Dark Terrors 5: The Gollancz Book of Horror

NICHOLAS ROYLE The Proposal

It didn’t happen often, but sometimes when Charlie looked at Anne he felt afraid.

‘What’s wrong, darling?’ Anne would ask him.

He just shook his head. What could he say that wouldn’t sound stupid?

They’d been looking out for a bed and breakfast for the last half an hour. After leaving St David’s around lunchtime, they’d driven up the coast. It was the first time Anne had been to Wales.

‘What about that place?’ Charlie asked as they passed another sign pointing the way up a little track with a farm at the end of it.

‘We’ll find a better one,’ Anne said, winding her window down and leaning out to let the breeze catch her long mahogany hair. ‘If only you’d let me drive, you’d find it easier to look.’

‘I’ll drive,’ he said. ‘I make a nervous passenger.’ She didn’t answer. ‘We used to come here when I was a kid,’ he said, to change to subject. ‘Family holidays, you know.’

‘Stop dreaming, Charlie. You’re a dreamer. We need to find somewhere to sleep.’

They drove slowly through the little village where he’d queued for freshly baked bread on summer mornings twenty years ago, on the edge of days that had hummed with promise. Then they took the road that went down the side of the estuary, thickets of rhododendrons and beech on one side, vast sands on the other, and beyond the shallow channel the great mountain he’d climbed with his parents.

‘Look!’ Anne shouted, pointing at a sign already a speck in his rearview mirror.

Hell, he thought, she was right about most things. Why not this?

He swung a quick U-turn and moments later the tyres were crunching uphill gravel. They both got out and the engine ticked as it cooled into silence behind them.

Charlie broke the spell. ‘I’m dreaming,’ he said. ‘Wake me up.’

‘Charlie, it’s wonderful,’ Anne breathed softly into the warm draughts of scent; small blurred clouds of insects chugged like a faraway tractor.

The house itself was almost completely hidden from the road by a lush garden bursting with sudden blooms and thick, knotted trunks, sinewy roots and spiny bushes in vibrant flower that seemed to float off the ground. Something distracted Charlie and he looked up at the first floor of the house, just catching, or so he thought, the dark shadow of a figure moving away from the window. And then abruptly he realised that someone had appeared on the front step, a kind-looking practical woman with hair like a dandelion clock. Her hands moved slowly around one another like a dove preening itself. Anne looked at Charlie and he stepped forward shyly.

‘What a beautiful garden,’ he said, the words borne on the pollenated air as they were drawn out of his mouth.

The owner just nodded slowly, smiling, and Charlie and Anne found themselves being led into the hall and upstairs.

‘There’s no one else in at the moment,’ the owner said as she turned a corner in the staircase, ‘so I can offer you this room.’ She reached a door and was already twisting the round, pitted knob.

Charlie had been all over the country, he must have stayed in more than a hundred B&Bs, and he’d never seen such a beautiful room as this. While it wasn’t necessarily the sort of room he’d want in his own place, its ancient king-size bed, walnut dressing table with triptych mirror and creaky old rocking chair facing the window were more than you had a right to expect from a guest house. It was top hotel standard and yet it wasn’t, because a hotel room would be cold and sterile — no matter how many frilly valences, boxes of apricot tissues and potpourri baskets they adorned it with — and the thing that gave this room its warmth and welcoming air was the fact that it seemed lived in. Not that a single thing in the room was dirty — Anne trailed her finger along the window ledge and failed to pick up a speck of dust — but the room had soul.

Charlie opened one of the windows and the heady draught from the garden was intoxicating. Anne was sitting down in the rocking chair when Charlie finally turned around. She was grinning from ear to ear. Suddenly Charlie realised the owner was still waiting in the doorway for their answer.

‘Obviously we’ll take it,’ Charlie said, accepting a key from her outstretched hand. ‘It’s a dream of a room.’

The owner left quietly. Anne was testing out the bed.

‘I’ll go down and get the bags,’ Charlie offered.

