Best New Horror #26, page 42
“You want to read this first.” She produced something hidden down the side of the chair. An exercise book, pink for a little girl, with cartoon horses and fairies and bunnies on the cover. She thrust it at him forcefully. He felt obliged to take it, opening it to find the first page full of a list of names and dates written in a terribly shaky copperplate hand. Old-school education never goes away, he thought. Even if the faculty to hold a pen does.
“You know what that is?” Bronwen was confident he could not answer. “That’s the name of everybody who’s died. Here, I mean. In this place.” She pointed to the floor with a finger bulging at the joints with arthritis. “Since I come here, anyway. Everybody who’s heard her and seen her.”
“You mean—I’m sorry. They told you they’d seen her? The Gwrach-y-Rhibyn?”
“Don’t be soft! How can they tell me when they’re dead? Nobody can tell you. Not once they’ve seen her.”
“No, of course not.”
“Once they see her, that’s it. You can’t get away from it, you can’t get out of it. That’s that. And I’ll be oocht when she comes for me, too. And that’ll be soon. Don’t you worry.”
He saw a cloudiness come over her eyes and thought it a kind of bewilderment. He thought of her cataracts again. Then saw the shudder of her lower lip with its aura of downy hairs, and a tremor in the hand that gripped the rim of the arm of the chair, and realised that it was fear.
“Can you—can you say that again, please? For the tape?”
He switched it on, and before he could ident the recording with his own voice, stating the day, time and full name of the subject, she spoke again, staring at a space above the fireplace as if she was alone in the room.
“They’re dead. Just like I’ll be dead, once I’ve seen the Gwrach-y-Rhibyn. Once she comes calling for me.” She blinked and with an unstable, jerky movement turned to look at him, almost as if seeing him for the first time. Then he saw a little girl eager to please. “Was that all right?”
He nodded. It was. It was perfect.
The spool turned, a stray thread curling a corkscrew admonition in the air.
The cold of the wind from the sea did not infiltrate the room but he could hear the slow fingertips of rain tapping the window-panes.
“Fifteen kids, my Mam had. Can’t remember them all. Names. Some of them didn’t live, see. They didn’t in them days.”
“Where was this?”
“Troedyrhiw. She always believed in them. Put a saucer of milk out for them every Sunday, the Tylwyth Teg. ‘Don’t you aggravate them,’ she’d say, ‘or they’ll have your guts for garters.’”
“Which one is Mary?”
Rees had the old photograph album on his lap. It felt like an alien artefact. Nobody had photograph albums these days. They just uploaded their jpegs and selfies onto Instagram, Facebook or Twitter.
“This one, bless her. Like a little doll, she was. Bronwen and May, it was. May and Bronwen…” The old woman began fiddling with the locket on a chain round her neck. “I used to torment her terrible. S’pose I was jealous, her being younger and getting all the fuss, like. We used to share a bed, and I used to tickle her till she wet herself. Wicked, I was.” She opened it and showed it to Rees, but in her trembling hands the face he could make out was blurred and indistinct. “I used to tell her I could make her hair fall out by just staring at her, and she’d scream blue murder. Then one night I started telling her about the Gwrach-y-Rhibyn.” She snapped the locket shut and let it drop onto her wrinkled, puckered chest. “I told her there was this witch outside the window who was so ugly that if anyone set eyes on her they’d die of fright, just like that.”
Rees eased forward, elbows on knees, knitting his fingers together, but said nothing. He wanted this pure. Unspoiled.
“And she said, ‘No there isn’t, Bron. Don’t be ‘orrible. It’s just the branches in the wind. I know it is!’ And I said, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure that’s all it is?’ And she said, ‘Yes!’ And I said, ‘What if it’s not branches though? What if it’s her long, long fingernails tapping the window—tap, tap, tap…”
The old woman gulped and sniffed.
“Well. She screamed the house down. I had to go and sleep in my Mam’s bed, and my dad slept with May. I was awful. Even before that night I was a handful. And after that, well…”
“What do you mean?”
