The Spectral Book of Horror Stories (16 page)

She kissed Beverly then, and got up off her bed, and left the bedroom, and closed the door behind her.

Beverly cried one last time, and she knew now what she was grieving, and it wasn’t a father she had never met. And then she decided she was never going to cry again, not ever, not about anything. That was all over now. And so it was.

She waited until the house was still. And then she studied the row of digits on the envelope that was too short to be a phone number, and she went downstairs, and she dialled the number anyway.

It rang for several minutes, but Beverly was patient, it wasn’t as if she had anything else to do. And by the time the woman on the other end picked up, Beverly knew exactly what she wanted to ask her.

#

Beverly was strangely relieved that the woman lived so very far away. Had she been close, Beverly could have slipped out of the house to meet her and been back before her parents knew it. She might have had some thin hope that everything could be put back to normal, and that hope would have made her anxious, it would have been something to fight for. But the woman told her she was in a town Beverly had never heard of, and the name didn’t seem real, it had too many syllables and too few vowels, and when Beverly found it on a map she could see that it would take her all day to get there, all day and part of the night, there was no way her mother and father wouldn’t realise she’d abandoned them. So that was that.

She left home in the middle of the night. By the time she reached her destination it was the middle of the night again—the next night, probably, or maybe the one after. Beverly had had to catch so many trains, all of them so slow and winding, and she’d slept only fitfully on each of them, she couldn’t tell how much time had passed.

The cafe was right where the woman said it would be, out of the railway station, turn right, then turn right again—but the town was so dark, all the houses were shut up and still, there wasn’t even a single street lamp to throw any light. And Beverly thought the cafe wouldn’t be open, it couldn’t be open, not when the rest of the town was so dark and dead. But there it was—lights poured out abruptly from the windows and gave the pitch black outside it some little warmth. Beverly went up close, shivered in that warmth. There was chatter indoors. Something like laughter. Even music from an old jukebox.

A bell tinkled as Beverly pushed open the door, and she went into the cafe, and everybody looked up at her, just for a moment. The cafe was full, not a single table was free, and it seemed to Beverly that all manner of people were there—policemen, bikers, men in pinstripe suits. Women in ball-gowns who looked as if they’d just escaped from a dance, their hair up in beehives, and their faces heavy with make-up. Entire families with children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren besides. For that one moment they looked at her, and some of them smiled, and most of them looked tired, and one of the ball gowned women burst into tears.

And even now Beverly thought this must be a mistake, that she’d be told by some grown-up that she couldn’t come in—she thought that with all these people inside, the one she’d come so far to meet wouldn’t be there. But then, from the other side of the cafe, sitting in a pink plastic booth by the window, a woman gave her a single wave in greeting.

Beverly went to her. The woman looked her up and down appraisingly. Then shrugged. “Well, sit down then,” she said. Beverly did.

“You wrote to me?” said Beverly. “About my father? We spoke on the phone?”

“Yes,” said the woman, “and yes, and yes. And they changed your name to Beverly? Well. Why not? Why not indeed? It’s as good a name as any other.”

“I was called something else?”

“It doesn’t matter now. May I pour you a coffee?”

“Mother says I’m not old enough to drink coffee,” said Beverly, and then blushed bright red.

“If you can have your ears pierced, you can drink coffee. And if you can drink coffee, we can talk like adults.” The woman pulled back her hair, showed Beverly there were rings dangling from her lobes. “See? We’re both old enough.” She poured the coffee, it came out thick and slow like treacle, she pushed the mug across the table to Beverly. The coffee smelled strong and bitter.

Beverly stared at the woman closely. Her skin wasn’t milky, but dull like sackcloth. Her nose wasn’t bulbous, the nostrils were well-behaved and refused to flare. “Are you my mother?”

The woman looked scandalised, and then barked out a laugh. “Good God, no! I have children. I have three fine sons, and I got them the normal way. I don’t need
you.
Look. I have photographs. Look. Look.” From a neat little purse she took three photographs, spread them out on the table. “That’s Harry, he works in insurance. And that’s Gary. And that’s Larry, he works in insurance. You can keep the photographs if you like,” the woman added helpfully. “Really. I have plenty.”

Beverly thanked her. “Do you have a photograph of my mother?”

