The Year's Best Horror Stories 15 Part 15

"Denny, you can't blame yourself for what happened to that girl at work," Sarah said. "You weren't even with her the night it happened, you couldn't possibly have saved her."

She s.h.i.+vered in the semi-darkness of the room.

"You're right about the city, though. You can only pray it doesn't happen to you.

"Now, c'mere."

She pulled him toward her, burying his face into her blonde hair.

"You know," Ca.s.sady spoke into Sarah's b.r.e.a.s.t.s. "I'm not like the others ... like that old bag Spinoza next door.

"I'm not afraid of the streets."

"n.o.body said you were, Denny," Sarah said, slowly rocking him back and forth in her arms. "C'mon. I'll make you a drink."

She stood up, ruffling Ca.s.sady's hair as if he were a child's plaything, and walked across the room to the small bar that stood against the wall. There were only two bottles on the shelf: a full bottle of Seagram's and a half-empty fifth of DuBouchett's Blackberry Brandy, for when Sarah's father came by to see how his little girl was doing on her own.

"I'm ... not sure why you told me these things, Denny," Sarah repeated. "But, don't blame yourself. Believe me."

"You're right." Ca.s.sady's voice was like a metronome. "Life's too short."

He covered his eyes with his hands again. Without stopping, he told Sarah about the October night on the E1 platform, about being a spectator to death. In his head he was singing (making love in a rock bed) Sarah spilled much of the bottle's contents on the counter.

(beneath the subway tracks with you) Ca.s.sady slowly took his hands from his face. Without stopping, he let the knife drop into Sarah Dunleavy's back. Much of her blood spilled onto the counter.

(my brown-eyed girl) The next several hours were a nightmarish blur. Conspiracy blended with paranoia, enveloping Ca.s.sady the moment he left Sarah's apartment. His face was no longer familiar; he was wearing the same type of mask that all the other faces were wearing. Every day of their stinking lives. The cops wouldn't even question his motive; they would nod their heads in agreement and maybe even buy him a beer after he told them the reason he killed the love of his life SarahSarahSarahhhhh He grabbed a too-inquisitive squirrel and squeezed its steaming guts onto the dying gra.s.s as if the rodent was toothpaste. Squirrel-honey, your gums are bleeding because of gingivitis, you dumbs.h.i.+t. Better use Colgate. Ha! He named the squirrel Binky. R.I.P., Binky old buddy. Hasti Spumanti.

It was a Bad Day at Black Rock, all right. First Sarah and her incessant whining over his looks and that stupid laugh that sounded like a freaking air hose! And the rain was making the deads.p.a.ce in his right bicep throb as if the muscle was still there. f.u.c.king doctors, eight years ago said it'd be all right. Yea, all the interns at the Osteopathic Hospital were aware of his case, nodding their heads in agreement, saying the muscle would be back in the next six months. Liars! Didn't they realize muscles are what girls wanted? They were too busy making their six-figure incomes anyway ...

Ca.s.sady bought a pint of Seagram's, downed it while crossing a public park, and threw the empty bottle with all his might. He clapped in glee when the bottle smashed against the wall of a recreation center, shattering the gang graffiti and lovers' initials.

He ran screaming down a deserted midnight street. No one looked out their windows, and, knowing this, Ca.s.sady smiled broadly and winked at the clouds above.

He shared secrets with the drainage ditches.

Somehow finding his way uptown to Sheridan, Ca.s.sady raced madly for the E1 tracks intersecting the street at Loyola. He fell down, chipping a front tooth. Swinging a ragged fist, he mouthed b.l.o.o.d.y epithets at several singing winos behind the ruins of the Grenada theater.

He had to get to the train. Pull a train. The train of thought. He had lost his train of thought. Hey, where did we go, days when the rain came? All along the waterfall with you, my brown-eyed girl. On Slate Street that grate street I saw a man he dry humped his wife a Chicano made moan sound Ha! I saw a man he danced with a knife in Chicago oh please come to Boston in the springtime ... the train! It was coming he could make it (underneath the subway tracks with you).

(my brown-eyed girl).

the train. A giant, throbbing p.e.n.i.s that screwed Ca.s.sady every time he took its sterile ride for a job interview. Or for a pick up.

The turnstile of the Loyola station wavered in front of him, a gateway to truth, an upright skeleton of a dead centipede. Glazed with ice, it blazed like neon blue in Ca.s.sady's brain.

