God looked sad.
“I’m dying,” he said.
“Oh, dear,” said Steve.
“That’s a shame,” said Cindy.
“I’ve been mucking about with too many cancers. I’ve got nobbled by the ebola virus, I’ve come down with a spot of mad cow disease. It’s all the same to me. I’ve been careless. Too careless, and about things that were too important.” He coughed again, gently wiped at his mouth with a handkerchief, looked at the contents of the handkerchief with frank curiosity. He blinked.
“Shame,” said Cindy again.
“And I wanted to see you. I wanted to be with you, because we’re family, aren’t we, you were always my favourites, weren’t you, you’re my favourites, did you know that? I’m crazy about you crazy kids. I miss you. I miss you like crazy. We never had a cross word. Others before you, others after, well. I admit, I got angry, plagues, locusts, fat greasy scorchmarks burned into the lawns of the Garden of Eden. But I love you guys. I love you, Cindy, with your big smile and your deep eyes and your fine hair and your huge norks and your sweet, sweet-smelling clit. And you, what was it, Steve, with your, um. Winning personality. If I have to die, I want to die with you.”
His eyes were wet, and they couldn’t tell if he were crying or rheumy.
“This world can’t be all there is,” he breathed. “It can’t be. I have faith. There must be a way out.” He opened his spindly arms wide. “Give me a hug.”
So they did.
“Because,” said God. “You loved me once. You loved me once, didn’t you? You loved me once. You loved me. Tell me you loved me. Tell me you loved me once. You loved me. You loved me. You loved me.”
They buried their father in the back garden that night. It wasn’t a grand garden, but it was loved, and Cindy and Steve had planted flowers there, and it was good enough.
Then they went indoors, and they began looking for the dark space at the centre of the world. They’d been to Tenerife and to Venice, they’d seen no dark spaces there. So they looked in the kitchen, they cleared out the pots and the pans from the cupboard. They looked in the bathroom behind the cistern. They looked in the attic.
They decided to go to bed. It had been a long day. And Steve offered Cindy his hand, and she took it, a little surprised; he hadn’t offered her a hand in years. They both liked the feel of that hand holding thing, it made them seem warm and loved. They climbed the stairs together.
They looked for the dark space in the bedroom too, but it was nowhere to be found.
They got undressed. They kicked off their clothes, left them where they fell upon the floor, stood amidst them. They came together, naked as the day they were born. They explored each other’s bodies, and it was like the first time, now there were no expectations, nothing defensive, nothing to prove. He licked at her body, she nuzzled into his. Like the first time, in innocence.
She found his dark space first. It was like a mole, it was on his thigh. He found her dark space in the shadow of her overhanging left breast.
She put her ear to his thigh. Then he pressed his ear against her tit. Yes, there were such whispers to be heard! And they marvelled that they’d never heard them before.
She slid her fingertips into his dark space, and they numbed not unpleasantly. He kissed at hers, and he felt his tongue thicken, his tongue grew, all his mouth was a tongue. They both poked a bit further inside.
They wondered if they could squeeze themselves into something that was so small. They looked at each other for encouragement, but their faces were too hard to read. They wondered if they could dare. And then she smiled, and at that he smiled. And they knew they could be brave again, just one last time. They pushed onwards and inwards. And they went to someplace new.
THE MUSE OF COPENHAGEN
Nina Allan
It’s wonderful to discover a new writer who understands the traditions of supernatural fiction, while bringing something new to the field. There is something Aickman-esque about Nina’s story, but while you can feel the presence of that master of the genre there is also a bold and original voice here. ‘The Muse of Copenhagen’ proves that Nina Allan is an exciting new writer in the genre of the weird.
I dumped my holdall on the back seat of the taxi and got in beside the driver. When I told him where I wanted to go, he seemed surprised.
“Southshore?” he said. “I thought Mr Gouss was away?”
“My uncle’s dead,” I said. “He died at the weekend. I’m here to take care of the house.”
I thought it best to get the facts out into the open. People in small communities are invariably curious about each other and if I tried to keep my business a secret it would only make them gossip all the more. Everyone in St Lawrence knew my Uncle Denny. Whether they would remember me, I was less sure. Southshore had been my home throughout my boyhood, but I hadn’t been back to the house for a decade, not since Anka’s funeral. Uncle Denny packed up and left soon afterwards, dividing his time between his houses in Athens and Marseille. I never questioned him about his voluntary exile. Once I was past my teens, we didn’t tend to discuss our personal lives all that much. What we talked about mostly was stamps.
After Anka’s death, we didn’t see each other so often either, but we kept in touch fairly regularly by letter and then later by email. He usually phoned at Christmas and on my birthday, but his last call came out of the blue. It was a bad line. I couldn’t make out who it was at first. I put that down to the lousy connection, but as the conversation continued I realised it was more than that. Uncle Denny sounded weird. Furtive somehow, as if he was afraid someone might be listening in on what we were saying. He also seemed older. My uncle was getting on a bit, that was true, but he had always been fit and healthy, and the last time I saw him, in a restaurant in Geneva, he could have passed for sixty or even younger. Now suddenly he sounded ninety, and on his last legs.
