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

“They seem very capable. It’s a real shame you can’t hang around for a bit so I can pick your brain, but—”

“My flight leaves tonight,” I tell him. Saying such words brings on a spasm of terror every single time. It’s tempting fate, surely. This is where he says I’ve changed my mind. But no. He doesn’t. He nods.

“Very exciting,” he says. I can tell from his face that he thinks he’s got the best deal here. I’m the fool who sold a goldmine to get away from a beautiful place. Surely there can’t be any place in the world as wonderful as this.

“The best thing about living here is the sea,” says my mother.

“There’s sea in other places,” I hear myself saying, ridiculously. “Seventy per cent of the world is water.”

“It’s not the same.”

She’s been positioned next to the window that looks out over the harbour. Her favourite spot. A crocheted blanket has been tucked around her knees by one of the workers. I feel grateful for their ongoing care of her, and their sympathetic looks on the bad days, but today is a good day.

“You’re right,” I say. “It’s not the same.”

Is it even worth saying goodbye, when she won’t remember it? Maybe she will. I have constructed versions of her, leading up to this moment. There is a version that calls out my name every night, and one of the workers phones my mobile and tells me I have to return. And there is a version that forgets me as soon as I’m gone, sits peaceably in this spot, and looks blankly at me if I ever return. I honestly don’t know which version I’d prefer.

“You look like that lady,” she says.

So it’s not such a good day, after all.

“Which one, Mum?”

“The one on the rocks that time.”

“When?”

She can’t answer this. I shouldn’t have asked the question. She moves her head from side to side, searching, and then returns her vision to the view.

I could ask—was it by the cliffs? What was the woman wearing?

In truth, I don’t know if the story follows me, or if I search it out. It’s like the fear of the dark I developed after the nightmares started. At first, a small bedside light kept it at bay. Then it wasn’t enough. I needed the overhead light on, to try to banish all shadows, and what might lurk in them. Then the dark was a strip of black, under the door, ready to creep in if I let it. I had my eyes fixed on it every night until sleep overcame me.

Once you are afraid of something, you see it, for just a moment, every time you close your eyes. You hear the echo of it between each breath.

I said goodbye in the end, and she looked confused and shook her head. But she did not make a fuss, and now it’s done, and the last thing before I take a taxi to the train station is a slow walk up the cliffs to look out over a view from a vantage point I’ve not dared to visit since I was a child.

It’s approaching sunset, and it’s going to be an unspectacular one, not worthy of a picture postcard; the clouds are low on the horizon, and the sea is choppy. There’s a light, stinging rain starting up. The tide is coming in. It roars and crashes below, and then gathers itself back for another assault upon the rocks.

I take the path that only locals use, skirting around the gorse bushes to stick close to the crumbling edge. I refuse to lift my eyes from my feet; I will not look over the edge. Not until I’m ready. I’ll know when I’m ready.

I wondered if I would know the spot, but a voice inside me tells me when to stop walking. I’ve arrived. I will see it. If I dare to look over the edge, it will be there.

I blink. I breathe.

The line of rocks stretches out to sea, and the tide is rushing in fast, churning and writhing around the peaks. The rain is intensifying; it is hard and cold against my face. It makes it difficult to see, and I have to stand there for a long time before I’m certain.

There’s nobody down there.

No man, no woman. No little girl. No apparition, no mermaid, no creature of the deep. No ghost, no spirit.

No orange coat.

It was never waiting for me in this place. And that means I cannot leave it, and my fear of it, behind.

Will I find it on the other side of the world? It might not be set on a cliff top, or hinge on the threat of a relentless tide. It might have replaced the police or the coastguard with other officials, or done away with the dog barking at the waves. But it will manifest again.

Wherever I go, I’ll take it with me.

Today Mr Haringa was wearing a scarlet waistcoat with gold trim and gold buttons under his usual tweed jacket and over his usual shirt and tie. A gold watch chain looped out of the waistcoat’s right pocket, through which the outline of a large pocket watch was visible. While Mr Haringa was required to dress professionally, as were all staff and students at Quinsigamond Academy, he did so without the irony and even mockery evident in the wardrobe choices of many students and not a few of his colleagues: cartoon-character ties, movie-print blouses, black Doc Martens. His jackets and trousers were in dark, muted colours, his white button-down shirts equally unassuming, and his half-Windsor-knotted ties tended to blue and forest-green tartans. If he added a sweater vest to the day’s ensemble, which he did as fall crisped and stripped the leaves of the school’s oaks, then that garment matched the day’s colour scheme. “It’s like he likes dressing this way,” the occasional student muttered, and though delivered disparagingly, the remark sounded fundamentally accurate.

For Mr Haringa to appear in so extravagant, so ornate an article of clothing was worthy of commentary from the majority of the student body and a significant minority of his fellow teachers; although the conversation only circled, and did not veer toward, him. Aside from the scarlet-and-gold waistcoat, whose material had the dull shine of age, Mr Haringa behaved in typical fashion, returning essays crowded with stringent corrections and unsparing comments, lecturing on the connection between Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Robert Bloch’s “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” to his two morning sections, and discussing the possible impact of Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer on Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” with the first of his afternoon classes. By his second class, the change in his attire had receded in the students’ notice.

A few in the final session wondered if the waistcoat was related to that date on the course syllabus, which had been left uncharacteristically blank. They had completed two weeks of exhaustive analysis of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness , during which they had lingered at each stop on Marlow’s journey into the interior of the African continent to meet the elusive and terrible Kurtz, examining sentences, symbols, and allusions with the care of naturalists cataloguing a biosphere. Ahead lay a selection of Yeats’s poetry, including “Second Coming,” which several students had mentioned they knew already but which Mr Haringa assured them they did not. This afternoon, however, was a white space, unmapped terrain. As the rest of the syllabus was a study in meticulous planning, it seemed impossible for the gap to be anything other than intentional.

When Mr Haringa entered the room, he strode to the desk, removed his jacket and hung it on the back of his chair, loosened the knot of his tie, pulled it from his neck, draped it over the jacket, and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt. Had he appeared stark naked, the students could not have been more shocked. He extracted the pocket watch from the waistcoat and opened it. Although gold, or gold-plated, its surface was scratched and dented. With his left hand, he gave the crown a succession of quick turns. Roused to life, the timepiece emitted a loud, sharp ticking. Watch in hand, Mr Haringa said, “Anyone who wants to leave is free to do so. For next class, please be sure to read ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and be prepared to discuss it.”