The door opened. She blinked at him with the confused look of a foreigner, someone who didn’t know the customs or if he had the right to be there or not. She was wearing a beige dressing gown that hid her figure, and her hair was towelled up on her head so that he couldn’t see its colour. She looked older than he had expected. Her eyes looked drugged yet still wary – familiar TV eyes from other girls years ago, and he felt a familiar excitement.
“Layla?” he said. Her eyes took longer than they should have to widen at the sound of her own name. After a pause she shrugged cautiously.
“Dom sent me,” he said.
“Dom?” she said, obviously recognising that name. She looked even more scared – a wariness; but also a sense of routine.
“Dom sent me. I’ve been… helping him. I live downstairs. Dom sent me to claim my recompense, my reward.” He wasn’t sure how much she understood. His voice was throaty and felt on the verge of breaking again.
There was anger – but not the outrage he had feared. She merely said “Now?” and stamped one bare foot; but invited him in.
He flat was familiar to him: the same layout, the same décor, the same sense that some significant noise had just stopped. She had the curtains drawn and the light was hazy, cinema-like, dust floating in and out of visibility. As if he owned the place, he walked into the lounge (refusing to glance towards her bathroom) and he heard her sigh and take off the towel and shrug off her dressing gown. Almost sick with anticipation he turned around and the sight of her naked and kneeling felt familiar too, and what he deserved. The window rattled out its warning, but he ignored it and walked towards her.
“Dom said you were to give me everything,” he said.
She said something in her native tongue and it excited him whatever it was. Her voice was a coquettish script with no real echo to it at all. She undid his belt, unzipped him, stroked him for a few seconds before looking up at him.
“But you are just a boy", she said. When she spoke she stressed the wrong words of the sentence.
His reaction came easily and well rehearsed to him – he didn’t slap her with the full force of his strength, but just enough to make her moan and whisper a foreign curse, and to make one lock of her damp, black hair stick to the new cut in her lip, cinematically.
She didn’t say anything else, and he took what he wanted.
***
He rushed back down the stairs, and the foundations seemed to shake in his mind. He shrank from door B as he passed it, expecting ogre-like punishment to burst from it at any second. He just wanted to get back to his own flat, where he could feel safe. But no - he didn’t even feel safe there. Everything in the warm flat seemed to be shaking, rattling; the walls and ceiling warping when he looked away; the floor imitating footsteps behind him. The random slam of a door unnerved him and when the bulb went in the front room he almost cried out. He had bought some candles but their light was hardly comforting, throwing up man-sized shadows and making the dimensions of the room seem to shift around him. A spider scuttled beneath the sofa, a bat-like moth took wing and circled heavily.
He went to the bathroom, automatically reaching out for the light cord. The room flickered into light, the ventilator rattled above him like it wanted to tear itself from the ceiling. The tap was dripping with its moron’s rhythm, and the edge of the sink was stained with a red female handprint, which slid down the white enamel.
On the floor, the girl was lying still – a ghost playing dead, he thought. If this was some supernatural playback of past events, then it had reached its end. The translucent figure still glowed, but dimly and without variance, the previous pulse and beat of light gone. Her back was still arched but with no sense of tension; her mouth was still stretched towards some words, but there were no shrieks or little cries now. Her black hair was stuck to her face with dead sweat. The soles of her feet were black with dirt and blood. She was naked, and he couldn’t help but look at the bruises on her back, her split lip, and remember how they had occurred.
Despite the supernatural glow the sight in the bathroom seemed far more real than the movie-like events that had taken place upstairs. His mind had ceased to flicker and jump too, and he took in the still scene and realised what had happened. There was blood everywhere – not the thin blood of an accident or a cry-for-help suicide, but thick black private blood. A twisted and gory coat-hanger lay on the floor, along with an opened bottle of painkillers and an empty bottle of gin – these were all transparent and ghostlike too. The whole house seemed to press home the message of what had happened in one of its rooms – of course Dom would have been furious if one of his girls had made a mistake and got pregnant. She would have been of little economic use then, and probably evicted. Best not to let him find out. But with little English, bouncers guarding her, and no money (“I let them live rent free in lieu of wages”) it would have been hard to get to any doctor… Easier, safer to try and sort it out herself, in the way girls had for thousands of years. But not so easy, not so safe in fact – a slow death in a foreign country, heels kicking at the floor of the strange house that was the last place she ever saw.
Shaking, he turned off the light. Images of his recent past crowded his mind, shorn of lust and excitement. He went quickly to his bedroom, and started to throw clothes into a rucksack.
He wasn’t scared of Dom. Obviously he would find out from “Layla” what he had done, but that wasn’t the reason he had to leave. He had defeated Dom, took back what was his, marked his territory. He had to leave because of the house.
