But as I turned and passed the rear of the Mercedes, I couldn’t help looking back at the shifting sack, only now I saw that it was a person unballing itself from a foetal position, because a head had appeared. It was a middle-aged woman in a grey cardigan and a dark blue flower-print skirt. Her hair was the same colour as the leaves in the ditch she was heaving herself into. I realised that she was making the gurgling noise because when she looked up at me and tried to speak, blood swilled over her yellow bottom teeth and ran down her chin, forming a scarlet stalactite. She looked desperate, and determined to crawl out of the car by dragging herself forward on her elbows. ‘What’s wrong with her?’ I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
Now the fat guy, Sam, was coming at me with his thick Mont Blanc wallet open. He was pulling out 100-franc notes, separating them and counting them at the same time, the way bank tellers do. His breath was hot and sour with brandy. A blood vessel had burst in his right eye, clouding it crimson. He thrust the notes at me. ‘Just take these and move on, son.’ He checked himself, made a quick calculation, decided he had underbribed and added several more notes from the wallet. He held the money further out, like a child trying to feed a zoo animal that was known to bite. ‘Go on, take it.’
‘I don’t want your money,’ I said. It was his quick recalculation of the amount that disgusted me. ‘What the hell have you done to her?’
‘It’s his wife.’ Sam gestured over at his bony-faced companion. ‘She drank too much.’
‘What’s wrong with her face?’
‘He hit her.’ The companion’s protests were overridden. ‘It was sort of - a game - that got a bit out of hand, that’s all.’
I looked down at the woman as she pulled herself forward on her elbows, her rump slipping off the leather bench seat and toppling her into the ditch beside the car. It crossed my mind that if I bent down to help her, I might be overpowered by the two men. The skinny one had a screwdriver in his hand. We stood silent in an awkward stand-off as she whimpered and spat between us.
‘We can take care of this ourselves, sonny.’ Sam’s money-hand hung half-proffered at his hip, as though he was still hoping I’d take the cash, but was also reluctant to part with it.
‘Just tell me what happened. I’m not going until you do.’ I kept an eye on the other one, sensing he was the more dangerous of the two. I was just a skinny kid making brave, trying not to betray my fear.
‘She was fucking me about, that’s what,’ shouted the skinny companion. The gash on his cheek had reopened, and was dripping on his T-shirt. ‘Now either you help us, or you join her.’
‘We’re not going to make this worse, Michael.’ The overweight driver dragged a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his sweating forehead.
‘That’s it, keep using my fucking name. This is all your fault, you’re never man enough to see it through, I always have to finish everything you start.’ He gave the crawling woman a vicious kick in the gut, and another in the head. She began whimpering more loudly, and tried to draw in her arms and knees as protection, but the amount of haemorrhaged matter she was leaving behind her as she moved suggested that her internal injuries were already serious. She was missing a sandal, and the back of her skirt was caught up in her pants. She was dying, and it was so undignified.
Michael dropped to his knees and started to do something that caused the woman to shriek. When I dared to look, I saw that he was banging a screwdriver into her ear with the flat of his hand. I gave a yell, ran forward and stood beside her, flinching with indecision as Sam opened the car boot and removed a large yellow sponge. He returned to the back seat and began wiping smears from the cream leather upholstery while Michael stamped on the end of the screwdriver with his loot.
The scene was tripped into my memory like some distant, grotesque photograph of a forgotten crime: the red-faced driver carefully wiping the seats, his stomach pushing over the belt of his trousers, studiously ignoring his screaming companion who, deranged with anger, was leaping about on something with a screwdriver sticking out of its head, a pathetic victim-thing that looked no longer human, just a squirming sack wrapped in pleated floral material. The shiny silver Mercedes still gleamed in the dying light of the day, half lost in the deep cool verdure of the arched trees. Beside its rear tyre a stream of crimson was filling the ditch beside the road.
I ran for help.
