Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories (18 page)

The room was small. Space enough for a coffin, a chair, a table bearing the candles, and one or two living souls.

“Shall I leave you with your mother?” Mr. Beckett asked.

“No,” she said with more urgency and more volume than the tiny room could accommodate. The candles coughed lightly at her indiscretion. More softly she said, “I would prefer you to stay, if you don’t mind.”

“Of course,” Mr. Beckett dutifully replied.

She wondered briefly how many people, at this juncture, chose to keep their vigil unaccompanied. It would be an interesting statistic, she thought, her mind dividing into disinterested observer and frightened participant. How many mourners, faced with the dear dead, asked for company, however anonymous, rather than be left alone with a face they had known a lifetime?

Taking a deep breath, she stepped toward the coffin, and there, snoozing on a sheet of pale cream cloth in this narrow, high-sided bed, was her mother.
What a foolish and neglectful place to fall asleep in
, she thought;
and in your favorite dress. So unlike you, Mother, to be so impractical.
Her face had been tastefully rouged, and her hair recently brushed, although not in a style she had favored. Miriam felt no horror at seeing her like this; just a sharp thrill of recognition and the instinct, barely suppressed, to reach into the coffin and shake her mother awake.

Mother, I’m here. It’s Miriam.

Wake up.

At the thought of that, Miriam felt her cheeks flush, and hot tears well up in her eyes.

The tiny room was abruptly a single sheet of watery light; the candles two bright eyes.”Mama,” she said once.

Mr. Beckett, clearly long inured to such spectacles, said nothing, but Miriam was acutely aware of his presence behind her and wished she’d asked him to leave. She took hold of the side of the coffin to steady herself, while the tears dripped off her cheeks and fell into the folds of her mother’s dress.

So this was death’s house; this was its shape and nature. Its etiquette was perfect. At its visitation there had been no violence; only a profound and changeless calm that denied the need for further show of affection.

Her mother, she realized, didn’t require her any longer; it was as simple as that. Her first and final rejection.
Thank you
, said that cold, discrete body,
but I have no further need of you. Thank you for your concern, but you may go.

She stared at Veronica’s well-dressed corpse through a haze of unhappiness, not hoping to wake her mother now, not hoping even to make sense of the sight.

Then she said, “Thank you,” very quietly.

The words were for her mother; but Mr. Beckett, taking Miriam’s arm as she turned to go, took it for himself.

“It’s no trouble,” he replied. “Really.”

Miriam blew her nose and tasted the tears. The duty was done. Time now for business. She drank weak tea with Beckett and finalized the financial arrangements, watching for him to smile once, to break his covenant with sympathy. He didn’t. The interview was conducted with indecent reverence, and by the time he ushered her out into the cold afternoon, she had grown to despise him.

She drove home without thinking, her mind not blank with the loss but with the exhaustion of having wept. It was not a conscious decision that made her choose the route back to the house that led alongside the quarry. But as she turned into the street that ran past her old playground, she realized that some part of her wanted—perhaps even needed—a confrontation with the Bogey-Walk.

She parked the car at the safe end of the quarry, a short walk from the path itself, and got out. The wire gates she’d scrambled through as a child were locked, but a hole had been torn in the wire, as ever. Doubtless the quarry was still a playground. New wire, new gates; but the same games. She couldn’t resist ducking through the gap, though her coat snagged on a hook of wire as she did so. Inside, little seemed to have changed. The same chaos of boulders, steps and plateaus, litter, weeds and puddles, lost and broken toys, bicycle parts. She thrust her fists into her coat pockets and ambled through the rubble of childhood, keeping her eyes fixed on her feet, easily finding again the familiar routes between the stones.

She would never get lost here. In the dark—in death, even, as a ghost—she would be certain of her steps. Finally she located the spot she’d always loved the best and, standing in the lee of a great stone, raised her head to look at the cliff across the quarry. From this distance the Walk was barely visible, but she scanned its length meticulously. The quarry face looked less imposing than she’d remembered; less majestic. The intervening years had shown her more perilous heights, more tremendous depths. And yet she still felt her bowels contracting as though an octopus had been sewn up at the crux of her body, and she knew that the child in her, insusceptible to reason, was searching the cliff for a sign, however negligible, of the Walk’s haunter. The twitch of a stone-colored limb, perhaps, as it kept its relentless vigil; the flicker of a terrible eye.

