Best New Horror #26, page 21
I would not have minded those facts alone; the house with its two staircases and extravagant gardens supplied much of what I needed as a child, and Beth tells me now the same was true for her. We would come across each other in the old sure places of sanctuary—in the cupboard under the back stairs, or in the spidery storage room in the winter. In the summer, we would find our way separately to the stables or the broken greenhouse and curse and rejoice at the same time if the other was there. Only the Quiet Garden remained mine, for it was too queer and sombre for Beth.
Despite their depravity, our parents were conservative people in the 1880’s, and in the way of Queen Victoria, they never changed their opinions about the vileness of cremation. Beth believes it was because the first enthusiasts were gifted people such as Mr Millais and Mr Trollope. We suffered through many mealtimes listening to them threaten each other with cremation when death mercifully freed each from the other.
I recall one conversation over lunch—I believe it was in 1885 when Beth was seventeen, and I, ten years of age. The Woking Crematorium had just been opened, and a Mrs P., very well known for her opinions and presence in literary circles, was cremated there. In December of that year, the body of an extra-large woman was also subjected to the same treatment, successfully.
“So then,” began our father, “it occurs to me that this cremation business is a fitting end for obnoxious women, be they vile of body or mind, or in some cases both.”
Mother blanched. “The entire business of course was started by an individual who could be regarded as a true example of the stupidity and vanity of men.” She coughed loudly and drank noisily from her water glass, “a ridiculous old Welsh man who claimed to be a Druid, if I recall correctly. Last year, wasn’t it Teddy dear, you remember, he tried to cremate the body of his infant child and was arrested for his foul behaviour.”
I cast a glance at Beth and she looked away, we shared the same goal at that moment of judging a suitable pause in the sharpening exchange so that we could beg to leave the table. But our father turned his eye upon us. “Ask your mother to pass the salt cellar, Beth,” he said. His moustaches were horridly wet.
“Mother, Father would like the saltcellar,” Beth mumbled.
“Inform him that he must obtain it for himself.”
Beth lent forward towards her plate and began to weep silently. As often occurred, I intervened. “Oh, do let me get it, it is nearest to me,” I said, as if the task would give me pleasure.
I watched my mother’s dark eyes travel across the vegetable dishes, the water glasses, the napkin rings, and up my neck until they rested on my face. “Do eat up, Annie. Otherwise what a surprise you will have at breakfast tomorrow.”
Beth fumbled for her handkerchief and buried her face in it so that our parents were not visible to her. Father began his customary tapping of the tines of his fork on the table edge as mother positioned the water jug and gravy boat around her as if building a fortress.
We were eating mutton and peas. To this day, the thought of it fills me with horror. I had devised a way of disposing of mutton and other meats as a child. I was frequently abandoned at table when Beth and my parents had left to go about their chores. At a chosen moment, with only the cook as guard, I slipped the meat into my pocket and claimed to have eaten it. Released from the table I went quickly to a spot on the edge of our land and buried the flesh, trying at the same time to push away the curious fantasies that came to me in the process.
Our parents died quite suddenly within hours of each other in 1905. In this, their last year, they had been shadows to each other about the place. They were like two deranged beings looking constantly for ways to thwart the other, their war poisonously silent. I was thirty and Beth nearing forty. We had made nothing much of our lives, for it was difficult in our circumstances to engage with the outside world. I knew Beth had a small circle of friends in those days, but of course she never did bring them back to the house. I, on the other hand, had only my books and my thoughts.
Mother died first. She dropped onto the dining room floor by the window quite suddenly and with no sound. He came in to stare at her as he often did—sometimes for half an hour without blinking. He made a small noise at the sight of her and wandered off into the garden. We found him later dead under the willow tree, his face still moist with tears. We had them cremated at West Norwood. For Father we chose a simple ceramic urn in the Greek style, for Mother a smaller, more rounded clay vessel. We stood them side by side on the dining room table and looked at them.
