The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  The house is dark. They are trying to save money on electricity and gas, and the light bulbs in the Long Gallery are all dead anyway. It’s too dark for her to see the Things, beyond a horrid peripheral impression of shifting and shuffling; clicks and titters that remain, for now, on the edge of hearing.

  There’s a slice of light under the door to the library, though, and a rumble of voices from within. It’s not surprising her father has chosen to be interviewed in there, even though they’ve sold all the important books. The stained glass windows with the family’s coat of arms are still there.

  “They can’t buy something that isn’t for sale,” Sir Randall Sacheverell-Lytton is saying. “I haven’t touched a penny of their filthy money and I won’t. All these people are trespassing, none of them have the right to be there. Neither the hooligans with the chainsaws nor these hippies with the silly hats; they’re not there out of altruism, you know; what they really want is to be able to wander in and build wigwams and so on whenever they like. But I’ve been here five hundred years.”

  He has a way of saying that, as though he has actually lived all that time.

  Something slides up her ankle, snags and scratches at her shin under the denim, and she trips, falling headlong on the uneven floorboards, with a crash that echoes through the house.

  Her father bursts out of the library into the gallery: George a little scaled up, large and red, giving off a dangerous glow like heated iron. “For God’s sake, what are you doing now?”

  Quentin stares past her father at the woman from the local BBC news, hoping her father will remember she’s there. The woman is poised in a shoulder-padded suit, her expression curious, her hair preternaturally shiny. He won’t go too far in front of her, she hopes.

  It works, at least for now. Randall growls only, “Idiot boy. If your mother ends up in a mental ward...” and slams back inside.

  She hurtles onwards, towards her room. She hopes it’s just possible that the television people will have effectively distracted her family to the point of their forgetting her escape – her mother might be lying in a stupor that will last till morning. She skids to a stop on the landing and stands paralysed, because the grand staircase offers a quicker route, but the darkness hanging in the stairwell is so thick and grimy and she’s afraid to breathe it. She turns at last to the servants’ staircase, where the electric lights are still bright on peeling white paint, but it takes longer, this way, gives the things more time to notice her presence.

  It had been very bad, the night before. An hour or so after midnight, she’d run down to the kitchen and returned with a bag of flour. It was an hour and a half before she’d completed the pattern filling the floor of her room, and another hour before she’d charged it with attention enough that the things drew back and quietened a little, enough to buy her a couple of hours of sleep.

  Randall or George would have just thought it was a mess, a stupid game; her mother knows, unfortunately, exactly what it is. She’d hoped for at least a few days, maybe enough time to think of something better, before anyone found it.

  Cecily Sacheverell-Lytton is sitting on her bed, straight-backed, swathed in a moth-eaten cardigan and a Liberty scarf, waiting for her. Her eyes are unfocused, her fine cheekbones streaked with trickles of mascara, a chapped bluish stain on her full lower lip. “For all I knew, you’d been taken by paedophiles,” she says.

  At some point during the day she’s kicked her foot through the pattern, ruining it, but hasn’t actually cleaned up the flour. A hoover stands beside her.

  Quentin does not have anywhere further to shrink inside herself, any deeper recesses of silence.

  And now they know; they know she tried to scare them off and then she ran and now she’s back, the whole houseful of things know, she can feel it.

  “What happened to you?” Cecily asks. “You were so good. You used to be such a sweet little boy.”

  Quentin looks at the wreckage, and can’t think of anything to do but offer part of the truth. “It’s the only thing that helps, Mummy,” she says.

  Cecily springs up and seizes her by the shoulders with painful force “Help!” she cries. “It helps to bring this filth into our home? You’re going to clean that up.” She’s almost screaming. “You’re going to clear up every grain of it, and then we’re going to pray for you.”

  She crushes Quentin close. She smells of stale Chanel No. 5, red wine and sweat. She doesn’t wait for Quentin to clear up the pattern to begin praying.

