The Spectral Book of Horror Stories (36 page)

“Just make him feel at home. Just give him anything he wants.”

“What does he want, though?”

“He might want the radio on.”

Iris hid a laugh in a sigh. “Oh, I see. Okay. What kind of music does he like?”

“Any kind.”

The front door banged and the house was hers. Whether she liked it or not. She looked for the Senior Service ashtray— relic of The Collier’s—found it.

She switched on the transistor and it played
Yellow River
by Tony Christie and, by the time she’d finished the washing up,
All Kinds of Everything
by Dana. Drying the last teacup, she looked round the corner of the kitchen into the sitting room to see the settee side-on, and the guy hadn’t moved. Of course it hadn’t. How could it
move
?

She spent half an hour in the kitchen, tidying what needed to be tidied and wiping down the fablon surfaces and the hob of the oven, when she realised abruptly she was lingering there because she didn’t want to go back into the sitting room, which was pathetic and silly. As an act of defiance, to her own nonsensical fear if nothing else, she strode back through, not even looking at the horrible object—though one of its socks brushed against her calf—and went into the hall to get the Hoover out from under the stairs. She shut the door behind her, but couldn’t help seeing the vague, rippled shape of the occupant of the settee through the semi-opaque glass. As she moved her head from side to side it almost gave the illusion it was…

She carried the vacuum cleaner up to the landing and gave all three bedrooms a good going over. She didn’t enjoy housework, but she was house proud—got that from her mother, never a speck of dust on anything—and she was a good worker, and soon lost herself in the mindlessness of the task. By the time she came back downstairs an hour later she’d forgotten the guy and when she saw it gave a start.

Bugger!

Left tilted at an angle, the gnomish creation had now slumped on its side and gave every appearance of snoozing, impossibly, behind its plastic grin.

Annoyed at her over-reaction, Iris grabbed it and dropped it unceremoniously on the carpet, leaving it a discarded and distorted sack while she vacuumed the upholstery, after which she sat it back in position, puffing the scatter cushions around it.

The machine droned and sucked. Afterwards she stood breathless with the spout of the appliance in her hand. The mask was looking at her like she was stupid. Like it knew something she didn’t.

Sod you
, she thought.

She desperately wanted a smoke. She poked the ‘off’ button with her toe and went to get the packet of Embassy from the mantelpiece, but it wasn’t there. It wasn’t on the stool next to her armchair either, which was always where she put it. It wasn’t in the kitchen and it wasn’t on the small table next to the telephone. She scanned the room, turning in a circle twice, but her eyes only fell on the inscrutable guy with its listless neck and hollow fingers in its freshly puffed-up throne.

“What have you done with my cigarettes?”

She didn’t mean it literally, of course. She was just voicing her frustration at not finding them. But she found herself saying it again, out loud:

“What have you done with my cigarettes?”

It was mute. It had no lips. It had no voice.

She knew it didn’t.

But when she made herself a mid-morning cup of coffee she didn’t have it in the sitting room, she took it in the front room, the posh room, and drank it in the quiet away from the radio there, without opening the curtains.

#

When Kelvin came home he burst past her as if she didn’t exist, went straight into the sitting room and emerged almost immediately with the guy, his arm hooked round its midriff, trailing it with him as he hurried upstairs, its baggy limbs flailing. The bedroom door slammed. It would have been nice for him to say hello or to tell her about his day in school, but that was fine if that was the way he wanted it. She went back to her ironing.

At five to five she gave him a shout to tell him
Blue Peter
had started. There was no reply. She called again, louder, from the foot of the stairs but heard nothing but a solemn and disinterested, “Okay.”

Twenty-odd minutes later the show finished with the usual chirpy goodbyes from Val Singleton, John Noakes and Peter Purves and its distinctive hornpipe theme music—but Kelvin still hadn’t come down. Iris went upstairs to see what was so important to keep him from one of his favourite programmes.

As she approached the bedroom door, hand raised aloft to rap it with her knuckles, she frowned and froze. Could she hear not one but
two
voices coming from inside? Two children. Two boys in conversation, laughing and joking. One of them her son, yes… and the
other
?

She lowered her hand and twisted the door handle.

