“I know,” he said. He helped his mother into the chair. “I got you breakfast.”
“Mixed it up with that shitty milk I bet.”
Elliott watched as his mother struck a match on the side of the wheelchair and touched it to the tip of the cigarette in her mouth. “Well, yeah.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I’ll give it to the cats.”
Elliott’s mother grunted and drove the heels of her hands against the wheels. The chair shuddered, then rumbled out of the bedroom.
Elliott followed her. She went into the living room and, after tugging weakly at the curtains until Elliott pushed them back himself, settled before the window and looked out at the yard and the cracked walkway and the untrimmed brush and the county road.
In the kitchen, Elliott picked up the phone book. Already, Mosby’s picture was scuffed and bent. Elliott’s father had used the phone book already, treating the artwork like he treated everything else around him, as something made for a purpose, a single purpose, and nothing else. Daddy’s purpose was to work and sweat and be the head of the household. Elliott’s job was to go to school like all the other boys his age, like the boys who weren’t sick and didn’t have a ruined penis and boys whose mothers weren’t dying. And Elliott’s mother’s job was to go on and die.
The grimy, strawberry-shaped clock over the stove read ten thirty-seven. Mrs Anderson wouldn’t be there for another three and a half hours.
Elliott went into his bedroom and sat on his cot. He pulled the paper bag out from under his pillow and looked at it. Even with the dull pencil lines, the horses were good. He was a good artist.
“Mom, you think I draw good?”
From the living room, “Huh?”
“You think I draw good?”
“Whatever.”
Elliott put the horses back. He walked back through the living room into the kitchen, where, through the open door, he looked at the bony back of his mother’s neck as she looked out the window.
He turned on the stove. He filled a pan with water and set it down to boil. He wondered how badly scald burns would look. He wondered how they would feel. He felt around in the junk drawer and took out the little knife he’d used to sharpen his pencil. He wondered how hard someone would have to push if neck skin were to part?
He went out to the living room and stood beside his mother. From outside, he could hear one of the cats picking on the door.
“Cat wants in,” said his mother.
Elliott opened the door. The cat trotted in. Cats, Elliott thought, were like his father. Cats believed people had a single purpose – to serve them. Elliott shut the door and the cat ran into the kitchen in search of food.
Elliott said, “You want me to turn on the TV?”
“My head hurts too much. You gonna give me a massage on my head, Ellie?”
Elliott rubbed her head with one hand. In his other, he held the little knife.
He stopped then, because he could hear the water boiling in the kitchen. He left his mother and went to the stove.
Before lifting the pan, he went to the window, unlocked it, and pushed it open an inch. May air bled into the stuffy room. The crusty orange curtains trembled as if afraid of the breeze.
Elliott looked over at the Campbells’ yard. He thought about their children, taken away.
He turned Mosby’s wrinkled painting upside down.
The knife was put back into the drawer for next time, if the water wasn’t enough.
Then, sucking air through his clamped teeth, he poured the boiling water over his forearms and hands. The skin erupted, bright and red. Angry, insulted blisters rose.
He caught his breath.
“Goin’ back to bed, honey,” said his mother. She rolled away from the living room window and out of sight.
He caught his breath. Pale cat hairs, floating in the kitchen, landed on the burns and beneath the pain he almost felt a tickle.
He dropped to the kitchen chair and lost his breath; he thought of horses running running running on sand toward the beach. He caught his breath again.
Elliott faced the living room and the front door, his arms stretched out. And he waited for his smiling teacher with the white, billowing sailboat coat.
RAMSEY CAMPBELL
The Alternative
FOR THE PAST five years, Ramsey Campbell has been my indispensable collaborator on these volumes of The Best New Horror. Although he has now decided to concentrate on his own fiction, he will continue to act as a spiritual guide for the series with his recommendations and contributions.
