Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories

by Clive Barker

  “But we are meeting in another lifetime,” she said.

  The man paused, thought about this, then laughed.

  “I like that,” he said. “I like ‘we are meeting in another lifetime.’ Like the one I’ve been living hasn’t been the one I’ve thought I was living all along.”

  Dana smiled. Could almost feel a second mouth, behind her own, smiling for her.

  ***

  She’d been staring in the mirror for too long. Grease in her hair, ketchup under her nose, spinning, then staring into her face, eighty-something years old. She’d definitely been staring for too long because the woman who looked back was frightening. Not because she was ugly; no, never. The woman was indeed pretty, had aged almost unfairly well. What scared Dana was the look in the woman’s eyes, as though she was capable of doing different things than Dana was; able to move in a different direction; might blink when Dana, on this side of the glass, did not. At one point, Dana had to bring her wrinkled hands to her face to stop herself from looking. She was so sure the woman in the glass was about to say something, about to move, even the slightest bit, showing herself, completely, for the first time.

  Dana crouched to her knees and ran her fingers through the grease in her hair, wiped the ketchup onto her fingers and looked at her fingernails. This was good; better than looking in the mirror. Dana was sure, as sure as she’d ever been of anything ever, that if she looked up, she’d see that other woman peering over the edge of the sink, eyes wide, wider than her own, this her, almost mockingly, as her lips moved independently and formed the words:

  Have you met her yet?

  ***

  She was in a hospital bed and the nurses were very nice. They fawned over her endlessly and loved the story about never naming the dog. They told her that ninety-nine years was an incredible run. To Dana it was more fitting than one hundred. She liked that. What she didn’t like was that she was not alone. The unit held two patients and the other one was quiet, too quiet, behind the curtain that divided them.

  “Who’s there?” Dana called often and once a nurse told her it was woman. The nurses helped in this way, helped Dana forget about this other patient and how the curtain was kind of like a mirror the way it split two images of two people doing the exact same thing in dying.

  Maybe because the nurse asked about her childhood, Dana often recalled her mom, long after the nurses left the room.

  There’s two yous, Mom once said. And there always will be. There’s the you that you show to other people. Then there’s the you that you are inside. Now, since you’re just a kid, the two yous are much closer together than mine are. You might not even notice the split. But it’s there. You’re just not smart enough yet to see it. And the older you get, the more that split is gonna grow, breaking up the two yous, until you hardly recognize the you you are when you’re out of the house and the you you are when you’re not. I think it’s the best thing a person can do is to try and keep those two yous as close together as they can. It’s hard. It’s damn hard. But you gotta try, right?

  Dana thought Mom was right, thought it was the smartest damn thing Mom ever said. She thought about this talk a lot and eventually she didn’t want to think about it but it kept coming back. One night, hoping for a distraction, she turned on the television that hung high up on the wall and dropped the remote control before she’d changed the station from static. It hit the floor.

  Still nimble at ninety-nine, she turned onto her side to ring for the nurse, to ask them to remove the static from the screen, to put something entertaining on, perhaps a program featuring a woman who was sure of herself. Before the nurses came, in the blue light of the flickering static, Dana saw a ripple in the curtain that separated her from the other patient, the woman, and saw a hand, too, fingers, curl around that curtain’s edge.

  Have you met her yet?

  And as the curtain was pulled aside, Dana smiled, all on her own, smiled because Mom was right when she said it was hard, keeping them together, damn hard, but you gotta try.

  And Dana believed she knew what she was gonna say, when the parting of the curtain was complete, she was gonna say what she should’ve said on New Year’s Eve forty-nine years ago, that it was hard, damn hard, but you gotta try.

  Because there’s the you you are at any given time, and the you you get and give with; the one you often are and, always, the one you live with.

  And Dana would tell the woman on the other side of the curtain that she believed she’d tried.

