Shadows & Tall Trees 7

by Michael Kelly

  The thing about the letting agents was that we had parted on bad terms. They had complained about the state of the flat when I moved out and surrendered my keys. Citing patches of peeling paint on the walls, soot on the ceiling and stubborn stains on the carpet, they had refused to return my deposit in its entirety and had informed me of their intention to deduct certain amounts, which were itemised on a memo that came attached to a tetchy email. I challenged their proposal, pointing out that the paint had peeled from the walls only where it had been behind furniture, which suggested to me that either damp or poor decorating was to blame. Also, although I had not told them this, when I had emptied the flat, I had gone round covering up the nail holes in the walls with TippEx. I hadn’t anticipated any problems with the refunding of the deposit.

  After an exchange of unfriendly emails, they agreed to reduce by a half the amount they intended to charge for cleaning and redecorating. I felt by that point that I had no choice but to give in.

  So, when the agents started phoning me with regard to the difficulties the new tenant was experiencing, I didn’t particularly welcome the contact. I felt like offering to be put directly in touch with her.

  But it got me thinking and it reminded me of how I’d felt when I had just moved in, two years earlier. The flat had been unfurnished, superficially clean, but I had found myself wanting there to be some kind of trace left by the previous tenant, some clue to his or her identity. I didn’t feel that he or she could be held accountable for the curtain rail that became detached from its fittings if you opened the curtain too far on one side, or for the lumpy lino in the kitchen. I found the trace I was looking for in the wardrobe cupboard in the hall. In it I found a number of empty hangers from mid-range high street fashion stores, some marked 14, others 16. I imagined a young woman, her weight fluctuating over the months or years that she lived there. I wondered what she might have looked like. I wondered where she might have gone. I wondered if she ever gave a thought to the place she had left behind.

  I was grateful for her clothes hangers, having brought few with me from the house I had shared with my ex. I remember the estate agent who showed me round. It takes special skill to show someone round a studio flat. But this studio was the best of a fairly bad bunch that I had viewed over the previous week. I remember looking at him when he had shown me a smaller one, where the kitchen was so small the position of the cooker prevented two of the cupboard doors from being opened.

  The landlord will remove the cooker if you don’t want it, the estate agent said.

  I said nothing in response to this.

  It will get harder to find a good place in the New Year, he said.

  Why’s that, I asked?

  Because couples struggle through Christmas together, he explained, and realise they can’t do it anymore. Come January the men are out looking for flats.

  I studied the expression on his face—scorn? Despair?—and tried to work out if he, too, was living in a rented studio. He hadn’t once looked me in the eye.

  I took the next flat he showed me—the studio with the clothes hangers whose previous owner had, I imagined, jumped from size 14 to size 16 as she had become unhappier, alone in the flat and perhaps alone in the world, and then back to 14 once she had made up her mind to move out.

  I put up a picture in my daughter’s room. A framed collage of images of butterflies cut out of magazines that she made in Year 9. I also have a go at fixing the window blind, which has been catching on one side. I open the top drawer of her chest of drawers and look through her tights and socks and underwear. I take out a pair of tights and hold them to my nose—they smell only of fabric softener—then drop them on the floor.

  In my son’s room, I go through his football shirts. I take one out and unfold it on his bed.

  The intercom buzzes and I go to the door to pick up.

  Post, says a voice.

  I press the button and hear the door open down below in the communal hallway. I wait until I hear it shut again and then open my door and go down to see if there’s anything for me or if, as is usually the case, I was simply the only one at home to let in the postman. In my pigeonhole I find a padded envelope.

  In the kitchen I put the package down on the table while I get out bread, chopping board and bread knife, and cheese from the fridge, and make myself a sandwich. While I eat this, I open the padded envelope to reveal a proof copy of a forthcoming novel. I take the book into the living room and find room for it on a shelf full of similar-sized books. My eye briefly lingers on the spines of the books. Novels, short story collections, a non-fiction book about the night, an anthology of sea stories. An academic study of a certain school of French literature. A book about underground films. All they have in common is size.

