Strangers at the Door: Twelve unsettling tales of horror

by Christopher Henderson

  Gone. Too late Marsh realized how much he had wanted to meet Ulli in the flesh after all. At that instant, a sapphire starburst in his display announced that his drill had broken through the icy crust. Rushing vapour enveloped him as the welling liquid boiled into the vacuum.

  * * * *

  The silent music swelled and receded, then trickled back into his consciousness. It rolled and surged, submerging his sense of everything he was. A sea-serpent of an ear-worm, it had already been uncoiling in his skull when orange glow had lured him back to this place and he had awoken in a pool of moisture. Drifting in and out of the lingering belief that this was a dream, he had clung like a drowning sailor to the hope that it was the sweat of another nightmare-haunted sleep – but when he pulled himself out of the moulded interior he saw the puddled prints his returning feet had left while he should have been locked inside the womb. He could no longer deny what he had known for some time, that the Link not only enabled his consciousness to reach Europa but, because of some affinity between them, it also enabled whatever existed out there to travel to Earth. His flesh body had become just as much a vehicle as the suited machinery currently recharging in the Poseidon.

  He made his arms move and gazed at his hands as they swept through the drizzle. He flexed the fingers, pretending he could hear the tendons flex and the joints crack. They were badly bruised, the knuckles on both hands scraped to an unhealed glistening red. There were what looked like teeth marks below his right thumb.

  Stumbling through the drizzle, he was aware that he was humming, adding a new sound dimension to the throb and pulse of Europa’s song. Only when he saw police and a gaggle of bystanders huddled around the sheltered pond-side benches did he understood where he had been headed.

  Mrs Fletcher was there, her back to him as, puffed with self-importance, she gave her verdict on the patrolman’s murder.

  ‘Immigrants,’ she announced to a general murmur of agreement. ‘You mark my words.’

  Next to her a middle-aged man in a well-cut overcoat looked around, jowls wobbling, and frowned with suspicion. Marsh pulled his hood tighter around his aching, swollen face and gazed past the crowd, into the water.

  He knew now what to do. He belonged with his kin out at Europa, and wanted nothing more than to join with them. In return, he would offer them full use of this body to do whatever they wished on this sordid little world they missed so much.

  The people that lived here were so afraid of foreigners, so scared to let strangers share their space, that they had become monsters. He washed his hands of humans.

  Marsh turned and loped back through the rain towards his womb. He heard himself singing out loud now, a joyous ululation as his feet slapped the slick pavement in time to the beat.

  He was going home, and soon something else would be too.

  As I Was Going Up the Stair

  ‘You coming up, Jack?’

  ‘On my way,’ I reply. But I’m not, not really. If anything, I’m trying to get down these stairs, down to the hall, to the front door and, finally, to escape from this … whatever it is.

  This time, though, in this current – what the hell should I call it? An ‘iteration’? – I appear to be heading up the stairs, up to bed. And it’s become night-time.

  ‘Don’t forget to lock the door.’

  It’s already locked, I know. I always remember to lock it, have done every night without fail, ever since we moved in, but each night Hel has to remind me before she can relax enough for sleep. She doesn’t even know she’s doing it. I imagine some husbands might find this irritating but somehow in Hel it’s endearing. Like the way she tugs on her left earlobe when she’s worried, a quirk I remember from when we were in primary school together.

  Yes, primary school! I really was lucky enough to marry my childhood sweetheart. Isn’t that something? I’ve known Hel and loved her pretty much my entire life – even though less than two minutes ago she didn’t exist.

  Or maybe she did, somewhere, only I’d never met her. I’m really not sure how this thing works.

  Ahead of me the stairs rise to our landing, carpeted in a soft beige that, somehow, has so far survived being ruined by dirty footprints. It was Hel’s choice, of course. I would have gone for practicality over aesthetics, but that – I’m told – is because I’m a man.