In a career that has spanned three decades, he has been the recipient of more awards for horror fiction than any other writer. They include The Bram Stoker Award, The World Fantasy Award (three times), The British Fantasy Award (seven times) and the Liverpool Daily Post & Echo award for continuing literary excellence.
Recognised as one of the finest living genre writers, his fourteen novels include the recently published The Count of Eleven, The Long Lost and The One Safe Place, and some of his best short fiction can be found in the collections Alone with the Horrors (which won both the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award in 1994), Waking Nightmares and Strange Things and Stranger Places. He regular column in Necrofile, “Ramsey Campbell, Probably”, also comes highly recommended.
While writing “The Alternative”, the author experienced his worst ever nightmares and panic dreams about something going wrong with his family and his home. They stopped when he finished the story.
“The tale came from the idea of a successful life being somehow based on increasingly terrible nightmares,” he explains. “Come to think of it, doesn’t that pretty well describe my career . . .?”
HIGHTON WAS DRIVING past the disused hospital when the car gave up. On the last fifty miles of motorway he had taken it slow, earning himself glances of pity mingled with hostility from the drivers of the Jaguars and Porsches. As he came abreast of the fallen gates the engine began to grate as though a rusty chunk of it were working itself loose, and the smell of fumes grew urgently acrid. The engine died as soon as he touched the brake.
A wind which felt like shards of the icy sun chafed the grass in the overgrown grounds of the hospital as he climbed out of the Vauxhall, rubbing his limbs. He was tempted to leave the car where it was, but the children who smashed windows were likely to set fire to it if he abandoned it overnight. Grasping the wheel with one hand and the crumbling edge of the door with the other, he walked the car home through the housing estate.
All the windows closest to the hospital were boarded up. Soon he encountered signs of life, random windows displaying curtains or, where the glass was broken, cardboard. A pack of bedraggled dogs roamed the estate, fighting over scraps of rotten meat, fleeing yelping out of the communal entrances of the two-storey concrete blocks.
His skin felt grubby with exertion when at last he reached his block. A drunk with an eyeshade pulled down to his brows was lolling at the foot of the concrete stairs. As Highton approached, he staggered away into the communal yard strewn with used condoms and syringes. Someone had recently urinated at the bend of the staircase, and the first flat on the balcony had been broken into; a figure was skulking in the dark at the far side of the littered front room. Highton was opening his mouth to shout when he saw that the man at the wall wasn’t alone: bare legs emerging from a skirt as purple as a flower were clasped around his waist above his fallen trousers. The couple must have frozen in the act, hoping Highton wouldn’t notice them. “Have fun,” he muttered, and hurried past six doors to his.
The 9 on the door, where the red paint had been sunbleached almost pink, had lost one of its screws and hung head downwards from the other, like a noose. When he pushed it upright, it leaned drunkenly against the 6 as he let himself into the flat. The dim narrow corridor which led past three doors to the kitchen and the bathroom smelled of stale carpet and overcooked vegetables. He closed the front door quietly and eased open the first
inner door.
Valerie was lying on the bed which they had moved into the living-room once the children needed separate bedrooms. Apart from the bed and the unmatched chairs the room contained little but shadowy patches lingering on the carpet to show where furniture had stood. At first he thought his wife was asleep, and then, as he tiptoed through the pinkish light to part the curtains, he saw that she was gazing at the corner which had housed the television until the set was repossessed. She gave a start which raised the ghost of a ring from the disconnected telephone, and tossing back her lank hair, smiled shakily at him. “Just remembering,” she said.
“We’ve plenty to remember.” When her smile drooped he added hastily “And we’ll have more.”
“You got the job?”
“Almost.”
She sighed as if letting go of the strength which had helped her to wait for him. As her shoulders sagged, she appeared to dwindle. “We’ll have to manage.”
He lowered himself into a chair, which emitted a weary creak. He ought to go to her, but he knew that if he held her while they were both depressed she would feel like a burden, not like a person at all. “Sometimes I think the bosses choose whoever travelled furthest because that shows how much they want the job,” he said. “I was thinking on the way back, I should have another try at getting jobs round here.”
