A Book of Horrors

by Stephen King

  Then I picked up the bag of groceries and went inside to make dinner.

  As I was boiling the potatoes for mash and frying the sausages, I could hear Robin mumbling into his headset, along with the roar of futuristic weapons and the groans of vanquished enemies. I wondered what Annelie would have said about it all.

  She would probably have come up with a way of limiting the amount of time Robin spent gaming, thought of alternatives. I couldn’t do that.

  Can two people converse or hang out together when they live on different planets? Here was I, frying sausages and adding nutmeg to my mashed potatoes, while Robin battled against mutants with a flame-thrower. If you looked at it like that, could we ever really meet?

  I knocked on Robin’s door and told him dinner was ready. He asked for five more minutes to finish off the session. I sat down at the kitchen table with my hands resting on my knee, listening to the sounds of the slaughter. I looked at the dish of steaming mashed potato and felt so unbearably lonely.

  Robin emerged after five minutes. As we were eating I asked what kind of a day he’d had in school, and he said ‘Good’ with no further comment. I asked how the gaming was going and that was good too. Everything was good. The mash grew in my mouth and I felt as if my throat was closing up. I had to make a real effort in order to swallow.

  When we’d finished I asked Robin if he fancied a game of Monopoly. He looked at me as if I’d made a bad joke, then disappeared into his room. I tackled the washing up.

  I had just put the last plate in the drying rack when I heard those notes again. I listened more carefully, and thought they reminded me of voices. Had I been mistaken the previous evening, during the power cut? Was it in fact the piano I had heard? There was something about the rise and fall of the notes that sounded like voices. Terrified voices.

  My arms dropped, but before I disappeared into the same state as before, I got a grip, strode over to Robin’s door and pushed it open.

  Robin was sitting at the piano with tears pouring down his cheeks. On the music stand I saw a piece of paper, stained and yellowed. The last note he had played died away and he looked at me wide-eyed.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘What’s that you’re playing?’

  Robin’s eyes were drawn to the piece of paper, which flickered as a gust of wind blew in through the half-open window. When I went over to close it I noticed bits of soil on the windowsill. Behind me Robin played a couple more notes and I yelled: ‘Stop it! Stop playing!’

  He lifted his hands from the keyboard and I slammed the lid shut. Robin jumped and the sharp crash as wood met wood vibrated through my breastbone, through the walls. Robin’s eyes met mine. They were the eyes of a child, pure and clear. He whispered: ‘I don’t want to play, Dad. I don’t want to play.’

  I sank to my knees and he fell into my arms, still whispering through his tears: ‘I don’t want to play, Dad. Fix it so I don’t have to play any more, Dad.’

  Over his shaking shoulders I could see the piece of paper on the music stand. It was covered in handwritten notes. Here and there things had been crossed out and something new added; dark brown patches caused by damp made some of the notes illegible. It must have been written over a fairly long period, because several different writing implements – a pencil, a ballpoint pen, a fountain pen – had been used.

  I stroked Robin’s head and sat with him until he had calmed down. Then I took his head between my hands and looked him in the eye. ‘Robin, my darling boy. Where did you get that piece of paper?’

  His voice was muffled from all the tears and he glanced over at his bed. ‘I found it. Behind the wallpaper.’

  The wallpaper next to his bed was coming away from the wall and was ripped in a couple of places; Robin had made it worse by lying there picking at it. I nodded in the direction of the torn patch and asked: ‘There?’

  ‘Yes. He wrote the notes.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The murderer. Can we have some hot chocolate?’

  We didn’t bother with the pastries as it wasn’t long since we’d eaten. As we sat at the table with our cups, Robin’s gaze was more open than it had been for months. He looked me in the eye and didn’t waver. This was so unusual that I didn’t know what to say; in the midst of everything I was just so happy to feel that contact between us. I sat and revelled in it for a while, but eventually we had to talk about what had happened.

  ‘This murderer,’ I said. ‘Do you know his name?’

