“The remainder of my walk along the gritty road to the house was not agreeable. For one thing I was tired and feeling the lack of Tom. Mr Thornton had reminded me of the need, not supplanted it. For another, there was something small down the side of my boot that irritated without being uncomfortable enough to justify undoing all the lacing.
“At the side door of the house I found what it was – a thin tooth, brown and stained. It was careless of me to have let it lodge there, and I should have thrown it away into the garden without a thought. But I didn’t. To do so felt somehow sacrilegious, at least a disrespect to the dead whom I had disturbed – as if they could care!
“Rather than leaving it on the window-sill of the porch where my aunt or a maid could see it and would ask questions, I took it to my bedroom and placed it on the chimney-piece intending to drop it back in the churchyard again on Sunday.
“That evening after supper I was sitting pretending to read. We were still enjoying the long sunsets of the north, and I did not think it cold, but Aunt May suddenly got up and closed the French windows.
‘‘ ‘There’s a chill in the place,’ she announced. ‘It’s the river air. I hope you didn’t catch cold walking home? The Rector much approves of the roses. Thank you for planting them. I phoned him about the Sunday School outing and he mentioned that his curate had met you. Such a nice young man. Pity about his father. I hope you didn’t find the planting too hard?’
‘‘ ‘Not at all. It was most interesting digging up all the bits of bone. If I’d gone on I could almost have made a man of him again.’ I don’t know if my levity was inadvertently or intentionally sarcastic, but my aunt bridled.
‘‘ ‘Oh dear! I’m so sorry. They will have been fragments from old graves that have been re-used. You left them alone? One isn’t supposed to touch things like that, although I don’t know why. We smashed up living men easily enough in the last war.’
‘‘ ‘I put them behind Elenor Ward’s headstone, and Mr Thornton said that would not be wrong.’
‘‘ ‘Elenor . . . ?’
‘‘ ‘Round the corner at the end of the rose bed. Mr Thornton said—’
‘‘ ‘Oh yes, of course. That unfortunate girl! They say she killed her lover you know.’
‘‘ ‘Mr Thornton didn’t tell me that.’
‘‘ ‘He wouldn’t. It was never proved and he’s too charitable to repeat old gossip. I should be, but I’m not. It’s more interesting than modern parish chit-chat. She and the others – there were others – had reason enough. He took his pleasure where he could get it without asking – a brutal, ugly creature by all accounts, more like a Cairo street dog than a man. He disappeared, God knows how or where, but she was blamed.
‘‘ ‘Will you take a cup of cocoa with me before we go to bed? I’m still cold, and cocoa always reminds me of nights in the desert with the wounded. I never saw a man die that really wanted to live you know, but I remember one that really wanted to die, and did, merely because his school friend had been killed beside him in the trenches near Gaza. Silly boy! Life is more than love.’
“I said I would take cocoa, partly to humour her, partly because I was becoming concerned about myself for a reason I need not mention, and I knew she normally put some mild sleeping draught in the cocoa for herself and, since it was the same making, I would gain the same benefit.
“My great-aunt was right about the chill. My bedroom had not retained the heat of the afternoon sun, and I didn’t know whether to open the window to let the summer air in, or keep it closed against the dampness of the river.
“I slipped out of my clothes and into a night-dress as quickly as possible. The tester bed was large and needed to be warmed by the heat of one’s own body. I lay on my back, looking up at the ceiling through the space where the canopy ought to have been. The four posts were there, and the top rails joining them, but there was nothing more than a box-pleated frill of tapestry round the outside to look at, and a spider out of reach in the middle of the ceiling, motionless and waiting for a victim. I hoped it would not drop on to the bed.
“The room was cold, and I ought to have opened the window to freshen it, but I couldn’t summon up the will to get out of bed again. I thought about Tom. I worried about the future. I tossed about. I told myself I was tired. I insisted that I should sleep. But sleep would not come. Perhaps my aunt had been too sparing with whatever she used.
