Best New Horror 29

by Stephen Jones

  The writer excused himself and got up, and I was tempted to go over and say how beautiful she looked. I was up and moving when she got a phone call and answered it, and she…changed. I don’t know how else to put it. Her face in profile seemed to set and harden, her eyelids dropped to half-mast, her fingers on the damask tablecloth became like claws. She listened and began to talk into the phone in single words, one after another: rat-a-tat-tat. Then her upper lip curled, and the hair stood up on the back of my neck, and I all but fell down. I had to sit a minute to regroup.

  A few minutes later, I bumped into her guest.

  “You’re ________.” I suddenly remembered his name. He was a successful playwright for the stage. “And you’re working with Ashleigh now?”

  “Not yet. Probably. Why?”

  “We used to work together. Just be a little…cautious with her.”

  “She seems nice enough. I mean you never really know but…wait a minute, I’ve seen you,” he said. “You’re her ex? Right?”

  I grabbed him by his Gap corduroy collar and said, “Forget who I am. You’ve been warned.”

  I left him annoyed and flustered. I could see him returning to her table while Alfonso was taking forever to bring me the Tesla, but Ash calmed him. She was always good at calming me down too.

  I told myself, Forget about it Jake. It’s Chinatown, and drove off.

  So, both he and I had been warned, hadn’t we?

  Big slash-cut now to seven months later. I was driving the kids and their nanny home from a five-day weekend in Santa Barbara with my folks. We’d just arrived on the street of our old house.

  This was a quiet neighbourhood. Not that day. It was filled with cop-cars and policemen, one of whom was putting up yellow tape.

  I got out, and a plainclothes cop challenged me, pad in hand. “You are?”

  “What happened?”

  “Again! You are?”

  “I’m Ashleigh’s ex-husband. I’ve had the children for a week out of town, and it’s her week, so I’m returning them.”

  Heard our neighbour, Mrs. Neidich, talking with the nanny and kids at the SUV back window.

  “You’ll have to keep the kids a while longer.”

  “What? Why? Oh my God. Is she okay? Ashleigh!” I yelled, while trying to get inside. “Ash!”

  Two uniformed guys stopped me and pulled me over to the side of the house.

  The plainclothes cop joined us, pad in hand.

  “As a rule, did your ex-wife keep the French doors onto the back open at night?”

  “Not when I lived here, I don’t think. Why? Was she burgled? Please tell me she’s okay.”

  One of my twins was saying he had to go to the bathroom.

  The cop shook his head and then said, “We think that’s how the perpetrator entered—through the open French doors. And she was right there.”

  Ice shot up my spine.

  “Daddy, I have to go now!” Scottie cried.

  I’ll bring them into my house,” Mrs. Neidich offered.

  “You do that,” the detective said. “Could you bring them all inside?”

  She enticed them, saying, “You can all use the bathroom, and I’ll make us cookies. Okay?”

  My hand had covered my mouth, as if afraid of what it would say next. I unclasped it long enough to utter, “Where is she?”

  “A back office that’s also a bedroom. With a separate garden. You can’t go in. But you’ll need to come down to the station and to the coroner’s office too, later on.”

  That’s when I knew for sure.

  “Was this a bad divorce?” he asked.

  “No,” I mumbled, half-sobbing, “It was mutual…We remained on good terms. Mostly for the children.”

  I couldn’t believe it was happening.

  I must have been a real mess, because a nice policewoman came over to me, took me aside, and blocked me from onlookers while I proceeded to break down.

  When I finally got my bearings again, I asked, “Is it okay if I get the kids settled back in my place before I come to…where? The Beverly Hills police station? And can the nanny get in to retrieve the kids’ stuff they’ll need?”

  “Of course. But she will have to be escorted.”

  “It’ll all be upstairs. It’s nowhere near that…room.”

  According to my dozens of friends and associates who called, texted, and e-mailed, and were all so happy I hadn’t been anywhere near the place, Ashleigh’s death occurred after midnight in the downstairs second drawing room, which apparently had become her bedroom. I’d not followed her career arc closely, so I was shocked when they more or less agreed that she’d screwed over so many people that they were not surprised by her awful end.

  Luckily, all four kids and the au pair were with me that entire week at the beach house, but even so it had to be traumatic for them.

  Sometime after that, while re-reading my notes from Alexandra Laws Pfaff, I remember thinking, Maybe someone else was there that night, besides Ben Alligham and that truck driver? Maybe someone actually forced his car into the front of that twelve-wheeler?

  Our friends fondly recall our parties, and ask what I’ll do with the big house.