He could smell gas, but knew it wasn’t there. He could hear the window rattle, but knew it wasn’t really, for he had secured it with a piece of cardboard. It wasn’t really so hot, wasn’t really so stuffy. There weren’t really footfalls behind him, nor something soft flying against his face in the dark. The flat was his, not Dom’s – the ghosts were his, the haunting was his. Every sound, every flicker of the light made him imagine some twisted and pained form behind it. Maybe if he had paid attention to its messages from the start then this escalation wouldn’t have happened. But he had been distracted by the images in his head, by the deja-vu so strong that he couldn’t remember now when it had started, Layla, the ghost, all the girls from all those films, One, Nine, Eight, Six – he had fucked them and left them to die in his bathroom.
He hurriedly packed, and dust moved around him. The heat pipes choked. The cries and groans came from the bathroom, both clear and distant – the cycle had started again. He could smell alcohol and nausea, hear the clatter of something metal fall to the bathroom floor. He zipped the rucksack shut and slung it on his back, leaving things he knew he would never come back for. He went out into the hallway. Something heavy pulled itself up, crying out home words in a foreign country, managing to press one hand against the sink before falling. Cursing the man who had done this to her.
He left his flat hastily, and as soon as door A was shut behind him the burglar alarm started to shriek accusations. The sound filled his head, was his own shrieking, his own accusation. He knew that the code to turn it off would no longer work for him – he was the intruder now, and his footsteps were loud on the floor. He heard the door to flat B open above him, and as he fled out into the night he thought he felt something follow him.
***
The house was set back from the road, its garden distancing it from the street. As he walked up the path he saw that the well trimmed grass was dewy, and he heard the alarm call of a blackbird hectoring him from the tall, shady tree, like it could read his mind. It seemed like a lifetime since he had heard a birdcall, even if it was territorial.
The house itself was large, detached, with bright bricks and cream woodwork, double-glazed windows, a state of the art intrusion alarm. He knew it had a spacious lounge, a quiet kitchen, a dining room with a family sized table, a ‘study’, and five bedrooms. One of these bedrooms was his, and it was almost as big as the whole flat which he had fled from the previous night. He wondered if Dom w
ould track him down – he thought not, Dom would probably just keep his deposit and move someone else in. But he still felt a hangover of fear from those days at the flat. And lust again, too.
It was like he had never been away. He would leave university for a bit, take a year out. He told himself this would be to ‘find himself’ (and maybe find a girl too), to grow up, to learn more about himself. But he really just wanted to sleep in, to snuggle in his soft, warm duvet, protected and secure by four strong walls and parental love, and cut off the outside world for as long as he could… He didn’t want to find out anything more about himself.
Even as he reached for the keys in his pocket he realised this would not be possible. He felt dirty and unclean, his head dusty with old images. He wondered if the images had started when he had watched the first videos, or before. His head swam, and he heard something move behind him.
He raised his hand and knocked on the front door of the house. He looked down, unable to face the dark haired figure who opened the door, still wearing her dressing gown. He needed permission to enter…
“Tim?” the figure said with a puzzled look.
“Mum,” he said, hoping the awful and exciting images in his mind wouldn’t show on his face. “Can I come in?” She stood aside to let him enter, and something soft and winged flitted over his shoulder, and into the gloom of the house.
Author's Notes
I've always loved short story collections where the author describes some of the background and inspiration behind the stories in the book. Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, for example, both do this very well - see Skeleton Crew and Smoke and Mirrors for evidence (in fact in the latter Gaiman goes one better and hides an entire extra story in the notes).
Maybe such notes are more interesting for stories of the fantastic or surreal, where a simple autobiographical explanation isn't obvious from the story itself. Because often even the most surreal or horrific story has its origins in the most simple, everyday incident. That's certain the case for some of those here.
Those readers who prefer not to know how their food is made, look away now.
The Other Room
I've the kind of job where I occasionally have to stay in hotel rooms on my own, but not often enough to get used to it. And there's something weird about the experience, a sense of anonymity to go alongside the anonymity of the cheap hotel rooms themselves - no one knows you. You could be anyone.
Returning from the hotel bar on one of these occasions, I put my hotel swipe-card in the wrong door. Although nothing happened the thought occurred to me - what if it had opened? This story pretty much wrote itself after that initial thought. I didn't plan it, and things I wrote without thinking turned out felicitously, such as the whole Waits/Straw thing. If I'd planned that before hand, I would have spent ages getting two names which were exact reversals of each other. But of course the world outside the Other Room isn't an exact opposite of our own.
I chose this as the title for this collection because reading fiction, in particularly weird or fantastical fiction is like stepping into a strange room. One where everything initially seems familiar and safe, but you still feel that something, somewhere, is off-key...
