The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  “In Surrey...?”

  I shrugged, and peeled my hand carefully away from my neck, where I’d slapped at the sting of it. There was something on my fingers, sure, and my skin was burning. I didn’t really think it was a mosquito. I thought maybe a plant had spat venom at me, like a cobra. I didn’t think they had venom-spitting plants in Surrey, any more than I thought they had mosquitoes, but still: that was how it seemed, a packet of poison hurled at me from the dark.

  DAYS PASSED, AND it wasn’t just me. People cut themselves on rusty tools, dropped bricks on sandalled feet, had to be untangled from rampant briars. At first we mocked our own clumsiness; then we joked about the garden poltergeist; then we stopped joking.

  Actually, we pretty much stopped talking about it at all. Silence indicates denial, rejection, no consent at all. We turned away from what was unbearable and sought refuge in refusal. If we didn’t admit it, of course it wasn’t happening.

  If it wasn’t happening, then of course it couldn’t be happening worst to me. I might limp on both feet simultaneously, I might carry blood into the shower and bruises out at the end of every day, but still: no acknowledgement meant no surrender.

  And still the work got done. Relentlessly, grimly, enduringly. We stripped the jungle back to stubble, found old brick ways and borders laid between. Dug and turned the earth, washed down the brick, brought order rising out of chaos.

  And still...

  “You put that down,” said Mel, gently and firmly taking a spade away from me. “You’ll only lose a toe, you know you will, and I like you whole. Besides, I’ve got another job for you.”

  So I spent the morning measuring panes of glass in the greenhouse and counting how many were broken, counting back to be sure; and then driving to town and finding a glazier and waiting while he cut what we needed.

  Back at the Rectory, I set to work picking out the clinging shards and scraping down old putty. Mel saw me at it and came over frowning, but I forestalled her. “Look,” I said, “teeny-tiny panes, they’re barely larger than my hand. What harm can I do myself with these?”

  It was meant to be rhetorical, but for a moment I thought she’d tell me anyway. In the end she just said, “Wear gloves,” and stomped away.

  THAT BECAME MY job, then, restoring the greenhouse. I scraped and sanded and painted woodwork, I swept and scrubbed and whitewashed the interior, but mostly I reglazed the frame. Little by little, pane by pane: painstaking work, it suited my mood and my skills together.

  I did wear gloves, despite the heat. Stripped down else to shorts and Factor 50, the only other protection I clung to was my shades. With the sun behind me I worked in my own shadow, but I’d have been blinded none the less by the fierce light jagging off a thousand panes of glass all around me.

  My back to the sun, to the garden, to my friends. I could hear them, of course, call and response, and the soft murmurs of private conversation. I could turn and join in, take a break any time...

  I could do, but mostly I didn’t. I worked in a kind of deliberate isolation, an exaggeration of the determined mood that had settled on us all. They didn’t talk much; I barely said a word from dawn until dusk. They worked harder than they’d planned to, paused less often, found less fun than they had hoped for; I was reluctant to stop at all. Even at dinner or in the pub, it felt as though I faced a different direction.

  At night, my room – well, it had been Charlie’s. It still was Charlie’s, though we had taken everything we could away from it. Mrs P had offered me another when he was sick, and again after he died; but this was the room I’d always slept in, with him or without him. It would be worse than refusal, it would be betrayal to leave him now.

  So I spent my nights in his absence, and my days in the ruin of his playground, scouring that as we had scoured this. Painting him over, washing him away. It would have been a wonder if I hadn’t seen him, at least in my mind’s eye.

  In fact I saw him reflected: little shimmers of movement, moments of stillness, in all those many panes of glass. I might have mistaken his figure for anyone’s, for Rob or Mark or Cat as they worked in the garden behind me – but that would have been deliberate, a denial too far. Pattern recognition: we can’t turn our backs on that. Besides, sometimes he was just too small, smaller than Mel, even: a child still, a child in his garden.

  Besides, I’d seen him before. At night, in the dark of the windows of his room, a reflection poised behind me; or in the bathroom, a blur in the steamed-up mirror when I showered, gone when I wiped the glass.