Valerie was flicking a lock of hair away from her cheek. “If I can rewire a few properties,” he went on, “so people know they shouldn’t associate me with those cowboys just because I was fool enough to work for them, the work’s bound to build up and we’ll move somewhere better. Then we can tell Mr O’Mara that he’s welcome to his ratholes.”
She was still brushing at her greying hair. “Where are Daniel and Lucy?” he said.
“They said they wouldn’t be long,” she responded as if his query were an accusation, and he saw her withdraw into herself. He was trying to phrase a question which he wouldn’t be afraid to ask when he heard the door creep open behind him. He turned and saw Lucy watching him.
He might have assumed Valerie was mistaken – that their fourteen-year-old had been in her room and was on her way out, since the front door was open – if it weren’t for her stance and her expression. She was ready to take to her heels, and her look betrayed that she was wondering how much he knew – whether he recognised her cheap new dress as purple as a flower. She saw that he did, and her face crumpled. The next moment she was out of the flat, slamming the door.
As he shoved himself off the chair, his heart pulsating like a wound, Valerie made a grab at him. How could she think he would harm their daughter? “I only want to bring her back so we can talk,” he protested.
She shrank against the headboard of the bed and tried to slap away the lock of hair, her nails scratching her cheek. “Don’t leave us again,” she said in a low dull voice.
“I’ll be as quick as I can,” he promised, and had a fleeting impression, which felt like a stab of panic, that she meant something else entirely. The clatter of Lucy’s high heels had already reached the staircase. He clawed the front door open and sprinted after her.
He reached ground level just in time to see her disappearing into the identical block on the far side of the littered yard. The drunk with the eyeshade flung an empty bottle at him, and Highton was afraid that the distraction had lost him his daughter. Then he glimpsed a flash of purple beyond a closing door on the balcony, and he ran across the yard and up the stairs, on tiptoe now. As he reached the balcony he heard Lucy’s voice and a youth’s, muffled by the boards nailed over the window. He was at the door in two strides, and flung it open. But his words choked unspoken in his throat. The youth on the floor was his son Daniel.
The fifteen-year-old blinked at him and appeared to recognise him, for a vague grin brought some animation to his face as he went back to unwinding the cord from his bruised bare scrawny arm. Highton stared appalled at the hypodermic lying beside him on the grimy floorboards, at the money which Lucy was clutching. He felt unable to move and yet in danger of doing so before he could control himself. He heard Valerie pleading “Don’t leave us again,” and the memory seemed to release him. “No,” he tried to shout, and woke.
He was alone in bed, and surrounded for some indeterminate distance by a mass of noises: a hissing and bubbling which made his skin prickle, a sound like an endless expelled breath, a mechanical chirping. When he opened his eyes, the room looked insufficiently solid. “Valerie,” he managed to shout.
“Coming.” The hissing and bubbling grew shriller and became a pouring sound. As he sat himself up she brought him a mug of coffee. “Don’t dawdle in the bathroom or your father will be late for work,” she called, and told him “You seemed to want to sleep.”
“I’m just drying my hair,” Lucy responded above the exhalation.
“Finish on the computer now, Daniel. You know not to start playing before school.”
“It’s not a game,” Daniel called indignantly, but after a few seconds the chirping ceased.
Valerie winked at Highton. “At least all that should have woken you up.”
“Thank God for it.”
She stooped and, holding back her long black hair with one hand, kissed each of his eyes. “Have your shower while I do breakfast.”
He sipped the coffee quickly, feeling more present as the roof of his mouth began to peel. The dream had been worse this time, and longer; previously it had been confined to the flat. It must have developed as it had because he would be seeing O’Mara this morning.