  Robin shook his head.

  ‘So how do you know he was a murderer, then?’

  Robin sat there chewing his lips, as if he were considering whether what he wanted to say was permitted or not. With a glance in the direction of his room he whispered, ‘The children told me.’

  ‘Children? What children?’

  ‘The children he murdered.’

  This was the point at which I should have said: ‘What on earth are you talking about, that’s nonsense’ or: ‘Now you see what happens if you spend too much time playing computer games’, but that wasn’t what I said because

  The dead speak through the notes

  because I knew that something was going on in our house that wasn’t covered in the Good Advice for Parents handbook. Instead I looked at Robin in a way that I hoped would indicate that I was taking him seriously and asked: ‘Tell me about these children. How many of them are there?’

  ‘Two. Quite small.’

  ‘What do they look like?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘But you’ve seen them, haven’t you?’

  Robin shook his head again and stared down at the table as he said, ‘You’re not allowed to look at them. If you do, they take your eyes.’ He glanced anxiously at his room. ‘I don’t know if you’re allowed to talk about them either.’

  ‘But they talk to you?’

  ‘Mm. Can I sleep in your room tonight?’

  ‘Of course you can. But there’s something we’re going to do first of all.’

  I went into Robin’s room and picked up the handwritten sheet of music from the piano. A horrible feeling had settled in my chest after what Robin had said, and as I stood there with the piece of paper in my hand I had the impression that something was radiating from it. I ran my eyes over the messy notes, the damp patches and the creases and I saw that it was evil.

  As I said, I can’t read music, so it must have been something in the way the notes were written, the hand that had guided the pen, the pens. Or perhaps there is a language that transcends the barriers of reason and goes straight in without passing through the intellect.

  Whatever the case may be, there was only one sensible thing to do. I took the piece of paper into the kitchen, screwed it up and dropped it in the stove. Robin sat watching from his chair as I struck a match and brought it towards the paper.

  I have to admit that my hand was shaking slightly. My sense of the inherent evil in the piece of paper had been so strong that I was afraid something terrible would happen when I set fire to it. But it began to burn just like any other piece of paper. A little yellow flame took hold, flared up, and after ten seconds all that remained were black flakes, torn apart by the draught from the chimney.

  I gave a snort of relief and shook my head at my own fantasies. What had I expected – blue flashes, or a demon flying out of the fireplace and running amok in the kitchen? I flung my hands wide like a magician demonstrating that an object really has disappeared.

  ‘There,’ I said. ‘Now you don’t have to play those notes any more.’

  I looked at Robin, but the relief I had hoped to see on his face wasn’t there. Instead his eyes filled with tears and he tapped his temples with his fingertips as he whispered: ‘But I can remember them, Dad. I can remember them.’

  If there’s one expression I can’t stand, it’s Every cloud has a silver lining. Take Annelie’s death. I can think until my ears bleed without coming up with a single good thing it has brought us. The atomic bombs that were droppe
d on Japan? They led to Japan’s dominance of the electronics market through a complex pattern of cause and effect, but tell that to those who were blown to bits, wave the stock market prices under the noses of the children mutilated as a result of radiation. Good luck with that.

  I’m rambling. What I wanted to say was that for once there was a grain of truth in that ugly expression. Later in the evening Robin and I actually played Monopoly. He didn’t want to go back to his room; he preferred to sit beneath the safe circle of the kitchen lamp, moving his little car along the unfamiliar streets of Stockholm.

  The wind was whistling around the house and I had lit a fire. The roll of the dice across the board, the soft rustle of well-worn bank notes changing hands, our murmured comments or cries of triumph or disappointment. They were good hours, pleasant hours.

  It was half-past ten by the time I found myself bankrupt as a result of Robin’s ownership of Centrum and Norrmalmstorg, with the requisite hotels. As we gathered up the plastic pieces and various bits of paper, Robin said with amazement in his voice, ‘That was quite good fun!’

