She rose shakily, after trying to straighten thick stockings of two different tones of grey. She went out into the hall, picked up the 1968 telephone directory, and, her eyes squinting two inches off the page, looked up the solicitor’s number.
She had difficulty making the solicitor’s girl understand who she was; an old-standing client and a wealthy one. She mentioned the name of partner after partner . . . old Mr Sandbach had been dead twenty years . . . young Mr Sandbach retired last spring. Yes, she supposed Mr Mason would have to do . . . two o’clock?
Then she slowly climbed the stairs, slippered feet carving footprints in dust thicker than the worn staircarpet. In what had once been her bedroom she opened the mirrored wardrobe door, not even glancing at her reflection as it swung out at her.
She began to wash and comb and dress. With spells of sitting down to rest it took three hours. The creature had to lend her its own waning strength. Even then, Miss Forbes scarcely managed. The creature itself nearly despaired.
But between them, they coped. At half past one Miss Forbes rang for a taxi, the ancient black stick-phone trembling in her hand.
The taxi-driver watched her awestruck in his rear-view mirror. Two things clutched tightly in her gloved hand: a door-key and a big lump of wallpaper with something scrawled on the back in a big childish hand. Like all his kind, he was good at reading things backwards in his mirror.
‘I leave all my worldly possessions to my niece, Martha Vickers, providing she is unmarried and living alone at the time of my death. On condition that she agrees, and continues, to reside alone at 17 Marine Parade. Or, if she is unable or unwilling to comply with my wishes, I leave all my possessions to my great-niece, Sarah Anne Walmsley . . .’
The taxi-man shuddered. He’d settle for a heart-attack at seventy . . .
‘Suppose I spend all the money, sell the house and run?’ asked Sally Walmsley. ‘I mean what’s to stop me?’
‘Me, I’m afraid,’ said Mr Mason, wiping the thick fur of dust off the hallstand of 17 Marine Parade, and settling his plump pinstriped bottom. ‘We are the executors of your aunt’s estate . . . we shall have to keep some kind of eye on you . . . it could prove unpleasant . . . I hope it won’t come to that. Suppose you and I have dinner about once every six months and you tell me what you’ve been up to . . .’ He smiled tentatively, sympathetically. He liked this tall thin girl with green eyes and long black hair. ‘Of course, you could contest the will. It wouldn’t stand up in court a moment. I couldn’t swear your aunt was in her right mind the morning she made it. Not of sound testamentary capacity, as we say. But if you break the will, it would have to be shared with all your female aunts and cousins – married and unmarried. You’d get about three thousand each – not a lot.’
‘Stuff them,’ said Sally Walmsley. ‘I’ll keep what I’ve got.’ She suddenly felt immensely weary. The last six months had happened so fast. Deciding to walk out of art school. Walking out of art school. Trailing London looking for work. Getting a break as assistant art editor of New Woman. And then lovely Tony Harrison of Production going back to his fat, frigid suburban cow of a wife. And then this . . .
‘I must be off,’ said Mr Mason, getting off the hallstand and surveying his bottom for dust in the spotted stained mirror. But he lingered in the door, interminably, as if guilty about leaving her. ‘It was a strange business . . . I’ve dealt with a lot of old ladies, but your aunt . . . she looked . . . faded. Not potty, just faded. I kept on having to shout at her, to bring her back to herself.
‘The milkman found her, you know. When the third bottle of milk piled up on her doorstep. He always had the rule to let three bottles pile up. Old ladies can be funny. She might have gone away. But there she was, sitting in the bay window, grey as dust.
‘He seems to have been her only human contact – money and scribbled notes pushed into the milk bottles. She lived on what he brought – bread, butter, eggs, yoghurt, cheese, orange juice. She seems to have never tried to cook – drank the eggs raw after cracking them into a cup.
‘But she didn’t die of malnutrition . . . the coroner said it was a viable diet, though not a desirable one. Didn’t die of hypothermia, either. It was a cold week in March, but the gas fire was full on, and the room was like an oven . . .’ He paused, as if an unpleasant memory had struck him. ‘In fact, the coroner couldn’t find any cause of death at all. He said she just seemed to have faded away . . . put down good old natural causes. Well, I must be off. If there’s any way I can help . . .’
