For a moment, looking at that sliver of daylight, his head seemed to clear.
This is dangerous, he thought, but then smoke swirled and the daylight was lost and all that remained was that flitting firelight and an old, old mouse, whiskers twitching, pushing a card toward him.
‘One for you,’ said the mouse. ‘One for me. One for you. One for me.’
The mouse turned first.
‘That’s ten, right?’ it said. Clive shrugged and nodded. A king, could be ten...he didn’t really know. The cards didn’t seem quite as important to him as the mouse. He watched the mouse, and forgot about his own cards, until the mouse coughed politely.
‘Come along, Mr. Greenwood. I’m getting old waiting for that damn card, and in case you hadn’t noticed,’ it said, flicking its head to the right, where flames were now leaping, ‘time’s short for both of us.’
Clive shrugged again. What did he care if his bastard colleagues burned to death below?
‘You go first,’ he said. ‘Seems fair. Do them all at once.’
‘That’s not the way the game’s played,’ said the mouse. It seemed thoughtful, though. ‘Unfair advantage to you, you see?’
‘No,’ said Clive honestly.
The mouse was delighted at the answer, and laughed again. ‘Oh, Mr. Greenwood, you are a card! Well, then, care to change the wager?’
Clive couldn’t seem to remember what the wager was in the first place, so he just shook his head, and coughed, because the smoke from the fire below was tickling his nostrils.
The mouse flicked its second card over, an ace.
‘Twenty-one,’ said the mouse. It sounded triumphant.
‘Turn away,’ it said, so Clive did.
‘Oh,’ said the mouse, because Clive held the jokers in the pack. Two of them, with jester’s hats with bells on, and a little bell tinkled.
Clive reached up to find a jester’s hat on his own head. He frowned.
‘What’s it mean?’ he asked the mouse.
The mouse laughed again, full of good humour, even though the old playhouse was burning down around them.
‘How much is that, then?’ he said again, because the mouse just carried right on laughing.
‘Joker’s wild!’ said the mouse, capering up Clive’s jester suit to sit on his hat. The bells tinkled as Clive’s head swayed, giddy from the smoke.
‘Joker’s wild,’ said the mouse, whispering in his ear, ‘and they’re worth whatever you want them to be...’
*
Harris woke in the gutter in the dim light of a street lamp. His head hurt like a bastard, and when he felt around he found a knot the size of an egg just behind his right ear. He sat up with a groan and shivered, because someone had stolen his coat.
Mr. Harris Jakes was a gambling man, and a drinking man, but he was also a smoking man. Fortunately, he kept his matches in his trouser pocket.
He reached in and pulled out the matches, then walked unsteadily down a dirty alleyway where the light didn’t reach, an alleyway that ran along the back of the Theatre Royal, right up to a small window.
He tripped over a pile of rubbish and fell badly. He twisted his right hand and dropped the matches, but his left hand hit upon something hard. He felt around it and discovered that it was a rolling pin.
Perfect.
He rummaged through the rubbish, swearing, until eventually he found his matches.
Then he smashed in the window and cleared away the glass and pulled himself with a groan over the window sill.
‘Bastard friggers,’ he said, and set fire to the curtains.
Mr. Harris Jakes died two weeks later in a bar fight over a tab. He didn’t die easy. People said he was unlucky, the way he went, but then maybe luck had nothing to do with it.
Luck’s not personal, but sometimes it can be, too. Like when you cross the wrong mouse, a mouse named Mr. Paws, and a mouse that maybe wasn’t a mouse at all.
*
Clive rapped his knuckles on the hatch, the bells on his jester’s costume jingle-jangling.
His colleagues giggled below, despite the fires licking at the ladder.
As he descended they all smiled and their smiles looked, somehow, terrified.
‘Saw old Mr. Paws, did you, young man?’ said David, his senior editor. ‘Good man. Good man.’
Clive nodded.
‘Join the club,’ said Paul. ‘Lost, of course, but won, too. Sold my soul to that damn mouse, but I’ve got a sweet wife with big...’
