by Stephen King
Instinctively Alan pulled back, and he didn’t know why – he wanted this delivered, didn’t he? But from inside the house he heard a growl, something thwarted, something angry, and he knew then he mustn’t let this envelope go inside that house, he mustn’t let any part of his wife or his son go in there, not even the worst part of them, not even their shit. And he pulled back harder, and the growler was shocked by that, at the sheer nerve of it, there was a gnashing of teeth too, Alan was sure of it. And he set his feet upon the welcome mat to try to get a better grip, and he looked down at it, and that was a mistake, because there was nothing now on the welcome mat, no wording at all – and more than that, there was really nothing there, it was smooth and soft and oh so slippery, and Alan couldn’t stop himself, Alan fell backwards, Alan let go.
The envelope was snatched away; the letterbox slammed shut; the jaws of the house, they slammed shut. And Alan cried out in frustration and fear, and suddenly realised how very dark the night was.
When he got home, Alice was in the bedroom waiting for him. She was wearing her underwear. She never showed that. He could see her breasts peeking out, saying hello. ‘But where’s Bobby?’ he asked.
‘Bobby went to bed hours ago,’ said Alice. ‘Hey. You did it. You big, bad, bold man. You’ve been husband to me, and father to our boy. You’ve protected your family, you’ve kept us safe.’
And for only the second time since he’d known her, she tore into him. She ripped off his tie, his jacket, her hands were all over him, her lips too. ‘I want you so much,’ she said, ‘I love you so much,’ and she pulled him down on to the bed – ‘Oh, okay,’ said Alan – and, oh God, she was everywhere, how was she doing that, when she only had two hands, and she was in him and now he was in her and that last bit was pretty unexpected – ‘I love you!’ she shouted, and he wanted her to hush, Bobby would hear, the neighbours would hear – and it was all so silent out there, there was no music at all, and Alan could picture them maybe as a family sitting around the contents of the envelope soberly, ‘Well, I guess we learned our lesson,’ – and Alan wished the music was back, just a bit of it, just to give him a bit of rhythm, it had been a long time since he’d done anything like this. ‘I love you,’ cried Alice, ‘Alan, why did we ever stop? Why did we ever stop loving each other?’ And Alan didn’t know.
Alan was woken by Alice with a kiss.
‘I have to go to work,’ he said.
‘Couldn’t you just stay here with me?’
‘Not really,’ he said.
‘Okay.’
There was still no sound from next door, and Alan supposed that was a good thing.
Alan phoned Alice from work. He never did that.
It was late morning, he wanted to hear her voice.
‘I love you,’ he said.
‘That’s nice,’ she replied. ‘Will you be home at the usual time?’
‘I think so. I hope so.’
‘Good.’
He phoned her again later in the afternoon, but this time there was no answer.
When he got home at last he was surprised to see the dog was waiting for him.
The fur had fallen out, every last hair of it. But the dog didn’t seem too distressed by this. His face was etched into one big doggy grin, tongue lolling out. He waddled towards Alan on those shiny smooth paws of his.
‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Hey. Good dog. Good boy.’
He stroked at his off-beige skin, and it was a little sticky to the touch.
Bobby was playing on his Xbox.
‘Hello, champ,’ said Alan. ‘What about Sparky, then? Sparky pulled through!’
Bobby didn’t look up; he was too absorbed in his game. Alice came in from the kitchen.
‘Bobby,’ she said. ‘That dog of yours needs feeding.’ Bobby’s body twitched in irritation. ‘Now, come on,’ she said. ‘He’s your responsibility.’
‘Hello,’ said Alan. ‘I love you.’
‘Now, Bobby,’ insisted Alice.
So Bobby tottered to his feet. Then tottered to the kitchen, fetched a can of dog food. He tottered back to the dog, who all this time had gazed after his young master in utter adoration. Bobby scooped some of the food out of the tin with his fingers. He bent down towards his dog. And then, very carefully, he smeared it all over the dog’s face. He smeared it in good and hard, so that the jellied meat stuck there firm – some of it went into the mouth, and a little on to that hanging tongue, but the majority hung off the face and gave Sparky an impromptu beard.
