The Kimota Anthology (5 page)

“But it still feels cold in here.” Gill rubbed her arms.

“Maybe you’ve got a draught.”

“It’s double-glazed,” John said acidly. Christopher was starting to nod off on his shoulder, his lips sucking at his dummy in a steady rhythm.

“Could it be cutting out?” Gill asked. “Coming on intermittently, but not enough to heat the room?”

“Maybe it decides to come on when you’re in here and switches itself off when you’re not,” the engineer replied sarcastically. He slipped out of the door before anyone could ask him any more stupid questions. Gill followed to let him out. John gently lifted Christopher off his shoulder and laid him in his cot, throwing a couple of blankets over him and then, as an afterthought, the small cover from his moses basket.

Through the window he could see the heavy grey skies that had transformed the mellow autumn into a biting foretaste of winter. The first heavy frost had iced the lawn that morning; it was imperative they sort out whatever was wrong with Christopher’s room as soon as possible. The problem had been building steadily; however warm the rest of the house was - and it got very warm - Christopher’s room always felt like an icebox. With the memory of that frantic flight to the hospital still strong in his mind, John didn’t want to risk anything which could trigger another fit. They had considered moving him, but the other spare bedroom had become piled high with junk, and if he slept in their room their sleep was always disturbed.

Gill returned and beckoned to him to come out of the bedroom. “Well, what are we going to do now?” she said in a hard voice as if it was his responsibility to find a solution.

“I don’t know. What do you think we should do?”

“For Christ’s sake, John. I’ve got a heap of washing to do. There’s a sink full of dirty pots that you should have...”

“Oh, shut up!” He forgot himself and almost shouted it. There was a split second pause and then Christopher let out a loud bawl of shock that developed into a wailing cry.

“Now look what you’ve done,” Gill hissed, pushing past him.

John had stomped halfway down the stairs when Christopher suddenly stopped crying. A second later he heard Gill catch her breath. He leapt back up two steps at a time before she had a chance to call his name.

“What is it?” he said anxiously. Gill had plucked Christopher from the cot and was staring at him, wide-eyed and frightened.

She held the baby out, mutely, and John took him in his huge hands, afraid of what he would see. Christopher was still breathing, but he appeared to have been frozen: his eyes were wide and staring unwaveringly, and his little lips were blue. His body was rigid, like a block of wood, and there seemed to be a spiderweb tracing of frost across his skin, following the pattern of veins. It glistened in the light that came through the window. John was transfixed with shock. Gingerly, he stretched out his fingers and brushed the down of Christopher’s cheek. It was like touching a window on a mid-winter morning. He snatched his hand back and rolled his fingers into a fist as if that would deny the sensation.

“Christ...”

Christopher hovered there for a moment, and then John clutched him to his chest and ran downstairs. Gill found them in front of the gas fire in the lounge. Christopher was swathed in thick towels from the kitchen as the fire roared on full, while John rubbed his son’s delicate hand, the tears streaming down his cheeks.

“What’s going on?” he said as Gill breezed through the door. He looked pale and lost. “This isn’t right. It’s not natural.”

Gill ran forward and knelt next to them, holding John tightly as the emotions bottled up by the stress of the previous few months came flowing out. For a moment, things were just as they had been. All John could feel was the bottomless well of love he had felt on his wedding day, and he could tell Gill felt it too. It washed out around them and swept them together, making them forget how they had drifted apart. It’s not dead, John thought with a rush of relief, and then he looked back at Christopher and everything was driven from his mind.

It took half an hour before the chubby pinkness returned to Christopher’s limbs. Soon he was chuckling and kicking on the mat in front of the fire as if nothing had happened. John and Gill felt emotionally drained and they flopped back on the mat with their son silently while they tried to make sense of what had happened. Nothing could account for the blue frost or the depth of cold his skin radiated. They couldn’t bring themselves to discuss exactly what was the root cause, but in the privacy of their thoughts, they both turned to dark, unscientific things.

