Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  Another creak.

  She had turned the rocking chair around and angled it so that she was facing Anne’s side of the bed. Charlie emitted a thin, high-pitched moan and pulled the covers over his head, rolling towards Anne and moulding himself around her, embracing her as gently as his trembling arms would allow. You won’t get her, he thought.

  He woke again and found himself on the far side of the bed, ten inches of cool sheet separating their bodies. The rocking chair was empty. Charlie’s body was slick with sweat, his chest tight. Suddenly he jumped out of the bed and ran out of the room. He didn’t pause at the top of the stairs. The heavy front door swung open beneath his hand and he charged into the heart of the garden, ignoring the paths. He fought his way through roses, hardly noticing the thorns lacerating his skin, clawing through thick shrubs and swollen, sticky flowers until he stopped dead, panting and sweating in the densest part of the garden. Inches in front of his own face was that of the old woman. Grey, pock-marked and creased, it looked like rotting wood, her eyes like insects with shining wings. Her dry lips hung slightly apart, but he could neither hear nor feel the passage of air between them.

  A fit of dizziness seized him and he squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. When he looked up again the old woman’s face was just knots and gnarls on old bark, her grey woollen clothes loose trails of moss and lichen. He sank to the ground and tried to calm his raging mind.

  Anne woke as he climbed back into bed. At first she just rolled over and muttered unintelligibly, but then she sat up straight, distressed. ‘What’s that?’ she snapped.

  She’d touched Charlie’s foot which was still covered with leaves and soil. Anne swept the covers aside and stared in disbelief at his legs.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ she said. ‘And where’s all this from?’

  ‘The garden,’ he said lamely.

  ‘Charlie, I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s got to stop because I can’t take much more of it. Okay?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ll wash. I must have walked in my sleep.’ He was already at the washbasin switching on the light and wiping his legs with a flannel. ‘There’s nothing wrong, honestly. I’ve just been a bit tense, that’s all.’

  ‘It’s got to stop,’ she said crossly and turned away from the light.

  When Charlie woke again it was to see the back of Anne’s legs disappearing through the doorway. Someone was leading her. He leaped out of bed, but they were already at the foot of the stairs and the old woman’s hand was reaching out to open the big door.

  ‘Anne,’ he called.

  She looked up at him, her face white as the moon itself. ‘Charlie, I’m going for a walk. Just let me, okay?’ She was naked. He watched her go out of the door and wondered if in allowing her to leave there might be a way to understand.

  He walked slowly back to their room and sat on the bed. Straight away he got up again and went to the window. Anne had reached the bottom of the winding gravel path and turned right, the woman like a shadow thrown down on the ground ahead of her.

  A shadow; nothing more. Anne wanted to go for a walk, and, even though it was the middle of the night and she was wasn’t wearing a stitch, Charlie had to let her. If he attempted to control her she’d perceive his arms as a trap and she’d slip free of it, as simple as that. He forced himself to take deep breaths, then pulled on his trousers and a T-shirt and sat down in the rocking chair. It creaked beneath his weight.

  It was still facing towards Anne’s side of the bed.

  He was out of the room and down the stairs in a flash, tearing down the road on bare feet. He wondered if he should have taken the car, but didn’t lose a stride as he ran. Rounding the last curve before the town, Charlie looked left and saw the railway viaduct striking out across the estuary. There was a naked figure walking slowly beside the track. He saw the old woman standing in the channel with an arm out beckoning to Anne. She could have been standing on the sand but that part of the estuary seemed to Charlie to be under water. As he left the road and ran down towards the viaduct the new day’s first light was streaking the sky above the hills inland. He clambered up on to the track and skipped from sleeper to sleeper. Anne was on the right-hand side of the line, away from the edge of the viaduct nearest the old woman, but she had stopped and was now looking in that direction. Charlie didn’t turn to look, he just ran. Someone somewhere had started to sing, a high-pitched tuneless wail. Still he ran. Anne took a step forward towards the track, which suddenly started to thump and rattle, and a light appeared beyond Anne, growing brighter and bigger like the flowers in the garden.

  He reached her just as the train thundered by and he put his arms out, but he only needed to steady her. She was still a step away from the line. As the carriages clattered past, her eyes appeared to come to life and quickly follow the yellow fogged-up windows. In another second the train was gone and they both looked across the track at the estuary. There was only a depth pole standing in the channel with an outstretched boom and a dimly burning navigation light on top.

  Her gave Anne his T-shirt and they supported each other all the way back to the guest house.

  They didn’t stop for breakfast, but the owner smiled kindly when Charlie paid her and made their excuses. As he tucked the last bag into the boot of the car and closed it, he resisted the strong temptation to take a final look up at the bedroom window.

  They turned left on to the road, away from the sea and the town, and drove in silence for at least five minutes. When the scenery started to change, Charlie pulled into a lay-by, switched off the engine and asked Anne if she wanted to drive.

