The Spectral Book of Horror Stories (7 page)

Nora hated the nerve of the girl.

“Mrs Moreland!” she called, taking off her shoes. “Mrs Moreland! Oh, there you are.”

The old woman had appeared at the top of the stairs.

“Of course, dear, now what’s the matter?”

Nora opened her mouth to speak, but another idea came to her. She abandoned her original course of action. “I thought, perhaps—” she forced a wide smile “—you might like some company?”

“Why, yes, that would be splendid.”

Mrs Moreland stepped quickly down the stairs and disappeared into the kitchen, appearing a moment later with a tray loaded with a teapot, cups and biscuits.

“I’ve just been tending to Sean’s affairs,” she said. “He left quite a lot of them. It haunts me so! He was a messy boy, you know. But I miss him, I really do. I can’t bear to think about him shut up in a box underground.”

“Where did he live?” Nora asked, trying to divert the subject. She smiled again, kept the smile, all curious politeness, fixed and ready.

“Oh, in America. He left to go to school there.”

“Was he a good student?”

“The very best.”

“That’s important, you know,” Nora said. “So many young people neglect their studies. Freedom doesn’t suit them.”

She thought of Kitty with her cigarette. Her haughty air. Her casually fashionable clothing. Her hand on Nora’s wrist.

“He was very thoughtful. Just like you, Miss Higgins. You seem quite thoughtful. Very pretty. He would have liked you, I think. Here’s the tea now, mind you blow on it.”

“Thank you.”

They sat in silence for several minutes. Nora blew on her tea. It was much too sweet.

“I wonder—” Mrs Moreland began. She clutched her cup with both hands.

“Yes?”

“I don’t want to trouble you.”

Nora’s smile widened. She would be entirely solicitous. She would be entirely helpful. She would make this little old granny feel perfectly comfortable, perfectly comforted. That would show the girl, always trying to make trouble. She knew the type. But Nora would show her. She let Mrs Moreland take her hand. She let her clutch at it with those knobbly old fingers of hers even though it half-revolted her to do so.

“It’s just, well, if perhaps you wouldn’t mind coming to my room with me?”

“Of course, Mrs Moreland. Whatever you need.”

The old woman creaked up the stairs. Nora followed after her, past her own room, down the hallway. She had never come this far inside the house before. She had kept to her own little corner. But perhaps that was wrong. Perhaps she should have been more sociable. Perhaps she should have made an effort. Mrs Moreland was sweet. She had clearly taken a liking to Nora. And she must be so sad, so terribly, terribly sad. Nora could imagine that sadness. She felt light-headed just thinking about it.

Positively light-headed.

Nora followed Mrs Moreland into the bedroom. It was much like Nora’s, a narrow single bed, cream carpets, the whole place maintained perfectly, and there sitting in the centre of it: an enormous black coffin.

“Oh my,” said Nora. It had the wet shine of an expensive car recently polished.

“Sean’s come home today. They sent Sean home to me.”

Nora said nothing. She stared. It looked so absurd in the tiny room, like finding a loaded gun amidst the tea cosies.

“But they’ve sealed him up, you see,” Mrs Moreland said.

Nora took a step toward the coffin. She felt the strangest urge to touch it. To see her breath mist up the finely polished surface. To see her fingerprints like little round pebbles on the black.

When had the moving men brought him in? Had it been while she was out? And who would deliver such a thing?

“They’ve sealed him up so very tightly. And I must see his face.”

Nora bumped up against a little wooden chair. But Mrs Moreland was behind her now, Nora could feel her very close, there was nowhere to go but in. In and in and in.

“Would you help me, Miss Higgins?”

Now Mrs Moreland was pressing something into her hand. Something cold and hard. Nora looked down and she felt like laughing, it was ridiculous, it was a can opener from the kitchen, that giant clawed beast! Nora looked closer at the coffin and she could see a thin strip of something like rubber running along the inner margin of the casket.

“My arthritis, you see,” Mrs Moreland said, and Nora could see, could see where Mrs Moreland had begun the work. Where the teeth of the can opener had bit into the polish and begun to cut through the sealant. Of course the old woman hadn’t been able to make much more of a mark. Nora had seen her with the can of beans. She’d barely been able to punch through a flimsy piece of tin, it was ridiculous!