‘Never mind that now,’ said David. The sub editor giggled as flames leapt around his feet.
The smell of charred flesh filled the offices of the Fordham Town Herald, where the damned worked, sometimes for twenty-one grand, and sometimes for twenty-one grams.
‘What’d he offer for your soul, eh?’ said the assistant editor.
‘Nothing,’ said Clive. ‘Nothing at all.’
‘What do you mean?’ said David.
‘I didn’t lose my soul in a game of cards. I’ve still got a soul,’ he nodded madly, flicking his head side to side to set his bells ringing.
‘You won?’ said David.
Clive nodded, bells going mad.
‘Devious buggers, little people,’ said David sagely. The assistant editor and the sub editor and the man named Paul all nodded, too, at this pearl of wisdom.
‘What did you win?’ asked Paul.
‘Whatever I wanted,’ said Clive, ‘and I’m here to collect.’
The End
This is, perhaps, the longest burn of any of my stories. Three years - the editor at the time of Albedo One, John Kenny, told me 'no' to this, but he liked it. Took another story (Grass can be Weeds, too) back then, but he remembered this one...three years later he emailed me and asked for it back, for an anthology he was putting together called 'The Box of Delights', featuring Steve Rasnic Tem, Priya Sharma, Mike Resnick, et al. I've a copy sitting on my shelf. It's my favourite short story, I think, and a fine place to end this collection...
The Dancing Car
After a long cold shower and a breakfast of bacon I went and sat outside, cupped my hand around a cigarette to protect it from the fan on the veranda and stopped as I made to turn the radio on. I could swear I heard music.
There was a slight hint of bass, but I couldn’t make out what it was. The road was a fair distance away, and the farmhouse is surrounded by fields. If I could hear it sitting on the veranda, someone had it cranked up loud. It must be thumping for me to be able to hear it. And my ears weren’t what they used to be, either. I put the radio on, and now there were two tunes, one slightly over the second, like a blanket on top of a sheet…whichever way you look at it, one was superfluous to the other, especially in this heat.
I listened to the tunes for a while, and it didn’t fade away. I wondered if someone had got into the fields at the back of us, and was having themselves a picnic on the farmer’s land. He’d give them hell if they were. But I couldn’t see over there. Our land is surrounded by hawthorn trees, effectively cutting off the fields in the summer. Occasionally we’ll get a hint of a tractor, and in the winter you can see for miles out the back, but in the summer it was as effective as a brick wall. Didn’t stop the rabbits coming into the garden, but I like rabbits. They’re cute, with their little fluffy tails and stupid hoppity walk. Sweet, real, apart from the ones with myxy. I’ve picked up a fair few for the bin in my time. Didn’t see any point in burying them.
The music was still there, overlaying the tunes on the radio. I contemplated turning the radio up to drown the excess tunage out, but I elected to have a wander around the house instead.
It wasn’t my chores day, so I didn’t worry about doing the dust. I just wandered through the house, touching things. I do that sometimes, as though I need to be reassured that all this is real. There’s times when I think it must be a joke. My wife works, I watch telly, and somehow we manage to keep this fantastic house.
It’s brick and flint on the outside, and inside
it’s all dodgy plaster, but we’ve got all grandma’s old furniture, our old bed, and so much space we just don’t know what to do with it. When grandma died we got rid of some of the furniture. It was crowded, but then the place had every right to be. She’d had a lifetime of accumulating. We’d only had the last ten years. We got rid of some of our stuff, too. It was no contest. All our furniture was Ikea and Homebase, cheap MDF crap. Hers was teak, oak, mahogany…things that had aged gracefully and grown into the house.
I wandered through the front room, the dining room, and a small downstairs room that was now a study. I was supposed to be writing a novel, which was what my wife thought I was up to during my long days…but mostly I sat in front of the computer for a couple of hours a day, playing a CD or a game. I knew I had words in me somewhere, and I was off work so I could afford the time to write, but somehow I just couldn’t get started. I had written a short story two weeks ago, just so I could get my fingers working, but I couldn’t face a book. I told myself each chapter was just a short story, and all you had to do was put them all together. I told myself I knew where I was going – I had the story in my head. The story just wouldn’t come out.
