The Mammoth Book of Terror

MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH IS a novelist and screenwriter who lives in north London and Brighton with his wife Paula and two cats. His first novel, Only Forward, won the August Derleth and Philip K. Dick awards. His second, Spares, was optioned by Steven Spielberg and translated in seventeen countries worldwide, while his third, One of Us, was optioned by Warner Brothers.

His most recent books, The Straw Men and The Lonely Dead (aka The Upright Man), were published under the name “Michael Marshall” and have been international best-sellers. He is currently writing a third volume in the series.

Smith’s short stories have won the British Fantasy Award three times, and are collected in What You Make It and the International Horror Guild Award-winning More Tomorrow & Other Stories. Six of his tales are currently under option for television.

“I’d been nursing the underlying idea for this story for quite a while,” reveals the author, “waiting to find a way to get into it: I am someone who will watch wacky home video programmes on television and spend as much time looking at the details in the houses, at the hints of other lives, as I do laughing at the people falling over. Then one afternoon I happened to walk past a nice, normal house in our neighbourhood, and I thought ‘Wouldn’t it be odd to just walk up that path, knock on the door and walk in.’

“Thankfully I only did it in a fictional reality . . .”

NEVER BEEN GREAT AT planning, I’ll admit that. Make decisions on the spur of the moment. No forward thought, unless you count years of wondering and speculating – and you shouldn’t, because I certainly don’t. None of it was to do with specifics, with the mechanics of the situation, with anything that would have helped. I just went and did it. Like always. That’s me all over. I just go and do it.

Here’s how it happened. It’s a Saturday. My wife is gone for the day, out at a big lunch for a mate who’s getting married in a couple weeks. Shit – that’s another thing she’ll have to . . . whatever. She’ll work it out. Anyway, she got picked up at noon and went off in a cab full of women and balloons and I was left in the house on my own. I had work to do, so that was okay. Problem was I just couldn’t seem to do it. Don’t know if you get that sometimes: just can’t apply yourself to something. You’ve got a job to do – in my case it was fixing up a busted old television set, big as a fridge and hardly worth saving, but if that’s what they want, it’s their money – and it just won’t settle in front of you as a task. No big deal, it wasn’t like it had to be fixed in a hurry, and it’s a Saturday. I’m a free man. I can do anything I want.

Problem was that I found I couldn’t settle to anything else either. I had the afternoon ahead, probably the whole evening too. The wife and her pals don’t get together often, and when they do, they drink like there’s no tomorrow. Maybe that was the problem – having a block of time all to myself for once. Doesn’t happen often. You get out of the habit. I don’t know. I just couldn’t get down to anything. I tried working, tried reading, tried going on the web and just moping around. None of it felt like I was doing anything. None of it felt like activity. It just didn’t feel like I thought it would.

I don’t like this, I thought: it’s just not working out.

In the end I got so grumpy and restless I grabbed a book and left the house. There’s a new pub opened up not far from the tube station, and I decided I’d go there, try to read for a while. I stopped by a newsagents on the corner opposite the pub, bought myself a pack often cigarettes. I’m giving up. I’ve been giving up for a while now – and sticking to it, more or less, just a few here and there, and never in the house – but sometimes you’ve just got to have a fucking cigarette. Sometimes the giving up is worse for you than the cigarettes themselves. Your concentration goes. You don’t feel yourself. The world feels like it’sjust out of reach, as if you’re not a part of it any more and not much missed. The annoying thing is that anyone who knows you’re not smoking tends to think that anything that’s wrong with you, any bad mood, any unsettled-ness, is just due to the lack of cigs. I was pretty sure it wasn’t nicotine drought that was causing my restlessness, but so long as I was out of the house I thought I might as well have a couple.

