The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

TIM LEBBON Trick of the Light

IT WAS THE longest drive she had ever made on her own, and she so wanted the house to feel like home. But when she turned up the short driveway from the narrow country road, and the place revealed itself behind a riot of trees and bushes, Penny stopped the car and looked down into her lap.

“Oh, Peter,” she said. In her mind’s eye he was smiling. But in his eyes there was no humour. Only a gentle mockery.

I should never have come. I don’t belong here. Peter would have loved it, but I should be back at home in our nice little house, coffee brewing, patio doors open to the garden I made my own, and which sometimes he would sit in with a map book open on his lap, pretending to be with me but never quite there. I should never.

Penny’s hands were clasped in her lap. She forced them apart and reached for the ignition, turning the keys and silencing the car’s grumble. It, like her, had never come so far.

She looked up slowly at the house, trembling with a subdued fear of elsewhere that had been with her forever, but also a little excited too. This was her taking control. Her heart hurried, her stomach felt low and heavy, and she thought perhaps she might never be able to move her legs again. The mass of the house drew her with a gravity she had never been able to understand, but which now she so wanted to. For Peter’s memory, and for the short time she had left, she so wanted to understand.

She had bought it because of its uniqueness. While it had a traditional-enough lower two levels — tall bay windows, stone walls, an inset oak front door, sandstone quoins — a tower rose a further two storeys, ending in a small circular room with a conical roof and dark windows.

The estate agent had told her that an old boss of the coal mines had used the tower to oversee work in the valleys. The mines were long gone and the valleys changed, but Penny quite liked the grounding of this story. It gave the building a solid history, and that was good. Mystery had always troubled her.

Beyond photographs, this was her first time seeing the house. Her first time being here, in her new home. She knew that Peter would have been impressed.

“I think you’ll like it here,” she said, and as she reached for the door handle, a movement caught her eye. She leaned forward and looked up at the tower’s upper windows. Squinting against sunlight glaring from the windscreen, holding up one hand, she saw the smudge of a face pressed against the glass.

“Oh!” Penny gasped. She leaned left and right, trying to change her angle of sight through the windscreen, but the face remained. It was pale and blurred by dust. She was too far away to see expression or distinctive features, but she had the impression that the mouth was open.

Shouting, perhaps.

Penny shoved the car door open and stood, shoes crunching on the gravel driveway, fully expecting the face to have vanished as she emerged from the vehicle’s warm protection. But it was still there.

“Ah, Mrs Summers,” a voice said. A tall, thin man emerged from the front porch, and though she had not met him, she recognised her solicitor’s smooth manner and gentle voice. “Is there.?” He rushed to her, his concern almost comical.

Dust, she thought. The shape was much less solid now.

“Hello, Mr Gough.” She only glanced at him as she held out her hand, and he shook her hand whilst looking up at the tower.

“A problem?” he asked. “Broken windows? A bird’s nest in the aerial?”

“No,” Penny said. I did not see a face at the window. “No problem. Just a trick of the light.”

Mr Gough’s affected concern vanished instantly, and his smile and smoothness returned. “It is a beautiful sunny day, isn’t it?”

Penny did not reply. She approached her new home, and already she could hear the phone inside ringing.

Peter moves his food around the plate. Pork chops, boiled potatoes, carrots, cauliflower. He’s eaten some of the meat, and picks at where shreds are trapped between his teeth.

“Fuck’s sake,” he says.

“Peter, please don’t talk to me like that,” Penny says. Sometimes she thinks she would prefer outright anger, but Peter rarely loses his temper in front of her, and he has never touched her. Not in anger. And recently, not in any other way either.

“It’s just. ” He trails off, and she knows what he has to say.

“It doesn’t appeal to me,” she says. “The heat, for one. Flies, midges, the diseases they carry. The toilets out there, and you know me and my stomach. The water. you can’t drink the water. And the sun is so strong. I burn just thinking about going out in the sun.”

“All those things seem big to you now,” Peter says. She can hear his desperation and impatience. They have been through this so many times before.

“I can’t help how I feel,” she says. It makes her sad, this gulf between them. It has always been present, but there were bridges — their love, the passion, and Peter sometimes going off on his own. But he says he cannot do that anymore. Says he needs her with him, now that he’s getting older. Just because he has changed, doesn’t mean she must too. The bridges are failing.