Her face seemed to sag. Her hands made little folds in the knees of her dress and a frown of resistance, of conflict, of hurt, cut into her face.
“If you…”
“No, I’ll tell you. You came here to ask and I’ll tell you. The next morning, I rushed in to wake her, see. I jumped in bed and cuddled up to her and tickled her like I always did, havin’ a bit of fun. But she didn’t move. She was cold and white like one of them enamel plates we had in the kitchen. I said, “Come on, May! Play! Play with me!’ I tried to wake her but I couldn’t. Nobody could.” Her eyes fixed on the bars of the electric fire. They bulged and shone glassily, each reflecting a dot of light.
Rees found his throat dry as he listened.
“And I knew, sure as eggs, Matilda of the Night had got her. She came for my little sister all those years ago. And now she’s coming for me…”
Rees felt a faint draught on his cheek and knew that the door had opened behind him. He hadn’t heard it doing so but was now certain that somebody was occupying the space directly behind his left shoulder. He turned around.
He saw the tray with the microwave plate cover sheltering a meal, and holding it in both hands, the overweight but pretty Tina Griffiths.
“There you are. Meat and mash. It’s time Doctor Rees was making tracks.”
Rees looked at his watch and saw that it was 6:00 p.m.—he’d lost all track of time. As the girl placed down the tray he also saw a plastic container with around fifteen assorted pills inside it. Her daily dose. For what? Angina? Heart? Diabetes? Anxiety? Cholesterol? Or all of the above?
“Did I order meat and mash?”
“Yes you did, love.”
“I don’t like meat and mash. I like fish.”
“No, you ordered meat and mash. It’s beef. Beef and gravy.”
“Oh, I like beef. I just don’t like meat.” Bronwen noticed Rees unplugging his recording equipment, coiling a cable round his hand. “He—he doesn’t want to go. Does he?” Her lip shuddered with agitation. “Do you? Hm?”
“I think I have to,” said Rees. “She’s in charge here, I’m afraid.”
“But what—what if she comes? The Gwrach-y-Rhibyn? What if she comes tonight? And you’re not here? What then?” She was becoming tearful, and this upset Rees but did not seem to bother Tina spectacularly. In fact she became clipped. Firm.
“Bronwen. Now. Doctor Rees can’t stay, can he? He has to go home. He’s just a visitor. You know the rules, my love.”
“Why? You’ve broken the rules before. You know you have. When Cliff was bad, you let his wife stay. Well now I’m bad. What about me? I’m dying! And I want him to stay!” Her voice stuttered into sobs. “I want someone with me. I’m frightened, can’t you see? None of you buggers care! Nobody does!” Tears glistened on her cheeks. “Only him! He’s the only one who listens to me!”
“She’s upset, look,” said Rees, taking the strap from his shoulder. “I’ll stay. It’s no problem. I don’t mind staying. Honestly.”
He sat down and watched Tina sigh and mop the old woman’s tears with a few sheets from the box of tissues on the coffee table. Then a few sheets more. And a few sheets after that, till the childlike sniffling had subsided.
Just after midnight a thin young man of African ethnicity popped his head round the door and asked Rees a second time if he wanted a filter coffee. This time he said yes, thank you. He was tired but he had no intention of sleeping. At 2:00 a.m., quiet settling on the house with an almost physical presence, he paced up and down for a few minutes to stretch his back, then sat on the stool next to Bronwen Llewellyn’s flowery and be-cushioned armchair.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
All being recorded. Night. Branches on the far side of the curtains.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
He thought of Bronwen’s sister, Mary. May.
Eyelids heavy, he thought of the May Bride and May tree cults mentioned in Graves’ The White Goddess…the mythic significance of the horse and the hare…
May. Maybe. Might. Perhaps.
The old woman’s lips were moving slightly and he could see her eyeballs revolving under her lids. She’d been like that for five hours but he hadn’t switched off the tape except for putting on a new one. She was dreaming and he wondered what she dreamed. She was almost forming words, and he stood for almost an hour with the microphone an inch from her mouth in case she did.