  “Spirit of our God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Most Holy Trinity, descend upon me,” she says. “Purify me, mould me, fill me with yourself, and use me.”

  Quentin frees herself with some difficulty and turns on the hoover, but she can still hear Cecily, chanting under its drone.

  “Banish from me all spells, witchcraft, black magic, malefice, maledictions and the evil eye; diabolic infestations, oppressions, possessions; all that is evil and sinful.”

  “It doesn’t work,” she says mutinously. If anything, the pressure gathered around the room is getting worse. She wonders if it’s evidence of her spiritual sickness that she’s often suspected that praying to St Jude (lost causes) or Monica (abandoned maidens) does sometimes help, only because the saints are really just a different kind of Thing.

  She didn’t mean to be heard, but Cecily lunges at her again, dragging the hoover from her hand and knocking it, still whirring, to the ground.

  “Because you don’t want it to!” Cecily wails, “You want the darkness. Why are you like this, what are you?”

  As if Quentin ever stops thinking about that question.

  Cecily whirls out of the room, weeping. “I can’t do this!” And Quentin looks at herself. She’s always both tempted to and afraid to, whenever she’s near a mirror – it’s hard to resist the dread things will be worse than last time she looked, the lunatic hope that somehow they’ll be better. What are you? She feels the urge to strip off her clothes and punish herself with the search for thickening hair, coarsening flesh. But she can barely see her outline in this dim light, under the mirror’s velvet coat of dust.

  The dust thickens as she looks at it.

  The things in the house are not really ghosts, she is sure. But some of them are mimics. Their thuds and bangs caricature Randall’s heavy-footed stride, they warble in the Long Gallery in parodies of Cecily’s sobbing, and sometimes there are traces of others she hasn’t known, horribly human turns of expression or tones of laughter that she suspects must have belonged to long-dead Sacheverells and their servants, priests, persecutors.

  The shape in the mirror is her size, her shape, but the wisps of dust and cobweb stir around it in a mocking suggestion of skirts and floating hair. The face that grins back at her has a child’s proportions, the skin knotted and puckered in on itself under the dust.

  “Mould me, fill me with yourself, and use me...” echoes the thing, in a piping, little-girl lisp, as it drifts from the surface of the glass.

  “Please, don’t,” she says, though she knows it’s no use.

  It crams itself inside her and stays there.

  POSSESSIONS, INFESTATIONS. THEY’RE not the way Cecily thinks they are. When you can’t hold them off any longer and they get inside you, things don’t actually make you do anything (she shudders – not yet, anyway). They’re just there, smearing themselves over every thought, burrowing into every crevice you most want hidden. The thing presses dirty hands against her from the inside.

  She doesn’t know why the word she slides weightlessly over her skin like silk while he constricts and rubs like hemp rope. She doesn’t know if it has anything to do with the things (the demons, she admits wretchedly in her head, and hears the creature inside giggling approval at her), but she’s certain Cecily would tell her it is. It’s an aspect of infestation, a sign of the ruin of her – his – soul.

  She can feel the thing sucking a little filthy nourishment from her, but not enough to kill her. Not fast, anyway. She sleeps, dreams
of rotting flesh falling in clumps from her bones, and the boys from school chasing her naked through the mud of Wylmere Woods, while chainsaws roar.

  AT BREAKFAST, CECILY isn’t speaking to her, though when Randall grumbles, “When are you going to get that boy’s hair cut?” she does snap, “Soon,” so at least she hasn’t gone as far this time as pretending Quentin doesn’t exist at all.

  Quentin stirs cereal, trying to kindle up the energy to lift the spoon to her mouth. There’s a constant taste of rot and dust in the back of her throat.

  THEY ARE GOING to be installing the World Wide Web at Wylmere Hall today. “The Information Superhighway,” says Cecily reverently, whenever she mentions it. A man from the village is going to help her build a thing called a site or a page for Wylmere Hall. And this will bring in the money to repair the roof and heat the rooms and send Quentin to Ampleforth instead of the local comp.

