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

Not too much of a problem, you might think. Completely normal, the youth of today, etc. Well yes. But he was only eleven years old. It just can’t be healthy to sit there locked inside an electronic fantasy world for five, six, seven hours a day at that age. So I bribed him.

And what would an eleven-year-old do with the hundred kronor a week he had managed to extort from a father who was completely at a loss? What do you think? Buy new games , of course. But I couldn’t work out what else to do. Anything that could divert him from slaying monsters and conversing with invisible friends felt like progress.

Now I know better. Now I wish I’d spent the money on a faster Internet connection, a cordless headset, a new computer, anything at all. Perhaps then the darkness wouldn’t have got hold of me. I’ll never know.

It started well. Robin turned out to have a natural inclination for playing the piano, and after spending a few weeks playing “Frère Jacques” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” with one finger, he had grasped the basic principles of the notes and was able to play his first chord. His achievement was all the more praiseworthy because there was no help to be had from his father.

I am completely useless when it comes to music. I’ve never sung, nor played any instrument. Robin must have inherited that gene from his mother, and she should have been the one sitting beside him on the piano stool. But one of the few things we have left of her is in fact her piano. Perhaps that was why I insisted on Robin playing that particular instrument. To maintain some form of. contact.

When Robin started piano lessons it was almost two years to the day since Annelie got in the car and never came back. An icy road, a bus coming from the opposite direction. Only a month later they erected a central barrier separating the two carriageways. About bloody time. I came to hate that barrier, its wire structure like a wound across my field of vision every time I drove past the spot. Because it hadn’t been there then .

Six months after Annelie’s death, we moved. There were too many rooms in the old house. Rooms meant for more children, for Annelie’s loom. Rooms just standing there like empty memorials to a life that might have been. Rooms where I could get trapped, sitting there hour after hour. And on top of all that: rooms which together made up a house that was far too big and far too expensive to run on one income.

I decided to try to come to terms with all the dreams that had died, and got a job 300 kilometres away in Norrtälje. We moved from the house in Linköping to an eighty-square-metre windblown shack in the forest. The house was five kilometres from the town, where I didn’t know a soul. The property was surrounded by coniferous forest on three sides, and in the winter you hardly ever caught a glimpse of the sun.

But it was cheap. Extremely cheap.

I carried out the move in a state of agitation. After six months, during which my grief had taken on a physical form and squeezed my throat at night, tangled me up in the sheets and thrown me out of bed, I saw the chance to breathe in at least a little light. I would start afresh in a new place. For Robin’s sake, if nothing else. It wasn’t good for him, living with a father whose only companion in bed was death, and who never slept for longer than an hour at a time.

So I cleared the place out. Anything we didn’t need for our new life on the edge of the forest went into a skip. Annelie’s clothes, her hand-woven rugs. Piece after piece of furniture that belonged to a life for two, and carried its own memories. Out. I smashed up the loom with an axe and took it out in bits.

The night after the skip had been taken away, I slept well for the first time in six months, only to wake up in absolute terror.

What had I done?

In my feverish enthusiasm I had thrown away not only things that Robin and I could have made use of (but I just couldn’t keep the kitchen table where she still sat with her cup of coffee, or the lamp that still illuminated her face, casting dead shadows), but also things that I would have liked to keep. The cushion she used to hug to her stomach. Her hair slides, with a few strands of hair still attached. The odd talisman. But everything had been crushed to bits at some rubbish dump.

The only thing that remained was the piano. The lads who came to pick up the skip had refused to touch it, and I couldn’t manage to drag it out on my own. So it stayed where it was, with her fingerprints still lingering on the keys.

That morning. oh, that morning. If it hadn’t been for the piano I might have lost my mind completely, and Robin would have ended up calling the emergency services instead of being driven to school to say goodbye to his classmates. It’s a paradox, but that’s just how it was: that piano kept me from sinking.

And so it came with us to our new home, and the only place we could find enough space was in Robin’s bedroom, and that’s how it came about that Robin started to play the piano, and after six weeks was able to try out his first hesitant chord.

I can’t say he practised much, but enough to get by. He liked his piano teacher, a guy who was a few years younger than me but had already settled for a cardigan and Birkenstocks. Robin wanted to please his teacher, so he did his exercises, which meant at least an hour or two away from the games.

Since I had nothing to offer in musical terms, Robin didn’t want me in the room when he was practising. Instead I would sit at the kitchen table reading the paper, listening as his plinking became more assured each time he went through “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”.

Then the roars and explosions of Halo or Gears of War took over again, and I would move into the living room and the TV, pleased with how things had turned out in spite of everything.

If I remember rightly it happened in the eighth week. I had just driven Robin home from his piano lesson and settled down at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the newspaper, while he started practising in his room.

Since I had got used to the sound, I was able to concentrate on my reading without being distracted. But after a while I began to feel uneasy, for some reason. I looked up from the paper and listened.

Robin was playing the piano. But what was he playing?

I listened more carefully and tried to pick out a melody, something I recognised. From time to time I heard a sequence of notes which at a push could be linked to an existing tune, only to fall apart again. I assumed Robin was just messing around on the keyboard, and I should have been pleased that he’d reached this point. If it hadn’t been for that strange sense of unease.

The only way I can explain it is to say that I thought I recognised the notes, in spite of the fact that I had no idea what it was, and in spite of the fact that it didn’t sound like a melody. It was like knowing that you know something, but at the same time being incapable of expressing it. That feeling. That sense of unease.

I gritted my teeth, put my hands over my ears and tried to concentrate on the newspaper. I mean, I knew I ought to welcome this new development, and it would be completely wrong to go and ask Robin to stop. So I tried to concentrate on an article about the expansion of wind power, but failed to read a single word. The only thing that went into my head was the faint sound of those notes vibrating through the palms of my hands.

I was on the point of getting up and going to knock on Robin’s door after all when there was a short pause, followed by a halting version of “Jingle Bells”. I let out a long breath and returned to my reading.

That night I had a horrible dream.

I was in a forest, a dense coniferous forest. Only a glimmer of moonlight penetrated down among the dark tree trunks. I could hear singing coming from somewhere, and I stood there motionless as a weight dragged me towards the ground. When I looked down I could just make out a crowbar. A heavy iron crowbar, which I was holding in my hands. The singing turned into a scream, and I woke up with the taste of rust in my mouth.