The Spectral Book of Horror Stories (17 page)

Time to serve dinner. And the woman tossed the lump of raw steak into the gaping maw. The steak was lost from view—and then, just for an instant, Beverly could see it again—it was held aloft—it was held high and proud—it was gripped tight within the grasp of a tiny hand. A tiny hand sticking out from the mouth, and it looked so neat and so perfect, the little knuckles, the little fingernails.

And then—and then, the woman turned to the window. She looked straight out. She looked straight out at Beverly. She gave a smile. Maybe it was a smile of triumph. It wasn’t a cruel smile.

And the mother at last looked towards the window too. She strained against the straps, her head slowly turned. She stared out at her daughter—at her own child, pretty and smart and wearing earrings like a grown-up. Beverly could see that in spite of everything, the mother did look like her. Somehow, there was a resemblance.

Mother raised a hand to her. In greeting? In need?

And the little baby that was growing inside her mother’s mouth raised a hand in greeting too.

There seemed to be a sound in her head. It couldn’t really be there—but maybe it was like a blast from a whistle too high-pitched for human beings to hear.

So warm in here, big sister. But soon I’ll come out to play. And oh! What fun we shall have.

And that’s when Beverly turned and ran.

#

She dozed on the trains, she didn’t know for how long. But whenever she opened her eyes it was always dark outside.

And at first she had nightmares, but they soon wore off, soon her dreams were sweet and peaceful. She slept soundly, even though she now knew what she was.

At one point she decided to open her mouth wide, as wide as possible. All those years and she’d never thought to see how far it could go, now it would be such fun to find out. She let her jaw droop, she stretched and stretched, she had to grit her teeth hard and concentrate, these were muscles that were weak and lazy, but Beverly had no patience with weakness any more. She heard something splinter, and she tasted blood, but there was no pain, or not much, at any rate—and soon she could fit her hand inside her mouth, the whole hand even with the fingers splayed, and then her whole arm, she could push in the arm right up to the elbow, she could push it in as deep as she liked.

#

At first she wasn’t sure she would even recognise her old house. But there it was, she found it on the street side just where she’d left it, looking up at it seemed like such sweet nostalgia. Had she really made that her home for the past eleven years? It was dark. All was still. She found a key in her pocket, and she put it into the lock, and it fitted, and it turned, and the door was open, and so she went inside.

She could see her parents had been worried. There were leaflets about missing children, what to do in the event of… and how to cope with… thick pamphlets that made merry with words like ‘grief’ and ‘trauma’. They were scattered all around the sitting room, and that was the main clue something was wrong, her old mother and father had been so neat and tidy. She felt a stab of guilt, she hadn’t wanted them to suffer. She wondered how long she’d been away.

But when she went into her parents’ bedroom, when she stood over their sleeping bodies, they looked so calm and carefree, they looked innocent as babes.

She stood over them for quite a while. She enjoyed the peace. She didn’t want to disturb it.

Eventually, with a soft sigh of resignation, she went to her father’s side, and she picked up his pillow, and his head went ker-thunk! down upon his mattress, and that was funny, and he didn’t even think to wake up. And she pressed the pillow down hard on to his face, right over his mouth and that bulbous nose, and that’s when he stirred from sleep, too little too late, he struggled so limply and then stopped struggling at all. She lifted off the pillow, and he just lay there, still, and he didn’t look any different in death—suffocation agreed with him, if indeed it
were
suffocation, as she pressed down she had heard a little snap and had wondered vaguely whether she had broken his neck.

Her mother slept on. She walked round to her mother’s side, she lifted her pillow, the head did the ker-thunk thing again but it wasn’t so heavy and wasn’t so funny. She considered. Her mother wasn’t old, she was healthy. Beverly sniffed, and there was a faint coppery tang to the air, and she knew her mother was still fertile. The heart thrummed, Beverly could hear it, and it sounded confident and strong, it sounded strong enough to support two. Beverly put down the pillow. She sat down by her mother’s side. She stroked her hair, she stroked her milky skin. Her mother gave a little whimper at that, and cuddled into Beverly closer, and Beverly felt happy.

