The Fury

by Alexander Gordon Smith

  There was a call from behind the curtain, the whole thing billowing before Mrs Jackson’s face popped out. She saw the turmoil in the stands and trotted onto the stage, calling to the kids who rioted there.

  ‘Right. Right! Everybody, this is no way to behave in a theatre. I want you all to take your seats, straight away please. Anyone who doesn’t want to be here had better leave right now.’

  Gradually the noise levels ebbed as the audience took their seats, a few people drifting out the back.

  Mrs Jackson looked at Emily. ‘Are you ready?’ Emily nodded. ‘Good girl, now off the stage so we can get started. You too, Fred, Kimberly.’

  ‘Mrs Jackson,’ said Daisy. ‘What about me?’

  Mrs Jackson had already vanished back into the dressing room.

  Daisy stood there, hugging her backpack strap with both hands. Fred, Kim and Emily were strolling into the wings, still giggling. The audience were whispering in soft tones, occasional paper missiles still hurtling from row to row. Daisy had the terrifying idea that she was actually dead, that she had choked in her sleep or something. How else could she explain what was going on? She felt like screaming out to the crowd just to prove that she existed.

  There was a crunch and the lights in the hall went out, the stage spotlights blazing overhead, blasting away Daisy’s shadow and making her feel even more like a phantom. Once again the curtain opened, Mrs Jackson reappearing. She walked to the centre of the stage, about three metres from where Daisy was standing, and held out her hands.

  ‘Thank you all for coming,’ she said, her voice trembling with nerves. ‘It’s lovely to see so many of you here. Um, as you all know this is technically a dress rehearsal, not a finished performance, so please forgive any slips of the tongue or prompts from myself or occasional retakes.’

  Daisy didn’t move, couldn’t move, her cheeks burning more fiercely than the lights.

  ‘Please, please, please remember to turn off your mobile phones, children,’ Mrs Jackson continued. ‘And, yes, just enjoy the show. Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy by William Shakespeare.’

  Mrs Jackson turned around to go, and Daisy managed to break her paralysis, waving her arms at the teacher.

  ‘Please, Mrs Jackson,’ she whispered as softly as she could, sensing the weight of the audience in the shadows. ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be on the stage,’ Mrs Jackson replied. The harsh lighting turned her face into a leather mask. ‘Get off.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You’re going to ruin it,’ Mrs Jackson snapped, waving at Daisy like she was a fly on her dinner. ‘Now shoo.’

  Daisy stood there, in the middle of the stage, her mouth hanging open in disbelief. The crowd was silent, an audience of glass-eyed dolls.

  ‘Get off,’ said Mrs Jackson, and this time she took a step towards Daisy. The heat from the bulbs overhead was too much, an island of light in the middle of an ocean of darkness. Daisy stumbled, looking for the stairs. She saw them too late, missed her footing and tumbled down. Pain grabbed her left leg like a clawed fist as she landed on her hands and knees, her heavy rucksack swinging over her shoulder. She waited for the laughter, the screams of delight, the insults, but the theatre was deathly quiet.

  Daisy struggled to her feet. From here, out of the glare, she could see the kids in the crowd. Nobody was looking at her. On stage Mrs Jackson was holding the curtain open, ushering out the girl who was playing the narrator. She gave her a thumbs-up then sank into the black depths. The girl took her position then started to speak.

  ‘Er, two households, both alike in dignity . . .’

  Daisy backed away, heading for the doors, wishing that everybody was laughing at her. This was worse, so much worse. This was like something from a nightmare. By the time she was at the doors she was running, bursting through them, barrelling out the main exit into the sun, her mind screaming this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening over and over again as she tore across the car park. Eventually she crashed against the hedge, snatching breaths in between fits of sobs.

  Only when she felt like she had wrung out every last tear did she look up, using her sleeve to clean her face. Compared with what had just happened, home seemed like the best possible thing she could imagine – even if her parents were tucked up in bed, even if her mum, God forbid, was getting ill again. At least they still acknowledged she was there.