I told myself that there was nothing else I could do. I ran without looking back, into the deeper darkness of the tunnel, then out onto the brow of the road where the bus had stopped. Its engine was still running, and its headlights were now on. Irene and Chris were standing beside the boarding platform as Mickie and Dougie ran forward.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ asked Dougie. ‘We came looking for you.’
‘Just beyond the end of the road there.’ I gestured back into the darkness.
‘That’s where we looked,’ said Mickie, who clearly didn’t believe me.
‘I was beside the Mercedes.’ I barely knew how to start explaining what I had seen, how I had hopelessly failed to intervene.
‘What Mercedes? There was no car.’
‘Don’t talk shit, it’s right there.’
‘No, mate.’
‘Come with me.’ I grabbed at Dougie’s sleeve, pulling them all forward in turn. ‘Before they get away.’ We walked through the tunnel of branches to the spot where I had encountered the travellers and their victim, but there was no sign of the Mercedes, and now it was too dark to find the bloody ditch.
‘They must have pushed her body into the woods,’ I cried. ‘Help me. She could still be alive.’ I was still shoving into the brambles when I felt their hands on my arms, pulling me back towards the bus and the star-filled night.
Nothing went right after that. We slept in the bus and searched the road again the next morning, but we found nothing. Chris hitched a ride to the nearest town and got the bus repaired. I argued with the others, went to the police and eventually convinced them to listen.
Two doubtful gendarmes took me back to the place where I thought I had seen the Mercedes, but we couldn’t find the spot. One stretch of road looked just like the next, and after a while they stopped pretending to believe me. The rest of the holiday was a disaster. Irene angrily returned to her car without us. We went on, drunkenly rowing until the bus broke down again. This time it defied all attempts at being repaired, and we had to leave it behind. The last time I saw the big red bus it was sitting in a lay-by near a cement factory, abandoned to the corrosive air.
We took trains and a ferry home.
After the holiday, the four of us drifted apart.
Chris died of a drug overdose when he was twenty-eight. Dougie just disappeared. Only Mickie and I are still in contact, although now he prefers to be called Michael. I’m still plain Sam. I’m no longer a skinny kid; I’ve put on quite a bit of weight. I have to buy a lot of business lunches to keep my clients happy. Our company’s deep in debt, and once the auditors start investigating, we’ll all be in trouble. Michael has gone grey and looks ill. He’s married to a woman he hates, and I’m having an affair with her behind his back. We drink too much. We lie too much. We’re going on holiday together, driving through France.
I was seventeen when I met my degraded mirror-image. I am forty now, and hardly a day passes when I don’t think of that sunset evening in the forest. I have already created the circumstances that will return me to that dark spot. I saw the man I have become, and there is not a damned thing I can do about it now. Once you fall, you never get back up.
But as the shadows of fate close in around me, how I miss the bus, i he fun and laughter, the innocence that lasted until my first summer holiday.
Christopher Fowler’s novels include Roofworld, Rune, Red Bride, Darkest Day, Spanky, Psychoville, Disturbia, Soho Black and Calabash. His short fiction has been collected in City Jitters, The Bureau of Lost Souls, Flesh Wounds, Sharper Knives, Personal Demons, Uncut and The Devil in Me, and he was
the recipient of the 1998 British Fantasy Award for his short story ‘Wageslaves’. His story ‘The Master Builder’ became a CBS-TV movie starring Tippi Hedren, while another, ‘Left Hand Drive’, won Best British Short Film. He also scripted the 1997 graphic novel Menz Insana, illustrated by John Bolton. He is currently working on his eighth short story collection, Night Nerves, has completed his tenth novel, Full Dark House (a Bryant & May murder mystery in which he kills off one of his detectives), and is just finishing his eleventh, Plastic, about a shopaholic housewife trapped in a blacked-out building. ‘Some friends and I shared a nightmarish three-day journey through France in a collapsing car during a series of rainstorms,’ recalls Fowler. ‘Parts of the vehicle kept dropping off. I had to refill a radiator standing in a frozen stream armed only with a mini Perrier bottle. We crossed Mont Blanc with no alternator and only one working cassette we’d found in the boot, a mind-bendingly awful Cliff Richard album. At one point we got stuck behind a broken-down travelling circus on a narrow bridge, and I thought “Maybe I’m trapped in a movie”. This story came from that trip.’