When he returned and had put the bags down by the rocking chair he stood and looked at Anne for a moment. Closing the door rendered the atmosphere in the room even more exclusive and intimate. Anne was lying on her side facing away from him, her thick dark hair falling on to the counterpane.

He teetered on the edge of normal experience for a few soft seconds. Something had frightened him. The scene was too perfect. It would start to break up. Anne was too beautiful. He’d be looking at her and her face would suddenly become covered in fine spidery cracks like an old china doll.

He knew he could either give in to this madness or throw himself back into reality. She loved him; she’d said so several times, and she’d shown him in the way she sometimes looked at him when he was driving or ordering food in a restaurant, and in the way she touched him when they made love. Nothing filled him with greater pleasure than those moments when he felt her soul brushing his.

He lowered himself down on the bed beside her. Eyes closed, she murmured an acknowledgement. They moved quietly the first time, Charlie aware of the owner moving about downstairs. Inside her he felt the tightening, familiar by now of course, yet always a surprise when it finally seized him, and white lights flashed in his head, giving way to huge, grainy images of the deepest, pollen-richest flowers that twitched in the warm air outside the windows.

Anne locked her arms around Charlie’s back and wouldn’t let him move for at least ten minutes. They drifted off to sleep as if heavily drugged.

Before setting off Charlie had asked her seriously, ‘Do you still want to go to Wales?’

‘Yes,’ she’d said, but without any discernible enthusiasm, so he’d pressed, idiot masochist that he was, arch pessimist in spite of all his protestations to the contrary. Did she really want to go? Was she telling the whole truth? Again the indifference. So he asked her what was wrong.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

So there was something. What was wrong? What had he said or done? The more questions he lined up in front of poor bewildered Anne the deeper the trench he dug under the foundations of their relationship. It crossed his mind to assume the absolute worst and get up and walk away because he’d rather the end be short and brutal than long-drawn-out and spotted with the foul mould of false hope.

But for the first time in his life he realised the enormous stupidity of his actions, the crash course on which he’d plotted their short but wonderful relationship within the space of a few minutes. There was another way. He could step back, ease off, smile for Christ’s sake instead of beaming out such misery and resignation.

After all, he’d been pretty wound up the past couple of weeks because of his work. He’d been short with her, sulked when he didn’t get his own way, given her a hard time for not calling him.

‘Look,’ he said quietly, ‘I’m sorry.’ And he talked about the pressures at the office, said he’d offload some work on to his juniors — that’s what they were there for and they’d welcome the extra responsibility — and he and Anne would get over this; it was just a temporary hitch. She nodded, looking unimpressed but mollified. ‘We’ll go away,’ he continued, ‘and have a good time. We both need to relax. It’ll do us good.’

When he was younger he would have cried self-delusion at this kind of peace-making, because he knew, or thought he knew, that disaster was inevitable. The only variable was the time of its arrival. But these days he was a little less self-destructive and he considered that Anne was telling the truth: she didn’t know what was wrong, and maybe nothing was. As long as he acted fairly normally and showed her without histrionics how he still felt about her, the problem would go away.

But still sometimes he was frightened. One of his friends, on meeting Anne, said to him, ‘She’s far too nice for you,’ and deep down he wondered if it was true.

They were getting ready to go out. Anne was leaning over the washbasin to get a good look at her make-up in the mirror, Charlie sat on the far side of the bed. He’d just tied his shoe laces. They’d slept for half an hour, waking when Anne suddenly jumped and sat up. He asked her what had happened. She said it was nothing, a dream perhaps, though she couldn’t remember it. Now she was getting her white skirt out of the wardrobe and she left the mirrored door half open. Charlie was ready. He picked things up off the dressing table on his side of the bed, an old hair brush with not a single strand threaded between the bristles, a nail buffer in a horn case, something he hadn’t seen since his grandmother had been alive, and a hand mirror with dried flowers pressed behind glass on the back. He turned the mirror around and saw Anne buttoning her skirt.

He also saw, in the mirror in the wardrobe door, an old woman in a grey dress and a shawl sitting in the chair next to the dressing table.

He screamed and dropped the mirror.

