New Fears 2: Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

SENTINEL Catriona Ward

Anna droops in the green wing chair, black skirts spread about her. Night comes in through the open doors, warm and speaking. Wisteria, oleander, flowers that bloom as briefly as a gasp. The distant road is quiet. No neighbours but the dark and the trees. She thinks of the afternoons she spent as a child under the spreading reaches of those woods. She swore she’d get away from here and she did. But death has hurtled her back, the pendulum swinging over the fixed point.

Ma died the day after Anna came home, as if that had been the signal. By the end her faculties were blunted into nothing by stroke. She stared ahead or inwards. You could raise her arm and it would stay there. Her face was a carnival mask. Her lip drew up over her yellow teeth in a gunslinger’s snarl. Her body seemed barely tenanted. There was no sign of her passing. It was the nurse who told Anna that she held the hand of a corpse.

Sweat prickles on Anna’s brow, her palms. She should put out the lights, go upstairs and sleep. But she does not. If she sleeps now, her mother is truly dead and buried. When she next opens her eyes it will be to a world without Ma.

Her legs ache. Funerals require so much standing. Images flicker through Anna’s mind like sparks from bad circuitry. The Reverend’s red, sore nose, dripping. Soft rain on black umbrellas. Fresh-turned earth. Curling sandwiches, picked over by many fingers. The slight clunk, like a turnstile, as the coffin settled into the ground. Anna had hoped to feel lighter afterwards—that one burial might serve for all the past. She had wondered if she might feel free. She feels tired.

Boxes are piled high against the walls. Her mother’s possessions sit eyeless in the cardboard dark. Anna feels that they are judging her or planning something. The tiny glass figurines, each requiring careful individual wrapping. The collections of commemorative spoons and tea towels. The hundreds of plastic bags tucked into every crevice. Under cushions, behind radiators, at the back of cupboards. How can there be so many? What emergency would require them?

A thin wail trickles down the stairs. Pearl.

Anna starts, shivers, and goes to her daughter with relief. It is good to busy herself with life.

The tiny box room is hot, full of Pearl’s breath. They both sleep here. Next door is the dark bedroom where the apparatus of illness still stands; an IV drip swaying gently on an unfelt breeze.

Pearl is a small resentful shape curled on the inflatable mattress on the floor. Her head is silken under Anna’s hand. How can anything be so soft? The pyjamas with dragons on them, the plump, perfect limbs—Anna lets herself feel the animal joy in her daughter’s physical being. “You were so good today,” Anna says. “Such a brave girl.”

“I want to go home,” Pearl says. “I don’t like it here.”

“We will,” Anna says. “But now you sleep.”

Pearl clutches at Anna, tugs her hair. “I don’t like him. The boy. He was dirty. His teeth were brown. He said that he would take me. Tell him to go away.” She watches her mother for the effect of her words. Pearl’s imagination has begun to take flight. She is at that age.

“No one will take you,” Anna says. “Hush now.”

“It was the reekling,” Pearl says.

Anna’s blood cools so quickly that her ears sing. She strokes Pearl’s silken head. But the touch has lost its power. “Where did you hear that word?”

“He told me,” says Pearl.

“Don’t fib,” says Anna sharply. But who did? Her mother must have come to her senses when Anna left the room or as she dozed... recovered clarity just long enough to slip this old fear into Pearl’s mind, like a coin into a slot. Anna is savagely glad that her mother is dead. “That was just Granny’s story,” she says.

Pearl’s face goes pink. “I saw him.”

“Well,” Anna says, “I am a tiger and I will protect you from—everything.” She cannot bring herself to say “the reekling”. She makes her fingers claws, bares her teeth.

Her mother’s very own monster. It is different for everyone, taking the form of what you most fear. A beastie, or a scuttling thing… Perhaps it has long dangling arms like a chimpanzee and no eyes. Perhaps it curls about you softly, beneath the water, with its eight suckered arms. Perhaps it looks like the man at the deserted grocery store where Anna bought candy that summer when she was eleven. He slipped his cold hand up under her skirt as he gave her change. Whatever it looks like, it is the reekling and you know it when it comes.

Ma’s warm voice is in Anna’s ear now, shot through with the lilt of the old country. It takes you from the world and puts you behind a wall of glass. You are forever outside in the dark, your palms pressed against the lighted window. You feel the breath heavy on the back of your neck. You and I, alone together, the reekling says soft in your ear.

The hairs on Anna’s forearms lift like spiders’ legs and she scolds herself. “Do you want a drink?” she asks, nose buried in Pearl’s fine hair.

“I want hot chocolate,” Pearl says.

Anna wipes a fine sheen of sweat from her brow. “Surely not.”

“I do, I do, I do!” Each do rises higher.

