“I’m really cold,” mummy said.
Daddy went past me and into the corner where mummy had been sleeping, where I had trod on her when I was trying to find the door.
But he couldn’t find the door either.
He said the door had gone, and the windows, and all the walls felt like they were made of stone. Mummy tried to find the curtains, but she couldn’t. They tried to find the door and the window for a long time but they still couldn’t find them and then my mummy started crying.
Daddy said crying would not help, which he says to me sometimes, and he kept on looking in the dark for some more time, trying to find the door.
But in the end he stopped, and he came and sat down with us. I don’t know how long ago that was. It’s hard to remember in the dark. But I think it was quite long ago.
Sometimes we sleep, but later we wake up and everything is still the same. I do not get hungry but it is always dark and it is always very cold.
Mummy and daddy had ideas and used their imaginations. Mummy thought there was a fire, and it burned all our house down. Daddy says we think we are in my room because I woke up first, but he says really we are in a small place made of stone, near a church somewhere. I don’t know, but we have been here a very long time now and still it is not morning yet.
It is quiet and I do not like it. Mummy and daddy do not talk much any more, and this is why, if you wake up in the night, you should never ever get up out of bed.
NICHOLAS ROYLE
The Reunion
NICHOLAS ROYLE IS THE author of five novels and two novellas, and the editor of thirteen anthologies, including Darklands and The Time Out Book of New York Short Stories. His own collection, Mortality, was shortlisted for the inaugural Edge Hill Prize, and he has won three British Fantasy Awards.
Born in Manchester in 1963, Royle teaches creative writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and reviews fiction for The Independent newspaper. He also runs Nightjar Press, publishing original short fiction in signed, limited-edition chapbooks. Currently he is editing a new anthology of uncanny bird stories for Two Ravens Press.
“‘The Reunion’ is based on actual events,” reveals the author, “but the story only really came into focus for me when I was invited to contribute to Ellen Datlow’s Poe anthology.
“Poe is brilliant. I was at a conference recently where a teacher revealed that she had read Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ to a lecture theatre full of schoolchildren. She switched off all the lights and used a torch to read by. A number of parents lodged complaints, which she took as a measure of the event’s success. My tale is inspired by a different Poe story.”
ON ARRIVAL, we’d had to wait behind a man in jumbo cords and a pastel polo shirt who was giving the receptionist a hard time about some problem in his room, a missing towel or a faulty light, and we formed an immediate impression of him that was somewhat negative. It wasn’t long, however, before we realized he had a point.
They didn’t have any record of our booking, despite having sent us an email of confirmation, which happily Maggie had printed out and brought along. So we had to fill in a form, holding up those who had arrived after us, and finally the girl behind the desk gave us a key card and a map.
Yes, a map. It was a big hotel. A huge hotel. One of those places you get apparently in the middle of nowhere but actually no more than twenty miles from one or other dreary Midlands town. A former RAF training camp or stately home or converted mental asylum. This appeared to be all three, with not only west wings and east wings, but whole houses and vast halls tacked on to the main building. The room belatedly assigned to us was in one of the modern blocks.
We walked along one edge of a grand, colonnaded reception hall, past a tuxedoed piano player, through a little ante-room dominated by two stags’ heads mounted on adjacent walls. We passed a bar with its shutter down, then turned right into a wide corridor.
The further we got from the main part of the hotel with its marble columns and wide, red-carpeted staircases, the shoddier and tattier everything became. There was an armchair in a corner that was missing a castor, a cabinet of drawers covered in scuff marks.
I said to Maggie that it was like that scene in Jacob’s Ladder where Tim Robbins is wheeled down into the bowels of a hospital that turns into a vision of hell with crazy people banging their heads against the wall and gobbets of bloody flesh lying around on the floor.
Maggie gave me her standard nod of impartial assent, the one kept for observations beyond her frame of reference. I realized, though, that if I was overly critical of the hotel, and therefore, by extension, of the evening itself, it could provoke a reaction. This was Maggie’s evening – a medical school reunion – and the fact that I had readily agreed to come along meant that if at any point I regretted my decision, it would not be fair to allow it to show.
As we trailed past a rather tired series of framed prints of the hotel in its heyday, I felt the raised glands in my neck. The prints on the wall were undated and there were no outward signs that would enable you to assign them to a particular period. They were like idealizations or artists’ impressions. One hung askew and I wanted to straighten it, but I sensed Maggie’s impatience to get to the room and so left it.
We pushed through a set of glass doors and found ourselves in a lobby area. There was a lift to our right, a corridor behind wood-panelled doors beyond that, and another corridor heading off from the far side of the lobby. An old-fashioned three-piece suite occupied the middle of the space. Facing the lift doors was a walnut table that had seen better days. On it was a folded copy of The Independent.
It appeared that we had to go up two floors; I’m not very good at waiting around for lifts. Or buses. Or anything that you suspect might never come.
“I’ll take the stairs,” I said, “and I’ll still get there before you.”
