She asked for everything to be better, Morgane supposes, not for everything to be perfect.
“I DIDN’T ASK you to kill anyone,” she tells Mr Levanter-Sleet in her bedroom. On one of her midnight walks around the house, she found a trunk in an attic and inside it a beautiful oyster-coloured flapper dress. She’s repairing some patches where beads are missing; no one tends to burst into her room and interrupt her, these days.
She feels she has to say this. She should be devastated, eviscerated with remorse.
Though when she imagines George stricken with guilt or grief over her, she doesn’t get very far.
“He was a human being,” she tries. It sounds rather flat.
Mr Levanter-Sleet, bunched in inky cumuli on her bed, just stares at her. He does not seem to feel any need to defend himself.
She stares back.
She says, “Well, try not to do it again.”
SHE WALKS AMONG the skinny saplings on the banks of the A3012, planted in waist-high, beige plastic tubes, to replace the seven thousand trees felled.
“Save our trees,” Amber had shouted.
“Actually,” George would have said. “They’re our trees.”
No one has mentioned it, but she supposes she’s the heir to the whole estate now. Morgane Sacheverell-Lytton of Wylmere Hall. She has to admit to herself, she likes the way it sounds.
But not enough.
Mr Levanter-Sleet nudges her attention towards something shining in the grass. She bends and picks it up. It’s the art deco hair slide, it’s silver grey and tarnished, but the mother-of-pearl is still gleaming. It has waited for her, lovely and intact, while the landscape transformed around it.
The A3012 was completed just before she turned fourteen. She wanted to wait that long, to be sure. And she isn’t a millimetre taller or broader, there is not one additional hair on her skin, not a note in her voice has changed. “I’d have thought you’d have had a growing spurt by now,” said Cecily drearily.
In her backpack, there’s a change of clothes (and the beaded dress), a toothbrush, her sewing things, a packet of Jaffa Cakes, and twenty thousand pounds in cash. She has emptied a Delchester cash machine with Cecily’s credit card and the assistance of Mr Levanter-Sleet. She thinks, in the circumstances, that’s fair.
Her hair is still very short, but she jams the slide into it anyway. She skids down onto the hard shoulder, and sticks out her thumb. Children are warned not to do this, she knows, especially girls (my mother said I never should play with the gypsies in the wood). But she is in no danger at all. And she has already done a small spell, which she thinks will discourage any one from following her.
It doesn’t take long at all to flag down a car, and then (she times it by the dashboard clock) it only takes six minutes and twenty four seconds to drive the length of the A3012, through what remains of Wylmere Woods. They charge towards London, Mr Levanter-Sleet churning in the air above a green Ford Fiesta, like a plume of black smoke.
I was up on his back and away with a crack
Sally, tell my mother that I shan’t come back.
“Eruga!” whispers Morgane.
BINGO
S. L. GREY
You never know who you are going to meet on the road at night, who is behind the wheel of that car or bike in front of you, whether or not a momentary lack of judgement on their part will lead to you being involved in an accident. That potential for catastrophe and violent death is explored in the following story – an incredibly bleak but powerful tale by a writing duo who are fast proving themselves one of the most interesting voices in the genre.
4 A.M. THE only time the N2 highway ever sleeps. He coasts to the inside lane, leans the bike in, then rolls on the throttle as he comes out of the corner. He should be careful – with the roadblocks packed up for the night, this is the time the coked-up kids drive home from the clubs – but he’s irritated, restless; the night hasn’t gone as he’d planned.
The road is his. He pushes the Ducati to two hundred and imagines the city disappearing behind him: all of it – his work, the years he’s invested in trying to fit in, the Bingo Club, this latest girl. He can’t remember her name, and that bugs him. In the six months he’s been playing the game, he’s always tried to keep it civilised. It’s been a means to an end: finish his card and he’ll be in with the inner circle at the brokerage; he’d be a made man, offered all the massive accounts. This is what they told him, and he believes it – he’s seen it happen. James de Wet, Phil Malope were kids from nowhere like him, and they skipped a few rungs on the ladder to the big leagues. Now they’ve got flats in Camps Bay and Bugattis in the garage.