  The dead don’t go away. I knew that, I didn’t need to see it, to see it and see it, to wear it written on my body. And yet, and yet. I still didn’t get it: not until I carefully fitted the last little pane of glass into its frame like the last piece of a jigsaw, the final fragment of mosaic. And stepped back to see the picture complete, the greenhouse entire at last – and saw his reflection one more time, saw him eye to eye in front of me, complete and entire and just that little moment before the glass blew out in the shape of his silhouette, as though all his body had punched clean through the frame.

  If I hadn’t been wearing the sunglasses, I’d have been blinded for real. As it was, I was pierced and pierced, a thousand splinters all up and down my body.

  There was a lot more blood, then, and pain not quite like anything. There were screams, and a dreadful urgency all around me. There was a frantic drive, blood on the seat and foolish apology; a hospital, Casualty, nurses with tweezers and one more jab, a needle that lent me a little welcome distance.

  Then there was time, weaving in and out of bed, not my bed, not Charlie’s; and then another drive and we were all back at the Rectory. I was lying on the long sofa on my own, everyone keeping a little too much distance, and an inquest of sorts going on all around me, interrogation under oath.

  Mrs P said, “You all claimed that he fell in through the glass, but that’s not what happened, is it? Johnny was outside, yes, but that whole frame was broken from the inside out.”

  Into the silence, one voice dropping one word, like a pebble to break a sheet of glass: “Yes.”

  That was Mark, the quietest of us, the one who wouldn’t lie to her. She knew.

  It was Mel who picked the story up. Taking responsibility. She said, “We didn’t want to tell you, but there’s been... something, a spirit, a presence, out there all through. Not a friendly presence. We’ve all felt him – it, I mean, it – and we’ve all got scars to show for it. This was just... worse, an escalation, something we can’t shrug off. And it’s always been hardest on Johnny, and –”

  “No,” Mrs P said. “Wait. You mean, you think it’s Charlie?” And then, against our silence, “Yes, you do. But no. You’re wrong. Of course you’re wrong. How could you even think that? Charlie loved you all, he loved you,” and she said that directly at me, like a weapon, like a javelin. I had no defence. “He wouldn’t do this. Even if...”

  THERE WAS NOWHERE to go from there. Not for her, not for us. I wasn’t moving anyway: just lying still was drearily, dreadfully uncomfortable. No way I was going up to bed tonight, to any bed, let alone Charlie’s. This sofa was long enough, broad enough for me.

  I was deeply, intimately glad when at last they all peeled away and left me. They didn’t want to, they knew they left that silence hanging, that accusation unresolved; but things close down, time slips away, leaves you with nothing to hold on to. Mrs P went to bed, and one by one the others followed.

  Me, I lay awake a long time, listening to the soft murmur of the radio and staring at soft, unreflective velvet curtains, glad beyond measure not to have windows or mirrors to be looking at.

  I didn’t move much the next day, either: just out into the sunshine, to sit on the front lawn beneath the lilac and let heat soak into my bones, drugs into my tissues.

  That night, we went to Mrs P as a delegation, apologetic, armed with a cardboard box.

  “You were right,” Mel said. “Of course it wasn’t Charlie. We were diggin
g, and we found these,” a set of bones: not a full skeleton, but enough to say that this was a human once. A long time ago. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know what happened,” she said, “but there must have been some reason why he was buried beyond the churchyard, not in consecrated ground. He might have been a suicide, perhaps, or an executed murderer. Or a victim. Maybe he was killed and buried secretly in the garden there, and that’s why he haunts the place. Maybe that’s why the garden’s been abandoned all this time, I think it must be...”

  It was clever, the way she handled it. No answers, only a series of proffered questions and the bones themselves, dark and mute, exposed and unrevealing. Enough to settle Mrs P’s distress. She’d take the bones to the rector, no doubt, and have them securely reburied under a burden of prayer. She might do some fitful research into the history of the house, maybe construct her own story from a missing stableboy and a brutal incumbent. There was sure to be something she could work with.

  And meanwhile she would leave that difficult gate locked, and hasten her own intent to leave. A ghost in the garden, some other family’s lost sorrow would be the last spur that she needed, to set her own sorrows at her back and move away.

