As he completed repositioning the mirror, he grimaced at the sudden shooting pain in his arm, causing him to drop the screwdriver. Once the discomfort had eased, he stooped to retrieve the discarded tool but he paused as he caught sight of something under the bed. It appeared to be a shoebox and he reached under the mattress to it. What little secret had Eleanor squirreled away, he wondered with malicious glee.
His delight was short lived as the contents of the box filled him with horror. Bills. Dozens of unpaid bills. There were credit card statements, utility red letters, and many other demands for money. As he scanned the documents, his brain began calculating the totals.
‘I can’t afford all this,’ he whispered to himself. ‘I’m ruined. Damn her! I’m ruined.’
Just then, he heard the slamming of car doors and the burst of engines. The book club had finished and Eleanor’s cronies were leaving. A few moments later, his wife appeared at the bedroom door.
‘You can come down now. I thought we might…’ She put a hand to her mouth as she saw her husband clutching a fistful of unpaid bills. ‘You’ve found them I see.’
‘What have you done?’ He could feel beads of ice-cold sweat form on his forehead and desperately fought back the rising nausea that gurgled in the pit of his stomach. He’d never felt so bad. It was as if he had been somehow poisoned by the toxins of his wife’s careless and carefree ways.
Eleanor laughed nervously. ‘Oh, Harold, don’t be so melodramatic…’
The fury rose in him as he foresaw the rest of his life and the destitution she had wreaked upon him. ‘You’ve ruined us you stupid, selfish bitch!’ Before he realised what he was doing, he lunged at his wife and gripped her by the throat.
She tried to scream but Harold’s tightening grasp throttled the noise until it came out merely as a whimper. All she could do was stare at him with her terrified, pleading eyes. In a moment, anger replaced her fear and she clawed at his face. Harold yelped in pain as a fingernail gashed his cheek.
‘No more!’ he bellowed as his fingers dug ever deeper into her throat. ‘No more! I hate you! Die, you bitch! Die!’
Eventually, his wife hung limp in his arms and he let her drop to the floor. He stooped beside the body and studied it for a moment. ‘Can’t you see, Eleanor?’ he croaked. ‘You drove me to this.’
How good it felt to finally be rid of her. He hadn’t realised how much he hated her, how much he wanted to see the terror in her eyes until the very moment of the act of murder. After all those years of torture, he had simply snuffed out her life as if she were nothing more than a candle. The bitch was dead and the mirror had given him the final reason to fulfil his fantasy. The mirror…
With a growing realisation, he immediately began to grasp the enormity of his crime.
How could he have come to this? The horror of guilt grew inside his mind and he put his hands to his head. ‘This isn’t me. What have I done?’ he whispered.
He was suddenly filled with a compulsion to look at the mirror and, as he did so, saw a laughing, bearded man dressed in old-fashioned clothes. His white shirt was splattered with grime and blood dripped from the tips of his fingers. For all his wild appearance, it was the dark and hungry look in the eyes that were the most shocking aspect. Alarmed, Harold took a step back and then clutched at his chest as the pain began. It was as if a steel band hand been wrapped around his ribcage and was slowly tightening. The agony, was his only thought as he slumped to the floor beside his wife, his mind plummeting into darkness.’
When he opened his eyes, he found himself looking at two bodies lying on the bedroom floor. It took a few moments before he realised that he was staring at them from inside the mirror. He moved forward but stopped abruptly at the layer of glass. He couldn’t pass through. For hours, he beat his fists against the surface but to no avail. He was trapped and all he could do was watch. As the days passed by, he saw the bodies deteriorate and decay.
‘Oh my dear lord,’ he whimpered from his glass prison.
The corpses turned dark and swollen with gases and fluids, which leaked from orifices and seeped through decomposing skin onto the deep shag-pile carpet. It was not long before the flies began to appear. The thought that they would feed and lay their eggs in his own dead flesh appalled him. A few days after that, two police officers entered the bedroom. They held handkerchiefs over their noses.
Harold watched impotently as the maggot infested cadavers were taken away and men in disposable coveralls began to clean the room with power washers and disinfectant.
It appeared that he was invisible to those beyond the confines of the mirror. Neither beating the glass nor screaming aroused any notice from the investigators and cleaners. Once the sanitizing operation was complete, other workers appeared and began removing furniture. One of the men placed a blanket over the mirror and Harold was once again plunged into darkness.
When light finally returned to his confinement, Harold Bishop found himself in familiar surroundings. The proprietor of the antique shop stood with the blanket in his hands.
‘Like I said before, they always come back. Eh, Mister Purves?’
‘You can see me?’ Harold cried, ‘you can see me?’
‘I know someone eager to meet you, Harold.’ Then, the shop owner merely laughed and walked away.
‘No! Come back!’ Harold yelled in desperation, beating his fists impotently against the ancient glass. ‘Don’t leave me like this!’
As he watched the proprietor leave the room, he began to sense a malignant presence with him inside the mirror. He turned around and saw nothing but a pair of dark, hungry eyes. Then, Harold Purves screamed in the cold, glassy silence…
THE END.
