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

She began to cry. It was dislocation and fear, but also a growing sense that time had passed her by. She had never, ever thought like this before, even when Peter had angrily insisted that he only had one life, and he would not let it fritter away waiting for her.

Penny thought that moving here had opened up her view on things, and she could see a mile along the valley to the ridge behind which the sun hid for the night.

“Don’t be sad,” Peter says. His voice is stronger than the breeze, brighter than the sunset, and more meant for her than the hushing trees and calling birds. “You’ve done well, my sweet rose. You know not to waste any more time, or time will waste you.”

“Are you coming back to me?” she asked.

“You think I ever left?”

Penny stares up at the tower room, convinced that she will see movement there, or a face, or a sign that this new home is more than just her own. But still it exudes a weight of wrongness, as if the tower and room had been built onto the house long after it had first been constructed. Or, perhaps, the house had been built around the much older tower.

“I’m not going there,” she said. “The house is plenty big enough without me ever having to go there.” No one replies, and she sees that her glass is empty. She does not even remember drinking the wine.

Back in the kitchen, the bottle is empty as well. Penny sits on an old stool and rests her arms on the worktops, her head on her arms. She closes her eyes.

Tap, tap, tap.

“You never call me rose anymore,” she says.

“Huh.”

“What does that mean?”

Peter looks across at her from the driver’s seat. They are stuck in traffic on the way home from the supermarket. She bought food, he bought a CD and a book about Eastern European cuisine and a cheap one-man tent light enough to carry on a hike or a bike. “That was a long time ago,” he says.

“So much just fades away,” Penny says sadly.

“Huh.” The car pulls forward some more, and Penny watches her husband driving. He remains silent, stern. She wishes he would just throw her a glance, a smile, a cheeky, My rose never fades . But the rot has set in years before, and now they are simply playing the game.

She opened her eyes to darkness, and a cruel throbbing against her skull. The house sat around her, quiet, still, and she felt that it was observing her pained waking. The weight of above pressed down against her, almost crushing her into the stool and worktop.

How could the tower have not tumbled long before now? How could it stand, so heavy and dense?

Even though she could no longer hear the tapping sound, she could feel it through her hands and feet. Transmitted through the body of the house like a secret message from one room to another. All about me , she thought, and she slipped from the stool to the kitchen floor.

She unrolled the sleeping mat and sleeping bag, climbed in, ignoring the pressure on her bladder, the need for a drink of water, the fear of what else might be sharing the floor with her in the darkness. She had not been this drunk in decades, but today she welcomed it.

Her world swayed. She was protected by numbness, and still feeling that tap, tap, tap touching delicately against the flagstone floor, she was pulled back into unconsciousness.

Dawn, and she had dreamed of Peter sitting upright on a chair in the room at the top of the tower. There was no other furniture. Just Peter, seven years older than when she had last seen him, walking boots and trousers and waterproof jacket still on, day pack propped by his side with the flask open and cup steaming coffee, sandwich box balanced on one knee. So you came? he had asked, not sounding surprised. He had always known that Penny, his rose, would follow.

“I have to see,” Penny said. She glanced around the kitchen until she saw the set of keys, remembered throwing the tower key outside. Then recalled the spares Mr Gough had given her. She emptied her bag on the worktop and snatched up the key ring.

Her head throbbed with each stair she climbed. Her heartbeat matched her footfalls, reverberating through the house. She wondered whether her presence here would become an echo for whoever might own the building after her, but she did not like thinking that he would become only an echo. Peter was much more than that, wherever he was. A man so alive could, would always be more.

At the door to the tower, she touched the handle again. It was cool. It took a while to find the key that fitted the lock, and as she tried she looked around the landing, at all those closed doors. She had been into each room yesterday, but did not own any of them.

The key turned, and the lock tumbled open.

“Are you there?” she asked, expecting the tap, tap, tap. But there was nothing. She pushed the door open.

The tower structure was square, the staircase circular, made of cast iron and probably worth a small fortune. It did not make a sound as she climbed. She passed two windows out onto her garden, but it felt as though she was looking onto a world she had never visited. She saw places she had been, recognising none of them.

The stairs ended on a narrow landing with a single door. It was dusty and cobwebbed. She touched the door handle and it was warm, but she did not wait to think about why. She unlocked it with another key, wondering only vaguely why the tower room should be locked away behind two doors.

“Open the door, my little rose,” she said, imagining the words on her husband’s lips, and she turned the handle. Peter was waiting for her inside, and soon she would hear his voice again.

As Penny pushed the door open she saw something flash across the small room beyond, dashing for cover, terrified of being seen. She gasped, hand pressed to her chest. Her heart matched the tap, tap, tap she no longer heard, and as its thunderous beat transferred through her hand to the door, she saw a smear of light shivering in the room’s opposite corner. A window-shaped reflection, brought to life by her fear. She shoved the door a little more, and the reflection disappeared.

She entered the room. There was nothing there. The dusty windows caught the sun’s early light and filtered it, casting dust-shadows against the floor and one wall.

The door was closing behind her, and Penny turned to see herself in the mirror hung on the back of the door. Through the haze of old dust covering the glass, she looked nebulous, almost not there.

Also not there, Peter. There was no chair, no husband. The room contained old, old dust, and stale air, heavy with the aromas of age and seclusion.

“I’m here,” she said. “I’m here!” Louder. Dust floated down from the ceiling and flitted in pale sunbeams, like tiny flies startled at her presence.

A broken wooden blind hung down across one window, and one end tapped gently against the panelled wall. There were no broken panes, no breeze. Penny closed her eyes and felt a slight dizziness not connected to her hangover. The tower moved, or the world. Now that she was here it did not matter which.

Penny began to understand. She had not come here to die. Neither had she come to try and make amends to her absent husband, or to prove to herself that she was not as he had always portrayed her. She had come because this was another place where she belonged. This empty, barren room was her home, not the house down below. And there was no way she could leave here again, because everywhere else felt so terrible, threatening, and a million miles away from where she needed to be.

She pressed her face to a glass pane. At least with dust on the windows, she was shielded from some of the distance.

Soon, she would lock the door, prise a window open a crack, and drop the keys outside. Belinda and her family were not visiting for ten days, so there was plenty of time. Because hers was the face at the window. And she was a trick of the light.