I lurch over to the main gate and very slowly, very laboriously and very carefully, clamber back out – on only three or four occasions coming close to tumbling off and smashing my skull to smithereens.
I trudge up the alley and find a street I think I recognize. I walk along it, and keep going, and by the time I get back to the house in which I live, I’ve remembered both that my dad isn’t actually dead, and that the bastard never took me to a park in his life.
XII
Saturday and Sunday blurred into one. I spent some of it in the pub, some in the park, some of it walking the streets, but most of it in my flat. Whenever I was at home, I found myself reading from the book.
Not “reading” from it in a literal sense, I suppose, but letting it sit in front of my eyes. The conscious extraction of meaning from a procession of words is not, after all, the only way of interacting with a text, or with anything else in the world.
By now I had become sufficiently familiar with the book’s contents that I’d realized there was more than one rhythm to the words, that in the beginning they fell into one loose pattern – the one I thought I’d heard in the voice of the man who’d let me out of the park – but that by the end it had changed. No matter how much time I spent looking at the middle sections, however, I couldn’t put my finger on where the transition occurred.
I found that I was intrigued rather than bothered by this. I cannot, after all, recall the point where I became the person who lives in this flat and exists how I do, after being the person who was so far in advance of the other students at university that the lecturers just let me do my own thing, convinced I would amount to a great deal. I cannot recall when the four-year marriage I abandoned, toward the end of my twenties, started to be something I no longer wished to be involved in – nor at what point I stopped bothering to send birthday and Christmas cards to the daughter that I’d gained from it. I cannot remember when I became exhausted instead of merely tired.
Things rarely stop and start at easily identifiable points, after all. If they did, then it would be much easier to know when to hold up your hand and say “Wait, hang on, hang on, stop – I’m not sure I like where this is going”. Life tends to shade from one state to the next, to evolve, or devolve, to grow and develop, or fade and fall apart.
Books and sentences and words hide this, with their quantized approach to reality, their pretence that meanings and events and emotions stop and start – that you can be in one state and then another that is different and that the whole of life is not one long, continual flux. Whole languages collude too, especially the European ones, setting object against subject and giving precedence to the latter over the former: only rare exceptions like certain Amerind dialects structuring themselves to say “a forest, a clearing, and me in it”, instead of the individual-as-god delivery of “I am in a clearing in a forest”.
I think of these things as I sit. I find other things changing, too, aspects of the world becoming different. In the local corner store, for example, I discover myself chatting fluently to the strikingly beautiful Polish girl behind the counter, in her own language. I find myself walking away with her phone number, too, which is not the kind of thing that usually happens in my life.
I begin to feel hopeful that change is still perhaps possible in life, and that it is happening to me.
XIII
I arrived at Portnoy’s shop at midday on Monday, as requested. I’d made no further progress, but had stopped worrying about it. He wanted to meet, so we’d meet. I’d tell him I didn’t know what the book was supposed to be about, and he wouldn’t give me the remaining six hundred pounds, and that was that. Life would go on.
When I got to Cecil Court I saw through the window that Portnoy was with a customer, so I lurked outside and had a cigarette. Though the cough hadn’t come back, the smoke felt weird in my lungs, and so mostly I just held it in my mouth instead. Portnoy’s book was in a carrier bag in my hand. There had been times over the weekend where I’d found it difficult to imagine handing it back to him, so much a part of my life had it become. At some point in the night that had changed. I was tired of it now, tired of its music and transitions, tired of not knowing what it was about. Ignorance isn’t always bliss. Sometimes it’s just a huge pain in the arse, especially when it’s about to cost you six hundred quid.
The customer eventually left, clutching something in a neat brown paper bag. An early Wodehouse first, most likely, one of Portnoy’s minor stocks in trade. I entered the shop to the sound of him coughing.
“Sounds like you’ve got what I had,” I said.
He nodded. “Could be, my boy, could be.”
Clear grey light was coming through the shop window, and it struck me how seldom I’d seen him lit by anything other than his subterranean lair’s murky glow. Today his skin looked very pale, and waxy.
I held the carrier bag up toward him and started to speak, but he shook his head.
“Downstairs,” he said, and reached over to flip the sign on the door to CLOSED.
I followed him down the narrow and abruptly turning staircase that led to the basement office. The gloom down there seemed even more sepulchral than normal, so much so that I was halfway across the floor before I spotted that something was different: even then it was the smell that gave it away first, or the lack of it.
I stopped, looked around. “What happened to all the books?”
“Moved them on,” he said.
“What, all of them?” The room was entirely empty. Aside from the desk and its two chairs, everything was gone. Even the framed page of The Dream on the wall. All that remained was dust.
“Some were sold, others put in storage.”
He sat at his side of the desk, and I sat at the other.
“Are you shutting up shop?”
“Good lord, no,” he said, lighting one of his cigars.
“Well, in a way, I suppose. I’m moving on.”
“Moving on? Why?” I felt panicky.
“The cost of living where I do has simply become too high, especially as the fabric is falling apart. The lease is up.”
“But you don’t actually live here, do you? In this building?”
He smiled. “I meant it figuratively.”
