The Best New Horror 1 Page 4

  “Oh I remember. . . .”

  “I call it the children’s playground,” said Aunt Helga. “Joachim should see this. I strung up all the colored lights we had left. When I think how we filled this yard with colored lanterns in summer and colored lights in the Christmas season. I think of all the children: Roswitha, Harald, Luisa, Joachim . . .”

  “There were children in the house, hiding . . .”

  “Yes, even the little Rothmeiers. They were so quiet and good, but in the dusk they ran about like mad things. This yard can’t be seen from the street.”

  Aunt Helga threw the switch and half a dozen colored bulbs flowered in the half darkness, strung from the clothesline to the garden shed. Lucy walked down into the garden among the phantom children running about so wildly. Roswitha was dead, Harald was thin and old, Jo was a displaced person, Luisa had become Lucy. Aunt Helga called and came after her. She put her into an old cloth coat and a pair of ankle boots.

  “Aunt Helga, what became of the Rothmeiers?” asked Lucy.

  Helga stood at the top of the steps, holding out her arms to the playground and the lights.

  “They were saved!” she said. “We saved the family, your Papa and I. They all came safely to Palestine.”

  Lucy went stomping carefully across the lawn, which was lightly sprinkled with snow that was not sticking very well. The swing was in an iron frame painted white; the enamel was lumpy and rust-spotted. She stood against the back wall of ancient pinkish stone and turned to look at the house.

  She was pierced with cold. She had never been so cold in her life. Her whole body was shivering, her teeth chattered, her face was stiff with cold. She could not stir from her place against the wall. The house was oddly lit, red and green in luminous patches from the colored lights. The figure of a man was standing on the roof, not far from the catwalk and the sloped iron ladder for the chimney sweep. In deathly silence, the man side-stepped and fell, face downwards, his black coat billowing out. Lucy knew the sounds that he had made: the wailing horrid cry, the brief passage of a body through the air, and the moist thump upon the snowy ground below.

  She was trapped, unable to call for help, unable to think clearly about what she had seen. Gradually, the ordinary sounds of the night began to return. Aunt Helga shut a cupboard door. A car horn sounded, blocks away. A dog howled. Lucy ran shuddering for the back door and paused to glance around the corner of the house. Nothing lay on the ground.

  She dragged herself back inside, hung up her coat, switched off the lights at Aunt Helga’s command. She was like a sleepwalker. The bell rang at the front door.

  “It is Harald,” said Aunt Helga. “Let him in.”

  She fell against him in the hallway, gasping for breath.

  “Now, now,” he said. “How did you get so cold? What has upset you, Lucy?”

  He dumped his coat and books in the library, where he slept. Then he led her into the warmed sitting room and sat her on the couch.

  “What is all this?”

  “What is the sad tale about someone who fell off the roof?”

  Harald still carried his briefcase. Now he drew out a bottle of Coca-Cola and an opener. Lucy gulped the soda as if it were the elixir of life.

  “It is a sad tale,” said Harald, “and also a mystery. We are not even sure that he did fall off the roof. And if he did, no one has the least idea of what he was doing there. This gets unpleasant . . .”

  He took a sip of Coke.

  “He was not found, you see. The house was empty. Papa was in his lake-dwelling with Helga. I was in Theresienstadt. It was not until 1944 that Old Schultz, who used to do a bit of gardening here, came hunting for firewood. He found him lying there. He had been dead for years. His neck was broken.”

  “But who on earth was it?”

  “Didn’t I say? It was poor young Stein. Solomon Stein, Frau Rothmeier’s brother. She used to slip out and meet him sometimes.”

  “But surely someone noticed that he was missing!”

  “I’m sure they did,” said Harald bitterly. “He was on some deportation list, headed for the last round-up. His family were long gone.”

  “He was trying to shelter in the house,” said Lucy firmly.

  “Possibly.”

  “He did fall off the roof,” she said, watching Harald very closely. “I heard the sounds and I saw him fall.”

  Harald shook his head from side to side.

  “You are as bad as Papa and his nightmares!” he said.