  ‘You’ve never offered before,’ she said, turning in her seat to face him and putting her hand over his.

  He held the fingers of her left hand and ran his fingertips over them. She wore no rings yet on that hand. He leaned forward and whispered something into her ear.

  Nicholas Royle was born in Manchester and currently lives in London with his wife and two children. He is the author of four published novels, Counterparts, Saxophone Dreams, The Matter of the HeanandThe Director’s Cut,and more than a hundred short stories in various magazines and anthologies. He has also edited ten anthologies of short fiction, some of them for the listings publisherTime Out,for whom he works fulltime. About the preceding work’s locale, Royle says: ‘The story is set in Wales, but I’ve toned the Welshness down a lot. If you made Wales as strange as it really is, no one would believe you. The two main elements of the narrative -intoxication and fear - are the two things I associate most strongly with that small, proud and, in parts, extremely beautiful country. I enjoyed some idyllic holidays there as a child, but these days I make my rare ventures over the Severn Bridge with a heavy heart - and not just because of the standard of driving.’

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  * * * *

  Changes

  C. BRUCE HUNTER

  Jennifer winced when she got her first look at the cabin. Not only was it worse than she’d imagined, it was worse than she could have imagined.

  Some of the vines growing over it were three or four inches thick, and the only place they showed signs of trimming was around the front door. A couple of the windows were completely overgrown, as was the chimney, and the few clapboards that weren’t yet covered had been given only a temporary reprieve. In short, it was the kind of place only a troll could love.

  ‘This is utterly ridiculous,’ she said under her breath while she considered getting back into the station wagon and locking all the doors. She didn’t mind roughing it. Her lifestyle sometimes made that unavoidable. But this was too Gothic even for her.

  ‘I could use a little help here,’ George grunted. He had just hefted one of the cardboard boxes he’d pulled out onto the tailgate, leaving the other for someone else to carry. ‘Hurry up, gang. We’re going to lose the light soon.’

  ‘If you expect me to clean this place, you’re crazy.’ Jennifer rested her elbows on the roof of the car, cupped her chin in
her hands and continued staring at the cabin.

  ‘It won’t need cleaning,’ Lee said as he slid the other box off the tailgate. ‘We tidied up before we left last year.’

  ‘Men!’ she sighed, ‘loosely speaking, of course.’

  George and Lee carried their things in, while Jennifer took a half step back and sniffed at something very unpleasant. It came on the evening breeze, from inside the cabin no doubt, and she didn’t want to know what it was.

  But she had agreed to come, and a foolish bargain is still a bargain. So she decided at least to see what she’d got herself into.

  Leaving the relative safety of the station wagon, she ventured up what in any other setting would have been a fairy-tale path. It was laid out in a broad ‘S’. covered with small river stones and bordered by shaped redwood slats, with a menagerie of concrete animals and gnomes scattered around it. Some were posed in the yard, as if they were playing. Others peeked from behind bushes or around rocks. And most still sported fairly good coats of paint.

  ‘I see that someone with a little imagination used to live here,’ she said, but as soon as she walked through the front door, she regretted the statement.

  Compared with the path, the inside of the cabin was a calamity. Perhaps ‘insides’ would have been a more descriptive term. There was something vaguely intestinal about the array of artefacts that littered the place. They must have accumulated over a period of years, because they were in various stages of returning to nature, some cloaked in a thick covering of green fuzz and looking as if they might move at any moment.

  And while the outside got a little air, the inside did not. It sported a mouldering, half-empty cereal box on the counter, a garbage pail that should have been emptied at least a year ago, and a bowl of fruit that any reasonable person should have known wouldn’t remain fresh for an entire winter.

  All that could be managed, Jennifer thought. But other, more menacing things had insinuated themselves into the cabin. The odour she’d picked up on the breeze came from behind a stack of wood at the fireplace. She would just let the guys take care of whatever that was. And the ice chest sitting ominously in the corner was going to remain tightly sealed if she had anything to say about it.

  Fortunately, night came so fast that she didn’t have to worry about cleaning anything right away. It wasn’t so much the darkness that stopped her. The cabin did have a supply of candles. But the mood of the forest after sunset made work impossible.

  The full moon cast a bright pall over the mountain, making it look for all the world like a magical wonderland. Everything became colourless, all grey and black, but the brighter hues of grey took on an eerie glow, while the deepest patches of black seemed transparent, as if they were gateways that led to a mysterious, lightless realm.

  And it all happened instantly. One minute, daylight filtered through the tops of the trees. Then it winked out, and the whole forest was transformed. No longer sticks and leaves and dirt, the entire place was now an ethereal world of shades that seemed to offer a welcome to those wandering on the dark side but would be a little too foreboding for anyone else.

  The only thing they could do at that point was build a fire, open a bottle of wine and tell ghost stories while the moon cast patches of light and shadow through the vine-covered windows.