  THE PLACE OF REVELATION

  Ramsey Campbell

  At dinner Colin’s parents do most of the talking. His mother starts by saying “Sit down,” and as soon as he does his father says “Sit up.” Auntie Dot lets Colin glimpse a sympathetic grin while Uncle Lucian gives him a secret one, neither of which helps him feel less nervous. They’re eating off plates as expensive as the one he broke last time they visited, when his parents acted as if he’d meant to drop it even though the relatives insisted it didn’t matter and at least his uncle thought so. “Delicious as always,” his mother says when Auntie Dot asks yet again if Colin’s food is all right, and his father offers “I expect he’s just tired, Dorothy.” At least that’s an excuse, which Colin might welcome except it prompts his aunt to say “If you’ve had enough I should scamper off to bye-byes, Colin. For a treat you can leave us the washing up.”

  Everyone is waiting for him to go to his room. Even though his parents keep saying how well he does in English and how the art mistress said he should take up painting at secondary school, he’s expected only to mumble agreement whenever he’s told to speak up for himself. For the first time he tries arguing. “I’ll do it. I don’t mind.”

  “You’ve heard what’s wanted,” his father says in a voice that seems to weigh his mouth down.

  “You catch up on your sleep,” his mother says more gently, “then you’ll be able to enjoy yourself tomorrow.”

  Beyond her Uncle Lucian is nodding eagerly, but nobody else sees. Everyone watches Colin trudge into the high wide hall. It offers him a light, and there’s another above the stairs that smell of their new fat brown carpet, and one more in the upstairs corridor. They only put off the dark. Colin is taking time on each stair until his father lets him hear “Is he getting ready for bed yet?” For fear of having to explain his apprehensiveness he flees to the bathroom.

  With its tiles white as a blizzard it’s brighter than the hall, but its floral scent makes Colin feel it’s only pretending to be a room. As he brushes his teeth the mirror shows him foaming at the mouth as though his nerves have given him a fit. When he heads for his room, the doorway opposite presents him with a view across his parents’ bed of the hospital he can’t help thinking is a front for the graveyard down the hill. It’s lit up as pale as a tombstone, whereas his window that’s edged with tendrils of frost is full of nothing but darkness, which he imagines rising massively from the fields to greet the black sky. Even if the curtains shut tight they wouldn’t keep out his sense of it, nor does the flimsy furniture that’s yellow as the wine they’re drinking downstairs. He huddles under the plump quilt and leaves the light on while he listens to the kitchen clatter. All too soon it comes to an end, and he hears someone padding upstairs so softly they might almost not be there at all.

  As the door inches open with a faint creak that puts him in mind of the lifting of a lid, he grabs the edge of the quilt and hauls it over his face. “You aren’t asleep yet, then,” his mother says. “I thought you might have drifted off.”

  Colin uncovers his face and bumps his shoulders against the bars behind the pillow. “I can’t get to sleep, so can I come down?”

  “No need for that, Colin. I expect you’re trying too hard. Just think of nice times you’ve had and then you’ll go off. You know there’s nothing really to stop you.”

  She’s making him feel so alone that he no longer cares if he gives away his secrets. “There is.”

  “Colin, you’re not a baby any more. Y
ou didn’t act like this when you were. Try not to upset people. Will you do that for us?”

  “If you want.”

  She frowns at his reluctance. “I’m sure it’s what you want as well. Just be as thoughtful as I know you are.”

  Everything she says reminds him how little she knows. She leans down to kiss each of his eyes shut, and as she straightens up, the cord above the bed turns the kisses into darkness with a click. Can he hold on to the feeling long enough to fall asleep? Once he hears the door close he burrows under the quilt and strives to be aware of nothing beyond the bed. He concentrates on the faint scent of the quilt that nestles on his face, he listens to the silence that the pillow and the quilt press against his ears. The weight of the quilt is beginning to feel vague and soft as sleep when the darkness whispers his name. “I’m asleep,” he tries complaining, however babyish and stupid it sounds.