Then Bobby sat down again, picked up his Xbox joystick. He squeezed the controls hard, and the remains of dog food oozed out from his fist.
Alan watched, appalled. ‘What’s wrong with Bobby?’
‘Nothing’s wrong with Bobby,’ said his wife. ‘Bobby’s got his dog back. Bobby’s happy, the dog’s happy, everybody’s happy.’
‘Are you happy?’
‘Of course I’m happy. Come into the kitchen. I want to talk to you privately.’ He followed her, and she smiled as she closed the door.
‘What is it?’
‘You should sit down.’
He did.
‘I’m having an affair,’ smiled Alice.
Alan didn’t know what to say. ‘What?’ And then, ‘Why?’ And, ‘But you said you were happy …’
‘I am happy. I’m happy because I’m having an affair.’
‘Oh,’ said Alan. He supposed he ought to have felt angry. Was that what she wanted? But he had no anger left. He’d used it all up, wasted it on loud music and garden rubbish.
‘Don’t look glum, Alan. I’m not glum. We’re going to sort this out. Let me explain how.’
‘Okay.’ And Alan felt strangely reassured, actually; Alice always sorted everything out.
She explained how she could keep everything she wanted. And how he could get the same thing in return. That way everything would carry on as normal. It’d just be a different normal. A better normal.
He said, very quietly, ‘Can I have time to think?’
She was very polite. ‘Of course you can, darling.’ He’d been staring down at the kitchen table as she coolly told him what she wanted from him, how she saw their marriage surviving, what her conditions were. And now he looked up at her. She was staring at him closely, and there was still that smile, and her head was fixed to one side for the best angle, and he shuddered for the briefest moment. ‘Oh, Alan,’ she said. ‘When we first met, I remember. Trying to work out whether we ought to have just been friends. I think, darling, that we lost our way. I think we could have been such good friends.’
‘And last night?’
Alice turned her head to the other side, narrowed her eyes, frowned. ‘What about it?’
That night Alan stayed on the sofa. He played on Bobby’s Xbox. He played as Tiger Woods. He beat the computer once.
He went to work. The roads were filled with motorists who’d found love. Old Man Ellis called him in for another emergency meeting, and this time Ellis told him he was a disgrace, and threatened him with redundancy, and Ellis was a short ugly man and body odour clung to him like a limpet, but he’d found love, he’d found Mrs Ellis, he’d made it work, and Alan wanted to ask him what the secret was. Waiting on his desk when Alan came out was an unsigned note calling him ‘Wanker’. The man who’d called him a wanker was probably in love too.
He thought about calling Alice. He didn’t dare.
He didn’t go straight home. He went to the pub. He sat on his own. He drank lager and ate crisps.
By the time he reached the house, Alice was already in bed. He undressed in the dark, and climbed in beside her. She didn’t move, not a muscle. He couldn’t tell whether she were asleep or awake. Alive or dead. Human or. Or. He wanted to rub against her. In the moonlight her skin looked so smooth.
There was still no sound from next door, and the silence, the desperate silence, began to hurt.
‘All right,’ he said, out loud. ‘I’ll do what you want.’
A
lan hadn’t been on a date in years, and didn’t know how to dress. So Alice took him to the wardrobe and picked out a tie, a jacket, a shirt, shoes. She inspected the results critically. ‘You look good enough to eat.’ Alice herself was immaculate, she’d never lost the knack, who’d have thought?
‘Maybe we don’t have to do this then,’ said Alan. ‘If this is what you like.’
She chewed her lip, just for a second, then laughed. ‘Come on,’ she said, and plucked him by the sleeve, and took him downstairs.
Bobby was playing golf with his new friend. ‘Hello, champ,’ said Alan. ‘Hello, champs.’ He thought the boy on the right was Bobby, because that was Tiger Woods.
‘Don’t wait up!’ Alice told the two children gaily.
They stood on the welcome mat. The mat read, NOSTRA CASA and A VERY HAPPY FAMILY LIVES HERE! and HOME SWEET HOME SWEET HOME SWEET HOME SWEET HOME. Alan raised the knocker, but at his touch the door swung open.