  Jennifer kept up with the guys for a few hours. She told the two stories she knew - the one about the hook and the one about a ghost girl hitchhiking back from a prom. And in between, she listened to George and Lee rattle off a succession of tales that were so well honed, the guys must have been telling them for years. But finally she became drowsy, curled up in front of the fire and fell asleep.

  * * * *

  The next morning was fantastic, too. A light rain had fallen - not enough to turn the ground to mud, just enough to make everything look and smell clean. The whole mountain sparkled under a big, bright sun that hovered barely above the horizon and was just now peeking through a patch of clouds breaking up in the eastern sky.

  It was the one direction where the land dropped away fast enough to provide a view of anything, and the view over there - the valley, the small town with a white church steeple as its most prominent feature and a scattering of white and yellow and blue houses, and the small farms whose cattle, according to the guys, provided the best meat in the state - the view was spectacular. It was the kind of scene Jennifer didn’t know existed any more.

  When she wandered sleepy-eyed out of the cabin, Lee was sitting on the porch railing, sipping a cup of steaming coffee and looking wistfully at the valley. She stood behind him for a long time, looked past him at the scene Lee had told her about but she hadn’t really understood until now, and let the baggage she had brought with her from the city slip away from her mind, just as Lee had told her it would. The scene was so lovely and did such marvellous things to her that it seemed forever before she felt like saying anything at all.

  ‘Where’s George?’ she finally asked.

  ‘He’s gone for a run in the woods.’

  Jennifer sat on the railing beside Lee and took the cup from his hand.

  ‘I’m glad I let you talk me into coming this year,’ she said between sips.

  ‘Did you finish your project?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ She inhaled deeply and stared at the distant town. Somehow work didn’t seem to matter any more. ‘I’ll finish it when I get back to the office on Monday, but I’m not even going to think about it ‘til then.’

  ‘I told you you’d like this place.’

  ‘You should have put more conviction into it. I would have come up long ago if I knew it was this perfect.’ She handed the cup back and leaned over the railing so she could get a better look at the yard.

  ‘Who did the path?’

  ‘Some of the people who’ve stayed here over the years. I don’t know who started the tradition, but George says it’s been going on as long as he can remember.’

  ‘I can see that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Lee cocked his head to one side, as if he were trying to see whether Jennifer had found something he’d been missing.

  ‘Oh,’ she pointed to a well-weathered concrete pagoda. The family of rabbits that surrounded it was obviously a more recent addition. Their paint showed no wear at all. ‘I was just noticing. They don’t seem to go together.’

  ‘I know. The bunnies weren’t here last year, but I think the pagoda may have been the first piece someone brought up.’

  ‘Rabbits and pagodas,’ she mused. ‘Last night I thought it took imagination to do this. Now I wonder if it wasn’t just weirdness.’

  ‘You’re looking at it wrong.’ Lee took another sip of coffee and went into his I’ll-explain-it-to-you mode. ‘The way I see it, that path is the heart of the place...’

  ‘It’s certainly the only thing around here that shows any signs of maintenance.’

  ‘Exactly. So many of us share the cabin, there’s no way it can be a home. It just can’t be. But some of the guys want to make it at least a little more personal. So they put a critter on the path.’

  ‘I see. That makes it like “home away from home”.’

  ‘Exactly. And when they stop coming, they’ve left something of themselves behind. I know the pieces don’t all fit together, but they’re not supposed to. Each critter has a story, but no one knows all the stories, so they’re destined to remain just out of reach. And the critters have to stay separate, because each of them has a secret it can’t tell.’

  ‘Bull!’ George wheezed as he emerged from a clump of trees and jogged up the path. He was obviously exhausted and covered with sweat in spite of the cool mountain air.

  ‘Where?’ Lee pretended to look around the yard. ‘I don’t see a bull. Plenty of gnomes and bunnies, though.’

  ‘Has this man been filling your head with nonsense?’ George stopped to catch his breath when he reached the front steps.

  ‘He was just telling me about the animals.’

  George turne
d and glanced disdainfully at the concrete menagerie. ‘I tripped over that damned pagoda one night,’ he said between gasps. ‘Almost broke my neck.’ He wiped his face with the back of his wrist band and asked, ‘Is there any more coffee?’

  Lee nodded.

  George continued panting for a few seconds. Then as soon as he’d recovered a little, he took the steps two at a time and went into the cabin to towel off. Jennifer followed him in, while Lee stayed on the porch to finish his coffee and watch the sun climb into the sky.

  * * * *

  She spent most of the day cleaning, and the work turned out to be lighter than she’d expected. First impressions aside, the cabin was pretty well kept. A little dusting brought the shine back. The dishes had been thoroughly washed and stacked neatly in the kitchen cabinets. They only needed a rinse before being used again. The stove didn’t have a speck of grease on it. Even the pots and pans were scrubbed clean.