“The air felt oppressive, and there was no clarity in breathing: a cold stuffiness permeated everything. Eventually I sank into a state of semi-inertia, motionless in body and lethargic in mind. The last gleam of summer light faded away into the north leaving the walls dark, and my uncurtained windows visible only as pale oblongs hanging in space. There was no wind, and the sound of the river where it hurried over shallows was not strong enough to penetrate the room. I might have heard the harsh screech of an owl, or a curlew trilling down on the water meadows below the house, or far away on the moor, but there was nothing, and I lay in isolation from the world.
“I was not aware of falling asleep, but I must have done so, for I experienced again the walk from the churchyard with Mr Thornton. He was by my side talking foolishly. I walked with the helpless acceptance of a sleeper, except that I knew that if I could turn there would be something at my side I would not wish to see. But it was a dream. At the bridge, Mr Thornton turned away, but the other remained with me like a footstep scarcely heard in an empty street at night. The road wavered, bent upwards, and divided itself again into the windows of my room.
“I hear nothing now, but then I could sense even the smallest of creatures walking or scratching on wood or among leaves. Perhaps the spider wrought his business. But he had moved to a new place. Something was feeling along the woodwork beyond the foot of the bed – little pushings and scrapings which were not the living silence of one’s inner ear that never departs except with death.
“I was now thoroughly awake, but subject to the strangest delusion. Normally one moves without thought. I found myself thinking very intently about moving, but unable to put the matter to the test for fear of finding that I could not. The scraping had stopped, but I could detect behind the swishing of the blood in my ears some other disturbance. The blankets were becoming heavier. I do not understand how I failed to notice the beginning of that dreadful experience, but something was covering the bed. My feet were held down by a weight that was moving up my legs like a carpet of lead being slowly unrolled. I was on my back. The weight was on my belly, trapping my arms, creeping over my breasts, suffocating and sick. I wanted to shrink into the bed, to be lifted away, to die – anything to escape the horror of what was being done to me. But two things held me in being for later. One was an agonizing thrust of pain as if something had broken within me under the pressure. The other was a protracted flickering of lightening somewhere to the south, beyond the river, that lit up the whole room and let me see everything in it with the clarity and certainty of full light.
“My aunt could not have been asleep, for within seconds, even before the long undulations of thunder had caught up with its lightening, she was knocking urgently at the door. She came in before I could speak. I had fallen out of bed and knocked over a chair and small table in my struggles, but my first reaction was to look down to see if I was bleeding. Of course I was not, but embarrassment in my generation was almost as strong a motive as fear.
“She was a wise and practical woman behind the formal exterior, and must at once have seen that something far beyond thunder and bad dreams had moved me. She put her arm round me, and sat with me on the side of the bed. I was shivering uncontrollably and couldn’t tell her. To her everlasting credit she did not ask.
‘‘ ‘You’d better come back to my room for the night,’ she said after a few moments. ‘It’s got the biggest bed between Weldon and Windyhaugh, so you’ll be perfectly comfortable and safe. I’ll make tea, and you’ll take sugar in it whether you like it or not.’
“I went with her tha
nkfully. She had an electric kettle and tea things in the room, and a little nursery light that burned in a corner. I lay close to her but did not sleep.
“With the return of light she took me back to the room to collect my clothes. It was cold, and she flung open the windows. The rain-washed freshness of grass and the honeyed smell of the earliest heather wafted in with all the sweetness of the world. Then she examined the room. It was as I had left it – bedclothes flung about and the table on its side.
‘‘ ‘What’s that disgusting object?’
“She was pointing at the chimney-piece. A funnel of dirty grey, like rotting lace, was woven into the angle between shelf and wall. Shrunk into it, but still moving, was the tip of an obscene pink worm. I thought I was about to faint; instead I was violently and horribly sick.
‘‘ ‘What’s the matter, child? You must tell me. Something happened here.’