‘We’re expected,’ Alice assured him.
The house was pretty. Everything was clean and ordered and there was the smell of recent polish – or was it something besides? On a shelf with the telephone directory Alan saw his padded envelope, still sealed. DOG KILLER, it said, and that accusation seemed so spiteful now. We’re all good neighbours, aren’t we, good friends. Next to it, he saw, there were other envelopes, similarly sized – CAT POISONER read one. MURDERER said another. Still more: CHILD ABUSER. RAPIST. KILLER. RAPIST. KILLER.
On a shelf beneath, a cup filled to the very brim with sugar.
‘But where are they?’ said Alan.
‘They’ll be in the dining room,’ said Alice. Her eyes were shining with excitement. ‘Let’s see what they’ve got for us!’
They’d cooked pasta. Lasagne, fettuccini.
Barbara had really made an effort. Alan had never seen her with her clothes on before, and she looked beautiful, she’d done a really good job. Barbara smiled, a little demurely, Alan thought. ‘Doesn’t she look wonderful, Alan?’ Alice cooed. ‘Good enough to eat!’
Eric’s smile had no shyness to it, and he flashed it throughout the whole meal. He was wearing a suit. His tie was pure black. Alan thought it made his own striped one look wrong and silly. Eric looked so good he could have got away with a striped tie; even the Santa hat perched on the side of his head looked smart and chic.
The small talk was very small, but Alice laughed a lot at it, and Alan had almost forgotten what her laughter sounded like. In the background, playing very subtly, was a selection of festive favourites. But there was nothing cheesy about them, they were performed by famous opera singers, and the orchestra was one of the Philharmonics.
It was time for the dessert. ‘Allow me,’ said Alice, ‘you two have worked so hard already,’ and she fetched it from the brand-new refrigerator. ‘Tiramisu!’ she said. ‘It’s my favourite! Oh, how did you know?’ And she sat down, kissed Eric gratefully upon the lips.
‘Tiramisu, yum yum,’ said Alan.
Alice scooped a fistful of tiramisu from the bowl. She looked straight at Alan. And her eyes never leaving his, she smeared it slowly over her face. She massaged it into her cheeks, her lips and chin – then rubbing lower, down on to the neck, thick cream and chocolate peeping over the top of her cleavage.
Alan winced.
Alice’s eyes flashed for a moment. ‘If you don’t like it,’ she said, ‘why don’t you come over here and wipe it off me? Come on. Lick it off. Lick it off me, if you dare.’
Eric grinned at that, Barbara smiled so demurely. Alan didn’t move.
And Alice smiled such a polite smile from beneath her mask of soft dessert. ‘I think it’s time we left you two lovebirds alone.’ And so saying, she got to her feet. She picked up Eric from the waist, she tucked him under her arm. And they left the room.
Alan couldn’t be sure, but he thought as he left that Eric may have winked at him.
‘Well,’ said Alan. He looked at Barbara, who was still smiling, but was it really demure, was she perhaps just as embarrassed as he was? ‘Well,’ said Alan. ‘What do we do now? Just the two of us.’
He reached across the table, and took hold of Barbara’s hand. It felt like the skin of his dead dog.
Alan said, ‘I hope we can be friends.’
He closed his eyes. He concentrated hard. As if through thought alone he could make that hand warm to his touch, make it take hold of his in turn. As if, by wanting it enough, he could make Barbara love him.
He heard the sound of bedsprings, of his wife shrill and noisy, her screams of pleasure as she reached orgasm. He kept his eyes squeezed tight and tried to block out all the noise, all the noise there was in the world.
ROBERT SHEARMAN is an award-winning writer for stage, television and radio. He was resident playwright at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter, and regular writer for Alan Ayckbourn at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. He is the winner of the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the Sophie Winter Memorial Trust Award and the Guinness Award for Ingenuity in association with the Royal National Theatre. Many of his plays are collected in Caustic Comedies, published by Big Finish Productions.