  A fond memory rises, of the way she looked in her ancient, paint-spattered dungarees, tongue poking through her lips in concentration as she hammered down loose floorboards in preparation for the carpet to be delivered. The memory invokes a sadness that aches all the more for knowing it never happened.

  Probably never happened. As I said, I don’t understand how this works.

  The beige carpet has been there for almost five years now. A few minutes ago, it was a rich burgundy colour, with abstract floral swirls of yellow and peach. A few minutes before that, the floor was polished pine.

  I turn to gaze down towards the hallway, to the front door and the longed-for possibility of escape. I am still caught about halfway up, halfway down this damned staircase. Taking a deep breath, I lower my foot to the next step down. My bare foot sinks into the pile, reaches the point at which the carpet ceases to yield and I carefully transfer my weight to that foot.

  Nothing happens. It’s not this step. Not this time.

  ‘I’m switching out the light,’ warns Hel. ‘You’ll be in the dark.’ There is just the gentlest touch of impatience in her voice.

  ‘It’s okay. I know the way.’

  If only that were true.

  This staircase is a minefield, in an almost literal sense. Each step looks identical, yet I know that one of them will trigger the change. Tread on that step and reality will shift. Again.

  I no longer remember how long I have been trapped here, roughly halfway up and halfway down this staircase. Hours, perhaps. Possibly lifetimes. I cannot help but think in terms of seconds and minutes and hours, but really such concepts have lost their meaning. Two or three iterations ago, it was my first night here and I was 23 years old, heading up towards an as-yet unfurnished bedroom (if a bedroom can be called a bedroom if it contains only a sleeping bag). I had just arrived back in the country after several months working in Berlin. The house had been purchased on my behalf by my boss, Guy, and he hadn’t thought to warn me how much work needed doing. The time before that (or was it further back?) I had been living here for 48 mostly pleasant years, and my grown-up children had come to visit and were staying over in the spare room.

  The details change. I change. The only constant is that I am always caught on these stairs, going up or going down, and that I freeze as I realize in despair that everything has changed once more and I remember that the wrong move will spin reality again. Even the step in question changes. Sometimes I make it two, three, four, even seven once, steps before the wood creaks and I find myself once more halfway up and halfway down.

  Perhaps there is more than one trigger step, more than one ‘landmine’. That seems perfectly possible, given that no matter which route I attempt – up or down – I never make it all the way. But if there is only one trigger then one day or night, or whenever, I might actually make it all the way up or all the way down and finally get off these bloody stairs. But that hasn’t happened yet. When – if – it does I pray it will be down. If I were ever to make it up to the landing I believe I will be trapped in this house forever, too terrified ever to risk the journey downstairs to the front door.

  Not for the first time, I consider taking the steps two or perhaps even three at a time, to minimize the chance of hitting the wrong one. It is dangerous, though. I never know what I will land on. On at least two occasions, the ‘new’ staircase has been damaged (an air-raid siren was wailing outside once, I recall) and I narrowly missed breaking my neck. Sometimes, my young children have booby-trapped steps with toys. Once, the banister gave way as I grabbed it after an awkward landing, and it was fortunate I triggered the mine as I tumbled, and found myself once more standing halfway
up and halfway down rather than ending up a corpse sprawled on whichever version of the hall I would have landed on. A lucky escape.

  I suppose.

  Eventually, I know, I will risk jumping over steps again if I have to. Not yet, though. For now, I am paralysed as much by the hope of getting through this unscathed as by the fear of being trapped forever.

  Behind me the light disappears as Hel flicks off the bedside lamp.

  ‘G’night, love,’ she calls.

  ‘Sweet dreams,’ I answer automatically, the habit of years that never existed taking over.

  I take another step down.

  Nothing happens. Above me I hear my beautiful wife scrumming down into the depths of our duvet, and I wish I were with her. I love her so much. I always have.

  I will miss her.

  Only a few steps to go. I lower myself onto the next, then the next, and there is the faintest creak from the wood beneath.

  ‘Y’call, Jack?’

