Dark Terrors 5: The Gollancz Book of Horror

C. BRUCE HUNTER Changes

Jennifer winced when she got her first look at the cabin. Not only was it worse than she’d imagined, it was worse than she could have imagined.

Some of the vines growing over it were three or four inches thick, and the only place they showed signs of trimming was around the front door. A couple of the windows were completely overgrown, as was the chimney, and the few clapboards that weren’t yet covered had been given only a temporary reprieve. In short, it was the kind of place only a troll could love.

‘This is utterly ridiculous,’ she said under her breath while she considered getting back into the station wagon and locking all the doors. She didn’t mind roughing it. Her lifestyle sometimes made that unavoidable. But this was too Gothic even for her.

‘I could use a little help here,’ George grunted. He had just hefted one of the cardboard boxes he’d pulled out onto the tailgate, leaving the other for someone else to carry. ‘Hurry up, gang. We’re going to lose the light soon.’

‘If you expect me to clean this place, you’re crazy.’ Jennifer rested her elbows on the roof of the car, cupped her chin in her hands and continued staring at the cabin.

‘It won’t need cleaning,’ Lee said as he slid the other box off the tailgate. ‘We tidied up before we left last year.’

‘Men!’ she sighed, ‘loosely speaking, of course.’

George and Lee carried their things in, while Jennifer took a half step back and sniffed at something very unpleasant. It came on the evening breeze, from inside the cabin no doubt, and she didn’t want to know what it was.

But she had agreed to come, and a foolish bargain is still a bargain. So she decided at least to see what she’d got herself into.

Leaving the relative safety of the station wagon, she ventured up what in any other setting would have been a fairy-tale path. It was laid out in a broad ‘S’. covered with small river stones and bordered by shaped redwood slats, with a menagerie of concrete animals and gnomes scattered around it. Some were posed in the yard, as if they were playing. Others peeked from behind bushes or around rocks. And most still sported fairly good coats of paint.

‘I see that someone with a little imagination used to live here,’ she said, but as soon as she walked through the front door, she regretted the statement.

Compared with the path, the inside of the cabin was a calamity. Perhaps ‘insides’ would have been a more descriptive term. There was something vaguely intestinal about the array of artefacts that littered the place. They must have accumulated over a period of years, because they were in various stages of returning to nature, some cloaked in a thick covering of green fuzz and looking as if they might move at any moment.

And while the outside got a little air, the inside did not. It sported a mouldering, half-empty cereal box on the counter, a garbage pail that should have been emptied at least a year ago, and a bowl of fruit that any reasonable person should have known wouldn’t remain fresh for an entire winter.

All that could be managed, Jennifer thought. But other, more menacing things had insinuated themselves into the cabin. The odour she’d picked up on the breeze came from behind a stack of wood at the fireplace. She would just let the guys take care of whatever that was. And the ice chest sitting ominously in the corner was going to remain tightly sealed if she had anything to say about it.

Fortunately, night came so fast that she didn’t have to worry about cleaning anything right away. It wasn’t so much the darkness that stopped her. The cabin did have a supply of candles. But the mood of the forest after sunset made work impossible.

The full moon cast a bright pall over the mountain, making it look for all the world like a magical wonderland. Everything became colourless, all grey and black, but the brighter hues of grey took on an eerie glow, while the deepest patches of black seemed transparent, as if they were gateways that led to a mysterious, lightless realm.

And it all happened instantly. One minute, daylight filtered through the tops of the trees. Then it winked out, and the whole forest was transformed. No longer sticks and leaves and dirt, the entire place was now an ethereal world of shades that seemed to offer a welcome to those wandering on the dark side but would be a little too foreboding for anyone else.

The only thing they could do at that point was build a fire, open a bottle of wine and tell ghost stories while the moon cast patches of light and shadow through the vine-covered windows.

Jennifer kept up with the guys for a few hours. She told the two stories she knew — the one about the hook and the one about a ghost girl hitchhiking back from a prom. And in between, she listened to George and Lee rattle off a succession of tales that were so well honed, the guys must have been telling them for years. But finally she became drowsy, curled up in front of the fire and fell asleep.

The next morning was fantastic, too. A light rain had fallen — not enough to turn the ground to mud, just enough to make everything look and smell clean. The whole mountain sparkled under a big, bright sun that hovered barely above the horizon and was just now peeking through a patch of clouds breaking up in the eastern sky.