Instantly Anne was jumping across the bed, asking him what was wrong.

He felt cold and sick. The chair next to the dressing table, only two feet from where he was sitting on the edge of the bed, was empty.

Anne put her arm around his shoulders. ‘What’s wrong, darling?’ she asked him.

‘Nothing,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Nothing. I saw myself in the mirror, that’s all. In the double reflection.’ He laughed nervously. ‘Pretty frightening stuff.’

‘I thought something terrible had happened,’ she said, straightening her skirt.

When she left him, he picked up the hand mirror and looked again at the reflection of the wardrobe mirror. He could see the chair in front of him and it was empty. Still shaking slightly, he replaced the mirror and sat for a moment staring out of the window. The great mountain climbed above the luxuriant trees in the foreground. He wished he was there, within a few yards of its peak with his mother and father; to have the chance to live his life over again and not make the same mistakes.

They drove down towards the coast, skirting the estuary where the tide was beginning to encroach. They passed a sign for the Panorama Walk which he remembered negotiating as a little boy. And there on the left, leading boldly across the sand and the widening channel, was the railway viaduct, hundreds of yards long and propped up by thousands of wooden stilts. He wondered if trains still ran or if the government had closed the line because it wasn’t profitable. It was the sort of thing they’d do.

‘The bastards,’ he said out loud.

‘Oh yes,’ Anne agreed, ‘Who?’

‘The government.’

She nodded sagely and they entered the town. He cut his speed and they drifted past boarded-up restaurants and shops. These had been a feature of their trip, which had taken in some of the most depressed backwaters of the country. You heard about it on the radio, read about it in the Sunday papers, but only started to get a real impression of what it was like when you saw it at first hand. Cracks were spreading right across the face of the country, and not just Wales but the whole so-called kingdom. If only the king-in-waiting could be allowed to get on with the job, thought Charlie, as he so clearly wished, things could be different.

Anne didn’t agree. ‘It’s a world-wide problem, Charlie. The world economy is suffering. Mines aren’t profitable, so they close. People have to find something else to do.’

‘Yeah, ‘cause there’s so much choice, isn’t there?’

She wound her window down. He knew she hated his sarcasm, but every so often it crept out. They didn’t agree on politics as on many things, and if she commented on it he downplayed its importance. After all, what did it matter? He’d once gone out with a girl whose list of interests read like the personal section on his CV and it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. They enjoyed a high-speed, high-tension relationship for a few months, then crashed into each other. They were both write-offs for a good year or so. If life was a fairground, he was getting a bit tired of the dodgems and fancied walking away from all the noise into the warm night, under strings of coloured lights, with the right person, of course.

‘It means we have more to talk about,’ he’d once said, and believed it. In any case, she was right. There was a world problem, but he was a romantic and he couldn’t bear to witness the litter of so many shattered dreams. Shop after shop boarded up, which when he’d been here as a child were busy and bright as hives.

‘What’s wrong with being a dreamer?’ he asked her suddenly, thinking back to their earlier conversation in the car.

‘Nothing, only you have to be careful. Every dream has a blind spot, an area of shadow where the dream can become a nightmare. If you’re not careful.’

He thought about this for a moment, realised he didn’t really know what she meant, but that she was probably right. They left the car on the seafront and walked back up to the town. Nestling at the foot of a cliff — up there somewhere among the splashes of gorse was the Panorama Walk — the town gave the false impression of being sheltered from the world. Anne took Charlie’s hand and they found a homely little pub that served a tasty mild. After a couple of pints apiece Anne was mellow as a warm cat, but Charlie’s indignation about the state of the world had been displaced by gnawing anxiety: the old woman he’d seen in the wardrobe mirror had been standing behind the bar for the past half-hour.

Twice he’d suggested to Anne that they leave and find somewhere to eat, but she said she liked it and wanted to stay. Behind her eyes he could see the sparkle of the frost that would form and spread over the evening if he were to insist. This holiday was about showing her he loved her, not pushing her around. So instead he tried to stop her looking towards the bar, absurdly advising her against going to the ladies when she jumped up at one point. But she went, walking right past the bar, and showed no sign of having seen the old woman. He made himself calm down: it was just an old woman, what did it matter if Anne did see her? She’d seen nothing in the bedroom.