“Just a week,” he says. “The food is amazing, and there’s this one place in the hills that is just perfect for watching the sunset.”

“The food here is good,” Penny says, glancing down at his plate.

“This crap?” He shoves his plate across the table. It knocks over a glass of water, and Penny shifts back on her chair to avoid getting soaked. He’ll apologise, she thinks, but something subtle has changed. “You just want to stay here in your little house, cooking the same food, watching TV, letting the world go by and watching. watching the sun set over the roof of your neighbours’ houses.”

“Our neighbours,” she corrects him.

“Fuck’s sake,” he says again. “It’s always been you living here, Penny. I just exist.”

“I can’t help it if you want to—” she says, but Peter has already turned around and walked from the room. She hears him storming upstairs, opening and closing cupboards, and when he comes down again he is wearing his walking boots, trousers, and a fleece.

“Where are you going?”

“Somewhere,” he says. The gentle way he closes the front door is worse than a slam.

Penny sits for a while, sad, analysing what has passed between them. Then she clears the table, makes a cup of tea, and turns on the TV in time for EastEnders.

“I worry about you,” Belinda said.

“I’m fine.”

“Mum, you don’t sound fine.”

“It was a long drive, that’s all, dear. And you know me, I haven’t driven that long in. ” Ever, Penny thought. I’m further from home than I’ve ever been. She felt suddenly sick, and sat gently on the second stair.

Take a rest, Peter says, tough voice soothing. Take the weight off.

A shadow filled the doorway and Mr Gough paused, as if waiting for her permission. She waved without looking, and the shadow entered her house.

“So the house?” Belinda asked.

“Is beautiful. He’ll love it.” There was an awkward silence.

“Russ and I will bring Flynn down for a visit next weekend.

See if you’re settled all right, look around. Russ says to make a list of any jobs that need doing.”

“I won’t have it that he’s dead,” Penny said. “You know that.”

“Mum, it’s been over seven years. He’s been declared—”

“I don’t care what some strangers declare about my husband. I’d know if he was dead, and I say he isn’t. He’s. gone somewhere, that’s all.”

“What, for a long walk?”

“Belinda.”

“Sorry, Mum. But don’t talk as if you and Dad had some kind of special bond. We both know that isn’t really true, is it?”

“It’ll be lovely to see Flynn,” Penny said. “The garden’s big enough to kick his football around. And can you ask Russ to bring some stuff for cleaning windows?”

“I will, Mum.” Belinda’s voice was heavy with concern and frustration, but Penny was here now. She had made the break. Left her own home, bought somewhere unusual, twelve miles from the nearest town and without bringing her TV with her. The furniture was coming the following day, but she had brought with her everything she would need for her new life — walking boots, coat, and a map.

“It’s not much, dear,” Penny said. “I know that. It’s not Cancun, or China, or an Antarctic cruise, or the Northern Lights, or any of those things he always wanted to do with me. But it’s something. It’s a small step on a longer journey. He’d be very surprised of me and. proud, I think.”

She glanced up at Mr Gough, listening and trying to appear distracted. And then she looked around the large hallway, three doors leading off into new rooms, timber floor scuffed, ceiling lined with old beams. “He’ll love it here.”

“Okay, Mum. Just. call me if you need anything. Will you do that?”

“Of course. Give my love to Russ and little Flynn.”

“Love you, Mum. Really.”

Belinda hung up first, and Penny could tell that her daughter had been starting to cry.

“Would you like a tour?” Mr Gough said.

Penny shook her head. “Just the keys, please.”

“But you really should look at the tower, it’s a remarkable feature, makes the house—”

“Really, I’m fine. Very tired.” Penny stood, wincing at the pain in her hips from the long drive.

“Okay, then,” the solicitor said. Smile painted on, now. He handed her a set of keys, then a smaller set. “Spares.” He glanced around. “Lovely old place. You’re very lucky, Mrs Summers.”

As he turned to leave, a sense of such profound terror and isolation struck Penny that she slumped back against the stair banister, grabbing hold as the house swam around her. She tried to call out, but her mouth was too dry. Help me! she thought, feeling a great weight of foreboding bearing down upon her. Up there, there’s something above, a terrible thing that is pressing down on me now I’m inside. Dusty windows, a trick of the light, but I can hear it up there, I can almost smell it, and I wish I was back in my garden with the roses and rhododendrons.