He found the needed energy to run toward it, making the distance easily in seven long strides. But the bars moved clockwise, providing an exit for the commuters inside. It was not intended to be an entrance. The bars did not budge and Ca.s.sady was beyond hearing his nose crack. His lips curled in a snarl and his teeth touched the frozen metal.

He stepped back, lunging forward three more times, each time harder than the previous, stopping only when a triangular swatch of his cheek was ripped from his face. A bone shard, fingernail-thin and red in the night, peeked through Ca.s.sady's right eyelid like a sentry. Scouting a new way to get into the fortress.

He left the turnstile, then. Stumbling toward the closed gla.s.s doors. Flecks of his face trailed behind.

The door was locked. He did not hesitate, and by cras.h.i.+ng through it, gouged his already blinded eye. When he hit the ground, something broke deep inside him, making a pulpy sound, perhaps that of crus.h.i.+ng grapes for wine.

His legs made mock parodies of each other as he fell forward along the concrete floor. Muttering incoherent thankyous that it was too late for a teller to be on duty, Ca.s.sady crawled up the iced stairs, ten, twenty, thirty leading upward into a mist. Darkness clutched at his one remaining eyelid.

When he heard the quiet rumble of the approaching train, not realizing that the Loyola terminal was closed for repairs, he finally relaxed.

He cried as the train went by, a thunderous blur of winos and late-night partyers, none so much as noticing his outstretched, supplicating arms.

He cried louder, in great sobs spewed from his throat like vomit. Then he saw the man, so much like him, dragging his body away from Ca.s.sady as if Ca.s.sady himself was some kind of psycho pariah. Or was that messiah?

The similar man undid the b.u.t.tons on his s.h.i.+rt in painful slowness. Would anybody care if Ca.s.sady did kill himself, like he knew the other man was going to do? He was sure his parents didn't even know he was living in Chicago. The last time he had written them, years before, he had told them he was working for the government. Would his face be in the paper? Pull a train, pull the cord tighter tighter honey honey sugar sugar yummy yummy. My brown-eyed girl.

Tying the knot was easier than he had expected, even with the skin peeling off his fingers in the pre-dawn cold.

The other man, now nothing more than a shadow, climbed on top of the salt box next to the stairwell. He waited for Ca.s.sady to decide. So, it was going to be a game of chicken! Ca.s.sady would show them all!

The other man, now just a mist, painstakingly tied one s.h.i.+rt sleeve around his tired neck.

And on a bl.u.s.tery night in early November, long after the Night Owl train was lost in the distance of the skyline, Dennis Ca.s.sady watched with numb fascination as a crazy man hung himself with the remains of his blood spattered s.h.i.+rt. He was afraid to make a move.

THE FOGGY, FOGGY DEW.

by Joel Lane.

Joel Lane is one of the youngest writers to appear in The Year's Best Horror Stories, and it's nice to see that there's no danger the breed is dying out. Lane was born in Exeter in 1963, grew up in Birmingham, and is presently at Cambridge, where he obtained a B.A. in History and Philosophy of Science and has now started research in the same subject. He has published poetry in Argo, Oxford Poetry, and elsewhere, and his stories have appeared in Dark Horizons and Dark Dreams. He has also written a critical essay on Ramsey Campbell for Foundation.

"The Foggy, Foggy Dew" was published as a small press booklet (accompanied by a short poem) and suggests that Joel Lane will shortly be as popular with the Birmingham tourist industry as Ramsey Campbell must be with Liverpool's-a.s.suming such exists.

The gray van which stopped in front of the office carried no legend to correspond to the words...o...b..IEN INDUSTRIAL SERVICES printed in gray on the locked office door. As the eight people who had been waiting on the pavement gathered by the van, a short man in a cheap blue suit emerged from its front. He ticked their names on a list. "Right, can you get in the back?" They climbed awkwardly onto the wooden benches that flanked the body of the van, on opposite sides of a heap of canvas-covered boxes. The benches were dusty; someone coughed. The drizzle made a subdued insect-sound on the low roof. The van shuddered into activity; its interior was paler than the exterior, a discolored white, and enough light connected the windscreen with the blurred pane in the back door for the pa.s.sengers to see one another. Outside, the rain filled in the remaining pale s.p.a.ces on the pavement.

