Remember Why You Fear Me

by Robert Shearman

  They took strength from each other’s smiles; they heaved again; the box opened.

  The whispering stopped, startled.

  Inside there was a house. Not a proper house, of course, but a doll’s house. And it wasn’t quite like their house; it too had red bricks, and thin chimneys, it had windows and guttering, but they could see that the sitting room was smaller, there was less wardrobe space in the bedroom, the toilet had a broken flush.

  There was no one to be seen.

  “Talk to us!” said Cindy. “Come back!” said Steve.

  They wondered if they could squeeze themselves into something as small as that house. And they exchanged glances. And they shrugged. And they went in.

  iv

  God didn’t talk to them for a long while after that.

  There was lots of fun to be had in the haunted doll’s house.

  Their new neighbours were very kind. Their names were Bruce and Kate. Bruce and Kate knocked on the door one day, said they’d heard people had moved in next door, wanted to welcome them, hoped they’d be very happy. They invited them round to dinner. Cindy and Steve didn’t know what to bring, but they found a bottle of old red wine in the back of one of the kitchen cupboards, and Bruce and Kate smiled nicely at it and said it was one of their favourite tipples. Kate made a really lovely casserole, “nothing fancy, just thrown it together,” and Bruce laughed and said Kate’s casserole was a secret recipe, and it was certainly better than anything Cindy could have come up with. Bruce was in charge of dessert. Bruce and Kate showed Cindy and Steve around their modest house, and it wasn’t much different to Cindy and Steve’s, only in the bathroom their flush did work, Cindy and Steve felt a little bit jealous. And Bruce and Kate had a seven year old daughter called Adriana who was quite pretty and very polite and did ballet and whose drawings from school were hung on display for all to see with fridge magnets. “Can see you’re expecting!” said Kate to Cindy, and Cindy agreed she was; Kate said it’d be nice for Adriana to have a new friend to play with, maybe. Bruce and Kate were dead. They were dead, but they didn’t seem to know they were dead. Cindy and Steve could see right inside them and there was nothing but ash in there and their souls were spent. They smelled of death, their eyes rolled dead in their heads, they waddled awkwardly as they walked. Adriana was dead, and when at Kate’s indulgent prompting she agreed to show the new neighbours a few choice ballet steps it was like watching a broken puppet splaying cack-legged across the floor. “Well done!” said Kate, and clapped her dead hands, and Bruce laughed the most cheery of death rattles, and Cindy and Steve were good guests and clapped and laughed too.

  Bruce asked Steve what he did for a living, and Steve said that he was between jobs. And Bruce was very kind, he got Steve an interview at the bank where he worked. And Steve spent the day sorting money and counting money and giving money to people through a little glass grille. He’d never seen money before, but he liked the feel of it, and in return for his hard work he was given money of his very own. Steve determined he would try hard to collect an awful lot of it. And the bank manager was very nice, and congratulated Steve on his efforts, and gave him a promotion, which basically meant that Steve gave more money to different people through a slightly bigger glass grille. And the bank manager was dead, and the customers were dead, and Bruce was still dead, of course, Bruce being dead wasn’t going to change in a hurry. And Steve would sometimes after work go out with Bruce to a pub and get pissed.

  And Cindy wanted to work at the bank too, but Kate told her she’d really be better off staying at home and looking after her baby. And Cindy could feel it kicking inside, and decided it was high time she let the baby out, she couldn’t be sure but she thought it had been kicking inside there now for years. She went to the hospital and the doctors were dead and the nurses were dead and all the patients were dead, and some of the dead patients were so ill that during their stay at the hospital they died again and somehow got even deader, that was so weird. And a particularly dead nurse told Cindy she had to push the baby out, and that she was being very brave, and that they were having this baby together, and push. And out came the baby, and the baby was crying, and still kicking away, and the nurse cooed and said it was a beautiful little girl, and Cindy felt a sudden strange rush of love for her child, a stronger love than she’d ever known before, stronger than anything she’d felt for Steve or, even, God; but the baby was dead, it was dead, Cindy was given it to hold and it rolled its dead eyes at her and burbled and sneezed and Cindy could see there was no soul to it, just ash. “I don’t want it,” she said to the dead nurse, “I don’t want this dead baby,” and she thought of how this ashen soulless corpse monster had been feeding inside her stomach and she felt sick. The dead nurse told her again the girl was beautiful, she was such a beautiful girl; “You keep it then,” said Cindy. But apparently that just wasn’t an option, and Cindy had to take the stillborn little parasite home and feed it and pet it and read it fairy tales and give some sort of shit when it screamed.