Then the feeling started to filter away, and she knew that this was an important moment. She could give in to the terror and run. Or she could remain in her new home.

There, there, Peter says, his rough working-man’s fingers stroking her cheek with infinite care and softness. Come on, my little rose. Don’t be afraid. You never have to be afraid when you’re with me. He has not spoken to her like this since they were in their twenties, madly in love and obsessed only with each other. I’ll never let anyone or anything hurt you.

“Thank you, Mr Gough,” she whispered. The departing solicitor waved a hand without turning around, indicating that he must have heard.

As he climbed into his Jeep, he glanced back at the house just once. Not at Penny. At the tower. His constant smile had vanished.

She gave herself a tour of the house and wondered what she had done.

The fear had settled ever since she had reached a decision to sell the family home and move here. Belinda and Russ had been stunned, but increasingly supportive, as Penny had stuck to her guns and insisted that this was just what she wanted.

“Maybe your father is right and I am just stuck in my ways,” she said, and the worry niggled at her that this was hardly a big step. Moving from the home she had shared with Peter for forty years, out into the country, into a hamlet where there were fewer than a hundred people living, the house Grade II listed and an architectural oddity that occasionally attracted visitors. it was nothing, really. The sort of change some people welcomed every couple of years of their lives.

But to Penny, it was the world.

The house was incredibly quiet. So much so that as she strolled through its corridors and rooms, she heard a high, lonely aircraft passing over the landscape outside. You’ll never get me on one of those, she’d said to Peter when he suggested a simple flight to the Channel Islands to get her used to flying.

Penny opened the back door and paused, head tilted. She smiled. “One step at a time,” she said.

The garden was wild and overgrown, awaiting her attention. The rooms inside were not decorated to her taste, but neither were they worn enough to require immediate redecoration. There was wooden flooring throughout — it would take her some time to get used to that, as she was more at home with patterned carpets. The house smelled unusual, and the sounds were strange — creaks, groans, taps — and she had no real sense of its shape and the space it occupied. It was nowhere near home, and she felt something like an intruder.

When the furniture and boxes arrive tomorrow everything will change, she thought. But the idea of seeing her belongings transported here and dropped in place by sweaty removal men suddenly hit home. Everything she had ever owned was packed in a lorry somewhere right now, ready to be transported across the country and deposited in this strange place.

Home is where you are, she’d said to Peter once, but he’d scoffed and gone into a quiet sulk. Later, he’d said, You’re rarely where I am.

“Everything I have will be here, apart from him,” Penny said. Her voice was loud. A bird sang somewhere in the garden, as if in response.

A steady tap, tap, tap came from somewhere that did not feel like part of the house.

Penny walked from the kitchen to the hallway, unconsciously matching the rhythm with her own footsteps. She paused at the staircase, one hand on the banister, looking up. The sound was more distant than the bedrooms or bathroom on the first floor. More hollow, and sadder. She knew the sound.

Peter, sat in his armchair with a glass of whiskey in one hand and his eyes distant, while she sat on the sofa and watched the next episode of some TV series she was already losing interest in, and his foot would tap against the wooden leg of his chair. Just a gentle impact, as if he were ticking away the seconds of his life. She would hear, but had never, ever said anything. He was always like this after an argument — a screwed up travel brochure beside his chair, and a dead dream floating in his glass.

He would usually go anyway, but never with his wife.

Tap, tap, tap.

“Peter,” Penny breathed. The noise ceased. She held her breath.

Keys in hand, Penny walked slowly upstairs. Each tread had its own feel and sound, and probably its own memories as well. This one, a child sitting playing with toy cars. This one, a man tripping and spilling a tray of breakfast he’d been carrying for his wife. And this, someone kneeling and crying, perhaps in dread, perhaps ecstasy.

Spooking yourself, Peter says. You always worry too much, my rose.

Penny reached the landing and stood before the doorway that led to the tower. She had not looked inside on her first walk around the house. Had passed it by, truth be told, because it had felt like the last place she wanted to see. Too dusty up there, she’d thought, and she decided that was the one place she’d send Russ when he and Belinda came over the following weekend. Up into the tower, to clean those windows and see what else was there.

