A Book of Horrors

by Stephen King

  ‘Your folks let you keep those?’

  ‘I told them it’s for school.’

  ‘What do you need them for?’

  ‘My project. If I get a fish tank, I can have frogs, too. And one of these.’ She opened a book to a picture of a small snake.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I found it on the Internet.’

  ‘But why?’

  She turned her computer on and showed him a page from a university website. There was an article called Thanatosis: Nature’s Way of Survival, with close-ups of insects, a possum, a leopard shark and a hog-nosed snake. He read the first paragraph. It explained how some creatures protect themselves when afraid by pretending to be dead.

  ‘You think I’m like them?’

  ‘I don’t know yet. But I’m going to find out.’

  ‘Well, you’re wrong.’

  She noticed that his eyes were now focused on the bulletin board by the computer, and the headline of the newspaper clipping she had pinned there months ago: LOCAL WOMAN, SON DIE IN FIERY CRASH. She snatched it down and put it in the drawer.

  ‘Oh, David. I’m really sorry.’

  ‘I better go.’

  ‘But I need you to help me.’

  ‘You think I’m faking it.’

  ‘No, I don’t. I was there this time.’

  ‘Then you know I’m a freak,’ he said. ‘Like one of those animals. Like a bug.’

  ‘You’re not.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘They just – freeze up when they get scared. But you weren’t even breathing. Your heart stopped.’

  ‘So what am I scared of?’

  ‘It’s okay to say it. David, I saw you chasing the truck. Every time he leaves – well, you’re afraid he won’t come back either. Aren’t you?’

  He made a sound like a laugh. ‘You don’t know anything.’

  ‘Don’t I?’

  The laugh stopped. ‘If he doesn’t, it means I got a second chance and I blew it.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Don’t you get it? She was going to take me, but I was off playing that stupid game. She wasn’t supposed to take Eric. It was supposed to be me.’

  Her mouth stayed open while she tried to find words.

  ‘I have to go now,’ he said.

  Once he was out from under the trees the sky was fierce again. Leaves curled, flowers turned away from the sun and the asphalt began to glisten. He heard footsteps on the sidewalk that were not his own.

  ‘You’re right. I don’t know anything.’

  ‘Forget it, Sher.’

  They passed rosebushes, the yellow petals now almost white. It was half a block before she spoke again.

  ‘Can I ask one question?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘How does it feel?’

  ‘I told you, I don’t remember.’

  ‘Can you at least try?’

  He kept walking, stepping over cracks. Mrs Shaede’s rainbird sprinkler came on and a silver mist rose into the air.

  ‘Wilson’s Market,’ he said under his breath.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘The one on Charter Way? What about it?’

  ‘We used to go there, when I was little.’

  ‘We did, too.’

  ‘There was this one time,’ he said slowly, as they neared the end of the block, ‘I was four or five, I guess. Eric wasn’t born yet. She was wearing her long coat.’

  ‘The grey one? I remember that.’

  ‘Anyway, we went like always, just the two of us. And we got a shopping cart and she let me push it, so I could help. You know, put the milk and the groceries in for her. I stopped to look at the cereal, and I was going to tell her what kind to get, but when I looked up she was way ahead. I could only see the back of her coat. And you know what? There was another cart behind her, and another little boy was pushing it, and she was handing him the cans. I didn’t understand. I thought they were going to drive off and leave me there. So I started to cry. I yelled, ‘Mama, that isn’t me!’ And when she turned around, it wasn’t my mother. It was another lady with the same kind of coat. But before she turned, that was the feeling. If you want to know.’

  Her eyes were bright as diamonds and she had to look away. And then she did something she had never done before. She hooked her arm through his and reached down and lifted his wrist and laced her fingers between his fingers and held his hand very tightly. He let her do that.

  After a while she said, ‘You know, they have better nurses at middle school. Maybe they can give you pills to make it stop.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Maybe I was dead. So what? Next time, I hope I don’t wake up! What do you think of that? Huh?’

  When she did not answer he looked around for her.

  If she was not there she should have been.

  The next school year was a crazy one, say like landing behind enemy lines and fighting your way out, and the next one was even worse, so he saw less of her, even before his father learned the truth and started driving him to the Institute for tests. By then it did not happen very often but at least David was with him. The only time he was not was when Dad’s heart gave out suddenly during senior year. She broke up with Vincent when her family moved and people said she went away to college to study pre-med, but no one knew exactly where. If you ever meet her, you might tell her this: just that life goes on, and her project – say his name was David – finally figured out that there are so many small dyings along the way it hardly matters which one of them is Death.

  (for Kenneth Patchen)

  DENNIS ETCHISON is a three-time winner of both the British Fantasy and World Fantasy Awards. His short stories have been collected in The Dark Country, Red Dreams, The Blood Kiss, The Death Artist, Talking in the Dark, Fine Cuts and Got To Kill Them All & Other Stories.

  He is also the author of the novels Darkside, Shadowman, California Gothic, Double Edge, The Fog, Halloween II, Halloween III and Videodrome, and editor of the anthologies Cutting Edge, Masters of Darkness I-III, MetaHorror, The Museum of Horrors and (with Ramsey Campbell and Jack Dann) Gathering the Bones.