“I told her what I could, what I had felt. But I could never bring myself to tell any other living person what I had seen. I do not know how much she believed to be real, but it was enough. Some things cannot be spoken. She found the tooth beside the pillow. I explained how I had brought it into the room, and where I had left it.
‘‘ ‘I’ll take it away,’ she said. ‘It will go back where it belongs.’
“On the Sunday she pushed it into the ground where, as she said, Elenor or another, must have hidden the body. ‘Quite
clever,’ she observed judiciously, ‘like hiding a book on a bookshelf.’
“Before Daniel, my aunt’s gardener, could be summoned to remove the web, its tenant had disappeared. The maids took my things to a small room next to Aunt May’s where later my worst fears became manifest. She was very matter-of-fact and invented an acceptable story. My father was already away in France and died in an accident without ever being told. My mother did not wish to know. I never went to Switzerland. I heard Tom was one of the few killed in the big German push across the Ardennes. His baby was stillborn a month late – or so they insisted. I did not see him. The pain was like being torn apart by stones. I never wanted to recover. I took my departure by the railway as soon as I was well enough to move. It was easy enough in the end. The darkness was deep and cold. Sometimes I see the man who must hear my story. When his time is near he has no choice.”
“My dear Harry, what are you doing? You look quite stunned! They’ve all been at the food, and you haven’t had anything yet.”
Vivienne Selwood almost rushed at me, and I stood up in some confusion with my back to the window.
“I’m sorry. I haven’t been attending. I’ve been listening to . . . to . . .” I made a helpless gesture, and turned to indicate my companion in the hope of a belated introduction, but she had slipped away. “To the old lady who was sitting here. I didn’t get her name.”
“Old lady? What old lady? Really, you men do exaggerate! What was she like?”
“Well . . . very old. A dry, grey face, shrunken mouth and deep-set eyes, dark clothes and black gloves. She seemed to have no—”
I broke off, aware that what I was saying might give offence if I was describing a relative or old friend of the Selwoods’.
Vivienne laughed. She was very beautiful, and when she laughed her fair Nordic features had a power that negated argument. “I don’t think any of my guests would like to hear themselves described like that!”
She paused.
“But there may be someone living up near the old railway who fits your description. Dad told me he’d spoken to someone like that. It was last year; but he died in November, so we can’t really ask him now can we?” She laughed again. “Tony and I don’t know all the locals yet, but if she came here she was certainly an uninvited guest. You didn’t get her name?”
“No. She mentioned a clergyman – Thornton – and I think she said her aunt or grand aunt’s name was Addison.”
“There are dozens of Harrisons in this area. I believe one lived here before the Malings and there was some sort of tragedy. But do come and have some food before the farming contingent demolishes everything. Tony has some rare whisky he wants you to try, and the other Scots are dying to sound you out about the bank’s share price.”
Before following her I looked across the valley at the still perceptible line of the abandoned railway. It curved into an oblivion of hills to the south. There was no one to be seen, and the mud on the carpet had already turned to dust.
TERRY DOWLING
Two Steps Along the Road
TERRY DOWLING HAS BEEN called “Australia’s finest writer of horror” by Locus magazine, and “Australia’s premier writer of dark fantasy” by All Hallows. His collection Basic Black: Tales of Appropriate Fear won the 2007 International Horror Guild Award for Best Collection, earned a starred review in Publishers Weekly and was hailed as “one of the best recent collections of contemporary horror” by the American Library Association.
Other award-winning horror collections by Dowling are An Intimate Knowledge of the Night and Blackwater Days, while the The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror series featured more horror stories by the author during its twenty-one-year run than by any other writer. His latest titles include Amberjack: Tales of Fear & Wonder and his debut novel, Clowns at Midnight.
“‘Two Steps Along the Road’ came out of a conversation with US editor Danel Olson,” Dowling explains, “where we discussed me doing a ghost story set in Vietnam for Exotic Gothic 3, and the interesting possibilities it might provide for delivering atmosphere and an interesting perspective on familiar things.