“Silly,” she said. She reached for the door.

“You’re just stuck here,” Peter says. “Don’t you see that?”

“But I like it here.”

“You used to enjoy travelling. All those weekends we spent down in Cornwall when we were courting. The tour of Scotland in the motor home. Don’t you want to do all that again?”

It always goes the same way.

So Peter packs a bag and leaves. He says he is going hiking for a weekend in the Lake District, but he never comes back. His body is never found.

Penny insists that Peter is still alive somewhere, and that drives a rift between her and her daughter. Because there was never any tension between Belinda and her father, and if he is still alive, she says, he would contact her.

“No,” Penny says whenever the subject is brought up. “He’s not gone. Not Peter. He’s out there somewhere, waiting for me to join him. And one day, I will.”

Belinda never believed that she would. In truth, neither did Penny. But discovering that she only had months to live had changed something fundamental about the way she viewed the world. Before, she had felt safe and secure in her own small bubble of existence. Now, she already sensed that everything else was moving on. Leaving her behind. She was a dead woman walking, and she had one more chance.

She paused with her hand on the door handle. It was metal, curved, and vaguely warm, as if someone gripped it on the other side. It was only a tower, and a room. Perhaps there was a chair up there, and she could sit and look out over the landscape, watching the sunset over a hillside instead of her neighbours’ rooftops for the first time in—

Tap, tap, tap.

The sound was closer. Beyond the door, up whatever staircase might have been built within the tower. Peter, tapping his foot impatiently against the chair’s leg.

Penny gripped the handle tighter, but was suddenly certain that there was someone directly on the other side of the door, holding the handle, ear pressed to the wood, smiling expectantly as they waited for her decision.

My little rose, Peter says, sometimes you’re so scared of the smallest things, so fragile and sensitive. It’s a hard world, hardy and impartial. But I’ll look after you. Sweet Penny.

She let go of the handle and took two steps back until she nudged the landing balustrade. The tapping had stopped, but the silence was worse.

“Stupid woman!” she berated herself, and she started singing to fill the space. Still singing, she searched through the set of keys until she found one that locked the tower door. She paused again then, listening for movement on the other side. But there was none.

“Of course not,” she said. “Just an empty room, and dust.”

Hungry, thirsty, a little angry with herself for being so easilyscared, Penny went down to the kitchen and switched on the kettle. She’d brought everything she needed to make tea and cook a simple meal, but as the kettle boiled she opened the back door and looked out onto the wild garden again.

Water bubbling and steaming behind her, she walked outside, fiddled with the key ring until she had removed the key to the tower door. She threw it as far as she could into the garden, turning away so that she did not even see where it landed.

“There,” she said. “That settles it. The house is way big enough for me anyway.” She entered the house again, not once looking up.

And not looking up meant that she felt watched.

Penny ate her fried egg sandwich. She’d speckled it with cayenne pepper, because Peter used to like that, and so spent the next half an hour sipping milk from the bottle and trying to lick the burn from her lips. And she tried to make sense of the house around her as the light outside changed.

She missed her little three-bedroom house. Living room, kitchen, dining room, spacious hallway, stairs, three bedrooms, bathroom, she had always known where she was in that house in relation to every other room. Her awareness had always filled the entire place, when Peter was there with her and, later, when he was gone. It had been more than a home, and sometimes she’d forgotten where she ended and the house began.

She wasn’t like one of those strange people who never liked to go out. She went out plenty, to the shops and garden centre and to the chip shop on a Friday. But she always looked forward to returning home.

Now, the new house hung around her like something waiting to pounce. There was no sense of equilibrium here. The first floor felt as though it sought to crush the ground floor. The kitchen was too large, crushing out the dining room, storage room, and pushing into the corner of the quirky living room.

Penny felt vaguely dizzy, as if some part of the house was constantly moving, just slightly. Even when she closed her eyes and hung onto the table, the feeling persisted. Perhaps it was the landscape moving, and the house remained still.

And above it all, the tower.

Maybe Belinda is right, she thought, squeezing her eyes against the idea. But it could not be shunned. Maybe he is lying dead out there somewhere, gone to bones and dust. Worms in him. And he’d have died alone, perhaps with a broken leg or a heart attack, under lonely skies without me to be there with him. Without me. She opened her eyes when she felt the first tears squeezing out.

