The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  I booted up the computer in my uncle’s office so I could check my emails and deal with some of the more urgent correspondence, then spent the rest of the evening watching television. I went to bed at around one o’clock, so tired that I fell asleep with the light on. Half an hour later I woke with a start, unsure for a moment of where I was, and then uncomfortably aware of the lamp shining full on my face. I leaned over to switch it off, and in the fleeting afterglow I caught a glimpse of a woman, standing beside the bed. I snapped the light back on immediately but there was no one there.

  I fell asleep again and dreamed of Ginny, a row that ended in sex, a petulant, angry coupling that felt like a continuation of our fight. As I struggled in her arms I became aware that strands of her hair had become caught on my shirt buttons, that I was tied to her and could not get loose. The hair, though, was not short and dark like Ginny’s own, but long and light, glass-coloured, and as I looked down at her, spread on the bed, I saw the woman I was with was not Ginny after all, but Anka.

  I tried to roll away but there was no room to move.

  “It’s okay,” Anka said. She reached up and touched the side of my face. “It’s okay, Johnny.”

  I could hear her voice, so clearly it was as if she was actually there in the room with me, and I could smell her breath, the woody, aniseed scent of a particular garden herb she liked to nibble. Her hands gripped my buttocks, pulling me astride her. I bent to kiss her, grinding my mouth down on hers and closing my eyes. I came almost at once. Ginny and I hadn’t made love in almost three months and my orgasm hit me so hard it was like hoof beats against my skull. I tried to wake up, then realised I was already awake. The inside of my thigh was sticky with semen.

  I WAITED FOR it to get properly light and then I called Ginny.

  “Don’t laugh at me, Gin,” I said. “But I think the place is haunted.”

  She sighed. “What are you calling for, Johnny? I thought we’d agreed.”

  It was strange, but the sound of her voice, so familiar, so familiarly irritated, was enough to bring me back to reality. It was also enough to remind me that the Ginny I still missed was not the Ginny that now actually existed, no matter how much I tried to fool myself. The connection between us was broken. It had been stupid to call.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s just a bit weird, I suppose, being back here after all this time.”

  “And I’m sorry about your uncle. He was a nice man. Go back to London, Johnny. You can leave all this stuff to the lawyers, make them earn their fee for a change.”

  “That’s what he said, too. Uncle Denny, I mean.”

  “Well, there you are, then.”

  There seemed nothing more to be said. I said goodbye and ended the call. I felt both wretched and foolish, wretched for having to be reminded yet again that it was over between us, foolish because if I had wanted to look an idiot, calling my ex-wife at the crack of dawn and raving about ghosts seemed the perfect way of going about it.

  I got myself up and dressed, then called the solicitor in Maldon and told him it was my intention to sell the house as soon as it had passed through probate. When he asked if I intended to live there or rent it out in the meantime, I said no. I added that I was concerned about my uncle’s pictures, and asked if he could recommend anyone to store them for me.

  “I’m glad you brought that up,” he said. “The current period of insurance has almost expired, and the policy your uncle put in place is very expensive. It would make a lot more sense to put the paintings and antiques under separate cover.” He said he would email me some details later that morning.

  When I had finished dealing with the solicitor, I began gathering together those few of my uncle’s possessions that I intended to take back with me to London. There weren’t many. The two days I had spent rifling through drawers and cupboards and picking over the remnants of the past had given me a distaste for the whole business and I was tempted to leave as I had come, empty handed. In the end though I knew there were some things I would regret forever if I didn’t save them, and it was these things – the university photographs, and pictures of my parents on their wedding day, an early pastel by Ivon Hitchens, the six Royal Copenhagen mugs – that I put together on the kitchen table ready to pack. This brought me once again to the problem of what to pack them in. There were some bin liners under the sink and in the understairs cupboard I found the old nylon carry bag Anka had always used for her vegetable shopping, but neither of these were really suitable and I resigned myself to hunting down the key to the locked store cupboard.