  I made myself a bed on a mattress on the floor so that Robin could have my bed. I set the alarm for seven as usual and turned off all the lights apart from the lava lamp; I lay there for a long time watching the viscous, billowing shapes until my eyelids began to feel heavy. Then I heard Robin’s voice from the bed.

  ‘Dad?’

  I sat up, leaning on my elbow so that I could see him. His eyes were open and in the soft, red light he looked like a small child.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I don’t want to play the piano any more.’

  ‘No. I understand.’

  ‘And I don’t want us to keep the piano.’

  ‘Okay. We’ll get rid of it then.’

  Robin nodded and curled up, closing his eyes. I lay down on my side and looked at my son. For the second time that day the feeling struck me again: things could all work out, in spite of everything. It might all be okay.

  The feeling didn’t diminish when Robin half-opened his eyes and mumbled sleepily, ‘We can play Monopoly or something. Or cards. So I don’t spend as much time playing computer games.’

  ‘We certainly can,’ I said. ‘Now go to sleep.’

  Robin muttered something and after a moment his breathing was deeper. I lay there looking at him, listening to the wind and waiting for it to increase in strength and make the aerial sing. It happened just as my consciousness was about to drift away, and a single long note followed me down into sleep.

  Annelie came to me that night.

  If it had been a dream, the setting should have been one of the many places where we had actually slept and made love. But she came to me there on the mattress next to the bed. She crept naked under the narrow spare duvet and one thigh slid over mine as she burrowed her nose in the hollow at the base of my throat.

  I could smell the scent of her hair as she whispered, ‘Sorry I went away,’ and her dry palm caressed my chest. I pulled her close and held her tight. If I had doubted that this was really happening, my doubts dispersed when she said: ‘Hey, steady!’ because I was squeezing her as hard as I could to prevent her from disappearing again.

  ‘I’ve missed you so much,’ I murmured, moving one arm so that I could stroke her belly, her breasts, her face. It really was Annelie. The particular curve of her hips, the birthmark beneath her left breast, all the tiny details imprinted on my mind. Only now did I understand how intense the actual physical longing for this woman had been, this woman whose skin I knew better than my own.

  She moved her fingers over my lips and said, ‘I know. I know. But I’m here now.’

  One part of my body had been sure ever since her thigh slid over mine. I was so hard I felt as if I might burst. I pressed her body to mine and as I pushed inside her I couldn’t tell whether the throbbing beats pulsating through me were mine or hers. I followed their rhythm, and the rhythm turned into notes which became a melody that I recognised, and I couldn’t hold back. My body contracted in a convulsion so powerful that I slipped out of her and my seed shot out all over the sheets in a single spasm.

  I opened my eyes wide.

  I was alone on the mattress. My penis was stiff and I could feel the warm stickiness of my ejaculation, the faint aroma of sperm beneath the covers. But that wasn’t all. Annelie’s scent still lingered in the room. The shampoo she always used, the moisturiser from the Body Shop perfumed with oranges and cinnamon, the one she called her ‘Christmas moisturiser’. Plus the scent of her own body, but I have no words to describe that. They were there in the room. All of them.

  I was so preoccupied with trying to drink in that smell and to remain in the moment that it was a long time before I grasped that the notes were real. That they were being played in the house.

  I propped myself up on one elbow and saw that the bed was empty. Robin had got up and gone to the piano.

  Something moved in my peripheral vision. A faint, swaying movement. Annelie’s scent was superseded by another – sweaty feet. Horrible, stinking, sweaty feet. I turned my head slowly to the side and saw a bare foot swinging to and fro next to me. As my gaze travelled upwards I saw that the foot belonged to an equally naked body. A hairy pot belly and flaccid testicles. A head on a broken neck, eyes staring into mine. The hanged man opened his mouth and said:

  ‘Without her … nothing. That’s true, isn’t it? You can get her back. I did. I am happy now.’

