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

Pearl stands on the half-landing. Her face is open, her mouth a soft questioning O . Anna seizes her daughter in her arms, throws open the front door and they are out. It feels like a single smooth movement. The world is rendered in the sheerest clarity, the edges of everything are apparent. They are held by the night.

Anna runs, stumbling, dialling with her thumb. She does not stop until she reaches the moonlit rise of the hill. She speaks into the phone. Yes, no , gives directions for how to get there from the highway, It’s ok, we’re outside . She is impressed by how calm she sounds. Below, the house is lit, windows blazing in the dark.

She ends the call. Her foot crunches on something. A can. It could have come from anywhere. But an image comes to Anna now, of the boy standing in the night, watching, drinking soda in the long wait. She looks at the house, at the room where she sat minutes ago. The books, the green wing chair. A fragile world in a bright box. She feels sick.

A shadow moves at the corner of the brightly lit living room. A slight, dark curve by the curtains. A head. He is crouching by the window, trying to keep out of sight, looking into the night. Looking for them. Anna laughs a little to herself. She was never great at science, but she knows you can’t see out of a lit window into the dark.

The lights go out. The house vanishes, black into black.

Timeless fear pours into her. She thinks for the first time that there might be others. How did he come here? There is no sign of a car. Breathe , she tells herself.

“Get on my shoulders, Pearl,” she says. “Up you come. Pony ride.” Small, hot palms on her neck. Pearl’s silence is wrong too. Pearl is never quiet. She seizes her daughter’s legs where they hang over her shoulders and runs.

The forest is full of night whistles and petrichor leaks from the earth. As Anna runs she pants, looks behind her at intervals. She feels beasts and old things trotting beside her in the shadows of the trees.

The gas station is a mile distant, off the highway. The man there is tall, quiet. He gives Pearl a juice box even though they have no money. He lets them wait for the police in the back room. He lets them watch his little TV. There is nothing playing this time of night but a biography of a Prime Minister. The man closes the front and sits with them. Either he feels sorry for them or he does not want to leave them alone in his shop.

“She’s a good girl,” he says, nodding at Pearl, who kicks her legs. There are twigs in her dark hair. Anna begins to pick them out.

Red and blue light flares on the glass. The eerie squawk of a siren.

The policeman is the most exhausted person Anna has ever seen. He is composed of a series of pouches: under his eyes, around his mouth, about his midriff. There is no one at the house, the officer says. He searched. He found the saucepan in the kitchen, leaking a bay of brown milk across the floor. There was no blood. No sign of forced entry. Most of the windows were open, the front door swinging gently in the night air. No trace of a vehicle. No trace of anyone for miles about. Where could he be, or have gone? What more was there to be done?

Anna says, “I can’t take my daughter back to that house unless you find him.”

The tired policeman says, “You should get a dog. They’re good company if you live alone.”

She sees what is happening with the slow grace of a nightmare. “Listen,” she says. “He was in the house. He went into my little girl’s room. He tried to hit me with an iron bar. Pearl saw him, I saw him…”

“I wouldn’t tell her scary stories before bed either,” says the policeman. He mops his forehead with his handkerchief. The hot night is not kind to him. “Children imagine things.” She hears what he leaves unspoken. Women and children. He asks her what medication she is taking. She tells the truth and sees his face harden to certainty.

“I didn’t imagine it.” The pitch of her voice rises. She sounds like Pearl denied a story. “Is there someone else I can speak to?”

The policeman shrugs. “Come to town in the morning.” He rubs his face hard, leaving a flaming trail on his cheek. “Take you home,” he says. “Been a long day for all of us.”

Back at the house thin greenish dawn is leaking into the east.

“Bed, now,” she says to Pearl.

Pearl yawns and rolls her new fire engine across the coverlet. “ Brrrrrm ,” she says. The man at the gas station gave it to her. Anna was flustered by his kindness.

“If you have trouble,” he said as she got into the police car, “you call me. Here’s the number. I’m closer than they are. Get there faster.” In his eyes she saw weary acceptance. He knows that the law is only for some. She despises him for his weakness, she is grateful for the offer.

Her eyes have the grainy, burning feeling that comes of no sleep. Her body is toxic; the chemicals of high alert swill uneasily around, riding in her blood.

Pearl broom-brooms the fire engine over the coverlet.

“The bad boy won’t come back,” Anna says. “He’s gone.”

Pearl gazes at her truck with loving, unfocused eyes.

“Do you want anything?” Anna stops herself from asking, “ Hot chocolate? ”

Pearl shakes her head and yawns. She will sleep soon.

Anna goes downstairs. She mops the kitchen floor. Then she puts the pan back on the stove. She makes more chocolate, steaming and hot. She puts three heaped tablespoons of sugar in it. Then she brews coffee thick as syrup. She adds the coffee to the hot chocolate. She takes the whiskey bottle from the shelf.

She sits in the green wing chair in the dawn. This was Ma’s favourite chair, of course. How had she forgotten that? Anna thinks of the long nights her mother watched as she slept upstairs. How alone she must have felt.

Anna drinks. Her eyes water at the fumes. The alcohol, sugar and caffeine are good. She needs something more. She gets pills from her handbag and crushes two under a saucer. They make the coffee mouth-numbing.

We will leave here , she promises Pearl silently. Perhaps it will not follow us . But she knows in her heart that what’s done is done.

She hears the rustle in the wisteria outside. Morning birds explode into the air in the wake of something’s passage.

When Anna looks it is there, in the grey light beyond the window. It wears her mother’s face, eyes sewn shut for the grave. Ma’s nightdress flutters about its chalky ankles. The reekling sways, sensing Anna. The blind head seeks her, yearning. Its dead lips stretch to show yellow teeth.

Anna comes close to the glass. “You may not come in,” she whispers. Her breath leaves white clouds on the pane. “I guard this house.”

Eamon saw the bronzed man as soon as they arrived at Casa del Sol. Laden with luggage and shepherding two toddlers on Trunki Ride-On suitcases away from the ornamental fountain and toward the entrance, he could see the man leaning against the railings of the uppermost balcony, watching the new arrivals with apparent interest. He was shirtless, thin and wizened, the colour of Hawaiian Tropic. Eamon followed the stream of holidaymakers into the foyer, pausing at the entrance just long enough for the twins to wave goodbye to the coach and the holiday rep who’d accompanied them for the brief journey from the airport and whose only job had appeared to be apprising them of the temperature: 36 degrees, set to rise. It certainly felt hot, hotter still as Eamon passed beneath the bronzed man’s gaze and into the welcome relief of the air-conditioned foyer.