  I began at the top of the house, with the ebony bureau in Anka’s old dressing room, and worked my way down from there. It was not a pleasant task. Most of the things in Anka’s room had clearly not been touched since her death, and my fumbling among her underwear and jewellery had a feel of grave robbery about it. In any case, the key was not there. Neither was it in my uncle’s games table, nor in the fifty-drawer apothecary’s chest at the end of the hall, nor was it in the bathroom medicine cabinet, nor in any of the dozen or so cupboards or chests or chiffoniers in the three main guest bedrooms.

  I nearly gave up at that point, and had it not been for my dislike of being beaten I almost certainly would have done. In any case, I decided I had been coming at the problem from the wrong angle, concentrating on the where instead of the who. Given that Anka had died before him, the person most likely to have locked the cupboard was my Uncle Denny. It seemed odd and not a little ironic that the one room I hadn’t looked in so far was my uncle’s office.

  I made a cursory search of the bookshelves and the large wooden filing cabinet, and then began to go through his desk. There wasn’t much there, of course. All his legal papers and anything concerning his business activities had been packed up and removed to the Marseilles house a decade before. But if anything that made the things that were left behind seem all the more poignant. There was a stack of my old school reports, a postcard I’d sent to him and Anka during a class trip to the Norfolk Broads, my uncle’s onyx inkwell, the letter opener in the shape of a crocodile that I once coveted so much I stole it, only to smuggle it back into his desk during the black-coated small hours of the following morning.

  And there, in the secret drawer that had stopped being a secret when Anka showed me how to open it by pressing and then sliding a certain piece of the lustrous maple marquetry, were my uncle’s stamps.

  UNCLE DENNY ALWAYS used to joke that he gave up serious collecting on the day I first outbid him at an auction.

  “This is where I throw in the towel,” he said. “Time to leave it to the professionals.”

  We were drinking champagne at the bar of some hotel in Knightsbridge, celebrating my Trinidad Red. Uncle Denny was still based mostly in London then, still living at Southshore. Anka was still alive. I laughed, and protested he had taught me everything I knew, that the game would be no fun without him.

  “But it’s not a game for you though, is it, Johnny? That’s where you and I differ, and that’s why I’m getting out now.”

  He was right, in a way, I suppose. Philately had always been my uncle’s hobby, a break from the jet-powered world of international investments, a place where he could occasionally be foolish and let down his guard. Whereas I had chosen to pour my own modest accretion of what Anka called the Gouss instinct for moral suicide into the peculiar business of buying and selling stamps. It was true that Uncle Denny had taught me a lot. But at some point it was inevitable that I would overtake him.

  I felt sad when I found the album, but at the same time it made me smile. I always liked to think that Uncle Denny had not given up the game entirely, that he still made the occasional purchase on the sly. Now it appeared that my suspicions had been correct.

  It was just a slim album, and the most of what it contained was if not second rate then unexceptional, issues my uncle had kept, I suspected, more for sentimental reasons than out of any hope that their value would increase.

  There were a
couple of nice things, though: a Gagarin first day cover displaying the famous ‘yellow Vostok’ error, a Hitler skull stamp that I thought was almost certainly genuine, a strip of three fifty-cent McKillips, an artist’s commemorative that showed the complete New York skyline including the twin towers, issued at the end of August 2001 then hurriedly recalled on September 12th.

  It was an odd little collection, with something of the macabre about it. I turned the page, curious about what else might have taken his fancy. There was a yellow Romanian beetle stamp with three torn perforations, an unfranked Limoges Bleu, and a stamp with Anka’s face on it.

  I did not recognise her at first. What caught my attention was the sight of a stamp I had never seen before. I leaned forward to get a closer look, then examined it through the magnifying loupe I always carry in my right breast pocket.

  The stamp was Danish, and of a relatively scarce denomination. Its design featured the face of a woman, a detail from an oil painting. The woman looked familiar, and because I was seeing her out of context I wondered at first if it was some opera singer or minor film star that I was looking at. Then suddenly I realised it was Anka, her exact likeness.