It was the one direction where the land dropped away fast enough to provide a view of anything, and the view over there — the valley, the small town with a white church steeple as its most prominent feature and a scattering of white and yellow and blue houses, and the small farms whose cattle, according to the guys, provided the best meat in the state — the view was spectacular. It was the kind of scene Jennifer didn’t know existed any more.

When she wandered sleepy-eyed out of the cabin, Lee was sitting on the porch railing, sipping a cup of steaming coffee and looking wistfully at the valley. She stood behind him for a long time, looked past him at the scene Lee had told her about but she hadn’t really understood until now, and let the baggage she had brought with her from the city slip away from her mind, just as Lee had told her it would. The scene was so lovely and did such marvellous things to her that it seemed forever before she felt like saying anything at all.

‘Where’s George?’ she finally asked.

‘He’s gone for a run in the woods.’

Jennifer sat on the railing beside Lee and took the cup from his hand.

‘I’m glad I let you talk me into coming this year,’ she said between sips.

‘Did you finish your project?’ he asked.

‘No.’ She inhaled deeply and stared at the distant town. Somehow work didn’t seem to matter any more. ‘I’ll finish it when I get back to the office on Monday, but I’m not even going to think about it ‘til then.’

‘I told you you’d like this place.’

‘You should have put more conviction into it. I would have come up long ago if I knew it was this perfect.’ She handed the cup back and leaned over the railing so she could get a better look at the yard.

‘Who did the path?’

‘Some of the people who’ve stayed here over the years. I don’t know who started the tradition, but George says it’s been going on as long as he can remember.’

‘I can see that.’

‘What do you mean?’ Lee cocked his head to one side, as if he were trying to see whether Jennifer had found something he’d been missing.

‘Oh,’ she pointed to a well-weathered concrete pagoda. The family of rabbits that surrounded it was obviously a more recent addition. Their paint showed no wear at all. ‘I was just noticing. They don’t seem to go together.’

‘I know. The bunnies weren’t here last year, but I think the pagoda may have been the first piece someone brought up.’

‘Rabbits and pagodas,’ she mused. ‘Last night I thought it took imagination to do this. Now I wonder if it wasn’t just weirdness.’

‘You’re looking at it wrong.’ Lee took another sip of coffee and went into his I’ll-explain-it-to-you mode. ‘The way I see it, that path is the heart of the place…’

‘It’s certainly the only thing around here that shows any signs of maintenance.’

‘Exactly. So many of us share the cabin, there’s no way it can be a home. It just can’t be. But some of the guys want to make it at least a little more personal. So they put a critter on the path.’

‘I see. That makes it like “home away from home”.’

‘Exactly. And when they stop coming, they’ve left something of themselves behind. I know the pieces don’t all fit together, but they’re not supposed to. Each critter has a story, but no one knows all the stories, so they’re destined to remain just out of reach. And the critters have to stay separate, because each of them has a secret it can’t tell.’

‘Bull!’ George wheezed as he emerged from a clump of trees and jogged up the path. He was obviously exhausted and covered with sweat in spite of the cool mountain air.

‘Where?’ Lee pretended to look around the yard. ‘I don’t see a bull. Plenty of gnomes and bunnies, though.’

‘Has this man been filling your head with nonsense?’ George stopped to catch his breath when he reached the front steps.

‘He was just telling me about the animals.’

George turned and glanced disdainfully at the concrete menagerie. ‘I tripped over that damned pagoda one night,’ he said between gasps. ‘Almost broke my neck.’ He wiped his face with the back of his wrist band and asked, ‘Is there any more coffee?’

Lee nodded.

George continued panting for a few seconds. Then as soon as he’d recovered a little, he took the steps two at a time and went into the cabin to towel off. Jennifer followed him in, while Lee stayed on the porch to finish his coffee and watch the sun climb into the sky.

She spent most of the day cleaning, and the work turned out to be lighter than she’d expected. First impressions aside, the cabin was pretty well kept. A little dusting brought the shine back. The dishes had been thoroughly washed and stacked neatly in the kitchen cabinets. They only needed a rinse before being used again. The stove didn’t have a speck of grease on it. Even the pots and pans were scrubbed clean.

In fact, it was only the intrusions of nature that had made the place look so dismal. Someone left a window open, and that had given small animals their run of the cabin long enough to make a mess. But it was all superficial. No real harm done.

Jennifer got everything looking pretty good, but when George cooled off from his run, he kicked her out of the kitchen, and she had to turn her attention to the combination living and bedroom while he cooked supper.