“Before I knew it, I was blending two separate elements that were demanding attention: the notion of a root-form behind all hauntings, regardless of what form they took, and the unnerving realization that the eyes of a quite attractive teaching colleague would be truly terrifying to behold if they were set just a tad closer together.
“The ideas were intended for very different stories but, as so often happens, they decided they were meant for each other.”
WHEN THOMAS NEVILLE climbed from the white runabout at the ramshackle jetty and saw the Hotel Dis 300 yards off in the clearing, he felt he’d been thrown back not just in time but into other identities as well.
He went back forty years to his father’s tours of duty at Da Nang and Long Tan, of course, and the stories that damaged, often unsettling man had been persuaded to tell in Sydney before he died, making those stories, those events Thomas’ own after a fashion. But it went beyond old Deek’s experiences, much further beyond, back to when the dream of a French Indo-China had still seemed possible.
Thomas couldn’t explain it. It was as if he were seeing the sprawling two-storey structure through Deek’s eyes as well as his own, and through those of Gerard Larier who had built the place in 1924.
Then he was back in an instant, as if a switch had been thrown, and he was remembering to call “Cảm on!” to the boatman. The young Vietnamese waved, worked the throttle of the outboard with easy skill. The narrow craft made a long slow arc on the brown surface and began the four-mile journey back to the great waterway of the Mekong. Only when it had vanished from sight and there was a blazing insect-laden silence all around, did Thomas heft his bag again and carry it the eight or so yards to where the jetty met the road. The path more like. There was a good chance it was decades since it had last seen a wheeled vehicle.
Wait till someone comes for you, Yosen’s final letter had said. It is most important that you do this.
And since Stefan Yosen was the client, and the advance suitably impressive, Thomas did just that. He set his bag down again and stood in what shade he could find, watching the weathered wooden structure off in the clearing for any signs of life.
Maybe it was the absence of rice paddies and farmed terraces, any signs of the usual wetland farming, but the Hotel Dis was unnervingly familiar, that was the problem, the sort of rundown mansion you saw in too many old movies featuring antebellum plantation estates in forgotten Louisiana bayous, or those decaying
colonial hotels you still found in the backwaters of the various Congo republics or in the Cameroon. More so when Thomas took off his sunglasses to wipe the sweat from his eyes. In the blur of heat and humidity, the Hotel Dis truly was too much like something out of time. It brought the borrowed memories, the other identities, crowding in again: Deek’s R&R stint at the Market Hotel on Cranbow Road, Larier’s journal entries for the Unitat and his meetings with Sainteny and others from the Deuxième Bureau.
“You’re wondering why it’s never been renovated,” the words came, not from the road leading to the decrepit hotel but from the jungle to the side. Stefan Yosen appeared from a track concealed there, pushing low fronds aside as he stepped into view. He was a tall, long-faced man in his late sixties, twenty years Thomas’ senior, and wore modern enough clothes - white trousers and shirt, wide-brimmed hat, synthetic fibre sandals, sunglasses – but in the broad strokes he looked as much of some other time as the building itself.
They shook hands, exchanged the right pleasantries for two people who did but most certainly did not know each other, both aware of an edginess between them, possibly to remain. It had been in the initial letters, the few phone calls, the careful e-mails. It came with the nature of the project too, the reason for this visit now.
“Tourism’s booming everywhere but here,” Yosen said, gesturing to include the deserted tributary and the cleared stretch of the estate. “It’s as if they don’t see. That boatman just now knew where he was bringing you. Thang’s been here hundreds of times. He’ll be out to get you Tuesday. But he doesn’t see it, will have put it out of his mind already. This is a short-term memory place. The way it sits in the mind. It doesn’t exist.”
“And why is that, Stefan?” Thomas had come a long way from Saigon (they still called it that in the South); these details had been promised.
His host’s answer was almost a question. “But you see it. The hotel. That’s what matters.”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Page 33