  He has written extensively for film, television and radio, including hundreds of scripts for The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas, Fangoria Magazine’s Dreadtime Stories and Christopher Lee’s Mystery Theater.

  His next book is a much-anticipated collection of new stories.

  ‘When I was a boy,’ recalls Etchison, ‘some grotesque tales would not die. They were always recounted as absolutely true (“It happened to my cousin’s best friend, I swear to God!”) and eventually they acquired the weight of Known Facts, like Mick Jagger’s search for a lost Mars Bar or Richard Gere’s problem with a misplaced gerbil.

  ‘Years later I learned that the Vanishing Hitchhiker, the Hook, the Killer in the Backseat and many more classics had been told throughout the land until they became Urban Legends. This made me question whether other strange events, which I knew to be true because they had happened to me, were really so strange after all.

  ‘For example, we used to play at staging the most realistic accident scenes possible, usually involving a bicycle, to create the illusion that one of us had just been killed. We struck extreme poses and took turns holding our breath and voted on whose death was the most convincing. Looking back, this seemed a truly odd and morbid game – until recently, when I did a reality check. My friend Mike Lester, who grew up in a distant state, admitted that he and his childhood pals had done exactly the same thing, but next to the busiest roadways they could find, in hopes of freaking out passing motorists.

  ‘Now the writer in me was hooked. Add a metafictional interest in the authorial voice (who is actually telling this, and why?), plus the metaphysical spell of Prelude to a Kiss, the film version of Craig Lucas’s superb play, and inspiration as always from Kenneth Patchen’s emotional courage and control … and presto, a new short story. />
  ‘Of course the larger question remains: Why did these particular elements, and not others, come together in my unconscious? I honestly can’t say, which may be the real mystery. I only play what I hear, even when I don’t understand where the music is coming from.’

  The Music of Bengt Karlsson, Murderer

  —JOHN AJVIDE LINDQVIST—

  Translated by Marlaine Delargy

  I’M ASHAMED to admit it, but I bribed my son to get him to start learning to play the piano.

  The idea came to me one night when I heard him sitting plinking and plonking away on the toy synthesiser he’d been given for his birthday two years earlier. He’d actually taken a break from playing computer games – imagine that. So I went into his room and asked if he’d like piano lessons.

  No, he would not. No way. I hinted that an increase in his pocket money might well be on the cards if he agreed. Eighty kronor a week instead of fifty. Robin must have realised how desperate I was, because he refused even to come and look at the community music school unless we were talking about doubling the amount. A hundred kronor a week.

  I gave in. What else could I do? Something had to change. My son was sliding towards unreality, and if a piano lesson now and again could bring him back to the IRL-world to some extent, then one hundred kronor a week was a cheap price to pay.

  IRL. In real life. I don’t know what the other world is called, but that was where Robin spent almost all of his waking hours when he wasn’t in school. Online. Wearing a headset and with a control in his hands, he had surfed away to a coastline where I could no longer reach him.

  Not too much of a problem, you might think. Completely normal, the youth of today etc. Well yes. But he was only eleven years old. It just can’t be healthy to sit there locked inside an electronic fantasy world for five, six, seven hours a day at that age. So I bribed him.

  And what would an eleven-year-old do with the hundred kronor a week he had managed to extort from a father who was completely at a loss? What do you think? Buy new games, of course. But I couldn’t work out what else to do. Anything that could divert him from slaying monsters and conversing with invisible friends felt like progress.

  Now I know better. Now I wish I’d spent the money on a faster Internet connection, a cordless headset, a new computer, anything at all. Perhaps then the darkness wouldn’t have got hold of me. I’ll never know.

  It started well. Robin turned out to have a natural inclination for playing the piano, and after spending a few weeks playing ‘Frère Jacques’ and ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ with one finger, he had grasped the basic principles of the notes and was able to play his first chord. His achievement was all the more praiseworthy because there was no help to be had from his father.

  I am completely useless when it comes to music. I’ve never sung, nor played any instrument. Robin must have inherited that gene from his mother, and she should have been the one sitting beside him on the piano stool. But one of the few things we have left of her is her piano. Perhaps that was why I insisted on Robin playing that particular instrument. To maintain some form of … contact.

  When Robin started piano lessons it was almost two years to the day since Annelie got in the car and never came back. An icy road, a bus coming from the opposite direction … only a month later they erected a central barrier separating the two carriageways. About bloody time. I came to hate that barrier, its wire structure like a wound across my field of vision every time I drove past the spot. Because it hadn’t been there then.

  Six months after Annelie’s death, we moved. There were too many rooms in the old house, rooms meant for more children, for Annelie’s loom. Rooms just standing there like empty memorials to a life that might have been. Rooms where I could get trapped, sitting there hour after hour. And on top of all that: rooms which together made up a house that was far too big and far too expensive to run on one income.