Beth laughed hard and for a long time, until I began to smile. “Don’t look so rueful, Annie, we are free.” We had on the table between us a small bottle of Father’s malted whiskey. As the last remnants of the spring sunlight fell on the urns, we finished the liquor. “Are we in a ghastly stupor?” Beth asked me, as we gazed at each other.
“Putting them in these awful vessels would suggest it, I suppose,” I replied.
“No, they’re very fitting, Annie. The proud one is for a man and the little bevelled one is for a woman.” She jabbed her finger at them, “A gentleman and a lady, a lady and a gentleman,” she announced with unnecessary loudness.
I reached out and moved the vessels closer together. “What on earth are we going to do with them now?”
“Put them in the attic out of harm’s way,” she whispered. “I cannot tell you, Annie, how I cherish the silence now that they have gone. I too have plans to go.”
“Did they really do some of the things I remember, Beth? Did I see them rolling down the lawn together when we were children and falling into the stream, both naked?” I recalled the scene often, the spongy flesh of my father reddening in the grip of my mother’s bony fingers as they propelled each other towards the wet edges of the stream.
Beth nodded. “It is true that the relationship between them was frenzied at the time, but later on they did not box each other around so much; their wickedness became more subtle, and I was glad you were too young to notice what they next embarked upon. They started to hide each other’s things and Father cut holes in her dresses, little discreet ones nastily placed. From time to time, she tried to damage his automobile. Then, for a while she hunted him as though she was a different person.”
“Say what, Beth?”
“She wrote menacing little letters, she would go to London and post them from there. I read a couple of them once; they were in the pocket of her outdoor cape. He knew of course. When she came back he would tell her earnestly what had happened, and what he would do to the person were he to catch them.”
“You said you have plans, what plans?”
She frowned. “Oh, not this very minute, Annie. I’ll tell you later.”
I thought about my mother’s face, porcelain white and sharp jawed. “Even so, Mama and Papa could not have lived without each other, could they?”
“Well, that is it exactly, Annie. It was as though they had cast a fairy spell upon each other. It is strange to think that love between two people could be so vile a thing for other people to witness.”
“I think we should scatter them in the garden, I believe that is a fashion now. We should get rid of these hideous things they are trapped in. Maybe they could make peace if we did so. Indeed I know the very place; there is a tree on the edge of our land.” It was an idle thought, spoken only to cast aside the gloom that had descended upon us. I reached out and took the lids off the urns. Beth stood up and peered into each of them cautiously. “Let us put them together,” I said. We were drunken I suppose—but funeral drunk with a steadiness of purpose.
I picked up Father, and she took Mother. We laid a cloth upon the table and let the gritty grey particles trickle together, moving our heads back as fine dust began to form around the urns. And then we dared to go further, we mixed them with the tips of our own fingers, mingling them into one pile.
“Do you think this is legal, Annie dear?”
“They belong to us. I suppose we could eat them if we wanted to, with peas,” I replied frivolously, and to my utter shame.
All is now in the open between myself and Beth, I have shown her the recordings I made of their appearances and she affirms that they made no sense. “Perhaps you were in a trance, Annie,” she murmured. “But even if we must live once more with Mama and Papa, they cannot harm us one jot, you know.”
She was very calm, and I could not help but feel furious with her. “You make so little of it,” I shouted. “You think your sophistication can expunge them.”
“It is you who can expunge them, Annie, you alone. You must try mightily to let them go. They haunt you because you allow it.”
“Why can you not own that it is something we did together, and why can you not see that if you had not left, they would not be so very angry with us now?”
So our positions in this matter became fixed. We agreed that under no circumstances should we let our troubles become known to others. When tradesmen call it is she who has the task of speaking to them, and it is she who attends to our meals and comfort in the house. Although I feel she could be close to nervous exhaustion, she is wonderfully attentive to me most of the time; on that, I cannot fault her.
Now that November is nearing its end, strong winds blow against the yew hedges and the Quiet Garden is very much alive. Some dry snow has fallen, and more is likely in December. The bench close to the stone urn is swollen with damp and its tendrils of lichen so milky green in the summer, have taken on a darker hue. I spend much time there.