“I’ve called to tell you you’ll get everything,” he said. “I’ve made sure you’ll inherit the lot. But I want you to clear the house, Johnny. I want you to promise. And you mustn’t touch anything yourself. Get a firm in. Don’t worry about the money, that’s all been arranged.”
“Steady on a moment, will you? I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about.”
“I’m talking about when I’m dead, of course. Get rid of it all. If I had my way, I’d burn the house down, but it’s too late for that.”
“This is crazy, Uncle Denny. Are you trying to tell me you’re ill?”
“Not so far as I know. I just wanted to get things settled, that’s all. You never know what’s round the corner, do you? Especially at my age.”
“You’ll live to be a hundred.”
“God forbid.” He laughed then, and immediately he sounded more like himself. “How are you, Johnny?”
I said I was fine, which I mostly was. I’d been working my way around to breaking the news of my divorce, but I didn’t want to do it over the phone and now didn’t seem like the right time in any case. Uncle Denny had been fond of Ginny, and when I received the news of his death a week later my first thought was one of relief, that at least now I wouldn’t have to tell him my marriage was over.
My second thought was that my uncle had predicted his own death. The thought made me go cold all over.
Southshore was never a grand house, but it had a sizeable chunk of land attached to it, and its westerly aspect meant that its narrow, high-ceilinged rooms were always full of the pearlescent, rain-coloured light particular to the estuary, even in summer. During the war, the house was requisitioned as a convalescent home for wounded soldiers; afterwards it was turned into a hotel. The business was successful for a while, but it began losing money in the mid-seventies, and by the time my uncle bought the place it had become run down almost to the point of dereliction.
I knew that Uncle Denny had been married before, very briefly, to a woman named Lily Betts, but I was scarcely more than a toddler at the time and I had no memory of her. It was Anka, of
course, that I remembered. Anka was Danish, and some twenty years younger than my uncle. I don’t know if Uncle Denny left Lily Betts to be with Anka, or whether his first marriage was over anyway. It was something that was never talked about. But my uncle often repeated the story of how Anka fell in love with Southshore at first sight. They were driving back to London after a day in the country and Anka saw the house out of the window. She made my uncle stop the car, telling him this was the house she wanted to live in and that they had to buy it. Less than two hours later Uncle Denny was putting his signature on a draft contract in an estate agent’s office in Maldon.
I think Anka loved eastern Essex because its level greenness and eroded coastline reminded her of Denmark. You say Essex and people think immediately of Ilford and Romford, the commercial wastelands of the London commuter belt. But the country around the Blackwater estuary is a flat, watery spread of narrow inlets and offshore islets, salt marshes and open grassland. Because of the constant steady ingress of tidal erosion, there is no coast road, and three of the four railway branch lines from Maldon were closed down during the Beeching reforms. The place bears a mantle of secrecy. Anka used to refer to it as her haven.
I never questioned what drew her to my uncle. Linden Gouss was a handsome man, generous and sharp-witted. He was also a highly successful businessman. It was only after Anka died that I wondered why they’d never had children of their own. I supposed there must have been some physical obstacle, some gynaecological complication. The idea of asking my uncle for details made me wince with embarrassment.
I pulled my suitcase out of the car and on to the gravel. A playful breeze was tripping in off the mudflats, bringing with it the familiar dense reek of bladder wrack. The sky was wide, clouded with bands of cirrus, opalescent as a late Turner. The house reared up before me like a mirage, like a faded Polaroid, and suddenly I felt emotions rising in me, a wave of feeling that could have been to do with my uncle’s death or with Ginny leaving, but that seemed to be connected with neither, that seemed to come from much further back, from that sun-drenched afternoon in late August when I was summoned to the headmaster’s office and told that both my parents had been drowned in the Victoria ferry disaster.
I paid off the cabby and stood with my back turned as he drove away, not wanting him to see how shaken I was.
Only when the taxi had passed completely out of earshot did I continue on up the drive and into the house.
What with the place having been unoccupied for so long I suppose I’d been prepared to find it in a bit of a state, but it was quite the opposite. The parquet looked recently polished, the air was filled with the scents of furniture wax and fresh chrysanthemums. There was a small stack of post on the hall table, all of it addressed to me, the various bills and legal permissions sent on to the house as promised by my uncle’s solicitor in Maldon. Everything looked cared for, pristine, and I remembered that as well as the annual heating and plumbing inspections Uncle Denny had employed a cleaner, some local woman from the village, to come in once a week to run a vacuum cleaner and a duster around and generally keep an eye on the place.
It must have cost him a small fortune over the years. It would have been cheaper to keep a pied-á-terre in London, not to say a great deal more convenient. I found myself wondering for the hundredth time why my uncle hadn’t just sold the place and been done with it.
I placed my luggage at the foot of the stairs and went through to the back. I felt on edge rather, starting at the slightest sound, although what I was expecting to encounter I had no idea. My uncle’s body had been cremated in Marseille, under the strict instructions that there should be no funeral service. He left a letter for me, apologising for his strange request but pleading for my understanding.
