Searchers After Horror

by S. T. Joshi

  The patch of reeds put him in mind of this. Nevertheless, despite observing the thing for more than an hour now, he’d still failed to achieve the coherence that accompanied success with a Magic Eye illustration. This was how a short-sighted person must feel when they put on spectacles, a sudden resolution of tension-evoking fragmentation . . . But it simply wasn’t happening for David right now.

  He got up from his stool and moved closer to the reeds, pushing aside in his mind further thoughts about Helen. The grass swayed back and forth, as if mocking him with its aloof indifference. At the foot of several stalks, David noticed that the dead shrews he’d spotted yesterday were gone, replaced by scattered bones so tiny they could only belong to such ineffectual rodents. Someone’s inadequate lunch, he thought, imagining tiny hands with nothing like fingers snatching at the mud in which their dwelling was rooted. That would surely account for so many small grooves in the ground, where a darkness as hungry as the place’s tenants shifted uneasily, like glutinous liquid on the move . . . But then David glanced away. It must be an after-image of staring too long at the canvas that made him see red dots—nothing at all like avaricious eyes—lurking amid the writhing reeds.

  He had to leave. He’d begun to feel physically ill. Retreating to his painting instruments and drawing in mouthfuls of autumn air did little to alleviate his sense of having been violated by the patch of grass behind him. After packing up, he turned away involuntarily and offered one final look at the thing . . . but the noise he heard from deep inside—a hideous creaking and rasping—sounded nothing like children sniggering.

  Or at least, that was what he told himself.

  An ex-colleague called that afternoon to ask if David would like to meet up in the city the next day for a few beers. David, watching Helen preparing dinner, reluctantly agreed, and after hanging up he went across to his wife to help cook the chicken and its accompaniments.

  “I’m not an invalid,” she replied, her eyes averted while adding stock to the bird’s juices.

  “I know that. I was . . . just being courteous.”

  “Then bugger off and leave me to it.”

  She hadn’t sworn much before her breakdown. The more David witnessed of the new Helen, the less he liked the old truism about their former profession: Teachers learn more from pupils than pupils ever learn from teachers. He shuddered to think what damage that abusive child had done to his wife. And even though Helen had probably just been joking with her sharp rebuke, he still felt slightly affronted.

  “Well, I won’t be a burden to you tomorrow, anyway,” he said, a tad stiffly.

  “Why’s that?”

  As she hadn’t appeared troubled by his comment, David quickly added, “Off out for a few with Kenny. Back on our old stomping ground.”

  “How will you get there and back?”

  “Bus there, taxi back.” He was touched by her concern—at least she still felt something for him—even though she’d spoken as if he were a child. “It’s not as if we can’t afford it.”

  “Yes, we’re rich indeed,” she finished, and then, with a stiffness of the shoulders he was unable to decode, she continued making their meal.

  Later, while eating the meat and boiled vegetables, David showed his wife his painting. Now that it was dry, he thought it looked even less like what he’d attempted to elucidate, but surely that was more a consequence of his limited skills than anything else. He could ascribe his curious thoughts earlier, while standing beside the writhing reeds, to stress and strain.

  Helen sat looking at the picture for a long minute, captivated in a way that exceeded its merits. Then she glanced up at David, her eyes bright and eager.

  He grew hopeful; he hadn’t seen her look like this in months.

  “Where is this?” she asked in a voice full of borderline awe.

  Keen to encourage any renewed interest in the world on her part, he talked about the patch of reeds and how it could be found by taking a shortcut through their back garden. But he held off mentioning all his unsettling impressions. It would be unwise to project his own pathologies onto those of his wife; life was hard enough at the moment.

  After another few minutes, while neglecting the meal she’d spent hours preparing, Helen ran one hand across the painting, as if its manic frenzy of country colours were still wet and could be conveyed to the face she then fingered with a mother’s delicate touch.

  “Their eyes,” she said, looking fixedly at the picture. “Their burning red eyes.”

  David was confused. Red, he wondered? He hadn’t prepared any paint of that colour and certainly couldn’t remember cutting himself or developing a nosebleed. Nevertheless, after getting up to examine his work over his wife’s rigid shoulders, he noticed what she clearly had: tiny specks of red lurking amid the deep shadows of the reed, each doubled up with only millimetres between them, like onlooking demons.

  Tiny demons, he meant. The reeds were as tall as an adult, after all. And the faces—if that was what they were, rather than just accidents arising during haphazard composition—were placed at half that height.

  They were no taller than children.

  The truth was that he couldn’t remember much about painting the reeds, nor about pacing home across mud. If he’d suffered a nosebleed—and he had been prone to them in the past—that would account for the specks of red on the painting.

  He went upstairs that night without considering Helen and her condition. He now had his own worries and felt needful of a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow he’d experience some merciful normality, talking over beer with an old friend about cars, sport, and investments—all the usual stuff for men of their age.

  You forgot about children, a tiny voice said in his mind. Kenny has kids—hell, the whole world has kids. But his are grown up and at university—a genuine source of pleasure to him and his wife. Sure, he’s still heavily mortgaged and has no way of retiring early, but is that such a large cost to escape a world that can do . . . do . . .