  “But how does it make money?” asks Randall.

  “People will be looking for ideas for days out,” says Cecily. “We’re going to take them on a virtual tour of the house.”

  “And then they’ll come charging here up that road. That’s the plan, is it?”

  “Yes,” says Cecily. She stares fiercely at her bowl for a moment. “If you would only take that money...!”

  “It’s all a fantasy, you know,” Randall says. He looks around the table, as if for agreement, as if expecting more people than are actually seated there.

  Cecily says nothing.

  “First prize, a day at Wylmere Hall!”says Randall darkly. “Second prize, two days at Wylmere Hall.”

  Cecily lays down her spoon with a sharp little clink. “You constantly undermine me.”

  “There’s a lot of people making money in dot-coms,” says George.

  Cecily talks much more about dot-coms and much less about malefices or the evil eye in front of Randall or George. There’s an awful intimacy in the fact she only really shows that side of herself to Quentin.

  Quentin dreams vaguely about the Information Superhighway, imagines climbing inside the computer in her mother’s study and blazing away down a road made of light.

  THE HOLIDAYS WILL be over soon. She wonders if the thing will accompany her, whether it’ll let her go each day at the gates and wait to greet her when she returns home. She’ll have to let Cecily get her hair cut soon, or things at school will be even worse.

  She says nothing, she acts as much like everyone else as she can, but so many of the boys are like George; they seem to know.

  Five more years, she thinks. In five years, it’ll be over, she’ll be able to go wherever she wants.

  In five years it will be 2003 and the world may very well have ended.

  In five years she might look like George.

  She sprawls listlessly in the drawing room, staring at The Round Table, but turning the pages is so hard and it makes no difference to anything when it’s done. The chainsaws screech in the distance. “It’ll be like that all the bloody time when that road’s built,” says Randall, stomping through. For a moment he looks desolate. He’s not supposed to admit it’s going to happen.

  She heaves herself up and picks up the phone. There’s a weird trilling full of clicks and whistles, which unnerves her before she realises it must be to do with the Information Superhighway. Evidently it stops the phone working.

  IN THE SAME moment she sees George’s mobile lying abandoned on the sofa, and on impulse grabs it and runs back to her room and dials.

  “What?” says Rachel. “Who is this? You’re breaking up.”

  You’re breaking up, agrees the thing.

  But at last Rachel works out who she is and what she wants, and Amber’s voice comes on the line. “Is that... Quentin?”

  She manages an affirmative cough. There’s a long, oppressive pause.

  “So, you’re actually a boy?”

  She steels herself. Makes herself breathe, “Yes.”

  “Wow. I mean, wow. I really thought you were a girl,” Amber marvels. “Do you... often do that? Pretend?”

  “Kind of.”

  “So, is it like a gay thing, or something? I mean, that’s fine, if you are, but the pretending to be a girl thing’s a bit weird.”

  “I know,” she breathes. “I wanted to say sorry.”

  “Look,” says Amber, awkwardly. “You can come back, if you want. It’s okay. Just, be normal, you know?”

  Her voice warps oddly, static sings and roars on the line.

  “All right,” agrees Quentin, without knowing why. Because she can’t go back. There’s no question of that. She presses the little red button to end the call.

  Something comes boiling out of the phone. Quentin drops it, but it’s too late, the thing seethes it way through, gathering into black vastness, filling the room like a gas, two white-hot eyes in the midst of it. It condenses into something perhaps nine feet high, something all black blade-edged bones and claws and teeth.

  She cowers back. Without hesitation, the thing stabs her through the heart.

  THERE’S A SPIDER dangling above her head. It’s so tiny, but has cast a huge swag of web across a corner of the ceiling. She never noticed before. She breathes. The inside of her feels bare and spacious, as if heavy furniture has been cleared out and the windows left open; it feels clean.

