The Best New Horror 3 Page 26

  Still, some effort was being made somewhere, for the ensuing week was almost bearable. Only the exteriors of the shop seemed temperamental. Rain lashed, then began to pour in quicksilver strands, shoring the paving slabs up to the sky. Subsequently, the shoppers seemed damp and grey days afterwards, and the subway, on such evenings, sounded alive with clocks. He had to skip bleary pools and bent-double beer cans.

  The Monday following, his mind was already trained on the four women before he had arrived at their lair. Why was that? Not because of his alarm that they remained, even in the downpours; they had been there as long as he had been using the subway, though he recalled there being less of them. He was usually tempted to speak, but of what? Instead, he rushed past, around the clock hands of the streetlamp and its shadow. If only he had not dreamt of them! Better still, if he had not forgotten the details of it, but they had run together in his mind as if the rain had reached them. He should worry. Weren’t his dreams populated by strangers these days, in varying degrees.

  When the dull duo had arrived that morning, it was in time for him to hear the epilogue of some argument. “I don’t care,” Terry repeated. “It isn’t what I expect from you. Or what I pay you for.” Whittle was momentarily jubilant. Enough to let it pass that he saw to the salaries. The sense of promise diminished: they became amiable as the day wore on. Whittle was not above suspecting that the tiny scene had been staged for his benefit.

  There was a more pleasing surprise still to come. His letter was in the evening paper. Disconcertingly close to the bottom of the page, but what did that matter? His views held it aloft from the rest. Terry said nothing next day, which convinced Whittle he had seen it. Unemployment was one of Terry’s pet subjects—hence his willingness to employ all too hastily, a most unsuitable assistant for the bookshop.

  “You won’t forget the Trivial Pursuit evening Sal and I arranged, will you?” Terry asked as Whittle was locking the door. He cursed, now he was reminded. Before Whittle could ask if the boy was invited, Terry had rushed away.

  He strolled gradually, wondering if the offer were an oblique apology. The precinct, empty but for litter and youths of no fixed direction. Expletive minstrels hefting stereos like hods. Display dummies eyed him blindly, asexually erotic with beckoning hands. Darker nights had dared him to see them move.

  The mouth of the subway had snared some shadows and was drawing them in. Only three women this time. Maybe there was a fifth he was yet to see, for their patiently furtive manner did not differ from when they were four. Nearing them, the patchy raincoats and fronds of print dress, he grew clammy. He saw how dirt defined their fingernails. Their hair, drawn tightly back, resembled unhealthy grey skin. What else had paralysed his smirk, while he was about it? Their clinging together, or the quivering trunks of bare, unshaven legs that passed within inches of his face as he descended? What had they once been? A chorus line act for whom old habits died hard? He smiled until he imagined them lifting their dresses for kicks. He had once seen one of them menstruating onto a flattened newspaper.

  Later, he walked into a room filled with people he did not know. Thankfully, one of them was not the boy. “And this is Darren,” Terry announced rather ambiguously, handing refilled glasses to the second couple.

  “Terry’s told us about you. You both keep that shop running well Not difficult, is it?” one asked, stoking cold embers of conversation. Why ask, if they thought they knew! So, Terry was not above lying to them. Or did he believe it himself, the way he beamed down at them. Then the board gathered them round.

  He laughed only occasionally, but it was a strained sound. On his walk over, the subway had again slicked him with its chilly misery. He had been meaning to ask that Daniel be sacked, accumulating nerve. He had to convince himself that his mental rehearsals for their tete à tete hadn’t simply made Terry an irascible ventriloquist’s foil, and he hadn’t quite made sense of what he could make out from the far side of the tunnel. Four raincoats draped upon a shopping trolley, except that it was just the same four, stooping unnervingly low over it. Closer, aiming his face from them, he had seen it was a pram, and the crumpled pillow they prodded and patted had been a baby. It was struggling to stay in the light, beyond the shadows filling its pram. He should have said something, but was more doubtful of what that comment might have been. Only that babies were less discerning in their choice of company. Besides, hadn’t he been glad to get by them unnoticed?