‘I can’t stand the thought of it,’ he wrote. ‘All those vultures standing around saying things they don’t mean and polishing off the last of my Sauternes. I don’t want it, Johnny. And you and I know that the important things have already been said.’
I guessed that when he spoke of the important things he was referring to our final telephone conversation. Once more I felt that odd frisson of disquiet, that after calling me he had sat down and written that letter, knowing in some mysterious manner that we had talked together for the last time.
I supposed the mystery was all in my head. There was nothing that unusual about an old man coming increasingly to realise that time was running out on him. If so-called psychic premonitions were what you were after, you only had to turn on the television or open a newspaper. What was harder for me to admit was how pleased I had been, not to have to drag myself all the way down to the south of France, to make stilted small talk with a bunch of strangers, to do all of it alone, without Ginny.
It wouldn’t have surprised me to discover my uncle had somehow known about that too, after all, and that his most likely reason for not wanting a funeral had been to spare me the trouble of attending it.
The back rooms were as clean as the hall. In the kitchen, the pedal bin under the sink was fitted with a fresh liner, and the fridge and one of the overhead cupboards had been stocked with a small store of basic provisions. Had my uncle informed the cleaning woman that I would be coming? I put on the radio, tuning it to a jazz station I liked, then filled the kettle and spooned sugar and instant coffee into a mug. The mug was one of Anka’s, the Royal Copenhagen beakers she always used for hot drinks at bedtime, or for Bovril when I was ill. The mugs were simple in form – straight white porcelain cylinders with a narrow gold band at the rim – but they were functional and elegant and I had always loved them. The very act of handling one of them gave me a sense of coming home, though I had forgotten all about them until now. I waited for the kettle to boil, thinking how these few small acts of ownership – playing some music, making coffee – had already altered the atmosphere of the place, shifting it from the past into the present.
I reminded myself that Southshore was mine now, not just the house but everything in it. It was only then that I started to wonder about my uncle’s odd instructions, the way he had insisted I dispose of everything. I had not dwelt on his words at the time, mainly because I had other things on my mind but also as I had not the slightest expectation of his dying. Now I was forced to ask myself what he had meant by it all. Surely he had not intended me to literally get rid of every last object in the house; the porcelain mugs, for instance? As I thought about this I realised something I had not realised even five minutes before: that I did not want to get rid of the mugs, that they were important to me because of the memories they held, and selling them would be a betrayal. It would be like selling off a part of my past.
Southshore would be full of such things: objects that contained within them the essence of my whole childhood and of such deep personal significance that the idea of parting with them was unthinkable.
I could not believe that this was what my uncle would have wanted. When my parents died, Uncle Denny did everything in his power to make a new and secure home for me at Southshore. I could not imagine him wilfully forcing me to give up any part of it.
I came to the conclusion that there was only one explanation for my uncle’s request: there was something in the house that he hadn’t wanted me to know about. He hadn’t had time to remove it himself, and in his weakened condition telling me to dispose of everything must have seemed a viable solution.
I considered the obvious things – evidence of marital infidelity perhaps, or criminal activity – but found neither of them particularly convincing. It wasn’t that I didn’t think Uncle Denny capable of such misdemeanours – I tend towards the belief that anyone is capable of anything, given the right circumstances or incentive – it was just that they seemed insufficient grounds for such drastic action. Anka was dead. It could hardly matter now if I happened to discover that half a lifetime ago my uncle had been unfaithful to her. The same logic would apply if he had once embezzled funds or even killed a man: he could hardly be made to answer for it now.
Beneath the avuncular exterior, Denny Gouss had been a powerful and determined individual, the kind of man who had grown used to getting his own way. I rationalized his last words to me as a failure of nerve, the fear of dying, which is after all the ultimate loss of control.
I checked that the TV was working, made an omelette for supper, and as evening began to fall I poured myself a glass of Frascati from the bottle I had found in the fridge and went out into the garden. The wide lawns to the front of the house were kept regularly mown and trimmed, but Anka had always insisted that the acreage at the back be left free to go wild. It was a large stretch of land, running all the way down to the sluggish, briny waters of the estuary, a riot of yarrow and thistle and stringy red campion. As a boy I had found it enchanting.
I turned to look back at the house, and was surprised to see a light burning in one of the upper windows. I had been upstairs, just briefly, to deposit my holdall in the room I still could not help thinking of as my bedroom, but I didn’t remember switching on any lights. I went slowly inside, placing my empty wine glass on the draining board and passing through to the hall. At the foot of the stairs, I hesitated. One of the house’s anomalies and something my uncle had never got round to fixing was that you couldn’t turn on the upstairs hall light from downstairs. As a child I had always dreaded that blind rush up the darkened staircase to get to the light switch, a failure of nerve of my own that Anka had occasionally liked to tease me about. Now, to my own wry amusement, I found that the fear had returned. There was a cupboard up there on the half landing, an odd little store room that during the day I had often used as a hideout but that at night, for some reason, became terrifying in my imagination. As I crept past it now, on my way to the shadowed recesses of the upper floor, the door to that cupboard seemed carved from pure blackness, the velvet rectangular entrance to an endless void.
House of Fear Page 17