“I can’t help you,” Nora said faintly. “I can’t. Please.” But Mrs Moreland was close behind her, that powdery lavender smell filling up her nostrils. She was nauseated, drowsy. A giddy numbness was climbing up her spine.

“But you understand, don’t you?” Mrs Moreland said. “I knew that the moment I saw you. You know what loneliness is, don’t you, Miss Higgins? You know what it means to have been alone for a very long time?”

“No,” said Nora.

“You do, I can see it about you. It doesn’t even matter that you aren’t family. Kitty wanted to help, she was so close to him, you see, but she didn’t understand properly. You’re a kindred spirit, aren’t you?”

“No,” said Nora again.

But then she hesitated. Because she did understand, didn’t she? She
did
understand—better than Kitty, better than anyone, what it was like to feel that lonely. To crave loneliness, and to hate it as well, to want to be touched, to fear to be touched. Nora felt the can opener moving in her hand, as if by accident, as if the motion was automatic. And at first it was automatic, like she had no control at all, but then she was leaning in close to the coffin. She was digging the teeth into the metal.

“I know what it’s like for your type, I’ve housed so many of you! All of you squirreling away in your rooms, scribbling away in those dark libraries! You’re all the same, as quiet as little mice!”

The can opener was moving, moving, and turning ever so slowly. And it was hard. The metal stubbornly resisted. Nora had to work at it. She had to shove her weight behind it. She was gasping, panting with the effort. Her fingers cramped and twitched. There was blood on her wrist from where the jagged metal of the coffin bit into her skin. And perhaps it took hours, it
felt
like it was hours, but she turned the screw, and she turned it again, and she turned it again until she could see the trail it left behind, the way the lips of the coffin were opening up to her like an enormous mouth.

“This is what you want, isn’t it?” Mrs Moreland asked. Her voice was kind, she was really a very sweet old lady. And Nora couldn’t help but find herself nodding along.

“Do you feel tired, Miss Higgins?”

“I do feel tired,” she said. Her hands were heavy and bruised. Her Mount of Venus ached from the imprint of the handle. Nora stared at the coffin, stared at the reflection of herself in it. The black line cut across the surface, like it had been gnawed by teeth. Like it had been cut open by a lobster claw. And wasn’t that a strange thought! Nora wanted to laugh.

“I know you feel tired, Miss Higgins. You must. But it’s all right, dear. I’ll take care of the rest.”

“Good,” Nora said. There was blood running down her wrist, dripping off her index finger. “Thank you. That’s really very kind.”

And the lid was lifting up very slowly. Mrs Moreland was huffing and puffing, throwing all of her tiny, fragile frame into the effort of opening that lid. Then—there, it was open! And inside it wasn’t black at all, it was white, a pure white satin.

And, of course, there lay Sean, nestled cosily on the pillows. He had been a handsome boy, Mrs Moreland was right. And perhaps he looked like Kitty, but he was so much
cleaner
than Kitty was. He had a broad forehead, and such pink lips. So lifelike, even now. Like they might tremble and open.

And Nora felt tired. Her eyelids drifted. Opening them took quite a lot of work. It was a Herculean task, but she did it. And there was Sean again. Handsome Sean.

“You don’t want to be alone, do you, Miss Higgins?” Mrs Moreland asked. “Not such a pretty girl as you?”

“No,” she said, “please.”

“Of course,” Mrs Moreland said. “Of course, dear. It’s very easy now.”

Nora climbed up onto the chair slowly. It wobbled underneath her but held firm. Really, it was just like that hostel, wasn’t it? Climbing up those rungs? But this would be nice. The air was cool, not stagnant as it had been there, in that awful place.

“In you go, dear. In you go.”

And it would be quiet, wouldn’t it?

And there wouldn’t be all that touching. All that noise. Those damp, eager hands touching her. Those thick Italian voices, so full of passion.

It would be just as she wanted it.

She lay herself down. She could feel the cold body pressed against her—Sean, the handsome son—but she didn’t mind, it didn’t seem to matter so much. She was so very, very tired.

And the lid came down.

And the darkness.

She would be safe here. She would be happy here.

Her eyelids drifted shut. She let herself relax at last, her whole body slack and nerveless.

Good
, she thought.
Yes
.
Just like that. I’ll go to sleep now.