When I got to the pub – which we called the Hairy Pub, because it used to be covered in ivy to the point where you couldn’t actually see the building underneath – it wasn’t too crowded, and I was able to score one of the big new leather armchairs in the window, right by a fucking great fern. The pub never used to be like this. It used to be an old-fashioned, unreconstituted boozer, and – as such – a bit shit. I like old-fashioned pubs as much as the next man, but this one just wasn’t very good. Now they’ve got posh chairs and a cappuccino machine and polite staff and frankly, I’m not complaining. They cut off all the ivy and painted it black and it looks alright. Whatever. The pub’s not really relevant. I sat there for an hour or so, having a couple of coffees and smoking a couple of my small packet of cigarettes. Each one caused me a manageable slap of guilt, as did the chocolate powder sprinkled on the cappuccinos. I’ve been on the frigging Atkins diet for a month, to cap it all, which means, as you doubtless know, no carbohydrates. None. “Thou shalt not carb,” the great Doctor proclaimed, and then died. Chocolate is carbs, as – more importantly – are pizza, pasta and special fried rice, the three food groups which make human life worth living, the triumvirate of grubstuffs which make crawling out of the swamp seem worth it. That month has seen me lose a big six pounds, or, put another way, one point something pounds a week, while not being able to eat anything I like. It’s crap. Anyway.

I tried to read, but couldn’t really get into my book. Couldn’t get into a newspaper either. My attention kept drifting, lighting on people sitting in clumps around the pub, wondering what they were doing there on a Saturday afternoon. Some looked hungover already, others were in the foothills of starting one for Sunday. They were all wearing their own clothes and had their hair arranged in certain ways, which they were happy with, or not; some had loud laughs, others sat pretty quietly. The staff swished to and fro – most of them seem to be rather gay, in that pub: not something that exercises me in the least, merely making a factual observation. I’ve often wondered what it’s like, being gay. Different, certainly. The music was just loud enough to be distracting, and I only recognised about one song in three. I could see other people tapping their feet, though, bobbing their heads. The songs meant something in their lives. Not in mine. I wondered when they’d first heard it, how come it had come to be a part of them and not me. I looked at my coffee cup and my book and my little pack of cigarettes and I got bored with them and myself, and bored with my trousers and thoughts and everything else I knew and understood. Custom had staled their infinity variety. Custom was making my hands twitch.

In the end I got up and left. I stomped back out onto the street, caught between wistful and depressed and pissed off. Then I did something I wasn’t altogether expecting. Instead of walking straight past the newsagent, I swerved and went back in. I went straight up to the desk and asked for a pack of Marlboro Lites. The guy got it, and I paid for them. Emerged back onto the street, looking at what I held in my hands. Been a long, long time since I’d bought a pack of twenty cigarettes. It’s like that with everyone these days – you check, in the pubs and bars, everyone’s smoking tens now, just to prove they’re giving up.

But you can give up giving up, you know. You can choose to say one thing instead of the other, to say the word “twenty” instead often”. That’s all it takes. You’re not as trapped as you think you are. There are other roads, other options, other doors. Always.

I crossed the street at the lights and then, instead of walking back the way I’d come (along the main road, past the station), I took a turning which led to a shortcut through some quiet residential streets. It’s pretty hilly around where I live now, though if you’re on the way back from the pub then you’re walking down for most of the way. My first right took me into Addison Road, which is short and has a school on one side. Then I turned left into a street whose name I’m not even sure of, a short little road with some two storey brick Victorian houses on either side. At the bottom of it is Brenneck Road, at which point I’d be rejoining the route I would have taken had I gone the other way.

I was walking along that stretch of pavement, halfway between here and there, halfway between one thing and the other, when I did it.

I turned left suddenly, pushed open the black wooden gate I happened to be passing, and walked up to the house beyond it. Don’t know what number it was. Don’t know anything about the house. Never noticed it before. But I went up to the door and saw that it was one house, not divided up into flats. I pressed the buzzer. It rang loudly inside.

While I was waiting I glanced back, taking a better look at the front garden. Nothing to see, really – standard stuff. Tiny bit of grass, place for the bins, a small tree. Manageable.

I turned when I heard the sound of the door being opened.

A young woman, mid-twenties, was standing there. She had shoulder length brown hair and a mild tan and white teeth. She looked nice, and pretty, and I thought okay – I’m going to do it.

“Hello?” she said, ready to be helpful.

“Hi,” I replied, and pushed past her into the house. Not hard, not violent, just enough to get past her.

I strode down the hallway, took a quick peek in the front room (stripped pine floors, creamy-white sofa, decent new widescreen television) and went straight through to the kitchen, which was out the back. They’d had it done, got some architect or builder to knock out most of the wall and replace it with glass, and it looked good. I wanted to do something like that at home, but the wife thought it would be too modern and “notin keepingwith aVictorian residence”. Bollocks. Itlooked great.