But the old woman didn’t exactly look like a member of the staff, standing stock still and watching Anne as she returned from the ladies and sat down opposite Charlie.

‘Shall we have another?’ she suggested, getting out her purse and making as if to get up.

‘I’ll get them, darling,’ Charlie said, already on his feet.

‘But it’s my turn.’

‘Give me the money then.’

She gave him a fiver and sat back, shaking her head and smiling.

Charlie’s hands trembled as he handed over the money at the bar. The woman stared straight past him at the back of Anne’s head. The publican paid her no attention and Charlie assumed he couldn’t see her. Her eyebrows were strips of dead weeds, eyes the colour of an old sheep. Charlie wished her out of existence, but she persisted. He turned and walked unsteadily back to where they were sitting. Once back in his seat he glanced up over Anne’s shoulder at the bar.

The old woman had gone.

An involuntary grunt escaped his lips.

‘What’s wrong, love?’ Anne asked, obviously concerned.

He shook his head. ‘Nothing.’ He placed his hands over his face, rubbed at the corners of his eyes. ‘Sorry.’

‘You’re a bit jumpy tonight.’

‘I want to jump on you.’ He regretted this instantly. It was crass, not his style, but he was jumpy. ‘Sorry, darling, I didn’t mean that.’

She looked away.

As they left the pub he cast a final look in the direction of the bar. There was only the round figure of the publican waving goodbye, with rather too wide a sweep of his arm. Charlie made a confused sign and hurried to catch up with Anne who was already twenty yards ahead. He looked through the window as he passed and saw that the man was still waving. Charlie broke into a run.

They left the car at the bottom of the path and walked up through the garden, which, in the stillness of the night, smelled even richer and more varied than it had before.

Charlie sat in the rocking chair while Anne used the bathroom. He’d switched the lights off and opened the window as wide as it would go. Anne came in and stood behind him, placing her hands on his shoulders. She bent down and kissed the top of his head. Her hair fell across his face and he breathed in the smell of coconut. He murmured something to her and she walked around the chair so that she was silhouetted against the window. Moonlight caught the soft hairs on her arms and legs. The chair creaked as Charlie moved forward to place his hands lightly on her hips.

‘Tighter,’ was all she said to him, and outside the window an owl settled on a branch, folded its wings and blinked.

In the deepest pool of the night a noise awakened Charlie. His eyes opened and his body tensed waiting for the sound to come again because he felt sure it would. Anne’s body was bent around facing away from him. She liked him to lie behind her and fold his body into the curve of her spine. He would lie like this until she fell asleep, then usually roll over on to his back.

The air in the room was very still, rich in scents from the garden, and oily dark, the moon having moved around the side of the house.

He could hear Anne’s low, steady breathing. Then he heard the noise again. A creak. He believed he knew what it was but he had to raise his head a little way off the pillow to be sure.

Another creak.

She had turned the rocking chair around and angled it so that she was facing Anne’s side of the bed. Charlie emitted a thin, high-pitched moan and pulled the covers over his head, rolling towards Anne and moulding himself around her, embracing her as gently as his trembling arms would allow. You won’t get her, he thought.

He woke again and found himself on the far side of the bed, ten inches of cool sheet separating their bodies. The rocking chair was empty. Charlie’s body was slick with sweat, his chest tight. Suddenly he jumped out of the bed and ran out of the room. He didn’t pause at the top of the stairs. The heavy front door swung open beneath his hand and he charged into the heart of the garden, ignoring the paths. He fought his way through roses, hardly noticing the thorns lacerating his skin, clawing through thick shrubs and swollen, sticky flowers until he stopped dead, panting and sweating in the densest part of the garden. Inches in front of his own face was that of the old woman. Grey, pock-marked and creased, it looked like rotting wood, her eyes like insects with shining wings. Her dry lips hung slightly apart, but he could neither hear nor feel the passage of air between them.

