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

After we had walked the distance of a block, I noticed that, while it was not a very late hour, our entire neighbourhood had fallen into a most peculiar silence. All the streets were empty, yet behind the façades of the homes we passed there were no muffled sounds of stereos or televisions or even children at play indoors. As we stepped from one corner to the next as if from one ice floe to another, I would sometimes look up from this bobbing, incessantly restless hobgoblin of a figure to the darkened fronts of the houses falling behind us on either side. I could see no watchful eyes peering out, no hands or faces pressed to glass, neither openly nor covertly. There was not so much as the whisper of another living soul, and the quality of the silence was unusual; it was that special, tucked-in silence that is ordinarily experienced only during heavy, blanketing snowfalls. Though the air was cold and crisp, there was no snow, and the only sounds to be heard were those of our footsteps, mine trailing those in front, and the lively murmur of a soliloquy in a language unknown to me.

Before I knew it, we arrived at our destination. It was numbered 969, I took no note of the street. It was one of those apartment buildings composed of four residences, two on each floor, each side mirroring the other. There was a piece of ornamental stone framed in brick above the main entrance, inscribed with a woman’s name. Someone beloved by the architect, I imagined. As I write these words, I very much doubt I could ever find my way back there, wherever it was, though it could not be more than a five-minute walk from my own home. My neighbourhood is rife with buildings just like it.

My charge scurried ahead of me, pushing through the building’s front door. I hurried in pursuit, feeling my responsibility, and trailed a happily chattering voice to the second floor, where I found an open door, numbered 3. It offered ingress to an apartment with another bright-yellow interior. It had green wall-to-wall carpeting like the blades of a well-manicured lawn and no furnishing other than a single wooden chair, into which I sank—as I say—with intuition.

Once I had time to settle, the figure then solemnly, respectfully, removed from the violin case a stringed instrument of indescribable beauty, of such exquisite refinement and delicacy that its wooden parts were wholly translucent, as clear as glass. Even so, it was unquestionably made of wood, albeit wood curbed to the will of an inconceivable level of high craftsmanship.

Without removing its hood, the migrant raised the butt of the instrument and nestled it shoulder-wise under the clamp of a chin, a golden cleft and sacred chin, the only aspect of identity made available to my sight. Fingers of similar hue curled around the strings of its neck and then—gently, tentatively—the other hand lowered a magnificent bow to hover just above them. From my close vantage, I could see that the instrument was strung with four taut filaments of subtly different colours. They seemed to ripple up and down their full length as though they contained the rapids of a great river, alive with untapped sound even before they were touched.

My squat charge held this intent, disciplined, tentative pose for so long that I began to wonder if the divine instrument might produce its music somehow other than by direct contact—if it had to come about through some more inscrutable form of conductivity. Its celestial makeup did seem to argue against the involvement of anything so coarse as the frenzied scratching of horsehair upon catgut, however skilled, however impassioned might be the bow’s guiding hand.

Then, as if zooming inward from the outer reaches of my suspense, the figure suddenly upraised its bow and struck, with violence and panache, a galvanizing pose. From that pose arose a single note—and from that note radiated each of the world’s wonders, and from the next its horrors; in the summoned melody could be experienced each of the world’s defining revolutions, each of the world’s enlarging calculations, its decapitations and abominations, each of the world’s great declarations of love—each and every god-damned eureka—all symmetrically ordered and then fanned and arrayed as in a peacock’s tail, a gleaming spectrum of refulgent miracles, shames and intrigues. I found my senses dialling into them, my spinning form that of a weightless cosmonaut, visiting, inhabiting, becoming each place, each moment, each instance, each shaded evil and proud passion with perfect attenuation and detachment. I could stop wherever I chose.

Somewhere between the Taj Mahal and the Great Pyramid of Giza, I disentangled myself from the cartwheeling of the Khajuraho Monuments in Madhya Pradesh to find myself once again walking along Locust Lane. Each step, I knew, was taking me farther away from a feeling of wanting to remain, but I could not help but move forward. Had I turned on my heel, I knew there would be no finding my way back— which would only condemn me to a greater loss. This fate had been woven into my opportunity, and the point of it all was not what had happened, or where, or even with whom, but what still lay ahead.

There was a notable difference in the feeling of my homeward journey. The crystalline chill in the night air began to subside, the cloud now lifting. Here and there I could hear the muffled sounds of courtroom testimonies and criminal investigations being played out on different televisions tuned to different channels. I saw hands and faces pressed to glass, observing me in transit. I saw fear. I saw impatience. I saw the cold sweat of envy.

My jacket was beginning to feel a bit too warm, so I took it off and draped it through the handle of my arm, my hand sunk deep in my pants pocket. A shiver of sense memory, like a feeling of exposure, caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up.

I turned and saw the vague outline of a man, watching me intently and curiously as I made my way home. He stood with one foot inside his house, the other planted on his porch. Honouria ran through his legs onto the porch, her back arching and bristling at the receding sight of me.

After I had moved some distance beyond the streetlamp, I looked back once again and found that page had turned.

It was somewhere between the tenth and twentieth heap of roadkill Casey passed that the irony of their demises declared itself to her. These heaps of meat and smears of blood were white-tailed deer, mostly, and deer most obviously. It was early November, the start of rut season, and they were on the move and on the make, so desperate to propagate the species they forgot to look both ways before crossing the street.

Did their mothers not teach them, or did they just not listen?

Simmer down, boys. I know what drives you. I know it’s all you can think about right now. It drove your father too, the horny old rogue. But take a little care, for buck’s sakes. You have to watch yourselves on these hard grey rivers. A little pause here and there isn’t going to hurt anything. You’ll be haunches-deep in some nice perky doe soon enough, but not if you’re a big splattered tangle of antlers and legs and—oh, god, not again, I can’t keep watching this happen.

They were distributed in wide clusters, bunched in the crossing regions where the woods and the lonelier fields edged close to the interstate. A few nauseating miles as messy as a deregulated slaughterhouse, then nothing for a long while, and then she’d be back in another kill zone.

It weighed on a person. It grew nerve-wracking. It made her more watchful, not a bad thing in itself, but driving a few hundred miles under that level of tension was exhausting. Things would be exhausting enough once she got there.