Aickman's Heirs

by Simon Strantzas

  Once she would have bitten back at him in defense, but she had long since learned that such an exchange would be futile. Something passed between them. She thought, I'm going to leave him. She wasn't sure yet when or how, but in that moment she knew it in her bones, and the knowledge was as irrevocable as knowing you had cancer or that it was raining outside or that you were another year older. As soon as she thought it, it became immutable truth.

  He said, “Shall we have another?” like nothing was wrong, and she agreed. She could do this, she could play this agreeable part as long as she needed to. It was almost liberating, like being somebody else entirely. Send the real Sylvia away for a time and let some acquiescent creature take her place for a while. Then behind her she heard someone say, “Oh, look, it's our neighbours,” and she turned and it was the couple again. The girl was back in an unsuitable dress, this time a thin white one far too insubstantial for the chill edging in along with the dark. She had combed her dark hair and made up her pale face so that it was even paler save for the dark smudge of her eyes and ruby lips. The two of them looked like a pair of vaguely out-of-date and out-of-place goths, slumming it.

  The girl said, “I'm Lynne and this is Gabriel. Mind if we join you?” Of course they minded, but what on earth was there to say? And then Gabriel bought a round, so they were trapped. Still, Lynne and John appeared to be hitting it off, and John rarely hit it off with anyone. Sylvia leaned forward to Gabriel, who seemed always on the verge of smiling contemptuously at a joke only he was in on, and said, “Lynne was saying something about your cabin belonging to family friends—”

  Lynne and John stopped the conversation they were having and fell silent, and Gabriel shrugged and said, “People Lynne's parents know,” and Lynne turned that bared-tooth grin on her and nodded. “Just some people,” she said. “People we know.”

  “I was asking,” Sylvia said, “because John's been coming here since he was a little boy and it's my first time and I keep getting lost. Do you have that problem? I guess at least if you walk into someone's house around here they're not likely to shoot you like in America.”

  Gabriel said, “Well, there are a lot of hunters and fishermen around here. Our cabin's full of books about it, and trophies.” Was that the hint of a foreign accent she detected in his speech? She couldn't tell. Anyway, they could go now, they'd had their pints, but John wouldn't hear of leaving, he had to get the next round, and the evening passed into a haze just like that, two more pints turning into four more pints turning into who knew how many. Lynne said she was a clothing designer and Gabriel was—what was Gabriel? At first Sylvia thought it was something to do with new media, some kind of managing editor for a music publication online, but later there was something about his recording studio, so she wasn't sure. She thought their circles in London must overlap someplace but when she threw out a handful of likely names they both shook their heads, looking bemused, smiles playing at the corners of their mouths. She was drunk. Why was she trying to make sense of anything?

  Then it was last orders and she was laughing and leaning on John and the stars reeled overhead and it was just like things used to be and what had she been so upset about anyway? They should eat something, the four of them, and a Chinese takeaway across the street was still open. They ordered spring rolls and chicken with oyster sauce and chips and staggered back down through the town. John was walking up ahead with Lynne and she was lagging behind with Gabriel but she couldn't think of anything to say to him and then the sea was off to their left and she could hear it, sighing softly,washing up against the shore. She wanted to run away from the three of them and toward it. She imagined it, black and cold and endless under the night sky, unpierced by the sliver of moon high above. Secretive. Safe.

  “Aren't you cold?” she called to Lynne up ahead of her, but Lynne didn't seem to hear her, and Gabriel said, “She's just like that, she doesn't feel the cold. She doesn't feel many things, really.”

  “That's a really odd thing to say,” Sylvia said, feeling suddenly much more sober. They turned right into the leisure park, into the maze, and Lynne and Gabriel made noises about inviting them over for a nightcap but John said no, he had a conference call early in the morning. She followed John to their cabin but she couldn't shake the feeling that he was leading them back to the wrong one. He went right at a point where she was sure he should have gone left, and she nearly said something. As he fumbled for the keys, she could see the living room through the glass sliding door just as they'd left it. It looked the same, but something was off about it, she was sure of it, something just outside her conscious memory: a piece of furniture moved a foot this way, a nearly-imperceptibly different shade of carpet. Of course that was silly. Even if she'd been correct about turning left, this place was such a maze that there was probably more than one way to get back to where you'd come from.

