, a spare room for his gadgets, guests and neat closet space, and nothing in the master bedroom but a bed and a standing lamp. Danish stylings throughout. Clean lines, simple colours. Space, light, peace, modernity, protection.

  He had his work cut out.

  On the Friday of his first week in the house, the former resident’s furniture was still in place, as it had been for long enough to leave the carpet dark beneath the sofa and solitary armchair in the living room. He hadn’t been able to begin stripping the walls of the living room or bedrooms. Until the furniture was hauled away, the kitchen was the only part of the house he could dismantle. Though he had become fond of using the kitchen to make egg and chips, which he’d not eaten since he was at school, and he also liked to listen to the radio in there. So he’d staved off pulling down any of the old wooden cabinets with their frosted glass doors. There was something cosy and confirming about the cupboards and the little white stove. And anyway, Marcus would arrive the next morning, Saturday, with his tools, so Frank had decided to postpone the destruction until then.

  He needed groceries too, for the weekend. Hadn’t organised himself enough to conduct a proper shop at a supermarket, so he’d been dipping in and out of the local shop, called Happy Shop, at the end of the road to feed himself. This would be his fourth trip up there in a week. Or was it more than that? Didn’t matter. And he was due a treat. Which might just be the Arctic Roll he’d been eyeing up in Happy Shop the day before, or was it on Wednesday? He couldn’t be certain; nothing really defined any one day during his first week in the house. They’d all been slow and reassuringly pleasant.

  And he found himself looking forward to his excursion to the strip-lit cave that was Happy Shop, run by a smiling Hindu man, that hoarded forgotten treasures from any seventies childhood. Going round the local shops was the furthest he’d ventured all week, too, because the house was immensely warm and safe and he’d come to consider the world outside the front door as not being either.

  After six months without annual leave, he’d quickly slumped into a routine of slouching on the sofa each morning to watch the greenish TV screen, too. It was his first opportunity to relax in months, which must have accounted for his torpor. The house untied his knots wonderfully; he slept like he was in a coma for an hour after lunch, until his shows came on. Not that he’d ever seen any of them before, due to work, but he’d quickly discovered preferences on the five terrestrial channels available.

  In the cupboard under the stairs he’d found, and laughed at, a tartan shopping trolley on wheels, beside a carpet sweeper he was sure he could flog on eBay to a retro nut. But having to fetch and carry so many tins all week from Happy Shop made the idea of using the trolley incrementally less amusing. Before he left the house on Friday, he even paused outside the cupboard and wondered whether anyone would see him with it rattling along the pavement behind him.

  Inside Happy Shop, his usual tastes deserted him. The idea of sushi, or stir fries, or anything with rice and coconut milk, or anything that had been messed about with, like the curries and chillies he was always eating, all running with sauce… turned his stomach. Revolted him. Instead, he’d spent his first week eating tinned pink salmon and a brand of white bread he remembered as a kid, and had believed wasn’t even sold anymore. There had been tinned rice pudding, a Victoria sponge, ice cream packaged in cardboard, and Mr Kipling French Fancys for pudding during the week too. A taste for condensed milk and individual frozen chicken pies had been rediscovered. And he’d bought, for the first time in his life, a round English lettuce.

  Birdseye fish fingers and a tiny bag of minted peas landed in his basket; they had four baskets at the front of the shop that smelled of newspaper and tobacco. A tin of mandarin segments, strawberry Angel Delight – they still sold it in sachets! – a box of PG Tips, and a jar of Mellow Birds coffee went in next. He avoided anything with onions in it as he’d recently gone right off them.

  To his growing haul he added some Pledge furniture polish that he remembered under a sink in his family home, and realised he missed its smell; the veneered walnut finish on the wardrobe would come up a treat, as would the rosewood sideboard and teak dresser once he got busy with a duster.

  He’d become fond of using the cupboard above the cooker as a space for treats too; he could dip into it while he watched telly in the afternoon. Inexplicably, the true purpose of the cupboard seemed to have suggested itself to him. In Happy Shop, he bought a bag of Murray mints and a Fry’s Turkish Delight especially for it.

  Almost done. What else did he need? Washing up liquid. He seized one of the green and white plastic bottles of Fairy Liquid. He hadn’t seen that packaging in years, and when he smelled the red nozzle the fragrance of childhood summers made him instantly giddy as overexposed images flowed from his memory: running in swimming trunks, grass blades floating in a paddling pool, the plastic bottom blue, the water warm, suffocating with laughter as he was chased by his brother who squirted him with water from a Fairy Liquid bottle, trying to swim in the paddling pool – though the water was never deep enough and his knees bumped the bottom – then ly
ing face-down for five seconds before springing up to see if his mum was worried he’d drowned. He saw deck chairs in his mind, with his mom and nan in them, watching, smiling. He was rewound to such an extent, he even thought he could smell the creosote on the garden fence, that tang of burnt oil and timber.

  And then he walked home, dreamy, taking short steps with his head down, as if wary of hazards underfoot, until he snapped out of it and walked normally.

  When Marcus knocked at ten, Frank jumped up from the kitchen stool, but couldn’t account for why he was so nervous. Was being silly, but it was as if opening the front door was suddenly a cause of great anxiety. He hovered for ages, scarcely breathing, in the hall beside the thermostat that looked like something from an instrument panel at the dawn of space travel. When Marcus peered through the letter flap, Frank was forced to open up.

  “Fuck’s going on?” Marcus said, when he saw the kitchen. “I bought the tiles and units with me. This shit should be long gone by now. Your stuff can’t stay in my garage forever, mate.”

  Frank had convinced himself he could somehow delay, or persuade Marcus not to engage in the splintering of wood and crowbarring of those kitchen cabinets that must have been up there for decades. They were in good nick. Nothing wrong with them, so it seemed such a waste. And he wanted them left alone for another reason that had been nagging at him as Saturday approached: gutting the kitchen just felt wrong. Bad. Like violence. Like bullying. But he still helped Marcus break them away from the walls, because he was too embarrassed by his own sentimentality to defend them, but felt like crying as they did their worst.