All nightmare long, p.6
All Nightmare Long, page 6
“Leave,” she whispered. The car was still rocking, creaking on its springs, and I could not be sure of what she said. Not one hundred percent certain. But I shook my head, and she turned to look at me as if she had seen a ghost.
“I can’t,” I said. “This is my home now. I’ve made it my home, and you’ve helped me do that, Jill. You and lots of others. I’ve felt welcomed into Wellington Pond, and I love the village now probably as much as anyone. Why should I leave?”
She held onto the steering wheel and looked straight through the windscreen, and for a moment I thought she was going to talk about tables at the village fête again, and Max’s age, and Harry’s smashed bottles. But instead, she remained silent.
“I know what I saw, so who are they?” I asked.
She did not respond.
“Well, fuck them,” I said.
Jill blinked rapidly, wiping grim reality from her eyes like irritating dust. Then she started the car again and sighed heavily, smiled, and as we pulled off she told me how she and her boyfriend used to scrump apples from those orchards and make home-made cider.
I sat back in the seat feeling more isolated than ever before. Back in the city after Mary had gone, I had felt alone surrounded by millions of people. Such an impersonal place. So lonely. Now, the community I had come to call home was taking on the same feeling. As we approached the village hall and I saw the bustle of the car park and playing fields, I vowed that today would see the end of things. I’d visit the house next door and find out what those weird people were up to.
We parked, I stood from the car, knees popping and my back taking a few seconds to straighten. I hated growing old. My mind was still middle-aged, but my body betrayed me. Jill marched off to order someone around, and I leaned on the open car door and looked out past the hall.
Across the playing fields, where a gang of kids kicked a football around and a teenaged couple lay close together beneath an old oak, was a house I had never noticed before. Half of its roof had caved in. Its fences were slumped down beneath the weight of rampant roses. Windows were dark and foreboding.
I held my breath, then slowly let it out. I’m just seeing what I want to see, I thought. If you’re looking for a white Ford you suddenly see a hundred of them, and wonder why there are so many.
Yes. That was it.
I followed Jill into the hall and started moving tables around. And all the time I did my best to deny the red smear I’d seen on one high gable wall of the house. I had no desire to go close enough to know the grin.
After a couple of hours setting tables for the following day’s fête—a couple of hours during which I heard as much gossip about the butcher’s lesbian daughter, the threat of parking charges in the village car park, and Mr Robinson’s hedge as I could stand—I decided to walk home. All that time I’d spent dragging tables and unstacking chairs I had been avoiding the subject of strange clowns and empty houses, and so naturally that was all I’d thought about. So now that my good deed for the day was done, I decided that there was something else I could do.
Open my eyes. Make up my own mind about whether or not anything mattered.
Leave, I thought she’d said. But perhaps she had merely whispered a word I could never know.
I deliberately chose an off-road route, afraid that if I stuck to the road I’d be offered a lift by any well-meaning villager passing by. I didn’t want a lift, obliged to sit and converse with someone else. I wanted to walk. I wanted to be on my own.
I climbed over the stile beside the village hall and cut across the fields. At first I considered crossing directly back towards the village and passing closer to that other abandoned house. But something about it repulsed me. I kept glancing over my shoulder as I walked, and it was only when an overgrown hedgerow shielded the building from view that I started to relax.
It was a warm, still evening. Flies and bees buzzed, birds flitted and sang, and the dipping sun seemed reluctant to leave. My feet swished through the long grass, kicking up showers of seeds that caught the sunlight. I felt a sneeze grow and fade again. My eyes watered.
There’s nothing there, I thought, and looking around I could not believe that anywhere even close to here could be dark, bruised, corrupted and tainted with mad laughter. This was a good place, and it carried its shadows well.
The village was quiet, the meadows even quieter, and after another field and a couple of sweet-smelling orchards I entered the village close to the old abattoir. The building was long-since abandoned, but there was nothing that troubled me about it. It was a comfortable dilapidation like my own old age, not a forced decay. There had been talk of turning it into a café for summer visitors. I’d always thought that a little grotesque. I preferred it boarded up and silent, a memorial to the many thousands of creatures that had cried their last inside.
I wended my way behind the small new estate they’d built just the year before, and past there, behind the overgrown corner of another orchard, I found one more house that I had no memory of seeing. This was larger than the other two. Though I had walked this path several times before, it was entirely possible that I had simply never looked that way. I moved back and forth along the old wooden fence. Trees shielded the house from view, but I could tell that it was empty. An upstairs window was smashed. Ivy smothered a couple of downstairs windows. Some roof tiles were missing, tufty plants grew from the guttering like a green fringe, and the overgrown garden seemed on the verge of possessing the building for its own. I could not see any clownish smile, or kiss, or any other mark, but that did not mean it was not there.
But tempted though I was, I could not make myself go closer to investigate. I tried to convince myself that it was because the fence was too rickety to climb, the undergrowth grown too dense to push my way through without snagging my clothes or skin on thorns.
In truth, I was scared.
Leaning against the fence, observing the house through a narrow gap and with leaves disturbing my view, the flash of dirty colour was almost too brief to register.