Sally nearly said, ‘Please don’t go.’ But that would have been silly. So she smiled politely while he smiled too, bobbed his head and left.
Sally didn’t like that at all. She listened to the silence in the house, and her skin crawled.
A primitive man, a bushman or Aborigine, would have recognized that crawling of the skin. Would have left the spot immediately. Or if the place had been important to him, a cave or spring of water, he would have returned with other primitive men and performed certain rituals. And then the creature would have left.
But Sally simply told herself not to be a silly fool, and forced herself to explore.
The library was books from floor to ceiling. Avant-garde – fifty years ago. Marie Stopes, Havelock Ellis, the early Agatha Christie, Shaw and Wells. Aunt Maude had been a great reader, a Girton girl, a bluestocking. So what had she read the last ten years? For the fur of dust lay over the books as it lay over everything else. And there wasn’t a magazine or paper in the house. So what had she done with herself, never going out, doing all her business by post, never putting stamps on her letters till the bank manager began sending her books of stamps of his own volition. Even the occasional plumber or meter-reader had never seen her; only a phone message and the front door open, with scrawled instructions pinned to it . . .
Aunt Maude might as well have been an enclosed nun . . .
But the house with its wood-planked walls, its red-tiled roof, its white gothic pinnacles, balconies and many bay windows was not in bad shape; nowhere near falling down. Nothing fresh paint wouldn’t cure. And there was plenty of money. And the furniture was fabulously Victorian. Viennese wallclocks, fit only for the junkshop twenty years ago, would fetch hundreds now, once their glass cases were cleared of cobwebs, and their brass pendulums of verdigris. And the dining-room furniture was Sheraton; genuine, eighteenth-century Sheraton. Oh, she could make it such a place . . . where people would bother to come, even from London. Everybody liked a weekend by the sea. Even Tony Harrison . . . she thrust the thought down savagely. But what a challenge, bringing the place back to life.
So why did she feel like crying? Was it just the dusk of a November afternoon; the rain-runnelled dirt on the windows?
She reached the top of the house: a boxroom under the roof with sloping ceiling. A yellow stained-glass window at one end that made it look as if the sun was always shining outside; the massed brick of the chimney stacks at the other. A long narrow tall room; a wrong room that made her want to slam the door and run away. Instead, she made herself stand and analyse her feelings. Simple, really; the stained glass was alienating; the shape of the room was uncomfortable, making you strain upwards and giving you a humiliating crick in the neck. Simple, really, when you had art school training, an awareness of the psychology of shape and colour.
She was still glad to shut the door, go downstairs to the kitchen with its dripping tap, and make herself a cup of tea. She left all the rings of the gas stove burning. And the oven. Soon the place was as warm as a greenhouse . . .
In the darkest corner of the narrow boxroom, furthest from the stained-glass window where the sun always seemed to shine, up near the grey-grimed ceiling, the creature stirred in its sleep. It was not the fiercest or strongest of its kind; not quite purely spirit, or rather decayed from pure spirit. It could pass through the wood and glass of doors and windows easily, but it had difficulty with brick and stonework. That was why it had installed Miss Forbes in the bay win
dow: so it could feed on her quickly, when it returned hungry from its long journeys. It fed on humankind, but not all humankind. It found workmen in the house quite unbearable; like a herd of trampling, whistling, swearing elephants. Happy families were worse, especially when the children were noisy. It only liked women, yet would have found a brisk WI meeting an unbearable hell. It fed on women alone; women in despair. It crept subtly into their minds, when they slept or tossed and worried in the middle of the night, peeling back the protective shell of their minds that they didn’t even know they had; rather as a squirrel cracks a nut, or a thrush a snail shell; patient, not hurrying, delicate, persistent . . .
Like all wise parasites it did not kill its hosts. Miss Forbes had lasted it forty years; Miss Forbes’ great-aunt had lasted nearer sixty.
