New Fears--New horror stories by masters of the genre Page 5

  Flett said nothing right away. And then he said, “They’re Petrie’s?”

  “I suppose Thomas drove them over,” I said. “Nurse Kirkwood spotted him heading back on the moor. Is the baby with him?”

  Flett only shrugged.

  “I don’t care whether the rumours are true,” I said. “You can’t take a child from its mother. I’ll have to report this.”

  “Do what you like,” Flett said. “It was her idea.” And he walked away.

  I couldn’t put Jean Flett in the Riley, but nor did I want to leave her unattended as I brought in the ambulance. “I’ll stay,” Nurse Kirkwood said. “I’ll come to no harm here.”

  On the army highway I stopped at the moorland crossroads, calling ahead from the telephone box to get the ambulance on its way. It passed me heading in the opposite direction before I reached the hospital.

  There I made arrangements to receive Mrs Flett. My concern was with her injury, not her private life. Lord knows how a crofter’s wife with six children found the time, the opportunity, or the energy for a passion, however brief. I’ll leave it to your H. E. Bateses and D. H. Lawrences to explore that one, with their greater gifts than mine. Her general health seemed, like so many of her island breed, to be robust. But a bruised spleen needs rest in order to heal, and any greater damage could take a day or two to show.

  Biddy followed at my heels as I picked up a chair and went to sit with John Petrie. He’d rallied a little with the dog’s visits, though the prognosis was unchanged. I opened the window eighteen inches or so. Biddy could be out of there like a shot if we should hear the senior sister coming.

  “I know I can be straight with you, John,” I said. “How do you feel about your legacy giving a future to an unwanted child?”

  They were his sheep that had been traded, after all. And Jean Flett had confirmed her wish to see her child raised where it wouldn’t be resented. As for Daisy’s feelings, I tried to explain them with Tulloch’s own analogy of a ewe unwilling to leave its dead lamb, which I was sure he’d understand. John Petrie listened and then beckoned me closer.

  What he whispered then had me running to the car.

  * * *

  I’d no way of saying whether Thomas Tulloch might have reached his cottage yet. My sense of local geography wasn’t that good. I didn’t even know for sure that he was carrying the Flett baby.

  I pushed the Riley as fast as it would go, and when I left the road for the bumpy lane I hardly slowed. How I didn’t break the car in two or lose a wheel, I do not know. I was tossed and bucketed around but I stayed on the track until the car could progress no farther, and then I abandoned it and set myself to fly as best I could the rest of the way.

  I saw Tulloch from the crest of a rise, at the same time as the cottage came into view. I might yet reach him before he made it home. He was carrying a bundle close to his chest. I shouted, but either he didn’t hear me or he ignored my call.

  I had to stop him before he got to Daisy.

  It was shepherds’ business. In the few words he could manage John Petrie had told me how when a newborn lamb is rejected by its mother it can be given to a ewe whose own lamb has died at birth. But first the shepherd must skin the dead lamb and pull its pelt over the living one. Then the new mother might accept it as her own. If the sheep understood, the horror would be overwhelming. But animals aren’t people.

  I didn’t believe what I was thinking. But what if?

  I saw the crofter open his door and go inside with his bundle. I was only a few strides behind him. But those scant moments were enough.

  When last I’d seen Daisy Tulloch, she’d the air of a woman in whom nothing could hope to rouse the spirit, perhaps ever again.

  But the screaming started from within the house, just as I was reaching the threshold.

  NO GOOD DEED

  by Angela Slatter

  Isobel hesitates outside the grand door to the chamber she’d thought to share with Adolphus. It’s a work of art, with carven figures of Adam and Lilith standing in front of a tree, a cat at the base, a piece of fruit in transit between First Man and FirstWoman so one cannot tell if she offers to he, or otherwise.

