The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories
Page 22
Then Mr Brooks was at her door, hand on the door-handle, dishevelled as usual. He must be home on time tonight, would she see to things?
She almost called him back; but he was gone before she could find her voice. Now there were footsteps and echoing female voices in the hall; the rest of the staff were going home.
The big door banged shut, and she knew she was alone. No sound but the far musical drip of the cold tap in the little kitchen at the end of the corridor.
She knew the creature was coming for her. Was she afraid, a small part of her asked?
Oddly, she wasn’t. Or only as afraid as she’d been as a child in the bombings of 1940. Tense, worked up, but not afraid. Not terrified. She thought, quite calmly, that this was the best way, here, in the place she knew so well, with her things around her. In the fortress she had defended so long. Better than running away, and then waiting in fear for the dark to come. In the dark she could only grow weaker . . .
In a way, she was glad to end like this. All her life she had been on the fringes of the battle between the light and the dark, good and evil. It made her feel satisfyingly real to be in the centre of the battle at last. She knew her best years were gone; she had a sudden eagerness to spend what was left in a rush. For what she knew was right.
And beyond that, she was filled with a sort of wonder at the creature that would come. If he was real, then she would know for certain that his Adversary, her God, was real too. And it would be a relief, to know that for certain.
There was a vivid flash from the window; then a distant rattle of thunder. Any moment now. She began putting her desk in order . . . the waiting was what was making her drowsy. Her traitorous body was letting down her soul. If the creature caught her dozing . . . She heard her door squeak as it opened.
‘Here’s your tea, Mrs Parsons! Mrs Parsons! Mrs Parsons!’
A familiar, unfrightening and indeed female hand was gently shaking her shoulder. She looked up at Mrs Meadowes’s freckled face and ginger hair with total disbelief.
‘But I heard you go home, Mrs Meadowes!’
‘Heavens, no, it’s only half past three. I’ve brought your cup of tea. You must have dozed off. It’s ever so close this afternoon. I nearly dozed off myself.’
‘Was there . . . a woman in black . . . with a baby . . . a gypsy-looking woman with long hair held back with an elastic band? Come to register the baby?’
The receptionist looked baffled, shook her head. ‘We’ve only had three deaths this afternoon, and two notices of marriage. It’s been very quiet. Nobody like that – nobody like that at all. You must have been having a dream . . .’
She gave Mrs Parsons a slightly pitying look that roused all Mrs Parsons’s cold wrath. Then said hurriedly, ‘Don’t let your tea get cold,’ and left.
Mrs Parsons stirred her cup of tea, for want of anything better to do. It was then that she saw the draft form, filled out in Biro, in her own handwriting. The name stood out quite clearly.
Beelzebub.
A rage seized Mrs Parsons. She strode to the ordnance survey map on the wall. Witchford was there all right. So was Coveny Lane, with its several buildings marked.
It was Mrs Parsons who left Mr Brooks to lock up and see to things that afternoon. It was Mrs Parsons who drove to Coveny Lane, Witchford, full of rage and yearning, hunting for Old Luke Lucifer, hunting for the last battle, for the truth.
She didn’t find any of them, of course. All four buildings in Coveny Lane, Witchford, were large and luxurious modern bungalows. Two of their well-kept gardens contained middle-aged women in smocks and green wellies, up to their elbows in mowing, pruning and weeding. Neither had ever heard of any family called Smith, or seen the woman Mrs Parsons described. Which wasn’t really surprising, for Witchford itself wasn’t really darkest Fenland at all, but a pleasant prosperous village mainly inhabited by people who commuted to well-paid jobs in Ely. Shaking her head and lambasting herself, back in her car, Mrs Parsons had to admit she’d really always known that.
So where had those creatures come from, the terrible hating babe, the earthy slut in black, and Old Luke Lucifer who came in the night and was as cold as clay?
There was only one place they could have come from.
Inside herself. They lived there. Always.
For a long minute, Mrs Parsons seemed to teeter on a precipice above endless chasms of darkness, where slimy things coiled and twisted through and round each other, hating, fearing, devouring endlessly, without pity. The truth.
Then she murmured, ‘Stuff and nonsense.’
And drove away to get her husband’s tea ready.