It was a squalling winter evening when he first heard about the club, so unlike the dry heat of tonight. He was standing outside the office building, smoking, trying to figure out an imbalance in one of the pension schemes, one of those cut-fee, low-risk packages for ex-schoolteachers who were hoping to get enough back to stay in cat food until they died. This is what a scholarship boy out of government school and with no contacts has to handle at Levine Botha: twenty-hour days, for barely any commission. The boys from the Bingo Club – he didn’t know it was called that then, just knew they were the rich kids – came out of the lobby elevator, already drunk. He was surprised to see de Wet and Malope among them.
“Willems! Pulling another all-nighter?”
He shrugged, sighed out the smoke.
“There’s another way, brother,” Malope said.
Eventually he got an audience, doesn’t like to think about the humiliation, but back then anything seemed better than being stuck in a dead end at the company forever. Then he was put on trial – that’s what they called it: not initiation, not probation. Just fill the card and he’d be in.
So for the last six months he’s been checking the boxes, different types of women: a geekishly obsessive list of races and sizes, hair colour and physical attributes. It seemed quite simple at the time: bed them, take a picture for proof, and get out.
There’s a wink of a single red tail light far ahead of him, then a double flash as the driver touches the brakes. He slows the bike just a little. The last couple of months, he’s been wondering about the Bingo Club, why they do it. He’s been wondering whether it will actually get him into the inner circle after all, or if it’s just a bunch of kids playing a practical joke. The doubt, the idea that he’s just been played for a fool, the fact that he’s still dealing with cut-rate savings schemes, has made him frustrated, has made him angry; and last night, he supposes, it sort of came to a head.
He’s come up fast now behind the car – a black Beemer – with the broken tail light. As he overtakes it on the left, it drifts across his lane. He instinctively leans left, correcting immediately to stay on the road. He barely avoids going off onto the hard shoulder.
Shaky, flushed with adrenalin, he pulls to the side of the highway, where the concrete barrier is scarred with red paint (it’s always red, as if red cars are the only ones that ever collide) and drops the stand. If it wasn’t for the ABS, he’d be fucked. He flips up his visor, breathes in fuel-tinged air, flexes his fingers to stop his hands from shaking. He’s been in bike accidents before; he knows only too well how the time slows in the moment just before impact. How details come into sharp focus.
He replays the moment as the clutch on his heart loosens. He was way too close to the Beemer for that frozen second. He sees a still of the back of her head as she bent to fiddle with the radio or fish something off the passenger seat, oblivious that he was even there. And the snapshot reminds him of how he left the woman less than an hour ago, faced pressed down and crying into her pillow.
He’s got three more slots on the bingo card, but he doesn’t know if he can finish. He doesn’t know if he should finish. It’s only making him feel smaller. He doesn’t believe them anymore, that after the game it will be done, and he’ll have earned their respect.
That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Respect. And the bitch i
n the Beemer didn’t even fucking see him. He’s shunted by a shaft of fury, peels the bike with a scream back onto the highway. He’s not sure what he’s going to do if he catches the car – let the bitch know that she nearly wiped him out, maybe. Make her see him. He speeds up, hoping that she hasn’t exited somewhere up ahead.
No – he sees pale tail lights ahead, just past the airport turn-off.
Then, as if he’s done it with his mind, the car swerves, its back spins out, clips the middle barrier, and then it flips over once, twice, landing right-side up, its front crashing into the concrete wall that bolsters the hard shoulder.
He slows to a chug, then pulls up, the anger shocked away, sober. A silver sedan screams past, its horn blaring.
He considers driving on. Someone else will help, surely.
But he knows no one’s going to stop. Not on this dodgy road: the barbed-wire fence doesn’t keep the hijackers and vultures off the highway.