  She saw that she had come to some frontier that he could not cross; he was not battling with his unbelief, but with her unreason.

  A voice cried joyfully, “Children! Helga!”

  Vicki was calling; she walked slowly, majestically, down the stairs, arm in arm with August himself. Papa was making a special occasion, he was breaking his routine for them all. There was an instant response: Helga came with a bottle of wine, Harald stoked up the stove. Everyone spoke at once and crowded into the sitting room. The advent candle was lit again, the radio was switched on and a Strauss waltz was playing. Was it “Morning Papers?” “Wine, Women, and Song”?

  “Wrong!” cried August. “It is Artists’ Life!”

  But where was Jo? Lucy ran up three flights and looked into his bedroom. In the feeble light of the bedside lamp he was lying curled up on his bed, sound asleep. His face had an unhealthy pallor, his forehead was damp. His hands lay palm upward, filthy with dust, the same thick dust that clung to the cuffs of his trousers. She shook him roughly awake.

  “Jo! Jo! Papa is downstairs!”

  Jo looked at her with unseeing eyes, black, glistening pools. He was always hard to wake.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I threw up,” he said.

  “Papa is downstairs. Will you stay sick or come down?”

  He swung off the bed, and she followed him to the echoing bathroom. He washed his hands and face in cold water and stared into the glass. Lucy was impatient and frightened. He was only her kid brother, but who would be left for her if he slipped away?

  They went down to the bosom of the family. August was in top form, playing up shamelessly to each of his children in turn. How they laughed. How Lucy blushed. How Harald’s harsh jokes crackled from one end of the room to the other. Mom perched on the arm of Papa’s big leather chair. Over the mantelpiece was a large aquarelle of a sweet-faced girl in a green dress melting into flowery depths of an orchard. It was Nina, the first wife, mother of poor Roswitha and of Harald. She had been Helga’s schoolfriend.

  Helga was persuaded to go to the piano at last, although she protested that it needed tuning. She began with “Stille Nacht,” “Silent Night”; everyone joined in slowly, tentatively. Jo’s beautiful unbroken alto rose up alongside August’s fine light baritone and Helga’s trained soprano. When the first verse was over they stopped, amazed. Vicki began to cry.

  “It is over,” said August. “It is really all over at last. We are all together again. We can start to live!”

  Lucy was overcome by compassion. Poor things, she thought, poor old things. Aunt Helga swung into “O Tannenbaum” and Harald cried, “Now there’s a good tune!” Then, intoxicated by the warmth and the wine and the Christmas music, they caroled away at “Every year the Christchild comes again” and “Ring, ring little bell,” with Jo doing the solo for the Christchild who asks to be let in from the cold. Lucy and Jo and Mom began a capella with “White Christmas” and “Away in a Manger,” but Aunt Helga soon played along. After a few bars she could fake it.

  In a pause for refreshment after a bracket of Santa Claus numbers, Jo said, “Aunt Helga, what happened to my toy tiger?”

  “Oh, Jo,” said Mom.

  “No, I need him,” said Jo. “And there was a teddy and a wooden horse. A whole box of things we couldn’t take.”

  “Hush,” said Mom, “I expect they’re somewhere about.”

  “Joachim, you’re a big boy,” said Aunt Helga. “Why in the world do you want those old toys?
”

  “I want to give them to the refugee children,” said Jo, reddening. “There was an appeal, you know, on the radio.”

  Everyone was amused yet approving. Everyone but Lucy, who knew that for some reason Jo was lying, most persuasively.

  “It does you credit, Joachim,” said Aunt Helga in a quiet careful voice. “The toys have gone. They were given to refugee children. To the little Rothmeiers who stayed here.”

  It put an instant damper on the party. Harald said fiercely, “They were born and brought up in Germany and they became refugees overnight. Rosa and Benny Rothmeier and the baby. Not one of our greatest successes.”

  August was up in arms, arguing with Harald until they were both shouting. Poor organization! A complete farce! It couldn’t be helped. Would he blame Helga? Frau Rothmeier herself had a grave responsibility. The wonder was that they did not all end up in prison!