I took Maggie’s bag in my spare hand and shouldered open the door to the stairs. I ran up one flight, barged through the equivalent door on the next floor and found myself in an identical lobby space. I pressed the call button and while wondering if the lift would ever arrive tried on a number of expressions. It was certainly taking its time, the lift. On a walnut table that was indistinguishable from the one on the floor below was another copy of The Independent folded in the same manner. I thought to myself it had been a waste of money my buying one that morning.
When the lift arrived, the doors trundled open to reveal Maggie and a middle-aged couple, who looked as though they wanted to get out. She introduced them to me as Henrik and Caroline. I thought I could see a slightly guarded look in Henrik’s eyes as we swapped places; Caroline looked as if, like Maggie, she just wanted to get to their room. Henrik had been a contemporary, Maggie told me as the lift doors closed behind me and I turned to press the button. He’d seemed a lot older than me, but then Maggie is four years my senior and some men age worse than others.
The interior of the lift was mirrored on three sides, which created a theoretically endless series of reflections in both side walls. I checked myself out. I wasn’t ageing too badly. My problems were inside my head. I knew that. Maybe physiologically, certainly mentally.
“You look beautiful,” Maggie said in a way that managed to be affectionate and mocking at the same time.
When we finally got to our room, the third on the left beyond the wood-panelled doors, and managed to get the keycard to flash green rather than red on the fifth attempt, we found we had one small towel between the two of us, no complimentary toiletries, and the shower produced either a trickle of boiling water or an icy torrent. I thought about helping Maggie out of her travelling clothes and suggesting we test out the mattress, but I sensed she wanted to get back downstairs for pre-dinner drinks as soon as possible.
So while Maggie plugged in her hair-straighteners I stood to one side of the hot trickle in the shower cubicle pressing at my neck and trying to work out if the gland was bigger or smaller than the day before. I had mentioned it to Maggie and
she had dismissed it. Ideally, this would have sufficed. Whereas the average person might think they had a cold coming on and the raised gland was their body’s natural way of fighting it, my thoughts turn to leukaemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease.
I leaned over the washbasin and wiped a swathe of condensation from the mirror so that I could see my reflection. I fancied that it was studying me rather than I it. If so, perhaps it felt sorry for me with my imaginary ailments and constant nagging anxiety. Or perhaps it just thought I was ridiculous. It wasn’t bothered by anything like that. It was free.
Towelling myself dry, I returned to the bedroom, where Maggie was just stepping into her specially bought ballgown with its flatteringly high waist and gratifyingly plunging neckline. I slipped into my oversize dead man’s DJ and a pair of highly polished shoes that were coming away from their soles.
We left the room and headed back to the lifts. I suggested we walk down and Maggie acquiesced. She looked good in the ballgown and I thought she would prefer to watch the movement of the dress over her long legs than stand around waiting for the lift that might never arrive. I knew that was my preference. I pushed open the door to the stairwell and ushered Maggie through.
As we walked down, a small party in tuxedos and ballgowns was coming up. They passed us and turned left. They were going in the right direction, but they were on the wrong level.
“They’re going the wrong way,” I whispered to Maggie.
But as I made the remark, I lost confidence in its content.
“Are you going to the reunion?” I asked the disappearing party while they were still within earshot.
“Yes,” they said.
“It’s this way,” I said. “Down two flights. Unless you can get down at the other end?”
“No, this is the way,” said a tall man with thinning hair and a perfectly fitting suit.
“How can it be?” I said to Maggie.
I pictured the two identical lobbies with their walnut tables and copies of The Independent. How had we gone wrong?
Maggie had stopped. We exchanged puzzled looks. The people who knew where they were going headed off while we dithered on the stairs. Eventually, I thought we might as well follow them. When we got as far as we could go and hadn’t reached the main part of the hotel, and couldn’t find another stairwell, then we could come back.
So Maggie and I walked down the corridor, which was as similar to the one down which we had walked to get to our room as it is possible to be without actually being the same corridor. There would be no way out at the far end, and even if there was it would only be a stairway and we’d have to descend two flights to get to where we wanted to be.
Even the series of prints on the wall looked the same, one hanging askew. We passed a facsimile of the scuffed cabinet. I looked at the armchair in the corner. It sat unevenly due to a missing castor.
We entered a wide corridor and turned left at the end of it, past a bar that still had its shutters down. Then there was the room with the stags’ heads, the piano player on the edge of the main reception hall (which was now heaving with well-dressed bodies) and we were back where we’d started, without having had to go down two floors.
Maggie and I looked at each other in puzzlement and I just had time to start asking, “What the fuck—?” when a tall woman in a taffeta ballgown swept past and dragged Maggie off to meet someone else she hadn’t seen for twenty years.
They were giving out drinks. The choice was champagne or orange juice. I wandered off to a bar in an adjoining room where I waited behind a fat man who was ordering two turkey sandwiches.
Back on the fringes of the main room where the welcome drinks were still being served, I stood with a pint of Guinness -the nearest I could get to something drinkable – and looked on. At the far side of the room I could see Maggie laughing generously at somebody’s joke, her head dropping forward so that her straightened hair fell in front of her face.