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A Habit of Hating
JOHN BURKE
Now that I look back and assess it honestly, I’ve got to admit that I’ve always felt most intensely alive and somehow more loving when I was hating. Everything’s so drab when you’re just making polite conversation at a party or listening sympathetically to a friend’s problems. Much more fun to be writing blistering letters to British Gas or phoning some cowering little girl on the local council. I’ve been almost sorry when the stupid little bureaucrats crumble and apologise.
And way back, if one had only had the chance, the guts, all the adult weight and know-how …
School, and all the slights they heaped on you. Dismal daily routine, dismal men who held sway. A schoolmaster plastered with dandruff who once contemptuously kicked my rather shabby satchel out of the way as he strode through the cloakroom. I’d love to go back with my adult powers and ram his face down one of the lavatory pans until he drowned or, even better, choked on his own shit. Yes, I’d still love to do that. And Tubby Blackshaw - a slimy fat bully, always trying to grope your testicles. I dreamed of being bigger and stronger, and twisting his until they came off in my hand.
You think things like that, but of course you don’t really mean them, do you?
I did, though. Still do. Stilthate the bastards in the past, and find plenty more as time goes by.
Last year a scrawny blonde in the office complained to the Divisional Co-ordinator that I kept looking at her in a funny sort of way. He laughed when formally questioning me about it. Of course she was a neurotic little drip, and he never for a moment thought that I’d done any such thing.
‘I mean, she’s hardly worth a second look, eh?’
We laughed, man to man; though he never guessed how much I loathed him, pretentious little brown-noser who’d squelched his way up the promotional ladder.
Of course, in this instance he was right. Until then I’d hardly noticed skinny Miss Goffin. Now, although I was careful not to stare too directly, I couldn’t help glancing at her in a way which sent her scuttling off down corridors towards offices she hadn’t really meant to go to. Having been duly reprimanded, she wouldn’t dare risk another complaint. I wondered, in an abstract way, if I could frighten her into throwing herself off the roof, but our labs and offices were a sprawl of single-storey buildings, and even if she could be willed into climbing up on a roof and jumping, she’d probably only thump down on to the grass verge and bruise her bony shoulders.
She was a scrawny little nonentity, but the effect she was having on me proved to be quite stimulating. I was healthily indignant that she should have laid that complaint against me, and found myself ready to spread that hatred over others. Kids who stamped their chewing gum on to pavements: I dreamed of making them scrape it up with their teeth and then swallow it. Women, kids and prams always blocking the pavement while they gossiped below a large clock jutting out from a department store: let it drop on their heads, chiming jubilantly as their screeching voices rasped into silence.
And then there were the things I’d like to inflict on some of my wife’s repulsive friends. Just the thought of them …
No more than the thought, for a while.
To be fair, it wasn’t just the office moron or Amanda’s friends who were bringing things to the boil. Always simmering away below the surface had been the memory of Deborah’s treachery.
Not that I had always hated Deborah. For a long time I neither hated nor loved. I went to bed with honey-haired Deborah in her flat a quarter of a mile from my own bedsitter, stayed the night if it suited me or walked home immediately afterwards if it suited me, along those featureless streets and comfortably into my own bed. That was the way we both wanted it: no commitments, no intensity. Or so I believed. Until she confessed that she was pregnant, and I knew she must have been cheating on me.
Because I’m sterile. Always have been.
That was one of the things that Deborah said suited her just fine, just as it suited me. No risks, no responsibilities. Yet suddenly she was all aglow at the prospect of having a baby.
‘I can’t expect you to understand, Tony. I really am sorry. Truly I am.’
