House of Malice

SIX

Mandy awoke suddenly, gripped by cold and shivering. Outside the cottage the wind was howling.

Thump… thump. It was something moving behind the drapes that had woken her. She sat up in bed, momentarily startled before she realised that it was her bedroom window banging in the wind. She couldn’t recall having left it open — mustn’t have done up the latch properly, she supposed.

She reached out and switched on the bedside light, but it didn’t come on. Had the bulb gone? Was there a power cut? In the darkness she clambered out of bed, gritting her teeth against the chill air, and began to make her way towards the window to close it.

In just a few steps, she found herself completely disorientated. The room seemed pitch black and she could no longer sense where the bed was, or in which direction to find the window. She stumbled blindly a few more steps until she felt the cold wall with her hand, and used it to guide her until she came to another wall.

She turned, reached out her arms and found that yet another wall was blocking her way. Suddenly the pitch-black space seemed to be closing in on her, so that her quickening breath sounded confined in a tightening trap.

The sweat breaking out on her brow turned chill as she heard what sounded like a low moan coming from inside the room. She wasn’t alone in the darkness.

The walls were closing in even more, trapping her in here with some faceless presence that she could sense reaching out from the black shadows to touch her. She let out a ragged cry of terror and began to beat her fists against the clammy wall that blocked her escape. The window was banging wildly in the wind, which was roaring into the room and swirling violently all around her like a hurricane. The sound filled her head. She clapped her hands over her ears. Her scream was lost in the shriek of the gale.

And then the thing in the room was right beside her, raking her flesh as it clasped her in a bony embrace. A dread voice whispering meaningless horrors inside her head. She could smell the thing’s corrupt breath, feel its disease touching her…

Mandy awoke for real and sat up in bed with a shudder.

The bedroom was perfectly quiet. Not a breath of wind outside. Moonlight shone through the closed window.

It had been the most vivid nightmare she’d known in her life, and it took a few moments to persuade her that she was now fully awake. The bedclothes were tousled. Turning on the bedside light she peered anxiously around the room and then got up, feeling shaken and groggy. The alarm clock read 03:52. There was no way she’d get back to sleep easily after such a dream.

She padded barefoot downstairs to the kitchen, where she made herself a cup of cocoa. ‘Can’t you sleep either, Buster?’ she said as he came sidling up to her. ‘Looks like we both have a case of the nerves.’ He followed her to the living room and hopped up on the sofa next to her. Mandy drank the reassuring cocoa in small sips until the mug was empty. Then she curled up on the sofa and lay cuddling Buster until, eventually, she fell asleep with the light on.

No more nightmares haunted her. When she awoke again, the morning sun was filtering through the living room curtains. Buster was already awake, sitting close by and watching her as she got up. Far from feeling stiff and tired after having slept on her old sofa, she felt strangely energized. An idea for a story had come to her waking mind. It wasn’t fully formed, seeming to float nebulously around inside the part of her creative imagination that wasn’t fully conscious. Experience had taught her not to chase it, or it would run like a startled deer and the precious inspiration would be gone. She had to relax her mind, not think about it too much, and let it come to her.

After a quick breakfast and seeing to the dog, she went straight to her writing room without even bothering to change out of her pyjamas. The idea in her mind now somehow felt ready to emerge into the light. She sat down at the desk, flipped open the laptop, quickly created a new blank document for herself. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Here we go.’ She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and began.

But as the ideas in her mind crystallised into words, something strange happened.

Something strange, and deeply disturbing. Within moments, she realised with a shock that what was coming out of her head, flowing out of her fingers and appearing on the screen in front of her, wasn’t like anything she’d ever written before.

It was a horror story. And it was streaming out of her with a momentum she’d never experienced.

She stopped typing. Stared at what she’d written. ‘What the—?’

Where had these words come from? She’d no idea. But there they were, black on white on the screen in front of her, undeniably the product of her own mind. She couldn’t stop herself. Her fingers seemed to return to the keys of their own will, and the stream of words continued.

After almost four years as a professional fiction author, Mandy had no illusions about her skill at the craft. Her ability with the instrument that was her writer’s voice was that of a competent technician, no more. She could tell a story, and tell it adequately to suit the relatively simple needs of the readership she was familiar with — but she was no wizard, still less a virtuoso with words. There was always a lot of pencil-chewing involved, lots of coffee breaks for soul-searching and “inspiration”. It generally didn’t come that easily to her.

But now, suddenly, everything was different. The words were pouring out of her faster than she could type, her fingers a flurry on the clicking keys. She felt fully in command, effortlessly capable of summoning up ideas and images with a clarity, a vividness that was stunning, even alarming. It was as though the words were coming from some other source, and she was just channelling them, objectively, like a medium.

Her fingers clicked faster and faster. Line after line filled the screen, page after page. Lost a whirlwind of words, she sat there in growing awe and simply watched the writing appear.

What was happening to her?

‘No!’ she said out loud. This had to stop. It took an effort to tear her hands from the keys. She pulled away from the desk, stood up and edged away from the desk.

But something was dragging her back, and her will wasn’t strong enough to resist the call. She returned to the desk. Her hands were drawn once more to the keys. Her fingers began to move, like puppet fingers suspended on invisible threads and operated by an unseen force.

And on it came, relentlessly. A macabre outpouring that terrified her as much as it gripped her. The air around her seemed to thicken. Her peripheral vision melted away into a black-red haze so that all that existed was the screen, a living, pulsating thing filling her world.