When dawn broke Beverly stood up and left the bedroom. She took her father’s pipe from the cabinet. She took his other things too—the whisky that only he ever drank, the collection of commemorative coins, all the photographs, every single one. She put them into a sack, and left them outside by the dustbins. And then Beverly came back inside, and made herself a coffee, good, strong and black, and sat at the kitchen table, and waited for the woman upstairs to wake up.

THE DEVIL’S INTERVAL

Conrad Williams

Each time he unzipped the padded case and withdrew the guitar Fleckney felt a sting of self-consciousness. It was a Fender Squier Stratocaster, so not the greatest axe in existence, but “no POS”, as Pat, his guitar tutor, had confirmed to him. The guitar, made in Japan in 1989, had a cherry-red body with a black pick guard. A dark rosewood neck. It had cost him £90, a dent in his wallet back when he was eighteen, but not a huge amount for a secondhand Strat. It was probably worth much more nowadays, mainly because it was an unusual model: just one volume pot (no tone controls) and there was only one pickup, where normally there were three. That pickup was a double humbucker and it produced a savage sound that he really liked. No, any self-consciousness was more to do with Pat, who must have been twenty years younger than him. He wondered what Pat thought of this middle-aged, balding, overweight, bespectacled guy who turned up every Thursday evening without fail, but had trouble remembering his scales, or seldom managed to do anything interesting with them beyond slavishly running up and down the notes.

Fleckney had always wanted to be a guitarist but life (and laziness) had got in the way of his ambition. At sixth form college he’d cadged a handful of lessons from the mother of a friend who knew how to play chords. Once he’d learned a clutch of major and minor triads she could teach him no more, but put him in touch with a professional teacher who opened up the secrets of the minor pentatonic and barre chords. And then he took his ‘A’ levels and moved to Durham to study and suddenly he didn’t have enough money to pay for lessons. Other students were forming bands with overblown names—Wendigo Amok, Knee Cheese and Bakelite Heart were some that stuck in his memory—but even though they were only playing with three chords (if that) he didn’t feel confident enough in his own abilities to follow suit. So he stagnated, but he never felt tempted to sell his guitar, even during those grim days of student loans and swingeing overdrafts.

It wasn’t until his fortieth birthday, when he found the original plectrum his first teacher had given him, that he felt a pang of nostalgia, and regret. He dug out his old guitar and took it to a luthier who cleaned it up and put on a fresh set of strings. He found himself in a rush to learn, keen to understand the theory behind the practicalities, but he felt the frustration of his need versus the amount of years he had left. He didn’t want to suddenly crack the guitar’s secrets only to find he was too arthritic to shape the chords.

Pat didn’t seem to share his impatience. He was very laid back. More and more Fleckney believed Pat’s insouciance was down to a lack of concern. It was in his interests for Fleckney to progress at a sloth-like pace. Ten pounds for half an hour didn’t seem like much money until it hit home that he’d been coming for lessons once a week for just over two years. That was over a grand that he could have spent on an American Standard, one of the best Strats you could buy, before you headed into the realms of silly money for custom versions of old classics, or signature editions. Was it really so hard to teach yourself? But he knew very well the answer to that. He’d tried, but the sheer mass of information online, and his own lack of conviction when it came to proceeding in a practical, linear fashion, only served to confuse him. There was so much to take in: left-hand stuff like chords, scales, arpeggios, modes, but also the intricacies of right-hand work: finger-picking, legato, sweep picking, tremolo, sforzando, rasgueado… Christ, there was so much. Where did you start? Where did you stop? What was the most effective way to advance? He knew that whole careers had been built on three-chord riffs, but he wanted it all, he wanted to acquire the sophistry that he saw and heard in the work of his heroes: Hendrix, Page, Summers, Buckley.

He’d promised, once he’d become proficient, that he would treat himself to a brand new guitar, a real beauty. Maybe one of those American Standards. An Olympic white model with a maple neck. It didn’t matter that there was nobody around to hear him play. Except Pat with his smirk and his effortless ability and the faux enthusiastic encouragement he gave him. Playing guitar had always been just about him and his own limits. It had nothing to do with songwriting, or trying to attract women. It would be a way to express himself, he felt. A release valve, because there were no others.

