For a time Mercy became a shut-in. She was afraid to leave the house. She kept imagining the look on Comfort’s face if she returned to find her mother missing. Noah folded up the maps. Her living room became a living room again, ordinary, thick with dust in the corners where she had not bothered to look. In Hindmoor Green, she might have discovered a piece of Comfort tucked away there, but in the city she knew the dust was simply dust. Comfort had been buried elsewhere, in a basement, perhaps, or the foundations of the new bank: her tiny bones curdling in cement. Comfort did not like the dust. She was appalled by the open space of her living room. She had become so used to following the paths that Comfort made: here, along the sofa, two feet, three feet, then over the chair, then a rest, perhaps, under the old oak table whose tablecloth formed a perfect shelter. But Noah set it right. The chairs were placed neatly where they ought to be so the two of them could sit together over a breakfast of eggs on toast, coffee with sugar or cream. Simple kindnesses to help her cope.
And just like that Mercy realized it was not that she didn’t love Noah. She did. She loved his kindness, the hot snort of his breath as he slept, the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. It was just that she had traveled so far in one direction that she hated the feeling of having returned home, just like that, just that easily. So one morning, while he was sleeping, she levered herself from beneath him, put on her winter coat, and left. She did not know where she was going. Mercy took to the streets, circling the waterfront piazzas, and following, apparently at will, the paths that lined the canals. There was a smell in the air, something heavy and brooding. She knew the streets by name though many she had never visited before: Market Street, Bridge Street, Oldham Road, Stockport Road, New Street. They were what they were. They said what they were, where they were going. Nothing else in her life had ever been so straightforward.
She did not know what she expected to see until all at once, she did know, because there was Comfort. She looked older than Mercy remembered, taller. She had cut her hair at some point, and now it hung short and feathery beneath her ears. There were lines on her face. She clutched the hand of a tiny girl, three years old. “Comfort,” she cried, “please!” But the look her daughter gave her was uncertain, confused, exhausted. There was no recognition. “Sorry,” she muttered. Her voice was deeper now too, robbed of its sing-song quality. “I seem to have lost the way. How many streets are there in the city?” she asked. “Only twelve,” Mercy said, “but the glass is like a mirror here so it seems like there are many more.” They stared at each other like strangers. But then the girl smiled. Her lips were soft and delicate, she had her grandfather’s chin, her grandfather’s blunt nose. “Where do they lead?” the girl asked. Mercy touched the girl’s hand. It was cold and clammy, but Mercy could feel the pulse of something—new life—beneath her skin. It stretched the fabric of her, but she did not crack. She felt her heart expanding, she felt herself growing larger. She had anchored herself so firmly in heartache, and now the heartache was dissolving like sugar on the tongue. The touch was all she needed. Calmness washed over her. “I don’t know,” Mercy said, “I’ve never known, not for certain. But come with me, both of you. Let me take you home.”
JOSHUA KING
The Anteater
It’d been two weeks since the anteater had moved in next door and already things were starting to change. At first it was hardly noticeable, like the bush on the shared patch of grass at the end of their driveways had grown all out of control. The previous neighbours had trimmed it, but evidently the anteater didn’t think it was his to take care of.
If that had been it, Peter wouldn’t have been bothered, but that was just the beginning.
*
The village Peter lived in was quiet and everyone knew each other, whether they wanted to or not. At one end of the street was the park with its swings, a football pitch and surrounding houses for local farmers. At the other end was the church, houses for the schoolchildren and their families and the vicar. Bridging the two ends were the rest. This is where Peter and his wife lived, with the anteater next-door.
The previous owners of the anteater’s new house had only recently moved out. Their daughter had turned eleven and wanted to go to a secondary school in the city, which had a strict catchment area entry policy. So they left the rural life behind to seek better things. One day they were there and the next the anteater had replaced them.
When the anteater was moving his few pieces of furniture in from the van, Peter couldn’t help watching through the curtains. Twice the new villager caught his eye, but Peter would be damned if some anteater was going to just turn up and pretend like he was the one who should be self-conscious. He’d lived here his entire life.
*
It takes everyone a while to get used to somewhere new. Peter knew it took him close to five years to admit to himself that this little village was his home, having moved almost seven miles from the village where he was born.
Waking up to the sound of different farm birds and heavier-duty lawnmowers and inconvenient distances to the post-office was hard to get used to. He could admit that. This new chap though, well, he looked as though as he’d fit in here like a hoof in sandals. There was just something about him, Peter supposed it was a look he had, or the way he carried himself. It made him mysterious. Not knowing who he lived next door to was a sort of mental torture, and it was made all the more acute by the fact that the anteater never seemed to leave. Never went anywhere. Maybe he left at the times Peter wasn’t watching, then came back during those moments too, but that would take some coincidences.