But she could see nothing.

Almost ashamed of her fears, she retraced her steps through the canyon of stones, slipped through the gate like an errant child, and returned to the car.

The Bogey-Walk was safe. Of course it was safe. It held no horrors, and never had. The sun was valiantly trying to share her exhilaration now, forcing wan and heatless beams through the rain clouds. The wind was at her side, smelling of the river. Grief was a memory.

She would go to the Walk now, she decided, and give herself time to savor each fearless step she took along it, jubilating in her victory over history. She drove around the side of the quarry and slammed the car door with a smile on her face as she climbed the three steps that led off the pavement onto the footpath itself.

The shadow of the brick wall fell across the Walk, of course; and its length was darker than the street behind her. But nothing could sour her confidence. She walked from one end of the weed-clogged corridor to the other without incident, her whole body high with the sheer ease of it.
How could I ever have feared this?
she asked herself as she turned and began the journey to the waiting car.

This time, as she walked, she allowed herself to think back on the specifics of her childhood nightmares. There had been a place—halfway along the Walk and therefore at the greatest distance from help—that had been the high-water mark of her terror. That particular spot—that forbidden few yards that, to the unseeing eye, were no different from every other yard along the Walk—was the place the thing in the quarry would choose to pounce when her last moments came. That was its killing ground, its sacrificial grove, marked, she had fervently believed, with blood of countless other children.

Even as the taste of that memory returned to her, she approached the point. The signs that had marked the place were still to be seen: an arrangement of five discolored bricks; a crack in the cement that had been minuscule eighteen years ago and had grown larger. The spot was as recognizable as ever; but it had lost its potency. It was just another few of a hundred identical yards, and she bypassed the spot without the contentment on her face faltering for more than an instant. She didn’t even glance behind her.

The wall of the Bogey-Walk was old. It had been built a decade before Miriam was born, by men who had known their craft indifferently well. Erosion had eaten at the quarry face beneath the teetering brick, unseen by Council inspectors and safety officials from the Department of the Environment; in places the rain-sodden sandstone had crumbled and fallen away. Here and there, the bricks were unsupported across as much as half their breadth. They hung over the abyss of the quarry while rain and wind and gravity ate at the crumbling mortar that kept them united.

Miriam saw none of this. She would have had to have waited a while before she heard the uneasy grinding of the bricks as they leaned out against the air, waiting, aching, begging to fall. As it was, she went away, elated, certain that she’d sloughed off her terrors forever.

That evening she saw Judy.

Judy had never been beautiful; there had always been an excess in her features: her eyes too big, her mouth too broad. Yet now, in her mid-thirties, she was radiant. It was a sexual bloom, certainly, and one that might wither and die prematurely, but the woman who met Miriam at the front door was in her prime.

They talked through the evening about the years they’d been apart—despite their contract not to discuss the past—exchanging tales of their defeats and their successes. Miriam found Judy’s company enchanting; she was immediately comfortable with this bright, happy woman. Even the subject of her separation from Donald didn’t inhibit her flow.

“It’s not verboten to talk about old husbands, pet; it’s just a bit boring. I mean, he wasn’t a bad sort.”

“Are you divorcing him?”

“I suppose so; if I have a moment. These things take months, you know. Besides, I’m a Libra; I can never make up my mind what I want.” She paused. “Well,” she said with a half-secret smile, “That’s not altogether true.”

“Was he unfaithful?”

“Unfaithful?” She laughed. “That’s a word I haven’t heard in a long time.”

Miriam blushed a little. Was life really so backward in the colonies, where adultery was not yet compulsory?

“He screwed around,” said Judy. “That’s the simple truth of it. But then, so did I.”

She laughed again, and this time Miriam joined in with the laughter, not quite certain of the joke. “How did you find out?”

“I found out when he found out.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It was all so obvious, it sounds like a farce when I tell it; but he found a letter, you see, from someone I’d been with. Nobody particularly important to me—just a casual friend, really. Anyway, he was triumphant; I mean, he really crowed about it, said he’d had more affairs than I had. Treated it all like some sort of competition—who could cheat the most often and with whom.” She paused; the same mischievous smile appeared again. “As it was, when we put our cards on the table, I was doing rather better than he was. That really pissed him off.”