  I don’t really know and so far, I can afford to be indecisive. It is historic, and soon enough the City of Beverly Hills might decide to designate the house as such, and then I would not be able to tear it down at all. But the place is closed-up for now, with one room in particular sealed off from both ends

  I send Alexandra a gift on the anniversary of her visit. She calls me, and we chat each time for a few minutes.

  I think she’s getting a little dotty, and I know she’s confined to a wheelchair. The last time we spoke, she said, “I’ve been quite resourceful, Noah, for one so limited in motion. I was able to locate a person who will do almost anything for a certain sum of money.”

  It didn’t strike me at the time to ask what she meant. She didn’t mention it during the next call, and not long after she died, leaving a trust fund for my childrens’ college tuition. She didn’t trust that my luck in television will last.

  I’m socking away money too. The twins and the girls are growing nicely, and some day they may even have a stepmother, since I’m dating again. They know her and like her.

  No, I’m more afraid that one of the kids will eventually get into that house, while I’m away or after I’m gone.

  That’s why I’m writing this, for them, in case anything happens to me.

  Because I know they’re still in there: Frances Lodge Bellamy, and Ben Allingham and, who knows, probably Ashleigh too. And once sunset arrives, there they sit or stand with highball glasses or Bordeaux glasses in hand, in the second drawing room garden. They gossip, just gossip, because that’s all it takes, really.

  They gossip a mile a minute.

  NICHOLAS ROYLE

  DISPOSSESSION

  NICHOLAS ROYLE is the author of three short story collections—Mortality, Ornithology and The Dummy and Other Uncanny Stories—and seven novels, including Counterparts, Regicide and First Novel. He has edited more than twenty anthologies and is series editor of Best British Short Stories.

  Reader in Creative Writing at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, he is head judge of the Manchester Fiction Prize. Nightjar Press, which he founded to publish signed, limited-edition short stories in chapbook format, celebrates its tenth birthday in 2019.

  “I wrote ‘Dispossession’ for a planned Joel Lane tribute anthology, The Dispossessed and Other Weird Tales, but the project hit a rocky patch and looked unlikely to happen, and I needed a story to send to Michael Kelly for Shadows & Tall Trees.

  “I thought if Joel was looking down from above he wouldn’t mind, and so I pulled the story. My title had been partly inspired by the title of the anthology and partly by fears I was exploring in other stories at the time.”

  THREE MONTHS AGO I moved to a new place and, while my new flat more than meets my needs, I’m finding that
the old one is increasingly on my mind. I can’t dismiss this as nostalgia, because I really wasn’t ever happy there, but I can’t stop thinking about the old place. The other night I even dreamed about it.

  For a number of reasons, I was glad to move. I was moving from a rented studio, which was too small for me to have my children to stay, into a three-bedroom flat that I was buying. My children, who had never used the keys I had had cut for them for the old place, would get a bedroom each, which they would use two nights a week and alternate weekends, according to the agree-ment with my ex, and I would be able to get the rest of my stuff out of storage.

  The flat is on the top floor of a three-storey development dating from the 1950s. There are a number of blocks, each comprising six or ten or a dozen flats, separated by communal gardens. I’ve filled the flat with cheap units and shelved my books according to size, doubling up where possible. I don’t need to know how to find particular titles. I haven’t read a book in two years. Yet I can’t bring myself to give them away. I’ve bought new clothes for the children and these are stored in drawers in their respective bedrooms.

  My son’s bedroom is situated at the back of the flat, his windows offering a view across a courtyard to the rear of another block. You get the same view from the bathroom, if you open the frosted windows, and the kitchen, which is where I keep my binoculars, in an eye-level cupboard to the right of the sink. The flat opposite mine has been empty for a week, the soft outlines of shampoo bottles removed from the bathroom window ledge. Two days ago I watched a man painting woodwork in the kitchen. Since then, nothing.

  After I moved, I would occasionally walk past my old place on the way to the shops, but, at first, I barely gave it a second glance. Then one day the letting agents rang me to say that the new tenant was having difficulties with the phone company and would I be kind enough to give them my old number, so they could give it to her and she could tell the phone company what it was. It seemed a funny way around to do things, but I looked it up. A couple of days later they called again, wanting to know if I had had broadband installed in the old flat without encountering any major difficulties. I said that I had and I named the provider.

  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 e-mail. 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 Tipp-Ex. I hadn’t anticipated any problems with the refunding of the deposit.

  After an exchange of unfriendly e-mails, they agreed to halve 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 to. 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 around. It takes special skill to show someone around 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 any more. 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 th
e 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.