The wind.
It came again.
The doorknob rattled.
All at once, Jim’s terror turned to rage. He charged into the kitchen and went for the door. On the other side, he could see the vague suggestion of a face.
He reached for the knob.
Behind him, the cellar door slammed into the wall. Jim turned, and deargodinheaven, it was there, coming for him, its arms outstretched, moaning like the cold autumn wind in the barren treetops. A woman. Her long blue dress was rotted and falling off of her. Her face nearly skeletal, the flesh clinging to the bone black and withered. Through the tatters of her dress, Jim could see her ribcage: Beetles and spiders scurried madly.
“Jiiiiiimmmm!”
The window smashed, and an arm reached through, wrapping around Jim’s neck. It, too, was the arm of a thing, the covering fabric eaten away, revealing the bone underneath.
Jim screamed.
The woman came closer, her arms wide as if to embrace him.
“Give it your power, Jim. Give it your life!”
Screaming and thrashing, he kicked the thing when it was close enough. It fell back and came apart on the floor. The arm snaked away, releasing him, and he backed into the kitchen. The door flew open, and the second ghoul entered. Tall and bent to one side, dressed in the tattered remains of a suit, it was in remarkably good shape for having been in the ground since 1979.
“Come here, Jim,” it said.
Jim turned. The front door. He had to get to the front door.
The ghoul on the floor was reaching for him.
Jim kicked it away and ran into the living room. The old man was there, a shotgun in his hands.
“Help me!” Jim screamed.
“Now you just stay right there,” the old man said, taking a step forward. “Put your hands up over your head where I can see ‘em.”
Jim looked over his shoulder. The man ghoul was helping the woman ghoul up.
“What’s going on here?” Jim breathed.
The old man jerked the gun at him. “Put your hands up!”
Jim reluctantly did as he was told.
“Turn around and go into the basement.”
Jim turned. The two ghouls were standing there, watching.
The old man shoved the barrel into the small of Jim’s back, and forced him downstairs into the basement.
In the middle of the floor, one grave. Jim swallowed.
“Get in the hole.”
Jim spun so quickly he was knocking the gun away before he knew he was resisting. The old man grunted and pulled the trigger, sending a volley of buckshot into the stone wall. A low, rumbling groan rose from the house.
Jim punched the old man and pushed him back. He pulled his foot back for a kick, but something happened; something fell onto his head, knocking him down. A floorboard.
Blackness overcame him.
* * *
The old man patted the earth with the shovel and sighed. His jaw ached and his tailbone throbbed. Thank God that city asshole didn’t get the gun away from him.
Putting the shovel aside, the old man hobbled over to the wall where the buckshot hit; the pockmarks were already starting to heal.
As he shambled back to the stairs, the heating system kicked on; any residual energy City Boy left behind would be sucked up, just as surely as his life was being sucked up by the soil.
In the kitchen, the ghouls were gone, back to their graves. He hated when the house used mom and dad’s bodies like that. He understood why, but he still didn’t like it.
Outside, the old man gave the house a quick once over and nodded. By morning, it’d look brand new.
Then it would sit empty until it got hungry again.
Cold Harbour
Ro McNulty
Are you ready? Is it on? Do you want me to..?
OK. My name is Christine. Is that... Am I talking clearly enough? Can you hear me?
Alright. As far as I can remember, this is how it first started. I mean, this is how I met Joan Webster and her family in the first place. I’m a social worker. Not with children, thank Christ, but with adults. Joan’s blind, and quite badly physically disabled as well. She needed quite a lot of care to be able to do things like eat and wash. So, initially, my job was to sort out a care plan for her.
Straight from the beginning, though, it was a weird case, and after the first incident with Elsie, when the police started getting involved, it turned into quite a tricky situation to manage. A care worker from our team used to visit Joan, and the first time I went to meet her, I thought it’d be a good idea to tag along on one of the care worker’s visits. I think a lot of blind people would feel quite nervous about letting a stranger into their home, and I thought going along with someone Joan already knew would help to... you know. Help to put her mind at rest.