THE SISTERS IN THE GREEN by Luke Walker
As much as I shout at myself this is the same nightmare that’s woken me for the last three nights, my panicked yell is a lie. Instead of the comfort of a dream, right here in the cool silence is completely and horribly real.
The wall is directly in front, level with my chest, the scars in the bricks are visible in the white of the moonlight and I wonder how many years’ worth of rain and sun has fallen on them. I wonder who was the last person to do what I’m about to and boost themselves up. A kid, probably. This isn’t the sort of thing a grown man does. Certainly not a man like me. Jay Horton. Forty-six, married to Charlotte; a teenage daughter and a dog. No way is this me and despite knowing all the way down that this is happening, I’m still doing all I can to convince myself it is not real. Real is my new house on Harewood Road in this city I don’t yet know; this Dalry, ten miles from the village where my wife and I began our lives. Real is not my arse resting on the cold wall while I scream inside and shout at myself to stop. I don’t stop, though. I drop to the other side of the wall and land on soaking wet grass, most of the strands stretching past my knees to my thighs.
I stare at almost nothing because the moon’s illumination has no chance of penetrating the undergrowth growing in all directions. Not that the dark matters to me. No way. I’m going nowhere so if the white light shining on Dalry Road around the corner and at my back on Atherstone Park can’t stretch into the mass of curling grass and bushes growing wild, then so what? Not my problem.
I step forward.
No, stop, I don’t want to go in there.
I keep moving while trying to bellow at my body to turn around and run for the safety of the road. Even if there isn’t a single person back that way, it’s a world away from the stink of dozens of years’ worth of dead leaves all sinking into the earth.
My howl inside makes no difference and I have to believe that’s okay because reality is Charlotte beside me in our bed, and Bob on the floor, the Collie snuffling as he dozes; reality is our new house, the daily stress of Char’s job as a head teacher, Beth going to university in a few months. All this is heaven when put against my hands shoving at the green become black since the sun went down three hours ago.
Minutes pass which makes no sense. I’v
e only seen this area a couple of times in daylight so I know it’s large and I know my progress is slow, but even so, there’s no way it can take this long to cross from one end to the other. No way there can be so many stretching vines and trees growing close enough together to make their trunks indistinguishable, and no way I can be stepping over root after root like a kid trying to miss the cracks in a pavement.
With no warning, the cold and the aches in my throbbing muscles are cut away into nothing by a simple sound somewhere off to the side.
The slow tread of someone’s step matching my own.
No. Please, no. I am alone here. I am totally alone.
Still matching my dragging pace, the plod of whoever else walks out there argues that no, I’m not alone.
The hands I don’t control tear at leaves, crushing them into a pulp. Dropping the mess into the grass, I walk on and listen to the slow, sneaky steps of the other person. Whoever is out there, they hear me as clearly as I hear them. I tell myself not to be scared, to keep walking (like I’ve got a choice) and as soon as I reach the other end of the green, I’ll be back out in the clear light of the moon and I’ll see escape over the wall.
I cross over a mass of curling roots and come to an abrupt stop. My body won’t take me any further. Instead, it seems fine with my screaming command to run from the approach of the other person.
Move. Leg it. It’s coming. You need to run right now.
I cry in a way I haven’t since being a little boy. Tears slide down my cheeks, turning my vision into a blur of leaves and shimmering strands of grass. A ball of fear grows in the centre of my chest and turns my lungs into an oven while the rest of my body freezes because behind is terrible, and in front is even worse. I’m caught between the two and all I can do is wait to see which gets to me first.
A crunch of old twigs breaking. A shuffling through the curtain of vines.
Without warning, my hands jerk upwards, then straight out. My fingers grasp skinny branches, curl around them and I understand.
Whatever controls my body is about to pull the last of the wild shrubbery aside and reveal what’s beyond. And I don’t want to see. The area in front is worse than anything, worse than the slow steps drawing closer to my back. If my hands yank the branches and leaves away and the bright moonlight exposes the land on the other side of all the trees, then I will scream until my head explodes.
My fingers tighten their hold. Tiny flakes of bark patter to the carpet of weeds and grass. The muscles in my wrists and forearms flex and the only part of my body that remains mine is my throat. It opens to inhale enough breathe to power my howl.
At my back, the steps come to a stop. A soft hand slides over the ice-cold skin of my neck as my own hands begin to pull the branches to the side.
No, God no. Stop it. I don’t want to see. Please. Please, I don’t want to see.
The hand on my neck slides to my upper chest, then lower. A weight falls on me, one I’ve never known. In a blast of horror, I realise I have breasts and the phantom hand rests on them with gentle care.
No, please. Stop it. Get off me.
In response, a second hand comes to my neck while the first remains on the breasts I can’t have. Metal kisses my throat. At the last second, I understand I no longer need to worry about what’s being revealed by my independent hands.