“Don’t be soft, Penny,” Peter says, and for an instant she looked around, certain that she actually heard those words spoken. The natural direction for her to look is up. “I’m fine. You know I am. Fine now that you’ve made the break, and taken the risk. And how does it feel, my rose? How does it feel?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Penny said. Even the way her words echoed was unfamiliar. “I’m a little bit afraid.”

“Don’t be, my darling,” Peter says. Penny had not heard such love in his voice for many years.

Dusk approached. In the valley, it was a wild time. The breeze increased, rustling the trees along the edge of Penny’s new garden. Dogs barked from somewhere far off. Birds flitted overhead and, sitting out in the garden, Penny watched them circling the tower. None seemed to land. She could not blame them. There was something so intrinsically wrong there, but she was doing her best to steer her attention away from its upright bulk. To give in to the tower would be to admit defeat.

“I might just as well go home,” she said. The overgrown garden dampened her voice, and her words quickly faded to memory. This was going to be her home for now on.

She walked around the garden with a glass of wine. She had never usually drunk wine except on Friday evenings, and then only a glass or two after eight o’clock. Now it was Tuesday, barely six-thirty, and she loved the feel of the glass in her hand, the fruity taste of wine on her lips.

The garden was larger than she had thought at first. Either that, or the boundaries were poorly marked and she was strolling across open hillside. She always felt the bulk of the house to her left, but most of her attention was directed downwards, at the twisted vegetations, long grass, and exposed tree roots that sought to trip her. She stepped over and around obstructions, and thought perhaps tomorrow she would walk further into the hills. There was a famous trail up on the ridge, so Mr Gough had told her. Popular with walkers. Peter had been a walker.

“I was a sitter,” she spoke to the garden. “A not-doer. A nothing. A. waste of space.” She hated the term, because Peter had used it referring to her on more than one occasion. “Waste of space.” She looked across at the house, the looming tower, and realised that she now stood in its shadow.

The sun touched the hillside beyond, and cast a palette of reds and oranges around the tower’s stark lines. The glazed room on top was exposed to the sunset. There was a solid shadow within, as if a shape was standing in the centre of the room. And Penny wondered what would change were she to suddenly disappear, and what would fill the space she had left behind.

She began to cry. It was dislocation and fear, but also a growing sense that time had passed her by. She had never, ever thought like this before, even when Peter had angrily insisted that he only had one life, and he would not let it fritter away waiting for her.

Penny thought that moving here had opened up her view on things, and she could see a mile along the valley to the ridge behind which the sun hid for the night.

“Don’t be sad,” Peter says. His voice is stronger than the breeze, brighter than the sunset, and more meant for her than the hushing trees and calling birds. “You’ve done well, my sweet rose. You know not to waste any more time, or time will waste you.”

“Are you coming back to me?” she asked.

“You think I ever left?”

Penny stares up at the tower room, convinced that she will see movement there, or a face, or a sign that this new home is more than just her own. But still it exudes a weight of wrongness, as if the tower and room had been built onto the house long after it had first been constructed. Or, perhaps, the house had been built around the much older tower.

“I’m not going there,” she said. “The house is plenty big enough without me ever having to go there.” No one replies, and she sees that her glass is empty. She does not even remember drinking the wine.

Back in the kitchen, the bottle is empty as well. Penny sits on an old stool and rests her arms on the worktops, her head on her arms. She closes her eyes.

Tap, tap, tap.

“You never call me rose anymore,” she says.

“Huh.”

“What does that mean?”

Peter looks across at her from the driver’s seat. They are stuck in traffic on the way home from the supermarket. She bought food, he bought a CD and a book about Eastern European cuisine and a cheap one-man tent light enough to carry on a hike or a bike. “That was a long time ago,” he says.

“So much just fades away,” Penny says sadly.

“Huh.” The car pulls forward some more, and Penny watches her husband driving. He remains silent, stern. She wishes he would just throw her a glance, a smile, a cheeky, My rose never fades. But the rot has set in years before, and now they are simply playing the game.

She opened her eyes to darkness, and a cruel throbbing against her skull. The house sat around her, quiet, still, and she felt that it was observing her pained waking. The weight of above pressed down against her, almost crushing her into the stool and worktop.

