Stephen Jones: The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Vol 15

Tattered clouds like cobwebs laden with grime raced to meet him as he hurried home. They left the sky behind them no less dark. He let himself into the house and switched on the dimness before venturing upstairs. “You didn’t hear anything bad today, did you, grandma?” he whispered at her door. “God wouldn’t let you. Please God don’t.”

There was no sound from her room. If she’d been listening, the floorboards would surely have made her presence as apparent as they were making his. He was suddenly convinced he had been talking to nobody at all — for how long, he didn’t know. He grabbed the chilly scalloped brass knob and threw open the door.

The room looked yet more enormous for its emptiness. He could have imagined all the heavy mournful furniture was huddling against the walls. A wedge of murky twilight had managed to slip between the ponderous sombre curtains to emphasise the isolation of the bed, on which a fat faded patchwork quilt was drawn over a flattened stack of pillows. “Aren’t you there, grandma?” Jonathan barely said.

Perhaps he glimpsed the shadow of a cloud that was drifting unseen past the window, but the quilt appeared to stir as if something it concealed was trying to take shape and draw breath. He peered into the dimness until he grasped how terrified he was to see. Flinging himself backwards, he dragged the door shut and fled downstairs. “I’m sorry, grandma. I didn’t mean to-” he cried, and interrupted himself. “Please God don’t let her,” he repeated while he spread his schoolbooks across the kitchen table and attempted to work.

He didn’t know how his mother might react to his writing about his father. It could wait until the weekend, when Jonathan would be staying with him. The boy chanted his prayer as an accompaniment to copying a map of the world, and fell silent only when he heard Trudy and his mother at the front door.

Their wide smiles were virtually identical. “So how was your day?” Trudy asked.

It seemed safest not to be specific. “Just stuff.”

“What did you learn, then?” said his mother.

All he could remember was praying. “More stuff.”

“Never mind if you’d rather not tell us.” Her smile drained into her face as she remarked to Trudy “I expect we’d hear it all if my mother was doing the asking.”

Could his grandmother take that as a criticism? “I’m just…” Jonathan mumbled, and ran upstairs. “See, I said mum wants to be like you,” he whispered from the top stair, and repeated his plea to God several times before descending to the kitchen.

“I didn’t mean to upset you,” his mother assured him. “Eat up your dinner and forget what I said.”

He was able to achieve the first requirement and pretend the second was accomplished. Might she refrain from talking about his grandmother for fear of upsetting him? After dinner he finished his geography homework in the kitchen and then watched some of a television programme about how men were the cause of all conflict. He didn’t mind if his mother and Trudy thought that included him so long as it drew blame away from his grandmother.

He still had to pray with every breath so as to fall asleep. He wakened in daylight to hear laughter downstairs — the night seemed to have renewed the women somehow. His tormentors didn’t come to find him in the schoolyard, and his classmates had tired of giggling when he felt compelled to pray. He couldn’t have predicted the question with which his mother greeted him that night. “Jonathan,” she said, sitting down at the table to clasp his hands. “Aren’t you happy at this school?”

“Why?” he blurted in case that gave him time to think.

“Just tell me. Tell us, Trudy’s your friend too. What’s disturbing you?”

He could think of nothing his grandmother mightn’t be blamed for. It was Trudy who said “Shouldn’t you explain…”

“You’re right, I’ve missed a step. Jonathan, your headmaster rang me. He says you keep talking to yourself in class.”

Barely in time he saw how to tell something like the truth. “I was just trying to get things right.”

“So that’s why you were reading out your essay the other night. You’ll have to stop doing it at school, though, or you’ll have people thinking you’re-You’ll put them off their own work.”

He thought he’d convinced her all was well. He was on his way to bed when he overheard her saying “It’s my mother again. Living with her, that’s what’s made him so nervy, and no wonder.”

He dashed into his room and huddled in the bed to pray. He had to stop when he heard Trudy and his mother on the stairs: if his mother overheard him she would think he was mad — she’d almost said so — while explaining his behaviour seemed capable of making the situation even worse. At last his prayers under the bedclothes gave way to sleep and then to muddy daylight that smelled of hot food.

His mother and Trudy insisted on kissing him before he could escape from the car. He hastened through the gates to find his tormentors awaiting him. “How many mothers have you got?” enquired the boy with the grubby upper lip.

His singularly hairy crony imitated his disgusted grin. “Do they both live at your house?”

“Why shouldn’t they?” Jonathan was confused enough to ask.

“Bet your grandma wouldn’t like it.”

“Bet they’re glad she’s dead.”

“Bet they wouldn’t want to smell her now, though.”

All Jonathan’s dismay and bewilderment surged like bile into his mouth. “Maybe you will.”

The boys looked as if he’d shocked them by going further than they dared. “What do you reckon you’ll do?” the boy with the sole hair spluttered.

“Nothing. You’ve done it,” Jonathan told them and hid in the crowd.

He wasn’t going to pray to protect them. He didn’t mutter once in class. He mustn’t ask his mother about Trudy in case his grandmother might indeed have disapproved of her — in case that made his mother say things he would have to rectify. Instead he could tell her about his day} except that when she and Trudy came home, holding hands just long enough for him to see, she surprised him by asking “Would you like Lawrence to pick you up from school tomorrow?”

“Don’t you mind?”

“Why would anyone mind? That way you can spend a long weekend with him to make up for the last one and Trudy and I will sort out the house.”

Would that include his grandmother’s room? Tonight he had no sense of her presence. If the room was cleared out, mightn’t that mean she would stay with Jesus, since she would have nowhere to return to? He thought it best to continue praying once he was in bed. “Please God don’t let her hear us saying anything bad about her,” he repeated on the way to sleep.

He felt as if he’d hidden the implications of his words from himself until he was back at school. He couldn’t see his tormentors when he braved the yard. He left his suitcase full of clothes and other weekend items in the secretary’s office and hurried out to search, only to be found by Mr Foster, who was on yard duty. “There’s a pensive young face.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“No need to apologise for thinking.” As Jonathan wondered if that was necessarily true, the teacher said “Feeling more at home now?”

“I think so, sir.”

“You can expect a respite from the comedy, at any rate.”

Jonathan had noticed none. “Which is that, sir?”

“The comedians. The young teasers you encountered earlier in the week. The school will have to do without their routines for a while.”

That almost robbed Jonathan of the breath it took to demand “Why?”

“They appear to have taken up slapstick.” Mr Foster frowned at himself or at Jonathan’s terseness. “They climbed up on a roof they should have known wouldn’t support them, not that they ought to have been anywhere near it.”