Come away, his wife, Maggie, would say, pulling Peter back by the shoulders and turning the volume up so loud on the television that he got distracted and eventually fell asleep in his chair.
*
Every week at the church Peter and the five other husbands in the village would meet and talk about politics. They’d been doing it for years. There wasn’t anything else they had in common, and they didn’t even have politics in common come to think of it, but everyone can talk about politics and they had to stay sane somehow. When you’re detached from the rest of the country by miles and miles of field and motorway, entertainment can come from the simplest things.
This tradition started after a village party someone decided to throw for the vicar’s birthday, with music and wine in the church hall. The husbands stayed on drinking and talking. It wasn’t planned, only a natural result of the high-spirited evening. It was such a success—they got so unashamedly drunk without being told they had to stop—that they decided it should become a regular thing, and so from then on they all brought a bottle, took a seat and every Sunday night put the world to rights. That is, as long as the vicar remembered to leave them a key when he didn’t join in himself.
It was more a slip of the tongue—Peter often drank before going out in order to ease himself into socialising—than rudeness, but when the anteater sheepishly walked in and drew up a chair to their circle, Peter asked who had invited him. He didn’t mean it to come out the way it did, which was abrupt and suspicious, though of course his motivation was cruel, and rightly so. Who did this newcomer think he was?
A friend, a farmer, piped up and said it was him who had given the invitation. It’d been two weeks, he said, it was about time the anteater got to know the benefits of this sleepy little village. The farmer then waggled a bottle of whisky and poured himself a large glass. Of course, Peter laughed, saying he would have done the same if he’d bumped into their new friend here. This is, after all, the real beating heart of the place, the back room of the church.
Popping open the bottle of wine and offering a glass to the anteater, Peter wasn’t surprised to find the guest raising his claw to say no thank you. Here we go, he thought, but smiled at him and topped up his own glass.
It was an awkward evening, touching on news stories with less zest than usual and considerably less alcohol. It was only half past ten when Peter made it home, and having dro
pped behind the anteater on the walk back, he fumbled with his keys while listening to his neighbour lock his own door from the inside.
*
There were as many wives in the village as there were husbands, but more women overall. Maggie and Peter had theories as to why this was. He thought that a man was less likely to end up in a place like this, because if he was single he would likely have made more money than a woman in the same situation and anyway, men would be more likely to live in the city, wouldn’t they? There were a couple of reasons why, so Peter said, because firstly, a man had to show off a little more, to get women and all that, so they wanted to live where there were people to see all the showing off, otherwise what would be the point. And secondly, a woman didn’t need all the things a man needed for excitement. She was happy with a little house in the middle of nowhere. Women were humble and practical.
Maggie thought that it was because men died earlier, as a rule, and it was always likely that a place full of old couples would eventually become a place dominated by old women.
Besides, wouldn’t somewhere full of lonely woman just attract the men Peter was talking about? “What’s the neighbour like then?” Maggie asked, as Peter stumbled through the door.
“Bit quiet.”
“Oh really? You think so?”
“Yes. In my opinion. Why? Someone else say different?”
“I just didn’t get that impression.”
*
The next day stones were being disturbed on the neighbour’s driveway and the noise distracted Peter too much to read the newspaper. It wasn’t a car or anyone’s footsteps. It was loud enough to sound like some sort of small industrial machine. There was a crunch as the surface gravel was broken, then a scoop, then a scatter of the stones being tossed somewhere before the scooping returned.
The window offered no clues. Even the view out of the bedroom upstairs was conveniently obscured by a walnut tree. Slinking back downstairs to rest in his armchair, Peter almost entertained the thought of going outside to investigate when he heard Maggie, taking a break from her watering, call a hello over the garden wall. The churning of gravel stopped. Kneeling again on the sofa and looking out, Peter saw the humped, monolithic figure of his next-door neighbour rise above the dividing wall, his feather-duster tail shaking in the breeze, his machete claws dropping clumps of dirt and weeds.
Maggie’s voice was no more than distant scatting and rather than strain himself to hear how long they chatted for, or what they chatted about, Peter instead fell asleep and woke to the smell of a roast dinner, which they ate in front of the evening soaps as the sun set.
“You know,” Maggie said, “it wouldn’t kill you to do some weeding once in a while.”
*
The big news story of that week was about a group of six men that had gang-raped the son of the boss of one of Britain’s top banks. It wouldn’t have been such big news amongst the group of drunken husbands if it hadn’t happened in the city, only thirty miles away, where the boss’ son owned flats, which of course stirred the farmers and had stirred their wives into thinking the village would soon be plagued with similar problems.
It was an outrage, that couldn’t be denied. In the backstreets of their own county on a Wednesday night. A Wednesday. How on earth does a thing like that happen on a Wednesday? one of the husbands said, to the acquiescent grumble of the rest of them. A Saturday night, fine. But a Wednesday?