So me and this care worker went up to the house. Joan lived in this huge, tumbling down old Victorian house on Coldharbour Road, in the middle of Clifton. It must’ve been worth nearly a million, if it’d had anyone taking care of it. Anyway, we showed up, but Joan didn’t answer the door, and when the care worker got the key out of the key-safe and tried to let us in, we found that the door had been barricaded from the inside.
I actually called the police at that point. Its part of my job, to be honest. We can’t take risks. A car showed up with a couple of uniformed officers, and I think I decided then it probably wasn’t appropriate for me to be there anymore. You know, if Joan was hurt or in an emotional state then she probably wouldn’t want too many strangers hanging around. So, I went back to the office. And the next day, the safeguarding referral came in from the police.
This was when I first heard about Elsie. That afternoon, it turned out, Joan had been involved in a domestic abuse incident, and Elsie was the alleged perpetrator. Elsie was Joan’s daughter, and supposedly her carer, although no-one thought she did enough for Joan. Apparently, Joan had been at home and drinking by herself all morning. She’d drunk most of a bottle of gin and at about midday, a couple of hours before we got there, Elsie had come to the house unexpectedly and, we assumed, barricaded the door behind her. The two of them had a blow-out, and Elsie had grabbed Joan by the throat and dug in her finger nails.
Apparently this wasn’t unusual. The carer told me Elsie hated it when Joan drank and regularly shouted and screamed at her about it, to the extent where Joan would only risk drinking at all if she thought Elsie wasn’t going to be home. Anyway, this time the attack had been seen by a neighbour through the upstairs window, and when the neighbour saw a police car turn up, she went running out to tell the officers what she’d seen. The police put together a report and sent it over to our office, stating they suspected the abuse of a vulnerable adult.
Like I said, that was the first I’d heard about Elsie. You’ve already interviewed Derek, right?
Sorry?
No, Derek is Joan’s grandson, Elsie’s nephew. Joan had three daughters, and Elsie was a lot younger than the other two, so I think she may be closer to Derek’s age than to either of the other sisters’. Elsie and Derek had a lot of issues between them, as it turned out. Derek saw Elsie as the family’s guilty secret. You know, the mad aunt that no-one talks about.
I was just getting to that, actually. After the abuse claim was made we decided to call a meeting to try and come up with a plan of action, and my manager thought we should invite Derek. He was Joan’s closest relative after Elsie, and had told us in the past that he wanted to be more involved with Joan’s care. Elsie had been arrested and bailed, waiting to be charged, so she was supposed to be out of the picture for the next few weeks or so, and we thought this would be a good time to bring Derek in.
I remember that I was late, which is unusual for me and something that I hate doing. I remember jogging up that big ramp in front of city hall, past all the statues, it was pissing with rain, and then bursting into the meeting room panting and trying to apologise and introduce myself at the same time.
As it happened, it didn’t matter. Derek, our guest of honour, hadn’t turned up yet anyway. We got talking anyway, assuming that Derek would show up when he was ready to. A police officer called PC Kate something who was chairing the meeting. She got started by apologizing to all of us, and saying that she hadn’t actually been there the day of the attack. The copper who had answered my 999 call had been working on the case since, but he’d gone off on long-term sick.
I’ve actually tried to contact the man since... Anyway, it doesn’t matter. Kate told us she was taking over the case from him. She had the guy’s reports with her and said she’d try and tell us as much as she could.
She said that Elsie had been arrested that day and released early the next morning. One of the conditions of her bail was that she wasn’t allowed near Joan. That meant she wasn’t allowed to be involved in Joan’s care at all, and she wasn’t allowed to go to the house on Coldharbour Road either. The problem was, like I said, Elsie hadn’t been charged with anything yet and she couldn’t be kept away from the house indefinitely, if she hadn’t done anything wrong. So, the police’s dilemma was either that they charged Elsie with the assault on Joan, or otherwise they had to relinquish the bail conditions, in which case Elsie would be free to come and go as she pleased. But, they could only charge Elsie if Joan was prepared to give evidence against her, and so far Joan was being less than co-operative.