The young man seated opposite Daniel shrugged his raincoat up above his head and pulled it forward, reversing the sleeves, until he was free of its shadow. The gloom diminished his face, sharpening its familiarity. But even when, a few minutes later, the other offered Daniel a cigarette and he saw the long, tapering fingers, he could not convince himself of the recognition. Too much of the past was at stake for him not to hesitate. But as the journey continued, Daniel suspected that the other was watching him in a similar manner. Ahead, the windscreen blinked repeatedly at the gauze of rain.

The van stopped in a car park somewhere to the north of Birmingham. It released them halfway up a slope; uphill a line of factory buildings were being repaired or demolished, and in the creases of the valley a slick road twisted like a ribbon of metal. There were no houses in sight; a new industrial estate was taking shape on the ground of an older one. Large open patches displayed only flattened mounds of brick and steel, flecked with clumps of purple-flowering weed; only rain and the eye lent them perpendicular structures. Where the road dissolved in mist, three black chimneys were stubbed out against the sky. One was broken in half, presenting a scalpel's profile. Inside the factory it was dry, which made the air seem colder. A corridor opened onto rooms housing nothing but unfinished monsters of scaffolding. Radios competed with machinery. The vast concrete-floored warehouse in which the eight workers found themselves was contrastingly still and quiet. Tiers of metal shelves, beginning some eight feet off the ground, formed dust-skinned ranks that were confusingly repet.i.tive in the half-light. Daniel remembered how the public library had seemed to him as a child; being empty made these shelves even harder to distinguish.

Throughout the morning they swept the dust on the floor into ridges like Braille, then into mounds. It was so light and dry that the brooms raised little gray clouds whose outlines settled on the concrete. Apart from an occasional cough or sneeze, the only sound was the insectile rustle of the brooms. When they swept fine wet sand back over the same ground, the concrete began to reflect a thin light. The mounds were shoveled into wheelbarrows. The faint antiseptic smell of the cleaning sand drifted ambiguously over the original metallic odor. Someone in a white overall pushed a trolley along the dim aisle.

Daniel held a huge plastic mug of oversweetened tea between his grimy hands. He scrutinized the vague figure seated beside him by the wall. Had he seen it hunched over a desk? The figure shook with a violent sneeze; spilled tea played a bar on the floor. The man turned around. "Have you got a light?" he asked, then stared. "h.e.l.lo, Danny."

"Peter-I thought I recognized you." Suddenly he could recall clearly the image that had suggested itself: the boy of fourteen, face calm, eyes unreachable as he leaned over the piano keys. Six years ago Peter's father had died, and Peter and his mother had moved away to another district; they had lost touch after that. "What a coincidence. How are you?"

Peter's reply disintegrated into a violent fit of sneezing. He put his hand to his face; it came away discolored with blood. "Oh, Jesus." He fumbled into his pockets. "Have you got a handkerchief? Thanks." He leaned back, pressing Daniel's handkerchief into his face. "Sorry about this ... just this ... dust," he said nasally.

That afternoon Daniel and Peter used a mobile scaffolding frame to clean the lower tier of shelves in each row, taking it in turns to push the frame along. From time to time they whipped the bars with their dusters, creating sudden negative-image flowers in the air. As each gray keyboard of metal followed the last, Daniel felt more distant from his own mechanical actions. He could not imagine stopping, though his hands flinched from contact with the uncomfortable metal surfaces. Hours later the two climbed down, wearing makeup of dust-bound sweat. They washed in a mobile toilet on the building site; as Daniel turned to the door, Peter was still scrubbing at his hands and staring angrily into a freckled mirror. "Need hot water, for G.o.d's sake," he muttered. When he returned to the warehouse several minutes later, his face and hands were marked with red scratches. The anonymous van, which returned to the car park at four o'clock, seemed exactly the same color as the shelves. Vacillating between sleep and waking, Daniel hung the pale faces opposite him in a series of steel frames. Outside, nightfall was beginning to paint in the gaps between buildings.

