James Jenkins - The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories. Volume 1

Matt?

I stretched my neck, followed the car until it reached the bend where Dante had sat waiting, and felt my heart clench when he disappeared from view.

Dizzy, I let myself sink down along the wall. I wiped slime from the corners of my mouth and tried not to give in to the intense feeling of loss that washed over me. Maybe it hadn’t even been Matt. Maybe not.

But I need you.

And then I saw the dark form in the nook by the rough shape of the chimney. I swallowed, spat, panted. I told myself that it couldn’t be her, that it wasn’t possible, couldn’t be.

I crawled to the corner on all fours. I wiped my eyes, which kept clouding up, groped and left a little layer of sludge behind on the child’s knee-­high socks.

She hadn’t gone home and her mother hadn’t gotten angry. There would no longer be any home, not after all the many years that she must have been here.

Her skin was colored black and had become as stiff as parchment. Her flesh – hadn’t it still been there when she’d sat beside me? – was rotted away until it looked like scraped asphalt. The black eyes stared upwards but no longer saw anything.

Used up.

I looked at my hands and the dried slime on my fingertips. Was my skin dryer than before? I wiped my knuckles along my slippery mouth. Were my lips thinner?

His voice in my head. ‘Be a little kind to yourself.’

I had to get out of there.

My trembling hands on the door handle. I fumbled at it, tried to pull it, but there was hardly any strength left in my body. It seeped out like a snail excreting slime to propel itself. But the door opened – had she forgotten to lock it? – and I saw the staircase, although it spun before my weary eyes.

I stepped. Stumbled. Fell.

My body crashed, thumped, clattered, knocked against the steps. My muscles screamed. I remained lying at the bottom of the stairs, fighting to get myself under control. Get up, Tara. Run!

But then she was there.

Had she always been so tall? And hadn’t her eyes been cloudy blue instead of filled with dark fire? The woman who was approaching from the hall, who stood before me and towered over me, was Mrs. Gottlieb, but at the same time I felt someone else.

Mahabhaya , a voice whispered within me. It was a name, I knew; I recognized it with that deep human instinct with which we can fathom the unknowable.

‘Get up, dearie,’ she said.

It was as if the sound alone was enough to lift me up, and I rose until my face was the same height as hers. I saw the liver spots on her cheekbones and her forehead, the deep wrinkles that creased and folded every inch of her skin. The drooping eyelids, the fuzzy gray of her hair. And yet . . . yet there was power in this body, life in her eyes.

Prana.

‘Kiss me,’ she said.

She stretched her wrinkled hands out and I allowed her to place them on my cheeks. I smelled her breath and allowed it to fill my lungs. And then her lips closed over mine and licked the slime from my mouth. I let my life flow into hers, so that her body would not die.

She took my free will.

No . . . that’s not right. My will is intact, but the ability to act on it is gone. How she did it still isn’t clear to me. Maybe it’s the figure that lives behind her eyes, that makes use of her voice: Mahabhaya, the Fearsome One.

She told me, after my prana had brought the light back in her eyes, after I had bent over her husband – Antonie – and he had drunk my life with unwilling gulps.

That as the wife of a missionary she had followed her beloved to a little village in the heart of India. That she’d had to watch as the devastating cholera took him within the span of a month. How his body rotted away and his piss turned black from the blood.

That was the moment she had turned away from the god who had chosen to take away her beloved before he had celebrated his thirtieth birthday. That was also the moment when the villagers introduced her to their divinity, which until then had lain hidden in the folds of her reality.

And there, concealed from the eyes of Westerners who think they know everything, she found Mahabhaya, the Fearsome One, who protects against old age, liberates from fear, and knows the secret of eternal life.

She had done what was necessary. She had recited Her name – Mahabhaya – ten thousand times, sitting on a mountain of bones and with the ash of countless cremations strewn on her head. And when She came, after hours and days, and granted mercy, she had greedily accepted.

But mercy has a price.

I am that price, the child was that price. Even Matt, who will never see me again, is part of that price. And in the end her beloved Antonie is too.

He too has been deprived of his will. In his eyes lives despair, in his hands a fatigue that is deeper than I can comprehend. His voice is regret.

I can’t get him out of my head, that faltering supplication when I still had the strength to walk away, or to refuse. The desperate flutter of the dried-­out wings against the bars of the cage.

The cat’s eyes.

I turned back towards the attic room, obedient to a single look, a word. She is mighty, the Fearsome One, even if she looks through the eyes of an old woman.

Suddenly I wondered whether that was really her name, whether even for her eternity had already lasted longer than she had wanted.

Once out of her presence, my strength returned. I rattled on the shutters of the roof windows that were too narrow for a child to get through, let alone an adult, and I peered out, where I could see the road.

A car with the logo of the home care service. A tractor.

I fumbled at the door, banged on the wood. I pulled at the paneling around the fireplace in the hope of discovering an opening that would offer me a way out, any way whatsoever, onto the roof.

I shouted to the rafters and kicked at the walls. I was Tender Tara. I was the one who did volunteer work, who was socially minded, who fought to do what was good until my dying breath.

I sat motionless beside the desiccated remains that had once been a young girl and which now foretold my future. A future that I had to face alone.

I petted Dante, who had slipped upstairs with me. His aggressiveness had vanished. The bloody scab above his eye was nearly healed, but the look in his eyes was unchanged.

And then I heard the rumbling of a car on the road. A rattle that slowly grew louder and suddenly stopped.

I knew that rumble, that familiar rattling. Matt? Had he figured out where I was? Come to get me?

‘Matt!’

At the beginning of the garden path stood Matt’s red Volkswagen Polo. I heard his voice – urgent, though I couldn’t understand what he was saying.

And I heard her voice, with the innocent tenacity of a very elderly person who has nothing left to lose.

Again I shrieked at the top of my lungs, but the sound died against the wall of silence that surrounded me. I cried, sobbed, when I heard the door shut, when I saw Matt, my Matt, walking down the path to his car.

I pounded on the window, banged with my fist. I . . .

Broke the window.

Shards on the ground. Sharp cuts on my hands. Blood on my fist. And again I screamed. ‘Matt!’

I heard a little sound by my feet and saw Dante and those large, golden-­green mirrors.

What are you trying to say?

Did he know how scared I was? Of loneliness? Silence? Judgment?

What do you mean?

In a cat’s eyes you can read whatever you want. Compassion. Understanding.

I lifted him up to the window, which even he couldn’t easily reach. I pressed him against me for a moment as I loosened the collar from his neck. I pushed him through the hole in the glass and it didn’t matter that the glass cut into his fur. He wormed his way further, through the hole and up onto the roof.