I had no idea what he was talking about, and didn’t really care. I put the bag with the book in it on the desk. He looked at it, then back up at me.
“What’s that?”
“The book,” I said. “I’m giving it back. I can’t do what you asked.”
“And what did I ask you to do?”
“Translate it. Tell you what the book was about.”
“No. All I asked for was the gist.”
“How could I give you that without translating it?”
He smiled again, kindly. “A good question. But you have. Can’t you feel it?”
I was distracted by the smell of his cigar. It smelled good. It made me wonder, in fact, why I smoked cigarettes.
He evidently noticed me looking at the object in his hand, and held it out to me.
“Want to try?”
I took it, put it in between my lips. Drew some of the smoke into my mouth, and let it lie there a while.
“Nice,” I said, putting the cigar back in the ashtray.
“I have to be elsewhere in an hour,” Portnoy said, “so I suggest we get down to business right away.”
“Business?” My head felt fuzzy, as if I’d drunk far too much coffee. The cigar smoke, perhaps. But I allowed myself to hope that – as he appeared to be claiming that I had done what he asked – he might actually be intending to pay me the other six hundred pounds. “What business?”
He reached into his jacket pocket, and took out a small set of keys and a piece of paper with an address written on it. He put them on the table.
“There are six months left on this building,” he said, indicating two of the keys. “I’m afraid that will be more than sufficient, given your condition.”
“What are you t
alking about?”
“The address on that piece of paper is where you live. A pied-à-terre in Fitzroy Square. Not overly large, but extremely comfortable. I have left a fairly substantial sum of money in a suitcase under the bed.”
I stared at the young man opposite me. “Portnoy, what the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m not a bad person,” he said. “I’d like you to be at ease in the time that’s left. The money should see to that. I’ve left a note in the drawer of the bedside table, too, should you decide to, ah, self-medicate. The phone number on the note is that of an extremely reliable and discrete gentleman who can supply morphine at short notice.”
“Morphine?”
“The pain can be very bad,” he said, apologetically. “It’s only going to get worse, I’m afraid.”
Only then did I realize that, instead of having my back to the room, the wall was behind me. That I was sitting on the opposite side of the desk to normal. And then that the man I was facing was not Portnoy.
It was me.
I tried to say something about this, but was derailed by a cough. It went on for a long time, and hurt a very great deal. When I finally pulled my hand away from my mouth, I stared at it. It was Portnoy’s hand.
“What have you done to me?”
“Not so much,” the other man said. “Think of it as somatic drift, if you need a word. It’s never a book’s cover that matters, after all, but what’s inside. The gist. You found him in the end.”
“‘Him’? Don’t you mean ‘it’?”
“No,” he said, standing. “Good luck. And remember that gentleman I mentioned.” He picked up the bag from the desk, and replaced it with something in a frame. “A leaving present.”
I reached out for it, feeling tired and old and unwell. I tilted it toward me, and saw it was what had always hung on the wall behind him, that single page from the first folio of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Seeing it close up for the first time, I noticed that three words had been lightly underlined, in pencil.
Thou art translated.
“I don’t understand.”
“From the Latin ‘translatus’,” Portnoy said, “serving as a past participle of ‘transferre’ – to bring over.”
He picked up the cigar from the ashtray, and stuck it in his mouth.
Around it he said “Goodbye, dear boy,” and left.
XIV
In a month the deterioration has already become marked. From notes left in Portnoy’s flat I learned that my new body has lung cancer, of a belligerently terminal variety. Nothing that can be done about it – except, I suppose, what he did.
I wouldn’t know how to even embark upon such a course, even if I still had the book, which I do not. It is with him, wherever he is, in whichever quarter of the world he is starting upon his new life. Or a new chapter of it, at least. I wonder how many times he has done it before, how many younger men, like me, have allowed his meaning to be substituted between their covers. A great many, I suspect.
My days are comfortable, in any event. I sit in the large leather chair in his sitting room and look through the books he left behind, or out of the window at the trees in the square. If the pain gets very bad, I avail myself of the substance I now obtain from the gentleman Portnoy recommended. It beats knocking back pints of Stella, that’s for sure.
On afternoons when I don’t feel too dreadful I go for walks, watching the leaves turn, feeling the weight of the city around me, appreciating these things while I still have time.
Last week I even took the tube a few stops north, early one evening, and sat at a table in the corner of the Southampton for a while. Yes, naturally I was hoping that Cass might come in, and wonderously, she did. Her eyes skated over me, not recognising the portly, grey-skinned edition in which I now find myself bound. She had a few raucous glasses of wine with some guy I didn’t recognize, but took herself off into the night alone. I wish her well, wherever she is.
After she left I walked slowly around to Dalmeny Park, and down the alleyway, and looked through the closed gates. There’s no way I could climb them now, and it’s not really my place, after all. My body knows it, however. It remembers being there as a child, with its father, and so I let it stand there for a while, before wheezing my way back up the road and waiting until a cab came to take me back to my nest.
Where I continue to die.
The odd thing is that I don’t mind too much.