He thought about the guitar when it wasn’t actually in his hands. At work—he was an office manager for an architectural organisation based in the suburbs south of Manchester—he would go about his business diligently but was always trying to visualise where the different notes were on the neck of the guitar, or listening out for undemanding riffs being played on the radio in the kitchen that he might be able to replicate. He carried a finger grip around with him and tensed it whenever he was on the phone. There was always a plectrum or two in his pocket to fiddle with. Occasionally he would meet a resident who had played in a band back in the day and he would ask him how he learned, how long it had taken, what was the key to knowledge.

He wished he’d never admitted to his ambitions at work. Not a day went by without some joker—Jackson or Volant or Darnley—handing him an air guitar and asking him to play a few licks, or telling him his shredding technique needed improvement when he was getting rid of some documents, or reciting the same jokes with tedious frequency. Jackson: “Hey everyone, what’s the difference between an onion and Flecko’s guitar? Not much… they’ll both have you in tears”; Volant: “Hey everyone, how can you tell Flecko’s at the door? He knocks out of time and comes in too early”; Darnley: “Hey everyone, how do you make a chainsaw sound like Flecko’s guitar playing? Add vibrato”. Everyone laughed politely—Fleckney included—and he smiled courteously whenever Jackson perched on his desk and told him about the band he used to be in when he was a teenager, and the pedal board he’d constructed, and the girls he’d picked up on the strength of his solos.

“So why don’t you play anymore?” Fleckney had asked him, too late realising the trap he’d built for himself.

“Playing guitar is a young man’s sport, Flecko,” he said. “I’ve got better things to do these days than trying to finger A minor.”

#

Now he was in his den tuning his Strat and gazing out of the back window at the kids playing football in the street. There was that scruffy looking boy, smaller than everyone else, with his hair in a permanent cowlick, his hand-me-down clothes always too small or too big for his body. Eddie, was that his name? He was sitting on the kerb by himself, staring at some unidentifiable thing in the gutter, his hands tucked under his chin. He saw the other boys getting closer. He saw fingers being pointed. Fleckney felt the pang of recognition; misery was moments away.

One of the bigger boys deliberately kicked the ball at Eddie. It slammed into the side of his head and caused him to pitch over. His knee barked the edge of the kerb. He righted himself, hand rubbing his face, and even at this distance Fleckney could see the stoicism in his features, the determination not to cry.

Now they were gathering around him, the football forgotten, the blood high in their veins, the dark thrill of bullying overcoming them. Fleckney opened the window. He plugged his guitar into the amp and turned the master volume all the way up. He stomped on his overdrive pedal and the speakers began growling, as if in anticipation. He placed his fingers on the neck of the guitar and crashed his plectrum into the strings: a G5 power chord. He felt the floor vibrate. The glass in the window frame shivered. And every face in the street turned to see what the noise was. For a second he felt like someone on a stage wielding incredible magic, the ability to draw focus. And then the boys were giving him the Vs, but at least they were moving away from Eddie, who was still sitting on the kerb, rubbing his face. He got to his feet and began shuffling away in the opposite direction. He turned and waved at Fleckney, as if remembering his manners.

Fleckney closed the window and turned down the volume of the amp. It was still burbling away. His heart was beating hard. He stared at the guitar as if seeing it for the first time. He wondered about the guitar’s history, its providence before it had come to him: who might have picked it up and swung it like a weapon around a stage; where it might have travelled to or from. All those dozens of fingers—short and stubby like his own, or elegant and spiderish—that had caressed its neck. It was his instrument, but in so many ways it was not.

The noise had been amazing. He understood, he thought, in those few moments, a little of why performing live was such a drug for some musicians. And now he was going back to the subdued fumble, the sad twang of a note striven for but not quite reached. The long road between no good to less than mediocre. Excellence wasn’t a bus stop on his route. He wondered if Jimi had ever been all thumbs, if Eric had sometimes stumbled trying to pinpoint the root of the harmonic minor in D sharp.