Home Time
I'm sure it will surprise no one that I wrote this whilst living in Oxford; like the central character I did grow up in a Nottinghamshire mining village, although the one presented in the story is an exaggeration.
This was originally going to be a much longer piece, but in order to submit it to a magazine I had to slim it down to make it fit a lower word count. They rejected it, but fortunately Morpheus Tales accepted it - my first accepted piece of fiction.
Slimming this down made it better, I think; the whole thing now pivots around the garbled quotation from Larkin. The poem is The Explosion from High Windows.
I see this as a ghost story, for what are ghosts but the past come back for us?
Some Stories for Escapists
I wrote a ton of these while I was at university; I think I was inspired both by Labyrinths by Borges and Stephen King's description of horror archetypes in his non-fiction exploration of the genre Dance Macabre. I interlaced these archetypes with personal, subjective views of my own on horror stories... The result was rubbish, but that's fine - every writer needs to write some rubbish before they become any good. And being at university gives you a perfect opportunity to write such rubbish, particularly if it is pretentious rubbish, which this certainly was. Fortunately I put the finished thing in a drawer and never showed anyone.
About ten years later I mined and revised the best bits from the bloated original when I first saw the phrase 'flash fiction' on some trendy new website.
First Time Buyers
It's a truism that horror stories, for all their ghosts and ghouls, are reflections of our real worries and fears. And while it's true that the Big things like Death and Fate are scary, the fact is we spend a lot of our time worrying about comparatively little things - money, our jobs. Unemployment and homelessness.
And maybe because we are worried about these things, we tend to demonise those people who are made redundant or who lose their homes. It's easier to think that what has happened to them is their fault somehow, rather than something that could have happened to anyone.
The real monster in this story is not the white figure running in the mist; like Frankenstein's monster, it's one we've created ourselves.
Schrodinger's Box
I've read a smattering of modern cosmology and physics books, and while it's fascinating I can't say I understand it all. But it's always struck me that there's huge level of imagination to such writing, a scale and scope that is awesome, in the original sense of the word.
The 'thought experiment' known as Schrodinger's Cat also has a perverse and malicious ingenuity to it - it's easy to imagine an alternative reality where Schrodinger wrote Twilight Zone style horror stories. In fact, if you believe some theories of modern physics, this reality actually exists somewhere...
The quotation that heads the story is from Schrodinger's original 1935 article where he describes the experiment, which has the marvellous title Die gegenwärtige Situation in der Quantenmechanik. A description of the experiment and its implications simple enough for even a humanities graduate like me to understand can be found in the excellent God and The New Physics by Paul Davies.
The Watchers
This is the kind of story that makes me wish I hadn't decide to write these notes at the back of the book, as I've no idea where the central idea came from. There's some references to philosophy, and obviously the whole thing is an exaggeration of feminist ideas about the objectification of women... But other than that, I don't know. I just picked up a pen one day (I still write all my first drafts by hand) and started writing it. Sometimes it really is that easy.
Note to readers: when an author tells you where he or she 'gets their ideas' they're probably confused or lying.
The Final Wish
This is an odd one. I wrote this at university - one winter I got sick with some kind of flu, and barely left my room for days. I took the kind of flu medicine that knocks you out for a bit rather than cures you, and then when awake drank either coffee or whisky depending
on whether it looked light or dark outside my window.
Obviously whatever assignment or other writing I had on at that point was halted, but when I recovered this was scrawled on my notepad. I vaguely remember writing it. but those memories are tinted by the fever-like quality of my illness.
All I've ever done to alter it is give it a title; the whole story is mysterious to me and reading it back I get no sense of having written it myself. Despite that, I've always found it the one story of mine I can't form any objective opinion on. I'd be genuinely interested in hearing what readers think of it.
I suppose a Freudian reading through this would have a field day - I'd like to point out that my relationships with my parents and brother are completely normal...
A W
riter's Words
Yes, yes, I know the title is bad - awful, pretentious, and trite. But I've never been able to think of a better one. (I often struggle with titles - I can get all the way to the end of a third draft of a story and still have no idea what the damn thing should be called.)
Like The Other Room the inspiration for this one came from another minor incident which I then took to its extreme. Like the main character I was on a train when I became concerned it was the wrong one, and there was a note with back-to-front writing stuck to the window. From that brief spasm of anxiety (and it's always slightly nerve-wracking, using public transport for long journeys) came this story.
Red Route
These Lincolnshire roads, with signs showing the number of fatalities, are real. I guess this complements the previous story, but this time it's about personal not public transport. Do any of us stop to think as we get in the car that it's most likely the riskiest thing we'll do all day?
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