Some stories, some people, deserve their length and span. They merit a novel-length treatment, have things to tell and other lives to illuminate. The real Portnoy – whoever or whatever he was – is one of those, and I’m sure he’s already making far better use of my body than I ever did. There are others, people like the man I was, who should aspire only to being a novella, or perhaps not even that.
Short stories have their place in the world, after all. The tale remains afterwards, beyond death, and perhaps one day someone will read mine and understand what I amounted to.
A few events and mistakes, several hangovers and a kiss, and then a final line.
THANA NIVEAU
Guinea Pig Girl
THANA NIVEAU IS a Halloween bride who lives in the Victorian seaside town of Clevedon, where she shares her life with fellow writer John Llewellyn Probert, in a Gothic library filled with arcane books and curiosities.
She is the author of From Hell to Eternity, which was shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award for Best Collection 2013. Several of her stories have been reprinted in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror previously, and other tales appear or are forthcoming in Exotic Gothic 5; The Burning Circus, The Black Book of Horror (Volumes 7–10), Whispers in the Dark, Sorcery and Sanctity: A Homage to Arthur Machen, Demons and Devilry, Night Schools, The 13 Ghosts of Christmas, Magic: an Anthology of the Esoteric and Arcane, Terror Tales of Wales, Terror Tales of the Cotswolds, Steampunk Cthulhu, Sword & Mythos, Love, Lust & Zombies, Best British Horror, Bite-Sized Horror 2, Death Rattles and Delicate Toxins.
“‘Guinea Pig Girl’ is my twisted little Valentine to Japanese horror films,” admits the author. “It’s easily the most gruesome story I’ve ever written, although in a way it’s actually kind of sweet and romantic. I love J-horror, but I’ve never seen any of the notorious ‘guinea pig’ films (I suspect they’re a bit much, even for me). I’m also fascinated by the mindset of people who love pure torture porn.
“The second guinea pig film, the evocatively titled Flower of Flesh and Blood, was famously mistaken by Charlie Sheen for a snuff film and reported to the FBI. It isn’t, of course, but I couldn’t help but wonder what he felt while watching it and genuinely believing he was seeing a snuff film. Did he watch it all the way through? Or was he freaked out at the first inkling that it might be real and turn it off? How many others have watched films like it thinking what they were seeing was real? And what if that blurred line made the watcher vulnerable? What if it could weave a sort of spell?
“I wanted to write about someone who loved gory horror but felt conflicted about it and I really liked the thought of a male voyeur being more of a victim than the female ostensibly being tortured.”
SHE WAS BEAUTIFUL. Quite the most beautiful woman Alex had ever seen. But it wasn’t just her beauty. What he loved most about her was the way she suffered.
He had been horrified the first time. He’d felt the stirring in his loins and then the growing hardness in his trousers. A sidelong glance at his mate Josh, whose film it was, then some uncomfortable shifting.
“Holy shit,” Josh said with a laugh as the freak in the lab coat cut off one of Yuki’s fingers.
She screamed, her beautiful mouth stretched open, her slanted eyes as wide as they would go. She screamed. Josh laughed. Alex got hard.
“Yeah,” he said, to say something. Then he squirmed as Yuki’s torture continued and his erection grew.
Oh, how she suffered.
That night he’d wanked himself silly over the image of her terrified, pleading face.
He didn’t dare go as far as imagining himself pinning her down on the filthy mattress in the basement room, fisting a hand in her long black hair and telling her how he would take her to bits, piece by piece. No, he didn’t dare. The image flickered in the background of his thoughts but he shied away from it. Pictured himself instead as the guy who came to tend her wounds, give her water and a bit of food, hold her and reassure her that he would help her escape if he could, honest, but they were watching him too …
It was sick.
He felt ashamed and disgusted once the last throbs of pleasure had faded and he’d cleaned himself up and thrown the handful of tissues in the bin, wishing he could incinerate them. He felt as filthy as the room she’d been imprisoned in throughout the film. He’d let himself go this time but that was it. He didn’t get off on stuff like that, no way. In junior school some bullies had once tried to make him join in with torturing old Mrs Webber’s cat and he hadn’t been able to do it. He’d suffered then, suffered their ridicule and taunting, them calling him a pussy. But he wasn’t like them, couldn’t bring himself to hurt something else, something helpless.
So why did Yuki make him feel like this?
Days later he still couldn’t get some of the imagery out of his head. It was just some dodgy Japanese torture porn film he couldn’t even remember the name of but he remembered every moment of every scene Yuki was in. She was tiny and fragile, the way so many Japanese girls were. Sexy and girlish, slutty and innocent all at the same time. An intoxicating package in any context, but seeing her so helpless and vulnerable had done something to Alex. That wounded expression, her eyes streaming with tears, her hands clasped as she pleaded in words he couldn’t understand … It got under his skin.
He’d wanted to dive into the film and save her, protect her, and yet that wasn’t where his fantasies steered him afterwards. On the way to work his hands had clenched on the steering wheel as he sat in traffic and he imagined them wrapped around Yuki’s slender throat. If he closed his eyes he could hear her gasping for breath. He could smell her urine as she pissed herself in terror.
Best New Horror, Volume 25 Page 36