  In the old flat, there had been room for no more than two bookcases. I had taken books relating to what I was working on at the time, plus a couple of series for teenagers that I was in the process of collecting. I had bought one or two of those titles originally, second-hand, for my son, as I had enjoyed them at his age, but he had lost interest in reading, so I had carried on buying them, from charity shops and second-hand bookshops, partly out of nostalgia and partly out of a dimly understood need to collect them on my son’s behalf, even though he had no interest in them.

  Sometimes I would hear voices in the old flat. The first time I heard them, I couldn’t figure out where they were coming from. My first thought was from beyond the wall behind my bed, but when I worked out that that was outside—and my flat was at the top of the converted house—I ruled that out. Then I thought I could hear them better if I approached the wall where my desk was, but I pretty soon ruled that out, too. I only figured it out by accident. I opened the door to the boiler cupboard to get the vacuum cleaner out and there I heard voices. I realised they were the same voices, still quite muffled, but I could hear them better in the boiler cupboard than anywhere else in the flat. So, from that point on, I kept the vacuum cleaner under my desk, leaving enough room in the boiler cupboard for me to stand in there and close the door behind me.

  One of my then neighbours—either the woman in her forties from the floor below or the younger woman from the flat just down the half-landing from mine—was talking to a man. They sounded like a couple. The conversations were banal, but I found the cadences of their speech, the rhythms of their dialogue, soothing, lulling. I could spend up to an hour in there at a time, sometimes longer.

  I’m in the kitchen bending down in front of the washing machine, loading it with my few items of laundry. I shake powder into the tray, then add conditioner, and close everything up. I pause a moment before pressing the start button. My knees pop as I stand up. I go to my bedroom and have a quick look around, but it doesn’t appear as if I have missed anything. In my daughter’s room I pick up a pair of tights from the floor and there’s a football shirt on my son’s bed that could do with a wash. Back in the kitchen I open the machine, add these items, slam the door and set it going.

  I stand up again and look out of the window. The windows opposite are bathed in wintry sunlight. In the ground-floor flat directly across from mine—two below the empty flat—a young man and a woman are standing in the kitchen facing each other. His upper body is leaning forward, while she backs off slightly. He points, jabbing at the air between them, his shirt buttoned at the cuff. But he is the one who leaves the room. She remains where she is, rocking slightly to and fro, then turns on her heel towards the sink and the window. She rests her hands on the edge of the sink. I lower the binoculars for a moment to check that my kitchen light isn’t switched on and when I lift them back up again she is pouring herself a glass of water from the tap.

  In the kitchen of our family house, the four of us had sat down at the kitchen table. My wife and I—was she already my ex? Effectively, yes. I had told her. We had talked. It had been a few weeks—my ex and our two children.

  I heard myself saying banal and unspeakable things.

  Everything else
will stay the same, I finished.

  I stressed this point. We both did, my ex backing me up for the sake of the children.

  My daughter looked faintly embarrassed, while my son’s expression darkened quickly. I had never seen such a swift and dramatic transformation in a person’s face. Something fluttered inside my chest. Desperate hopes revealed as vain. The worst that could happen, now happening. I was destroying my life and possibly theirs. My son got up and walked out of the room.

  The washing machine signals the end of its cycle with a high-pitched beep. I open the door and pull the wet clothes out and drop them into the basket. I drape shirts, T-shirts and my son’s football top on hangers and hang these on door handles around the flat, a 14 here, a 16 there. Smaller items, including my daughter’s tights, I fold neatly over the radiators.

  Job done, I pull out my phone and look at it. I realise I’m frowning.

  I text my ex, reminding her it’s a Thursday and I’m wondering where the children are.

  She doesn’t reply.

  I call her.

  What do you want?

  It’s Thursday, I say.

  Don’t, she says. Just stop it.

  She hangs up.

  I go into the children’s rooms. They are very tidy. Really very tidy.