That afternoon John cleared all the junk out of the other bedroom and moved Christopher’s cot in. He was convinced the nursery was the basis of the problem - “cold air currents circulating or something like that” - and he knew the spare room was always like an oven when the central heating was on.

It took them both a long time to get to sleep that night; they had returned to their old routine of repeated checks on Christopher’s well-being, even though he seemed warm and relaxed in his new home. The worries persisted, even in their sleep.

Gill woke suddenly in the early hours. The clock radio glowed 3.15am, but she felt clear-headed and alert as if someone had slapped her across the face. The Green was dreamily silent, the only noise the soft thrum of occasional traffic along the dual carriageway half a mile away. John was fast asleep, his face frozen in an expression of worry and irritation. She remembered when he used to look like an angel when he was dreaming.

Something had woken her. There was a vague sense of irritation, like a bad taste in her mind, that had dragged her from her sleep and shocked her awake. A dream; nothing more. She eased out of bed and walked over to the window. The night was clear and bright with stars and a near-full moon, and there was a carpet of glittering frost across the road and lawns. She shivered.

On the way to the toilet, she paused outside Christopher’s room. There, on the floor by the door, was the old dummy they had found when they first moved into the house, the one that had been hanging over Christopher’s cot earlier that day. Why had John left it there? she thought with a brief burst of annoyance. As she bent to pick it up, she decided to look in on Christopher. His breathing had been coming through loud and clear on the baby monitor in the bedroom, but still, she thought. But still...

She pushed open the door.

Her eyes fell first on the cot and then on the figure next to it. Limned against the moonlit window, it resembled a giant spider, black and angular and hunched, boney hands resting on the edge of the cot, the rest of its upper body bent over into the pooling shadows around Christopher’s sleeping form. Gill could not see her son or what was being done to him.

She caught her breath, frozen in fear and horror, and the tiny sound scythed through the silence of the room.

The figure stirred suddenly, then looked up. There was a slight stop-go motion to its movements like bad animation which detached it from reality as the head rose from the cot and turned to look at her. It was a man, an old man, but his great age seemed to have been magnified through some dark glass until it was far, far beyond the normal span of a human life. His face was a mass of wrinkles, not one square centimeter untouched, and the skin flapped loose under his jaw and pulled in hollowly around his cheeks so that the shape of the skull was visible beneath. His eyes ranged huge and white in the sagging folds around his sockets, and when he smiled, briefly and maliciously, he showed a row of chipped, brown teeth.

Before Gill could cry out, he moved, bounding with surprising, animal-like agility towards her. Then she did scream, loud and piercing, as she turned her head to the door to cover her face. A breeze from his passing whipped at her hair, and she heard him vault over the banister and land on the hall floor far below. A split-second later Gill rushed to the banister to look after him, but the hall was empty. All the doors off it were tightly shut. She had heard none of them open.

Gill ran back to Christopher and pulled him out, clutching him tightly to her shoulder. She saw the familiar frosty bloom to his skin. He was rigid, as before, but he was still breathing.

It took several minutes for her to wake John and get his sluggish mind to comprehend what had happened. His first thoughts were for Christopher, but when he saw there was nothing he could do he went downstairs to search the house.

A nightmare, was his first thought. All this trouble with Christopher, it’s starting to get to her. And then he thought sourly, Or maybe she’s just going nuts.

Finding no sign of any break-in, he returned to the bedroom. Gill was back in bed with Christopher under the duvet next to her. She looked as pale as snow.

“Anything?” she asked edgily. He shook his head. “God, John, you should have seen him. There was something about him that wasn’t right...” She shook her head, unable to find the words that could describe what she had seen.

“An old man?” John asked incredulously. “Who jumped the bannister and landed in the hall? I’d like to find out what pills he’s on.”

“That’s what I mean.” She bit her lip. “It was like I was dreaming, only I wasn’t dreaming, John. I saw him, and I saw the look in his eye. I felt something from him that made my stomach turn.” She knew what she wanted to say, what she sensed on a very basic level, but she couldn’t bring herself to give voice to it. “He didn’t look real, John.”