  “Not yet, Colin,” Uncle Lucian says. “Story first. You can’t have forgotten.”

  He hasn’t, of course. He remembers every bedtime story since the first, when he didn’t know it would lead to the next day’s walk. “I thought we’d have finished,” he protests.

  “Quietly, son. We don’t want anyone disturbed, do we? One last story.”

  Colin wants to stay where he can’t see and yet he wants to know. He inches the quilt down from his face. The gap between the curtains has admitted a sliver of moonlight that turns the edges of objects a glimmering white. A sketch of his uncle’s face the colour of bone hovers by the bed. His smile glints, and his eyes shine like stars so distant they remind Colin how limitless the dark is. That’s one reason why he blurts “Can’t we just go wherever it is tomorrow?”

  “You need to get ready while you’re asleep. You should know that’s how it works.” As Uncle Lucian leans closer, the light tinges his gaunt face except where it’s hollowed out with shadows, and Colin is reminded of the moon looming from behind a cloud. “Wait now, here’s an idea,” his uncle murmurs. “That ought to help.”

  Colin realises he would rather not ask “What?”

  “Tell the stories back to me. You’ll find someone to tell one day, you know. You’ll be like me.”

  The prospect fails to appeal to Colin, who pleads “I’m too tired.”

  “They’ll wake you up. Your mother was saying how good you are at stories. That’s thanks to me and mine. Go on before anyone comes up and hears.”

  A cork pops downstairs, and Colin knows there’s little chance of being interrupted. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “I can’t tell you that, Colin. They’re your stories now. They’re part of you. You’ve got to find your own way to tell them.”

  As Uncle Lucian’s eyes glitter like ice Colin hears himself say “Once . . . ”

  “That’s the spirit. That’s how it has to start.”

  “Once there was a boy . . . ”

  “Called Colin. Sorry. You won’t hear another breath out of me.”

  “Once there was a boy who went walking in the country on a day like it was today. The grass in the fields looked like feathers where all the birds in the world had been fighting, and all the fallen leaves were showing their bones. The sun was so low every crumb of frost had its own shadow, and his footprints had shadows in when he looked behind him, and walking felt like breaking little bones under his feet. The day was so cold he kept thinking the clouds were bits of ice that had cracked off the sky and dropped on the edge of the earth. The wind kept scratching his face and pulling the last few leaves off the trees, only if the leaves went back he knew they were birds. It was meant to be the shortest day, but it felt as if time had died because everything was too slippery or too empty for it to get hold of. So he thought he’d done everything there was to do and seen everything there was to see when he saw a hole like a gate through a hedge.”

  “That’s the way.” Uncle Lucian’s eyes have begun to shine like fragments of the moon. “Make it your story.”

  “He wasn’t sure if there was an old gate or the hedge had grown like one. He didn’t know it was one of the places where the world is twisted. All he could see was more hedge at the sides of a bendy path. So he followed it round and round, and it felt like going inside a shell. Then he got dizzy with running to find the middle, because it seemed to take hours and the bends never got any smaller. But just when he was thinking he’d stop and turn back if the spiky hedges let him, he came to where the path led all round a pond that was covered with ice. Only the pond oughtn’t to have been so big, all the path he’d run round should have squeezed it little. So he was walking round the pond to see if he could find the trick when the sun showed him the flat white faces everywhere under the ice.

  “There were children and parents who’d come searching for them, and old people too. They were everyone the maze had brought to the pond, and they were all calling him. Their eyes were opening as slow as holes in the ice and growing too big, and their mouths were moving like fish mouths out of water, and the wind in the hedge was their cold rattly voice telling him he had to stay forever, because he couldn’t see the path away from the pond—there was just hedge everywhere he looked. Only then he heard his uncle’s voice somewhere in it, telling him he had to walk back in all his footprints like a witch dancing backwards and then he’d be able to escape.”

  This is the part Colin likes least, but his uncle murmurs eagerly “And was he?”

