A burglar would enter through the French windows, but the prospect of so much breakage dismayed him. The thief or his accomplice could have been small enough to climb through the kitchen window. He was picking up a tenderiser mallet to break the glass, and a towel to help muffle the sound, before he realised that he couldn’t use anything in the house. He dashed out, locking the front door behind him, and ran on tiptoe around the house.
He mustn’t take long. He had to leave the items on the balcony outside the flat and drive to the school in time to appear to have decided to see Lucy’s work after all. Once they were home he would discover that he’d been in such a hurry to get to the school that he had forgotten to switch on the burglar alarm. There were tools in the garden shed which an unprepared burglar might use, but how would the burglar open the padlock on the door? Highton had been straining for minutes to snap the hasp, using a branch which he’d managed to twist off the apple tree, when he wondered if he could say that he had left the shed unlocked, though wouldn’t he be claiming to have been too careless for even pressure of work to explain? He ran to the garage for a heavy spanner, with which he began to lever at the hasp and then to hammer at it, afraid to make much noise in case it attracted attention. He was still attacking the padlock when the Jaguar swung into the drive and spotlighted him.
Lucy was first out of the car. “They couldn’t turn off the fire alarm, so everyone had to go home,” she called; then her cheerfulness wavered. “What are you doing?”
He felt paralysed by the headlights. He couldn’t hide the spanner. “I lost the key,” he said, and remembered that Valerie knew it was on the ring with his keys to her car. “I mean, I snapped it. Bent it. Had to throw it away,” he babbled. “I was going to come to the school after all when I –” He had no idea how he would have continued if he hadn’t been interrupted, but the interruption was anything but welcome. A police car had drawn up behind the Jaguar.
Valerie climbed out of his car as the two policemen approached. “I wasn’t speeding, was I?”
“We weren’t following you, madam,” the broader of the pair assured her, staring at Highton. “We received a report of someone behaving suspiciously around this house.”
“There must be some mistake. That’s my husband.” But as she laughed, Valerie’s gaze strayed to the open boot of her car. “It’s all right, Lucy,” she said – too late, for the girl was already blurting “What are you doing with Daniel’s computer?”
“I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation,” Valerie said in a tone so clear that she might have been addressing not only Lucy and the policemen but also the neighbours who had appeared at several windows. “In any case, it’s a domestic matter.”
The police stood their ground. “Perhaps the gentleman would like to explain,” the thickset policeman said.
“I was just pottering. Can’t I potter around my own property?” Highton felt as if the lights were exposing his attempt at humour for the defensiveness it was, and the police obviously thought so; they stepped forwards, the man who was built like a bouncer declaring “We’ll have a look around if you don’t mind, to make sure everything’s in order.”
They stared hard at the spanner and the padlock, they examined all the downstairs locks and bolts. They lingered over the contents of the boot of the Toyota. “These are yours, are they, madam?” the wiry policeman enquired, and looked ready to ask Valerie to produce receipts. Eventually the police left, having expressed dissatisfaction by their ponderousness. “There won’t be any reason for us to come back, I hope,” the broad policeman commented, and Highton knew that they’d concluded they had cut short an insurance fraud.
Once they had driven away, Valerie glared at the neighbouring houses until the pairs of curtains fell into place. “Don’t say anything, Lucy. Help me carry these things into the house.” To Highton she said “You look terrible. For God’s sake try and get some sleep. Tomorrow we’ll talk about what has to be done. We can’t go on like this.”
He felt too exhausted to argue, too exhausted even to be afraid of sleep. He fumbled through washing his face and brushing his teeth, and crawled into bed. Sleep held itself aloof from him. In a while he heard Daniel and Lucy murmuring in the back garden, obviously about him. The unfamiliar smell of smoke made him flounder to the window, from which he saw them sharing a cigarette. “Don’t start smoking or you won’t be able to give it up,” he cried, and they fled around the house.
Later, as he lay feeling that sleep was gathering just out of reach, Valerie came to bed. When he tried to put an arm round her she moved away, and he heard muffled sobs. He had the notion that somehow her grief wouldn’t go to waste, but before he succeeded in grasping the idea, sleep blotted out his thoughts.
Then she was leaning over him and whispering in his ear. “Come and see,” she repeated.
Her voice was too low for him to distinguish its tone, but when he opened his eyes he saw she had been crying. He swung his legs off the bed, on which he had been lying fully dressed. “What is it?”
“Nothing bad,” she assured him, and he realised that her tears had been of relief. “Come and see.”
He followed her into the hall of the flat and saw a portable television near the front door. “Where did that come from?”
“That’s part of it. Have you really been asleep in there all this time?” She was too full of her news to wait for an answer. “He didn’t spend that money on drugs. That’s why you couldn’t find him. He bought the television for us and something for himself to keep him straight.”
She put a finger to her lips and beckoned him to the door of Daniel’s room. Daniel and Lucy were sitting together on the chair in front of the rickety dressing-table, which bore a computer with a small monochrome screen. Both of them were engrossed in the calculations which it was displaying. “I’m teaching them how to use it,” Valerie said in his ear. “Once they’re old enough to get a job doing it, maybe I can go back to mine.”