  “Aunt Helga,” cried Lucy, “you said they were saved, that they all came safety to Palestine!”

  “Make that the Promised Land,” said Harald, “poor little devils . . .”

  “I lied to you, Luisa,” said Aunt Helga. “It is too sad.”

  The Rothmeier family had been picked up . . . arrested . . . on the edge of town, as they waited for the car that was taking them to the Swiss border.

  “God, God, what could I do?” said Aunt Helga, wringing her hands. “I helped Frau Rothmeier button their coats and put on their overshoes. In the evening, when I was giving thanks for their escape, there came the telephone call from Herr Stein, the brother. The car had arrived late . . . he had seen his sister and the children arrested. Poor fellow, I think this sent him mad. Next day I went to take care of August. My bags were packed . . . It had taken weeks to get the necessary permit.”

  “Are you sure all the Rothmeiers . . . are gone?” whispered Vicki. “The mother and the three little children?”

  “I’m sure!” snapped Harald.

  “We have an inquiry running with the Red Cross,” said August heavily. “I mentioned something of this in my letters to America. But it is foolish to hope.”

  Nevertheless Lucy did hope, from that moment. She found herself turning to the front windows of the house, upstairs or down. She looked out, dreaming, and saw them coming down the path. They were thin as Harald but grown into hardy waifs, twelve, ten, seven years old, clutching a toy tiger, a teddy bear, a little wooden horse.

  She enjoyed this day-dreaming much more than her actual dreams, which were cold and filled with anxiety. She saw Jo with a dead look on his face, his lips moving as if in prayer. There was a tapping, scraping, boring sound that went on and on, and was sometimes like a voice, the Christchild or the lost children, wanting to come in. She woke at night hearing her father utter a strange roaring cry, coming out of his nightmare, and her mother soothing him to sleep again.

  On the eve of the sixth of December, St. Nicholas’s Day, everyone put out a shoe on the mezzanine near the door of the study. The adults persuaded the children to do so and vice versa. Lucy and Jo provided carefully chosen little gifts from their store, perfume, soap, socks, and what did they receive in return?

  “They have to be kidding,” said Jo.

  “Ssh,” said Lucy, sounding like Mom or Aunt Helga. “We get our real presents on Christmas Eve . . .”

  It was an old joke that no one remembered. In the olden days, kids had to be satisfied with much less at Christmas: in fact, with an orange and a bag of nuts.

  It was a quarter to six, bitterly cold, and pitch dark. The electricity would be off for another two hours: they had filled shoes and found their own presents with the help of Jo’s flashlight. Soon Aunt Helga would come down to stoke up the banked kitchen range by candlelight. They sat on the stairs, fully dressed in trousers and sweaters under their dressing gowns, and sniffed at the oranges.

  “I will go home,” said Jo.

  “You can’t,” said Lucy, not pretending to misunderstand. “You’re too young. You have to stay with Mom.”

  “She’ll see it my way,” said Jo, with steely determination.

  “Papa has plans for you.”

  “Papa can come and see me in America. He should have gone with us in the first place.”

  “Jo, they’re all doing their best . . . even Aunt Helga.”

  “She’s mean,” said Jo, kneading his orange. “This is a creepy place. Think of Uncle Markus and the poor guy who fell off the roof.”

  “That was the war,” said Lucy. “Jo, you have to stay here.”

  “This whole house is no better than one of those concentration camps.”

  Lucy was shocked and angry.

  “You’re out of your mind!” she said coldly. “Do you have any idea how bad it was in those places?”

  “Yes!” said Jo.

  Aunt Helga came down the creaking stairs and discovered the present in her old blue velvet slipper.

  “Lavender soap!” she cried. “After all these years!”

  August was driven out by Harald to give readings from his works, and radio interviews; he received his publishers’ representatives in the study. There were other changes in routine because the children were being prepared to enter a German high school. Even Lucy must do a year in the Gymnasium before trying for a university place. Mom coached them in math and Harald in German grammar. It was generally conceded that the writing of perfect grammatical German was so difficult that Lucy and Jo might never master it sufficiently to qualify for certain professions.