The car has come to rest perfectly within the bounds of the hard shoulder, neatly behind the yellow line, the front caved in, the windows smashed and spider-webbed. It’s an old off-white Toyota, not the black BMW. He’s not sure whether this makes it more or less of his business. The wreck already looks like one of the orphaned vehicles that clutter up the side of the highway, their owners unable to afford the cash for a tow truck. He takes off his helmet, rests it on the seat.
He approaches the car cautiously. Another vehicle whooshes past. When the sound of it dies, he hears a snatch of music floating out of the wreck, some millionaire wanker crooning, “You’re beautiful.” The music cuts out. The engine tick-ticks. The tyres are flat, twisted to a broken angle.
He tells himself he isn’t squeamish. You don’t travel South African roads without experiencing carnage. He’s seen bodies flung across the highway like toys. Once, a torso like a bin bag dumped on a dark road.
The street lights bathe the scene in a yellow glow, turning the car’s dirty white exterior a muddy gold. He crunches over glass. The bodywork is patched with old putty and scratches and dents. The bonnet is folded in half like a paper castle. On the back seat there’s an empty baby seat, encrusted with filth.
He doesn’t want to look in the front seat, doesn’t want to see what he’s going to see. It’s been a long night already, too long. He can just go. The night started with so much promise. The woman seemed genuinely interested in him, out on the prowl, just like him, on a Friday night. Why can’t he remember her name? The cocktails were working; she was feeling him up on the sofa. If it weren’t for this bloody game... It could have been a perfectly pleasant night, but when she took him up to her place, he couldn’t get the image out of his head, of the boys of the Bingo Club leering over them as he tried to fuck her. Saunders snapping his braces, watching too closely with his moist stare. He couldn’t manage; he pushed his softening dick against her. She laughed at him.
The blare of a truck going by, then silence, then a whimper draws his attention to the wreck. The driver’s side window is smashed, and as he bends to look into it, he catches a whiff of something. Smoke? He sniffs. An acrid electrical smell.
“Help me,” the driver whispers. There’s a diamond of glass embedded below her eye. She’s twisting her body, writhing. No air bag – it’s not that kind of car. The steering wheel is practically in her lap; he tries not to look too closely at that, concentrates on her face. He thought she’d be younger; the car made him imagine a student, but she’s older than he is – way past her sell-by. Flabby, sweat-shirted, he can see the lines on her face even in the flattering light. He wonders what she’s doing on the road alone at this hour.
He yanks the door handle – it doesn’t budge. She’s locked herself in. “Ug,” she says. “Legs. Can’t...” She wriggles again. “Hot,” she says. “Hot.”
The acrid stink is getting stronger. There’s a loud crack on the car roof. Something breaking? Someone lobbing stones from the slum over the fence? Her eyes swivel, panicked.
“Oh God please help me I don’t wanna die I don’t wanna die.”
She tries to tug herself from the seat, but she can’t move. As she thrashes her head around, he can see her left cheek is masked with blood.
He should say something like: “It’s fine. I’ll get you out of here.” But his instincts are screaming at him to step away, just leave. Something’s telling him not to use his iPhone to call for help. They can trace calls, can’t they? “Do you have a phone?” he hears himself say.
“Uh. Bag.”
He knocks out the last bits of jagged glass in the driver’s side window. He can’t get to the other side, the car is concertinaed against the crash barrier. He has to reach across her, feels the soft mush of her body against his. Rubbish is scattered everywhere. Old McDonalds bags, coffee cups. “Ah,” she moans. “Ah, hurts.” Another vehicle rushes past, doesn’t even slow.
He scrabbles wildly into the junk in the passenger seat, his fingers catching a strap. A bag? He hauls it out, tips it up, gets another lungful of that smoky stench. The car won’t blow, will it? Doesn’t that only happen in movies? But then... why are there always burnt-out cars on the side of the highway? The fire has to be coming from the electrical system, but he can also smell petrol and he doesn’t want to be caught in an explosion. That could happen, couldn’t it? Cars aren’t his thing – he doesn’t even maintain his bike himself, gets some dude from Durbanville to pick it up every so often to service it. Another luxury he can’t afford.
