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

“What would you say about getting you moving a little this weekend?” Casey asked, not for the first time. “Not far. Just to the end of the driveway.”

“And back ,” Mom said, as if that was the deal-breaker. She put on her sceptical face, like: Why don’t you just ask me to climb Mount Everest? “And you’d expect the same thing tomorrow, I suppose?”

“Probably.”

From sceptical to dismissive, in one practised swipe. “Pssh. Are you trying to turn me into a crazy person like you? No thanks.” And, just as quickly, from dismissive to omniscient. “With that ring off your finger and you back on the market, maybe you’ll finally admit I was right all along. I kept telling you, ’til I was blue in the face, men don’t like girls who are muscly.”

You couldn’t get too irritated with her, not when that tremor in her jaw was getting worse.

“Mom. That isn’t what happens ninety-nine per cent of the time.” And if it did, then, yes, actually there were men who went for that sort of look. Not a thing Mom would ever let herself understand. “Most women don’t get big muscles. We mostly get really fit-looking.”

“Pssh. I never had to put myself through that. It came naturally to me. I didn’t have to work at it. I just had to be . I used to be pretty. As pretty as you.”

Prettier , she figured her mother was thinking, but for the moment her diplomacy gyroscope was operational. Until it wasn’t. What a difference eight seconds could make.

Start loop.

Mom stared at her as if they hadn’t seen each other for years, and what the hell happened, anyway.

“ You used to be so pretty,” she said.

End loop. Running tally, nineteen.

She’d added a new one to the playlist in the past months. It would usually take her awhile to get to it, something she held in reserve for later.

“I’m at that age where I don’t know why I’m alive anymore,” she said. “I wish I wasn’t.”

It would’ve been callous to tell her that a lot of people felt the same, and it didn’t take all those birthdays to bring it on. Purpose could abandon you at any age. You were never too young for the future to look meaningless. But maybe after a certain point in life this outlook was a guarantee. You crossed it like a finish line that was nothing of the sort, a cruel hoax, because there was so much left to go. So Casey said nothing.

“I wish a heart attack or a stroke would come along and finish me off. I go to bed and pray for that every night. God never answers.”

The good news was he was bound to eventually. She couldn’t say that either.

Now, though, finally, something new: “You could help me. Would you help me? Just get me some pills. They won’t give them to me anymore, not the good kind. All the doctors around here know me from when…”

She didn’t finish. She didn’t have to.

“I’m not getting you pills, Mom.”

“I could tell you what to say. It would be easy for you. You were always a good liar anyway, it came so natural you hardly had to put your mind to it.”

“Mom! I am not getting you pills! If you were to do something bad with them, they’re going to know somebody else had to bring them to you. Who do you think the first person they’re going to come looking for is?”

Her mother sat a little straighter and swapped faces again: the poor-me face.

“Isn’t that just typical,” she said. “Never thinking about anybody but yourself.”

Her old bike was still in the garage and the hand-pump still on a shelf, and for now the tyres held air, so she went for it. The last thing that mattered was how silly she felt, a middle-aged woman astride a dorky-looking relic from another era, painted a mauve that only a teenage girl could love. Ten minutes of good, hard riding—that’s all she asked of it.

Maybe fifteen.

Twenty, tops.

The reasons why could change but the therapeutics didn’t, and if a lady didn’t sweat, then let it be known—she was no lady.

She whizzed along the streets of her childhood, then the roads of her youth, the old byways along the edges of town where she and her friends had learned to drink and smoke and barf and fumble under one another’s clothes. Most of it looked remarkably unchanged, as if she might round one of the more dangerous curves and collide with an old ghost, stuck in the amber of time.

Here , where a carful of friends she’d almost joined had steered into a massive oak that had become known as Dead Man’s Tree.

Here , where she’d met to engage in single combat with another girl over some slight that seemed gargantuan at the time, both of them backed by teams of jeering friends, and prevailed, because only one of them had a father who’d taught her how to fight.

Here , the turnoff to the cemetery where young immortals once gathered to look at the night sky and confess their worst fears, how maybe they weren’t immortal after all.

It was early November but she’d worked up a sweat worthy of August when the front tyre gave out. Maybe this was it, the real reason she drove herself so hard. She’d always thought it was the most direct thing she could do to not be like her mother, but maybe the truth was more fundamental than that.

When the time came, this was how she wanted to go: like a tyre blowing out. No lingering, no hobbling, no complaining and no warning… just whup-whup-whup over to the side of the road.

Mid-November was peak rut season and the highway all the worse for it—that much bloodier, that much chunkier. That much more relentless striving for life jumping straight to the messy end. Casey navigated the carnage and considered it a small victory that she didn’t add to it, as she again looped back to where she had begun and hit Play one more time.

“How’s David doing?”

“He’s fine. He found a co-worker he really, really likes. They’re spending a lot of time together, so I don’t see him as much.”

And at home, the old home, the once-and-dear-god-please-not-future home, the fourteenth occurrence of some variant of this: The young woman from the home care agency was in, not one of Natalia’s usual days. She’d swapped Thursday for Saturday because of a paediatrician appointment. But one day was about as good as another when $22 an hour was buying you all the shopping, cooking, cleaning, and light nursing needed to keep you living at home.

Which made today floor day, but as soon as Natalia made some quip about mopping away the scuffs from all the dancing, Casey knew it was a terrible mistake.

“Did you hear that?” her mother said. “Do you hear how she talks to me?”

“It was just a joke, Mom. It sounded pretty light-hearted to me.”

Now came the face of wrath and condemnation. “Pay attention, clean your ears out if you can’t hear any better than that. She talks that way to me all the time. I’m supposed to sit here and take it? No ma’am. I won’t.”

Mom looked to make sure there was no eavesdropping going on, and switched to her conspirators face.

“You tell her to not come back. You’ll have to find somebody else. What kind of home did she come from? We brought you up better than that.”

“We’re not firing another one, Mom. Not for a harmless joke. If you keep this up you’re going to end up on a blacklist, and you won’t be able to get anybody in.”

The funny thing? Casey didn’t mind this one. Instead of being wearying, it was… validating. Every so often something like this popped up, another saving grace about being here, that reframed more of the past and put it into a context that made a reconfigured sense.