  I decided to try to come to terms with all the dreams that had died, and got a job 300 kilometres away in Norrtälje. We moved from the house in Linköping to an eighty-square-metre wind-blown shack in the forest. The house was five kilometres from the town, where I didn’t know a soul. The property was surrounded by coniferous forest on three sides, and in the winter you hardly ever caught a glimpse of the sun.

  But it was cheap. Extremely cheap.

  I carried out the move in a state of agitation. After six months, during which my grief had taken on a physical form and squeezed my throat at night, tangled me up in the sheets and thrown me out of bed, I saw the chance to breathe in at least a little light. I would start afresh in a new place – for Robin’s sake, if nothing else. It wasn’t good for him, living with a father whose only companion in bed was death, and who never slept for longer than an hour at a time.

  So I cleared the place out. Anything we didn’t need for our new life on the edge of the forest went into a skip: Annelie’s clothes, her hand-woven rugs, piece after piece of furniture that belonged to a life for two, and carried its own memories. Out. I smashed up the loom with an axe and took it out in bits.

  The night after the skip had been taken away, I slept well for the first time in six months, only to wake up in absolute terror.

  What had I done?

  In my feverish enthusiasm I had thrown away not only things that Robin and I could have made use of (but I just couldn’t keep the kitchen table where she still sat with her cup of coffee, or the lamp that still illuminated her face, casting dead shadows), but also things that I would have liked to keep. The cushion she used to hug to her stomach. Her hair slides, with a few strands of hair still attached. The odd talisman. But everything had been crushed to bits at some rubbish dump.

  The only thing that remained was the piano. The lads who came to pick up the skip had refused to touch it, and I couldn’t manage to drag it out on my own. So it stayed where it was, with her fingerprints still lingering on the keys.

  That morning … oh, that morning. If it hadn’t been for the piano I might have lost my mind completely, and Robin would have ended up calling the emergency services instead of being driven to school to say goodbye to his classmates. It’s a paradox, but that’s just how it was: that piano kept me from sinking.

  And so it came with us to our new home, and the only place we could find enough space was in Robin’s bedroom, and that’s how it came about that Robin started to play the piano, and after six weeks was able to try out his first hesitant chord.

  I can’t say he practised much, but enough to get by. He liked his piano teacher, a guy who was a few years younger than me but had already settled for a cardigan and Birkenstocks. Robin wanted to please his teacher, so he did his exercises, which meant at least an hour or two away from the games.

  Since I had nothing to offer in musical terms, Robin didn’t want me in the room when he was practising. Instead I would sit at the kitchen table reading the paper, listening as his plinking became more assured each time he went through ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’.

  Then the roars and explosions of Halo or Gears of War took over again, and I would move into the living room and the TV, pleased with how things had turned out in spite of everything.

  If I remember rightly, it happened in the eighth week. I had just driven Robin home from his piano lesson and settled down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the newspaper, while he started practising in his room.

  Since I had got used to the sound, I was able to concentrate on my reading without being distracted. But after a while I began to feel uneasy, for some reason. I looked up from the paper and listened.

  Robin was playing the piano. But what was he playing?

  I listened more carefully and tried to pick out a melody, something I recognised. From time to time I heard a sequence of notes which at a push could be linked to an existing tune, only to fall apart again. I assumed Robin was just messing around on the keyboard, and I should have been pleased that he’d reached this point. If it hadn’t been for that strange sense
of unease.

  The only way I can explain it is to say that I thought I recognised the notes, in spite of the fact that I had no idea what it was, and in spite of the fact that it didn’t sound like a melody. It was like knowing that you know something, but at the same time being incapable of expressing it. That feeling. That sense of unease.

  I gritted my teeth, put my hands over my ears and tried to concentrate on the newspaper. I knew I ought to welcome this new development, and it would be completely wrong to go and ask Robin to stop. So I tried to concentrate on an article about the expansion of wind power, but failed to read a single word. The only thing that went into my head was the faint sound of those notes vibrating through the palms of my hands.

  I was on the point of getting up and going to knock on Robin’s door after all when there was a short pause, followed by a halting version of ‘Jingle Bells’. I let out a long breath and returned to my reading.

  That night I had a horrible dream. I was in a forest, a dense coniferous forest. Only a glimmer of moonlight penetrated down among the dark tree trunks. I could hear singing coming from somewhere, and I stood there motionless as a weight dragged me towards the ground. When I looked down I could just make out a crowbar. A heavy iron crowbar, which I was holding in my hands. The singing turned into a scream, and I woke up with the taste of rust in my mouth.

  Even though it was the end of November, we still hadn’t had any snow. Robin was practising for the Christmas concert – songs about happy little snowflakes and sleigh rides – while the temperature refused to drop below zero. Dark mornings with the smell of rotting leaves in the damp air, long evenings with the pine trees around the house swaying and creaking in the strong winds.

  One evening I was sitting at the table in the living room with my MacBook, trying to write a job application. I was in charge of the greengrocery department at the ICA hypermarket, but for a long time I had dreamed of being in charge of a smaller shop. Such a position had just come up. The work itself would be more varied, plus my journey would be five kilometres shorter each day.