  WE’D COME DOWN when the time came, to help her pack up the house and go.

  At least, most of us would. Not me.

  GOING HOME, I sat up front all the way, riding shotgun, privileged by pain. In the back, under all our bags, was one more box that we didn’t dare leave behind in case she found it at last, what was left of Charlie’s secret collection. All through his teenage years he’d picked up bones as they surfaced in the garden; I was fairly sure he’d deliberately dug for them along the wall that divided Rectory from churchyard, where the harvest would be richest. How else would he ever have found skulls? What we’d sorted out to give his mum had been the pick of his collection, enough to look convincing as a body.

  We couldn’t have left her with the truth – which was why I couldn’t go back, for fear of what I might be taking with me, undeniable this time.

  Like the story we’d given his mother, the truth was all questions. Maybe Charlie really didn’t like what we’d done to his secret garden; maybe he was upset that his mother meant to move. But I thought it was more personal, a tempest aimed at me. Envy, resentment maybe because he got sick and I didn’t, I had the life that he’d lost. And had come back robust and happy in the company of friends, to his own home yet, to rub it in.

  He wasn’t letting me leave so lightly, not leave him behind again.

  We drove away north, and I sat in the front and never looked behind me. Never needed to.

  Every time I glanced in the side-mirror of that van, I saw Charlie’s eyes stare back at me.

  THE DARK SPACE IN THE HOUSE IN THE HOUSE IN THE GARDEN AT THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD

  ROBERT SHEARMAN

  You may know Robert Shearman from his work on the BBC’s flagship show Doctor Who, and his episode ‘Dalek.’ But what really excites me about Shearman is that he is, hands-down, one of the best short story writers working in and out of the genre. His debut collection, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, blew me away, reminding me of the best of Walter M. Miller Jr, Jonathan Carroll and Fritz Leiber, while each story was uniquely… well, Rob. What follows is an unusual story of a house in a garden and how the people within that house find out what it is to be human.

  i

  LET’S GET SOMETHING straight, right from the outset, okay? I’m not angry with you. Mistakes were made on both sides. Mistakes, ha, arguably, I made just as many mistakes as you. Well, not quite as many, ha, but I accept I’m at least partly to blame. Okay? No, really, okay? Come on, take those looks off your faces. I’m never going to be angry with you. I promise. I have wasted so much of my life on anger. There are entire aeons full of it, I’m not even kidding. And it does nothing. It achieves nothing. Anger, it’s a crock of shit.

  Isn’t it a beautiful day? One of my best. The sun’s warm, but not too warm, you can feel it stroking at your skin, it’s all over your bare bodies and so comforting, but without it causing any of that irritating sweaty stuff under the armpits. Though I do maintain that sweat’s a useful thing. Look at the garden. Breathe it in. Tell me, be honest, how do you think it’s coming on? See what I’ve done, I’ve been pruning the roses, training the clematis, I’ve been cutting back the privet hedges. Not bad. And just you wait until spring, the daffodils will be out by then, lovely.

  No. Seriously. Relax. Relax, right now! I’m serious.

  The apples were a mistake. Your mistake, my mistake, who’s counting? My mistake was to set you a law without explaining why the law was being enforced, that’s not a sound basis for any legal system. Of course you’re going to rebel, right. And your mistake, that was eating a fruit in which I had chosen to house cancer. Well, I had to put it somewhere. You may have wondered about all those skin sores and why you’ve been coughing up blood and phlegm. Now you know. But don’t worry, I’ll fix it, see, you’re cured. Poppa looks after you. As for the apples, good source of vitamin A, low in calories, you just wait til you puree them up and top them with sugar, oh God, do I love a good apple crumble. I’m not even kidding! Keep the apple with my blessing. As for the cancers, well, I’ll just stick them in something else, don’t worry, you’ll never find them.

  Give me a smile. We’re all friends. Smile for me. Wider than that.

