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

“Those children came. They want me to find them. He killed them.”

I glanced up at the hole in the ceiling and shuddered as I thought about the pale, shapeless face that had been hanging there. Puffy cheeks covered with stubble. I had no doubt whatsoever that it was the murderer I had seen. The murderer who had spoken to me. Bengt Karlsson. He took it badly .

“I don’t want to do it, Dad.”

“Of course you’re not going to do any such thing. How could you?”

“Because they told me. Where they are.”

Bearing in mind the insanity in which my son and I found ourselves, perhaps it won’t sound too strange if I say that it was a relief to think that here at least was something to hold onto, something I recognised.

While Annelie was still alive we had watched all the Emil in Lönneberga films. Robin had been frightened by Krösa-Maja’s talk of mylings, the ghosts of murdered children who have not been given a proper burial.

Mylings. If someone had told me a week ago. but never mind. I took it seriously. I accepted that this was what we were dealing with, and so I was relieved that it had a name. Something that has a proper designation can probably be dealt with.

I asked: “So where are they, then?”

Robin whispered, “In the forest.”

“Did he bury them in the forest?” Robin shook his head. “So what did he do?”

Robin carried on shaking his head as he buried his face in the pillow. I tugged gently at his shoulder.

“Robin? You have to tell me. I don’t know what we can do, but. you have to tell me. I believe you.”

Suddenly he curled himself into a ball with his bottom sticking up in the air, just like he used to do when he was asleep when he was very small. Then he yelled into the pillow, “It’s so horrible!”

I stroked his back and said: “I know. I know it’s horrible.”

Robin shook his head violently and shouted: “You haven’t a clue how horrible it is!” He was breathing hard through the pillow, in and out, in and out, and his body kept on heaving those deep, convulsive breaths as I helplessly carried on stroking his back.

I was afraid he was actually going over the edge in some way. It would hardly be surprising. I too felt that I was very close to the edge in terms of what my mind could cope with.

Suddenly Robin’s body grew still and he rolled over onto his back. In a thin, expressionless but perfectly clear voice he addressed the ceiling: “The man found a rock. A big rock. He dug a hole next to the rock. Then he tied up the child so that it couldn’t move. Then he carried the child to the hole. He had one of those iron bar things. He had it with him so that he could roll the rock down into the hole. On top of the child. But the child’s head was sticking out so that the man could listen to the child screaming. And the child screamed because it hurt so much. Lots of bones got broken when the rock rolled on top of the child. The man sat and listened to the child screaming. He sat and listened right up until it died. It might have taken all night. Then he dug a little more and moved the rock so that the child disappeared.”

When Robin had uttered the final words he pulled the covers over his head and rolled himself into a secure cocoon. I lay there beside him with his story crawling around inside my head like a mutilated child.

His bed used to be where mine is now .

The man who had done these things had slept in Robin’s room. How had he been able to sleep? He had made his coffee on our stove and drunk it in our kitchen. He had looked out of the same windows as us, walked on the same floors, heard the same creaking floorboard just inside the door. And he had hanged himself next to my bed.

My eyes were drawn to the dark spot on the ceiling where the hook had been.

I am happy now .

I lay there looking at the black hole for so long that it started to take on the qualities of its astronomical namesake. Everything in the room was being drawn towards it, waiting to be sucked in; my thoughts moved around it like defenceless planets, orbiting in ever-decreasing circles on their way to destruction. And all the time I could hear the music. Round and round the music went, twelve notes in an incomplete melody.

Incomplete?

If you hum: “Baa baa black sheep, have you any wool, Yes sir, yes sir, three—” and stop there, then you know some notes are missing, even if you’ve never heard the tune before. It was equally clear to me that notes were missing from the melody which was now so much a part of me that I couldn’t get it out of my head. I lay in bed staring at the hole and trying to catch hold of the missing notes.

The pile of bedding next to me had started to move up and down with deep, regular breaths, and I managed to free Robin’s sweaty head without waking him up before tucking him in properly. Then I got up and put my clothes on, barely aware of what I was doing, because the notes absorbed all of my attention.

Dum, di-dum, daa .

I sat down at the piano and played the entire melody. The notes were so clear to my inner ear that I had played it twice before I realised there was no sound. I banged a couple of the notes really hard as if violence was the way to entice them out. It was only then I remembered. The pliers. The strings.

I looked around the room, unsure what to do, and I caught sight of the box under Robin’s bed. Among cast-off cuddly toys and plastic figures I found the Casio toy synthesiser. It covered only three octaves, but that was enough.

I played the twelve notes, and a dark serenity came over me. Yes, dark serenity. I can’t find a better way to express it. It was like getting stuck in the mud and slowly sinking. The moment when you realise it’s pointless to struggle, that there is no help to be had, and that the mud is going to win. I imagine you reach a point when you give up, and that this brings with it a certain serenity.

Over and over again I played the twelve notes, trying out different instruments in the synthesiser’s repertoire to make them sound good; in the end I settled for “harpsichord”. I think it’s called cembalo in Swedish, and the imitation of its metallic tone was quite convincing.

Dum, di-dum, daa.

I went into the hallway, put on my jacket, found the head torch, switched it on and fastened it around my head. The synthesiser had a strap which meant I could hang it around my neck. Fully equipped, I opened the front door and headed for the forest.

A mist hung in the air, and although the head torch was powerful, the light reached no further than about ten metres. As I set off among the damp tree trunks it was like walking through an underground vault where the trunks were pillars, carrying their crowns like a single, immense roof. There wasn’t a sound apart from the soft rustle as drops of water fell from the branches onto last year’s dead grass.

I hadn’t played for several minutes, and the blind determination that had driven me on had begun to falter when I reached the place.

This had to be the place. I had walked in a straight line from the house, I might even have followed an overgrown path, come to think of it. On the way I had passed the odd rock, but none of them would have been suitable for the purpose Robin had described.

In front of me lay a number of large rocks which sprang up out of the darkness when the beam of the head torch swept over them. When I examined the area more closely I found something in the region of fifty large and small erratic blocks which the inland ice had strewn across the ground where pines and fir trees would one day grow. Even without the knowledge I possessed, it didn’t take much imagination to compare this place with a graveyard.