Stephen Jones - Dark Terrors 3 - The Gollancz Book of Horror

There would be times — moments; decades — when this insistent, imposed interpretation would ring true: her understanding of who she was had not, in fact, been changed by what she’d heard and seen that day in the cemetery on the cusp of the seasons. What she knew about herself remained known, and she’d found out nothing new that mattered in any sustained way.

There would also, though, be reeling moments and decades of cumulative vertigo — such as when Ray and the children were all, for their various reasons, busy leaving her — when it would seem to her that some fundamental thing had been shaken that day, some profound and still-hidden depth plumbed. Not until Ray had left for good would she think of searching for William Bradley, and then all the trails would turn out to be cold. Not until she was old herself would she come back to Michigan — this time in hot and humid July — to stand again at Libby’s grave. Finding no markers for Aunt Maureen, Uncle Everett, or their two sons also gone by then, Cecelia would conclude that they, like the rest of her own family, must be buried somewhere else, and would muse with acute but indeterminate emotion on the complexities of human connection.

Libby would wake up in the night or, worse, in the middle of the day, alone, and she would bring with her out of fitful sleep that faint bittersweet odour. Sometimes there would be a voice and sometimes not.

‘Libby, Libby, you don’t have to stay here.’

‘I’m not well. Papa says if I won’t stay here he’ll have to put me in the state hospital.’

‘You can get out. There are windows in every room.’

‘They don’t open. Papa nailed them shut from the outside.’ She’d gone with him from window to window, she on the inside and he on the outside, glass between them. He was too old to be climbing so high and working so hard. But she’d stayed with him, and in their companionship had been solace and strength.

‘Glass breaks.’

‘This is the third floor.’

‘I will catch you.’

Libby was distressed that she even considered it, but there was no question that her resolve was greater than her suggestibility. ‘No,’ she said, and kept saying so.

Then she was freed and the signs were taken down. She had not known there were signs, and the discovery of them gave her a peculiar little thrill as rapid-fire fantasies rocked her of who might have read the warnings, whom they might have been posted for, who might or might not have heeded them. Otherwise, though, her life didn’t change much.

Over the years, she took care of her father and he took care of her; when he died she found him, and wept, and made the arrangements. Always she kept a place in her house for Frances to come home to, and Frances required a larger and larger place. She welcomed her sisters and their families on their annual visits, and was only a little sorry to see them off. Once in a while, taking a tiny stitch in another intricate quilt design, she would flinch as the needle, suddenly, pierced her heart with longing for her younger daughter and worry for her elder.

‘Take your daughter back. She’s yours. Helen isn’t her real mother.’

Having held her breath against him as long as she could, Libby took a heady gasp of him. ‘Could I?’

‘Sure. I’ll help you. She’s your child.’ But it wasn’t right, and Libby refused. ‘At least tell her,’ he urged, exasperated. ‘Tell her who you are.’ But Libby, tempted, refused.

‘What do you want with me?’

He leaned over her as if to kiss her, but still it was only his insinuating voice that touched her, and the odour of him, and his intense body heat. ‘You know what I want, Libby. You want it, too.’

She did. ‘Surely there are other girls. Younger. Prettier.’ To her horror, she was envisioning Frances for him, offering her daughter to him in her mind.

He said, ‘Frances is fine enough,’ and Libby caught her breath, although she ought not to have been surprised. ‘A fine girl. But I want you .’

‘Who’s that?’ she demanded with a laugh, then waited anxiously for him to tell her. Was she Uncle Clyde’s girl? Frances’s crazy mother? The woman who had given away her child?

‘Yes, darling. I’m afraid you are all those things.’

Or was she — perilous thought — the woman who, more than once in her life, had made a hard, right choice?

Hastily, he murmured, ‘Be mine, Libby, and I’ll show you who you are.’

‘No,’ she said.

They talked about other things until Uncle Everett came for them. Cecelia said a little about Ray. Aunt Maureen told about how close Libby and Frances had been — unhealthily close, she declared, which was the impression Cecelia had already had; during the months Libby was locked for her own safety in her suite at the back and top of the house, Aunt Maureen said with a shake of the head, Frances had even stayed in there with her for days at a time. Cecelia said it was getting really cold; Aunt Maureen predicted the first snow out of those heavy clouds.

Disappointingly, the two of them seemed to Cecelia no closer than ever. Wistfully she wondered whether Aunt Maureen would come to her wedding. As it turned out, Aunt Maureen and Uncle Everett would agree to take care of their grandchildren that weekend, but they would send a quilt that had been in the family for a long time; a note pinned to it said Aunt Maureen wasn’t certain which of her sisters had made it, but she thought Cecelia should have it.

As they wended their way to the road where Uncle Everett waited with the car, Cecelia caught sight once more of the two figures spun loose from the miniature funeral procession, which otherwise was lost now in the thickening mist and twilight gloom. The one in pink stood still. The one in black moved away until she couldn’t see it at all any more. A peculiar fragrance, not quite autumnal — vaguely bitter; wrongly sweet — lingered in her nose and on the cold skin of her hands as they drove away.

Melanie Tem’s novels include Prodigal (winner of the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement), Revenant, Desmodus, Wilding, Tides, Black River and, in collaboration with Nancy Holder, Making Love and Witch-Light. Her short fiction has appeared in Colorado State Review, Worlds of Fantasy and Horror, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Cemetery Dance, Black Maria, Peter Beagles Immortal Unicorn, Dark Angels and High Fantastic, among other magazines and anthologies. Stories are forthcoming in the anthologies Gargoyles, The Hot Blood Series 9 and 10, Going Postal and Snapshots. She has also published numerous non-fiction articles. About ‘Aunt Libby’s Grave’ she explains: ‘It is a chapter from a novel-in-progress, Round the Earth, Roaming About. Told as a series of interconnecting chapters/stories that span the life of Cecelia, one of the protagonists of “Aunt Libby’s Grave”, the novel concerns the moral decisions we are all faced with in our daily lives; if it’s true that “God is in the details”, then so, I think, is the Devil.’

You ask me at least to hint why I refuse ever to open a children’s book. Once I made my living from such material. While the imitations of reality hawked by my colleagues in the trade grew grubbier, and the fantasies more shameful, I carried innocence from shop to shop, or so I was proud to think. Now the sight of a children’s classic in a bookshop window sends me fleeing. The more apparently innocent the book, the more unspeakable the truth it may conceal, and there are books the mere thought of which revives memories I had prayed were buried for ever.