The Spectral Book of Horror Stories (31 page)

Alarm warred with anger in his lover’s face. “Seriously? Christ! Are you all right?”

“I’ll tell you all about it—after I’m home. When did I call?”

“About nine—well after midnight your time—I was on my way out the door. You were doing a kind of Woody Harrelson
shtick—
it didn’t make a lot of sense, to be honest. I don’t really remember what you said, but I thought it was a shitty way of breaking up with me, if—”

“No!”

“Well, you seemed set on staying in California. Expressed your love for the golden state. I thought—reading between the lines—you’d been offered a part, open-ended, starting immediately, and you were too nervous to tell me honestly that you weren’t coming back, so you’d got drunk and let this backwoodsman break it to me.”

“Nobody’s offered me anything. I’ve got a meeting on Monday, but even if he promises me the lead in
Die Hard: The Musical
I’m flying out of here the next day. I can’t wait to get home. I miss you.”

“You look like shit.”

“I love you too.”

“Migraine?”

Anson realised he was kneading his temples and squinting against a non-existent light. “Yeah. Quite a lot, recently. It’s the sun, I think.”

“Well, stay out of it. Go lie down. Take care of yourself, all right?”

#

Anson didn’t lie down after talking to Harry, even though his head was pounding. He took his tablets with a glass of water, and finished packing, eager to get away to the anonymity of a hotel room. Maybe he’d try the airport, where he could feel he was already on his way home.

The sun was low but still lancing painful beams of light off every reflective surface; each car in the small parking lot became an aggressor, and he all but closed his eyes as he shuffled towards his rental.

Opening the lid of the trunk immediately cut off those painfully distracting shafts and blades of light, and he opened his eyes wide, shocked by what he saw inside.

The woman’s body had been carefully placed, lying curled on one side. She wore only the dark blue slip of a dress, arms and legs bare. There was no blood visible, and the distortions and discolouration of her dead face was hidden by the same sweep of hair that covered the damage done to her neck. It was the way Cassius Crittenden always dealt with his victims; after sex, while they lay relaxed and unsuspecting beside him, he strangled the woman with a tie or a belt, then he washed and dressed her before laying her down, curled up so she looked at first glance as if she’d merely fallen asleep.

His eyes were drawn to the tattoo on her upper arm; the tattoo he had glimpsed on Elissa’s bare arm the previous evening. It was a dark red love-heart, with lacy scalloped edges, and the initials M.V. in the centre. He had seen it before, but not on this woman. He’d known it previously as a fake tattoo, created to adorn the arm of the actress who played Melinda Valentine to his Cassius Crittenden.

He heard the voice of Cassius as if it came from outside himself; knew it was impossible, but the drawling voice of an imaginary American psychopath was the last thing he heard in his final moments of knowing himself to be an English actor called Anson Barker.

“Who did she think she was? Who did she think
I
was? Sorry, darlin’, but you didn’t know
what
you were messin’ with, and now you’ve paid the price.”

THIS VIDEO DOES NOT EXIST

Nicholas Royle

I wake up two minutes before the alarm is due to go off. I cancel the alarm and lie still for a few moments, trying to remember my dreams, with limited success. All I can sense is a vague feeling of loss or nostalgia. In a moment my wife will stir and I will climb out of bed and open the curtains.

“The Manchester skies are grey,” I say as I look outside. How many times have I said these words upon opening the curtains? When does a running joke become an annoying habit? I suspect I will not find out until one day, when, instead of sleepily murmuring some benign response, my wife will retort, “We made the decision
together
to leave London. You know that as well as I do,” or “It’s been three years now. Can you not leave it alone?”

I forestall the possibility of this happening today by asking her, “Would you like some tea?”

“Yes please,” says a voice from under the duvet.

I leave the bedroom. I enter the bathroom and open the window blind. The Manchester skies are grey at the rear of the house as well. I wonder what the weather is like in London. I imagine a version of myself opening curtains and blinds in London right now and reporting to a version of my wife that the London skies are blue. I feel certain that if I check the weather online it will be two degrees cooler in Manchester than in London.