I remember it was hot in the room. You know that feeling just after it’s rained when the air feels stuffy because of the atmospheric pressure? I actually started to fall asleep in the meeting room, which wasn’t exactly professional of me. Just then the door opened and a little man in a polo shirt poked his head into the room, and said, “Alright all? Sorry I’m a bit late. I had to stop by at Nan’s house on the way.”
It was Derek, of course. And by ‘Nan’ he obviously meant Joan. His accent didn’t suit his words, and it made everything he said sound slightly like he was taking the piss out of someone. I don’t know why, now, but I remember that straight away I took a dislike to the guy. It wasn’t just the accent; he just seemed a bit too… I don’t know. Comfortable. Normally when members of the public or family members get dragged along to these sorts of meetings they look like they’re on trial, and it’s all any of us can do to reassure them that we’re not going lock them up there and then. You know, social workers have a certain reputation as it is, and everyone’s always scared of the police whether they’ve done something wrong or not. Derek just seemed to stroll on in like it was his fucking birthday party, or something. Not that we wanted people to be scared of us, that’s not what I mean. It’s just that… I don’t know. It made him seem dishonest, like he’d been practicing what to do, or something. And try as I might I couldn’t shake that feeling the whole time that I worked with him. He could have told me anything at that point and I wouldn’t have believed a word.
Actually, my manager made Derek wait outside for the first few minutes after he arrived. When he did come in he sat down. He looked older than me, about forty-five. He introduced himself to all of us one by one. Then he began to talk, and this is as much as I can remember from what he said.
Joan’s other daughters were called Harriet and Catherine. Catherine was Derek’s mother. Joan was well into her eighties now and the older children were in their early sixties, so Elsie must be about forty-two or forty-three, I think. I’m not sure, though.
One thing Derek kept telling us was that Elsie had never fit in with the rest of the family. He made a big deal out of that point, giving us about five or six different stories about Christmas presents that Elsie had broken and family holidays that she’d ruined, and things like that. She was ‘ungrateful,’ apparently, and a ‘weird kid.’ As a child, according to Derek, Elsie had spent her time locked in her bedroom, away from the rest of the family. The daughters used to fight when they were younger, apparently, and Elsie would always take things to extremes. She could be violent, too; Even at the age of ten or eleven she would lash out at her older sisters, throwing plates or glass bottles, he said, and the family had always been scared of her temper. One day, aged about sixteen, Elsie told Joan and her father that she had met a man and was going to live with him, and for five years or so, no-one had heard anything from her.
“Where had she been?” Katie asked
“Well that’s just it, love.” Said Derek. I saw Katie flinch at the word ‘love’. “We hadn’t the foggiest. Elsie had this habit of, sort of, trying to hurt herself and hurt other people and god knows what, to get at people, you know? For attention, like. I mean, when she got a bit older the doctors started saying she had some problems or whatever, but we all knew there was nothing wrong with her. She used to do it to get at Nan. This man she met? He was scum, by all accounts. He was into taking drugs, dealing drugs, and whatnot. I remember my mum and Nan talking about Elsie and what had happened to her, and they were in bits. She used running away to hurt the rest of the family. No-one knew if she was dead, on the run or in prison, or who knows what else.”
“Did Joan call the police at the time?” I asked.
“Well, as I said, darling, no-one knew what had happened.” Said Derek, raising his eyebrows at me.
“Anyway a few years later Nan started to get these photographs in the post from Elsie and all the places she’d been to. It turned out Elsie and this guy had got married and gone off travelling around the world. She’s still got some of the photos, I think. Not that she can see them…”
Derek grinned and then noticed that no-one else was smiling, and carried on quickly. “The last picture we saw was Elsie on a beach on some island somewhere, with this rough-looking guy standing next to her, and it looked like she was pregnant. Then, one day, the photos just stopped. There weren’t never any pictures of the baby, or anything. I don’t know where the kid is now. I’d have thought with the dad, except I doubt he was exactly a fathering type of man.