The scene that confronted her was an unremarkable one, yet not one that gave her any sense of relief—Kelvin sitting cross-legged on the bed with a comic open on his lap, the guy next to him, shoulder pressed against the wallpaper, mask askew on its round football head, arm twisted in a rubbery, inhuman curve. Kelvin looked at her as if interrupted mid-sentence.

“Sorry,” Iris said, feeling foolish. The TV was on downstairs and the other voice must’ve come from that. Mustn’t it? “I… I thought you had a mate in here.”

“I do.” Kelvin smiled.

It took her a moment to realise what he meant. When he grasped the guy’s hollow Christmas-gloved hand in his, a damp chill dispersed in the bowl of her pelvis.

“Come downstairs.” She stiffened, trying not to let the feeling intensify. “I don’t like you spending all this time in your room.”

“I do.”

“Well I don’t. Do as you’re told.” She found a firmness in her voice that didn’t come naturally. “And put your friend out in the shed, please. He doesn’t belong indoors.”

“Who says?”

“
I’m
saying, and I’m your mam.”

“I don’t have to do what you say.”

“Oh, don’t you?”

“No. And neither does he.”

“I’m not arguing, Kelvin. You can either do it now or you can talk to your father when he gets home. I’m not kidding.” She said nothing more, ignored the fact he threw the comic onto the floor, and went back downstairs to let him stew.

She sat and watched the BBC news with Kenneth Kendall as her son put the back door on the snib and hauled the guy out into the yard to the garden shed in the corner with the peg holding closed the latch. Feeling sorry for him now, she went to the kitchen, made him a glass of orange squash, brought it in and put it on the table with a couple of chocolate digestives, but when she turned she saw him standing, still clutching the guy to his side.

“He doesn’t like it in there. It’s too dark and smelly. It smells of paint. It’s horrible.”

“I don’t care,” Iris said. “He’ll like it in there when he gets used to it. He wants a home of his own.”

“No he doesn’t. He
said
he doesn’t. It’s too cold. He likes it in here. In
our
home.”

“Kelvin, I said no.” She was utterly powerless as he dragged the guy past her and back upstairs. “I said
No!
” But she knew he wasn’t listening, wasn’t even hearing. She didn’t go up and, for the rest of the evening, he didn’t come down.

Later, while Des was doing his marking in the middle room, she watched
Steptoe & Son
and couldn’t concentrate at all. Albert had broken Harold’s prize Ming vase and the audience on the laughter track was finding it hilarious, but it was all Iris could do to stop bursting into floods of tears.

#

It was Tuesday morning and she had some thinking to do, not something she was ever told she was good at. She didn’t have a degree like her husband. The most she’d learned in school was how to sit up straight, and couldn’t wait to leave that place, even if it meant working behind the bar in her father’s pub, The Collier’s, till her brother rolled in with a silly sod he’d met on National Service who pulled faces and acted the goat when she played
The Blue Danube
at the piano. Didn’t think she’d go on and marry him. Not in a million years. Neither did his mother, who didn’t approve and thought he could do better than a publican’s daughter, and made that plain on more than one occasion. She wished she could speak to him now, about her fears, her daft ideas he’d probably call them, but how could she do that when she couldn’t even talk to him about the chemistry of fireworks?

Instead she made herself a pot of tea and gradually let it warm her insides and the mug warm her hands. She wondered what a doctor might say about Kelvin and his new obsession with the object he had created? That there was no harm in it? That it was just like his collecting Mexico ‘70 coins? That it was just a phase he was going through? But what
sort
of phase, and why? She remembered, herself, as a ten-year-old having a sudden hankering to play with the teddy bear she’d adored when she was two or three, really wanting it back in her life, and asking her mother to find it in one of the tea chests in the attic. Had she wanted it to replace something missing? She couldn’t remember. Did she just want it because it was somebody she loved, and she imagined loved her back?

She knew Des thought she wrapped the boy in cotton wool, that she was too much of a blinking softie half the time. Maybe men in general think a child should be told what’s what. Do this, don’t do that. Maybe it’s about rules for them.
Their
rules, that is. But what about happiness? Did happiness ever come into it? She just wanted her son to be happy, and he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. Not when his best friend was a…

Then it struck her, what should’ve been blindingly obvious all along.

That if Kelvin had a real, proper friend there was a possibility he wouldn’t need his make-believe one any more.

