The Mammoth Book of Haunted House Stories (Mammoth Books) (32 page)

We both stepped down and cleared the chairs away, then hauled a table aside to clear a space, as if Alice would simply float down from that little opening above, her feet coming to rest lightly on the carpet.

“Switch the power on, Charlotte. Got a cigar handy, Derrick?”

When I shook my head, Charlotte brought a pack from behind the counter, stripping the cellophane wrapper with her nails. Lighting a panatela, I didn’t merely let the smoke uncurl. I sucked and blew out powerfully.

“Let’s all hold hands and wish,” suggested Jenny.

We did so. Me, puffing away like a chimney, Jenny, Martin, and Charlotte. What silly jokers.

Clunk-clack
. The slat opened and the fan whirred, blowing a dusty breeze down at our faces. The noise of the mechanism altered. Without actually becoming louder, the fan seemed to rev up as if a furious turbine were spinning inside the wall almost beyond the pitch of our ears. Our chorus line retreated. Then it happened.

Matter gushed through the slats of the fan – bubbling, convulsing substances, brown and white and crimson, blobs of yellow, strands of ginger and black – which all coalesced into a surging column of confusion struggling to reassemble itself before our eyes.

“Alice!” squealed Jenny.

The thing before us was Alice, and it wasn’t Alice. It was her, and it was a cat, and it was mice and iridescent black beetles and spiders and flies, whatever the fan had swallowed. The shape was human, and most of the mass was Alice, but the rest was fur and wings and tiny legs and all else, melted together, interwoven with scraps of clothing, black hair growing out at random. I was too appalled to scream.

The Alice-creature jerked brown lips apart as if tearing a hole in its head, and
it
might have wanted to shriek. The noise that emerged was a coughing, strangled growl. Facetted eyes ranged the room. And us; and us.

“We’re sorry!” babbled Martin. “We’re so sorry. Tell us what to do!”

Unbidden, I knew. Terrified, I snatched from my pocket the medallion and the keys to the Saab and tossed these onto the table nearest to the half-human creature.

Her fingers seized the keys. Her legs took her to the front door. Her hand unlatched and unbolted the door – so she was still intelligent. Tearing the front door open, she fled into darkness.

A few moments later an engine roared, headlamps stabbed the night, tyres gouged gravel. Her Saab slewed its way onto the road. It was Martin who shut the door and relocked it – he had been wrong about burglar alarms. There were none.

“What have we done?” moaned Jenny.

“Maybe we saved her from something worse,” I said. “Maybe she knows how to heal herself. She left her medallion . . . why would she do that?”

Martin groaned and sat down heavily. “You don’t need fucking jewelry when your body’s glistening with bits of beetles.”

I gathered the worn, cryptic medal up. “This is much more than jewelry. We’d better keep it.”

“No,” mumbled my wife, as I dropped the disc into my jacket pocket.

“It would be terrible not to have it to give to her if she comes back.”

“It could
lead
that thing to us, Derrick.”

“What’s going on?” John Chalmers had come down-stairs, attired in a paisley dressing gown and, God help us, a nightcap with dangling tassel. He seemed to be holding something behind his back – a cudgel, a shotgun? He moved in behind the counter and laid down whatever it was.

“Our friend came back for her car,” Charlotte attempted to explain. “We’re sorry we woke you.”

“You’re all fully dressed. You weren’t intending to . . . depart?”

“You said we could partake of a late drink if we wished, Mr. Chalmers.”

“Mm. Screwdrivers?”

For one stupid moment I imagined he was offering to fix cocktails for us. However, he was eyeing Martin’s tools, still lying in view.

Charlotte was quick on the uptake. “Our friend’s car needed fixing. That’s why she had to leave it earlier.”

Chalmers shook his head skeptically.

“I’d like a brandy, please,” she told him. Her hand was straying automatically to the shoulder bag she had brought down with her, hunting in it . . .