I use the toilet, then move to the sink. I lean on the edge of the washbasin, staring at the spotless white porcelain beneath my hands.

How many mornings have I done what I’m about to do? How many mornings have I raised my head to see the same reflection looking back at me? How many mornings have I thought that I am looking old, that I may be closer to the end of my life than its beginning?

This morning, however, is different.

This morning I do not look older, but I do look as if the end of my life is upon me.

The man in the mirror is wearing the same crumpled T-shirt that I am wearing, although the writing across the chest is back to front, as you would expect. The arms are the same—lightly tanned, freckled. The neck is the same slightly scrawny neck that makes me look my age in photographs. But above the neck—nothing. No tired eyes, lined forehead, stubbly cheeks. No vertical frown line above the bridge of the nose. Nothing.

I look at my neck, but I can’t see the end of it. There is no stump. Neither a flat, cartoonish disc like the end of a ham, nor the scraggy, gory mess of a victim in a splatter movie. Instead, it is like a tall building, its top lost in the clouds. I just can’t see it.

I raise my hands—I see them rise in the mirror—but there is nothing for them to alight on. No puffy skin beneath my eyes, no incipient jowls. I cannot feel the stubble on the top of my head, which I shaved only two days ago. The top of my head is not there. My head is not there.

The man in the mirror has no head.

I turn from the washbasin and look out of the window. The sky remains grey. I look back in the mirror. I still have no head. I step away, turn around, walk towards the door, then come back to the washbasin and look in the mirror again. No change. With my fingers I try to feel where my neck ends, but I can’t seem to gain purchase. Any sensation in my fingertips is weak. I don’t know where or how my neck ends, but I know that it ends and that there is nothing above it.

I pause in the bathroom doorway. My wife is waiting for her tea. She will not wake fully until I bring it to her. I step out on to the carpeted landing. I can walk normally. I can see, even though I have no eyes to see with. I can hear birds singing in the trees at the front of the house. A slightly sour smell of bedding rises from my T-shirt as I head towards the stairs. I walk downstairs, my sense of balance unaffected. I enter the kitchen, fill the kettle and switch it on.

Every morning I start emptying the dishwasher while the kettle is boiling and complete the job while the tea is brewing. As I bend down to remove the cutlery basket, I ask myself if bending down feels any different. Sometimes I bend down too quickly and once I have straightened up again I feel light headed. This time, that doesn’t happen.

I carry two cups of tea upstairs. I stand in front of the bedroom door as I remember approaching a road junction on my bike a day or two ago and not seeing a car that was coming towards me, because I was so intent on looking left and right. I saw it in time, but I had, for a few moments, been blind to it. I wonder if what I am experiencing now is a form of hysterical or selective blindness. I ask myself if I should place the cups of tea down on top of the bookcase on the landing and return to the mirror in the bathroom and have another look. But as I think this, I hear my wife getting out of bed and suddenly the bedroom door is open and she is standing in front of me.

“Oh,” she says, giving a little jump. “You frightened me.”

“Really?” I say.

“Yes, I didn’t know you were there. Thank you,” she says, taking one of the cups and moving past me to go to the bathroom. Did she actually look at me? I can’t be sure.

I enter the bedroom and check in the full-length mirror my wife uses when she is getting dressed. There is no change. If I were more detached from the situation I would find it interesting. It would thrill me on a number of levels—aesthetic, visceral, intellectual. But it’s hard to be detached.

My wife re-enters the bedroom and starts to get things out of her chest of drawers. She glances at me standing in front of the mirror and makes a humorous remark.

I ignore it and ask her, “Do I look tired to you?”

“Did you go to bed late?”

“Just look at me! Do I look tired to you?”

She turns and looks at me for a moment.

“There’s no need to snap,” she says. “You look neither tired nor not tired.”

“Thanks,” I say. “That’s very helpful.”

“Are you going to drink that?” she asks, lowering her eyes to the cup of tea I am still holding in my hand.

“Yes,” I say. “No… I don’t know.”

I leave the bedroom with the cup of tea and pour it away down the sink in the bathroom.