"I think we might do it this time. There'd be enough dust in the atmosphere to shut out the sunlight for weeks; the world would just freeze over." The Anvils' gloomy interior suddenly framed a snapshot of trees shattering like icicles onto a dead soil, weighted down by tides of mist. "Be useless to stay underground. There won't be a blade of gra.s.s left on the surface. Won't even be air to breathe." Daniel stared at the taut face across the table. His gla.s.s was chilly in his hands, dulled over with vapor. He shut his eyes, and the picture intensified: snow crusted like mold over an endless plain, littered with bodies that glowed faintly in the dark. Abstract faces crumbled; they consisted of gray ashes, like papier-mache masks. The men sitting by the wall had similar faces, patient and knowing. They looked up from their pints of Guinness as Peter continued: "They say people fear the unknown, but if something is feared it becomes unknown. It's like a shadow, it destroys the ability to see what causes it. Eventually it pervades and disconnects everything. By the time the end comes you can't tell it apart from the past. Imagine, though, casting a horoscope and finding that absolutely nothing is going to happen."

Daniel felt a gap widening between the words and their meaning. Was he drunk? Perhaps he could not hear all of what Peter was saying. The song on the jukebox seemed to go on forever without changing, dropping phrases like litter onto a neutral background: Tell me how does it feel, when your heart grows cold? "What about survival?" he tried. "You used to say man would survive if he wanted to."

"Well, perhaps. I don't know what survives. Is it humanity that wants to survive, or is it just flesh that doesn't want to turn into dirt?" He finished his pint. "Christ, look at the time. My mother'll be worried."

Daniel stood up; confusion filled his head like catarrh. Only outside, where it was already dark, could he see clearly. The clocks had been set back a few days ago. "Come along, she'll be glad to see you." The Anvil's door divided the jukebox and a barrage of noise. "They're widening the road," Peter explained. Wires that drooped plastic flags guided them through a maze of trenches and pits. A series of terraced houses were in the process of being demolished; the glimpses of pale wallpaper, strips of green vinyl over splintered boards, a red metal staircase, were inexplicably embarra.s.sing. Another house supported a growth of scaffolding, some of whose squares were filled in by tarpaulins. The next street was a row of little shops, mostly boarded up. The boards were patched with several layers of posters, some advertising events months past. Corrugated iron distorted a gigantic face. In one of the side-streets, so narrow that cars could not pa.s.s by one another, two old women in housecoats stood talking, bent nearly horizontal. They did not move as the two men pa.s.sed between them. In a gap between the houses a narrow ca.n.a.l gleamed through spiked railings. At the next house Peter stepped over a low wall, crossed a paved front yard and knocked loudly at the door; then he unlocked it and led Daniel inside. A wardrobe occupied the s.p.a.ce between the inner door and the naked stairs, to the right of which a narrow hallway was painted orange by the lampshade. A chilly Pica.s.so family-man, woman, and child-stared toward the floor. From the front room there came a repeated sound of high-pitched clicking. "h.e.l.lo," Peter called. The sound halted.

Mrs. Telford had aged considerably since Daniel had last met her. Loss of weight had sharpened the birdlike quality of her angular face, while her hair was thinner and paler as though it had died. Between her chair and the door, occupying half of the small room, was a black wooden handloom. Her hands, which, like her son's, were long-fingered and slender, perched on the shuttles. Squares of completed cloth, their pattern lost in the dimness, hung from several of the wires. After the brief interruption, her hands slipped back into the involuntary routine of movement. The clicking of the shuttles synchronized with her words: "So you're Danny Carr, I remember you." As they talked, Peter s.h.i.+fted uneasily at the door. "Peter told me about meeting you at this job, a strange coincidence, don't you agree?" She sniffed. "Have you two been drinking?"

"Only a little," said Peter. He moved clumsily around the room; the contrast with his mother's appearance made him seem heavier than before. Daniel watched the alternating shuttles, nearly hypnotized.

"You know how it is," Mrs. Telford said to Daniel, "when they grow up you've got no authority any more. He doesn't listen, doesn't even hear me. And when he's been so ill-" Her eyes focused on a point somewhere in front of Daniel's face; he remembered that she was shortsighted.

"Just some kind of allergy," Peter muttered to no one in particular. The abstraction that had been noticeable in the pub was taking possession of him. He drew away from his phantom image in the window and occupied himself with coughing quietly. "Must have been the dust in the factory. It was only the first day."

"Well, why not spend all of your money on poisoning yourself?" Her hands increased in pace; she glanced at Daniel as if to say can't you see the joke? The patches of finished cloth s.h.i.+fted in position, like draughts on a board. "Can you stay for dinner?"