I wear the wide blue ribbons that hung limp in my hair when I was a child, so that they do not mistake me for Beth. I find new ways to appease them, thinking to charm them into placidity; I dance for them and sing the songs of our childhood that they never heard. I take meals to the garden for them. I lay the plates out carefully upon the ground; I fancy that mutton and peas are well tolerated. Sometimes I sense that the plates have been disturbed and call to Beth in my excitement. But it may be as she says—that an animal has ventured by and taken parts of the food, a fox, she suggests, or a domestic cat—for it is not I who eats them.
But lately a further development has occurred which has cast a new light on my duties. I have not yet told Beth because it is an escalation of a horrible kind, and the thing I most feared. It has become essential that I find a way of containing Mama and Papa within the Quiet Garden, for they have begun to venture from it in the last few days. It is as if over the months since my first encounters with them, they have gained new knowledge. They are like two children on the verge of intellectual discovery, and I sense their excitement, and with it their increasing malevolence. They wish to gain entry to the house, and I must at all costs stop this happening, for it is clear to me that once inside they will find Beth, for whom they hunger terribly.
ROBERT SHEARMAN
SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN
ROBERT SHEARMAN is an author and playwright who is probably best known for reintroducing the Daleks to the BAFTA-winning first season of BBC-TV’s revived Doctor Who.
His four short story collections—Tiny Deaths, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, Everyone’s Just So So Special and They Do the Same Things Different There—have, between them, won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Edge Hill Readers Prize and three British Fantasy Awards. Remember Why You Fear Me: The Best Dark Fiction of Robert Shearman is a recent omnibus collection of the author’s work.
“When I was a little boy,” recalls Shearman, “I was scared of stories. The ones read to me in class, the ones I was told on television. Words on the page used to scare me. Book covers alone could make me scream.
“My parents were concerned. The doctor suggested that maybe, to calm me down, I might like to think of numbers instead.
“I liked numbers. ‘3’ looked smiling and happy. ‘7’ was a bit stuck-up until you got to know him better, then he was all right. And every night I’d lie in my bed and stare up at the ceiling and think of numbers, my new friends.
“My bedroom ceiling was made up of fifteen unbroken tiles. (There were the edges of other tiles around the cupboards, but I didn’t count those, they had to be unbroken for the game to work. One of the fifteen was partially interrupted by the light hanging from it, and sometimes I counted it, and sometimes I didn’t.) And I would imagine on the first tile I would place the number ‘1’. And on the second, I’d double that, and I’d place the number ‘2’. And I’d carry on doubling, and by the time I reached my fifteenth tile, right above my head, I’d be up to ‘16,384’. I liked playing with doubling numbers. Whenever I felt awkward or nervous, I’d start doubling them in my head, and see how far I could get until I felt better. (And in fact, all these years on, I still do this.)
“The nightmares started when I began to believe the numbers might eat me. Because there weren’t just fifteen tiles in the world, there were billions. You carry on doubling the numbers on that many tiles, who knows what monsters you’ll end up with? And I dreamed regularly of armies of numbers, and an ever growing single number that just kept getting bigger and bigger, and I couldn’t squeeze all its digits on to a tile, no matter how small I tried to write it. And there are so many people in the world, but there are many more numbers than people—in a very real sense, the numbers will always outnumber us. And if they turn against us, if they even choose to see us, that’s it—we’re dead, we’re dead, we’re all dead.
“I had this nightmare a lot, until my parents weaned me off numbers and back on to books, back on to Enid Blyton.
“I still have the nightmare, once in a while. The last time was five months ago.
“This is a story about that nightmare.”
EVERYTHING SHE TAUGHT she’d learned from the books in her father’s study—and even then, only from the bottom shelves, she couldn’t have reached the top shelves without the ladder, and the ladder’s wooden rungs were lined with cracks that looked like spider webs. So, no geography, then (but her pupils would be English, so how much did they need to know about foreign lands?). Plenty of history, she liked the way the past could be packaged into neat little romances; they were like fairy tales but the difference was, these fairy tales were true. A smattering of French. A smaller smattering of Latin. Poetry. Fine art. She liked simple mental arithmetic, something about its solid rightness made her happy.