  “He thought he never could till he remembered what his footprints looked like. When he turned round he could just see them with the frost creeping to swallow them up. So he started walking back in them, and he heard the ice on the pond start to crack to let all the bodies with the turned-up faces climb out. He saw thin white fingers pushing the edge of the ice up and digging their nails into the frosty path. His footprints led him back through the gap the place had tried to stop him finding in the hedge, but he could see hands flopping out of the pond like frogs. He still had to walk all the way back to the gate like that, and every step he took the hedges tried to catch him, and he heard more ice being pushed up and people crawling after him. It felt like the place had got hold of his middle and his neck and screwed them round so far he’d never be able to walk forward again. He came out of the gate at last, and then he had to walk round the fields till it was nearly dark to get back into walking in an ordinary way so his mother and father wouldn’t notice there was something new about him and want to know what he’d been doing.”

  Colin doesn’t mind if that makes his uncle feel at least a little guilty, but Uncle Lucian says “What happens next?”

  Colin hears his parents and his aunt forgetting to keep their voices low downstairs. He still can’t make out what they’re saying, though they must think he’s asleep. “The next year he went walking in the woods,” he can’t avoid admitting.

  “What kind of a day would that have been, I wonder?”

  “Sunny. Full of birds and squirrels and butterflies. So hot he felt like he was wearing the sun on his head, and the only place he could take it off was the woods, because if he went back to the house his mother and father would say he ought to be out walking. So he’d gone a long way under the trees when he felt them change.”

  “He could now. Most people wouldn’t until it was too late, but he felt . . . ”

  “Something had crept up behind him. He was under some trees that put their branches together like hands with hundreds of fingers praying. And when he looked he saw the trees he’d already gone under were exactly the same as the ones he still had to, like he was looking in a mirror except he couldn’t see himself in it. So he started to run but as soon as he moved, the half of the tunnel of trees he had to go through began to stretch itself till he couldn’t see the far end, and when he looked behind him it had happened there as well.”

  “He knew what to do this time, didn’t he? He hardly even needed to be told.”

  “He had to go forwards walking backwards and never look to see what was behind him. And as soon as he did he saw the
way he’d come start to shrink. Only that wasn’t all he saw, because leaves started running up and down the trees, except they weren’t leaves. They were insects pretending to be them, or maybe they weren’t insects. He could hear them scuttling about behind him, and he was afraid the way he had to go wasn’t shrinking, it was growing as much longer as the way he’d come was getting shorter. Then all the scuttling things ran onto the branches over his head, and he thought they’d fall on him if he didn’t stop trying to escape. But his body kept moving even though he wished it wouldn’t, and he heard a great flapping as if he was in a cave and bats were flying off the roof, and then something landed on his head. It was just the sunlight, and he’d come out of the woods the same place he’d gone in. All the way back he felt he was walking away from the house, and his mother said he’d got a bit of sunstroke.”

  “He never told her otherwise, did he? He knew most people aren’t ready to know what’s behind the world.”

  “That’s what his uncle kept telling him.”

  “He was proud to be chosen, wasn’t he? He must have known it’s the greatest privilege to be shown the old secrets.”

  Colin has begun to wish he could stop talking about himself as though he’s someone else, but the tales won’t let go of him—they’ve closed around him like the dark. “What was his next adventure?” it whispers with his uncle’s moonlit smiling mouth.

  “The next year his uncle took him walking in an older wood. Even his mother and father might have noticed there was something wrong with it and told him not to go in far.” When his uncle doesn’t acknowledge any criticism but only smiles wider and more whitely Colin has to add “There was nothing except sun in the sky, but as soon as you went in the woods you had to step on shadows everywhere, and that was the only way you knew there was still a sun. And the day was so still it felt like the woods were pretending they never breathed, but the shadows kept moving whenever he wasn’t looking—he kept nearly seeing very tall ones hide behind the trees. So he wanted to get through the woods as fast as he could, and that’s why he ran straight onto the stepping stones when he came to a stream.”