  The artist’s name, Mikkelsen, was printed in silver along the stamp’s left hand margin. I had never heard of him, but that did not surprise me; it was my uncle that knew about art.

  I fetched my uncle’s Gibbons, still in its old place on the top of the filing cabinet, and began leafing through. It was an old edition, fifteen years out of date at least, but the stamp was not a new issue, and it didn’t take me long to find the listing. The stamp was one of a set of five, issued in nineteen-sixty-six to commemorate the art of Arne Mikkelsen. The other stamps in the set featured a white castle, a raven with a rose in its beak, a flying horse, and a wizened witch with agate-green eyes. The stamps were listed as common. In view of that it seemed odd that they were unknown to me.

  Gibbons had nothing to say about Mikkelsen, of course, but a brief search online told me that he had been an artist and book illustrator, made popular throughout Scandinavia for his representations of subjects from Norse mythology. He died in nineteen-fifty. The centenary of his birth in nineteen-sixty-six was marked by the issue of the five commemorative stamps, together with a lavishly illustrated catalogue of his work, entitled Fantasme.

  It took me a little more time to unearth the original paintings, but in the end I found what I was looking for on a website published by a Danish museum. The woman depicted on what I was coming to think of as Anka’s stamp was Maryane, a beautiful succubus who, according to legend, had enticed and then enslaved a number of powerful merchants and princes in Copenhagen, wearing them away to madness and then to dust.

  The painting was called ‘The Muse of Copenhagen.’ My first assumption was that Anka had been Mikkelsen’s model, but I now knew that this was impossible: Mikkelsen had died before Anka was born.

  Her mother then, or grandmother? I realised I knew nothing at all about Anka’s background. What puzzled me most was why Uncle Denny had never told me about the stamp, had never shown it to me. It crossed my mind that it was this, after all, that my uncle had been wanting to hide from me, that the stamp was the secret. I reached for the idea, but it eluded me. None of it made any sense.

  Suddenly I felt very tired. I switched off the computer and closed my eyes. My head drooped forward on my chest as I listened to the quiet sounds the house made when it was resting: the sighing of the floorboards, the rattle of steam in the hot water pipes, the sly whisper from the open chimney. When I first came to Southshore as a child I was disappointed not to hear the sound of the sea, but Anka told me it was because of the marshes.

  “The water is heavy with sand,” she said. “The sand steals its voice.”

  Her words haunted me for a long time. I found I was unable to rid myself of the image of old father Neptune, his beard clogged with mud, his throat choked with the dark, glistening quicksand of the Blackwater estuary. I dozed where I sat, not quite conscious, the pale fingers of the dying autumn brushing my face. I told myself I mustn’t drop off, there were still things I needed to do before I left.

  A hand was gripping my shoulder. I jerked awake.

  “Johnny,” she said. “You look just like a naughty schoolboy, falling asleep in your seat at the back of the class.”

  She sank to her knees at my feet. Slowly I reached out for her, burying my hands to the wrists in her glass-coloured hair.

  TIME PASSED THEN, but I don’t know how much. Hours or days, possibly weeks. I know that, on the morning after Anka first came to me, a woman arrived at the house, and that following a moment’s panicked confusion I realised it must be the Mrs Mellors my uncle had employed to do the cleaning. I remembered I had asked to see her but couldn’t recall exactly when that had been. She asked if I would be wanting to keep her on and I said yes. I also asked her if she could get in some shopping. When she asked what I would like her to buy, my mind went completely blank. I knew I probably needed food, but I didn’t feel hungry.

  “Just get what you got before,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. Anything you like.”

  She looked at me strangely but she took the money I offered and returned an hour or so later with three bags of groceries. I don’t remember seeing her again.