I gasped and stepped back, closing my eyes and turning away. Too tired, too worried. Maybe too old. I shook my head, but knew that I had to turn around again.
The broken upstairs window seemed to pulse with a forceful, rotten rainbow as a face came close and moved back again, close, back. The third time it retreated from the window it stayed away.
I hurried home, trying to rationalise. It was a shadow thrown by trees. A skin of wallpaper inside the old house flickering in the breeze.
But no tree grew that close to the house, and the evening was calm and still.
“This is just stupid,” I said. Grasshoppers scratched their agreement. The buzz of bees echoed my words. I resolved to discover what was happening here. A village like Wellington Pond always had one deserted house, a place that kids could believe was haunted, adults could think was used by kids for drinking or screwing, and which would spend years and years slowly rotting down towards the ground, until some developer bought the plot and demolished the house and built something new. One house, yes, that was a given. But I had seen four today, since my eyes had been opened wider and my suspicions had sharpened my senses. Four, without really searching at all.
Four clowns had arrived next door.
It wasn’t often that I spoke with Isaac twice in a day. Sometimes we went a week or two without talking, and that was fine, he had a busy life and I couldn’t expect him to worry about me morning, noon and night. But as soon as I entered my house I picked up the phone and sat in my living room, looking out across my front garden and nursing the phone in my lap. I’d brought his number up on speed dial and my thumb hovered over the green button.
My son might still be in work. He worked long hours. My call would be an annoyance, nothing more. Even when he had all the time in the world, I only really heard impatience and boredom in his voice.
“This is for me to sort out,” I said.
I stood and marched through to the kitchen, opening the back door and stepping out onto the patio. The sun was setting now, and the air had that heavy feeling that only a warm summer evening can carry.
My garden was no longer my own. The shape was mine, the spread of plants, the wild parts attracting butterflies and bees and birds, the tended borders now eruptions of colour. But there was something else going on that I had never planned. The colours were just a little too deep and rich, too wet. The reds were too thick, the yellows too stark.
It’s the light. It’s later than I’d thought, darker, the shadows are spreading and making everything seem heavier . . .
But try as I might, I could not convince myself that all was well. Flowers hung heavier than they should, stalks stretching, as if made of sculpted flesh instead of delicate petals. Towards the rear of the garden, I saw a rose bush dripping into damp soil.
My heart started beating harder and faster, skipping a few beats every now and then, fluttering like a trapped bird attempting to flee. I backed towards the doors and stepped inside. The shadowy kitchen was cooler than the garden and more like home.
I watched shadows fall, a glass of cold milk from the fridge in my hand. I was shaking. More than once I spilled milk and it splashed across my shoes, speckling the flagstone flooring. But as the darkness grew, I felt better. It hid the garden away.
Sitting at the small dining table in the kitchen where I was so used to eating dinner for one, I looked at the phone again. I still didn’t like wireless phones. I’d preferred it in the old days, when you had to go to where the phone was kept to speak. Mary and I had bought an old church pew from an antique shop and kept it under our stairs, and that had been our phone seat. She’d made cushions for those longer phone calls. When Isaac had gone to university we had often sat there together, our heads pressed close so that we could both hear our son’s excited voice.
I suddenly wanted to hear my son. I dialled, expecting the answer phone again, but instead Isaac said, “Dad.”
“I’m really worried, Isaac.”
A sigh. “What about?”
“Well . . .”I couldn’t really tell him, could I? The clowns I’d seen moving in next door, the fallen houses with red smears that reminded me of a clown’s made-up mouth, the laughter that might or might not have been dreams. The dampness on my walls, spreading, consuming, that had not been there days before.
“Dad?”
“My garden looks overgrown.”
“Don’t beat yourself up about that. You’re just a bit older than you were, that’s all. So what if a few weeds take hold?”
“It’s not that,” I said softly, but I couldn’t find a way to tell him exactly what it was. I’d weeded and tended the garden earlier that day, and the day before, and most days before that. In the summer especially I was out there for much of the time, and several friends had commented that mine was the best kept garden in the village. High praise for someone who, in the little time he had left, would never really be accepted as a true villager.
I couldn’t tell him just how wild the place had become.
“I’ll pop up on Saturday, Dad.”
I was standing by the French doors looking out. Things seemed to be moving out there, even as the darkness swallowed them. I’d never known that plants could laugh.
“Dad? Saturday? Can’t stay long, we’ve got a meal thing in the afternoon, but I’ll come up and give you a hand in the garden. Dad? That okay?”
“Yes, thank you, son.”
“Cool. See you soon.”
I dropped the phone onto the kitchen worktop. “Dinner, then bed,” I said. “Tomorrow’s a whole new day.” That had been Mary’s favourite saying. Only once had she ever been wrong.
I stood in my open front doorway and looked out towards the street. It was mostly quiet. I could hear subdued voices in the distance, and smell the scent of barbecue, and the idea that others were gathered and having fun made me feel even more alone.
I’d had the idea to go to the White Horse to see if there was anyone there I could speak to. I wanted to ask about the house next door and the old woman who’d owned it. The villagers had said that she’d died in there, but now I couldn’t remember exactly who it was who had told me.