It was the sound of Buster barking in the kitchen that abruptly jerked her back to reality. She broke away from the screen, snatched her fingers from the keys with a gasp. Their tips were red and tender. She looked at the clock on her desk and couldn’t believe it. It was nearly 1 p.m. She’d been writing non-stop for the last five hours. The word count in the bottom corner of her screen stood at 8,503.

Unbelievable. She’d started with a completely blank document. Her morning’s output was more than five times what she could produce on a normal working day, and a good one at that.

But when she began to read back what she’d written, she felt sick. It was horrifying to think these images and ideas had come out of her head. Just as she’d done with her failed attempt at erotica, she highlighted the whole eight and a half thousand words and deleted them. To be rid of them properly and completely she clicked into her computer’s recycle bin. Are you sure you want to permanently delete this file? the computer prompted her.

‘You bet I do,’ she said. And the file was gone, flushed down the toilet where it belonged.

Buster was still barking. What was the matter with him? Then Mandy realised why: there was someone at the front door. She got up from the desk and went to see who it was.

When she wrenched the door open, the broad shape of Chester Durham was standing there grinning toothily at her. He was wearing the same dark business suit he always wore, a little rumpled from the drive from London. His racy Porsche was parked at the gate of Summer Cottage.

‘Surprised to see me?’ In one hand he held a bottle of wine, a bunch of bright yellow chrysanthemums in the other. ‘Hope you like ’em, whatever they are,’ he said, waving them like a sword. ‘All I could find at the local cemetery.’

‘Chester?’

He glanced at her pyjamas. ‘Kind of late in the day to have just got up. You’re not ill, are you? You look — what is it you Brits say? Out of sorts.’

She did feel slightly weird. Dazed, unfocused. ‘I’ve been… working on something,’ she said hesitantly. ‘Didn’t have time to change.’

‘Great to hear you’re keeping busy. Aren’t you going to ask me in?’

‘Of course. I’m sorry. Come inside.’

He hefted his boxy frame into the hall. ‘So this is where the great Ellen Grace once lived, huh? Wow. Feel like I’m stepping back into literary history. Not that I thought she could write worth a damn.’

She scowled at him, then hurried upstairs, grabbed a dressing gown and came back down tying up the sash belt. ‘Why are you here, Chester?’

Her question was sharp, but Chester was impervious to taking offence. Pressing the flowers and the bottle into her hands, he said, ‘One reason I’m here is to give you these and say I’m sorry if I gave you the hard talk yesterday. I felt bad about it afterwards. Anyway, I happened to be passing through the area, so—’

‘It’s all right, Chester. I’m used to your ways. Thanks for the wine and flowers.’

‘You’re definitely okay? You look kind of pale.’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Pleased to hear it. I need my writers firing on all cylinders.’

‘For what it’s worth.’

‘You never can tell. The other reason I’m here is, I have a proposition for you. Go make me a coffee. Strong, black, four sugars. I’m dying. Then I’ll tell you what I’ve got.’

She went into the kitchen, laid the wine and the flowers aside and made the coffee, wondering what he’d come up with. As the percolator began to bubble up she heard his voice from the hallway saying, ‘So this here must be the engine room, huh?’ followed by the creak of the study door opening and his footsteps going inside.

‘Uh, yeah, that’s right. ’ she called back. ‘Did you say four sugars?’

He didn’t reply. ‘That’s disgusting,’ she muttered to herself. She grabbed a small plate from the cupboard, spilled a few ginger biscuits onto it and carried it through, together with the appallingly oversweetened coffee, into her writing study.

‘Now tell me—’ she began.

The agent was sitting at her desk, his heavy shape bent over her computer, staring avidly at the screen.

‘Chester, do you mind? That’s my private—’

‘Shhh,’ he said, waving an arm at her, not taking his eyes off what he was hungrily reading.

‘What are you looking at?’

‘This is unbelievable,’ he muttered.

She strode over to the computer and saw with stupefaction that he had in front of him the work she’d done that morning. How could it be? ‘Jesus, you’re not supposed to see this. I thought I’d deleted it.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t,’ he said, almost laughing with pleasure. ‘How long have you been working on this? It’s mind-blowing.’

‘Just since this morning,’ she said sheepishly.

‘There’s nearly ten thousand words here. You telling me you wrote all that today?’

‘Look, it’s rubbish, Chester. I don’t know why it’s even still there. I was positive I’d binned it. Now I will for sure.’

‘Uh — uh. I don’t want you to bin it. I want you to go on with it.’

‘What?’

‘Have you any idea how big a market there is for this kind of schlocky stuff?’ he asked. ‘You write me another ten k like this and I can sell it on a partial. I already know who to go to. Believe me, I’ll have a bidding war going before you know it.’

‘I don’t know if I can.’

‘It’s in you. It’ll come out. Trust me.’ He drained his mug at a single huge gulp. ‘Hmm. Great coffee. Now I guess I’ll be on my way. Don’t want to stem the creative flow, and all that jazz. I was going to tell you about this proposal—’

‘What was it?’

‘Just a co-writing project with another author,’ he said dismissively.

‘Who?’

‘Jenny.’ Jenny Stickle was one of Chester’s stable of clients, a writer so overpaid and jaded that she now barely contributed a word to her own novels. “Co-authoring” with her basically meant doing all the donkey work under her haughty eye, and was regarded as a step up for flagging mid-listers.

‘I’m not that desperate,’ Mandy said.

‘Forget I mentioned it. You’re too good for the old bitch anyway. Especially now that this has come up.’ He stood. ‘Back to the desk, kiddo. Enjoy the vino. Don’t forget to put the flowers in water.’

Before she could say anything or try to stop him, he was striding out of the front door and back to his Porsche.