Only one of the perpetrators had been caught so far, because he’d twisted his ankle during penetration. The lesson, Peter said, was to never rape on a cobbled pavement, at which a few husbands laughed while others took uncomfortable sips of their drink. The anteater hadn’t said a word, continuing his tradition from the week before, and he’d neither accepted nor brought any drink. Peter wasn’t sure what was going through his neighbour’s head, but no one else seemed to mind his silence. The arrested rapist had told the police that in some parts of the world, a harmless gang-rape was equivalent to going to the movies. Everyone needs a way to wind down after a long day.
“Some people will just never see the world like we see it,” a farmer said. “The right and proper way.”
Peter could barely see as it was. He was pissed, and so was everyone else. Apart from the anteater, that is.
*
On the days that he didn’t get drunk with the other hobbyless men, Peter took the mile or so walk to the pub in the next village. Drinking there was ideal, because most people he knew were either too lazy or simply incapable of walking a mile, so he could guarantee some peace and quiet. The fresh air was always good for sobering up, too.
Sitting near the open fireplace, Peter warmed his feet as he sipped his ale. The pub prided itself on its original ales. This one was called Woodlouse and the image on the pump was just a pair of antennae, under shining orb eyes, poking out from under a rotting log. It tasted like smoked meat. Four pints of whatever was on offer was usually enough to kill a couple of hours and allow Peter to deliberate on life’s bigger questions. Are the council going to build a wind turbine in the village? If Valerie stops selling eggs, where will they get them from? Will that anteater ever cut the bush between their two driveways?
As the third Woodlouse started to hit and turn his thoughts into looser, cloudier versions of themselves, Peter gave up his own musing and turned instead to the comfortable silence of the room. Though most of the patrons were men just as averse to socialising as he was, the landlord kept it from being entirely dead by talking to whoever was closest.
“I read earlier,” he said, looking around the bar for the bundle of newspapers, “that two soldiers were killed in that hellhole. My nephew’s over there, too. Could have been him. I tell you, the world’s out of control. Never been any fucking thing like this, has there? And they’re on their way here. They’re already here.”
He sipped his own beer and went on.
“You know what they do—my nephew said he’d seen this—they strap ‘em to train tracks, loose bits of railway, not attached to the ground or in use or anything, and then lift these bits up with helicopters—bloody helicopters—and then drop them in this pit they make. By the time they’ve done a few, these poor sods are being dropped into pits of multiple railway pieces with others strapped onto ‘em. They’re alive, mind. Well, not by the time it’s over.”
“Terrible,” said the man at the bar.
“Another one was that they take the bones of whoever they killed last, then use the arm bones, you know, or whatever, the long ones, and push one into the guy’s mouth and another up their wherever until they meet in the middle. While the others watch. Imagine having that happen to you down an alleyway up the city. ‘Cause that’s what’s gonna happen.”
The man at the bar went to take a sip, grimaced, and then completed the action.
“He said as well that they have this zoo, where they keep weird stuff like … snakes and scorpions and things like that, and this thing that—no joke—he said burrows into people’s eyes, and–”
Peter couldn’t listen to it anymore. It wasn’t that he was squeamish, just that he wasn’t much in the mood for these kinds of thoughts before bed. Pouring the final quarter of ale down his throat, he lifted himself up and his eye caught a silver thread that connected the sleeve of his jumper to the armchair. Spider web, he thought. This place needed a dust. Catching it between his thumb and forefinger, however, it felt too thick and brittle to be a strand of web. He rubbed it between his fingers and held it up to his eye in the light. A hair. Dark grey and tough like a fishbone.
Flicking it onto the floor, he gestured a good bye hand at the landlord, who broke from his litany of torture tactics to grunt a good bye back.
*
A month went by and the weather soon became too cold to do any gardening. Maggie complained about being cooped up all day and never going on holidays or even going to the city anymore. She said Peter was becoming a boring old fart.
No one, not even the hardened country people i
n their wax jackets and thigh-length wellington boots went out in this type of cold. Not unless they had animals to feed, which they did quickly and then got the hell back inside.
“I don’t want to go far,” Maggie said. “Just anywhere. Anything. How about a film?”
After twenty minutes of arguing—they hadn’t been to the pictures in twenty years and Peter didn’t want to start again now—he agreed to drive her there and see what was on. On the way out, despite the cold wind and icy feel outside, they saw the anteater digging in the garden, his large, dry tail bent over himself, acting as a makeshift windbreaker or blanket. Peering out from underneath it, his long tongue unravelled and tasted the air. He was pulling a small tree from the ground and filling the hole back up with rocks and earth. Maggie waved, but Peter kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead and sped off.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Page 18