I stroked the monitor, sighed, and headed up the stairs. We have four bedrooms. I’d been in ours, so I went into the other three. I saved Grandma’s room for last.
The guest room was a little dusty. It had a big wrought iron double bed which dominated the room, and two wardrobes of what looked like oak. Against the window – this one facing west – there was a small dressing table. We’d taken the mirror off, so we could see out over the field. I wondered if I could see whoever had been making their music, but I could see nothing from this side of the house.
The bed looked inviting, but it was too hot to be laying about. I’d put a pair of shorts on, and no top. The quilt was covered in cotton, and it was cool to the touch…but no. It was too early. I’d think about having a nap later on.
The third bedroom was a kid’s bedroom. It had been my mother’s. Grandma hadn’t changed it since my mother had left home, and now mother was dead, it felt like this was the last connection I had to her. My wife wants to change it when we have children – she’s only thirty-one – still raring to go.
The room made me feel melancholy. I went into the fourth bedroom, and for a moment, as I stepped through the old farmhouse door, I could still see Grandma propped up on the bed, as she had been when she died. I could see her sunken face, her slack jowls, the wax skin…I shuddered and closed the door.
It was the one thing I didn’t like about the house, and the one reason we could afford to live in such comparative luxury. We’d nursed her while she was sickening, until the cancer had raged, and then we’d nursed her with the help of Macmillan nurses. She’d died suddenly, and for that I was thankful. It had put so much stress on our relationship – mine and my wife’s. But she’d not complained. Not out loud. I still felt a little peal of guilt tolling inside whenever I thought of Grandma, sitting up in bed, dead, and me thinking, ‘at last’.
What kind of a man would think that?
And then, when the will was being read…the sole beneficiary – me. It was like she had known my secret thoughts, and given me the house, which I could no way afford to turn down, just so I could remember my failings, my fears and at the last my grateful relief that she had finally passed on. I would remember it every day, until I got over it.
But then, sometimes people just don’t get over things like that. They eat away inside, gnawing at you every day, until you can take it no longer, until you have to kill yourself or just die from shame and sheer exhaustion.
I wasn’t going to kill myself, though. I didn’t feel guilty. I knew it was just a carer’s guilt, the little part of everyone who has ever nursed a dying relative that says ‘it’s not right to feel relief’. But it was just natural. I knew that.
But I still didn’t like that room.
I needed a cigarette, and then I’d start work on my story. I was going to call it ‘Bereavement Nights’. It was about a doctor who practised euthanasia, and how he felt after an accident put him in a wheelchair…if faced with a similar predicament to his patients, could he put himself out of his misery?
The more I thought about the story, the more stupid it sounded. But I needed to write it. I didn’t have any other ideas. I was just blank. But my wife was expecting a story, and I had to write it…
I lit a cigarette, finding myself not in the study, but out on the veranda, listening to the strangely subdued sound of what I realised was a radio, not a stereo, out in the fields. I’d looked through all the windows upstairs, but I hadn’t seen anyone. A DJ’s distorted voice worked its way through the hawthorn, wormed its way past the cherry tree and the beefy oak, muted and warbled by the time it got to my ears.
I strained, but I couldn’t make out the individual words. I recognised the jingle though. It was for ‘Trance Nation’, a relative newcomer in the digital radio stakes. I listened to it sometimes.
I turned on my radio, turning it up to drown out the sounds.
Lunchtime came, and the news was on. I hate the news. Inside again, and this time I made myself something to eat. I had a sandwich (cheese, ham, onion, lettuce and salad cream) and a glass of squash. My back ached from sitting out on my comfy chair. It was a comfy chair, but sit still anywhere for long enough and things go numb, things ache. I ate standing up.
Then, sated for the time being, I wandered over to the bushes to see if I could see the phantom music player.
