Тим Леббон - New Fears 2 - Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

“But I hope we can still be friends,” she added, and the smile in her eyes was so sweet; the promise in there of some nebulous closeness that I knew in my heart would amount to Elodie’s emotional table scraps, but I was so hungry, so desperate. She kissed me on the cheek, wound an arm around my shoulders. “You’re very special to me, Ruth,” she murmured, though we had barely known one another six months. Her warm, soft body felt like heaven. I greedily drank up her affection and despised myself for every last drop.

I walked along the beach towards the bright lights and noisy chaos of the Palace Pier, where life had not stopped for Elodie. Against the gathering dark the pier shone gold, a gaudy ersatz sun. She’d always hated that pier, though she herself had only lived in Brighton for a few years, scarcely enough time to consider herself rooted. She hated the noise of it, the quaint seaside tackiness—bingo halls and funfairs and sticks of rock, a monument to an era which, she contended, ought to have died out with the new millennium. She used to say that Brighton was for artists and outcasts, and it didn’t seem to matter to her that she was neither of those things because she was so good at pretending to be; so good that even when she was dead, people talked about the “free spirit” she had been, as though there’d been any truth in it at all.

She played the part well. She would commit to no one, to nothing. Plan would supersede hazy, unrealised plan as though they had only ever been suggestions: I’ll move to New Zealand. I’ll learn sign language. I’ll open up my own bar. She flitted between jobs, subsisted off borrowed money, which she solemnly promised she would pay back someday. It was an adventure, she used to say, to never know, to be at the mercy of the future. Nobody else could make meandering through near-poverty sound quite so romantic.

Cold water engulfed my shoes, a sudden shock. I’d wandered off towards the incoming tide. Above me, the pier stretched out, consuming the sky. The sea lapped at my ankles. Alone in that empty, liminal space, waves hissing like blood in my ears, I heard a voice calling out from the darkness.

She’d leave me voicemails. She knew I had an aversion to talking on the phone, even to her. She knew I would switch my phone to “silent” overnight because I valued my sleep far more than I valued human interaction. Elodie was a forest fire, burning through men, consuming hearts and leaving them in ashes, but it was never about love, or sex. She was Narcissus, and she beheld her own reflection in the eyes of her lovers.

I called them her “letters”, as though it were an intimate correspondence, something we had both consented to. I told her I threw them away, “unread”. She smiled at the metaphor, at my compliance, and we never spoke of it again. She knew I was lying, but that was okay. I was so good at keeping her secrets.

More often than not, she’d be drunk when she called. The persona she had so carefully put together would lie tattered, her crisp accent slurred; all the things she hated, all the people who had disappointed her. All the lies she had told. With each letter I pieced her together until she was no longer a patchwork of wild stories and daydreams and wispy, far-off ambitions but something else entirely. Something sadder, smaller. Threadbare at the edges and bitter at the core. Still vibrant; she could be no other way.

I’d lie alone in the dark at 3 am listening to her messages over and over, revelling in her vulnerability. I’d run her entrails gently through my fingers, press my tongue against her raw, exposed skin. I’d savour the anger and loneliness in her voice, feel a warm thrill in my heart at every barely suppressed sob. She disgusted me. I adored her. She would not love me, but she gave herself to me all the same. I held the truth of her in the palm of my hand. At any moment I might have exposed her, shown all her acolytes what they were really worshipping. She gave me the means to destroy her and trusted that I would never do it. That’s all love is, when you strip it down to the bare bones. A loaded gun to the temple with someone else’s finger on the trigger.

The salt stung my nostrils, the rich smell of wet decay. Thick moss grew where the struts met the water, damp and glossy. The space beneath the pier stretched out before me like a long, lightless corridor, framed on either side by deepening dusk. She was out there, beneath the water. I heard her whispering in the dark, though she couldn’t have been; her lungs had been reservoirs, her mouth filled with sand. And yet it was her voice, her cadence. I’d listened to her messages enough times that I remembered entire monologues by heart, could quote her the way other people quoted beloved films.

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and laid it on the shingle. Peeled off my shoes and placed them beside it. The pebbles were cold, wet with brine. She’d filled her pockets with stones. Walked out into the water. She’d died alone. She’d died without telling me.

The sea swallowed my ankles, tugging at the hems of my jeans. I walked into the incoming tide, and though the sharp chill gnawed at my skin, my bones, I felt the rhythm of her words like a pulse. Like sonar, rising to meet me as I turned to face the empty beach, sinking back into the sea. Cold water rushed to embrace me. I let it take my weight, cradling my skull, gentle as a lover. Filling my mouth and ears so that I might taste her, so that I might hear her. Her words carried on the current as clear and as eerie as whale song. Her voice in the water. Elodie’s last letter.

Eight days before she died Elodie and I went to a club, because a band she loved was playing, and because she didn’t want to go alone. I stood at the bar and watched her dance, though I hated the music: lo-fi indie bullshit, guitars scrawling out derivative riffs, narcoleptic vocals. I watched her pick her victim. He was tall and pretty, like they always were: long blond hair, a sick-skinny boy in tight jeans and pristine white T-shirt. She smiled like a sunrise, radiant. She leaned up and whispered in his ear, pressing her body just so against his so that there could be no ambiguity, but her coy smile was a play to his ego. She liked to let them believe they were in control.

I downed vodka tonics until the dancers began to blend into one another, an amorphous mass of arms and blissed-out faces moving ceaselessly. I drank until I couldn’t see Elodie anymore and so it didn’t matter when she disappeared, inevitably, her prize in tow. Always his place; nobody was allowed inside her flat, not even in the name of conquest. I drank until I could barely string a thought together so I wouldn’t picture them, so that the images (skin against skin, limbs sinuous, his eyes pale and glassy and her face, there, in the black of his pupils) would be lost in a sea of drunken non sequiturs. So that they couldn’t hurt me.

When the lights came up, I staggered out into the cold blue dawn, and the streets were full of us: the dishevelled and the desolate, grey-faced, haunting the seafront. Avoiding one another’s empty gazes as we navigated the slow crash of the comedown.

(I saw her flat for the first time a few days after she died. I asked the landlord for the spare keys. I stood in the doorway holding an empty suitcase, watching dust motes dance in the sunlight. There was a mattress on the floor, a holdall with clothes in. Nothing else. No signs of a life. As though she had only ever been visiting.)

There was a message from her when I woke up. The sun was high and bright, like a pickaxe to the skull. I crawled to the bathroom, pressed my face against the cool tiles. I lay there until the rotten-tooth throb of my head began to subside. I felt empty. Her voice echoed in the small space, omnipresent.