The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories Page 13

  There was little he could do. He went back inside and closed and locked the doors behind him, pulled the curtains, grabbed a miniature of gin from the fridge because the whiskey had run out.

  He tried calling Alison again, but his own voice greeted him from the past. He had recorded that message before the flight, before the crash, before Amaranth. He was a different person now. He dialed and listened again, knowing how foolish it was: yes, a different person. He had known so little back then.

  “Just sign on the dotted line,” Maggie said. “Then the deal’s done and you’ll have to sleep with me for what I’ve done for you.”

  “Mags, I’d sleep with you even if you hadn’t just closed the biggest deal of my life, you know that.” Maggie was close on seventy years old, glamorous in her own way, and Adam was sure she’d never had enough sex in her earlier years. Sometimes, when he really thought about it, he wondered just how serious she was when she joked and flirted.

  He picked up the contract and scanned it one more time. Sixth reading now, at least. He hated committing to anything, and there was little as final and binding as signing a contract. True, the gallery had yet to countersign, but once he’d scrawled his name along the bottom there was little chance to change anything.

  And besides, this was too good to be true.

  He wondered how Alison and Jamie were. And then he wondered where they were as well.

  It’ll happen to you, too, the bug lady had screamed at him, pus dripping from her lips, insects fleeing her body as if they already thought she was dead.

  You’ll lose them, Howards had stated plainly.

  “Mags …” he muttered, uncertain of exactly what he was about to say. The alcohol had gone to his head, especially after the celebratory champagne Maggie had brought to his room. His aim had been good. The cork had gone flying through the door and out over the street, and he’d used that as an excuse to take another look. The bug lady had gone, but Adam had been left feeling uncomfortable, unsettled.

  That, and his missing wife and son.

  The contract wavered on the bed in front of him, uncertain, unreal. He held the pen above the line and imagined signing his name, tried to see what effect it would have. Surely this was his own good fortune, not something thrown his way by Amaranth? But he had only been working in fire since the accident …

  “Mags, I just need to call Alison.” He put the pen down. “I haven’t told her I’ve arrived safely yet.”

  Maggie nodded, eyebrows raised.

  Adam dialed and fully expected to hear his own voice once more, but Alison snapped up the line. “Yes?”

  “Honey?”

  “Oh Adam, you’re there. I got your messages but I was hoping you’d ring …”

  “Anything the matter?”

  “No, no … well, Mum’s taken a turn for the worse. They think … she arrested this afternoon.”

  “Oh no.”

  “Look, how’s it going? Maggie there with you? Tell her to keep her hands off my husband.”

  “Honey, I’ll come home.”

  Alison sighed down the phone. “No, you won’t. Just call me, okay? Often? Make it feel like you’re really here and I’ll be fine. But you do what you’ve got to do to make our damn fortune.”

  He held the phone between his cheek and shoulder and made small talk with his wife, asked how Jamie was, spoke to his son. And at the same time he signed the three copies of the contract and slid them across the bed to Maggie.

  “Love you,” he said at last. Alison loved him too. They left it at that.

  “Shall we go out to celebrate?” Maggie asked.

  Adam shook his head. “Do you mind if we just stay in the hotel? Have a meal in the restaurant, perhaps? I’m tired and a bit drunk, and …” And I don’t want to go outside in case the bug lady’s there, he thought. I don’t want to hear what she’s telling me.

  In the restaurant an ice sculpture was melting slowly beneath the lights, shedding shards of glittering movement as pearls of water slid down its sides. As they sat down Adam thought he saw it twitch, its face twist to watch him, limbs flex. He glanced away and looked again. Still he could not be sure. Well, if Amaranth chose to sit and watch him eat—celebrate his success, his good luck—what could he do about it?

  What could he do?

  The alcohol and the buzz of signing the deal and the experience of meeting the bug lady all combined to drive Adam into a sort of dislocated stupor. He heard what Maggie said, he smelled the food, he tasted the wine, but they were all vicarious experiences, as if he were really residing elsewhere for the evening, not inside his own body. Later, he recalled only snippets of conversation, brief glimpses of events. The rest vanished into blankness.

  “This will lead onto a lot more work,” Maggie said, her words somehow winging their way between the frantic chords of the piano player. “And the gallery says that they normally sell at least half the paintings at any exhibition.”

  A man coughed and spat his false teeth onto his table. The restaurant bustled with restrained laughter. The shadows of movement seemed to follow seconds behind.

  A waiter kept filling his glass with wine, however much he objected.

  The ice sculpture reduced, but the shape within it stayed the same size. Over the course of the evening, one of the Amaranth things was revealed to him. Nobody else seemed to notice.

  The ice cream tasted rancid.

  Maggie touched his knee beneath the table and suggested they go to his room.

  Next, he was alone in his bed. He must have said something to her, something definite and final about the way their relationship should work. He hoped he had not been cruel.

  Something floated above his bed, a shadow within shadows. “Do not deny us,” it said inside his head, a cautionary note in its voice. “Believe in us. Do not deny us.”

  Then it was morning, and his head thumped with a killer hangover, and although he remembered the words and the sights of last night, he was sure it had all been a dream.