The sun beat down on my back as I crossed the too long lawn, feet tickled by the grass and intermittent weeds. I could feel the sweat around my balls, and for some reason they were drawn tight, getting tighter as I approached our hedge. The music was louder now. There was no DJ at the moment, just bass and a gentle wave sound under the bass, and I could almost imagine myself back on the beach in Phuket, dancing under the moonlight as the sea lapped the shore and lightening danced in the sky over the ocean. It had been hotter still than this on Ko Samui, and I’d loved every drug-addled minute of it.
The sun bore heavily on my shoulders, but I was curious enough to risk minimal exposure to its rays.
I reached a gap in the hedge and peered through. The music was thumping, but still distorted by distance. I could see the outline of a car behind that wall, silvery and glinting, sunlight dancing around its roof. I could just make out a shape at the steering wheel, and that the driver’s side door was open. No doubt it was hotter than hell out there in the field.
It looked like a Volvo. How he’d managed to drive a Volvo over the ruts in the field, I didn’t like to guess.
Curiosity satisfied, for the time being, I returned to my perch on the veranda, turned my own radio up a little to drown out the sound of the other radio, and closed my eyes.
I thought it was somewhat inconsiderate, having a radio on that loud in the field when there was a house close by, but I didn’t mind. He was listening to trance, and probably maximum chilled. He might even be tripping for all I knew. It wasn’t for me to second guess where a man listened to his tunes.
I had a momentary vision of a middle-aged ex-raver, suited and booted, listening to his tunes while he reminisced about the old days, perhaps to get away from his wife, perhaps as relief from the constant demand of sprouts crawling round his ankles and mewling in that teeth-tingling way of theirs. I felt sorry for him, even though I didn’t know anything about him. I felt I could understand a man who wanted to get away from it all, take some time out, listen to his tunes in a field where there was no one to tell him to turn it down, or rain on his day.
It was a beautiful day for it. On my radio, a tune came on. I rocked gently for a while, and fell asleep.
*
I woke once again with a headache, sweating thighs and a fuzzy mouth. I checked my watch. It was five exactly. Dinner time. Another meal alone. It didn’t matter what I ate. I didn’t have to eat vegetables if I didn’t want. If my wife’s late, I don’t w
orry about five-a-day, colon cancer, bowel cancer, whatever. Man dinner doesn’t involve fancy. It involves bacon.
Back in the house, I took out the pancake mix from the pantry and the milk, eggs and bacon from the freezer. Turning off the radio, smiling a little as I realised my phantom raver was still chilled in the field, I made batter and heated a little oil in the frying pan while grilling eight rashers of bacon (only four for breakfast, but eight when my wife was out. I had a little paunch but I wasn’t worried so much about getting fat, so much as I was about being hungry).
Dinner made, eventually, washing up piled neatly to one side of the sink for later, I laid out a knife and fork and some maple syrup. I got myself a cold beer and put some tunes on in the background. It was heavenly. No vegetables, not a spud in sight. Purely diner dinner.
I drank a few more beers, watched some TV later, and fell asleep on the couch before my wife came in. It cooled down a little when the sun finally set. When she woke me gently, I wasn’t sweating.
We went up to bed, and I fell asleep once more, my arms draped around her small, beautiful form and dreamt of a chocolate lady with gargantuan breasts straddling me, imprecation on her lips, urging me to enter her, to eat her, to lick her…
*
I woke up in a sweat with a raging hard-on, sheets standing proud like a battlefield tent.
I got up, got down and eventually managed to aim a stream of dark yellow piss with enviable accuracy into the toilet bowl.
I took a drink of squash out onto the veranda, sat in my chair (after checking for errant spiders – I am a cautious man) and took out a cigarette. There is something serene about a cigarette in the night time, sweet breeze blowing in off the fields, cooler air and gentle sounds of the hawthorn rustling. Occasionally there is some beast acting like a blowhard in the field. At dusk there is often the barking of deer, but in the full dark there is the snuffling of badgers, the hoot of a distant owl, and me, puffing smoke into the darkness.
Dark Words (Horror Short Stories): Collected Short Fiction Page 11