Truly she wasn’t. No way was she sorry. She was bathed in a sickly, self-satisfied radiance. It was a radiance I couldn’t share, but I did find some new incitements of my own. Only now, when I knew she had been a shabby cheat all along and I could begin steadily hating her, did those grey streets take on a different light. Instead of drowsing along them, I was wide awake. My mind tingled, I was ready for something. It would show itself soon. Had to be soon. The drizzle glittered a dancing silver, the wet pavements gave off a rich, musky smell. The tatty Cherry Tree pub on the corner looked as if it had been newly repainted, and the sounds from inside were livelier than they used to be. I swaggered past and thought of Deborah and out loud called her a bitch, and laughed and hated her and laughed all the more. Discarding her and detesting her gave a new shimmering edge to everything else.
Amanda was different.
Different to start with, anyway. I did believe I loved Amanda. We were married and we were happy. Well, content, anyway. We had nothing to quarrel about. I went off each morning to the laboratory while Amanda went to sit behind the reception desk at a management consultancy, always looking smart and sounding confident in her command of the up-to-the-minute jargon of the trade.
At weekends she devoted herself to our small garden and the greenhouse. We had the neatest possible flowerbeds, and no herb or pot-plant could be featured in a colour supplement without it appearing promptly inside or outside the household. Evenings together were tranquil. We played Scrabble a lot, and backgammon. I handed over tips about plant propagation or growth inhibitors which our lab researchers had been testing, and could see her mind wander until she simply had to scurry out to the greenhouse and adjust the heating and do her umpteenth survey of the month. We watched a lot of gardening programmes on the television.
Occasionally we went to bed early, and made love quietly, and slept tranquilly afterwards. Once, after reading a paperback she had been given by one of her firm’s clients, she asked me to beat her, which I tried to do lightly and methodically, until something took possession of me and I began to raise weals on her back and she howled and asked me for Christ’s sake to stop. But I couldn’t. Things between us had been so complacent, so ordinary. Now it was different. She had asked for it, and she was getting it.
Until she struck back. Not physically, but somehow flailing out at me with her mind. My arm was wrenched agonisingly to one side. My fingers went lifeless and I dropped the cane. Sweat broke out on my forehead.
Amanda’s voice was a harsh voice I had never heard before. ‘You were enjoying that. You liked hurting me.’
‘You were the one who wanted it.’ I had difficulty in steadying my breathing. ‘You asked me to do it.’
�
�But you enjoyed it so much. Too much.’
She looked at me with a mixture of fear and calculation for a few evenings after that. And something was pulsating inside me, some urgent appetite which had to be satisfied.
It was fed, for starters, by my growing irritation at those silly catch-phrases which old schoolfriends consider the height of wit and secret communion.
‘Remember the famous occasion when …’ ‘Famous’ meaning that nobody outside their own pathetic little clique had ever heard of it or would ever find it in the least amusing.
‘And old Miss Murray. The old dragon! Ugh!’ Marjorie Johnson, who was married and had two teenage children, still twittered like a gauche teenager herself. ‘We believed that at night, in her own room, she paced about breathing flames. One night she’d be bound to set the school on fire with her breath.’
Amanda shuddered with a terror not entirely feigned. She had always had a real fear of being burned alive, trapped in a car or in a room she couldn’t get out of.
I wondered what Marjorie’s special intimate fear was, and how it could be most poetically and lethally turned against her.
Afterwards, Amanda said, ‘Tony, Marjorie was a bit upset, the way you looked at her.’
‘What on earth are you on about?’
‘She says you gave her a look. Gave her the creeps.’
‘The woman does drivel on. Don’t any of you ever grow out of those old school hang-ups and bunfights in the dorm?’
And of course there was Bunty, with that repulsive dog of hers.
‘He’s such a great big softie,’ she drooled as the hulking great thing slouched about our lawn.
I saw Amanda’s face as it crapped on her wallflowers and then knocked over an urn of fuchsias. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said tightly when Bunty apologised as though any apology was an absurdity when the perpetrator of the offence was so lovable. ‘Honestly, it doesn’t matter a bit.’
Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 4