“I’m going to have a shower,” I shout.

“I’ll be gone when you’re done,” my wife shouts back. “So I’ll see you later.”

“Okay. See you later.”

I lock the bathroom door and look at myself in the mirror. No change.

I run the shower and wait until I hear the front door before switching it off. I return to the bedroom and start getting dressed, leaving my top half until last. I open my wardrobe and consider the separate piles of neatly folded T-shirts sorted by colour. I pick out a black one.

Downstairs I pull on my fluorescent jacket and zip it up. I open the cupboard where the rest of my cycling paraphernalia is kept and look at my helmet. I reach out and touch the cool plastic with a fingertip, but then withdraw my hand and close the cupboard door.

Cycling down our road I feel the wind on my face like pain in a phantom limb. I cut through the park, where dog-walkers take hold of their animals’ collars at my approach and joggers carry water bottles shaped like bagels. Everything as normal, in other words. Exiting the park, I notice a woman waiting to cross the road; I nod to indicate she can go and she does, raising a hand in thanks.

I reach the university and find that someone has saved me the trouble of opening the door to the bike shelter. A colleague whose name I can never remember is struggling to get his bike past those nearest the door.

One of us comments on the inadequacy of the bike shelter’s design and the other agrees. We lock up our bikes and leave and so enter the building at the same time. He presses the button for the lift and when it arrives and the doors slide open he gestures for me to go first. In the mirrored walls of the elevator I see an endless series of reflections of a headless man in a fluorescent jacket.

“Departmental meeting in half an hour,” says my colleague.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m counting the minutes.”

In the meeting, I sit next to Andy. Like me, Andy teaches film. I can see us reflected in the windows across the room.

“Andy,” I say, “you’d tell me if I had, like, egg on my chin or something, right?”

Andy turns to look at me, leaning back as he does so. “What are you trying to say?”

“Do I look normal to you?”

“Define normal.”

“Right,” I say.

“I hope this doesn’t go on for four hours like last time,” he says. “I’m going to that London tomorrow and I’ve got a ton of marking to get done before then.”

“Tell me about it. What you going to that London for?”

“Externals meeting at Birkbeck.”

“Lucky you.”

“Birkbeck?”

“London,” I say. “I mean, Birkbeck as well, but, you know, just London.”

The meeting proceeds along the usual lines. Every time we seem to have reached, if not a decision, then at least the end of the latest pointless discussion on a particular topic, one person, always the same person, will raise her hand and make a point that invariably starts with the words “I’m sorry, but…” and prompts further inconclusive debate, meaning that the end of the meeting is delayed by another ten or fifteen minutes. We are on the last item on the agenda—safety and environment—and a heated discussion about evacuation procedures for wheelchair users has just reached a sort of conclusion when a colleague—the same colleague—sticks her hand up and starts, “I’m sorry, but…”, and I turn to Andy, who is already turning to me and drawing the blade of his right hand across his throat. The gesture makes me widen my eyes, but, if Andy notices, he fails to react.

After the meeting I sit in my office with a pile of dissertations on the desk in front of me. I open the top one and turn to the first page, read the opening paragraph and see that the writer has failed to make correct use of the semi-colon. I close the dissertation. There’s a knock on the door. I look around, sit up straight in my chair, aware of a slight increase in my heart rate.

“Come in,” I hear myself say.

The door opens to reveal a third-year undergraduate, Rebecca, whose dissertation I remember supervising.

“Hiya,” she says. “I wanted to see you to talk about doing an MA.”

“Come in,” I say. “Sit down.” I move the dissertations to one side of my desk. “I imagine yours is in this lot somewhere,” I tell her.

She smiles.

“So you want to do an MA? That’s great news.”

“In London,” she says.

“Oh.”

“At Goldsmiths’ or UCL or somewhere. I wanted to see if you thought that would be a good idea.”

I look at her. She is one of those students my wife thought I would be tempted to have an affair with, or tempted to try to have an affair with: bright, attractive, a good critic, potentially susceptible to flattery from a widely published academic. She raises her eyebrows; the corners of her mouth turn up.