Blinding white streams through the tree trunks and branches and the knife on my throat cuts through skin and flesh without any effort. A spray of blood, more black than red, pumps from the widening hole, and the entirety of my senses collapse into agony. A foot boots me in the lower back. I pitch forward, blood still firing from the tear in my neck, and the sea of old green turns red as I fall.
Beth’s home first.
I’ve got precisely no work done this afternoon. Too many thoughts chasing each other about last night’s hallucination or whatever the hell it was; too strong a wish we’d bought a house in another part of the city even though that’s a ridiculous response to a couple of bad dreams and messed up visions.
“Hey, Dad.”
Beth drops her bag by the front door and grins at me as I wordlessly point at it. She hangs it along with her jacket on the coat stand.
“Good day?” I ask her.
She shrugs. “Nothing special.”
Beth’s eighteen so we’re now beyond the period of her grunting her replies to me or Char. Mostly beyond it.
We sit in front of the TV; she tells me a bit about her day, about exams and uni in September. I listen, wondering how my lovely daughter went from being a five-year-old kid to a young woman in what feels like a couple of months.
When she finishes, I ask as lightly as I can:
“You had a look around here, yet? Seen what the area’s like?”
She giggles, sounding a lot like the little girl I sometimes still want her to be if only because the sound of her scooter each morning as she starts the ten mile ride back to Repton and her school wouldn’t age me and hurt my heart.
“Yeah. Me and my mates went out for a bike ride the other day to explore and play football.”
“Jumpers for goalposts,” I reply and Beth laughs although I doubt she gets the joke.
“I’ve seen some of it. There’s a wood about ten minutes away, and a park near it. Atherstone Park, I think. Looks nice.”
My hand clenches into a fist. Beth doesn’t notice. She points to the window behind the telly. Outside, our new garden furniture gleams in the sun. On the arm of the sofa, Beth’s phone vibrates with a text. She checks it while I change the channel without seeing what’s on TV. It’s just something to do with my hands and pretend I’m not scared of something formless, something tied up in the move to Dalry and my daughter with her boyfriend and her scooter and how quiet the house will be when it’s just Char and me.
Whatever’s causing my fear, it’s all around us in our nice living room while the clouds that closed in after lunch drift away and the incoming evening promises to be one full of a good sunset and gentle warmth. All that and I’m frightened of nothing I can hold on to.
“Beth.”
She glances from her phone. “Yeah?”
“That park. Atherstone.” I have to swallow. My vision, the one of my own murder, pokes at my head, eager to come back while everything rational in me knows it’s nothing important and asks at the same time just what the hell my problem is.
“That park. Do me a favour and keep away from it.”
“What? Why?”
I give her the only answer that might make sense. “This is a big town. Bigger than we’re used to. I don’t want you going off into isolated areas just yet.”
She frowns, not quite getting my concern. And why would she? I’ve told her to be careful before but not like this. Not with beads of sweat, I don’t want to touch trickling down my temples and the whole world feeling as if it’s shrunk down to our living room. All at once, the words fall out.
“Stay away from it, Beth. That park. The roads around it. The green bit.”
“What green bit? The woods?”
She sees something in my face and she pulls away to the other side of our comfy sofa. I almost want a mirror so I can see whatever’s scaring my daughter. Is it my eyes bulging from their sockets? Is it my cheeks turned as white as milk? Or is it the sensation of not being here, not inside our house, but inside another one while the gloom of a winter twilight presses on the single glazing and I don’t dare peer outside to the street in case I see through the thin mist to the other side of Atherstone Lane, see the edge of the wall growing in a triangle rammed with overflowing greenery? I’m inside that b house, sitting in a chair with the window at my side and the voice on my radio my only comfort and companion because I’m nothing but an old man scared of the shadows and the bleak night that my small fire can’t combat as it can’t warm me against the chill of hands no more substantial than smoke pressing on the front door, eager to find a way in and drag me outside to the mass of leaves and long grass so I can see what
calls that ground their home.
“Dad?”
I’m back on the sofa with the afternoon here and my daughter staring at me, seeing me as my own man for the first time rather than Dad, and that’s enough to scare the hell out of both of us.
“It’s okay.” Somehow, my voice is steady even while my head is a throbbing wave, full of senses that belong to someone else. “Just do me a favour and keep away from that area.”
“Yeah.” She goes back to her phone. “Okay.”
As I pretend to see what’s on TV, there’s just enough left of my mind not poking at whatever happened a moment before to know telling your child to not do something is the best way to get them to do it.
The first I know of the old gent coming my way is the crunch of a twig below his shoe.
I pull my hand back from reaching for the leaves and face him. He isn’t as old as he looks, I realise. Maybe late-fifties which, to be fair, only makes him fifteen years older than me, not the twenty plus I’d like it to be. Despite the heat, his jacket is done up almost to the neck; a tie peeks over the collar. In my t-shirt and jeans, I feel like a scruffy teenager compared to this man.
“Morning,” he says and I nod.
“Hello.”
“Colin.” He extends a hand; we shake. The Alsatian he’s walking sits comfortably on the pavement and rests his head on large paws. I’m briefly glad I left Bob at home.
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