Though Highton recognised that he shouldn’t enquire too closely into how or where Daniel had been able to buy both a computer and a television for a hundred pounds, it looked like a miracle. “Thank God,” he said under his breath.
She squeezed his arm and led him back to the front room. “It won’t be easy,” she said with a strength which he’d feared had deserted her. “The next few days are going to be awful for him. He swears he’ll straighten himself out so long as we don’t leave him alone for a moment. He means you particularly, Alan. He needs you to be here.”
She wasn’t referring only to the present, Highton knew. “I will be, I promise,” he said, trying to grasp why he felt less sure of himself than he sounded. “Do you mind if I go out for a stroll and a think, seeing as I won’t be going anywhere for a while? I won’t be long.”
“Don’t be,” she said, and hugged him fiercely.
He would go back to her, he vowed as he descended the dark concrete stairs, just as soon as he understood why he was harbouring any doubt that he would. Not far now, not much farther, he kept telling himself as he tramped through the dark between the broken streetlamps, trying to relax enough to think. When at last he turned and saw only darkness and looming blocks of flats he was seized by panic. Before he could run back to the flat, he awoke.
Valerie had wakened him by sitting up. When he reached for her, desperate to feel that she was there, she slid out of bed without looking at him. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, rubbing his eyes.
She gave him a wavering glance and sat on the far end of the bed. “I don’t even want to know what you thought you were doing, but I need to know what’s wrong.”
“It’s as you’ve been saying, pressure of work.”
“You’re going to have to tell me more than that, Alan.”
He couldn’t tell her the truth, but what else might convince her? “I’m not happy about some of the clients I have to work for. One in particular, a landlord called O’Mara.”
“You used to talk to me a
bout anything like that,” Valerie said as if he had confirmed his disloyalty. She nodded at the open door, past which Lucy was padding on her way to the bathroom. “Wait until we’re alone.”
Once the bathroom was free Highton made for the shower. If he closed his eyes he could imagine that the water was lukewarm rain, surging at him on a wind between the blocks of flats. He hurried downstairs as soon as he was dressed, not wanting the children to leave the house until he’d bidden them goodbye.
They were still at the table. They stared at their food and then smiled at him, so brightly yet so tentatively that he felt like an invalid whose condition was obvious to everyone except himself. As Valerie put his plate in front of him with a kind of resentful awkwardness, Lucy said “Don’t worry about Mr O’Mara.”
The side of Highton’s hand brushed against the hot plate. The flare of pain was too distant to bother him. “What do you know about O’Mara?”
“Only that he says you’re the best accountant in town,” she said, flinching from his roughness. “I didn’t mean to listen to what you and mummy were saying.”
“Never mind that. Where have you come across him?”
“I haven’t yet. His son Lionel told me what he said. Lionel goes to our school.” She lifted a forkful of scrambled egg to her lips before adding defiantly “He’s taking me to the disco.”
Highton could see that she was expecting an argument, but he didn’t want to upset her now, particularly since there was no need. He finished his breakfast and waited near the front door to give her and Daniel a hug. “Don’t let life get you down,” he told them, and watched as they walked away beneath the sunlit cherry trees and turned the corner.
Valerie was switching on the dishwasher. “So tell me about this O’Mara,” she said with more than a hint of accusation.
“You look after Lucy. I’ll deal with him.”
“Not in your present state of mind you won’t. You need to see someone, Alan. Maybe they’ll prescribe some time off work, which we can afford.”
That was true, especially since she was a director of the firm. “At the very least I have to tidy things up,” he said.
She seemed resigned, even relieved. “Shall I drive you to the office?”
A surge of love almost overwhelmed him, and he would have pulled her to him if he hadn’t been afraid that the violence of his emotion would rouse her suspicions. “I don’t know how long I’ll be,” he said. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”
Having to be so careful of his words to her distressed him. He yearned to linger until he had somehow communicated his love for her, except that if he stayed any longer he might be unable to leave. He grabbed his overcoat and made for the front door. “We want you back,” she said, and for a moment he was certain that she had an inkling of his plan; then he realised that she was referring to the way he had become unfamiliar. He gave her a wordless smile which he just managed to hold steady, and hurried out to the car.
The lights at the junction on the road into town remained green as he approached them, and he drove straight through. For years he had driven through without considering where the side road led, but now there was barely room for anything else in his mind. It wasn’t the money he’d left at the flat which had changed the situation, he thought; it was the balance of fortune. Life at the flat had started to grow hopeful because life at the house had taken a turn for the worse. He parked the car and marched himself to the office, thinking how to restore the balance.
“I’m going to have to take some time off. I wish I could be more definite.” His partners reassured him that they could handle the extra workload; they didn’t seem surprised by his decision. He discussed with them the cases about which they needed information, and when they left him he grabbed the phone. “No, I can’t leave a message. I want to speak to Mr O’Mara in person.”
Eventually the landlord picked up the car phone. “I hope I’m going to like what you have to tell me, Alan.”
“You won’t,” Highton said, savouring the moment. “I want you to tell your son to stop sniffing around my daughter. I won’t have her feeling that she needs to prostitute herself for the family’s sake.”