  She lies on her back, one hand resting over her chest. Nothing hurts. She sits up, and disturbs a veil of dust that was apparently lying over her; she’s lying in a pool of dust, not blood, dust spread around her as if blasted outwards. She lets a handful slide through her fingers. She peers, cautiously, into herself, she finds no one else there.

  The dark thing from the tower is crouched in a brooding heap on her ragwork rug. It makes no move to come any closer. They sit in silence on the floor, watching each other. Minutes pass.

  “Hello,” she says, at last, her voice just a thin creak.

  The thing glowers in silence. She notices that she cannot feel the proximity of any other thing, glorious emptiness stretches out around her in all directions. Wylmere Hall’s unofficial occupants have all fled this thing’s presence.

  “What do you want?”

  No answer.

  She rubs her chest. “Thank you,” she manages.

  The thing expands enormously, fills the room while somehow at once ricocheting off every surface. She squints, the windows flash, dark, bright, dark – as the thing darts to and fro, blocking the light, letting it through.

  George’s phone, which she had forgotten, chimes, and keeps chiming. She ignores it, staring at the thing swilling like liquid around her bedroom, but the phone chimes and chimes and suddenly the thing stops by the windows, looking for a moment more like a smouldering skeleton at a martyr’s stake than anything else, and points one clawed hand at it.

  She picks up the phone. There’s an image on the screen like a little envelope, the word ‘open’. She presses the button in the middle of the phone and there’s the text message (she’s never sent or received one before, but George has). The letters seems larger than anything she’s glimpsed on a mobile before, filling the screen.

  DO

  That’s all.

  “I don’t understand,” she whispers, and the thing resumes its frenetic motion; the bedside light flashes on and off, the walls seem to quiver faintly. It occurs to her that she’s awed, dazed – but not frightened. “Do what?”

  It stops at the windows, almost man-shaped again, and lays its claws on the glass. The traces remain there of a spell she drew in spit; Cecily didn’t see it.

  MAKE

  says the phone in her hand.

  “That?” she asks. “The patterns? Things... ah, people like you... don’t normally like those.”

  LIKE

  the phone asserts, obstinately.

  She hesitates.

  MAKEMAKEMAKEMAKEMAKEMAKEMAKEMAKEMAKEMAKEMAKEMAKE

  demands the phone.

  In common politeness, how can she refuse?

  SHE SHAKES THE a
shy remains of the dead Thing off her clothes, and scrabbles in her desk for something suitable. She finds her geography exercise book under a box of coloured pastels. She tears out a sheet of paper and folds it in half, scoops up a little load of dust and carefully pours out the first line. The thing stills, squats on the floor beside her and watches her work. It should be impossible to think up a pattern under its gaze, but then, she’s managed in far more oppressive circumstances. She tries to think about this web differently, to adapt the meaning of its spirals and angles; not a deterrent, a sort of... welcome.

  Before she even thinks she’s finished, it springs up eagerly and sinks into the pattern like black ink into a sponge. It courses through the pathways she’s drawn and she has the impression it’s revelling in the convolutions, the connections. It emerges after a moment, larger, brighter, more full of sparks. The eyes blaze at her expectantly and she expects the phone to beep again, but instead the thing plunges back into the pattern, and she lays her hand on it, pouring her attention along its inner pathways as she always does, to meet the thing, to touch. . .

  But it’s a touch, a courteously light pressure, like a handshake, not the invasion she’s used to.

  A word sounds in her head, heavy and weightless at once, like thunder.

  WHAT

  It’s awkward at first, getting beyond single words. She has the sense of it clearing its throat, frowning, fumbling for language it once knew.

  WHAT DO THEY CALL THEE?

  She grimaces. “Quentin Sacheverell-Lytton,” she says, unhappily. “What... what do they call you?”

  There’s such a long pause that she’s sure there is no answer, or it has forgotten whatever name it once went by. She can feel her own name turned over and over in the thing’s hands, fingered like a stone from a beach, hear the syllables of the preposterous double barrel separated out and weighed.