“So you separated?”

“There didn’t seem to be much point in staying together; we didn’t have any kids. And there wasn’t any love lost between us. There never really had been. The house was in his name, but he let me have it.”

“So you won the competition?”

“I suppose I did. But then, I had a hidden advantage.”

“What?”

“The other man in my life was a woman,” Judy said, “and poor Donald couldn’t handle that at all. He more or less threw in the towel as soon as he found out. Told me he realized he’d never understood me and that we were better apart.” She looked up at Miriam and only now saw the effect her statement had had. “Oh,” she said, “I’m sorry. I just opened my mouth and put my foot in it.”

“No,” said Miriam, “It’s me. I’d never thought of you . . . ”

“ . . . as a lesbian? Oh, I think I’ve always known it, right back to school days. Writing love letters to the games mistress.”

“We all did that,” Miriam reminded her.

“Some of us meant it more seriously than others.” Judy smiled.

“And where’s Donald now?”

“Oh, somewhere in the Middle East, last I heard. I’d like him to write to me, just to tell me he’s well. But he won’t. His pride wouldn’t let him. It’s a pity. We might have been good friends if we hadn’t been husband and wife.”

That seemed to be all there was to say on the subject; or all Judy wanted to say.

“Shall I go and make some coffee?” she suggested, and went through to the kitchen, leaving Miriam to toy with the cat and her thoughts. Neither were particularly fleet-footed that night.

“I’d like to go to your mum’s funeral,” Judy called through from the kitchen.

“Would you mind?”

“Of course not.”

“I didn’t know her well, but I used to see her out shopping. She always looked so smart.”

“She was,” Miriam said. Then: “Why don’t you come in the lead car with me?”

“I’m not a relative.”

“I’d like you to.” The cat turned over in its sleep and presented its winter-furred belly to Miriam’s comforting fingers. “Please.”

“Then thank you. I will.”

They spent the remaining hour and a half drinking coffee, and then whiskey, and then more whiskey, and talking about Hong Kong and their parents, and finally about memory. Or rather, about the irrational nature of memory; how their minds had selected such odd details to fix events while neglecting others more apparently significant: the smell in the air when the words of affection were spoken, not the words themselves; the color of a lover’s shoes, but not of their eyes.

At last, way after midnight, they parted.

“Come to the house about eleven,” Miriam said. “The cars are leaving at about a quarter past.”

“Right. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

“Today,” Miriam pointed out.

“That’s right, today. Take care driving, love. It’s a foul night.”

The night was breezy; the car radio reported gale-force winds in the Irish Sea. She drove home cautiously through the empty streets, the same gusts that buffeted the car raising leaves from the dead and whirling them up into the glare of the headlamps.
In Hong Kong
, she thought,
there would still be plenty of life in the streets this time of night
. Here? Just sleep-darkened houses, closed curtains, locked doors. As she drove, she mentally followed her footsteps through the day and the three encounters that had marked it out. With her mother, with Judy, and with the Bogey-Walk. By the time she’d done her thinking, she was home.

Sleep came fitfully through the blustery night, punctuated by dustbin lids whipped off by vicious licks of wind, the rain, and the scratching of sycamore branches against the windows.

The next day was Wednesday, December 1, and the rain had turned to sleet by dawn.

The funeral was not insufferable. It was at best a functional farewell to someone Miriam had once known and now had lost sight of; at worst, its passionless solemnity and well-oiled ritual smacked of frigidity, ending as a conveyor belt took the coffin through a pair of lilac curtains to the furnace and the chimney beyond. Miriam could not help but imagine the interior of the coffin as it shuddered through the theatrical divide of the curtains; could not help but visualize the way her mother’s body shook with each tiny jerk of her box toward the incinerator. The thought, though self-inflicted, was all but unbearable. She had to dig her fingernails into the flesh of her palm simply to prevent herself from standing up and demanding a halt to the proceedings: to have the lid pried off the coffin, to fumble in the shroud, and to pluck that blank body up in her arms one more time; lovingly, adoringly thanking her. That moment was the worst; she held herself in check until the curtains closed, and then it was over.