“Just a bloody minute . . .” said a voice, and I saw the woman had followed me in. She looked very wary, understandably. “What the hell are you doing?”

I glanced over her shoulder and saw the front door was still open, but first things first. I went over to the fridge – nice big Bosch, matt silver. We’ve got a Neff. One of those retro ones, in pale green. Looks nice but holds fuck all. This Bosch was full to the brim. Nice food, too. Good cheese. Pre-cut fruit salad. A pair of salmon en croute, tasty, very nice with some new potatoes, which I saw were also there ready to go. Cold meats, pasta salads, da da da. From Waitrose, supermarket of choice. Wife always shops at Tescos, and it’s not bad but it’s not half as good.

“Nice,” I said. “Okay. Did you buy all this? Or was it your fella?”

She just stared at me, goggle-eyed, didn’t answer. But I knew it was her, just from the way she looked at it. She blinked, trying to work out what to do. I smiled, trying to reassure her it was all okay.

“I’m going to call the police.”

“No you’re not,” I said, and smacked her one.

It wasn’t hard, but she wasn’t expecting it. She staggered back, caught her leg on one of the chairs around the table (nice-looking chairs, kind of ethnic, oak) and fell back on her arse. Head clunked against the fridge. Again, not hard, but enough to take the wind out of her sails for a second.

I checked the back door – shut, locked – and then stepped over her down the hallway and to the front. A woman with a pram was passing by on the pavement. I gave her a big smile and said good afternoon and she smiled back (what a nice man) and then I shut the door. Went to the little table, grubbed around a second, and came up with a set of keys, and a spare. Locked the front door. Went into the front room to check: all windows shut and secured, and here’s a couple who stumped up for double glazing. Good for keeping the heat in. Good for keeping the noise in too, I’m afraid.

Went upstairs, had a quick check around. We’re secure. Okay. Excellenta.

Back in the kitchen the woman is pushing herself to her feet. As I come in she skitters away from me and slips (nice clean floors), ends up on her bum again. She makes a strange little noise and her eyes are darting all over the place.

“Now listen,” I said. “Listen carefully. This is not what you think. I am not going to hurt you unless I have to.”

“Get out,” she screamed.

“No, I’m not going to do that,” I said. “I’m going to stay here. Do you understand?”

She just stared at me, breathing hard, building up to scream again. She was cowering over by the microwave (matt silver again, nice consistent look throughout the whole kitchen area, there’s some thought gone into all this).

“Screaming really isn’t going to help,” I said. It’s not that I mind the sound, particularly, but there’s a lot of glass out the back and one of the neighbours might hear. “It’s just going to piss me off, and I can’t see why you’d want to do that. Just not in your best interests, to be honest. Not at this stage.”

Then I saw what she was doing, and had to go quickly over there. She had her mobile phone in her hand, hidden behind the microwave, and was trying to activate a speed-dial number.

I grabbed it off her. “I like that,” I said. “Really. I do. I like the idea, I like the execution. Nearly worked. Like I said, I admire it. But don’t ever fucking do anything like that again.”

And then I hit her. Properly, this time.

It’s a funny old thing, hitting women. Frowned upon, these days. And, so like everything else you’re not supposed to do, it feels like a big old step when you do it. Like you’re opening a door most people don’t have the courage to go through. You don’t know what’s on the other side of this door. There’s a chance, admittedly, that it won’t be anything good. But it’s a door, see? There must be something on the other side. It stands to reason. Otherwise it wouldn’t be there. And if you don’t open some of those doors, you’re never going to know whatyou missed.

She fell over and I left her there. I went around the house, collecting up the normal phones. Don’t want to break them, but I put there somewhere she’s not going to find them.

I feel both good and bad by this stage. Everything’s gone fine, would be according to plan if there’d ever been one. Everything’s cool, and I’m quietly confident and excited. I love it. But something tells me something’s not right yet. I don’t know what it is. Can’t put my finger on it.

So I ignore it. That’s what I do. I just think about something else. I made a cup of tea, stepping over her where she’s lying on the floor, and I put a big old couple of spoonfuls of sugar in it. It’s much nicer that way, if the truth be told. I checked the woman was still breathing – she was – and then went into the front room.

Then I sat on the sofa, and got busy with her phone.