Now it was awake, and hungry.
Sally hugged her third mug of tea between her hands and stared out of the kitchen window, at the long dead grass and scattered dustbins of the November garden. The garden wall was fifty yards away, sooty brick. There was nothing else to see. She had the conviction that her new life had stopped, that her clockwork was running down. I could stand here forever, she thought in a panic. I must go upstairs and make up a bed; there was plenty of embroidered lavendered Edwardian linen in the drawers. But she hadn’t the energy.
I could go out and spend the night in an hotel. But which hotels would be open, in Southwold in November? She knew there was a phone, but the Post Office had cut it off.
Just then, something appeared suddenly on top of the sooty wall, making her jump. One moment it wasn’t there; next moment it was.
A grey cat. A tom-cat, from the huge size of its head and thickness of shoulder.
It glanced this way and that; then lowered its forefeet delicately down the vertical brick of the wall, leapt, and vanished into the long grass.
She waited; it reappeared, moving through the long grass with a stalking lope so like a lion’s and so unlike a cat indoors. It went from dustbin to dustbin, sniffing inside each in turn, without hope and without success. She somehow knew it did the same thing every day, at the same time. It had worn tracks through the grass.
‘Hard luck,’ she thought, as the cat found nothing. Then, spitefully, ‘Sucker!’ She hated the cat, because its search for food was so like her own search for happiness.
The cat sniffed inside the last bin unavailingly, and was about to depart, empty-handed.
‘Welcome to the club,’ thought Sally bitterly.
It was then that the hailstorm came; out of nowhere, huge hailstones, slashing, hurting. The tom-cat turned, startled, head and paw upraised, snarling as if the hailstorm was an enemy of its own kind; as if to defend itself against this final harshness of life.
Sally felt a tiny surge of sympathy.
It was almost as if the cat sensed it. It certainly turned towards the kitchen window and saw her for the first time. And immediately ran towards her, and leapt on to the lid of a bin directly under the window, hailstones belting small craters in its fur, and its mouth open; red tongue and white teeth exposed in a silent miaow that was half defiance and half appeal.
You can’t let this happen to me.
It made her feel like God; the God she had often screamed and wept and appealed to, and never had an answer.
I am kinder than God, she thought in a sad triumph, and ran to open the kitchen door.
The cat streaked in, and, finding a dry shelter, suddenly remembered its dignity. It shook itself violently, then shook the wetness off each paw in turn, as a kind of symbol of disgust with the weather outside, then began vigorously to belabour its shoulder with a long pink tongue.
But not for long. Its nose began to twitch; began to twitch quite monstrously. It turned its head, following the twitch, and leapt gently on to the kitchen table, where a packet lay, wrapped in paper.
A pound of mince, bought up in the town earlier, and forgotten. Sally sat down, amused, and watched. All right, she thought, if you can get it, you can have it.
The cat tapped and turned the parcel, as if it was a living mouse. Seemed to sit and think for a moment, then got its nose under the packet and, with vigorous shoves, propelled it to the edge of the table, and sent it thumping on to the stone floor.
It was enough to burst the paper the butcher had put round it. The mince splattered across the stone flags with all the gory drama of a successful hunt. The cat leapt down and ate steadily, pausing only to give Sally the occasional dark suspicious stare, and growling under its breath.
OK, thought Sally. You win. I’d never have got round to cooking it tonight, and there isn’t a fridge . . .
The cat extracted and hunted down the last red crumb, and then began exploring the kitchen, pacing along the work-tops, prying open the darkness of the cupboards with an urgent paw.
There was an arrogance about him, a sense of taking possession, that could only make her think of one thing to call him.
When he finally sat down, to wash and survey her with blank dark eyes she called softly, ‘Boss? Boss?’
He gave a short and savage purr and leapt straight on to her lap, trampling her about with agonizing sharp claws, before finally settling down, facing outwards, front claws clenched into her trousered knees. He was big, but painfully thin. His haunches felt like bone knives under his matted fur. The fat days must be in the summer, she thought sleepily, with full dustbins behind every hotel. What do they do in November?