For BBC Radio he is a regular contributor to the Afternoon Play slot, produced by Martin Jarvis, and his series The Chain Gang has won two Sony Awards, and he is acclaimed for his work on Doctor Who, bringing the Daleks back to the screen in the BAFTA-winning first series of the revival in an episode nominated for a Hugo Award.
Shearman’s first collection of short stories, Tiny Deaths, was published by Comma Press in 2007. It won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection, and was also short-listed for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. His second collection, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, published by Big Finish, won the British Fantasy Award and the Edge Hill Readers’ Prize, while his third collection, Everyone’s Just So So Special, appeared in 2011, again published by Big Finish.
‘I have noisy neighbours,’ reveals the author. ‘They talk too loud. They stamp up and down the stairs. And once in a while, if they’re being insufferably happy, they play their music at full volume. They’re doing it at this very moment. Bastards.
‘My way of dealing with them is to be passive aggressive. I grit my teeth whenever I leave the house and they wave hello to me – oh, I wave back all right, I smile, but I’m being ironic. Behind closed doors I shake my fists silently at the walls, and tell them (in hushed tones, in the unlikely event they’d hear me over the decibels) to shut up, shut up, shut up!
‘The reason I wrote this story is in the hope that one day one of my neighbours will be in a bookshop. They’ll be browsing the shelves. They’ll recognise my name in this anthology, maybe, and buy it. And then they’ll find out. They’ll find out exactly how cross I was. And I’ll have my passive aggressive revenge.
‘If you’re reading this in the future, and you are my neighbours, I’m not joking. Turn the music down!’
The Man in the Ditch
—LISA TUTTLE—
THERE WAS NOTHING to look at once they were away from the town, only a long road stretching ahead, bare fields on either side, beneath a lowering grey sky. It was very flat and empty out here on the edge of the fens, and dull winter light leeched all colour from the uninspiring landscape. Occasionally there was a ruined windmill in the distance, a knackered old horse gazing sadly over a fence, a few recumbent cows, a dead man in a ditch—
Linzi screamed when she saw it, an ear-piercing screech that might, had J.D. been a less-practised driver, caused a nasty accident. If there was nothing else out here, there were still plenty of vehicles travelling fast and close, both front and back.
‘What the fuck?’
She saw how red his face had gone, the vein that throbbed in his temple, and felt bad, but she hadn’t screamed for nothing. ‘Jay, there was a dead body in the ditch back there – a person!’
‘Don’t be stupid.’ His hands tightened on the wheel and his eyes dart
ed between the mirror and the road, not sparing her a glance.
‘I saw it! We have to—’
‘What? What do we have to do?’
‘I— I don’t know. Go back?’
With every passing second the distance grew.
‘And why should we do that? Do you see anywhere to turn? And then, even if you could tell me where to stop, there’s nowhere to pull over without going right into the ditch. And why? So you can see that what you thought was a dead body was really a load of fly-tipped rubbish?’
She worried at her lip as she tried to recall precise details of what she had seen – a withered, brownish, naked man, lying curled on his side – but she didn’t believe it had been an optical illusion. ‘It was a man’s body. I’m sorry I startled you, but anyone would’ve yelled, to see a corpse like that.’
J.D. sighed and moved his head around, easing the tension in his neck. ‘All right, my lovely. It’s over now. A dead body doesn’t need our help.’
‘But – we ought to tell someone?’
‘Tell who?’
‘The police?’
He flinched and she shut her eyes, as if his response to the word had been a slap in the face. She opened them again when she heard him put on the indicator.
‘If you really saw it, other people did too,’ he said calmly. Then he turned left, onto a signposted road, and then, very soon, took another left onto an unmarked road, a narrow, single-track lane. They were now travelling parallel to the main road, back in the direction from which they had come. With a nervous flutter of anticipation low in her belly, Linzi realised he must be responding to her request, taking her back to the spot where she’d seen the body. From here, the main road was easily visible as a steady stream of traffic; only a short stretch of empty land separated the track they were on from the drainage ditch, even though she couldn’t see it. But then, she hadn’t noticed this road from the other side. She couldn’t guess how far they’d gone after her sighting, but she had faith that J.D. knew: he was a professional driver.