  During the days, I sorted through my uncle’s possessions, arranging his letters in date order, cataloguing his pictures. These tasks absorbed me while I was engaged in them, but afterwards I often had the sense of working in circles, repeating a thing incessantly with no hope of ever bringing it to completion. Anka was both there and not there. Sometimes she was physically present, at other times I was aware of her only as a kind of itching in the back of my mind, the sense that she was close by but could not be seen. Sometimes she brought me tea in the porcelain mugs, and when I mentioned that it tasted odd she said it was fennel tea, made from the herb in the garden that she liked to chew.

  “It’s good for you,” she said. “It will clear up those scabs on your arms.”

  I told her there were no scabs on my arms, but when I took off my shirt that night I saw she was right, that the skin of my forearms had become dry and abraded, its surface busy with small red lesions.

  “It’s the damp climate,” Anka said. “It’s nothing to worry about.”

  As the days grew shorter I felt listless and sad, but in bed with her I never seemed to tire.

  In the afternoons I dozed on the book room sofa. One afternoon towards the end of November I awoke out of troubled dreams to the knowledge that I was in the house alone. I opened the kitchen door and looked out, certain that I would see Anka down by the water as I often did, foraging for herbs or simply standing with folded arms, gazing out over the estuary.

  I asked her once if she was looking towards Denmark, but she just laughed and said she had been in England so long she had more or less forgotten what Denmark was like.

  On that day, though, there was no sign of her, there was just the grey water – the grey water and the grey sky, folded together like one grey blanket on top of another.

  I should go, I thought, but the idea refused to take hold. I closed the door and came back inside. There on the table in front of me was the missing Ravilious, the little steam train crossing its viaduct in the winter twilight. I picked it up, mystified as to how it had got there, then turned it over to look at the back. The picture itself appeared undamaged, but someone had scrawled some words on the hardboard backing. The felt tipped marker that had been used to write them was lying uncapped on the floor under the table.

  ‘Johnny,’ I read. ‘The key.’

  The key to what? I thought. Key to the problem? Key to the road map? Key to the door?

  It was my uncle’s writing, I knew that. But Uncle Denny was dead. He had been dead for weeks now, for months. Possibly years.

  Like a mud dredger churning the sands of the estuary I scoured my mind for a memory, the memory of my search for the key to the locked store cupboard. The cupboar
d had not been locked before, but now it was. I never did find the key. I had stopped looking when I found Anka’s stamp.

  I went groggily up the stairs to the half landing, convinced that when I reached the little store room I would find it open. It wasn’t, though; it was locked, just as before. I took hold of the handle and shook it, rattling the door in its frame. The lock held firm. I stood back from the door, aiming a hefty kick at its lower panel. Pain coursed up through my leg, curling itself in a ball when it reached my knee. I felt weak from fatigue, as if I had just climbed a mountain. Aside from my ferocious couplings with Anka it had been a long time since I attempted anything more strenuous than changing my location from one silent room to another.

  I retraced my steps to the kitchen. In the cupboard under the sink there was a rubber plunger and a small assortment of household tools: a pair of pliers, a steel claw hammer, two screwdrivers. I took the hammer and the heavier of the screwdrivers and went back up the stairs. Somehow I managed to jam the flattened tip of the screwdriver into the narrow space between the door and its frame. I worked it into the crack until it held firm, then struck out with the hammer as hard as I could. It missed the screwdriver by a couple of inches, bludgeoning the doorframe with a resounding crack. A long pale splinter of wood dropped to the floor. I froze, terrified that Anka would sense what I was doing and appear at my side. When nothing happened, I tried again, this time bringing the hammer down squarely on the handle of the screwdriver. There was a tense, splintering sound, and after a couple more blows the lock gave way.

  I was drenched in sweat, my shirt clinging to my back in damp patches. I remembered stories that had thrilled me as a boy, adventure yarns by Rice Burroughs and Rider Haggard in which men left for dead and half blinded by madness stumble on an oasis in the desert, outrunning the demons of sunlight and thirst by a hair’s-breadth miracle.