  August discovered—with a shocked look, one snowy afternoon as they trudged after him through the streets of Breitbach—that Lucy had read every one of his novels in the original and in translation. He set aside two hours, twice a week, to coach her in literature. They began to argue and expound very freely. Then each would stop, amazed: Lucy because this was the man, the author, who spoke, August because this fierce American girl was his own daughter. Aunt Helga, coming to end the seminar, had a proverb: “Children turn into People.”

  The snow was deeper now, and everyone was pleased, because Breitbach did not always have a white Christmas. The coldest months were those two generals who had defeated Napoleon further north: January and February. Lucy, ranging about the study one afternoon, looked from the window and became cold. The young man was much nearer, right in the grounds, staring up at the house with an expression of misery and terror that froze the blood.

  “Papa,” she whispered, “there is someone in the garden!”

  “What’s the matter?” said August. “Is it someone after firewood?”

  Far away in the reaches of the house there was a burst of tapping, a crescendo of little rapping sounds that rose up and then were still. They both heard the sounds, Lucy was sure of it.

  “I see a young man with black hair,” she said quickly. “He wears this long black coat . . . with a patch of yellow.”

  August gave a startled exclamation and hurried to the window. They looked down together, but the young man had gone. They were gazing at an unmarked patch of snow. They had both turned pale.

  “It was Stein, young Stein,” said August, “wearing his Star of David.”

  “He came from the cemetery,” said Lucy.

  “He is buried there,” said August, “in the wilderness. That is the Jewish cemetery, divided from the rest. I think he was the very last to be buried in that place, after he was found . . . behind the house.”

  August sank down on the window seat beside the balcony door and put his head in his hands.

  “I dream of him,” he said. “It is one of my nightmares. I see him on the path and run towards him crying ‘Come in, come in . . .’ but he turns away from me because my house is accursed. My whole life, my work, my country, all accursed . . .”

  “Do you hear . . . knocking sounds?” asked Lucy, very low.

  “Yes,” said August, “and scratching, and nibbling . . . the rats and mice working away at the foundations of the house . . .”

  “Oh Papa,” cried Lucy,
taking him in her arms. “It will be all right again. Everything will be all right. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve!”

  She looked down into the snowy garden again and screamed aloud. It was not young Stein who stood there, looking up with a terrible expression, but Jo, her brother. He flung a large snowball and it landed on the balcony. The next moment Aunt Helga came into the picture and hustled him away, raining smart little blows upon the shoulders of his coat. Lucy saw that her scream had been too much for Papa, who hated loud noises. He returned to his desk, shaking his handsome head; their study of literature was finished for the day.

  There was a problem about where to raise the tree. The small room downstairs with blue curtains was Vicki’s typing room now, full of precious manuscripts. The tree was brought in semi-secretly by Harald and placed in the dining room. Aunt Helga shooed everyone away and set to work.

  Late in the afternoon, Lucy sat with her mother in the typing room and Jo came to join them. It was Christmas Eve, so they were dressed in their best clothes. There was something very much the matter with Jo. He had grown two inches, his face was thin, he had an odd way of clenching his teeth when he spoke. All the grown-ups had spoken the word “puberty” in Lucy’s presence, but she was not quite convinced. Well sure, puberty maybe, but what else? What was he up to? Now he sat with them, looking old and sick, a little like Harald, thumbing through the carbon copies of his father’s letters to Luisa and Joachim in America.

  They waited for the Christchild. Once Harald stuck his head into the room. He collected their wrapped presents to put under the tree and made everyone look for Aunt Helga’s keys . . . she was turning the house upside down looking for her keys. He asked if they had their party pieces ready. Both Lucy and Jo, as the youngest, were expected to recite or read aloud at the feast.

  “You needn’t be afraid,” said Mom nervously when Harald had gone. “Jo? I’m sure Lucy is not afraid.”

  “Afraid!” said Jo scornfully. “Afraid of reading something to those guys . . .”

  Then he was sorry and he embraced Mom. Aunt Helga peeped in and said, “Vicki . . . Vicki . . . You must do your share!”