I screwed my eyes shut and blinked, trying to wake myself up.
“Then about fifteen years ago,” Derek carried on, “after granddad died and just after nan had lost the last of her sight, bless her, Elsie turned up out of nowhere, at the house on Coldharbour Road. The problem with Nan is that she’s too trusting, right? I mean, it could have been anyone on that doorstep come to rob the place. As it happened, it was Elsie. To be honest, though, I reckon it would have been better if it had been a burglar, given what Elsie did next.”
Something strange, Derek told us, happened at that point. Elsie’s father had not long ago died. To the horror of Harriet, Catherine, and the rest of the family, the house had been left to Elsie. No one seemed to know why, since Elsie obviously wasn’t the only child, and she hadn’t seen her father for fifteen years. The whole situation was a bit mysterious, Derek said. No one had seen a copy of the will since it had been written, until the old man had died. And no-one had known where Elsie was at that point to tell her. How Elsie had known to come home and claim the house, no-one knew. Derek said the general view in the family was that Elsie had either threatened their father into changing the will in her favour or had somehow fraudulently changed it herself.
Elsie had developed quite a serious drug and alcohol problem by that point. The family assumed she wanted to sell or gut the house as a quick way of making money. Whatever had happened, Joan was alone, and blind. The will had left her next to nothing to pay for care with, and the only support she now had was Elsie. Elsie hadn’t thrown Joan out, but she had moved herself in. Worryingly, from my point of view as the social worker, Elsie had closed Joan’s bank account. Joan’s pension now got paid in to an account in Elsie’s name, and Elsie claimed most of it as rent, presumably to fund her habit.
PC Kate did her spiel next. The police and CPS were trying to get enough evidence to charge Elsie. They’d tried to interview Joan, but from what Kate said, they might have well have interviewed the furniture.
“My colleague said that Joan had seemed very disorientated.” Kate said. “She didn’t respo
nd at all to his questions, or even look at him when he spoke. I was wondering, does Joan struggle with her hearing, or her cognition, at all?” I realised everyone was looking at me. I shrugged.
“Nope. Not according to my records. She is blind, though, which might have been why she didn’t look at your colleague.” I said, trying not to sound sarcastic. “She might have been in shock, or she might have just decided to ignore him. You never know. Maybe she just didn’t like the guy.” My manager snorted.
Katie said she’d rung Joan since, but Joan had told her that she wouldn’t give evidence against Elsie and didn’t want to be asked again. I don’t remember much more of the meeting than that, apart from one thing. Derek had leant across the table with this smirk on his face, trying to sound sincere, and said, “You need to do something about Elsie. The thing is, I‘ve known her for a long time, right? I ain’t bitter or resentful. I’m over all that. But Elsie, see, she’s not right in the head. She’s got some... psychotic problem, or something, genuinely, and she’s bloody dangerous if you ask me. If you let her near Nan she’ll hurt her again, and it’ll only be worse next time. She’s twisted.”
I remember Derek’s parting shot because of how much it riled me up. I don’t know what it was. Something about the look on his face when he said it had made me want to shout. Outside, I stood in the multi-storey with my manager, out of the rain, and fumed. She wouldn’t look at me while I was talking. She kept saying ‘mm’ and ‘yeah’ without really listening to what I was saying, and making all these non-committal comments like “Oh, Derek’s always been very helpful, you know,” and things like that.
I set out to walk home, but changed my mind after about five minutes out in the rain, and caught the bus instead. I was still angry, and on the bus I found I couldn’t stop thinking about Joan’s case. I’m normally really relaxed. I’ve been doing this for a while, and there’s not a lot that really shakes me up these days, but the meeting with Derek today had left a nasty taste in my mouth that I couldn’t get rid of.
Onyx Neon Shorts Presents: Horror Collection - 2015 Page 16