Arriving home in Penarth, he found he was famished. He put on a slice of toast, booting up his computer as the toaster chirruped, and ate it standing up as he typed the details into his archive list, not sure if it was excitement, caffeine or tiredness made his hands visibly shake. Too exhausted to edit, he calculated he could get six or seven hours sleep before heading back to the nursing home. As it turned out, it was five o’clock when he woke inexplicably anxious about where he was for several seconds, and was helping himself to some brie and slices of apple with his leather jacket already on when Glyn arrived home from the Wetherspoon’s in Cardiff Bay where he worked, the old Harry Ramsden’s.
Glyn saw that Rees was dressed to leave and his face dropped. “Jesus Christ, you could’ve waited. I’ve got pasta. I was going to make meatballs.” He dumped his carrier bag of shopping on the kitchen surface. “I don’t know why I bother.”
“The ingredients will keep till tomorrow.”
“Oh, you’ll be around tomorrow?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, thanks.”
“Look, I had no idea you were cooking. I’m going out. I have to go out. How could I know?”
“You’d know if you picked up the phone. You’d know if you spoke to me.”
Rees looked at the ceiling and rolled his eyes. Glyn hated when he made him feel like a child. Rees was a year older than his father, but he didn’t want him to be his father—far fucking from it, thank you very much.
“You still don’t get it, do you?” Glyn threw a bag of tomatoes into the chiller compartment of the refrigerator. “Where were you last night—all night? Did it cross your mind I might like to know? No. Did it even cross your mind I might be worried? No. Your mobile was switched off…”
“Yes. I was working.”
“Why?”
“I had to be.”
“Why?”
“Because I have to get this story. The whole story.”
“Why?”
“For God’s sake, because time is running out, if you must know. Because if I don’t get it now, I’ll never get it.” Rees didn’t want the food any more and left the chunk of cheese and apple core on the plate. He zipped up the case of the Nagra as Glyn made great theatrics of stocking the kitchen cabinets, banging doors ludicrously. “Look, I apologise if I didn’t explain, but this is ridiculous, it really is. Why are you so angry?” Rees walked to the door, picking up his headphones en route.
“I’m angry,” said Glyn, “because it never entered your head, did it? Well, did it?”
The overcooked lamb chops defeated her. She sawed at them with a knife then gave up, exhausted, chest heaving. He made weak tea from the jug kettle. As she sipped it he thought of those thin, sipping sounds appearing on his tape.
“Bronwen, when did you first hear about Matilda of the Night?”
“When did you first hear about Father Christmas?”
“I mean, was it from a relative? Do you have relations I could go and talk to?”
“All gone,” she said. “You get old. Nobody left, see. Not much of you left either, in the brain box. You don’t want to get old, I’m telling you.”
Rees sniffed a laugh. “I am old.”
“How old are you then?”
“Fifty-three.”
“That’s no age.”
“Say that to my twenty-year-old students.” He remembered Glyn was that age at the start of it. Teacher and pupil. The old, old story.
“Then they need their bloody heads examined. Parents still alive?”
“My dad died when I was seven.”
“What about your mother?”
Rees shook his head. “Ten years ago. I was in America.”
“You weren’t there.”
“Working. Studying. Same thing. Conference. Talking to complete strangers.” He felt the warmth of the bars of the electric fire. He blinked his eyes. They were unaccountably dry. “I got a phone call in this dreadful hotel room. This Holiday Inn—you know, where all the rooms across the world are identical? There was no time to do anything. It had already happened. She was gone. The worst thing was hearing all that emotion in my sister’s voice and being so far away.” He realised he was playing with one of the day-glo Post-It notes and stuck it back where it was meant to be. “Do you want me to close the curtains?” Bronwen said nothing. He walked over and tugged them shut, then sat back down.
“Sometimes it’s easier to be on your own,” she said. “Then the people you love can’t be taken away. And sometimes you keep yourself in a box, try to pretend it’ll never hurt you again. But it does.”
Rees told himself he didn’t understand what she meant. But even as he tried to dismiss it, it made him feel raw, exposed, uncomfortable. He needed to get out for a minute.