How could the tower have not tumbled long before now? How could it stand, so heavy and dense?

Even though she could no longer hear the tapping sound, she could feel it through her hands and feet. Transmitted through the body of the house like a secret message from one room to another. All about me, she thought, and she slipped from the stool to the kitchen floor.

She unrolled the sleeping mat and sleeping bag, climbed in, ignoring the pressure on her bladder, the need for a drink of water, the fear of what else might be sharing the floor with her in the darkness. She had not been this drunk in decades, but today she welcomed it.

Her world swayed. She was protected by numbness, and still feeling that tap, tap, tap touching delicately against the flagstone floor, she was pulled back into unconsciousness.

Dawn, and she had dreamed of Peter sitting upright on a chair in the room at the top of the tower. There was no other furniture. Just Peter, seven years older than when she had last seen him, walking boots and trousers and waterproof jacket still on, day pack propped by his side with the flask open and cup steaming coffee, sandwich box balanced on one knee. So you came? he had asked, not sounding surprised. He had always known that Penny, his rose, would follow.

“I have to see,” Penny said. She glanced around the kitchen until she saw the set of keys, remembered throwing the tower key outside. Then recalled the spares Mr Gough had given her. She emptied her bag on the worktop and snatched up the key ring.

Her head throbbed with each stair she climbed. Her heartbeat matched her footfalls, reverberating through the house. She wondered whether her presence here would become an echo for whoever might own the building after her, but she did not like thinking that he would become only an echo. Peter was much more than that, wherever he was. A man so alive could, would always be more.

At the door to the tower, she touched the handle again. It was cool. It took a while to find the key that fitted the lock, and as she tried she looked around the landing, at all those closed doors. She had been into each room yesterday, but did not own any of them.

The key turned, and the lock tumbled open.

“Are you there?” she asked, expecting the tap, tap, tap. But there was nothing. She pushed the door open.

The tower structure was square, the staircase circular, made of cast iron and probably worth a small fortune. It did not make a sound as she climbed. She passed two windows out onto her garden, but it felt as though she was looking onto a world she had never visited. She saw places she had been, recognising none of them.

The stairs ended on a narrow landing with a single door. It was dusty and cobwebbed. She touched the door handle and it was warm, but she did not wait to think about why. She unlocked it with another key, wondering only vaguely why the tower room should be locked away behind two doors.

“Open the door, my little rose,” she said, imagining the words on her husband’s lips, and she turned the handle. Peter was waiting for her inside, and soon she would hear his voice again.

As Penny pushed the door open she saw something flash across the small room beyond, dashing for cover, terrified of being seen. She gasped, hand pressed to her chest. Her heart matched the tap, tap, tap she no longer heard, and as its thunderous beat transferred through her hand to the door, she saw a smear of light shivering in the room’s opposite corner. A window-shaped reflection, brought to life by her fear. She shoved the door a little more, and the reflection disappeared.

She entered the room. There was nothing there. The dusty windows caught the sun’s early light and filtered it, casting dust-shadows against the floor and one wall.

The door was closing behind her, and Penny turned to see herself in the mirror hung on the back of the door. Through the haze of old dust covering the glass, she looked nebulous, almost not there.

Also not there, Peter. There was no chair, no husband. The room contained old, old dust, and stale air, heavy with the aromas of age and seclusion.

“I’m here,” she said. “I’m here!” Louder. Dust floated down from the ceiling and flitted in pale sunbeams, like tiny flies startled at her presence.

A broken wooden blind hung down across one window, and one end tapped gently against the panelled wall. There were no broken panes, no breeze. Penny closed her eyes and felt a slight dizziness not connected to her hangover. The tower moved, or the world. Now that she was here it did not matter which.

Penny began to understand. She had not come here to die. Neither had she come to try and make amends to her absent husband, or to prove to herself that she was not as he had always portrayed her. She had come because this was another place where she belonged. This empty, barren room was her home, not the house down below. And there was no way she could leave here again, because everywhere else felt so terrible, threatening, and a million miles away from where she needed to be.

She pressed her face to a glass pane. At least with dust on the windows, she was shielded from some of the distance.

Soon, she would lock the door, prise a window open a crack, and drop the keys outside. Belinda and her family were not visiting for ten days, so there was plenty of time. Because hers was the face at the window. And she was a trick of the light.