  Adam managed to flag down a taxi as soon as he stepped from the hotel. He was dropped off outside the gallery, and as he crossed the pavement he bumped into an old man hurrying along with his head down. They exchanged apologies and turned to continue on their way, but then stopped. They stared at each other for a moment, frowning, all the points of recognition slotting into place almost visibly as their faces relaxed and the tentative smiles came.

  “You were on the horse,” Adam said. “The unicorn.”

  “You were the disbeliever. You believe now?” The man’s smile was fixed, like a painting overlying his true feelings. There was something in his eyes … something about giving in.

  “I do,” Adam said, “but I’ve met some people … a lucky one, and an unlucky one … and I’m beginning to feel scared.” Verbalizing it actually brought it home to him; he was scared.

  The man leaned forward and Adam could smell expensive cologne on his skin. “Don’t deny Amaranth,” he said. “You can’t anyway, nobody ever has. But don’t even think about it.”

  Adam stepped back as if the man had spat at him. He remembered Howards telling him that he would lose his family, and the bug lady spewing promises darker than that.

  He wondered how coincidental his meeting these three people was. “How is your family?” he asked.

  The unicorn man averted his gaze. “Not as lucky as me.”

  Adam looked up at the imposing facade of the gallery, the artistically wrought modern gargoyles that were never meant for anything other than ornamentation. Maybe they should have been imbued with a power, he thought. Because there really are demons …

  He wondered how Molly was, whether she had woken up yet. He should telephone Alison to find out, but if he hesitated here any longer he may just turn around and flee back home. Leave all this behind—all this success, this promise, this hope for a comfortable and long sought-after future …

  When he looked back down, the man had vanished along the street, disappearing in
to the crowds. Don’t deny Amaranth, he had said. Adam shook his head. How could anyone?

  He stepped though the circular doors and into the air-conditioned vestibule of the gallery building. Marble solidified the area, with only occasional soft oases of comfortable seating breaking it up here and there. Maggie rose from one of these seats, two men standing behind her. The gallery owners, Adam knew. The men who had signed checks ready to give him.

  “Adam!” Maggie called across to him.

  His cell phone rang. He flipped it open and answered. “Alison?”

  “Adam, your lateness just manages to fall into the league of fashionable,” Maggie cooed.

  “Honey. Adam, Mum’s died. She went a few minutes ago. Oh …” Alison broke into tears and Adam wanted to reach through the phone, hug her to him, kiss and squeeze and love her until all of this went away. He glanced up at the men looking expectantly at him, at Maggie chattering away, and he could hear nothing but his wife crying down the phone to him.

  “I’ll be home soon,” Adam said. “Alison?”

  “Yes.” Very quietly. A plea as well as a confirmation.

  “I’ll be home soon. Is Jamie all right?”

  A wet laugh. “Watching Teletubbies. Bless him.”

  “Three hours. Give me three hours and I’ll be home.”

  “Adam?” Maggie stood before him now. It had taken her this long to see that something was wrong. “What is it?”

  “Alison’s mother just died.”

  “Oh … oh shit.”

  “You got those contracts, Mags?”

  She nodded and handed him a paper file.

  He looked up at the two men, at their fixed smiles, their moneymaker’s suits, the calculating worry-lines around their eyes. “This isn’t art,” he said, and he tore the contracts in half.

  As he left the building, he reflected that it was probably the most artistic thing he had ever done.

  There was a train due to leave five minutes after he arrived at the station, as he knew there would be. He was lucky like that. Not so his family, of course, his wife, or his wife’s mother. But he was lucky.

  He should not have taken the train—he should have denied Amaranth and the conditional luck they had bestowed upon him—but he needed to be with Alison. One more time, he thought. Just this one last time.

  They made themselves known in the station. He had been aware of them following him since the gallery, curving in and out of the ground like sea serpents, wending their way through buildings, flying high above him and merging with clouds of pigeons. Sometimes he caught sight of one reflected in a shop window but, whenever he turned around, it was gone.

  At the station, the four of them were standing together at the far end of the platform. People passed them by. People walked through them, shuddering and glancing around with startled expressions as if someone had just stepped on their graves. Nobody else seemed to see them.

  Adam boarded the train at the nearest end. As he stepped up, he saw Amaranth doing the same several carriages along.

  He sat in the first seat he found and they were there within seconds.

  “Go away,” he whispered. “Leave me alone.” He hoped nobody could hear or see him mumbling to himself.

  “You cannot deny us,” their voice said. “Think of what you will lose.”

  Adam was thinking of what he would gain. His family, safe and sound.

  “Not necessarily.”

  Was that humor there? Was Amaranth laughing at him, enjoying this? And Adam suddenly realized that an emotionless, indifferent Amaranth was not the most frightening thing he could think of. No, an Amaranth possessed of humor—irony—was far more terrifying.

  They were sitting at his table. He had a window seat, two sat opposite, a third in the seat beside him. The fourth rested on the table, sometimes halfway through the window glass. The acceleration did not seem to concern the thing, which leaned back with one knee raised and its face pointing at the ceiling, for all the world looking as if it were sunbathing.