  And Steve didn’t like their new baby daughter either—he said he did, and he played with it, and sat it on his knee, and asked after it when he came back home pissed from the pub—he didn’t say anything against the baby at all, come to think of it; but Cindy knew he must hate it, because she hated it, and they were one flesh, weren’t they, they were soulmates, they were one. And they still had sex, it was a little more routine than before, even a bit desultory—but Cindy didn’t mind, she wasn’t quite sure what part of the sex process had resulted in this baby growing inside her in the first place; she thought that if they did the sex thing very quietly, almost without passion, almost as if they weren’t really there at all, then they wouldn’t draw attention to themselves. Then no future daughter would see.

  Cindy stayed at home. Cindy felt trapped. Cindy remembered the fairy tales she’d been fed when she was a child. Damsels with long hair locked away in high towers, princesses forced down to sleep on peas. Mothers pressed into bargains with grumpy evil dwarves who wanted to steal their first-born. Cindy didn’t meet many dwarves, no matter how hard she looked—not at the supermarket, not at the kindergarten, not at the young mothers’ yoga group that the erstwhile Kate had persuaded her to join. Cindy knew that the dwarves wouldn’t have been much use anyway, the dwarves too would have been dead.

  “I love you,” Steve would say to Cindy, each night as they got into bed, and he meant it.

  “I love you,” Cindy would say back, and she meant it too.

  Steve had met someone at work, a little cashier assistant less than half his age. He didn’t expect her to like his whitening beard and his receding hairline and his now protruding gut. She fucked him at the office Christmas party, and he told her it had to be a one off, but she fucked him three more times in January, and an astonishing fifteen times in February, she was really picking up speed. “Tell me you love me,” she’d say afterwards as she smoked a fag, ash in her ash, and he’d say he did, and he thought that maybe that was even true, just a little bit; she’d wrap her corpse legs around him and her dead matted bush would tickle the bulge of his stomach, and then he was inside her, he was inside something that felt warm and smooth but he knew was really so so cold and was rotting away into clumps of meat. He thought her death would infect him, he hoped it would. He wished he had the sort of relationship with Cindy where he could talk about his new girlfriend, who bit by bit was becoming the very centre of his world, the little chink of garden at the heart of his day. But Cindy had never been one to share things with, nothing of any importance. And some nights he’d cry.

  Once in a while they’d try to escape the doll’s house. But they couldn’t find the exit. They took their dead daughter on a holiday to Tenerife, but there was no exit there, not even as far away as Tenerife. When their dead daughter was older, and wanted holidays of her own, with disreputable looking dead boys who had strange piercings and smelled of drugs, Cindy and Steve took their very first holiday alone. They went to
Venice. They drank wine underneath the Rialto. They were serenaded on a gondola. They made love in their budget hotel, and it felt like love too. It felt like something they could hold on to. And sometimes, back at home, when Steve cried at night, or during the day when Cindy stared silently at the wall, they might think of Venice, and the memory made them happy.

  This account focuses too much upon the negatives, maybe. They had a good time in the haunted doll’s house, and the ghosts were very chatty, and some of them were kind.

  v

  “Hello, hello!” Beaming smiles all round. “Well, here we are! Here we all are again!” A clap on the host’s back, hearty and masculine, a kiss on the hostess’ cheek just a little too close to the mouth. “So good to see you both, I’m not even kidding! I brought some wine, where would you like it?”

  They showed him the house. He made appreciative noises at the sitting room, the kitchen, the bedroom. He admired the toilet, Steve pointed out to him the flush, and how he’d fixed it with all the DIY he’d learned. They settled down at the kitchen table and ate Cindy’s casserole, and they all agreed it was really good.