“I’m just—just going to get some water. Is that all right? Do you—do you want some?”
Bronwen didn’t nod. She stared glassy-eyed. Her hands supported her cup and saucer and thoughts and words seemed to have deserted her, or she had absconded to memory. He left the room with the tape spools turning and gently closed the door after him.
He walked to the water cooler at the end of the landing. The floorboards did not creak under his footsteps. He yanked a paper cup from the dispenser, half-filled it and took a gulp. He poured the residue into his cupped left hand and rubbed it over his face and the back of his neck, then rubbed his eyes too.
In a nearby room he could hear an elderly person moaning in their sleep. It almost sounded like weeping. He hoped they were dreaming and this wasn’t the sound of their waking despair. When he was a child he had wondered long and hard why old people did not rage screaming and gnashing at the prospect of death, and he still could not completely understand why they didn’t. The fact they might settle into a kind of numb acceptance only struck him as even more horrifying.
A large window overlooked the garden. The wind from the bay was considerable and in the semi-dark he could make out hydrangea bushes undulating and the branches of trees gesticulating mutely in pools of artificial light. He untied the ornate tassels of the curtains and dragged them tightly across to overlap each other.
“Is that the one with George Clooney?”
The nurses down in the reception area were talking about what movie they fancied seeing. He walked back, leaned over the banister and saw them eating Jaffa Cakes below.
“Oh, is that with that comic off the telly? I can’t stand him. He really does my head in, that bloke. I’m not kidding.”
Rees opened the door to see her on her feet, swaying unsteadily, shoulders heaving.
“No, you can’t! I’m not ready! Skin off! Skin off, you bloody—!” She was facing the window with an outstretched hand. Saw him now. “She’s there! She’s out there! I can hear her! I can hear her bloody whassnames flapping!”
“Sit down. Please sit down, Mrs Llewellyn. Just sit down and I’ll take a look for you.” He managed to settle her into her armchair, then opened the drapes to see what she had seen—except he didn’t. “It’s just the canvas come loose from one of those parasol-type things in the garden…”
“No! It’s her wharracalls—wings! It’s Matilda! Matilda of the Night! She’s out there with her long hair and, and long fingers and she’s after me. She was perched on the windowsill. I know she was!”
“Shshsh. Honestly now. It’s nothing.” Rees bent down to pick up the cup and saucer, fallen from the arm of her chair but miraculously unbroken. As he stood up he felt Bronwen clinging to his sleeve, sobbing.
“You’ll be there, won’t you? When she comes back?”
“I don’t know if I…”
“When she does come for the last time, please! I promise I’ll tell you everything. You’ll have everything on your tape like you want it. I’ll tell you everything I hear and everything I see, I promise. Just say you’ll be with me.” Fear shone in the old woman’s eyes and Rees didn’t feel able to look at it.
As gently as possible he peeled her fingers off him. He sat her down and knelt and placed his hands over hers, which were ice cold. He looked at her and could feel the warmth emanating from his skin but he couldn’t feel hers getting any warmer, at all. This is the way it will go, he thought. The cold. The cold that cannot be warmed. Is this the way we all go? Grey and cold and separated and lost?
“I will. I promise,” he said.
“She wants me to do it.”
“But you want to do it, that’s the point. You want her to die, don’t you? You can’t bloody wait.”
“Rubbish.”
“How is it rubbish? When she dies you’ll have exactly what you want. You said so yourself. A recording of someone experiencing this—this ‘death visitation’, whatever the fuck that is.”
“She’s going to die, Glyn. Whether I’m there sat beside her or not. I can’t stop it happening.”
“No, but you can use it. For yourself. For your precious collection.”
Rees sighed in exasperation. “This isn’t for my ‘collection’. Christ. It’s more than that. How do I get through to you? Nobody has catalogued something like this—ever. This isn’t some piddling article in Folklore. This could be my—my Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. Something that gets me noticed, finally.”
“Me. Exactly. You’re a bloody vulture, Ivan. Haven’t you got any feelings of—?”