He roots through the bag, but there’s no phone, just a confetti of receipts, an old lipstick and a child’s drinking cup.
“Something’s burning,” the woman sobs. “Please! I don’t want to die like this. I don’t want to burn to death oh God please help me.” And then, “Please,” she wails. “Please! Help me!”
He yanks at the driver’s door again, leans in, fiddles with the inside catch. It’s jammed, and even if he could open it, she’s really trapped. The engine block has been pushed forward, pinning her hips, crushing her legs.
He could just get back on his bike, roar away and pretend he was never here.
“Mister,” she whispers. “Mister. Don’t go.” Has she read his mind?
He needs a fire extinguisher, he has to somehow dampen whatever is causing the smoke that’s leaking out of the vents. But this is some old jalopy, not a Merc fresh off a showroom floor. He knows, even without looking, that there won’t be one in this car, but he snatches the keys out of the ignition anyway – the woman batting at his hand as he does so – and runs around to the boot. His gloved hands are trembling and it takes him several tries to fit the key in the rusty lock, and it opens with a creak. He blocks out the sounds coming from the car’s interior – the muffled cries of the woman, as if someone’s trapping, pushing her face down, taking out his rage on her – they hurt his ears. He surveys the junk filling the boot. He hauls out an overpacked suitcase, the sleeve of a purple silky blouse hanging from its seam. There’s also a tote bag filled with all sorts of shit. He scrabbles through the stuff, chucks it onto the tarmac – an old iron, a plastic kettle, a hairdryer, a photograph album, a half-full jar of Milo, a pair of child’s sneakers, shoelaces knotted together, a balding teddy bear. What the fuck was she running from?
“Mister!” she screams from the front. “Mister!” she’s coughing now, sounds like she might be choking. “Burning! I’ve seen it happen. I’ve seen it happen, I’ve seen people die like this on TV.”
He makes himself walk to the front of the car. She whips her head back and forth. “Mister,” she says again, “Please!”
“What show was it?” he says. As if that will calm her. As if it will calm him. As if he was just back at home and he was never really here.
“Discovery,” she says. “I used to...” She starts to cry now. A regretful cry; not fear, but sadness.
“I’ll try and flag someone down –”
“Mister, I don’t want to die like this.”
She’s starting to annoy him.
What the fuck is he supposed to do? This isn’t his mess. Another car whooshes past. Then another. It’s as if he’s cut off from the real world – a world where everyone else just gets on with their shit, goes home – trapped behind an invisible barrier, behind their massive barbed-wire fucking fences. The light is changing. It will be morning soon, then rush hour. The highway will be teeming with people.
“It hurts, mister! Get me out, mister!”
She stares into his eyes and he remembers the woman from last night. She looked at him the same way: that mixture of pleading and betrayal. Then she laughed again, as if his fists were as soft as his dick. He steps back. The booze and the anger churn in his stomach. He wants to be sick.
And then she says it, the hysteria gone from her voice. “Then kill me. I don’t want to burn to death. Kill me,” she whispers. “Make it quick.”
He looks into her eyes, the thick wisp of smoke drifting between them. She means it. He’s never been looked at like that before. No woman has ever looked at him like that before.
He steps away woodenly. Limbs moving of their own accord.
“Don’t go, don’t leave me, mister! Please! Please!”
He rounds to the back of the car and picks up the steam iron, feeling a trickle of cold water running down his wrist – she didn’t bother to empty it when she packed it up.
He approaches her window. “Do it,” she screams, flapping her hands towards her crushed legs. “I’m burning. It hurts. It hurts so bad, mister it–”
The angle’s all wrong, and the first swipe only glances off her forehead, and she screams again. He braces his left shoulder against the side of the car, swings his arm back and in the split second her eyes lock with his, he sees something in them – doubt? betrayal? – then lands the first real blow with a hollow thunk, and her noise stops. He shuts his eyes and keeps swinging. Thunk, thunk, thunk. He thinks he can feel something give. He keeps going until the muscles in his arm spasms.
The Future of Horror Page 85