For some time O’Mara only spluttered, so extravagantly that Highton imagined being sprayed in the face with saliva. “He won’t be going near her again,” O’Mara shouted, “but I’ll be wanting a few words with her father in private.”
“Just so long as you don’t send your thugs to do your talking. I’m not one of your tenants,” Highton said, and felt reality lurch. “And if you come anywhere near my house the police will want to know why.”
When O’Mara began spluttering obscenities Highton cut him off and held onto the receiver as if he couldn’t bear to let go until he’d placed one last call. He dialled and closed his eyes, waiting for Valerie’s voice. “Look after one another,” he said, and set the receiver on its cradle before she could respond. Snatching a fistful of old financial journals from the table in the reception area, he headed for his car.
The lights at the junction seemed almost meaningless. He had to remind himself not to turn left while they were against him. As soon as they changed he drove through the rubbly streets until he found a courtyard entirely surrounded by boarded-up flats. With the tyre-iron he wrenched the number-plates off the Jaguar, then he thrust the rolled-up magazines into the petrol tank. Once they were all soaked he piled them under the car and set fire to them with the dashboard lighter. As he ran out of the courtyard he shoved the plates between the planks over a window, and the numbers fell into the dark.
He was nearly at the flat when he heard the car explode. Surely that would be enough misfortune for his family to suffer. The sound of the explosion spurred him onwards, up the smelly concrete steps, along the balcony. The door of the flat swung inwards as he poked a key from his ring at the lock. “I’m home,” he called.
Silence met him. The cramped kitchen and bathroom were deserted, and so were the untidy bedrooms and the front room. The small television in the latter, and the computer in the boy’s room next to it, were switched off. He prayed that he wasn’t too late – that Daniel had gone wherever Lucy and his mother were so that they could watch over him. Thank heaven the phone wasn’t working, or he might have been tempted to make a call which could only confuse and distract him. He lay down on the bed and closed his eyes, wondering if he might dream of his life in the house while he waited for his family to come to him.
KARL EDWARD WAGNER
In the Middle of a Snow Dream
KARL EDWARD WAGNER was one of the genre’s finest practitioners of horror and dark fantasy. He has been represented with a story in every volume of The Best New Horror to date, and his untimely death in 1994 robbed the field of one of its major talents.
Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Wagner trained as a psychiatrist before becoming a multiple British and World Fantasy Award-winning writer, editor and publisher. His early writing included a series of fantasy novels and stories featuring Kane, the Mystic Swordsman. His first novel, Darkness Weaves With Many Shades, introduced the unusually intelligent and brutal warrior-sorcerer, and Kane’s adventures continued in Death Angel’s Shadow, Bloodstone, Dark Crusade and the collections Night Winds and The Book of Kane. A new Kane story recently appeared in the White Wolf anthology Elric: Tales of the White Wolf, based around the character created by Michael Moorcock.
Wagner also expanded the exploits of two of Robert E. Howard’s characters, Conan and Bran Mak Morn respectively, in the novels The Road of Kings and Legion from the Shadows, and he edited three Echoes of Valor heroic fantasy anthologies and a collection of medical horror stories, Intensive Scare.
For fourteen years he was the editor of the renowned The Year’s Best Horror Stories series, while his own superior short horror tales were collected in In a Lonely Place, Why Not You and I? and Unthreatened by the Morning Light. At the time of his death, he had just finished compiling a new collection, Exorcisms and Ecstasies, and was working on
two new novels, The Fourth Seal and Tell Me, Dark, the latter based on the graphic novel he disowned.
THE COSTUMES WERE RUMORED to be genuine Playboy Club surplus, minus the bunny tails and funny ears. Niane Liddell hated them. They were satin or something, heavily boned to pull in the waist and push out the bust, and you needed a friend to help zip you in and out of them whenever you went to the toilet. She had waited topless in bars before, but at least that had been more comfortable than this blue satin torture device. The pawing and patting were about the same either way, but it was cooler topless lugging trays of drinks all about, and at least she could draw full breaths.
This was not the reason why she decided to pour scalding coffee upon her hand.
Niane Liddell actually had just turned twenty-one, although she had claimed to be of that age since she had fled a dying mining town in Campbell County, Tennessee four years before in search of the bright lights of Nashville. Her singing career had not burst upon the country music scene quite as she had expected. After a series of dirty jobs, Niane had saved enough dirty money to afford a bus ticket to Los Angeles. There, she found things dirtier.
Her Nashville agent had promised this and passed her on to a Los Angeles agent who had promised that, but the promises never really came true and neither did Niane’s wishes. She slept with the people she was told to sleep with, and she landed a few bit parts in trash films, mostly done directly for videocassette. Niane had a very good body, a naturally pretty face and smile, although she thought her nose too big, lots of shining straight black hair which she wore Cleopatra style, and an East Tennessee accent that only Nashville should have loved. She took voice lessons, but her film career proved as hopeless as her music career. She could always find work waiting tables in bars, and this she did. Niane took pride in the fact that she hadn’t had to turn to the streets, as had so many other crushed hopefuls.
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