  And so, are we good? Cindy, and what is it, Steve? I think we’re good. The fruit is all yours to eat. The air is all yours to breathe, the flowers are all yours to smell. The beasts of the world, yours to name and pet and hunt and skin and fuck. We’re good, but there is one last thing. Not a law, ha ha, I wouldn’t call it a law, ha ha, no, okay, no, it’s a law. Don’t go into the forest. The forest that’s at the heart of the garden, the garden at the centre of the world. The forest where the trees are so tall that they scratch the heavens, so dense that they drown out the light, where even the birds that settle on the branches come out stained with black. What? Why? Because I said so. What? Oh. Yes, fair point. Because at the centre of the forest there stands a house, and the house is old, and the house is haunted.

  Okay.

  Okay. I’ll be off then. Night, night, sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.

  SO THEY WENT into the forest the very next morning, man and wife, hand in hand, and they dropped apple cores along the way so they could find a path back again. “Like Hansel and Gretel!” said Cindy, because God had told them all his favourite fairy tales when they’d just been children, he’d tucked them up tight in beds of leaves and moss with stories of enchanted castles and giant killers and heroes no bigger than your thumb; “you can be Gretel,” agreed Steve, “and I’ll be Hansel!” And the trees were so tall and so dense and so black, and they were glad they were doing the hand holding thing together, it made them both feel warm and loved. And they didn’t know for how long they walked, it may have been days, and they worried they might soon run out of apple cores, but presently they came across the house, right there at the forest’s heart. And it was a magical house, a structure of red brick and thin chimneys and big bay windows and vinyl sided guttering. It didn’t look very haunted; “it’s probably quite nice inside,” said Cindy, and Steve agreed, but he held on to her hand tightly, and both hands began to sweat. They went up to the front door, and peered their way through the panel of frosted glass, but they couldn’t see anyone, nothing inside was moving. Steve rang the doorbell, and Cindy called “Hello!” through the letterbox, but there was no answer, and they were both about to give up, turn about, pick up their apple cores and go home, when the door swung open anyway at their touch. It didn’t creak, the hinges were too good on that door.

  Cindy and Steve wondered if they could squeeze themselves into something as small as that house, they’d been so used to the sheer size of the garden that was their world. And they exchanged glances. And they shrugged. And they went in.

  In the kitchen there were two places set for dinner, and
at each place there was a bowl of porridge. “Like Goldilocks!” said Cindy, because God really hadn’t stinted himself in his fairy-tale-telling; “you can be Goldilocks,” said Steve, “I’ll be the bear!” They ate the porridge. They both privately wondered who the porridge belonged to. They both wondered if the porridge belonged to the ghosts. They thought they should go home, but it had started to rain. So they decided there was no harm in staying a little longer; they inspected the sitting room, the bathroom, a nice space under the stairs that could be used for storage; “Hello,” Cindy called out, “we’re your new neighbours!” And they looked for the ghosts, but saw neither hide nor hair of a single one. The rain was coming down hard now, it was a wall of wet, and it hit the ground fierce like arrows and it was so dark outside you couldn’t see where the rain might have fallen from, how it could have found its way through so dense a crush of treetops. And the apple cores were gone, maybe they hadn’t been dropped clearly enough, maybe the birds had eaten them, maybe they had long ago just rotted and turned to mush. So they had no choice, they had to stay the night together in a haunted house, maybe they could find their way back to their own garden in the morning, maybe.

  The bedroom was big. There were two large wardrobes, and there was a dressing table with a nice mirror to sit in front of and do make-up, and there was a huge bed laden high with blankets and pillows. Cindy and Steve got under the covers.

  They both listened out for the ghosts in the dark.

  “I’m frightened,” said Cindy, and reached out for Steve’s hand. And Steve didn’t say he was frightened too, that his stomach felt strange, stuffed as it was with porridge, that his skin felt strange, too: tingly and so very sensitive with a mattress underneath it and sheets on top of it and this smooth naked body lying next to it, brushing against it, tickling its hairs, yes oh yes. “Don’t be frightened,” said Steve, “I’ll protect you, my Snow White, my Rapunzel, my unnamed princess from Princess-and-the-Frog,” and he kissed her, and they had never kissed before, and they explored each other’s mouths much as they had explored the house, with false bravado, and growing confidence, and some unspoken sense of dread. They pushed their tongues deep into each other’s dark spaces. And slept at last. And dreamed of ghosts. And of what ghosts could even possibly be.