He should have been an agony; but strangely he was a comfort. The gas stove had made the room deliciously warm. His purring filled her ears.
They slept, twisted together like symbiotic plants, in a cocoon of contentment.
The creature sensed her sleep. It drifted out of the boxroom and down the intricately carved staircase, like a darkening of the shadows; a dimming of the faint beams that crept through the filthy net curtains from a distant street-lamp.
Boss did not sense it until it entered the kitchen. A she-cat would have sensed it earlier. But Boss saw it, as Sally would never see it. His claws tightened in Sally’s knee; he rose up and arched his back and spat, ears laid back against his skull. Sally whimpered in her sleep, trying to soothe him with a drowsy hand. But she didn’t waken . . .
Cat and creature faced each other. Boss felt no fear, as a human might. Only hate at an intruder, alien, enemy.
And the creature felt Boss’s hate. Rather as a human might feel a small stone that has worked its way inside a shoe. Not quite painful; not enough to stop for, but a distraction.
The creature could not harm Boss; their beings had nothing in common. But it could press on his being; press abominably.
It pressed.
Boss leapt off Sally’s knee. If a door had been open, or a window, Boss would have fled. But no door or window was open. He ran frantically here and there, trying to escape the black pressure, and finally ended up crouched in the corner under the sink, protected on three sides by brickwork, but silenced at last.
Now the creature turned its attention to Sally, probing at the first layer of her mind.
Boss, released, spat and swore terribly.
It was as if, for the creature, the stone in the shoe had turned over, exposing a new sharp edge.
The creature, exploding in rage, pressed too hard on the outer layer of Sally’s mind.
Sally’s dream turned to nightmare: a nightmare of a horrible female thing with wrinkled dugs and lice in her long grey hair. Sally woke, sweating.
The creature was no longer there.
Sally gazed woozy-eyed at Boss, who emerged from under the sink, shook himself, and immediately asked to be let out the kitchen door. Very insistently. Clawing at the woodwork.
Sally’s hand was on the handle, when a thought struck her. If she let the cat out, she would be alone.
The thought was unbearable.
She looked at Boss.
‘Hard luck mate,’ she said. ‘You asked to be let in. You’ve had your supper. Now bloody earn it!’
As if he sensed what she meant, Boss gave up his attempts on the door. Sally made some tea, and, conscience-stricken, gave Boss the cream off the milk. She looked at her watch. Midnight.
They settled down again.
Three more times that night the creature tried. Three times with the same result. It grew ever more frantic, clumsy. Three times Sally had nightmares and woke sweating, and made tea.
Boss, on the other hand, was starting to get used to things. The last time, he did not even stir from Sally’s knee. Just lay tensely and spat. The black weight of the creature seemed less when he was near the human.
After three a.m. cat and girl slept undisturbed. While the creature roamed the stairs and corridors, demented. It began to realize that one day, like Miss Forbes and Miss Forbes’ great-aunt, it too might simply cease to exist; like the corpse of a hedgehog, by a country road, it might slowly blow away into particles of dust.
A weak morning sunlight cheered the dead grass of the garden. Sally opened a tin of corned beef and gave Boss his breakfast. He wolfed the lot, and then asked again to be let out, with renewed insistence.
Freedom was freedom, thought Sally sadly. Besides, if he didn’t go soon there was liable to be a nasty accident. She watched him go through the grass, and gain the top of the wall with a magnificent leap.
Then he vanished, leaving the world totally empty.
She spent four cups of coffee and five fags gathering her wits; then opened her suitcase, washed at the kitchen sink, and set out to face the world.
It wasn’t bad. The sky was pale blue, every wave was twinkling like diamonds as it broke on the beach, and her brave new orange Mini stood parked twenty yards down the road.
But it was Boss she watched for: in the tangled front garden, on the immaculate lawn of the house next door.
Then she looked back at number 17, nervously. It looked all right, from here . . .
‘Good morning!’ The voice made her jump.
The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories, Volume Two Page 10