"No, thank you. I've got to get home soon." He was glad that this was true: eating in strange company made him feel stupidly clumsy. But Peter had behaved as though he wanted to discuss something. He felt guilty about leaving now, while his friend was off balance.

"Why don't you show Danny your music room?" Mrs. Telford said. Peter stepped forward, his face still in shadow. He reached out a hand as though to touch her bent shoulder, to make a link, but drew it back. "You'll excuse me for not coming with you," she continued to Daniel, "I don't walk around much these days. My arthritis is getting worse." For the first time, he noticed a pair of dull aluminum crutches leaning against the far wall, next to Peter.

The music room was upstairs, between the two bedrooms. It had clearly once been a child's bedroom, perhaps Peter's; the wallpaper, tacky with mingled dust and moisture, was the same sickly pink as the cotton curtains. Two gray metal bookcases stood to left and right, one erratically packed with books, the other bearing heaps of music scripts, some in box files, most in loose bundles. "Most of the music was my father's," Peter said. In the middle of the room stood the large piano that Daniel remembered from the front room of the Telford's former house. Behind it, a dull bra.s.s Christ was dying on the wall, small as a pinned insect.

"You still play the piano?" he said. Memories jabbed him: Peter in music lessons at school, in the junior-school a.s.sembly hall, at home in the evening. The wooden mouth jerked open to reveal the pattern which he had been reminded of several times lately, though he couldn't recall what by. Peter sat down on the stool and bent his head low over the keyboard, as though trying to read it. From downstairs Daniel could hear the insistent click of the loom; and from along the street, he heard the crunch and sc.r.a.pe of demolition.

Peter had been playing for what must have been half an hour when the lights went out; Daniel had listened in a kind of confused trance that was more submission that attention. The player seemed to draw life out of the keys into his fingers, while his body and head remained fixed as a fetal statue. One of the keys struck dully-the wire was slack-and he drew in breath abruptly whenever he touched it, or when he played an occasional wrong note. Every few minutes he either switched to another tune or waited for Daniel to suggest one. When the house suddenly went dark, he carried on playing; perhaps his eyes were closed. Daniel remembered that the local papers had carried warnings about the likely effect of coal shortages on Midland power stations. He wondered whether there were any candles in the house. In the dark the piano, a cold and painful voice, limped on regardless; so, he realized suddenly, did the even click of the handloom downstairs. There was a quality both rea.s.suring and slightly threatening in these sounds that kept him, silent, in his chair and listening. Gradually his friend's profile defined itself out of the gray.

He could see the piano and its hunched player with detailed clarity, though the rest of the room was blurred; and no light came from the window. He could even distinguish the black from the white keys, and follow Peter's fingers on them. The tune was familiar, though he couldn't put a name to it. There must be a draught from somewhere, turning the room cold; the walls were invisible, and he could imagine himself to be in a vast open tunnel. The figure in front of him was smaller and more sharply featured than before. There was less of a curve to the mouth, and the eyes were wider open. The thought let a few words loose from the tune: and the every, every time that I look into his eyes, he reminds me of the fair young maid ... But he didn't want to look into the eyes, for this was the face that Peter had worn perhaps seven years ago. He hoped that the illusion would dissolve before this image could turn toward him a face of terrible perfection. If only Peter would cough, falter or play a false note, it would set him free. But the notes plucked at him, drawing his eyes to the piano, where he could now see the strings and the hammers forming the skeleton of a chessboard, one square vibrating at a time. Dust surged back and forth on the squares, almost making figures-the draught was coming from the piano, he realized. That was why its teeth were chattering. He suspected that if he looked downward, he would be able to see the loom, the hands riding the shuttles, even the pattern on the finished squares. He did not look downward, but tensed in his chair, captured by vertigo.