  Terry’s living room was almost as dim, and as cramped as if he were squinting. No wonder he was away before the lifts home were allocated, his footsteps like striking matches as he crossed the car park. The subway now looked ironically less threatening than he had made it. The women’s absence helped. He searched for traces of the pram, making amends now he was braver, but it could have been anywhere. A sickening premonition was only a froth of cement, not the calcified brain it resembled. Whose child could it have been?

  Theirs, you fool. He was making too much of it all. It could only have been theirs, no matter how that notion disgusted him. He walked the rest of the way home, clucking disapprovingly. Even next morning’s sunlight proved all his fears wrong.

  During the lunchbreak, he had to scour Terry’s book-keeping, but it was as scrawled as the subway’s graffiti, as meaningless. It had probably taken Terry until then to recall the suggested trip to Portmeirion. The conversation was as sketchy as his details. “Don’t you want to go?” he asked, just as Whittle’s disinterest had begun to labour.

  “I never said I wanted to. We don’t have to go everywhere we mention. Some things are just meant for idle talk.” How pompous that last had made him sound! Terry’s eyes were flinching away.

  “That’s not the impression I got first time.” Then a customer upstaged him. Whittle heard the boy asking Terry where Portmeirion was.

  Perhaps it was too soon for replies, he thought as he left the newsagents, disillusioned with his paper. He would not be happy if agreement meant apathy. The car park and subway were both dogged with litter. Once more, the baby crawled to mind. Some children had commandeered a battered pram, hemmed with frays. The canvas was darkly damp. Too much damage to have been that of the night before, surely. A florid woman broke out of her car and chased the children off. When she saw the pram, she deflated; had it been worth the effort? He tried to pass without glancing. The litter applauded underfoot, slow and sarcastic. There was no harm in pushing the pram to the back of his mind. In his street, his home was dull with streetlighting, a block of rusty limestone. He ate in silence, as his mother might have made him.

  He took time in answering when the phone rang, in case it was Terry.

  At first, he had thought it must be an indecent call, but there were words amid the breathing. Emotion had made them incomprehensible. Poorly restrained violence, if the language was any indication. My God, it was indecent! He could only be grateful he had not been provoked into speaking. If the caller were random, he must give no clue to his identity. But what on Earth had possessed the man?

  The following day was better, possibly because his anxiety had been directed elsewhere. His nightmares had tried to convince him he had heard not one voice, but four, and that he had answered the call with his number. But the unclear line might have masked the digits—what point was there in arguing with a dream? He could always change the number. In fact, the call had made him glad of work. His whole house had begun to feel like that dim hallway. The shuffling at his door had been vindictive litter, and lurking sets of shadows only the trees in roving headlights. Terry hurried to remind him that Whittle would be alone with the boy for the next two days.

  “Take care of him, won’t you?” What Terry had intended as a joke, was sour in his absence. Forgetting the days previous, Daniel behaved as though he had interpreted the comment as a trigger for insolence and tension. The moment the door caught in his wake, it was the setting of a trap. A weight of potential confrontation in the air. The boy spent the first day marking the attendance of the
shelves (Jack Vance was late, Orwell unaccountably absent). Whittle chased up deliveries, which might have been best saved for when he could no longer avoid addressing the boy. In the afternoon, the phone was unavoidable, however. Requests for books about dyslexia that sounded like a tasteless joke gone on too long. An elderly man who would know the cover if he saw it, but refused to come to the shop to look. Whittle realised how closely he was listening to their voices, recognised none as that from the call.

  That night, he had heard something being killed in the subway.

  The relic of a pram was gone, though the women felt close. He was just looking for things to trouble him, far beyond his concern for the baby. He seemed to have forgotten how much he disliked children. Margins of shadow hid the subway walls. Echoes pursued him with his own footsteps, made papery and thin. He was thinking of Terry when he found he had left his paper at the shop, that perhaps it was because they had spoken so little in childhood that they had mistaken each other for friends. A depressing thought. He turned back. Local children had gathered an arsenal of stones on the grass verge beside the entrance. The cry had come from below, waiting until he was within earshot.