  David silenced these thoughts and then closed the bedroom curtains against that distant patch of reeds. It looked as if a mist had settled in the area, most obviously above the swaying grass. A stream of moonlight dramatised the whole scene, and small shadows clawed at its fringes, like little hands reaching out in desperate hope of more to eat.

  After waking far too early, he felt alone . . . and soon realized why.

  Helen was gone from the bed.

  David got up quickly and switched on his bedside lamp. The first thing he saw was his wife’s sleeping pill; she’d forgotten to take it, and in unsettled confusion the previous evening he’d failed to remind her.

  After strapping on his dressing gown, he rushed into the rest of the cottage, calling his wife’s name like that of some wayward child. After realising that she wasn’t in any of the other upstairs rooms, he descended to search the ground floor.

  But there was nothing. Just his muddy boots in the hallway and . . . the front door key hanging in the lock.

  David stepped forward and tried turning the handle. The door opened freely. He was unable to recall locking up the previous evening, but his mind was so unsettled that this was hardly surprising. Nevertheless, the implication was clear: Helen had gone outside and David would now have to go and find her.

  Back in the bedroom, he dressed within minutes and then descended again to strap on his muddy boots. His wife would be horrified if he’d trampled muck in the house—this was another symptom of her depression: obsessive cleanliness— and so he went quickly outside, leaving the door unlocked behind him. He didn’t want Helen to find the house inviolable if she returned before he did, and he was certainly unconcerned about intrusion from others in the area. After all, nobody lived within at least a mile.

  Red dots in his mind—just residue from sleep, of course— sent him around the back of the property and then to the foot of the garden, where a shortcut would deliver him
to the field leading to the reeds. That was surely the place to which Helen had ventured. David recalled the brightness of her eyes when he’d shown her his inept painting yesterday. She’d looked rapturous and had asked about something she’d appeared to see in the picture . . . something with burning red eyes . . .

  But he was being foolish. His wife’s condition was getting to him. He was susceptible because, as his thoughts the previous night had suggested, he held the same regrets about their childless lives and might even still be repressing what Helen had been unable to.

  Rushing through undergrowth and across damp grass, he finally reached the reeds, whose writhing bulk was illuminated by clear moonlight. The dark made the place no more easy to get a satisfactory perceptual grip upon. The breeze was stronger now, pushing through countless stalks like a parent’s hand ruffling a beloved child’s hair. There was a whisper like ineffectual gratitude, the sound an infant makes following a healthy feed. It pained David to continue observing, his gaze flinching away after a long minute, during which the hissing movement of the thing clawed inside his skull.

  But then this sound was broken. Something moved among the reeds, tramping David’s way. The swaying back-and-forth noise was replaced by crunching footfalls as whatever occupied it paced through. The grass parted, shadows squirmed, and then a figure emerged, carrying a large metal object that glittered in the moonlight.

  It was Helen.

  Standing just outside the circle of reeds, she held a pan from their kitchen, which David noticed, after approaching her, was full of stripped chicken bones, leftovers from their meal the previous evening. The carcass had been picked clean, and if other food—vegetables, stuffing, gravy—had also been in this receptacle, the ravenous diners had made even shorter work of that. Its silver gleamed, as if licked clean by hundred impish tongues.

  David glanced up at Helen and for a moment was unable to distinguish her from the churning background. She looked vague, insubstantial, elusive to observation . . . but then he achieved perceptual grasp and saw her as she was: disturbed and vulnerable; fodder for entities with few compunctions about exploitation.

  From his eye corners, he thought he saw movement—a flash of reds, like distant brake lights moving. He looked around, among the deep shadows of the reeds, but saw nothing of any import. Then he glanced up, at mist coiling way above the grass, which resembled a nebulous ladder leading to or from the stars, its rungs little more than ragged wisps, with a stream of moonlight forming the uprights . . .

  He quickly returned his gaze to his wife and asked, “Helen, what are you doing? Why are you out here?”

  “Je m’assure que les petits aient à manger,” she replied, her eyes staring beyond him, at a patch of sky above their home where darkness gestated like a foetus in a womb.

  David sighed with unnerved exasperation. When they’d first met at university, Helen had often spoken to him in foreign languages. In those days, this had been a form of affection, and he’d found it sexy. Ever since then, whenever they grew intimate together, she’d sometimes express herself in this way. It was only recently, after she’d begun to do this more to conceal than reveal her feelings, that he’d wondered if she’d always hidden emotions behind the linguistic device.

  Je m’assure que les petits aient à manger, she’d said. And what had this meant? He knew it was French, but had only a basic, getby-in-cafés grasp of the language. He guessed that “je m’assure” meant “I’m making sure.” And would “petits aient” translate to “little ones”? The last word—”manger”—was obvious: “fed.”

  I’m making sure the little ones are fed.

  Now disturbed, David asked, “You’re not making sense, Helen. Come on, let’s get you home.”

  But as he reached to take her arm, she squirmed again in his peripheral vision, as if writhing like reeds. Then she added, “Sie haben anderen so viel beizubringen.”