  Her recent exertions have drained what little strength she had, and the food she’d found in the main kitchen (all the servants asleep, the odour of stale mead rising from them like swamp gas) sits heavily in a stomach shrunk so very small by a denial not hers. The polished wooden floorboards of the gallery are cold beneath her thin feet—so thin! Never so slender in all her life. A little starvation will do wonders, she thinks. As she moved through the house, she’d caught sight of herself in more than one filigreed mirror and seen all the changes etched upon her: silver traceries in the dishevelled dark hair, face terribly narrow—who’d have known those fine cheekbones had lain beneath all that fat?—mouth still a cupid’s bow pout and nose pert, but the eyes are sunken deep and, she’d almost swear to it, their colour changed from light green to deepest black as if night resides in them. The dress balloons around her new form, so much wasted fabric one might make a ship’s sail from the excess.

  How long before the plumpness returns? Before her cheeks have apples, the lines in her face are smoothed out? She can smell again, now, but all she can discern is the scent of her own body, unwashed for so long. A bath, she thinks longingly, then draws her attention back to where it needs to be: the door.

  Or, rather, what lies behind it.

  She reaches out, looks at the twiggish fingers, the black half-moons of dirt beneath the nails, how weirdly white her hand appears on the doorknob shaped like a wolf ’s head, so bulbous she can barely grasp it properly. She takes a deep, deep breath, and turns the handle.

  * * *

  Isobel woke with a weight on her eyes, cold and dead.

  Her mouth, too, was similarly burdened: lips pressed down and thin metallic tendrils crept between them. Her forehead was banded by something chill and hard, a line running the length of her nose, her cheeks and chin encased, as if she wore a helmet she had no memory of donning before bed. She had no memory either of going to sleep. Her throat and arms were mercifully free, but chest, abdomen and hands were encumbered. Not a cage, then.

  Remain calm, she told herself, slow your breathing. She’d been taught at St Dymphna’s to assess situations carefully; easier said than done when you couldn’t open your eyes.

  Rings, she thought. Rings on my fingers and bells on my toes. She tried to wiggle her feet, found them unwilling to respond, still quite numb; pins and needles were beginning, however, so some sign of hope. Wrists encircled, entrapped by… bracelets and bangles. She twitched her digits; only one finger bore a reasonable burden, a thin metal ribbon. Her husband’s family, no matter their wealth, always insisted on a wedding band as plain as day. For love, they believed, must be unadorned.

  My husband, she thought, and wondered where he was.

  Adolphus Wollstonecraft.

  Surely he’d not have deserted her? Not so soon at any rate. Then she recalled they’d only just been married. That this morning she was preparing for her marriage, surrounded by Adolphus’s girl cousins, so numerous that she’d had to pause before addressing each one so as not to get a name wrong and thereby cause offence (excepting Cousins Enyd and Delwyn, of course, they’d become so close!).All of them dressed as bridesmaids for she had neither sisters, nor cousins, nor aunts, nor friends who might stand her this service; all of them a whirl of pastel colours and soft fabrics, the light from the candelabrums picking out the rich necklaces and earrings, brooches and hair ornaments, finer than any queen might own.Yet none as lovely as those Isobel brought with her, inheritances from mother and grandmothers, aunts and great-aunts, the items that came to Isobel because she was the last of her line, the single point where all things might end or begin again depending on the whims of her womb.

  She ran her tongue over her teeth, prodded at the wires and was able to dislodge them with a dull, wet clink against the bone of her teeth. But there was
something else: her canines were larger, augmented, and polished, a series of cool smoothnesses and sharp edges. She caught the tip of her tongue on one of those edges and tasted a burst of iron tang, imagined the blood as a red blossoming.

  She opened her mouth wider, felt the weight on her lips half-fall into the cavity; she turned her head, spat, and the mouthpiece fell away; the wires, reluctantly giving up their grip on her dentition, hit the softness she was lying on with a slithering plink. Whatever had been attached to her canines remained, however, so firmly affixed she was wary of interfering with them after that first cut.They would wait.

  The weights over her eyes and face had also loosened with the movement of her head. She shook harder and with a tinkle and a chink they were gone, landing wherever the other things had. Whatever she reclined upon was soft but compacted by the weight of her body. How long had she been there?

  Where was she?

  Isobel opened her lids, though the lashes felt glued with sleep, with the sandman’s dust. She blinked vigorously, but there was only blackness even when she widened her eyes. She closed them again, breathed slowly to calm herself, then shallowly when she realised the air was stale with a hint of old decay.