  I squeezed my eyes tight shut and pressed my wrists against my eyelids so hard that my eyeballs were pushed into my skull and I saw a shower of red stars. I counted to ten, and while I was counting the piano stopped playing. I heard voices coming from Robin’s room. And a faint creaking sound.

  I opened my eyes. A long, dirty toenail was swaying to and fro centimetres from my face, and from above I heard the gurgling, muffled voice saying, ‘The door is open. You just have to—’

  A strong impulse made me want to curl up, put my hands over my ears and wait until the madness went away. Perhaps I might even have done it if I hadn’t heard Robin. In a tearful voice he suddenly yelled: ‘I can’t! I can’t!’

  I rolled off the mattress, away from the visitation above my head. I got to my feet and ran to Robin’s room without looking back.

  The window was wide-open and the room was freezing cold. Robin was standing by the window dressed only in his underpants, leaning out. When I put my arms around him to pull him inside I saw movement on the lawn outside. Two small, hunched bodies dressed in rags were running erratically towards the forest.

  The door is open.

  In my despair I pulled too hard and Robin lost his balance. I fell over backwards and he landed on top of me without making a sound.

  ‘Robin? Robin? Are you all right?’

  I sat up, holding him in my arms. His expression was distant and he was looking straight through me. I shook him gently.

  ‘Robin? What happened?’

  His head moved feebly from side to side, and when I checked him over I saw four long scratches on one forearm, scratches made by fingernails.

  I picked him up and carried him into the kitchen. As I approached the door of the living room I let out a sob and held onto him more tightly. I inched forward two steps and peered in through the doorway. Above my mattress and the stained duvet cover there was nothing but an empty hook on the ceiling.

  ‘Robin? It’s okay now. They’ve gone.’ It was as if another voice was speaking through my mouth as I added, ‘The door is closed.’

  Robin didn’t respond as I gently laid him down on my bed and tucked him in. His wide-open eyes were staring at the hook. Could he see something I couldn’t? The stale smell of sweaty feet still lingered in the room, and had completely obliterated the scent of Annelie. I looked at the hook with loathing. Couldn’t the bastard have showered before he hanged himself?

  ‘Dad …’

  I stroked Robin’s hair, his cheeks. ‘Yes, son?’

  ‘Dad, get rid of i
t. Get rid of it.’

  I nodded and licked my lips. They had a sour taste, like sweaty feet. When I got up from the bed I realised I was still naked. I pulled on my dressing gown, went into the kitchen, rummaged in the drawer where I kept tools for indoor use and dug out a pair of heavy pliers.

  The first thing I did was to unscrew the hook from the ceiling. I didn’t know if it would help, but I didn’t want the accursed thing in the house. When I opened the living room window Robin whispered, ‘No, no, don’t open it.’ I hurled the hook as far as I could, closed the window and said: ‘It’s fine’.

  ‘Get rid of it, Dad. You have to get rid of it. I can’t.’

  ‘What do you mean, son?’

  ‘The piano. Get rid of it. I don’t want to.’

  I was on the point of saying that it would have to wait until tomorrow because I hadn’t the strength to carry or even drag the piano on my own, but then I realised there might be a simpler solution.

  When I stood in front of the open lid looking at the keyboard, the notes were playing inside my head. By now I had heard them so many times I knew them by heart. I was able to make out a melody, and what’s more, when I looked at the keys it was as if some of them glowed, flashed as the notes passed through my mind. I can play, if I want to. My hands were irresistibly drawn towards the piano.

  Dum, di-dum, daa.

  Just once. Or twice. Or as many times as necessary.

  When I placed my right hand on the keyboard to begin playing, there was something in the way. A pair of pliers. I was holding a pair of pliers in my hand. A pair of pliers. I worked the handles and saw the sharp jaws opening and closing. Bite through it. Snip snip.

  I blinked a couple of times and pushed the notes out of my head, concentrating on the pliers. Then I opened the top of the piano and whispered, ‘Sorry, Annelie.’