A ma.s.s of figures hovered, inside or beyond the piano. They were houses in a street plan. As Peter used the loudness pedal in two harsh chords, the houses disintegrated. Some burned like newspaper, some were simply flattened. Others remained in place as charred sh.e.l.ls, standing without roofs or windows. They could all have been card houses in the wind. Human figures struggled in them like insects being tortured by children, until they had no limbs left to struggle with. Even when the jagged ruins were softened by drifting gray snow, a few people wandered over the mounds, perhaps wondering where their homes were. One made a cross of sticks and left it stuck at an angle in the snow-was it snow or ashes? Whatever it was, it blew into people's faces and shriveled them. Kings and knights turned to p.a.w.ns and were captured. The curled bodies glowed faintly, like their own ghosts, until the gray covered them entirely. The piano's cold notes fell into the vacuum, while the loom continued to mark the time, a perpetual metronome. Daniel squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his hands over his ears. He would not let this instrument draw the life out of him on its wires-but he could feel the response growing in him like unexpelled breath; tears formed behind his eyelids. The despairing reached out for him with arms that stretched harder even as the flesh dripped from them. Their faces were lost, but photographs of his family were stuck over the skulls. Before he could find his own among the faces, Daniel stood up and fumbled for the wall. Almost blind, he made his way by touch to the door. He searched for words. "Good-bye," said Peter, setting him free.

"Good-bye." The movements that took him downstairs and outside felt arbitrary. The streets were lightly smeared with mist; he felt warmer in the open air. There was a s.p.a.ce in his thoughts where the edges itched like healing tissue; what continually seemed worst to him was how the feeling from within himself had suddenly closed off. It had been too easy to walk away, there should have been more sense of decision. On the horizon, street lamps were reduced to slanted eyes. The road-menders had packed up for the night; their trenches by the pavement appeared bottomless. It was some time before he happened to find the bus stop. Every vehicle that pa.s.sed was transformed into anonymous gray. As Daniel finally stepped onto the bus it occurred to him that he had forgotten to say good-bye to Mrs. Telford. He would apologize when he saw Peter at work on Monday.

There was no work until the following Thursday, however, and the group that Daniel found himself in was mostly different from that of the first week. Peter was not among them. "I've no idea," the foreman said when Daniel asked, "probably he found another job." Another van almost indistinguishable from the first ferried them to a series of small factories where they packed boxes with sawdust, polished machinery until it shone like bone. Daniel eventually became fascinated by the pattern that the company's activity was forming in the city. He was reminded of a novel that he had once read which suggested a hidden meaning in the architecture of San Francisco; the idea had so many applications that at times only a growing insecurity could pull him out of speculation. In a similar way, he began to find that he could listen to the radio for hours while he tried to link the underlying threads in the music. He played his records until he could hold every note and s.p.a.ce in his mind, where he replayed them at different speeds. The language of musical notation was surely not adequate. It might conceal another language, he realized, that contained messages. Perhaps a way in which ghosts could communicate. A dead language. Daniel knew that these patterns were illusory, but it didn't matter. At least they responded to minds, which no object could. Weeks went past while he placed abstractions between himself and Peter; and nothing changed, except that the day shrank like a window between the curtains of night, and the patterns of leaves on the sky and the pavement became simpler.

One night he dreamed an idea and lay awake, thinking it out, while the moon appeared and vanished. If he cast a grid over a map of the city and used it as a chessboard (playing against himself, as he was used to doing), the movements of the winning pieces would tell him where the company's influence was directed. The losing king's position would tell him where Peter's house was; he had forgotten the address, and their name was not in the phone book. He was s.h.i.+vering in a dressing-gown, searching through his shelves for a nonexistent town plan, when the pattern allowed him to admit that he could find Peter's house quite easily by memory. He hurried back to bed and pressed his eyes into the pillow before they could project the previous night's dream. He had been lying in the middle of a small bedroom, with pink curtains and a dull crucifix on the wall. A man had stepped toward him in the half-light; his face was invisible, but his outstretched hands were dark with soot. Just before touching him the hands had drawn back to peel off thin gray gloves, which he had hung up like paper bags on the crucifix. But when they had fluttered back to him the hands were still gray.