“Don’t smoke, love!” Martin said urgently. “If you have any, don’t light up! Make that two brandies, will you? Doubles.”

“Same for us,” I said.

As Chalmers busied himself, Martin nodded significantly at the fan. It was still set to blow, not suck. Could anything else emerge from between those slats? Or was the eerie zone beyond its blades, the zone of the past, empty now? Where the hell had my panatela gone? I was dimly aware of discarding it when the fan began to gush. Ah – it was lying in an ashtray. Gone out, by the look of it. Nevertheless, I crushed the cigar into extinction. How could we put the fan to rights? Chalmers would be on the alert till daybreak. We couldn’t. We would have to abandon the Roebuck in the morning, abandon and never come back. We gulped our brandies and trooped upstairs.

“So, no more Fridays for us,” Martin said dully. “Get rid of that medallion, will you, Derrick?”

“Alice may need it,” I said.

“She may need us, she may need you,” said Charlotte, “but not in the same way as before.”

We parted and drove off from the Roebuck through the dead, cold countryside.

Jenny worked on me all weekend about that wretched medallion until I did promise to dispose of it. On Monday morning, walking through London to work, I dropped the worn disc down a sewer grating.

That night I dreamed about Alice, the Alice we had known before. This time she beckoned me lasciviously toward a doorway. She dropped her clothing. Naked, she invited me.

On Tuesday, prior to a meeting with some Japanese about supplies of Butadiene, Martin phoned me at the office.

“A car followed me home last night, Derrick. It hung well back, but when I was passing through—” – he mentioned a village with some decent street lighting – “I’m sure it was a Saab. Thought I’d better tip you off, eh? I’ve been thinking . . .” He sounded furtive. “I’ve been thinking about Alice. She never knew where we lived, did she?”

“I’m not sure she wanted to know.”

“She knows now, so far as I’m concerned.” He rang off.

It’s Friday night, and I’m driving home on my own, listening to Vivaldi’s
Four Seasons
. It’s the time that should be the happy hour. Jenny and I both took our cars to MK today. Headlights are following me, always keeping the same distance behind whether I speed up or slow down. If Alice comes calling, what do I give to her now?

Since Monday I’ve been increasingly haunted by mental snapshots of the old Alice. The other day I heard on the radio how the average male thinks about sex eight times an hour; that’s how often Alice crosses my mind.

I realize that I’ve fallen in love – or in lust – with her. Does Martin secretly feel the same way – for his “lamia”? These feelings overpower me as surely as I was possessed in the pub that night by an urge to piss, the need to release myself. Even after what happened, maybe Alice left that medallion behind to protect us – from the altered lamia? Now that token no longer does so.

Ahead there’s a lay-by where a caravan is parked permanently: Sally’s Cafe, serving breakfast to truck drivers all day long – but not by night, when it’s locked up, shuttered, abandoned.

I’m pulling in, and braking fifty yards past the caravan. Will the car in my mirror overshoot, pass by? No. It pulls in too. It parks abreast of Sally’s Cafe, douses its lights. A Saab, I’d say.

The driver’s door swings open. Soon I may understand all about Alice and her domain, which we first denied, then stupidly desecrated. Has the past’s love of us all turned sour now? Grown vicious?

A dark, amorphous figure emerges from the Saab, and rushes toward me. I’ll let her in. The Alice we knew always appreciated jokes. The final joke is: I’ve become an almighty fan of hers. Will I have time to tell her? To hear her laugh – or shriek? I open the door. I can’t help myself.

3

SHADOWY CORNERS

Accounts of Restless Spirits

The Ankardyne Pew

W. F. Harvey

The following narrative of the occurrences that took place at Ankardyne House in February 1890, is made up chiefly of extracts from letters written by my friend, the Rev. Thomas Prendergast, to his wife, immediately before taking up residence at the vicarage, together with transcripts from the diary which I kept at the time. The names throughout are, of course, fictitious.