Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

Don thought of his job. For so long he had been going through the motions it was as if he was working from a script every day. In a way he was, following the slavish schedules set down by a government eager to have its target figures bolstered by achievable test results.

He showed the children how to play basic chords, the first few essentials: A, D and E, corrected them when they went wrong — which was often — and put on excruciating “musical” events for their parents to come and listen to. Interaction was at a minimum. He thought the children could see right through him, though they were all under ten years of age. He wondered if he resented them, since Julie’s death. He wondered if maybe he was taking out the fact that he was fatherless, and had never intended to be — certainly not at this age — on them.

“I’m unemployed,” Don said. He tried to think of a job so far removed from who Kerner seemed to be that he wouldn’t ask him any follow-up questions about it. “I used to work in Human Resources.”

That worked. Kerner’s smile froze a little; he nodded, gazed outside. “That your car?” he asked brightly, apparently happy to find another conversational topic.

“The Focus? Yeah.” Don closed his mouth. We used to have a Volvo. You know, safest car in the world.” Until I totalled it. And my wife .

“I drive a Lexus.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah,” Kerner said. “I like to drive gone midnight. Empty roads. Good up here. Some good roads. Hairpin bends and suchlike.”

“It’s just a metal box to get me from one place to another.” Don had bought a second-hand car a week after the accident. He forced himself into the driver’s seat. He would not allow it to lock him down. Metal boxes. Wooden boxes. Snow globes .

“Well, I must go,” Kerner said, and drained his cup. “Some good light here in the mornings. Click-click and all that. Peace out, rainbow trout.”

Don watched Kerner move through the dining room to the door. The other man was of a similar age to Don, he reckoned, but there was a world of difference in their physiques. Kerner’s limbs were slender, he was lithe and stealthy. He panthered across the room. Don hated his own rounded posture. He was all clump and jostle. Too many hours hunched over his guitar. He resolved to do something about it — cut back on the alcohol, eradicate the fast food from his diet, try to exercise more — but even as he left the hotel lobby and walked across the square to his car, he knew this would never be the case. Some people were born to the shape they would occupy all their lives.

I’m going to take you to the school I attended. I was a model pupil. Don’t laugh. I was a senior prefect. I never had a day’s absence. I took eight “O” levels and scored As for all of them .

Don sat in his car wondering how he had arrived here; the journey was a blur. It angered him that he should still be able to switch off whenever he drove, considering what had happened. He got out, stalked away from his little metal box, his mobile coffin, and loitered by the school gates. So this was his old seat of learning, Sheckford Junior. So what? It might have meant something had she been with him.

There’s the veranda where I used to sit with Belinda Smart, under our coats, feeding each other toffees. There’s the playground where Johnny Dobson fought back against Mr Addison. There’s the school field where I got ambushed on my birthday and I was egged to within an inch of my life. Now it was all just memories. Then and now. No context. His life was a flatline without detail. Bedtime stories, and not very good ones at that.

He walked along the edge of the school grounds until he reached the gym. Everything the same. Everything changed. His youth was so close sometimes, he felt he could feel it beneath his fingers. He saw himself every day in any number of mirrors, and it was Don, it was him. But a photograph from even as recent as five years ago displayed to him a massive change in how he looked. His skin greyer now, his eyebrows lighter, his eyes more sunken. But he had not seen it happen. He had been tricked.

He was a prisoner to the calendar, he realised, as we all were. He thought in little boxes that were to be ticked off and filled with things to do. Almost every day he thought back to what he had been doing ten years ago, twenty years ago, further. He lived in the past, by his diary. He was a history man, his head full of dead leaves. It was a form of reassurance, he knew. There were too many roads into the future and he didn’t like not having a map for it.

Movement. He turned and gazed out over the school fields

pelting Debbie Epstein with snow, winning the high jump and just missing out on the 800 metres title, kissing Penny Greig for the first time near the pavilion

and saw a couple gesticulating wildly at each other as they raced across the grass towards the main road. She was having to run to keep up with him, her red scarf flapping at her throat like a terrible wound. She spotted Don and pointed at him. The man’s head snapped up. Little hair. It was like a pink oval, a beige egg sitting on an elaborate eggcup. They arrowed towards him. The man was rolling his sleeves back as if setting himself for a scrap.

“Martin,” she was calling. Don shook his head, but then realised she wasn’t attempting to address him.

“Have you seen Martin?” Her voice was brittle. She was at the edge of tears.

“My boy,” the man explained, and he was full of accusation. “Our boy. He was playing in our garden on Kent Lane, just down there at the foot of the fields. Keepy-uppy. In our garden.”

“I was washing dishes,” said the woman. “I could see him. And then I went to empty the washing machine and when I came back he was gone and the back gate was swinging open.”

“Maybe he kicked his ball over the wall,” Don said.

“Martin is six,” the man said, as if that was explanation enough.

“He can’t reach the latch,” the woman said.

“I haven’t seen anyone,” Don said. “I just got here.”

The man looked him over as if Don might somehow be concealing Martin on his person. “The police,” he said at last. “We have to bring the police into this.”

“Oh, God,” the woman said. And then she screamed Martin’s name.

Don drove back to the hotel and forced himself to face up to what was going on. His coming here was nothing to do with a pilgrimage. It wasn’t a personal tribute. It was running away. All of those responsibilities back home; they’d still be there when he returned. Debts and deadlines and demands. Julie was the soft barrier that prevented him injuring himself against all that bureaucracy. She organised, she delegated, she controlled. It might have lapped around their ankles occasionally, but the water never rose around their throats, as it seemed to be doing these days.

Now Julie was gone, every day was like crashing his car. There were impacts everywhere. He missed her so desperately it was as if he could still feel the mass of her in his hands. Her smell was in every room she’d inhabited. There were shadows and shades of her in everything he owned. When the sun shone she was splintered within it; when it rained, each drop carried a fragment of her reflection.

He had tried to find that snow globe of hers, after the crash. She took it everywhere with her. It had been a gift from her childhood. A lucky token. He had wandered around in the ruins for an age until the ambulances arrived, his face dripping into the snow around the wreckage, poking with his toe amidst the mangled aluminium, the torn fabric seat covers, the shreds of her. It was gone.

This is madness , he thought now, but there was no way he could stop being dragged under. To tackle that might mean he had to force her out of his life altogether and he was not ready for it.