  “Well. Well! Here we all are again.”

  God was wearing a sports jacket that was meant to look jaunty, but it was two sizes too big for him; God looked old and too thin; the jacket was depressing, it made him look diminished somehow. The wine he’d brought was cheap but potent. The conversation was awkward at first, a series of polite remarks, desperate pauses, too-big smiles and eyes looking downward. The wine helped. They began to relax.

  Cindy asked if they could return to the garden.

  “Go backwards?” said God. “I don’t know if you can go backwards. You crazy kids, what will you think of next!”

  They laughed, and shared anecdotes of mazes and apples, of fairy tales told long ago.

  God mused. “I think the idea is. If I think about it? I think, the older you get, and the more experienced you get. And the more you realize how big the world is, and how many opportunities are in front of you. Then the smaller the world becomes. It gets smaller and smaller, narrowing in on you, until all that’s left is the confines of a wooden box.” He coughed. “You could say that it’s a consequence of maturity, of finding your place in the world and accepting it, of discovering humility and in that humility discovering yourself. Or, maybe. Ha. It’s just a fucking bad design flaw. Ha! Sorry.”

  He drank more wine, he farted, they all laughed, oh, the simple comedy of it all.

  “But,” God said, “this world isn’t all there is. It can’t be. There must be a way out. At the very centre of the world, there’s a dark space. Don’t go to it. Don’t go. It isn’t a law. I’m not, ha, forbidding you. But I think,” God said, and his voice dropped to a whisper, and he looked so scared, “I think there are ghosts there. I think the dark space is haunted.”

  “Well,” said Steve, eventually. “It’s getting late.”

  “It is getting late,” said Cindy.

  “No doubt you’ll be wanting to get back home,” said Steve. “Back to your garden and whatnot.”

  “Back,” said Cindy, “to your maze.” She took away God’s wine glass, put it into the sink with a clatter.

  God looked sad.

  “I’m dying,” he said.

  “Oh dear,” said Steve.

  “That’s a shame,” said Cindy.

  “I’ve been mucking about with too many cancers. I’ve got nobbled by the Ebola virus, I’ve come down with a spot of mad cow disease. It’s all the same to me. I’ve been careless. Too careless, and about things that were too important.” He coughed again, gently wiped at his mouth with a handkerchief, looked at the contents of the handkerchief with frank curiosity. He blinked.

  “Shame,” said Cindy again.

  “And I wanted to see you. I wanted to be with you, because we’re family, aren’t we, you were always my favourites, weren’t you, you’re my favourites, did you know that? I’m crazy about you crazy kids. I miss you. I miss you like crazy. We never had a cross word. Others before you, others after, well. I admit, I got angry, plagues, locusts, fat greasy scorch marks burned into the lawns of the Garden of Eden. But I love you guys. I love you, Cindy, with your big smile and your deep eyes and your fine hair and your huge norks and your sweet, sweet smelling clit. And you, what was it, Steve, with your, um. Winning personality. If I have to die, I want to die with you.”

  His eyes were wet, and they couldn’t tell if he were crying or rheumy.

  “This world can’t be all there is,” he breathed. “It can’t be. I have faith. There must be a way out.” He opened his spindly arms wide. “Give me a hug.”

  So they did.

  “Because,” said God. “You loved me once. You loved me once, didn’t you? You loved me once. You loved me. Tell me you loved me. Tell me you loved me once. You loved me. You loved me. You loved me.”

  They buried their father in the back garden that night. It wasn’t a grand garden, but it was loved, and Cindy and Steve had planted flowers there, and it was good enough.

  Then they went indoors, and they began looking for the dark space at the centre of the world. They’d been to Tenerife and to Venice, they’d seen no dark spaces there. So they looked in the kitchen, they cleared out the pots and the pans from the cupboard. They looked in the bathroom behind the cistern. They looked in the attic.

  They decided to go to bed. It had been a long day. And Steve offered Cindy his hand, and she took it, a little surprised; he hadn’t offered her a hand in years. They both liked the feel of that hand holding thing, it made them seem warm and loved. They climbed the stairs together.

