Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

Croft puts his whole head inside the cupboard and presses his opened mouth to the draughty hole. He tastes brick dust, cool air, the smell of damp earth and old pennies.

He closes his eyes and then breathes in. The cold, metallic air tastes delicious and somehow rare, like the air inside a cave. He exhales, pushing his own air back through the gap, and it is if he and the building are breathing together, slowly in and out. It is then that he feels the thing pass into him, something old that has been waiting in the building’s foundations, in the ancient sewer tunnels beneath the street, or somewhere deeper down even than that. Its face is a hideous ruin, and as Croft takes it into himself, he is at last granted the knowledge he has been fumbling for, the truth of who he is and what he has done.

Strange lights flicker across the backs of his closed eyelids, yellow stripes, like the markings on the metal tiger he bought for the boy near Borough Market.

You are ready now , says a voice inside his head. Croft realises it is the voice of Ashley Symes.

And in the end, it is easy. Both McNieces are downstairs, working the bar. Alex is alone in the living room of the first floor flat. The carpet is a battleground, strewn with Transformers toys and model soldiers. The tin-plate tiger is surrounded by aggressive forces. The TV is playing quietly in the background.

When Croft sticks his head around the door and asks if Alex would like to come on an assignment with him, the boy says yes at once. The boy knows the word assignment has to do with photography because Croft has told him so.

“Where are we going?” Alex says. It is getting on towards his bedtime, but the unexpectedness of what they are doing has filled him with energy.

Croft knows that unless he is very unlucky, the boy’s absence will not be noticed for at least three hours.

“To visit some people I know,” Croft says. “They keep a tiger in their back garden.”

The boy’s eyes grow large.

“You’re joking me,” he says.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

The boy laughs delightedly, and Croft takes his hand. The journey passes uneventfully. The boy seems captivated by every small thing — the pale mist rising up from the streets, the lit-up shop fronts, the endlessly streaming car headlights, yellow as cats’ eyes.

The only glances they encounter seem benign.

When they arrive at Symes’s house, Alex rushes up the driveway to the front door and rings the bell.

“And who is this young man?” Symes says, bending down.

“Dennis says you’ve got a tiger, but I don’t believe him,” says the child. He is beginning to flag now, Croft senses, just a little. He is overexcited. The slightest thing could have him in tears.

“We’ll have to have a look, then, won’t we?” Symes says. He places a hand on the boy’s head. Croft steps forward out of the shadows and towards the door.

Once he is inside, he knows, it will begin. He and Ashley Symes will kill the child. The rest will watch.

“You have done well,” Symes says to Croft, quietly. “This won’t take long.”

“Will there be cookies?” Alex says.

Croft stands still. He can feel the thing moving inside him, twisting in his guts like a cancer.

He wants to vomit. Croft gasps for breath, sucking in the blunt, smoky air, the scent of macadam, of the hushed, damp trees at the roadsides and spreading along all the railway lines of southeast London. The fleet rails humming with life, an antidote to ruin.

He smells the timeswept, irredeemable city and it is like waking up.

Above him, bright stars throw up their hands in surprise.

“Come here to me, Sasha,” Croft says. He is amazed at how steady his voice sounds. “There’s no time now. We have to go.”

“But the tiger,” the child whimpers. He looks relieved.

“There are no tigers here,” Croft says. “Mr. Symes was joking. Come on.”

The boy’s hand is once again in his and he grips it tightly.

“Will we be home soon?” says the boy.

“I hope so,” Croft replies. “We should be, if a bus comes quickly.”

He does not look back.

Concerning the affair of the house on Cobb Street, much ink has been spilled, most notably from the pens of Rupert Young in the busy offices of the Athens Courier; Maude Witcover at the alternative weekly Chronictown; and independent scholar, poet, and local roustabout Perry “Pear Tree” Parry Jr. on his blog Under the Pear Tree. Indeed, the ink (or in the case of Parry, the electrons) — and those from whose pens (or keyboards) it spilled — are all that remain today of the incidents that came to be known locally (and colloquially) as the Cobb Street Horror. The house itself was razed, its lot now surrounded by a high fence bearing a sign that announces the construction presumably in progress behind it as the future offices of Drs. Laura Gonzales and Didi Mueller, DDS. The principal witnesses in this case did not respond to repeated enquiries, and in one case, obtained a restraining order against this author. And the young woman in question is said by all to have disappeared, if indeed she ever existed in the first place.

I wanted to embed the YouTube video here, but it looks like it’s been removed. It was uploaded by someone bearing the handle “cravencrane” who has no other activity on the site. Shot in low quality, perhaps with someone’s cell phone, it showed a red-haired woman in a gray wool coat — presumably Felicia Barrow — not quite running, but walking away from the lens rapidly and talking over her shoulder as she went. “Of course Vivian existed,” she said. “Of course she did. She was my friend. That hack would print anything to make his story sound more mysterious than it was. Roger St. Lindsay, that’s not even his real name.” And then she was out of the frame entirely, and the clip ended.

The snippet purported to be part of a documentary in progress known as The Disappearance of Vivian Crane , but little else has been found about its origins, its current status, or the people behind it, and it is assumed that the project is currently dead. Felicia Barrow was located but had no comment about either the project or the fate of the Cranes.

Vivian wakes.

It is a night like any other night and not like any night she has known at all.

The heart of the house is beating. She can hear it, vessels in the walls, the walls that exhale with that life’s breath that is just as sweet to the house’s groaning floorboards and arched doorways and soaring cupolas as her own breath is to her; she can hear it, heart beating and moaning and sighing and “settling.” That was what her mother used to call it, in the other old house they lived in way back when, her a skinny wild girl; and maybe “settling” was the right word for what that old house did, that old house that was never alive, never had a pulse and a mind and — most of all — a desire, but “settling” was the least of what this old house did. Vivian knows that if she doesn’t know anything else at all.

This old house is not settling for anything. This old house is maybe waiting, and possibly thinking, and could be sleeping, even, but never settling.