  An unshaven face is leaning out of the front-room doorway. Bleary-eyed, Steve looks around and spots me. He’s a great guy, Steve. My housemate. Has been for years. A confirmed bachelor, like me. What woman would put up with us?

  ‘Whatcha doing up there, mate?’ he asks, and he swigs from his can of Krony as I stare back at him, trapped halfway up and halfway down these painted blue stairs.

  I ignore him and, as I’d known he would, he simply shrugs and wanders back to the telly.

  ‘The ninth one up that time,’ I mutter to myself. ‘And before that it was the fifth.’

  I search for a pattern in the numbers, trying not to scream as I seek an algorithm that will let me navigate this hellish maze, to plot a route to reach the bottom of these stairs and get out of this accursed house forever.

  ‘Ninth one up,’ I repeat, adding the number to a mental list so lengthy I refuse to admit I forgot most of it long, long ago.

  To Make Our Bread

  It would have to wait; this was urgent.

  John pushed his way deeper in, thin branches snagging his jacket’s sleeves. Damp leaves smeared the bottoms of his jeans and the rain-soaked ground yielded underfoot with horrible squelching ease. His boots felt heavy, and he hoped it was only mud clinging to their soles.

  Another step and the trees closed behind him, shutting out all sounds of the modern world. With a rustle of leaves, night folded in. It was a thick darkness that smelled of earth and mulch and a time when all this had effectively been the countryside. A time that, according to Beardy Bob, was barely a century ago.

  It was weird when you thought about it, how it had been no more than a handful of generations since the expanding metropolis had oozed across the border, signalling the inexorable mutation of Eilsham village into just another part of suburban London. Weird, and worthy of contemplation, but not right now. John was bursting for a piss, and thoughts of Bob and his tales of local history would have to wait. As would that nagging inner warning John could sense bubbling up through the cider.

  Moments later, the ground was a little wetter and warmer. John sighed his gratitude, zipped himself up, and picked his way back through the undergrowth. With a refreshed lightness of body and mind, and having quite forgotten the murmuring sense of something being wrong, he re-emerged at the roadside directly opposite the pub. In the light of a nearby lamppost he noted with relief that the mess on his boots was, after all, merely mud.

  Scraping the soles clean on the kerb, he smiled. He had so nearly made an idiot of himself a few minutes earlier, losing his temper like that! It had been the chill air’s fault: the cold had hit him the instant he’d stepped outside the Mill House, and his bladder had suddenly seemed so much fuller than he’d realized. He’d never make it home in time. So he’d turned straight around, intending to pop back inside to use the facilities, only to smack his forehead on the door and to see the new barman already turning the key in the lock!

  Naturally, there had been some swearing on John’s part. To be honest, though – and he could admit it now that the pressure was gone– it had already been well past drinking-up time and every other customer had left long before.

  Now all the pub’s doors were secured, and the curtains were drawn tight across every window. Inside, John supposed, the staff were relaxing as they cleared away the evening’s debris, and no doubt helping themselves to a pint or two on the house. Good on them, he thought. A relaxing golden glow was settling deep into his bones.

  Ah well, he thought. Time to head home.

  He turned up his jacket collar, thankful the rain had stopped and that there was no wind to add bite to the cold. It wasn’t too bad a night really, although the mud was slippery and he took care as he stepped over the narrow ditch that ran between the Common and the road. Making it safely across, he lifted his gaze from the wet tarmac – and that was when the something odd at last filtered into his awareness.

  He knew the Mill House well, and so he was familiar with the peculiar ruin that stood in the pub’s car park. He could see it now, on the opposite side of the road and almost in the centre of the painted parking bays: a circular wall of crumbling red bricks surrounding a central brick pillar. The pillar formed the base for a sort of hollow pyramid of heavy wooden beams. Scorched and weather-stained, those beams leaned in against a thick wooden trunk, once tall but which had snapped at some point so that now, a meter or so above the pyramid’s apex, only a few jagged splinters still reached up, clutching at empty space.