  Was it a warning or a plea? He daren’t investigate until he knew. A train passed, and for a helpless moment, he feared something had become trapped on the line. But it was the subway, as the echo proved. Sudden recollections of the baby appalled him, until he heard it begin to yelp and whine. A dog hit by traffic, dragging itself from sight to die. Shuffling told him how badly it was injured, the image too graphically real. Could youths be kicking it to death, though the rising cries suggested it was going to breech the corner so that he could see for himself. What could he do then, but hurry away. Whenever the noises in the road waned, the cries continued, like a can being scraped clean in his skull.

  A pity about the paper. There had been two replies to his letter, both furious with him. Possibly the caller on the phone had been provoked in just such a way. Reasonable, but unsettling. Were it true, then his name and address beneath the letter had betrayed him.

  He nursed himself during the night, as a wife should have. How passionately could someone feel about unemployment? Being entitled to freedom of speech should not be reason enough to place one in danger. There he went again! What danger was this? Only that evidenced in his neurotic rechecking of every lock in the house, and didn’t that only confine him with the phone? Yes, he argued, but things were so much different in the real world. You could have an irrational fear of a subway, for instance. Caution might be a better word, if less honest. Too late, the thought had darkened his room immeasurably.

  He left for work early, before dawn. The subway was empty, but for a faint shuffling. Litter whispered. Lit windows, strung together by a train, rollercoasted overhead. If there had been blood, or a corpse, he had not seen any. The Council, no doubt.

  That afternoon, the shop seemed full of customers, as he had never seen it. Outside, was the reason. Crowds of football fans had been misdirected into the precinct, pushing over the wire baskets of litter and glaring into the shop windows. “Where are the police when this happens, eh?” one old man was calling, too loudly.

  He kept the shop door open—mightn’t visibly locking them incite the gang in some way. Meanwhile, the gathering in the shop tried to incite him, if only to fear. “I can’t stand them. Nothing good ever comes of gangs. Get a few people together and you see all their worst aspects. They get you cornered. Brings out the monster in them, all this ganging up. They get you cornered.” Good God, they had all begun to sound like his letter. Trying to control his thoughts was like fighting a blanket in the wind.

  “Groups trouble me,” was his only offering, and even that he could read two ways. When at last the gangs drained away, lubricated by the arrival of some police vans, the shop began to empty. That was when Whittle noticed how Daniel had been unmoved during the whole episode. Well, he wasn’t a stone’s throw from the kind of people out there, was he? Too stupidly macho to know when to be afraid. When a uniformed officer came to see if any damage had been done, Whittle refused to let the boy speak.

  He watched the papers. One businessman, who claimed to patronise training schemes, called him “bloody-minded” to suggest that crime was not simply a by-product of unemployment, but an easy alternative to applying for work. Of course, if the man had to stoop to insults—why, what could he know of the idler’s state of mind? Even Whittle could recall stealing from his mother’s purse when money was scarce. “Aren’t big city take-overs just muggings in pinstripe, brought on by the lassitude of deprived goals?” he wrote, but declined to continue. The reply had been orchestrated to provoke, with no thought beyond that. Terry rang, but it was not his voice that Whittle sought. Neither mentioned the boy, which was as well.

  It was twilight or dawn in the dream, for taut sunlight had yet to illuminate the subway’s midsection. Litter poised and sprang in the breeze, glass gleamed faintly. It was bothering him more than he realised; the baby too, for the images highlighted baby-snatching. His mind had taken it literally, ropes of dull graffiti dropping down between the grid of mortar, plunging into the shrieking pram. When he looked again, the pram had gone. The pools where it had stood must have been water darkened by rusty wheels. The walls and ceiling looked ready to drip on him, darkly. He ran, but was permitted no escape. Even in the streets, with their endless walls and corridors, and at home in his blackened hallway, he still wasn’t sure he had thrown it off. There was a group of figures at the top of his stairs, but not when he woke.