“No.”

“Do you have a photograph of my father?”

“Before or after he died?”

“Um. Before.”

“No. I thought you should be told he died.” And she screwed her face into something that looked somewhat sympathetic. “I always think the children should be told.”

“How did my father die?”

“Good God! It’s not as if you even know how he lived! Ask how he lived first!”

“I’m sorry. How did my father live?”

The woman gave this some thought. “Clumsily. I always knew he’d die horribly one day.”

“And did he die…?”

“Horribly? Yes. Suffocation. Believe me. It’s not as painless as it looks!”

Somewhere on another table a small boy began to cry, and his mother comforted him. On another table a policeman started crying, and no one cared. Beverly looked for the ball-gowned woman, but she had gone, all the women in ball-gowns had paid up and left. “Can I see my mother?” she asked.

“Your mother doesn’t want to see you.”

Beverly felt tears prick at her own eyes, and she blinked them away, she wasn’t ever going to do that again. “Why not?”

“She doesn’t want to see any of the children. Not afterwards. Don’t,” and she touched Beverly’s arm in a sudden act of tenderness, “take it too personally. Or, rather,” she added, letting go of the arm, and sitting back, and shrugging, “
do
take it personally, if you like. It probably is personal.”

“Oh.”

“Was there anything else?” And the woman was making for her purse, closing it with a tight snap. Beverly felt a last chance slipping away from her.

“Please,” said Beverly. “Do you know her? Are you her friend? Please. Tell me what she’s like.”

The woman gave this some thought. “You could say I’m a friend of your mother’s,” she said, at last. “I suppose, in a way, I am. I care for her. I do the best I can. She’s not easy to care for. Your mother is a very demanding person. But special. We all think she’s special.” The woman frowned, as if assessing the accuracy of her response, then gave a single nod, and pulled herself up from the booth. “I’m sorry for your loss,” she said. “Losses are irritating things. I’ve taken care of the bill. Don’t try to follow me.”

The woman left.

Beverly sipped at her coffee. Just for show, so the woman would think she wouldn’t follow. It was too hot, but the taste was surprisingly sweet, Beverly wanted nothing more suddenly than to stay and finish it. It took effort to set it back down on the table. And as soon as she heard the bell on the door sound, and she knew the woman had left, she made to her feet. Her legs felt weak, she had to grasp on to the booth to steady herself, and the pink plastic was soft and yielding, her fingers sank in deep and it would have been the easiest thing in the world to let them sink further, to sit back down on to the comforting warmth of the padded seat, to drown in it.

With all the nonchalance she could muster she walked through the cafe, walked to the door. This time none of the customers looked up at her, they had their own lives to worry about, and that was just as well, Beverly didn’t want anything to do with them, all she wanted was her mother—and even as she thought of that, of that word, ‘mother’, it seemed like such a precious lie, all her life she had never understood how precious, and if it were a lie, well, so, what of that? And so excited, and so nervous, almost walking on air, she stepped out into the dark. She’d forgotten how very black the dark was, and this time even the lights of the cafe couldn’t penetrate it, and there was a moment of panic, she couldn’t see which direction the woman had taken. But then—there—just a few metres away—she was leaning against the wall, she was fiddling with something, her purse, her hair, her shoelace, it didn’t matter—she had delayed, and that was a stroke of luck.

And now the two of them were walking on into the night—Beverly trying to tread quietly so she wouldn’t be heard, trying to keep her distance—the woman striding into the pitch black with such confidence, as if she knew every junction, every corner, every loose paving stone (and perhaps she did)—her heels tapping out on the ground a beat for Beverly to follow. Every so often Beverly thought she’d lost her, that the woman had got too far ahead, but the woman would always stop and deal with that meddlesome shoelace again, and Beverly would catch up. They walked on like this for an hour, maybe longer. Until at last the woman stopped, and turned to one of the houses lining the pavement, and it was only then that Beverly realised there were houses there at all, it had been so dark and the houses so bland; the woman took some keys from her purse, and marched up to the front door. She unlocked the door. She turned around. She looked back out, she seemed to stare right at Beverly. Beverly froze, tried to make herself invisible, or at least see-through, or at least as black as the night—and maybe it worked, because the woman turned around again, and entered the house, and closed the door behind her.