In the kitchen Anna lights the stove. A breeze ruffles the curtains. Through the open window, the scent of flowers opening in the dark. She puts a drop of vanilla essence in the pan with the milk. It sits warm in the air, mingling with wisteria and moonflower. Anna thinks of her mother’s dark eyes, her dark mind. She curses her, wherever she is. And she feels the ache of loss.

Sometimes she thinks her mother began dying the day she stepped off the boat forty years ago. Ma never accustomed herself to this country, to its high clean horizons. The land here had no memory, she said. But Ma brought something with her from the old world.

“I led it here,” she said. “But I won’t let it get us. I know its tricks.” Ma took Anna tightly in her arms and the long brown skein of her hair fell over them both.

Anna stirs cocoa powder and sugar into a paste, takes the pan off the heat, pours in more milk. A little cinnamon, more vanilla. Anna puts the pan back on the stove now, just as Ma taught her. Not all the memories are bad. In the early days Ma cooked. Childhood was full of the grainy scent of scones, cauliflower cheese soup, tipsy cake which took a little bite out of the back of Anna’s throat and made her head sing pleasantly. Perhaps the reekling was just a story then, to frighten Anna into obedience. But imagination can be an unpredictable guest. The reekling took up residence.

Anna does not recall exactly when Ma stopped sleeping. She began to sit up nights, drinking coffee thick as syrup. Later it was laced with whiskey and then with ground-up Benzedrine. “I will stop it coming in.”

There was no more cooking. Or there should have been no more. Anna found pieces of glass in mouthfuls of potato. She spat the shards out carefully and said nothing. She was afraid but she could not say of whom. It was not possible that she should fear her mother.

Eventually Ma just stayed in her chair at the window. She watched for the reekling at all hours, her trembling hand parting the curtains in the dawn. “I guard this house,” she said to no one.

Anna taught herself to drive the truck. Each day she drove most of the way to school, parked down a track in the woods and walked the rest. She would have rather died than let anyone know about Ma.

Later they gave it a name. A soft-sounding word, schizophrenia, the s and z sounds slithering after one another, the plump landing of the ph. But all that came afterwards. For years it was just Anna and Ma, watching for the reekling.

Everyone has a secret that lies at the heart of them. This is Anna’s. No matter where she goes or how many years pass, it is nested within her. Her mother’s wide eyes fixed on the middle distance, her frame shaking after six wakeful days.

The hot chocolate steams in the pan. Anna tastes it. It is perfect. Sweet, homelike in a way this home never was. Anna shakes her head, irritable. She has fought to give Pearl a life different from her own. But the past is everywhere tonight, wreathed about like smoke.

Anna does not see the boy until he is almost upon her. He comes out of the store cupboard like a shadow, face dead-pale above his ragged shirt, brown teeth bared, eyes deep whorls into nothing. An iron bar whistles by her head as she ducks, the air hums with its passage.

Anna seizes the pan from the stove and swings it at his face. She hears it connect with cartilage and bone. The boy screams. Steaming milk spatters, runs down his acne-scarred cheeks in rivulets. He falls to the floor, moaning through bubbles of milky blood.

Anna looks at him for what feels like an age but is probably no more than a moment. His lank black hair, his broken fingernails. Dark lashes, long on plump cheeks. Arms mottled with purple scars. Face dusted with acne. He is small, slight. He looks hungry. She takes in everything, each detail of the boy who has come into the house where her child is.

Anna seizes the phone from the shelf above the stove. She runs from the kitchen. She has been preparing for this moment since Pearl first opened her dim baby eyes.

Pearl stands on the half-landing. Her face is open, her mouth a soft questioning O. Anna seizes her daughter in her arms, throws open the front door and they are out. It feels like a single smooth movement. The world is rendered in the sheerest clarity, the edges of everything are apparent. They are held by the night.

Anna runs, stumbling, dialling with her thumb. She does not stop until she reaches the moonlit rise of the hill. She speaks into the phone. Yes, no, gives directions for how to get there from the highway, It’s ok, we’re outside. She is impressed by how calm she sounds. Below, the house is lit, windows blazing in the dark.

She ends the call. Her foot crunches on something. A can. It could have come from anywhere. But an image comes to Anna now, of the boy standing in the night, watching, drinking soda in the long wait. She looks at the house, at the room where she sat minutes ago. The books, the green wing chair. A fragile world in a bright box. She feels sick.

A shadow moves at the corner of the brightly lit living room. A slight, dark curve by the curtains. A head. He is crouching by the window, trying to keep out of sight, looking into the night. Looking for them. Anna laughs a little to herself. She was never great at science, but she knows you can’t see out of a lit window into the dark.

The lights go out. The house vanishes, black into black.