And I wanted to ask about the other houses I’d seen. Those tumbled, old, overgrown places, hidden in plain sight across the village, ignored and passed by as if ignorance could hide them even deeper. It must have worked. If I had seen any of them before today, I’d not registered them at all.
I closed my eyes and thought of the village square. Even though I had only seen it that afternoon, I could not see the thatched cottage in my mind’s eye. I saw Old Max pumping petrol in the little garage, the grocer’s on the corner, the bed & breakfast place set back slightly from the square, the bakery, the stream that cut the square in half, bridged in four places for road and paths. I saw the red phone box set against the tall wall bounding the church yard, the church itself proud and grey in the shadow of ancient oaks, the attractive houses lining the road that passed by across the square’s eastern edge. But I could not see that abandoned house. I knew it was there, I could imagine what it should look like. But the painting on my mind needed changing.
I opened my eyes again, and suddenly the thought of going out into the darkness held no allure. If that house was so troublesome for me to remember, then what if I approached someone and they...?
They’ll look right through me.
I shivered. It was a horrible idea. A ridiculous idea, too, because Wellington Pond had taken me willingly to its bosom, the villagers welcoming me not as a stranger but as a villager-to-be. But it felt like a cooler, more sinister place now. In the darkness there was not only the village, settling down for the night; the barbecuers, chatting softly and laughing gently as stars speckled the summer sky. There was also deception. There were places that should not be, and in those places, things that should not be.
I closed the front door and threw the bolt. Even though this place had only been my home for several years, it still felt like my castle. Mary had never been here, but I carried her memories rich and full in my mind. She would never be cast aside, ignored, forgotten.
“It’ll all be fine,” I said, and my voice echoed comfortably from furniture and walls that I knew so well. “Tomorrow’s a whole new day.”
I watched TV all evening without seeing anything, then went up to prepare for bed. In the bathroom I switched on the light and saw my ghostly visage peering at me in the big mirror above the sink. I gasped, shocked, and wiped the mirror free of condensation. It did no good. I still looked pale and wan, as if a fine dust had settled over my eyes.
Or my face.
I wiped a hand across my skin, but the greyness remained, pale, corpselike. My skin felt slick and greasy.
Washing and cleaning my teeth, I hummed a tune to help me forget the things I had seen and heard. It was an old Chas and Dave song, one which Mary and I had once danced to in a London boozer many moons ago. It had become our song.
Trying to imagine the singers’ cheery faces, I saw only leery clowns. Closing my eyes brought them into sharper view. Opening my eyes, I saw only myself. Greyer than ever. Puffy around the eyes, red across the nose and around the mouth.
Changing.
Retreating to bed—the one safe place in any home, from a child pulling covers up over its eyes against the darkness, to an old man like me seeking sleep to escape reality—I reached over to turn off the lamp. Only then did I notice the area of dampness on the wall and ceiling. It had spread since earlier that day. It had bloomed, too, like a bruise finding colour after its initial, angry darkness. Purples and reds, oranges and yellows, and the plaster wall and ceiling had taken on the pitted, textured appearance of old skin.
I debated whether to turn out the light, but decided that the darkness would be worse.
There was no sleep for me. Only a twitchy wakefulness.
I heard creeping in the attic above my head, creaks too regular and purposeful to be caused by the house settling or mice skipping across attic boards. Something kissed wetly, a sound like moist lips opening and closing again, opening and closing, and the damp seeped across the ceiling and down the walls. It flowed, like a mix of melted wax finding its own shape.
“Isaac,” I said, shaking. “Mary.” But they were both far away from me now. I tried to move but I was frozen, trapped in my bed by the illusion of safety. The pure, deceitful illusion.
Distant laughter droned in, dulled by heavy walls and heavier shadows. And then another cackling burst from much, much closer, above me beyond the ceiling. Less than eight feet away. It rose and fell, and beneath the mad laugh I heard the insistent scraping of sharp, coloured nails.
My whole house creaked and groaned as it settled into its fate. Glass cracked somewhere downstairs. Floorboards warped. A door buckled in its distorting frame.
I tried to shout for help, but an altogether different sound came from my mouth. It was answered from the house next door.
The ceiling began to sag and crack as something forced its way through from above.
Reaching for the phone that I’d brought to bed with me for the first time ever, I wanted to call Isaac. But I was worried that he would hear only maniacal laughter. And I was afraid that although four clowns had arrived one late summer’s afternoon, five would leave.
RELICS
“I know where you can buy a dragon’s cock.”
I tried to hide my surprise. Not because I believed him, but because he’d never before shown any inclination to speak. I’d been aware of Fat Frederick for over six years, and I thought it might have been the first time he’d even looked at me. Until now, I’d been less than a shadow.
“What would I want with a dragon’s cock?” I asked. I remained cool, taking deep swigs of the harsh chemical they passed off as single malt in the Slaughterhouse Bar. Nice name. Hide in pure sight. I’d heard rumours of four people who’d been carried from here in bags. The fifth I’d seen with my own eyes.