  I am asleep, she thought. I am asleep and dreaming in my marital bed. But she still could not summon the details of her wedding eve, of either feast or fornication, and surely she should? Surely good or bad, she would remember that? The touches, the sighs, the delight? The pain, the weight, the imposition? Surely she’d recall at least one of the things the other girls at St Dymphna’s had whispered of at night in their dormer attic when they should have been resting?

  “I am asleep,” she said out loud. “I am asleep and in my bridal bed.”

  “Oh no, you’re not,” came a voice from the darkness, brittle and raw, with a hint of amusement. Not Adolphus, no. A woman. A woman who’d not spoken in a very long time by the sound of it.

  Isobel startled, jerked; things that weighed on her chest slipped and slid off with a jingle. She sat up, but her head connected with a rough low rock shelf; the skin parted at her hairline and she felt a slow welling of blood on her forehead. It was a while before she could speak.

  “Who are you? Where am I?” The Misses Meyrick had always instructed their pupils to ask questions whenever they could: You never know what skerrick of information might help you survive.

  “I am you,” answered the woman, and Isobel wondered if she’d gone mad, prayed to wake from the dream. “Well, you before you, I suppose. And you are me, after me.”

  “Don’t speak in riddles! Tell me how to wake! I bid you, spirit, release me from this delusion!”

  “Oh, you think yourself ridden by the mare of night?” The pitch lightened with surprise, then fragmented into giggles, each as sharp as a pin.There was an echo, too, wherever they were. Then the tone steadied, though mirth remained in evidence. “Oh, no. Oh no, poor Isobel.You are sadly awake. Alert at long last.”

  “Who are you? Why am I here? Where is my husband? I was at my wedding banquet…” she trailed off, not truly able to remember if there was any trace of the feast in her mind. She thought she remembered someone—Adolphus’s mother?—tugging the veil down over her face, readying her for the procession through the castle. Or was it Cousin Enyd? Or Cousin Delwyn? Or? Or? Or?

  Someone had lifted the veil, certainly, for it was bunched behind her head, pillowing her neck. Surely later, after Volo had been said, the echoes of the vows running along the walls and floor and vaulted ceiling of the small chapel, barely big enough to hold that fine family. So small a chapel, in fact, that only relatives had been bid to attend at the Wollstonecrafts’ isolated estate.

  And the Misses Meyrick. She could not forget them.

  Isobel’s erstwhile school marms, not invited, had come anyway to watch, to witness the choice she’d made, all their good training, her mother’s good money, gone to waste.They did not speak to her, neither Orla nor Fidelma, not a word of congratulation or censure. Naught but disappointed looks as she and Adolphus walked down the aisle as man and wife.

  There!

  A memory, solid and stable. Pacing beside her handsome new husband, and the Misses Meyrick so far from their school for poison girls and looking at her as if she’d left their house to burn; left them to shame. So, not a happy memory but a memory nonetheless. A real one. A true one. Something to hold on to.

  And another memory: the Misses Meyrick once again at the wedding feast, waiting by the doors while the happy couple were greeted and congratulated by their guests. Isobel thinking, I must speak to them for they loved me in their own fashion! So she’d picked her way through the crowd until she stood before her old instructors in their gowns magnificent, their eyes bright, Orla’s left blue, her right yellow; in Fidelma the colours were reversed. Long moments passed before Fidelma spoke.

  “Your mother,” she said,“would be ashamed.”

  Orla stepped behind her and Isobel felt terror like she never had before; but the woman merely said, “Pish!” and showed her a hairpin with a long silver shaft and a jewelled head shaped like a daisy; the outer petals were of diamonds, and the floret, divided distinctly into two halves, of yellow topazes. Then she slid it into Isobel’s finely constructed hairstyle, beneath the long veil so no one might see the ornament and note how exquisite it was. “This,” said Orla, “is the last thing we can do for you.”

  Before she could reply, the Misses Meyrick seemed to fade from the room, although she knew she saw them move, saw them walk away with elegant contempt, yet somehow it seemed that it was not a mere exit they committed, but a departure.