  Her mum was supposed to collect her again tonight at the usual time, but her house was only a ten-minute bus ride away. Daisy hurried up the path, swerving round the packs of pupils that loitered near the gates, wishing that one person – just one, a pupil or the teacher on duty or the policewoman who always stood outside at home time – would notice her. But she may as well have been invisible.

  There were three buses lined up on the road. She climbed on board the middle one just as it was leaving. She didn’t have a bus pass, but after standing at the driver’s side for a minute or so waiting to pay, trying to stay upright as he accelerated down the road, she slinked off to a window seat at the front. From there she watched the world flash by, rubbing her throbbing temples, thinking that if she was a ghost then surely she wouldn’t have to keep wiping the glass to clear away her breath.

  The traffic was heavy, and it was more like fifteen minutes before her street came into view. Daisy pressed the button, getting out of her seat when the bus pulled to a stop. It wasn’t a long way to her house but all the same she walked quickly, almost running, desperate to be inside, desperate to see her mum. If the tumour had come back, Daisy decided, then it didn’t matter. She’d look after her, she’d make sure she was okay. Her mum had beaten it once before, she could do it again.

  She reached her front gate, feeling a little better. So what if everyone at her school was a total jerk. She had more important things to worry about. Maybe that’s why she’d had such a rubbish week – maybe life was preparing her for a tough few months, maybe it was trying to make the thought of staying at home and caring for her mother easier. Yes, that was it. For the first time in what seemed like the whole day she remembered to breathe in.

  She was halfway down the path before she realised there was another piece of good news.

  Somewhere between getting off the bus and arriving at her front door, her headache had gone.

  Brick

  Fursville, 3.46 p.m.

  He saw her too late, the copse of plastic greenery shielding her approach. It was only when she screamed – a wet shriek gargled through a throatful of blood – that Brick knew she was there.

  Lisa threw herself at him, wedging him in the angle between the wall and the floor. Her body felt like a bag of bones and gristle, nothing in the right place, broken things poking through her skin. And yet she was heavy, too heavy, a dead weight that crushed him, which stopped him from getting up – even when her toothless maw stretched impossibly wide, closing over his mouth like a plunger, stealing the air from his lungs.

  ‘I still love you, Brick,’ she breathed a hot stew of words into him, the stump of her tongue flicking against his lips. ‘Even though you did this to me. Even though you did this to me. Even though YOU DID THIS TO ME!’

  Brick choked, crying out, swinging his fists. She dissolved, spinning apart like sugar in water, leaving only the coppery taste of her. He lurched awake, gasping, heaving, his hands at his throat as if he could somehow widen his airways. He sucked in oxygen, his cries weakening as the nightmare bled away. He was drenched in sweat, his T-shirt plastered to his chest and back, his eyes stinging from the salt. The stuffed leopard stared at him and he glared back.

  ‘Great watchdog you turned out to be,’ he muttered, reaching over to the laptop and sliding it towards him. He opened it up, waiting for the dongle to connect to the internet. He’d left his Yahoo Question page open, and he refreshed it, his heart kicking when he saw that somebody – PWN_U13 – had already left an answer. His excitement didn’t last long.
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  Dear weirdo

  Either you are a total nutjob who has imagined all this BS and needs to seek professional help for your brain problems, or you are a total nutjob who has p****d a lot of people off and done some crazy stuff and needs to seek professional help for your psycho problems. Hope this helps.

  ‘Thanks a lot,’ he said to PWN_U13, refreshing the page, then again just to make sure, before gently closing the laptop.

  What if it was just him? What if he was the only person in the world this was happening to? He remembered somebody at school once telling him that people could be allergic to each other, to the oils in the skin or their saliva. Kissing or touching that person could bring them out in a rash, even send them into some kind of shock. Brick hadn’t believed it at the time – the kid who’d told him this also told him that rhino horns were made of hair – but it could have been true. What if people were suddenly allergic to him? To his one-of-those-faces face. Would that make them want to kill him?