  Inside, they set the takeaway on the counter and John kissed her hard and then he was pushing up her skirt and pushing aside her underwear and shoving himself inside her, there in the kitchen with the counter hard against her back. She gasped and lifted her head and that was when she saw Lynne, from the window over the sink, standing some yards away but staring in at them through the window, her pale face ghostly in the dark. Sylvia cried out and shoved him away, and he stumbled back, and it would have been comical if he weren't so angry, but now there was no Lynne to be seen out there. Of course there was not. “What the hell?” John said, and she said, “I'm sorry. I thought I saw someone.”

  “Don't be stupid,” he said, and she said, “I know, I'm sorry,” but she'd set off another argument as usual, and then next thing she knew she was waking stiff and sore and tangled in bed sheets. Her head was pounding and for a few awful moments she could not remember where she was. The previous evening after the kitchen was nearly a blank: she could remember arguing, and trying to apologize—her, not John—and then not much after. She went into the kitchen for a drink of water and the plastic bag of Chinese food was still sitting there on the counter, untouched.

  A run might clear her head. She headed out into a bright cold morning. This time the wind whipping across the sea had an icy quality to it, more so than the day before. It felt like an abrupt shift in the weather and the season, just as something had shifted in her the previous day. Across the water black storm clouds gathered.

  As she ran up beyond the harbour to the nature trail the wind intensified, biting at her face, tearing the moisture from her eyes. It was too much. She turned, cutting the run short.

  Back in the leisure village, she tried to retrace their steps from the previous night, turning right where John had when she thought he should have turned left. She ended up in front of cabin that looked like theirs, but it couldn't be; the way hadn't circled round, it had gone off in the opposite direction, and so she went back the way she'd come. This time she went right. Once again, the cabin looked the same, but now she must have been mistaken, there was something taped to the glass of the front door and there hadn't been before it. No, she couldn't be wrong; she had followed this path every morning for the last three after her run.

  The thing taped to their door was a note, written in an angry scrawl.

  We could hear you last night, everybody could all around with your sex noises, and it was disgusting, this is a family place and we are here with our families not like you filthy people and your fucking. What are we supposed to tell our children?

  Sylvia stood stunned, frozen, awash in a stew of emotions: shame, humiliation, fury, despair. She looked all around, as though whoever had delivered the note would be lurking nearby. The cabins all appeared deserted as ever. She went over to the one where she thought she'd heard the child's voice from the window the previous day. Curtains were drawn across the glass door so she could not see inside, and she knocked tentatively. What she would say when someone answered she had no idea, but there was no response. She peeked through a window, which was uncurtained, and jumped back, startled.

  The p
lace was a tip; it appeared to have been ransacked, clothing and other items strewn across the floor, plates of rotting food stacked about. It looked as though no one had been in there for a long time.

  It also looked much the same as their own cabin, from what she could tell under all the mess: roughly the same furniture layout, the same furniture even. Maybe all the cabins came furnished the same way and people didn't bother to change them around.

  Sylvia stumbled back. She ran back to their cabin and burst through the door calling, “John!” only to be confronted by a thunderous look; he was on the phone. Of course, the conference call. He made go away gestures to her like she was an unruly pet. She dropped the note on the carpet and fled into the shower, fled him, fled everything. She turned on the water as hot as she could stand and scrubbed till her skin was raw and it still wasn't enough. Then John was hammering at the door. She cried, “Hang on!” but he shoved it open anyway, shouting, “What the hell is this?” and when she peeked round the shower curtain he was waving the note at her like it was her fault.

