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

“Who?”

“The murderer. Can we have some hot chocolate?”

We didn’t bother with the pastries as it wasn’t long since we’d eaten. As we sat at the table with our cups, Robin’s gaze was more open than it had been for months. He looked me in the eye and didn’t waver. This was so unusual that I didn’t know what to say; in the midst of everything I was just so happy to feel that contact between us. I sat and revelled in it for a while, but eventually we had to talk about what had happened.

“This murderer,” I said. “Do you know his name?”

Robin shook his head.

“So how do you know he was a murderer, then?”

Robin sat there chewing his lips, as if he were considering whether what he wanted to say was permitted or not. With a glance in the direction of his room he whispered, “The children told me.”

“Children? What children?”

“The children he murdered.”

This was the point at which I should have said: “What on earth are you talking about, that’s nonsense” or: “Now you see what happens if you spend too much time playing computer games”, but that wasn’t what I said because

The dead speak through the notes

because I knew that something was going on in our house that wasn’t covered in the Good Advice for Parents handbook. Instead I looked at Robin in a way that I hoped would indicate that I was taking him seriously and asked: “Tell me about these children. How many of them are there?”

“Two. Quite small.”

“What do they look like?”

“Don’t know.”

“But you’ve seen them, haven’t you?”

Robin shook his head again and stared down at the table as he said, “You’re not allowed to look at them. If you do, they take your eyes.” He glanced anxiously at his room. “I don’t know if you’re allowed to talk about them either.”

“But they talk to you?”

“Mm. Can I sleep in your room tonight?”

“Of course you can. But there’s something we’re going to do first of all.”

I went into Robin’s room and picked up the hand-written sheet of music from the piano. A horrible feeling had settled in my chest after what Robin had said, and as I stood there with the piece of paper in my hand I had the impression that something was radiating from it. I ran my eyes over the messy notes, the damp patches and the creases and I saw that it was evil .

As I said, I can’t read music, so it must have been something in the way the notes were written, the hand that had guided the pen, the pens. Or perhaps there is a language that transcends the barriers of reason and goes straight in without passing through the intellect.

Whatever the case may be, there was only one sensible thing to do. I took the piece of paper into the kitchen, screwed it up and dropped it in the stove. Robin sat watching from his chair as I struck a match and brought it towards the paper.

I have to admit that my hand was shaking slightly. My sense of the inherent evil in the piece of paper had been so strong that I was afraid something terrible would happen when I set fire to it. But it began to burn just like any other piece of paper. A little yellow flame took hold, flared up, and after ten seconds all that remained were black flakes, torn apart by the draught from the chimney.

I gave a snort of relief and shook my head at my own fantasies. What had I expected — blue flashes, or a demon flying out of the fireplace and running amok in the kitchen? I flung my hands wide like a magician demonstrating that an object really has disappeared.

“There,” I said. “Now you don’t have to play those notes any more.”

I looked at Robin, but the relief I had hoped to see on his face wasn’t there. Instead his eyes filled with tears and he tapped his temples with his fingertips as he whispered: “But I can remember them, Dad. I can remember them.”

If there’s one expression I can’t stand, it’s Every cloud has a silver lining . Take Annelie’s death. I can think until my ears bleed without coming up with a single good thing it has brought us. The atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan? They led to Japan’s dominance of the electronics market through a complex pattern of cause and effect, but tell that to those who were blown to bits, wave the stock market prices under the noses of the children mutilated as a result of radiation. Good luck with that.

I’m rambling. What I wanted to say was that for once there was a grain of truth in that ugly expression. Later in the evening Robin and I actually played Monopoly. He didn’t want to go back to his room; he preferred to sit beneath the safe circle of the kitchen lamp, moving his little car along the unfamiliar streets of Stockholm.

The wind was whistling around the house and I had lit a fire. The roll of the dice across the board, the soft rustle of well-worn bank notes changing hands, our murmured comments or cries of triumph or disappointment. They were good hours, pleasant hours.

It was half-past ten by the time I found myself bankrupt as a result of Robin’s ownership of Centrum and Norrmalmstorg, with the requisite hotels. As we gathered up the plastic pieces and various bits of paper, Robin said with amazement in his voice, “That was quite good fun!”

I made myself a bed on a mattress on the floor so that Robin could have my bed. I set the alarm for seven as usual and turned off all the lights apart from the lava lamp; I lay there for a long time watching the viscous, billowing shapes until my eyelids began to feel heavy. Then I heard Robin’s voice from the bed.

“Dad?”

I sat up, leaning on my elbow so that I could see him. His eyes were open and in the soft, red light he looked like a small child.

“Yes?”

“I don’t want to play the piano any more.”

“No. I understand.”

“And I don’t want us to keep the piano.”

“Okay. We’ll get rid of it then.”

Robin nodded and curled up, closing his eyes. I lay down on my side and looked at my son. For the second time that day the feeling struck me again: things could all work out, in spite of everything. It might all be okay.

The feeling didn’t diminish when Robin half-opened his eyes and mumbled sleepily: “We can play Monopoly or something. Or cards. So I don’t spend as much time playing computer games.”

“We certainly can,” I said. “Now go to sleep.”

Robin muttered something and after a moment his breathing was deeper. I lay there looking at him, listening to the wind and waiting for it to increase in strength and make the aerial sing. It happened just as my consciousness was about to drift away, and a single long note followed me down into sleep.

Annelie came to me that night.

If it had been a dream, the setting should have been one of the many places where we had actually slept and made love. But she came to me there on the mattress next to the bed. She crept naked under the narrow spare duvet and one thigh slid over mine as she burrowed her nose in the hollow at the base of my throat.

I could smell the scent of her hair as she whispered, “Sorry I went away,” and her dry palm caressed my chest. I pulled her close and held her tight. If I had doubted that this was really happening, my doubts dispersed when she said: “Hey, steady!” because I was squeezing her as hard as I could to prevent her from disappearing again.

“I’ve missed you so much,” I murmured, moving one arm so that I could stroke her belly, her breasts, her face. It really was Annelie. The particular curve of her hips, the birthmark beneath her left breast, all the tiny details imprinted on my mind. Only now did I understand how intense the actual physical longing for this woman had been, this woman whose skin I knew better than my own.