As usual when Lucy had used it, the bath was full of foam. Highton cleared the mirror and tidied away Daniel’s premature electric razor before sluicing the foam down the plughole with the shower. By the time he went downstairs, Valerie was waving the children off to school. When the microwave oven beeped he grabbed his breakfast and wolfed it, though Valerie wagged a finger at him. “You’ll be giving yourself indigestion and nightmares,” she said, and he thought of telling her about his recurrent dream. Doing so seemed like inviting bad luck, and he gave her a long kiss to compensate for his secrecy as he left the house.
All along the wide suburban street the flowering cherry was in bloom. Highton inhaled the scent before he drove the Jaguar out of the double garage. He had an uninterrupted run along the dual carriageway into town until the traffic lights halted him at the junction with the road which led to the disused hospital past the flats which O’Mara had bought from the council. When the lights released him Highton felt as if he were emerging from a trance.
The only spaces in the car park were on the ninth floor. Beyond the architectural secrets which the top storeys of the business district shared with the air he saw the old council estate. He put the sight out of his mind as he headed for his office, mentally assembling issues for discussion with O’Mara.
O’Mara was late as usual, and bustled into Highton’s office as if he had been kept waiting. He plumped himself on the chair in front of the desk, slung one leg over the other, rubbed his hands together loudly and folded them over his waistcoated stomach, flashing a fat gold ring. Throughout this performance he stared at Highton’s chair as if both men were on the wrong sides of the desk. “Tell me all the good news,” he demanded, beginning to tap the carpet with the toecaps of his brogues.
“We’ve identified a few points you overlooked in your accounts.”
A hint of wariness disturbed the heavy blandness of O’Mara’s round face. “So long as you’ll be making me more than I’m paying you.”
“It depends whether you decide to follow our advice.” Highton picked up the sheet on which he’d made notes for discussion, and blurted out a thought which seemed just to have occurred to him. “You might consider a programme of repairs and improvements to your properties as a tax expense.”
O’Mara’s face reddened and appeared to puff up. “I can’t afford to splash money around now I’m no longer on the council.”
“But surely – ” Highton said, and heard his voice
grow accusing. How could he forget himself like that? It wasn’t his job to moralise, only to stay within the law. The dream must have disturbed him more than he knew for him to risk betraying to O’Mara his dislike of the man. “Let me guide you through your accounts,” he said.
Half an hour later the landlord was better off by several thousand pounds, but Highton couldn’t take much pleasure in it; he kept seeing how exorbitant the rents were. He showed O’Mara to the lift and made himself shake hands, and wiped off the man’s sweat with his handkerchief as soon as the lift door closed. The sympathetic grins his partners and the secretaries gave him raised his spirits somewhat, and so did the rest of the day: he set up a company for a client, argued the case of another with the Inland Revenue, helped a third choose a pension plan. He had almost forgotten O’Mara until he returned to his car.
He leaned on the Jaguar and gazed towards O’Mara’s streets. Could they really be as bad as he’d dreamed? He felt as if he wasn’t entitled to go home until he had seen for himself. When he reached the junction at the edge of the estate he steered the car off the dual carriageway.
Concrete surrounded him, identical streets branching from both sides of the road like a growth which had consumed miles of terraced streets. The late afternoon sky was the same dull white. From the air the place must resemble a huge ugly crystal of some chemical. Perhaps half the windows he passed were boarded up, but he didn’t know if he was more disturbed by the spectacle of so many disused homes or the thought of tenants having to live among the abandoned flats. The few people he passed – children who looked starved or unhealthily overweight, teenagers with skin the colour of concrete, older folk hugging bags tightly for fear of being mugged – either glared at him or dodged out of sight. They must take him for someone on O’Mara’s payroll, since the landlord never visited his properties in person, and he was uncomfortably aware that his wallet contained a hundred pounds which he’d drawn from the bank at lunchtime. He’d seen enough to show him the district was all that he’d imagined it to be; but when he turned off the main road it was to drive deeper into the maze.
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