I looked through the address book on it, and found a few obvious ones. “Mum Mobile”, not hard to work out who that is, is it. Few girls’ nicknames, obviously good friends. And one that is a single letter, “N”. I’m guessing that’s her boyfriend (no wedding ring but everything about this house says two people live here) and I also go out on a limb and opt for “Nick”. She doesn’t look like she’d be going out with a Nigel or Nathaniel or Norman (got nothing against those names, you understand, just she isn’t the type). So first I send a quick text message to “N”.

Then I dial “Mum Mobile”.

It rings for a few seconds and then a middle-aged woman’s voice says “Hello, darling”. I didn’t say anything, obviously. I just listen to this woman’s voice. She says hello a few times, sounding a bit confused, irritable, worried. Then she puts the phone down.

It’s enough. I’ve heard enough to get an idea of what she’s like, which is all I want. After all, it wouldn’t be realistic for a boyfriend never to have heard his mother-in-law’s voice. So then I send her a quick text, saying the number got dialled by accident, everything’s fine, and I (or of course, she, so far as her Mum knows) will call her properly later.

A minute later a text comes back saying OKAY, LOVE. Sorted.

Fifteen minutes later, “N” arrives at the front door, blowing hard. He lets himself in with his key. He runs towards the living room, expecting to see his girlfriend lying there naked and waiting. That, after all, is the impression I/she gave in the text.

He never even saw me behind the door. She did, unfortunately. I saw her wake up as I was straddled over him, and I know she saw the brick come down with the blow that did for him. Shame, for any number of reasons. Transition should be much smoother than that, and she’s just going to feel alienated.

But at least I’ve got his wallet now, which will come in handy. Credit cards, driving licence, the lot. And guess what? He was a Nick. Just goes to show.

I know what I’m doing.

She’s up on the second floor now. Her name’s Karen, I know now. Which is a nice name. I’ve been practising saying it, in lots of ways. Happy ways, mainly; plus a few stern ways, just in case. Not sure where she is just at this second, but I’m guessing the bathroom. A door that can be locked. She’s likely to start screaming again, in a while, so I’m going to have to work out what to do about that. Not all double-glazed up there. Last bout I covered with turning the television up loud. Limit to how many times I’m going to be able to do that. Butwho knows what the limits are? They’re not as tight as you’d think. You can hit people, it turns out. You can listen to music you’ve never heard of, and learn to like it. You can choose not to give a shit what dead Mr Atkins said: you actually can eat potatoes if you feel like it – just like we’re going to a little later on, when Karen calms down and we can sit like proper mates and have our supper.

For the time being I’m just going to sit on this nice sofa and smoke all I want and watch TV programmes I’ve never seen before. Judging by all the videos, Karen and Nick like documentaries. Better get used to that. Never been one for that kind of thing myself, but it’s nice to have a change. For it all to be different. For it to be someone else’s life, and not the same old shit of mine, the same old faces, the same old everything. I see later there’s one of those home video programmes on, too. I love those. They’re my favourite. I love seeing all the houses, the gardens, the wives and dogs. All of the different lives. Superb. If I get bored, I’ll just text a few of her friends.

I was worried earlier, but I’m not now. What I felt was just a little niggle of doubt. Gone now. If you’ve got what it takes, everything’s possible. I have high hopes, to be honest. I’m going to like being Nick. The woman’s nice-looking. Much better than the last. From what I can make out, Nick was an estate agent. Piece of piss. I could do that – whereas, if I’m honest, I was crap at repairing televisions. Couldn’t pick it up in two days, that was for sure. Wouldn’t have been long before people started ringing me up, coming round, wanting their televisions back and spotting I wasn’t the bloke they left them with and that they weren’t fixed. Wasn’t a stable life. Just as today, ten minutes after I left the house, a car will have come around expecting to pick up the woman, to take her out to a wonderful lunch with champagne and laughs. I knew about that. It was on their calendar, on the side of that retro fridge. Kind of forced my hand. Two days is a very short life and I didn’t want to leave so soon, but I couldn’t have talked my way out of that.

She hadn’t worked out anyway. Didn’t want a new start. Just wanted what she’d had.

Doesn’t matter. I like a change. This life, I think it could be different. Could go on for longer. Well . . . to be honest, you only ever get about three, four days. But this will definitely be easier than the last one. More relaxing.

No sign of kids, for a start.