“What do you mean?”

She paused, wrestling with a thought that was too big for her. Then she said, “I’m frightened.”

“Come on. Come on!” John hammered the steering wheel impatiently. The traffic was bumper-to-bumper along the main road into town, creeping along at such a snail’s pace that he would be late for work by at least fifteen minutes, if not longer. In his mind’s eye, John saw the look on Gordon King’s face when he walked through the door; tardiness was King’s major bugbear, and it would just give him another opportunity to make John’s time between nine and five more difficult.

Carefully, he edged his way out into the stream, ignoring the blare of a horn from a red-faced man in a BMW. Out of the corner of his eye, John could see him mouthing some expletive. John smiled to himself, taking some small pleasure from the irritation he was causing. These days it seemed to be the most enjoyment he could get.

He glanced down at the passenger seat. The dummy was there, on the old bit of ribbon, looking worn and out-of-date. He didn’t know why they had kept it. Gill was the one who had believed it was a good omen, but now she seemed to have changed her opinion. Since her experience with the intruder in Christopher’s room, she had changed all round; more nervous, inclined to jump at the slightest sound, Introspective, even depressed. John had tried to comfort her, but he had got little response.

That morning she had handed him the dummy and said simply, “Get rid of it.”

“Why?”

“Just dump it. I don’t want it around any more.”

And that was that. Gill had decided. He would throw it in the bin outside the office and God forbid her if she changed her mind and phoned up later asking for it back.

The traffic came to a halt. There was some kind of disturbance ahead; he could see people craning their necks out of windows and he could hear raised voices. A shunt. That was all he needed. He increased the tempo of his beat on the steering wheel and tried to think of a song to hum to himself, but nothing would come to mind apart from the words: I’m going to be late.

Why did Gill keep the stupid dummy in the first place? It was so unlike her. A good luck charm! Sure, they’d had lots of good luck, hadn’t they? The thing that was happening to Christopher. They’d had him checked out by specialist after specialist and all of them had found nothing. Some of them had been so surprised by the symptoms, they virtually implied that John and Gill were making it all up, addicted to wasting doctors’ time like those hypochondriacs who became hooked on operations.

There was a man walking up the other side of the road from the direction of the hold-up, clutching at his face as if he was crying or in pain. His path was erratic. The raised voices seemed to have grown louder, barking angrily, yelping like caged animals.

They had had their problems before they moved into the house, he and Gill, but they had grown infinitely worse since. Now they could hardly bring themselves to touch each other. It wasn’t even just the two of them. It was the atmosphere in the house too. The erratic heating, the sudden snaps of coldness, had become more than irritating. Gill’s encounter with the old man - or ‘the thing’ as she called him - had had a dramatic effect as well, and John had to admit that it was starting to influence him as well; he never quite felt alone in the house any more.

He looked down at the dummy.

It was starting to bother him for some reason, or perhaps it was just his paranoid thoughts. As he stared out of the window, he could sense it on the seat next to him.

Stupid. Stupid. He looked down at it. Just a dummy.

Was that a whisper? A paper-thin rustle of sound?

He could hear sirens. Someone was screaming, the sound rising and falling, rising and falling, in sync with the siren. On the street corner opposite, a woman was rigid like a statue, staring in the direction of the hold-up, her mouth frozen in a giant O. That was it. He would be there forever.

There was something else. A feeling, like the one he had in the house. His skin prickled and a flush crept slowly up his back. Someone was watching him. He could sense the eyes, the concentration; he could almost feel the emotions behind it. He shuddered.

He couldn’t stay there all day. He had to find a short cut or his neck would be on the chopping block. He glanced up the street opposite and remembered a route; long, through, winding streets, but it would get him to town quicker than if he sat where he was. Ahead of him, he could see they had started to wave the oncoming traffic through. An enormous lorry was beginning to build up speed. He would have to move quickly or he would never get across the road. He could just about do it. He yanked at the steering wheel, revved up and popped the clutch.