  I find myself back in the kitchen looking at the flats opposite. The top flat is still empty. The middle flat is in darkness. In the kitchen of the ground-floor flat a single glass sits on the worktop.

  I look around my own kitchen. The bread left out, going stale. The bread board. The bread knife.

  I turn to the kitchen drawers and open the second one down. I rummage around and come up with the keys I’d had cut for the children and hadn’t handed in to the letting agents.

  I walk over to the old flat, the contents of my bag rattling with each step. I look up at the window, which is dark. Maybe she is out in one of the local bars or restaurants, or at work, or studying in a university library, or away for a spell. I press the buzzer and wait for a response, which doesn’t come. I use my key to gain entry. The entrance hall looks the same. I see some junk mail addressed to me lying on the floor beneath the pigeonholes and I leave it there as I head for the stairs. On the half-landings I pass doors that were once familiar to me. A television can be heard behind one of them; cooking smells emanate from another. When I reach the top of the building I stand with my ear to my door. It still feels like my door. The key turns in the lock and I enter.

  The flat is warm. She can’t be far away. It doesn’t look like it did in my dream; the bed is smaller, but it’s in the same place. She has a cheap white desk where I used to have my sofa and coffee table. Her TV is where my desk was.

  I hear footsteps on the stairs, a key in the lock. I cross the ten feet to the boiler cupboard in the time it takes her to open the door, and while she is closing the door to the flat I close the door to the boiler cupboard behind me.

  I hear her moving around, even above the suddenly deafening sound of my heartbeat. I can also hear voices coming from behind the boiler. In my dream there had been a large window in the kitchen allowing access to a grassy slope. I had jumped from tussock to tussock, feeling buoyant and free.

  I close my hands around the contents of my bag and try to listen only to the voices.

  CONTRIBUTORS

  Malcolm Devlin’s stories have appeared in various publications including Black Static, Interzone and the Undertow Publications anthology Aickman’s Heirs. His first collection, You Will Grow Into Them, is due to be published by Unsung Stories in June 2017.

  Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen books of fiction, most recently the novella The Warren (Tor.com) and story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press). His story collection Windeye and his novel Immobility were both finalists for a Shirley Jackson Award. His novel Last Days won the American Library Association’s award for Best Horror Novel of 2009. His novel The Open Curtain was a finalist for an Edgar Award and an International Horror Guild Award. Other books include The Wavering Knife (which won the IHG Award for best story collection), Dark Property, and Altmann’s Tongue. He is the recipient of three O. Henry Prizes as well as an NEA fellowship. His work has been translated into French, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Slovenian, and Spanish. He teaches at CalArts and lives in Los Angeles.

  Michael Kelly is the editor of Shadows & Tall Trees, and the Series Editor for the Year’s Best Weird Fiction. His fiction has appeared in Black Static, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, and Weird Fiction Review, among many others. As an editor he’s been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the British Fantasy Society Award.

  Rebecca Kuder’s story, “Rabbit, Cat, Girl,” appeared in Year’s Best Weird Fiction, vol. 3. Her essays have appeared in The Manifest Station, Jaded Ibis Press, Lunch Ticket, and The Rumpus. She lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with her husband, the writer Robert Freeman Wexler, and their daughter. Rebecca blogs at www.rebeccakuder.com.

  V. H. Leslie’s stories have appeared in a range of publications including Black Static, Interzone, Shadows & Tall Trees and Strange Tales IV and have been reprinted in a range of ‘Year’s Best’ anthologies. Her short story collection Skein and Bone from Undertow Books was a finalist for both the British Fantasy and World Fantasy Awards for Best Collection. Leslie was also a finalist for the 2014 Shirley Jackson Award for her novelette, ‘The Quiet Room’ and she won the 2013 International Lightship First Chapter Prize. She has also been awarded Fellowships at Hawthornden Castle and the Saari Institute in Finland, where she was researching Nordic water myths for her PhD. Her non-fiction has appeared in The English Review, Emag, Thresholds, This is Horror and is forthcoming in History Today. Her debut novel Bodies of Water was released this year from Salt Publishing.