  It was a curious relic and John had spent enough time hanging around the car park waiting for opening time to have read – and practically memorized – what was recorded on the scratched brass plaque screwed to those old bricks. Thus, he knew that the ruins were the base of a windmill, one that had been built during the Napoleonic Wars and had, in the words on the plaque, ‘ground the grist’ here until a storm blew in during the later years of Queen Victoria’s reign.

  In the violence of that storm, lightning had struck the windmill and destroyed two of the sails. That would have been a dramatic enough end to the windmill for most people, but apparently not for Beardy Bob who on more than one drunken evening had declaimed to willing and unwilling companions at the bar that, in his opinion, it had not been ‘your usual type of lightning that did for the old mill’.

  Apparently, contemporary records referred to what hit the mill as a ‘ball of fire’. This suggested, or so Bob claimed, not normal sheet or forked lightning but instead something called ball lightning – a phenomenon (and Bob liked to emphasize this point with wild gesticulations) that was a sizzling, sparking sphere of electricity, a globe of such unpredictable nature that it might float through the air, or maybe pass ghost-like through solid walls, or else explode with abrupt yet silent violence.

  After a few pints, it sounded convincing. Whatever the truth, though, today only the burnt stump of the mill remained. And that was what was so odd.

  John tried to re-focus his eyes but the black shape remained: a tall, arched slab of darkness that blocked out the dull glow of the night clouds. It loomed above the old brick base like a Gothic church window in negative. From the upper third of the non-existent window the blackness seemed to extend in huge straight-sided slabs. John blinked, and took a moment to make sure he could really see it, but the absence in the sky remained. The overall shape, he was forced to admit, looked like nothing so much as the silhouette of a becalmed windmill.

  He wandered across the empty road to get a closer perspective. It was no optical illusion. There really was a windmill standing there and he could see it in more detail now, its weather-boarded body firm and solid on the old brick base. He glanced around, hoping for some passer-by to confirm what he was seeing, but the road was deserted and there was no sign of anybody peeping through the pub’s curtained windows.

  Moving as quietly as anyone could after six ciders, suspecting he was technically trespassing, he crossed the forecourt into the empty car park, gazing up in disbelief. How was the windmill there? Evening had already
been drawing in when he’d reached the pub, and he hadn’t seen anything then, although he had been chatting to Lee on his phone, trying to persuade the lazy bugger to meet him for a few. Obviously, he simply hadn’t noticed it then. There was no way it could have been built here in the space of the few hours he’d been inside so it must have been here the whole time.

  But what was it? A replica of the original windmill? He hadn’t heard of any plans to do that. Mind you, the local council did seem to be wasting money on a whole heap of half-hearted heritage schemes these days. Yes, a replica was surely the answer – yet those dark-stained wooden boards didn’t look new. If anything, they looked old enough to be the real thing. How was that possible? Were there suppliers of salvaged Victorian timber you could go to for that sort of thing? He had no idea.

  He reached out, hesitated, then scoffed at himself for being silly and prodded the brick base with his forefinger. The bricks felt as if they were buzzing – no, that was too strong a word. Humming. It was very faint but it was there, as if an electrical generator were installed just on the other side of the wall.

  ‘Help you, lad?’

  John started. He turned to see a gaunt, middle-aged man standing close behind him. A good foot shorter than John himself, he wore a loose-fitting granddad-style shirt of rough, grey material. The sleeves were rolled up to reveal forearms corded with tight muscle. A dun cloth cap, below which the sides of his head seemed bald, and a red neckerchief added the sole splashes of colour to his outfit.

  ‘Come to peek inside, ‘ave yer?

  At once the explanation seemed clear. The missing mill had indeed been replaced by a replica, and this guy – dressed in what was presumably the sort of outfit a Victorian miller might wear – was involved in some sort of historical re-enactment. It seemed an odd time to be doing it, nearly midnight, but maybe they were getting ready to close for the night, or maybe John had stumbled into some private preview event for local journalists, bigwigs and heritage nutters like Bob.