  She shut the water off and grabbed her towel, winding it round. “It was on the door. Someone had taped it to the door when I came back from my run. And John, I think there's something wrong in the cabin beside us—”

  “What the hell? Who the hell did this?” John rubbed his hand over his face. “How am I supposed to—I know the people here. They know my family. They've known me since I was a child. What am I supposed to do? How am I going to face them?”

  She was aghast. “How are they going to face you, more like—John, that note's insane. Who would do something like that? What's wrong with people?”

  She didn't want to add that she couldn't remember the previous night at all, after the argument in the kitchen; had they gone straight to bed? Had they been loud? Had they been so loud that people in other cabins could hear them? Her memory was clear, featureless blank, undisturbed even by the memory of fitful dreams.

  John slammed the bathroom door, shaking the entire cabin. She waited there for several minutes and then crept out. She scurried across the hall to the bedroom and shut the door where she dressed quickly and began shoving things in her bag, her mind racing. She did not want to spend one more moment in his presence. She could push the bag out the window, stroll past John in the living room and say she was going for a walk, circle round and grab her things, walk into town, bus, train, home, back to their flat before he'd worked out she was truly gone as opposed to vanishing in a sulk for a few hours. She could then get anything important she needed and stay with a friend while she figured out what to do next.

  She was still throwing things into her bag when John came in the room. “What are you doing?” he said. “Why are you packing? We're not going to be driven out of here by anyone. We have just as much right to be here as anyone else.” She said, “I'm just trying to get organized,” but his questions deflated her. She thought of what it would take to run away from him, to leave him. Her head hurt and her body was exhausted and she just wanted to curl up and sleep for a very long time. She said, “Anyway, we need to get back to London soon,” and he said, “What for? Some dilettante friend of yours smearing herself with mud and writhing around on stage again?”

  “Sarah's not a dilettante,” she said, “and anyway it wasn't mud it was—never mind.” She shoved the bag off the bed. There were better ways to leave him, better ways to make that plan once they'd returned to London. At the moment she needed sleep. The hangover she'd hope to clear out with the run had taken hold with a vengeance. She crawled into bed and slipped almost immediately into a dream in which she was running along the shoreline only instead of bathing huts it was lined with the leisure park's cabins and trailers. All of them had fallen into disrepair. Some had their fronts torn off and the furniture inside was rotting and falling through floorboards. She kept thinking she just needed to get past them and up to the nature trail but she seemed to be running in circles, or they were just endless, and something was pacing her, just at her heels, though when she turned her head she couldn't see anything. Then whatever the thing was grabbed her and started shaking her roughly, and John's voice said, “Wake up. We've got a dinner invitation from Lynne and Gabriel,” and she swam groggily to the surface. Had she really slept the entire day away? She was starving, and realized she hadn't eaten anything since the unwelcome breakfast the previous morning.

  She crawled back out of bed and ran a comb through her hair. She looked terrible, puffy and worn. She was making herself a cup of tea in the kitchen when John came in and said they were already running late and had to go. “Five minutes,” she pleaded. “What, do we have a booking they're going to give away if we aren't punctual enough?” But he kicked up such a fuss that in the end she left her tea there cooling in its mug and followed him out.

  She said, “How do you know which one is theirs anyway? I can barely find ours,” and he said, “They told me, they stopped by while you were sleeping.” She supposed that if you knew the leisure village well enough that certain things must serve as landmarks but as far as she could tell they were just walking in circles past the same cabins. John came up in front of one that was exactly like all of the others and said in a satisfied voice, “Here we are!”

  “Welcome!” Lynne said, opening the door to them, and as they went inside she felt vaguely disappointed at how ordinary this cabin was too. Table, chairs, a couple of sofas, a television, a gas fire flickering warmly and a kitchenette off the one side.

  She said, “It looks almost exactly like ours.”