When he got off the bus the fixed, cloudless brightness of the November day made the facades of houses resemble postcards. Gaps made by demolition punctuated the series. Daniel tried to ignore the sequence of missing buildings; the pattern might lead him astray. If this was the right way, they must have filled in some of the trenches and dug new ones. He was becoming certain that he had lost his way when a Watneys pub held up the black weight of its name on a sign: The Anvil. On a bench outside, two men sat asleep, coc.o.o.ned in layers of frayed clothing. He could recognize some of the posters on the boards-somebody had scratched out the middle of the word WORKERS to expose a pop star's face-but the dissected house whose red staircase he had seen was now a patch of rubble-strewn ground where weeds were already growing. On the off-white side wall of the next house, graffiti were interlaced so densely at the eye level that one could read anything into the scribbling. Surely this was the road, where a young boy in cut-off jeans was running across to bowl a tennis ball into the pa.s.sageway between two houses. Dodging the airborne stroke that followed, he walked down and examined each house for signs of familiarity. Unexpectedly, he found himself looking through a line of railings; below, a drowned-looking black barge was adrift on the ca.n.a.l, its curtains drawn. Neither the boat nor the litter of leaves and twigs on the surface appeared to be moving. It was the next house, he remembered; but it had a ragged privet hedge instead of a wall, enclosing rose bushes stripped down to thorns. He must be in the wrong street, he realized, but recognized the house opposite as he turned. One of its upper windows wore a board like an eye patch; the result of vandals, he supposed.

There was no answer to his knock, but the flaking door creaked open at the pressure. The inner door was ajar; he pushed through it. "h.e.l.lo? Mrs. Telford?" Then he coughed at the sharp dust which the draught loosed from the carpet. Damp painted a forest in the hall. Dust filled in the angles of the stairs. Obviously this house, whatever it was, had not been lived in for years.

From the unlit front room there came a regular clicking sound.

"h.e.l.lo? Come in." It was her voice. The carpet felt puffy underfoot. In the front room he could hear water dripping onto the ceiling. The window where Peter had flinched from his reflection had been smashed also, but not boarded. The draught took the door from his hand and slammed it. "Oh, Danny. It's you." Mrs. Telford's bright eyes did not focus at all. She was running the shuttles back and forth on the loom as efficiently as ever, though the wood seemed darker and warped out of true. There were no threads attached to the shuttles.

"Is Peter here?" Daniel said, and sneezed painfully.

"I've finished the cloth, look!" She pointed to a thick roll on the tea-table. Daniel repeated his question.

"He's upstairs. In the music room." Daniel made his way cautiously up the Uneven stairs, holding on to the banister until it suddenly lurched away from the wall. The door to the music room was open. He looked in at the figure hunched over the piano. Peter's hands ran over the keys, but no sound came. Daniel s.h.i.+vered; was he deaf? Sweat tickled his back like a cold wire. There was a strong antiseptic smell in the room. He sneezed again, and heard it.

"Peter. It's Danny, what are you doing?" The silent performance continued. Daniel crossed the floor toward the helpless Christ, then turned to the piano. Peter's eyes were closed; he did not appear to be breathing. Tiny clouds of dust appeared from between the keys as he played. Now that he was close, Daniel could make out an almost entirely m.u.f.fled thud from within the piano at each note. He realized that it was choked up with dust. In the middle of a tune, Peter stopped and opened his eyes.

"Peter. What's wrong?" The player looked at his hands. They were scrubbed pink and recently scarred with scratches. Dust was beginning to smear the fingertips. Some black material was lodged under the nails. Slowly, he began to rub his hands, like a Lady Macbeth in a silent film, and then to rip at the skin with his nails. Blood ran down onto the piano keys. Daniel's face flushed, but he could not cry, he was not capable of it. When his hands were red-gloved, Peter reached down under the stool and lifted a large bottle and a wad of cotton-wool. He dabbed antiseptic solution from the bottle onto his hands, wiped away the diluted stain, and swabbed the skin clean with fresh solution. His expression had still not changed (indeed, he wore no expression at all) as he put away the bottle and the cotton-wool and, closing his eyes, commenced to play what looked like the same tune as before.

Descending the stairs less carefully than he had climbed them, Daniel stood for a while in the hall, then went back into the front room. Mrs. Telford looked up at him and smiled. Her hands still s.h.i.+fted the vacant shuttles. "Look at the tapestry, go on. It's finished." He picked up the bundle of cloth and unrolled it. The material was soft and light, pleasant to the touch. He held it up to the light: the pattern was composed of innumerable tiny black and white squares. "Stand back from it," she said. "Then you'll see what it is." Daniel spread it on the floor and looked down. He stared for some time. Then he looked straight up at Mrs. Telford.

"I can't see anything in it." He rolled up the cloth tightly and set it back on the table.

"Then you'll be all right," she said. "It can't hurt you." She watched the nonexistent threads on her loom. Her hands slid back and forth, regular as a pendulum. A few minutes later, she said: "That's all, you've nothing to do here. Goodbye."