“Kelvin,” she said at lunch time as he ate his sausages and beans. “Why don’t you ask your friend Gareth to come over for tea tonight?” Kelvin stopped chewing. “I’ll phone his mother and make sure it’s all right with her, but I’m sure it will be. You can show off your guy. I’m sure he’ll be impressed.” She didn’t get an immediate answer, and Kelvin buried himself back in his dinner.

“And
he
’ll enjoy it too,” he said, looking over at the pile of clothes stitched into a human shape. “
He
hasn’t got any friends either, see. Just me.”

“Exactly,” she said, wiping the drip of tomato sauce off his chin with her finger.

She phoned Gloria Powell while he ate his thin brick of Walls ice cream, then accompanied him to school, stopping off on the way back at Graigwen Stores to stock up with what she needed for tea. Jaffa cakes seemed a necessity, and she got a tin of salmon for sandwiches (it was a special occasion after all;
she
felt it was); oh, and some individually wrapped Cadbury’s Swiss rolls, as well as bottles of white pop, Tizer and dandelion and burdock, just in case. It was a hike back home, but she found she had a spring in her step and didn’t stop to catch her breath till she reached Jeff Beech’s sweet shop, lightheaded, round the corner from her house in Highfield Terrace.

As it happened, Gareth said he’d like a cup of tea, please—he always had tea at tea time: didn’t they? Iris said they didn’t, not always. Or rather, she and Kelvin’s dad had tea, but Kelvin didn’t, he preferred squash. It already seemed a difficult conversation and she wondered why she was getting so flustered, given she was talking to an eight-year-old. The way he sniffed suspiciously at the salmon sandwich also didn’t greatly enamour him to her. She said they could go upstairs and play with Kelvin’s Scalextric if they liked, or Monopoly. Gareth said he always beat his sister at Monopoly. Kelvin said he didn’t like Monopoly anyway, he liked draughts best. Gareth sniggered, repeating the word derisively and said his father was teaching him chess. He asked Kelvin what his dad was teaching him.

“Anyway, Gareth,” Iris said. “What are you doing on November the fifth? Going up the quarry to the big bonfire?”

Gareth shook his head. “My dad gets a box of fireworks and lights them in the backyard. I’m allowed to hand him them, but he lights them.”

“Quite right too. Light the blue touchpaper and stand well back!” Iris laughed, hoping the boys might laugh too, but they didn’t see what was so funny. “I hope you keep your cats and dogs indoors.”

“My mam and my sisters have to watch through the window. They always put their fingers in their ears. Dad says this year I can light a rocket.”

Kelvin had left the table and now plonked himself down next to the guy on the settee. Frowning hard, he entwined its arm round his. “
He
wants to watch TV.”

“What do you want to do, Gareth?”

Gareth shrugged.

“Well, you go and sit down and watch TV with Kelvin, and I’ll get some cake and biscuits. How’s that?”

Out in the kitchen she folded paper serviettes and arranged the mini-rolls on two small plates. A sense of satisfaction sank in as she heard nothing from the other room but the twinkly ‘gallery’ music from
Vision On
, played when they showed the drawings and paintings sent in by its child viewers. The boys were quiet. They were getting on, thank goodness, she thought. She’d been right. It was
working
… Then the spell was broken, the apparent calm torn asunder by a lilting, innocuous rhyme.

“Remember, remember, the—”

“
No!
—”

“Fifth of—”

“
Shut up!
”

“—vember. Gunpowder, treason and—”

“
Don’t! Don’t do that!
”

“—reason why gunpowder treason should
ever
be for—”

“
Don’t! DON’T HURT HIM!
” This turning into a shriek. From her son.

Iris couldn’t get into the sitting room quick enough. “What the heck is going on in—?”

Three small figures sprawled, entangled on the cushions of the settee, limbs for a moment indistinguishable. Kelvin was wrestling the guy away from Gareth who in turn seemed to be making pincer-like gestures at the effigy’s polo-neck with crab-like hands. Kelvin tugged the guy’s head towards him protectively and flung a foot out at the other boy, aimed at his face. Luckily this was countered by a swing of the arm, while Gareth’s other arm swiped the guy with a karate chop in the middle of the chest, caving in the torso with a massive dent and bending it double. Kelvin emitted an even more ear-piercing shriek.