Christopher Fowler - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 10

“With each trip to the hardware store/lumber yard I found myself muttering: ‘This is the last 2x4 I will buy in my lifetime, this is the final section of sheet rock, this is the last bucket of joint compound, etc. etc’.”

Two of his neighbors have died in as many weeks. Another has lost his mind, or his past, Taylor’s not sure which.

The fellow at the end of the street electrocuted himself while rebuilding his roof: a raised hammer, a cable shedding black insulation and hung too low. The man’s wife says he had no business up there in the first place — he was always doing too much, remodeling the house every few years whether it needed it or not, and besides he had no depth perception.

Walter across the street had been another weekend remodeler. He was putting in a new tub on the second floor, the good-for-nothing son-in-law helping him carry the thing. Walter had a heart attack, but if that hadn’t killed him the torturous fall through water-rotted flooring would have. Now the son-in-law lies out on a towel each day beside a blue cooler full of cold ones.

Taylor has never met the fat man who wanders up and down their street in overalls, but he’s been told the poor fellow owned the big green Queen Anne — worked at fixing it up most every day of his adult life, and after forty years the bank took it away. A fall down the stairs on moving day and something important must have slipped away, because the fat man no longer knows his own name.

Some days their street smells like a kid’s birthday party. Other days it’s a dead mule washed up along the Mississippi.

Many nights Taylor wakes up from some bad dream of the past and the fear is so strong in him he can smell it coming out of his pores, a smell like the solvents he uses to strip decades off the woodwork and clean his tools: a rotten soup of ancient tint and discoloration. “It’s two a.m. in the Bluff City,” the radio tells him, and sometimes it tells him the day and sometimes the year and he decides to take it at its word because right at this moment he has no clue. The bedroom’s been torn up for over a year, walls demolished down to studs and the original knob-and-tube wiring, exposing the rusted narrow pipes used to supply the gas lights of the last century, and then it’s three a.m. in the Bluff City, then four, and staring out his window — the casement gone, paint flakes working their way under his fingernails — all he can see moving on this street in midtown Memphis is someone else’s memories, shadows walking with the power of regret, and “it’s a killer out there,” the radio reminds him. “The hottest summer in years. Mr J. T. Reynolds of our fair city died of heatstroke this afternoon, trying to put in a new attic exhaust fan, they tell me. Those old houses, well, you just gotta watch your step. Best take it easy, friends.”

Taylor looks out over the dark trees to another row of street lamps. J. T. Reynolds had a pretty little house a block away. And that makes four. What’s that smell ? he thinks, his face flushed with damp heat and something else. What’s that smell?

It’s just another one of those things that slips away, he decides, stumbling down steps with no railing, grabbing a beer out of the greasy brown ice box, and so many things just slip away. You don’t think about them for a time and before you know it they’re gone, and will no longer hold in the mind however much you try. You cannot will some things to stay.

Like some smells, he thinks, going out to the porch, stepping around what is missing from the porch, the things he’s torn away. Taylor cannot remember the smell of his mother’s perfume, although he recalls it as a dramatic fragrance he’d been exposed to, surely, every day of his life from birth until his twenties. He would have been twenty-three, maybe twenty-four, when he’d finally left, only to return here years later to discover that his mother’s smell had slipped away from this house, gone into the dark with her lace doilies, flowery dresses, and white bowls full of jelly beans.

Angela’s smell, now that was something else. Like lemons, something to do with the lotion she likes so much. And the kids, hair and faces scented like sunlight in sheets, Beth’s with a touch of strawberry, Andy’s lemony like his mother’s. Angela promised to bring them by for a visit — “Not that you’ll notice” — but he hasn’t laid eyes on them in months, and can count on their remembered smells only to suggest a child’s revenant in their darkened rooms.

His kids had hated all the remodeling as much as his ex — no, he wouldn’t call her that — Angela had. Beth said she had “visitors” in her room, splinter people with doorknob eyes. Andy just said the shadows were all funny and he hated the holes in his walls. Angela said this was no way for kids to live.

Taylor talked to them about how important a sense of history was, how their house had stood when Memphis was an important slave market, and about the underground railroad, and the thousands who had died in the yellow fever epidemics, some in this very neighborhood, how 70,000 lay buried under the shady trees of Elmwood Cemetery.

“I hate his tree,” Beth suddenly cried, pointing out the window at the distorted bark of a century-old oak. “He’s always making faces at me!”

“You’re always telling them the worst things about the past,!’ Angela accused him, the day she took their kids away.

It occurs to him now he might turn the power back on to that part of the house. He completed the new wiring only a few weeks after Angela made her escape — his kids straining to see him through the back window as the taxi sped off. But filling those empty rooms with bright, new light would only make him feel worse.

An aroma of licorice stains the air behind him, coming from that section of the porch he’d took out last week. He found his dad’s old cigarette lighter on the exposed ground, nested in a paste of black leaves and rotting rags — the old man must have lost the thing, what? a good thirty years ago. Taylor should know — his father was so sure he’d stolen it he’d whipped him ‘til he bled, the memory of that time stinking of leather, warm piss.

As the memory strides around him, grey porch wood creaking under its prodigious weight, Taylor takes another swig from his Blue Moon Ale, refusing to turn around, to grant that grim-faced recollection the satisfaction of his fear.

“Daddy?” Stupid thing to ask, but he’s almost finished the bottle, so what better time to ask a dead man questions?

His father doesn’t answer, but that smell of licorice — the old man gnawed it constantly — permeates the muggy air. Suddenly Taylor feels nauseated by it, tosses the rest of the bottle into the weedy lawn.

“I’m going to finish this place,” he speaks through the stench. “You didn’t get it done, Grandpa didn’t get it done. I’m getting it done.” His head swims in the heat. A shadow floats across his vision, brown and slightly distorted, as if seen from inside an amber beer bottle. It’s a killer out there. “Once Angela sees how it turns out, she’ll understand better. People are going to read about it in the paper.” The house settles around him, groaning in its disordered sleep. I’ll wake you yet, he thinks. But a house this old should be done with all its settlings, and Taylor sniffs the air with unease. A few remaining wheaty fumes of beer. The irises from next door smelling a little like orange blossoms, sausage and red beans cooking a few doors down the street. The straggly surviving azaleas in his own yard have no smell, although a lot was promised by the showy pink flowers of months back. He has a vague memory that azaleas smelled when he was a kid, smelled like flannel comfort and a lukewarm bath after supper, but now he can’t be sure.