But what she taught didn’t matter; she was left under no illusions about that. Her task was to ensure the children were occupied and well-behaved, and that their wits were kept sharp to prepare them for proper education later. Children liked her, and that was the main thing. Adults didn’t, much; adults never quite knew what to say to her. She was unfailingly polite, but somehow always at one remove, everything she said sounded too considered and deliberate. But children seemed charmed by her.
In part, perhaps, that may have been the way she looked. She had such a very young face. Her cheeks were full and red like a baby doll’s. Her eyes, wide and innocent. The children instinctively might have recognised her as one of them, that for all the authority bestowed on her she belonged to their world, not the world of their parents. It was true that she always looked so serious and thoughtful, and she only rarely smiled. But that didn’t mean she ever looked disapproving, or in judgement of them. She seemed to be a little girl who wanted to be all grown up. Children understand that. They want the same thing.
It was only natural that Susan Cowley would be a governess. Even as a girl she’d had a calming effect on the other children playing around her; she didn’t seem to have any friends amongst them, not as such, but what of that? And Susan seemed to accept that role with incurious equanimity. Her little sister would be given all manner of pretty clothes; Susan, more and more, would get formal dress, bordering even upon uniform in its austerity, all befitting her future career. She never complained.
When she reached seventeen, her great aunt found her a placement at Exley Hall, to look after two young children of friends of hers.
It was impossible to judge how responsible Susan Cowley was for the Exley Hall scandal. Certainly, she never tried to offer any defence, and that may well have been her undoing. She seemed only too willing to take the blame, and so the blame was put squarely on her shoulders. And maybe that was right. The children were in her care. Whether or not she had done anything directly to influence events, that, surely, cannot be disputed.
There were no criminal proceedings, and that was just, for it was hard to see how anything that had happened could be called a crime. The Exleys did not want any muck clinging to their son’s name. They did not want any word getting out. That said, Susan Cowley was unable to find herself another position afterwards, so someone must have talked.
Mr and Mrs Cowley did not know what to make of it all. Susan had always been such a quiet child, the reliable one, the boring one truth be told. They did not discuss the matter. They tried to pretend nothing had happened. Mr Cowley only lost his temper the once, and that was not even with Susan; at the dinner table the little sister began asking how it was that Susan was home again, didn’t she like being a teacher?—and at that, without a word, Mr Cowley had got up and slapped the girl around her face. The girl was so shocked she even forgot to cry.
One night, when he couldn’t sleep, Mr Cowley found Susan in his study. She was sitting on the floor, a stack of books by her side, and she was leafing through them slowly. All her old favourites—Arthurian legends, a Latin primer, and tomes and tomes of rudimentary calculus. “Susan?” he asked softly, “are you all right?” It was the gentlest thing he had said to her since her disgrace; Susan looked up at him, but her face registered no surprise at his new tenderness. She nodded. Mr Cowley stood there in the doorway, and he knew that this was the moment he should reach out to her, try to talk to her, maybe find out what had happened. This was his chance. And he couldn’t take the chance, or didn’t, at any rate; he nodded back, quite formally, turned, and went back to bed.
There came in the post one morning a letter for Susan. Inside there was a newspaper clipping advertising for young teachers at H Priory. There was no letter, no indication who it might have been from; Mr and Mrs Cowley wondered whether the great-aunt was offering some help, just as she had done before; she hadn’t spoken to the family since the incident but maybe she had relented. It was not a governess’ position; it was not ideal; it was to teach a class of young children of no discernible means or background, and the wages offered were meagre. But, as Mr and Mrs Cowley said, beggars could not be choosers. They looked for H on the map. It took them a while to find it; it was far away, and seemed very small, tucked away at the edge of the page.