  Robert Levy is an author of stories, screenplays and plays whose work has been seen Off-Broadway. A Harvard graduate subsequently trained as a forensic psychologist, his first novel The Glittering World was a finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award and the Shirley Jackson Award. Shorter work has appeared in Shadows & Tall Trees, Black Static, Strange Aeons, Autumn Cthulhu, The Madness of Dr. Caligari, and The Best Horror of the Year, among others. A Brooklyn native, Robert is currently at work on a number of projects in various media and can be found at TheRobertLevy.com.

  Laura Mauro was born in London and now lives in Essex, largely against her will. Her short stories have appeared in Shadows & Tall Trees, Black Static, and a variety of anthologies. By day, she works as a medical laboratory technician. In her spare time, she writes strange stories, collects tattoos and probably spends too much time in front of the Playstation. She is very pleased to be appearing in Shadows & Tall Trees again.

  Manish Melwani is a Singaporean writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror. He attended the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 2014, and currently lives in New York City, where he’s completing a masters thesis in science fiction and post-colonial studies. His story “The Tigers of Bengal” can be read in Lontar: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction. That tale, and this one, are part of a forthcoming collection of Singapore ghost stories. You’ll find him where the waters are darkest, or online at www.manishmelwani.com

  Alison Moore’s first novel, The Lighthouse, won the McKitterick Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards. Reviewing her latest novel, Death and the Seaside, Nina Allan referred to her as “one of the most gifted and interesting writers of weird fiction in Britain today.” Her short stories have been included in Best British Short Stories and Best British Horror anthologies and collected in The Pre-War House and Other Stories.

  Harmony Neal lives in the USA and had to put her writing on hold to try to protect her local community from HATE. She hopes to continue her writing work as soon as she’s gotten her new organization, Northfield United in Love, up and running. Her essays and stories have been published in or are forthcoming from The Fantasist, Interzone, Black Static, Eleven Eleven
, Psychopomp, Gulf Coast, Nashville Review, The Gettysburg Review, and Paper Darts, among others. You can find links to more of her writing here: harmonyisawitch.com

  Rosalie Parker is a writer, publisher and film-maker who runs Tartarus Press with her partner R.B. Russell. Her first collection of short stories, The Old Knowledge and Other Strange Tales (2010, reprinted 2012) was published by The Swan River Press. A second collection, Damage, was published by PS Publishing in 2016. Rosalie lives and works in North Yorkshire, UK, in the wilds of the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

  Before earning her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, M. Rickert worked as kindergarten teacher, coffee shop barista, Disneyland balloon vendor, and personnel assistant in Sequoia National Park. Her first novel, The Memory Garden, was published in 2014, and won the Locus award. She is the winner of the Crawford Award, World Fantasy Award, and Shirley Jackson Award. She has also lost several awards for which she was nominated, including the Nebula, Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, Sturgeon and British Science Fiction Award. Her newest collection, You Have Never Been Here was published by Small Beer Press in November, 2015. A certified yoga instructor, she teaches Bhakti yoga in Grafton, Wisconsin. For more information visit her website at www.mrickert.net

  Steve Rasnic Tem’s last novel, Blood Kin (Solaris, 2014) won the Bram Stoker Award. His new novel, UBO (Solaris, Super Secret Recordsuary 2017) is a dark science fictional tale about violence and its origins, featuring such historical viewpoint characters as Jack the Ripper, Stalin, and Heinrich Himmler. He is also a past winner of the World Fantasy and British Fantasy Awards. Recently a collection of the best of his uncollected horror—Out of the Dark: A Storybook of Horrors—was published by Centipede Press. A handbook on writing, Yours To Tell: Dialogues on the Art & Practice of Writing, written with his late wife Melanie, will appear soon from Apex Books. Visit the Tem home on the web at: www.m-s-tem.com