Timeless fear pours into her. She thinks for the first time that there might be others. How did he come here? There is no sign of a car. Breathe, she tells herself.

“Get on my shoulders, Pearl,” she says. “Up you come. Pony ride.” Small, hot palms on her neck. Pearl’s silence is wrong too. Pearl is never quiet. She seizes her daughter’s legs where they hang over her shoulders and runs.

The forest is full of night whistles and petrichor leaks from the earth. As Anna runs she pants, looks behind her at intervals. She feels beasts and old things trotting beside her in the shadows of the trees.

The gas station is a mile distant, off the highway. The man there is tall, quiet. He gives Pearl a juice box even though they have no money. He lets them wait for the police in the back room. He lets them watch his little TV. There is nothing playing this time of night but a biography of a Prime Minister. The man closes the front and sits with them. Either he feels sorry for them or he does not want to leave them alone in his shop.

“She’s a good girl,” he says, nodding at Pearl, who kicks her legs. There are twigs in her dark hair. Anna begins to pick them out.

Red and blue light flares on the glass. The eerie squawk of a siren.

The policeman is the most exhausted person Anna has ever seen. He is composed of a series of pouches: under his eyes, around his mouth, about his midriff. There is no one at the house, the officer says. He searched. He found the saucepan in the kitchen, leaking a bay of brown milk across the floor. There was no blood. No sign of forced entry. Most of the windows were open, the front door swinging gently in the night air. No trace of a vehicle. No trace of anyone for miles about. Where could he be, or have gone? What more was there to be done?

Anna says, “I can’t take my daughter back to that house unless you find him.”

The tired policeman says, “You should get a dog. They’re good company if you live alone.”

She sees what is happening with the slow grace of a nightmare. “Listen,” she says. “He was in the house. He went into my little girl’s room. He tried to hit me with an iron bar. Pearl saw him, I saw him…”

“I wouldn’t tell her scary stories before bed either,” says the policeman. He mops his forehead with his handkerchief. The hot night is not kind to him. “Children imagine things.” She hears what he leaves unspoken. Women and children. He asks her what medication she is taking. She tells the truth and sees his face harden to certainty.

“I didn’t imagine it.” The pitch of her voice rises. She sounds like Pearl denied a story. “Is there someone else I can speak to?”

The policeman shrugs. “Come to town in the morning.” He rubs his face hard, leaving a flaming trail on his cheek. “Take you home,” he says. “Been a long day for all of us.”

Back at the house thin greenish dawn is leaking into the east.

“Bed, now,” she says to Pearl.

Pearl yawns and rolls her new fire engine across the coverlet. “Brrrrrm,” she says. The man at the gas station gave it to her. Anna was flustered by his kindness.

“If you have trouble,” he said as she got into the police car, “you call me. Here’s the number. I’m closer than they are. Get there faster.” In his eyes she saw weary acceptance. He knows that the law is only for some. She despises him for his weakness, she is grateful for the offer.

Her eyes have the grainy, burning feeling that comes of no sleep. Her body is toxic; the chemicals of high alert swill uneasily around, riding in her blood.

Pearl broom-brooms the fire engine over the coverlet.

“The bad boy won’t come back,” Anna says. “He’s gone.”

Pearl gazes at her truck with loving, unfocused eyes.

“Do you want anything?” Anna stops herself from asking, “Hot chocolate?”

Pearl shakes her head and yawns. She will sleep soon.

Anna goes downstairs. She mops the kitchen floor. Then she puts the pan back on the stove. She makes more chocolate, steaming and hot. She puts three heaped tablespoons of sugar in it. Then she brews coffee thick as syrup. She adds the coffee to the hot chocolate. She takes the whiskey bottle from the shelf.

She sits in the green wing chair in the dawn. This was Ma’s favourite chair, of course. How had she forgotten that? Anna thinks of the long nights her mother watched as she slept upstairs. How alone she must have felt.

Anna drinks. Her eyes water at the fumes. The alcohol, sugar and caffeine are good. She needs something more. She gets pills from her handbag and crushes two under a saucer. They make the coffee mouth-numbing.

We will leave here, she promises Pearl silently. Perhaps it will not follow us. But she knows in her heart that what’s done is done.

She hears the rustle in the wisteria outside. Morning birds explode into the air in the wake of something’s passage.

When Anna looks it is there, in the grey light beyond the window. It wears her mother’s face, eyes sewn shut for the grave. Ma’s nightdress flutters about its chalky ankles. The reekling sways, sensing Anna. The blind head seeks her, yearning. Its dead lips stretch to show yellow teeth.

Anna comes close to the glass. “You may not come in,” she whispers. Her breath leaves white clouds on the pane. “I guard this house.”