  “Oh, yes, they're all the same,” Lynne said vaguely, but there were some differences. Gabriel had mentioned hunting but not taxidermy though it, too, was clearly a hobby of the owner as evidenced by several somewhat worn-looking birds—she identified a pheasant, a mallard—mounted on solid bases on the mantle. A shelf near the fireplace held books on the topic along with manuals about angling and hunting.

  “Hope you like curry,” Gabriel said from the kitchen, and they all agreed that yes, they liked curry, and Lynne brought them wine and they sat on the sofa and Sylvia drank the first glass much too fast, but afterward she felt calmer. Lynne poured her a second and she sat back. The room was warm and the curry smelled so good and maybe John was right. Maybe she needed to relax. Maybe things were in her head. Maybe she was the problem after all.

  She was lost in thought and paying no attention to the conversation around her—this was another thing that drove John mad—when she realized John was reading something. It was the note that had been taped to their door.

  She said, “John, don't!” but it was too late, and no one was paying attention to her anyway. Her face flamed at hearing the words spoken, and remembering the shock she'd felt on first seeing it, but the other three did not seem to share her sense of humiliation and outrage, least of all John who'd been so angry in front of her. Lynne turned toward her while they were all still laughing and it occurred to her that what bothered her about Lynne's smile was that all of her teeth were too small. They looked like two tiny, even rows of baby teeth in an adult mouth, an adult face.

  She murmured, “Sorry, where's your bathroom?” even though she knew based on the identical layout of their own cabin, but they didn't hear her anyway, so she got up and slipped into the hallway and tried the first door, the one that was the main bathroom in their cabin. It appeared to be locked. Out of curiosity she tried another door, one she knew must lead to a bedroom, and it was locked as well. She stood indecisively for a moment or two in the hallway until their laughter reached her again, and then she tried the third door. She knew from the layout of their own place that it would be a bedroom with a half bath just off of it.

  This door opened, and the light switch illuminated a plain room that appeared unused. Just a bed, a bureau and no personal items. There was a shelf above the bed with more books on it about hunting and mounted on the wall, above that, dominating the room, the pale skull of something with enormous antlers. It must have been a stag, sh
e thought, with its hollow eyes and jagged opening that she guessed must be the snout, the nasal cavity, but looked like a shrieking mouth.

  Imagine how restful a night you'd have with that over your head. In the bathroom, she washed her face and hands and looked at herself in the mirror for a long time. She didn't recognize the face that looked back; her eyes looked as hollow as those of the poor dead stag. The wine and heat had flushed her cheeks but it was an unhealthy, feverish flush. She shouldn't drink any more, certainly not before eating something.

  She deliberately did not look in the direction of the skull again, and back in the living room, no one seemed to have even noticed she'd left. Gabriel was dishing up dinner at last, heaps of basmati rice and rich yellow curry, and she fell on it ravenously.

  “Easy,” John said to her, “it's not going anywhere,” and she stopped, embarrassed, and Gabriel tried to smooth it over by saying, “It's nice when someone appreciates your cooking” but that only made her feel more self-conscious. Lynne, poking in a desultory way at her plate with one fork and twirling a wine glass with her other hand, said, “You must not look at goblin men, you must not buy their fruit.”

  Sylvia said, “What?”

  “It's from the Rossetti poem,” Gabriel said. “You know, you aren't supposed to eat fairy food or you'll be trapped with them forever. Lynne and I were working on a project a while ago based around it.”

  “I hope this doesn't mean we're stuck here at the leisure park for the rest of our days,” Sylvia said, and they all laughed. It must have been too much wine on an empty stomach that made her add, “You know, I had the funniest thought when I first saw Lynne. That you two didn't belong here. That you'd done something with the people who really lived here and just made yourselves at home.”

  As soon as it was out she regretted it, but they were laughing again, thank goodness they all laughed, and Gabriel said, “Not sure you'd have to kill anyone to move into one of the cabins this time of year, it's all pretty easy pickings,” and they all laughed more. She joined them though she didn't even know why.