Daniel was outside and anesthetized by the cold, sharp winter air before he realized that, for the second time, he had forgotten to say goodbye to Mrs. Telford. He continued to walk toward the bus stop, still wondering quite what had changed in him. But it was too difficult to know. He found himself wis.h.i.+ng it would rain, though the sound would be entirely drowned out by the rush hour traffic.

THE G.o.dMOTHER.

by Tina Rath.

When I first read "The G.o.dmother" by Tina Rath in Ghosts & Scholars 8, the mordant elegance of the prose made me suspect that Tanith Lee might he playing a game of pseudonyms. A query to editor Rosemary Pardoe ended my hopes for a detective career: Tina Rath is indeed Tina Rath. Further, she has had stories published in the respected anthology series, The Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories and The Fontana Book of Horror Stories, as well as in such magazines as Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Woman's Realm and Catholic Fireside.

Of herself, Rath says: "I was born in 1943, in Surrey, because of the bombing, but I am a Londoner. I have a B.A. from London University, an M.A. from North London Polytechnic (my dissertation was on the Theatrical Vampire) and I am currently working on my Ph.D. in vampire fiction." Wonder about the job market on that.

"She's been like this all morning, doctor."

Old Mrs. Rothiemay heard her granddaughter's voice, querulous as usual, but now with an undertone of some more positive emotion. Anxiety? Or could it be hope?

"Is she really bad?"

Then the doctor's rumblings, harder to make out, because she was less used to his voice, but clearly offering rea.s.surance, suggesting perhaps that there was a lot of it about. Mrs. Rothiemay, a gripper all her life, gripped the sheets, and wished the voices away. She was such a very old woman now that she could only manage one thing at a time. Now she did not want to listen, but to think, to remember. Gratefully she let herself sink away from the voices, back through the years ... A last, shrill exclamation from her granddaughter held her back, but only for a moment: "She's been like this ever since Den brought her the paper up."

Mrs. Rothiemay had started life in the last century as Susannah Deborah Jewkes, named for her aunt Deborah and her G.o.dmother, Susannah Paget. Mrs. Paget had proved the better investment. When her namesake was twelve years old she found her a place at Satterthwaite, the big house where she reigned as housekeeper. Aunt Deb had been good for nothing but a plain cross and chain of doubtful metal. The young Susannah, or Sukey as she was called, had even then a well developed sense for personal property. She wore the cross permanently round her neck, where it left a greenish mark, to keep it away from her sisters. But she was well aware that Mrs. Paget was a more glittering prize. In the weeks before she went away she drove her family nearly mad with her accounts of the splendors of Satterthwaite and the glorious life she would lead there.

It was useless for her mother to point out that she was going as scullery maid, and not as an adopted daughter, and that scullery maids do not, as a rule, wear black silk dresses and eat roast chicken every day. Mrs. Paget might indeed wear silk, but she was the housekeeper. And she would only wear it on Sundays and holidays. And, as for chicken, words failed her! Nevertheless Sukey went on with her tales. It was unfortunate perhaps that Mrs. Paget arrived to take her to Satterthwaite wearing a silk dress so rich that it could have stood without the support of its wearer's ample figure, with silk petticoats audible beneath it, and silk stockings! The stockings alone were enough to give a normal child delusions of grandeur, besides giving a prudent mother pause for thought.

Mrs. Jewkes studied her old friend carefully as they sat sipping tea and talking over old times, and wondered about those stockings. They certainly were silk. She could hear the rasp as Mrs. Paget crossed her ankles. And was that ring on Mrs. Paget's large white hand a diamond? Was it possible that such things could be come by honestly, and if not was she right to let Sukey go? But after all, Sue had always been a saving woman, and who else had she to spend the money on but herself? Besides both stockings and rings could have been presents. Upper servants were often given such things by grateful employers ... she did not want to stand in Sukey's way ... and she wanted the child out of the house. She was undisciplined, lazy, and as inquisitive as a monkey.

So Mrs. Jewkes contented herself with fervently kissing her daughter, reminding her of her prayers and her duty and bidding her write a line now and again, to say how she did.

"You don't want to fret about her," said Mrs. Paget, comfortably. "Satterthwaite's not China, nor yet Tartary."

And Mrs. Jewkes dabbed her eyes with her ap.r.o.n, obscurely comforted by these self-evident truths.