  He considered going online again, Googling it, but he decided not to. Even if that’s what was happening, looking at stuff on the internet wasn’t going to help him. No. He’d wait it out. Sooner or later somebody had to give him a sensible answer, didn’t they? Brick rested his head against the wall, his heart still drumming from the dream.

  This time, he would stay awake.

  Daisy

  Boxwood St Mary, 3.48 p.m.

  It was like opening a door into another universe, cool darkness spilling out, muting the sunshine and the heat. The change in light was so extreme that it took Daisy’s eyes almost a minute to penetrate the shadows of her hallway, the gloom inside her house like a solid, living thing.

  She stepped inside, pulling the Yale key free and wiping her feet on the big doormat. The silence was immense, as if it had wrapped itself around her head, pulling her in. In spite of the fact that her headache had gone – or maybe because of it – she felt weird. Lighter, somehow, as if part of her wasn’t there.

  The house was empty. She could always tell. A house without people had a different sort of atmosphere, as though it was waiting for something. It creeped her out, and she’d told her parents plenty of times that she didn’t like being here by herself. You’re almost a teenager now, her dad usually said. Aren’t you old enough to be alone in the house? Aren’t you old enough now not to be spooked by shadows? Yes, she was practically a teenager, but that didn’t magically take away the fears that had lived inside you for all those years. A birthday didn’t suddenly make you brave.

  Daisy slung her rucksack on the floor beneath the coat stands, massaging her shoulder where the strap had dug in. It was brighter in here now that the imprint of the sun had ebbed from her retinas, but even so she flicked the hall light on, and the kitchen light too as she walked to the back of the house. Her dad would be at work – he was an accountant at a firm in Ipswich. Her mum hadn’t gone back to her teaching job after her illness, but she often popped out for the shopping, or to see friends, or just to get a little fresh air.

  Or maybe they’re at the hospital? Daisy’s brain suggested. Needles plugged into mum’s veins, her hair coming out in handfuls, her face a thousand years old, Dad pretending that his eyes are red raw because of the pollen, or the exhaustion.

  She shushed the thoughts, going to the sink and filling a glass from the filter tap. Their back garden, through the window, was a mess. It always had been, even though both her mum and her dad were out there all the time in spring and summer. The little box of grass was short, but the flowerbeds were a riot of colour, taking over the garden – like a tumour – a little more every day. Soon they wouldn’t be able to get out the back door without being clawed to death by thorns and jaggies.

  She finished the water and walked back through the kitchen, heading for the living room. It would do her good to sit down and watch a little telly, it would help calm her. Already the events at school seemed like a million years ago, vague and distant as if she’d imagined them. It probably hadn’t been as bad as it had seemed at the time. It wasn’t as if this was the first time that people had ignored her.

  She was through the kitchen door when she realised that something was wrong. She ducked back inside, looking at the key box over the radiator. She’d made that box in her last summer in middle school. There was a door which wouldn’t close because she’d screwed the hinges in the wrong place, and inside it were nine hooks in rows of three for the family’s keys. Hanging on those hooks were three sets – the spare one, her mum’s and her dad’s.

  Daisy frowned, prodding them as if to make sure they were actually there. The little ‘Best Mum Ever’ and ‘Dad’s Taxi (and Cash Machine)’ key fobs she’d bought them last Christmas jingled. That didn’t make any sense. If the keys were here it meant – They’re still in the house, they’re still upstairs, they’re still in bed.

  Her skin went cold, goosebumps breaking out so fast that they stung. She nearly made a break for the front door, for the sun, before managing to calm herself down. It was no great shock that her parents were still in bed. She already knew – or as good as knew – that her mum was ill, so it made sense that she’d be up there, under the covers, resting, her dad keeping watch over her.

  So why didn’t she want to go and look?