  Then the other voice repeated, “Wedding feast?” and Isobel was brought back to the Stygian confines of… wherever she was.

  “Wedding feast, I remember my own. All those fine families, all those relations of blood, all of Adolphus’s cousins and aunts and uncles. I had no one, myself, being an orphan of very rich parentage, but he said to me, ‘Kitten’—Kitty, actually, for he called me by that endearment—‘Kitty, my sweet, they all adore you! It’s like you’re one of our very own, a true Wollstonecraft. Cousins Enyd and Delwyn say the same.’And those very cousins sat beside me at the wedding feast, making sure I drank from my goblet the wine my husband poured for me and they considerately topped up.” The woman in the darkness cackled. “Does this sound familiar?”

  “Where am I?” asked Isobel in a very small voice. She did not say that it all sounded very familiar indeed. She carefully raised her hands until the fingertips touched the rough stone of the low ceiling. She inched them along, felt the scrape of rock, found a place where roof joined wall; but there was only the hint of a line, a thin parsimonious suggestion on her skin, not a chink, not a gap where air or light might creep in.

  How many feet between where she lay and the ceiling? Two? Three? Ceiling? Lid? That last thought made her shudder and she shook it away.

  “You’re where you’ve been these past twelve months, sleeping like the dead.” The voice dropped low, secretive. “But I knew you yet lived. I could hear the slow, slow beat of your heart, the slug-slug of your blood, the base breath that made your chest only just rise and fall.”

  “Twelve months? Don’t be a fool. I’d have died!”

  “And you were meant to! But when you’re so very nearly dead, everything becomes unhurried; blood, breath, appetite. You’ll be ravenous soon, now that I’ve mentioned it.”

  As if in response Isobel’s stomach growled and cramped. She put a hand to it, discovered a kind of armour there, a lumpen embossed corset that might well turn aside a knife blade. At its sides she located small latches, which opened easily; presumably no one expected the deceased to undress themselves.

  “The poison they used,” mused her companion, “is a strange mix: too little and it will render you ill, too much it will send you into a sleep indiscernible from true death, but if the amount is juuust right, then and only then you’ll die. And it was new when used on me, so I died. It was old when
used on you and Adolphus panicked and used too much, so you but slept.”

  “You’re lying.You’re mad.”

  “Oh, ho! Mad am I?That’s possible, I suppose; I’ve been here a long while with only my thoughts, waiting for you to wake, and before that no one but myself to talk to.Who wouldn’t go a little mad?” A sigh shifted the blackness; Isobel was almost certain she could see it.“Shall I show you?Where we are?Then we can discuss my mendacity or otherwise.Well?”

  “Yes,” said Isobel faintly.

  For a second there was nothing, no sound, no movement, and then: a light. A tiny pinprick of luminous green, a point that pulsed and grew, strengthened and increased its ambit. The glow lit upon the things that had fallen from Isobel when she sat so precipitously; it caught at their lovely edges, lodged in facets, made it appear as if a hundred small fires had kindled on the musty purple silk.

  She was distracted by a king’s ransom in jewellery, but not of a common sort. Rich and rare, the cut and settings were of ancient design, almost foreign it was so antique, and Isobel could not think of where she’d seen its like before. None of it was hers, not one piece of the Lawrence family jewels to be seen, not a single thing she recognised. She put a hand to the back of her head, beneath the veil which had become odd in its texture, and found the one gem no one knew she had − no one but the Meyricks − the hairpin, its cool, hard daisy arrangement reassuring.

  Then she gazed around the space, found it to be a box, six feet by six feet by two and half, a flattened mattress beneath her. Such a small room! A bed-closet perhaps, but no sign of a door, of any egress. And that mattress… not like any she’d ever seen, without either ticking or calico, neither down nor rushes to make it plump, but there was the smell of old lavender… no, more like… the lining for a death bed.

  She sought her companion. Saw…

  Saw…

  Saw nothing but a skeleton in a jaundiced wedding dress, blue-and-gold boots with silver buttons up the side, a manically grinning skull from which red hair and a lopsided veil hung.The body was adorned with strange bijoux akin to those Isobel herself had worn.