  Daniel did not arrive for work the next day. “Saturday’s a kid’s favourite day,” Whittle called from the stockroom. “He may just be feeling off it.” They both knew he should have rung in, but neither seemed to want to say so. “Maybe he lives off his parents.”

  “You mean, with them,” Terry said. God, he was naive. Besides, if they rang, he would first have to tell Terry what had happened the night before, after he had locked up. Not that it was relevant, except in that it was so childish.

  Since the precinct had been practically deserted, it had not taken him long to realise that he was being followed. He had hesitated by the department store, where four of the dummies had been leant head-to-head, as if the frame for a wigwam. A trick of the light made them sway greyly, and then he saw that it was the boy skulking after him. There was no crime in that, but even so, he was impelled to move on. Slyly, the boy duplicated. Whittle had tried to keep sight of him only in the glass, but it confused him. At times, there seemed more than one figure, each somehow different. He might have been wrestling with his nerves to approach his employer.

  Churlishly, Whittle had kept going, even when finally he heard the boy calling to him. Panic had run him to ground at the subway, and it was there that he saw the chance to scheme. He had waited until the boy was in view, before plunging down the gradient. The flagstones had snapped at his feet with his own belated echoes. Something caught his shoulder, and he had heard the women stirring from some dark spot. Good, for they would be in the halflight in time for the boy to arrive. Imagine his horror! Seeing what Whittle had meant by leading him there would make him think twice before hounding him again.

  Perhaps he had not been tempted to enter. He did not emerge, nor had he heard him enter. He waited, refusing to call out in the thickening silence. He’d not have his joke turned upon him. Let the boy sulk elsewhere or stay hidden. Whittle could hear the women shuffling back and forth.

  No harm could have come to the child, for God’s sake. The women were harmless, even to the fainthearted like himself. The boy’s absence was just an extended version of his silence in the subway. That was all. He should enjoy the respite, the opportunity to speak unhindered to Terry.

  He avoided the subway all weekend, superstitiously, though every bus route he used took him past it. Worse, it looked so meaningless, the women so small. They were squabbling over scraps of paper, or rags. He tried to smile at how he had once seen the boy, a still life by the
till titled VACANT by his folded newspaper. Then there had been the window cleaner, the sight of whom outside had made him think of a portrait tending to its own frame. But then he had to look at the other things in his mind. Where the sun strained whitely down, gleaming ghosts of shoppers were trapped in streets behind the panes. Whenever he turned, he wasn’t sure why. Wherever he looked, the four women were masquerading as different people, or ducking. They were even in the bookshop as he sidled past, long as shadows. Perhaps that was all they were, since they were gone as soon as he recognised them.

  Sunday found him wishing for the patience to sketch or write, willing for any medium to express his thoughts. He strolled to the seafront, looking aimless as the tourists, with every detail of the picture he could make of the subway evolving. Clenching teeth of reddish railings (rusty with blood?), oesophagus of brick, tongues of tarmac and ribs of mortar. How pretentious it made him feel. Only the sight of blank paper would make it all futile.

  He arrived home to find a neighbour posed artificially by her rose tree, not pruning. The sight of him broke the spell. “Your phone was ringing while you were out.” Something had made him slam the door on her. True, her voice had suggested, unreasonably, that she knew the substance of the calls. Had she read his letter, and shared the caller’s sympathies?

  There was a note from Terry to join him at his local, but the phone was engaged for as long as Whittle wanted to decline. Why spoil his own weekend because of that damned boy! Whittle was still young enough to enjoy himself. They didn’t have the monopoly, these youths, for all their tattoos and aftershave. Dinner over, he resolved to walk back via the subway, as a test of mettle. The drinks would help.

  Terry was trying not to loiter in the shady doorway. He dimly remembered the pub from one of the Quiz League forays, all polished nubs of brass and coarse oak. It resembled a beached ship to Whittle, who had given up on the similes his mind kept floating. They writhed to the tables, through columns of couples like a dance floor between numbers. When he spoke, it was almost a shout. Terry listened too intently for comfort; Whittle’s eyes ached with holding his gaze. Beside him, a drunk rocked. A dummy on a careless ventriloquist’s knee.