But something was wrong. It was warm in here. It should be cold in a coffin but now it felt warm, so very warm, stiflingly so. The hot air seemed to choke her. Nora pressed against the lid but there was no give, none at all. And the heat began to rise, and there was nowhere to move, she didn’t want to disturb Sean, she didn’t want to writhe around in that narrow, narrow space. She wouldn’t. She would stay perfectly still. She would let the warm air flush her neck, glowing on her cheeks, and she would do her very best to ignore it: the sound of someone breathing beneath her.

SLAPE

Tom Fletcher

“Them stones are slape as fuck.” He gestured at the slabbed path. “Went over on them last week.”

Eel was much bigger than the rest of us and could hold three full milk bottles in each hand, their necks gripped tightly between his sausage fingers. He’d been carrying six bottles in such a fashion when he’d slipped—’slape’ meaning ‘slippery’, I realised—and he’d landed on them, on his hands. His feet had gone out from beneath him, he’d put his hands out to break his fall, and—smash. Milk and blood everywhere. The round bottle necks had driven right up into his palms. He’d shown me the wounds later, back at the yard, laughing. We’d been standing by his van, and the steering wheel and door handle were all dripping with blood. The boss had been furious, because another worker had had a similar accident the month before—really, it happened a lot, especially in spring, when paths and driveways were green with moss, and the showers were heavy—and that worker had severed several tendons. But then, he’d been returning to the van with empties. And everybody knows how milkmen carry empties—with their fingers right inside the bottles. (You can carry up to ten that way, to save time). Also, he was only twenty-one, and his hands were very soft and vulnerable. Whereas Eel was in his sixties and had worked outside all his life, so he had thick skin, literally.

The stones that Eel warned me about were slate slabs forming a narrow, uneven path through a wild thicket of brambles and nettles. It was also covered in broken glass by that point, because Eel hadn’t bothered to clean up the aftermath of his accident, and neither had the owner of the property—our customer. This path, these stones slape as fuck, led us from the van to the customer’s back door.

Eel was teaching me the round, because he was leaving the company. I didn’t know why and I didn’t much care. I didn’t like the man. I was glad he was going. I just wished that it didn’t mean spending two weeks in a van with him as he showed me the route.

After he’d gone, I didn’t think about him except when I was delivering milk to that one particular customer; the one with the particularly slippery path. Even then, it wasn’t so much that I
thought
about him; it was more as if I heard his voice. I heard him say the words ‘slape as fuck’ every time I stood at the first of those stones.

As I got to know the round, and memorised which customers had which milk on which days, and how much, and I learned where to park the van to minimise walking time, and I familiarised myself with a frankly bewildering variety of garden gate latches, I became quicker, which meant that I arrived at any given customer’s property earlier. As summer became autumn and the days grew shorter, more and more of my round was completed in darkness. Eventually, of course, this meant tackling the slippery path before dawn. That in itself didn’t bother me. But the first time the words ‘slape as fuck’ came to me from out of the impenetrable blackness of that wild and overgrown garden, I nearly had a seizure. For the first time, they felt real and audible; not like the memory that they were. If I wasn’t sensible enough to carry the milk bottles in a crate, I probably would have dropped them all. I think that because it was so dark—because I couldn’t see that he
wasn’t
there—I felt as if Eel was actually present. I wondered, for the first time, if he’d died immediately upon leaving the company and his ghost was lurking around trying to scare his old co-workers.

On that occasion I delivered the milk without further incident.

I should tell you a little more about this customer. His name was Bacon. He was a widower. All those spring and summer months, I never saw him. His house had once been the parish workhouse, and it still looked like a workhouse. It was large and grey and forbidding. It was set back from the road and had a wall around it. Both inside and outside of the wall was a deep sea of brambles. Driving down the long lane towards it, you’d see the wrecks of old cars submerged in that sea. Eel told me, before he left, that every car Bacon had ever owned was in there somewhere. Whenever he bought a new car, he just parked the old one up and left it. There were at least three old Jaguars and an MG being pulled apart by those plants. And close up to the house, it was evident that he didn’t care about the building much more than he did about his old cars. It was tired-looking and it smelled bad. It was overrun by cats, and in the back porch—where I left the milk—there were several bowls of meaty cat food too rotten and writhing for even animals to eat.