A fit of dizziness seized him and he squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. When he looked up again the old woman’s face was just knots and gnarls on old bark, her grey woollen clothes loose trails of moss and lichen. He sank to the ground and tried to calm his raging mind.

Anne woke as he climbed back into bed. At first she just rolled over and muttered unintelligibly, but then she sat up straight, distressed. ‘What’s that?’ she snapped.

She’d touched Charlie’s foot which was still covered with leaves and soil. Anne swept the covers aside and stared in disbelief at his legs.

‘You’re bleeding,’ she said. ‘And where’s all this from?’

‘The garden,’ he said lamely.

‘Charlie, I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s got to stop because I can’t take much more of it. Okay?’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ll wash. I must have walked in my sleep.’ He was already at the washbasin switching on the light and wiping his legs with a flannel. ‘There’s nothing wrong, honestly. I’ve just been a bit tense, that’s all.’

‘It’s got to stop,’ she said crossly and turned away from the light.

When Charlie woke again it was to see the back of Anne’s legs disappearing through the doorway. Someone was leading her. He leaped out of bed, but they were already at the foot of the stairs and the old woman’s hand was reaching out to open the big door.

‘Anne,’ he called.

She looked up at him, her face white as the moon itself. ‘Charlie, I’m going for a walk. Just let me, okay?’ She was naked. He watched her go out of the door and wondered if in allowing her to leave there might be a way to understand.

He walked slowly back to their room and sat on the bed. Straight away he got up again and went to the window. Anne had reached the bottom of the winding gravel path and turned right, the woman like a shadow thrown down on the ground ahead of her.

A shadow; nothing more. Anne wanted to go for a walk, and, even though it was the middle of the night and she was wasn’t wearing a stitch, Charlie had to let her. If he attempted to control her she’d perceive his arms as a trap and she’d slip free of it, as simple as that. He forced himself to take deep breaths, then pulled on his trousers and a T-shirt and sat down in the rocking chair. It creaked beneath his weight.

It was still facing towards Anne’s side of the bed.

He was out of the room and down the stairs in a flash, tearing down the road on bare feet. He wondered if he should have taken the car, but didn’t lose a stride as he ran. Rounding the last curve before the town, Charlie looked left and saw the railway viaduct striking out across the estuary. There was a naked figure walking slowly beside the track. He saw the old woman standing in the channel with an arm out beckoning to Anne. She could have been standing on the sand but that part of the estuary seemed to Charlie to be under water. As he left the road and ran down towards the viaduct the new day’s first light was streaking the sky above the hills inland. He clambered up on to the track and skipped from sleeper to sleeper. Anne was on the right-hand side of the line, away from the edge of the viaduct nearest the old woman, but she had stopped and was now looking in that direction. Charlie didn’t turn to look, he just ran. Someone somewhere had started to sing, a high-pitched tuneless wail. Still he ran. Anne took a step forward towards the track, which suddenly started to thump and rattle, and a light appeared beyond Anne, growing brighter and bigger like the flowers in the garden.

He reached her just as the train thundered by and he put his arms out, but he only needed to steady her. She was still a step away from the line. As the carriages clattered past, her eyes appeared to come to life and quickly follow the yellow fogged-up windows. In another second the train was gone and they both looked across the track at the estuary. There was only a depth pole standing in the channel with an outstretched boom and a dimly burning navigation light on top.

Her gave Anne his T-shirt and they supported each other all the way back to the guest house.

They didn’t stop for breakfast, but the owner smiled kindly when Charlie paid her and made their excuses. As he tucked the last bag into the boot of the car and closed it, he resisted the strong temptation to take a final look up at the bedroom window.

They turned left on to the road, away from the sea and the town, and drove in silence for at least five minutes. When the scenery started to change, Charlie pulled into a lay-by, switched off the engine and asked Anne if she wanted to drive.

‘You’ve never offered before,’ she said, turning in her seat to face him and putting her hand over his.

He held the fingers of her left hand and ran his fingertips over them. She wore no rings yet on that hand. He leaned forward and whispered something into her ear.