  They looked for the dark space in the bedroom too, but it was nowhere to be found.

  They got undressed. They kicked off their clothes, left them where they fell upon the floor, stood amidst them. They came together, naked as the day they were born. They explored each other’s bodies, and it was like the first time, now there were no expectations, nothing defensive, nothing to prove. He licked at her body, she nuzzled into his. Like the first time, in innocence.

  She found his dark space first. It was like a mole, it was on his thigh. He found her dark space in the shadow of her overhanging left breast.

  She put her ear to his thigh. Then he pressed his ear against her tit. Yes, there were such whispers to be heard! And they marvelled that they’d never heard them before.

  She slid her fingertips into his dark space, and they numbed not unpleasantly. He kissed at hers, and he felt his tongue thicken, his tongue grew, all his mouth was a tongue. They both poked a bit further inside.

  They wondered if they could squeeze themselves into something that was so small. They looked at each other for encouragement, but their faces were too hard to read. They wondered if they could dare. And then she smiled, and at that he smiled. And they knew they could be brave again, just one last time. They pushed onwards and inwards. And they went to someplace new.

  AFTERWORD:

  MERELY A HORROR WRITER

  The editors of this volume have asked me to give a brief overview of the life and works of R_____ S_____, and I shall say at the outset that I have misgivings about the enterprise. The enterprise being not merely the introduction itself, but the very publication of this collection. I do not think S_____ would have wanted to have seen his books back in print; indeed, I am quite sure not. And I do not think that the motives behind their reissue are of the best either; the letter I received this morning urging me once again to change my mind and write about

  S_____ speaks—and I quote—of “the public’s fascination and appetite for the ‘Master of the Macabre.’” I put it to you that the fascination is not with the stories themselves, which I suspect to be no better than the rest of their genre, but with the author himself, and a rather prurient curiosity about the manner of his death. I put it to you, too, the reader, holding this book in your hands, that the aforementioned appetite is sensationalism of the worst kind, and I say
, shame on you, sir, shame on you.

  But nonetheless, and much to my surprise, I find myself writing. There is a storm outside; there is a draft in my study that I cannot locate nor still; the very candle by which I work is guttering. And I am not without a sense of humour, no matter what my students claim, and I can see the irony of a night like this, the very setting of so much of S_____’s work, a setting which lets the mind fancy about ghosts and witches and wendigos. So, here I put this before you, if not with my blessing. And this way I may at least hope, with the book on sale, that Margaret may be given some money.

  I do not say that S_____’s interest in writing supernatural fiction was beneath him. Every man must have a hobby. I myself am quite a keen golfer, with a handicap of sixteen above par, and I take great pleasure in that, but would also venture that it in no way intrudes upon my academic reputation. The same was not true of S_____, and that was his curse. He was a scholar of some undeniable merit, and although many critics would claim that his analysis of fourteenth century poetry yielded little fresh insight, I’ve never heard anyone suggest that his research was anything less than thorough and his theories anything less than cogent. But there is surely no question that whatever his academic prowess, in the last few years of his life any renown he had was for his ghost stories. It wasn’t even as if he had published that many; he wrote one a year, as I understood it, always performed on Christmas Eve during the university celebrations. This was the sum total of his literary fame, or shall I say, notoriety: no more than three thousand words per year, and all three thousand melodramatic mumbo-jumbo.

  I attended his final ghost story reading. There was an undeniable excitement in the air, and I allowed myself to share in it in spite of myself. The undergraduates all dressed in their gowns, and drinking wine and ale, and eating pork and steak, and singing Christmas carols and songs of an altogether more secular nature. S_____ sat up on high table, of course, and looked shrunken in on himself, not conversing, not eating, barely taking part in the festivities at all—but then, when the port was served, and cigars were lit, the lights were lowered, and S_____ got to his feet—and it seemed to me that he was suddenly transformed. He seemed much taller, much younger, and at once the room fell silent in ready anticipation; there was no need to call for silence, this performance is what we all had been waiting for.