  So far, thankfully, nobody else had taken the seats.

  “Leave me alone,” he said again, “and leave my family alone as well.” His voice was rising, he could not help it. Anger and fear combined to make a heady brew.

  “We are not touching your family,” Amaranth soothed. “Whatever happens there simply … happens. Our interest is in you.”

  “But why?”

  “That is our business, not yours. But you are in danger … in danger of denying us, refuting our existence.”

  “You’re nothing but nightmares.” He stared down at the table so that he did not have to look at them, but from the corner of his eye he could see the hand belonging to the one on the table, see it flexing and flowing as it moved.

  “Since when did a dream give a man the power to survive?”

  He glared up at them then, hating the smug superiority in their voice. “Power of the mind!” he could not help shouting. “Now leave me! I can’t see you anymore.”

  Surprisingly, Amaranth vanished.

  Pale faces turned away from him as he scanned along the carriage. Everyone must have heard him—he had been very loud—but this was London, he thought. Strange things happened in London all the time. Strange people. The blessed and the cursed mixed within feet of each other, each cocooned in their own blanket of fate. Maybe he had simply seen beyond his, for a time.

  He had been unfaithful to Alison only once. It had been a foolish thing, a one-hour stand, not even bearing the importance to last a night. A woman in a bar—he was drunk with his friends—an instant attraction, a few whiskeys too many, a damp screw against the moldy wall behind the pub. Unsatisfying, dirty more than erotic, frantic rather than tender. He had felt forlorn, but it had taken only days for him to drive it down in his mind, believe it was a fantasy rather than something that had truly happened.

  On the surface, at least.

  Deep down, in places he only visited in the darkest, most melancholy times, he knew that it was real. He had done it. And there was no escape from that.

  Now, he tried to imagine that Amaranth was a product of his imagination, and those people he had met—Howards, the bug lady, the man who had ridden the unicorn—were all coincidental players in a fantasy of his own creation …

  And all the while, he knew deep down that this was bullshit. He could camouflage the truth with whatever colors he desired, it was all still there, plain as day in the end.

  They left him alone until halfway through the journey. He had been watching, trying to see them between the trees rushing by the window, looking for their faces in clouds, behind hedges, in the eyes of the other passengers on the train. Nothing. With no hidden faces to see, he realized just how under siege he had been feeling.

  He began to believe they had gone for good. He began to believe his own lies.

  And then the woman sat opposite him.

  She was beautiful, voluptuous, raven-haired, well-dressed, clothes accentuating rather than revealing her curves. Adam averted his eyes and looked out the window, but he could not help glancing back at her, again and again. Yes. She was truly gorgeous.

  “I hate trains,” she said. “So boring.” Then her unshod foot dug into his crotch.

  He gasped, unable to move, all senses focusing on his groin as her toes kneaded, stroked and pressed him to erection. He closed his eyes and thought of Alison, crying while Jamie caused chaos around her. Her father was long dead and there was no close family nearby, so unless she had called one of her friends around to sit with her, she would be there on her own, weeping …

  And then he imagined himself guiding this woman into the cramped confines of a train toilet, sitting on the seat and letting her impale herself upon him, using the movements of the train to match their rhythms.

  He opened his eyes and knew that she was thinking the same thing. Her foot began to work faster. He stared out of the window and saw a plane trail being born high above.

  Realized how tentative the oth
er passengers’ grips on life were.

  Saw just how fortunate he was to still be here.

  He reached down, grasped the woman’s ankle, and forced her foot away from him. This isn’t luck, he thought, not for my family, not even for me. It’s fantasy, maybe, but not luck. What’s lucky about betraying my wife when she needs me the most?

  They’re desperate. Amaranth is desperate to keep me as they want me.

  No, he thought.

  “No.”

  “What?” the woman said, frowning, looking around, staring back at him. Her eyes went wide. “Oh Jesus … oh, I’m …” She stood quickly, hurried along the carriage and disappeared from sight.

  Amaranth returned. “Do not deny us,” the voice said, deeper than he had ever heard it, stronger.

  He closed his eyes. The vision he had was so powerful, quick, and sharp that he almost felt as if he were physically experiencing it then and there. He smelled the vol-au-vents and the caviar and the champagne at the exhibition, he saw Maggie’s cheerful face and the gallery owners nodding to him that he had just sold another painting, he tasted the tang of nerves as one of the viewers raved about the painting of his they had just bought, minutes ago, for six thousand pounds.

  He forced his eyes open against a stinging tiredness, rubbed his face and pinched his skin to wake himself up. “No,” he said. “My wife needs me.”

  “You will regret it!” Amaranth screeched, and Adam thought he was hearing it for the first time as it really was. The hairs stood on the back of his neck, his balls tingled, his stomach dropped. The things came from out of the table and the seats and reached for him, swiping out with clear, sharp nails, driving their hands into his flesh and grabbing his bones, plucking at him, swirling and screaming and cursing in ways he could never know.

  None of them touched him.

  They could not.

  They could not touch him.

  Adam smiled. “There’s a bit of luck,” he whispered.

  And with one final roar, they disappeared.