So this was the house where her mother lived—and Beverly felt a strange recognition, a
belonging
somehow; it was an anonymous house, it was no different in shape or size to the others either side, but it was so very special. She wanted to know what the address was, what this special house was called, but there were no street signs, and there was no number on the front door. She looked around for any landmarks, anything that might help her identify the house again in the daylight—nothing—really, nothing. And she thought that she’d just have to stay there, then—she’d stand on the pavement outside her mother’s house all night, just to be sure she wouldn’t lose it, she would
never
lose it now, she wouldn’t even take her eyes off it in case it slipped away—and then, suddenly, there was light. So startling and dazzling that for a moment Beverly was blinded, and she thought the house might have vanished in the flash, that when her eyes adjusted to the glare the house would be gone and her mother would have gone with it, gone forever. The woman had pulled open the curtains to the front room, and Beverly could see inside so nice and bright, and the woman was smiling, it was as if she
wanted
her to see.

And there was her mother.

Her mother was pregnant again. Beverly realised she had expected her mother to be pregnant, this was no shock. All she knew of her mother was that she could pump out babies, it made some strange sense to find her like this. The shock was how pronounced was the pregnancy, that it made her mother so fat and swollen. And ugly too—because it wasn’t the stomach that was swollen, Beverly thought she could have accepted that, no matter how gross and distended that stomach might have been. It was the head. It was the head. The head was swollen. Somehow balanced upon what was still a perfectly slender neck—and it was to this neck that Beverly kept lowering her eyes, the neck was the beginning of what was normal and the end of what was obscene—balanced upon that stick-thin neck was a head maybe four or five times the size it should have been. It looked like an enormous balloon, filled with air to the point of bursting—and yet, not like a balloon at all, because balloons are neat and round, and this head had grown into such a lumpen shape, bits of the skull rising sharply out of the skin like crude horns. The nose had been smoothed down to a point; one of the eyes had been stretched thin and wide across the face, the other seemed almost normal, though sunken rather, and a little dull, and a little teary, as if it knew it wasn’t as impressive as the other. And the jaw looked crushed with the weight of it all.

When the first thrill of horror had passed, Beverly felt a surge of such pity. Her mother was in pain. Her mother was
trapped—
she was sitting upright on a hard wooden chair, and her ankles were tied to the chair legs. And a thick leather strap ran around her mother’s forehead, fastening the back of the head against the wall—and she could see how tight the strap was, how the fat skin pooled and bulged white against it. The woman from the cafe—her captor?—was smiling still. Her mother couldn’t smile back, she wouldn’t have been able to frame that contorted mouth into any sort of reciprocal position—but she did raise a hand in greeting. Beverly wondered whether the strap was a restraint at all. She thought that maybe the strap was there to keep the head balanced. She thought that maybe, without that balance, the head would simply fall off.

And then there was, what? A ripple, yes, across her mother’s face? Something passing close underneath the skin, something on the move. And the ripple passed over the flat eye, and it popped out big and wide and shining, it seemed to attempt an almost flirty wink.

The woman from the cafe was talking now. And then taking something out from a metal box on the table, it looked silver and so glamorous, like an old cigarette box. Chunks of meat—and they looked to Beverly red and raw, was it beef, was it something else? Talking again, and waving the beef at the mother playfully; Beverly could see her mother start to drool, a whole stream of it spilling out over the flab of the bottom lip, gushing now like a geyser. The woman went up to the mother, and with both hands grabbed hold of those fat lips. And then she began to prise them apart, to pull the mouth open—it was obviously quite a strain, and the woman put her all into the job, and the mother didn’t have the strength to help her, she sat there looking down at the woman’s efforts uselessly and apologetic—the woman set her own mouth hard with the effort, and her mouth was so puny and ridiculous in comparison—the woman heaved, she was up to the task, she had done this before, she was expert at opening Mother’s mouth, Beverly could see that and could admire her for it—and was there some give?—was there some dark hole peeping out between those lips?—the mouth finally gave way, it swung open large and wide and wet. And quickly the woman produced a block of wood, she wedged it in to keep the mouth from slamming shut again. There weren’t many teeth left, and they were small and fractured—they were pebbles bobbing to the surface on a sea of hard red gum.