I became aware of a tall, slim man with silver hair standing near to me. A picture of understated elegance, in his own tailored suit and carefully polished shoes, he sipped at a glass of champagne.
“It’s strange being an outsider at one of these events,” he said with an almost imperceptible turn of the head.
“Very strange,” I agreed. “Will,” I added, offering him my hand.
“Gordon,” he said with a warm smile.
We raised our glasses to our lips and watched the increasingly animated crowd in the centre of the room.
“Do you know?” he began, “I was reading in the paper today – just now, upstairs, in fact – that during the Cold War the East Germans used to pay Bulgarian border guards for every East German they shot trying to cross the frontier into the West. It’s almost unbelievable, isn’t it?” He tipped the last of his champagne into his mouth and swallowed. “I don’t know what made me think of that.”
“Extraordinary,” I agreed.
“I’m not sure I could kill anybody, even if ordered to do so.”
“Not even for money?” I joked.
“Especially not for money,” he said, turning to me. “Nice to meet you, Will. Excuse me.”
As he walked away to look for his wife, I ticked myself off for my banal and unfunny joke.
I became aware of my fingers probing inside the collar of my dress shirt. I wondered if this latest fixation on head and neck cancers would end up with another referral to a specialist. I remembered with a jolt the not-so-smooth progress of the endoscope up my nose and down past my ear.
One of the organizers appeared up in the gallery with a photographer. Cupping her hands, the organizer announced a complicated sequence of group photographs.
I took this as my cue to wander back to the bar and secure a second pint of Guinness. When I returned to the reception hall the photographer had finished. I looked for Maggie and saw her talking to a man with a paisley-patterned bow tie but when she lifted her head up to the light I saw it wasn’t Maggie at all. The direct light revealed deeper lines, a less youthful skin texture.
I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned around. This was Maggie, looking several years younger than the woman I’d thought was her. She introduced me to a well-meaning gastroenterologist from Peterborough and we had a conversation about five-a-side football. Despite both being regular players of the game, neither one of us was at all interested in what the other had to say.
Fortunately dinner was announced, so I was able to escape and find Maggie again and together we joined the throng heading towards the ballroom.
“I can’t remember,” I said to her, “is Jonathan coming to this?”
Maggie and Jonathan had met in their first year and started going out. They’d stayed together for a number of years, until a mutual acquaintance had lured Jonathan away from Maggie for a one-night stand that had turned into marriage, kids, the lot.
“No,” Maggie answered, looking all around as she spoke, “this is not Jonathan’s scene at all.”
I wanted to say that it wasn’t mine. It wasn’t mine possibly even more than it wasn’t Jonathan’s. But I kept quiet. My hand crept up to my neck as we shuffled towards the seating plan resting on an easel by the entrance to the ballroom.
“No doubt we’ll be on a table at the back,” Maggie said, “with all the other people who booked at the last minute.”
As we duly made our way towards the back of the ballroom, I had a look around. Two large video projection screens were each showing a series of stills, mugshots taken on enrolment. They were monochrome and the images had either become degraded or had been drenched with a sepia hue.
There were probably 200, maybe 300 people at the event; less than half of those would be partners, and possibly a not insignificant proportion of the partners would have been fellow students.
I was trying to work out how long I might have to watch the parade of faces before Maggie’s might appear. I had seen photographs of Maggie – and Jonathan – from back then. I was confident I’d recognize h
er. It’s not as if the passage of twenty-five years actually makes you a different person. You just look a little older. Or a lot older.
I saw a picture of the organizer, the woman who had appeared on the balcony to orchestrate group photographs. She’d been slimmer, but you could already see the confidence in her eyes. For her it seemed a short step from enrolling to sending out invitations for a twenty-five-year reunion. She already knew she was going to do it. Maybe not explicitly, but she knew herself very well, she knew what she was capable of.
On the other screen I saw an early mugshot of the guy from the lift, Henrik, and he did indeed look a lot younger, but, again, the eyes were the same. That reticence, suspicion even.
I looked away from the mugshots in order to be introduced to the people at our table. Through a combination of first impressions, whispered intel from Maggie and the fruits of my own efforts at conversation, I gathered that they were a mixture of old friends of Maggie’s and former fellow students: a likeable psychologist whose husband had left her for another man; a guy in his early fifties who had given up medicine for web design, but whose ideas seemed mired in the 1990s; a woman who had trained as a GP, before taking time out to have kids and finally going back to do a day a week; another part-time GP and editor of medical journals and his wife, a teacher who called herself a freelance journalist on the strength of writing a column for her husband’s magazine about being married to a doctor.
When I next looked towards the front of the ballroom, there was Maggie’s mugshot just fading from the screen on the left. I’d gathered now that the two screens were showing the same photographs, but out of synch. I saw the psychologist from our table. She was smiling at the camera, her eyes full of hope and expectation.
I turned back to the table, where three Polish waitresses in black and white costumes had converged. Drinks were being ordered, but the choice appeared to be limited to red or white, as far as I could tell from my attempts at dialogue with the three Poles, who, in terms of their mental and practical preparedness, were still on the plane from Warsaw.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Page 28