  Daisy stood by the kitchen door, unable to do anything else. Her fear was too huge to understand, it seemed to fill up her whole body. You’re just worried about seeing her looking so sick again, she said to herself. And all that stuff at school today, it’s just made you a Nervous Nellie, that’s all. But it wasn’t just that. It was the thought of her dad smashing his head against the bed, looking at her with that manic, bug-eyed face; of being cocooned forever in their too-long arms.

  Daisy took a step forward, and another, her momentum building as she walked to the stairs. She was halfway up when she understood what had happened. It hit her like a fist to the gut, making her slump onto her hands and knees on the steps.

  It was the smell. She knew it from the time a cat had been hit and killed by a taxi outside their house. None of the neighbours had known who it belonged to so her mum had brought it in and put it into a cardboard box in the garden shed. Daisy – she’d been seven or eight, she couldn’t remember – had snuck in first thing in the morning, before her parents had woken up, hoping that it might have come back to life, that it would spring from the box and lick her hand and meow and purr, and that she could keep it and look after it and make sure nothing bad ever happened to it again.

  Daisy had opened that box and the smell had clawed its way down her throat right to her stomach. It wasn’t a rotten smell, not like when the bin needed emptying. It was hardly even there at all, yet somehow it was everywhere. And even though she was only seven or eight Daisy had known exactly what that smell was. It was death, plain and simple. It was the smell that death left behind when it had been inside your house.

  It was here now. It clung to everything – the stairway carpet, the walls with the framed photographs on. It was on her skin, too, so pungent that she thought at first that she was the one who stank, that death had come for her.

  Only it hadn’t. It had been here, but it wasn’t Daisy it had taken.

  She forced herself to climb the last few steps. Hunched over, she crossed the landing to her parents’ room. The door was closed, and on it was a sheet of paper on which her mum’s haphazard script read: Daisy, do not open this door. Call the police, darling. Please don’t come in.

  She reached up, a puppet, unable to stop herself. The handle popped, the door creaked, and a fresh wave of the smell washed over her, settling into her nostrils. The stench was so strong that there could have been a dozen dead cats in boxes inside the room, two dozen, a hundred.

  Or one mum, her mind suggested, a perverse rhyme from somewhere inside her brain. One mum, dead in the bed, the cancer is back and it messed with her head.

  ‘Shut up!’ she shouted, the tears flowing. She leaned on the door jamb, trying not to breathe, but
the sobs kept emptying her lungs, forcing her to suck the smell into her mouth. The heavy curtains were still pulled tight and it seemed that there was no air in the dark room, just death.

  There were two figures in the bed, the same as before. Only this time they didn’t stir. They sat propped against the headboard, leaning on each other, two shadows that reminded Daisy of the pictures she’d seen at school of the victims of the nuclear bombs in Japan, their shapes burned onto the pavements by the heat of the explosion. She wanted to call out to them, but she didn’t. She didn’t want to fall into the silence where their response should have been.

  Instead, she moved to the window, thinking that it was the lack of light which had her parents bound tight. Maybe if she let the sun in, the warmth, it would blast death away, clear his stench from the room.

  She grabbed hold of the heavy velvet, yanking the right-hand curtain first, almost hard enough to jar the pole loose from its mounts. The light that flushed in from outside was less golden than umber, burned and sticky. She wrestled with the left, jigging it along. It got stuck halfway and she had to tuck the end behind the mirror on the sideboard. She stared into the glass, seeing her parents asleep on the bed – They’re asleep, that’s all it is, it’s obvious, look closely and you’ll see them breathing.

  Only they weren’t asleep. They weren’t even her parents. There was something wrong with their faces, their muscles turned to jelly beneath their skin.

  A barrage of sobs broke free from her chest and Daisy doubled over. She didn’t fight them, she just let them come, knowing that whatever she saw when she turned around it would be better if all the tears were already gone. She didn’t know how much later it was that the last of them dropped from her trembling lips. With a heaving, groaning sigh she walked to the bed and sat down on the edge of the mattress, the same place she had sat that very morning, a million, billion years ago.