  That was German, and David’s command of this languagewas a little better. He was sure his wife had just said: They haveso much to teach.

  “Possiamo adottare e imparare da loro,” Helen went on, but David’s Italian was hopeless and he had no idea what this unsettling statement meant. But he no longer cared. He was now shocked to notice that Helen was dressed only in her body-length nightdress. Her feet were bare and squelched in mud as he tugged her away from the swaying reeds, back towards their secure new home.

  The footprints he saw among hers on the ground were surely nothing of the sort; they lacked the usual structure, bearing too many toes. They were also smaller than any youngster’s had any right to be, however hungry they’d become and keen to draw into their lair anyone offering sustenance.

  “I don’t know what to do, Kenny.”

  “Show me your picture again.”

  David handed over the painting, feeling self-conscious about others in the pub observing it. He’d brought it along on a whim, not knowing what his friend would make of it. Kenny was an art tutor at the city college and always had much to say about a variety of issues. David guessed that he’d hoped the man could help.

  Looking up from the incomplete sketch, his friend said, “I can see how Helen might have interpreted the red specks in the way she did. They do look like eyes lurking in there.”

  “I know. But nothing could have been further from my mind. I didn’t even mix a red, let alone . . . well, see anything looking out at me.”

  “Okay, so they’re just random blotches, which your wife has interpreted in an idiosyncratic way. It’s like a Rorschach test, isn’t it?”

  David was familiar with the psychoanalytic technique used to elicit material from patients’ subconscious minds. And what did Helen seeing small people in his painting of the reeds imply?

  At that moment, Kenny anticipated his thoughts. “Are you worried about having no children and how this might be affecting your wife? I know you’re both ambivalent about that.”

  “We used to be ambivalent, mate,” David replied, the beer freeing him up for voluntary exposure. “But I’m not so sure these days. I think that now we’re too old even to adopt, the cold truth is hitting home. Helen was desperate for children; her own family was very close. Me, I grew up in a pretty cold household, so I’ve never had the same desire for offspring. But I wonder whether I’m just fooling myself. I mean, isn’t that what the purpose of life is—to procreate? To keep the species going?”

  Moonlight tumbled in through the uncurtained pub window, the same moon that had brought such mysterious life to the circular patch of reeds close to his new home. But then David suppressed these treacherous impressions and listened carefully to his friend’s response.

  “I don’t know, mate,” Kenny replied, raising one self-conscious hand to his face and stroking his beard; the ring of gold around his third finger shone like a curious eyeball. Still committed to paid employment, the man looked jaded and beaten. “Having children has its charms, but it’s one hell of an expense and responsibility.”

  “Oh, I don’t romanticise it,” said David, but secretly wondered whether this was what he’d always done. However rationally one regarded the inevitable pressures involved in being a parent, didn’t a private part of all childless people remain hungry for its inconsistent joys? And wouldn’t many exchange their relative wealth and security just to sample what it was like?

  “Hey, that’s odd,” Kenny said, snapping David out of his impromptu speculative reverie.

  “What is?” he replied, glancing up to observe his friend looking closely at his painting again. Kenny had his face almost pressed up against it, as if it were a Magic Eye illustration he was trying to solve.

  “If you stare really hard at the areas behind those red dots, you can see . . .” The man hesitated, pulled away, took a needful slurp of his pint, and then went on: “. . . yes, you can see small figures, dark and bony.”

  “Bugger off, Kenny!”

  “It’s true! It must be
a trick of perspective or something . . . Oh, but no, it can’t be.” Kenny hesitated, took another gulp of beer. Then he finished, “I mean, what on earth could remain alive while remaining that thin?”

  David was unable to see the figures his friend had alluded to in his picture, but as a taxi took him home, he had more important things on his mind.

  His academic training in social science had offered him many hints about life, if few certainties. In psychology, indisputable facts were rare, but even so, he’d always suspected—his perspective informed as much by experience as by book learning—that his wife had been overprotected as a child, and that this had led her to think that families were havens in such a world of woes.

  Helen was egocentric, slightly manipulative, and not always in touch with reality. David had first observed this after they’d married, especially when he’d expected to have a say in their long-term plans and had been frequently overruled. He’d always acquiesced to her sulky character—passive-aggressive, he guessed it would be called in these jargonised days—and had loved her enough to accept the paths she wished them to take. She was sexy and charming, quite a catch in comparison to his bespectacled, studious persona. He’d felt lucky to be with her, especially given his affectionless upbringing. And when Helen had learned that she was physically incapable of bearing children, he’d become bonded to her forever.

  As the taxi stole along country lanes, David glanced out through one window, at stars scattered across heaven like fierce beacons. He guessed that in the grand scheme of the universe, one childless couple meant nothing important. But he’d never bought into the idea that human beings were cosmically insignificant. It surely depended on perspective. To whatever sentient beings lurked beyond the stars and regarded the earth with outrageous indifference, he and Helen would mean very little. But to the two of them, and to their friends and what remained of their families, they meant a great deal. Even jaded, acerbic Kenny had expressed regret at their woeful lack of offspring.