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

Six months later, she did. Matilde went with her, of course. He didn’t think there was much more that could be said or understood on the subject. When first he’d sat out on this deck alone, trying to work it all through in his head, the recounting could take hours. As time went on, the story seemed to get shorter and shorter. As they said around these parts, it is what it is.

Or it was what it was.

Time passed and then it was late. The scotch was long gone but he didn’t feel the desire for any more. He took the glass indoors and washed it at the sink, putting it on the draining board next to the plate and the knife and the fork from lunch. No lights were on. He hadn’t bothered to flick any switches when he came in, and — having sat for so long out on the deck — his eyes were accustomed, and he felt no need to turn any on now.

He dried his hands on a cloth and walked around the house, aimlessly at first. He had done this many times in the last few months, hearing echoes. When he got to the area which had been Catherine’s study, he stopped. There was nothing left in the space now bar the empty desk and the empty bookshelves. He could tell that the chair had been moved, however. He didn’t recall precisely how it had been, or when he’d last listlessly walked this way, but he knew that it had been moved, somehow.

He went back to walking, and eventually fetched up outside the room that had been Matilde’s. The door was slightly ajar. The space beyond was dark.

He could feel a warmth coming out of it, though, and heard a sound in there, something quiet, and he turned and walked slowly away.

He took a shower in the dark. Afterward he padded back to the kitchen in his bare feet and a gown and picked his scotch glass up from the draining board. Even after many, many trips through the dishwasher you could see the ghost of the restaurant logo that had once been stamped on it, the remains of a mast and a crow’s nest. Catherine had slipped it into her purse one long-ago night, without him knowing about it, and then given the glass to him as an anniversary present. How did a person who would do that change into the person now living half the state away? He didn’t know, any more than he knew why he had so little to say on the phone to his daughter, or why people sat and looked at views, or why they drove to nowhere on Saturday afternoons. Our heads turn and point at things. Light comes into our eyes. Words come out of our mouths.

And then? And so? Carefully, he brought the edge of the glass down upon the edge of the counter. It broke pretty much as he’d hoped it would, the base remaining in one piece, the sides shattering into several jagged points.

He padded back through into the bedroom, put the broken glass on the nightstand, took off the robe, and lay back on the bed. That’s how they’d always done it, when they’d wanted to signal that tonight didn’t have to just be about going to sleep. Under the covers with a book, then probably not tonight, Josephine.

Naked and on top, on the other hand.

A shorthand. A shared language. There is little sadder, however, than a tongue for which only one speaker remains. He closed his eyes, and after a while, for the first time since he’d stood stunned in the driveway and watched his family leave, he cried.

Afterward he lay and waited.

She came in the night.

Three days later, in the late afternoon, a battered truck pulled down into the driveway and parked alongside the car that was there. It was the first time the truck had been on the road in nearly two years, and the driver left the engine running when he got out because he wasn’t all that sure it would start up again. The patched front tyre was holding up, though, for now.

He went around the back and opened up the wooden crate, propping the flap with a stick. Then he walked over to the big front door and rang on the bell. Waited a while, and did it again. No answer. Of course.

He rubbed his face in his hands, wearily, took a step back. The door looked solid. No way a kick would get it open. He looked around and saw the steps up to the side deck.

When he got around to the back of the house he picked up the chair that sat by itself, hefted it to judge the weight, and threw it through the big glass door. When he’d satisfied himself that the hole in the smashed glass was big enough, he walked back along the deck and around the front and then up the driveway to stand on the road for a while, out of view of the house.

He smoked a cigarette, and then another to be sure, and when he came back down the driveway he was relived to see that the flap on the crate on the back of his truck was now closed.

He climbed into the cab and sat a moment, looking at the big house. Then he put the truck into reverse, got back up to the highway, and drove slowly home.

When he made the turn into his own drive later, he saw the STOP sign was still there. Didn’t matter how many times he told the boy, the sign was still there.

He drove along the track to the house, parked the truck. He opened the crate without looking at it, and went inside.

Later, sitting on his porch in the darkness, he listened to the sound of the wind moving through the tops of the trees all around. He drank a warm beer, and then another. He looked at the grime on his hands. He wondered what it was that made some people catch sight of the sign, what it was in their eyes, what it was in the way they looked, that made them see. He wondered how the man in the big house had done it, and hoped he had not suffered much. He wondered why he had never attempted the same thing. He wondered why it was only on nights like these that he was able to remember that his boy had been dead twenty years.

Finally he went indoors and lay in bed staring at the ceiling. He did this every night, even though there was never anything there to see: nothing unless it is that sad, dark thing that eventually takes us in its arms and makes us sleep.

ROBERT SILVERBERG IS A multiple winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and he was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2004.

He began submitting stories to science fiction magazines in his early teens, and his first published novel, a children’s book entitled Revolt on Alpha C , appeared in 1955. He won his first Hugo Award the following year.

Always a prolific writer — for the first four years of his career he reputedly wrote a million words a year — his numerous books include such novels as To Open the Sky, To Live Again, Dying Inside, Nightwings and Lord Valentine’s Castle . The latter became the basis for his popular “Majipoor” series, set on the eponymous alien planet. His most recent book is the seventh volume in his Collected Short Stories from Subterranean Press.

“I am not, of course, noted for writing ghost stories,” Silverberg admits, “but I have had a life-long interest in them, going back to my discovery of the classic Wise & Fraser Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural when I was ten.

“My unsurprising favourites have been, all these years, Machen, Blackwood, and M. R. James, whom I have read and re-read many times.

“Another favourite of mine since childhood has been Kipling; and so, when Nick Gevers and Jack Dann invited me to contribute to an anthology of modern ghost stories paying homage to the British masters, I fell immediately on the idea of doing a Kiplingesque ghost story for them.”

WHAT HAPPENED TO Smithers out there in the Great Indian Desert may seem a trifle hard to believe, but much that happens in Her Imperial Majesty’s subcontinent is a trifle hard to believe, and yet one disbelieves it at one’s peril. Unfortunately, there is nobody to tell the tale but me, for it all happened many years ago, and Yule has retired from the Service and is living, so I hear, in Palermo, hard at work on his translation of Marco Polo, and Brewster, the only witness to the tragic events in the desert, is too far gone in senility now to be of any use to anyone, and Smithers — ah, poor Smithers—