She started by scraping the empty beer cans and food wrappers off the low table in the middle of the room. In their place she set out one of the bottles of bourbon George had bought on their way out of the city, and beside it three bowls and as many glasses, which she managed to liberate from the kitchen with only minimal objection from the chef. A candle in an old Chianti bottle became the table’s centrepiece. And Jennifer topped the setting off with a loaf of bread on a piece of wood she’d found in the kitchen and assumed was a bread board.

She had just finished arranging everything for the best effect when Lee came in from outside. As usual, he seemed a little wrapped up in something private; didn’t start a conversation or offer to help with the housework. Instead, he took his guitar out of its case and after giving it a few minutes to adjust to the room’s atmosphere started playing a tune Jennifer hadn’t heard before.

Apparently it was something he was trying to learn. He kept getting stuck part way through and spent most of his time looking for a chord that fitted. But it still sounded good, and Jennifer listened to it as she finished her work.

The cabin had several boxes of candles — more than she thought it really needed — so she appropriated a dozen and placed them strategically around the living room. And when everything outside was dark, she lit them and stood back to admire what she’d done. Somehow the candles seemed a perfect accessory for the cabin. They gave it a warm glow that blended with the smells of George’s stew to make the place seem every bit as much a home as her own apartment.

It was as if she’d managed to bring in some of the nocturnal wonderland from outside. And that was no small accomplishment.

‘This cabin isn’t so bad, really,’ she said, looking around to survey the results of her labour one more time.

‘We like it,’ George answered as he brought in a large pot of non-vegetarian stew and set in on the table.

‘No. I’m serious. It looks like a dung heap from the outside, but once you get settled in, the place feels pretty comfortable.’

‘That’s because it’s lived in,’ Lee said, without looking up from the strings of his guitar. ‘We’ve been coming here for decades…’

‘Since you were an infant, I suppose?’

‘Very funny.’ He finally gave up and laid the guitar aside. ‘I mean “we” as a group.’

‘I was pretty young when I first came here,’ George said. ‘An old guy picked me up in the Y when I was sixteen. I used to hang out there, hoping to find someone else like me. Then he found me. He brought me here for a week that summer.’

‘Does he own the place or something?’

‘No, I don’t think anyone owns it. And he’s dead now.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s all right,’ George said, though something at the edge of his voice hinted that it wasn’t. ‘We were close for a while, but those days were long ago. I guess that’s the way it goes. Everyone dies. Anyway, he told me how his uncle brought him here when he was just a pup.’

‘Did they bring up the pagoda?’

George looked confused.

‘On the path.’

‘Oh, that. They may have. I think someone just put it there to dress the place up. After that, other guys brought up the rest of the stuff over the years.’

Jennifer dished up the food. She ladled out a bowl of stew for George, passed one to Lee and served herself. Then she settled back into a pillow and stirred hers with a piece of bread.

‘That’s the way this place is,’ George went on, pouring some bourbon into his glass. ‘The old guy told me I could use it any time I wanted. So I brought Lee here about five years ago. Now we’re bringing you. Someday you’ll bring a friend. And years from now they’ll bring others.’

‘Everyone who stays here makes the place a little more lived in,’ Lee added.

‘Living’s better than the alternative, I suppose.’ George took a gulp of whiskey and pronounced his approval by pouring another shot.

‘You know what I mean,’ Lee insisted.

‘Sure, but a house is just a house. You got your roof, you got your bed, and if you’re lucky you got your whiskey glass.’

‘What ever happened to him?’ Jennifer asked.

‘Who?’ Now George looked a little frustrated, as if he wished Jennifer would stick to one subject and ask questions he could grasp the first time out.

‘The man who brought you here.’

‘Oh. He’s buried out back.’

Jennifer didn’t ask. She wanted to, but the circles she ran in had an unwritten rule. Everyone was expected to sense which topics were too personal to talk about, and guessing wrong meant getting slapped down.

She wasn’t sure, but she suspected she’d drifted into one of those topics. So she didn’t ask.

They finished the meal in silence. Then they drank and talked and played harmless games. But it didn’t take long for the mountain air and the day’s exercise to take their toll, and they were all asleep before midnight.

Sunday started gradually on the mountain. Even in the city, there would have been no need to rush. But here it was unthinkable.

They slept late and woke slowly. There was plenty of time for coffee and doughnuts, which led them out to the porch where they sat for hours, watching the people in the valley emerge in small groups from their tiny dwellings and gather at their big white church and, after a respectable interlude, drift away from it to return home. There was little activity in the town after that, no visible motion at any rate, to show whether the people were doing anything important.

Most of the day on the mountain was like that, too. It passed without incident.

Then came the morose drinking that’s often a symptom of being away from home and having too much time to think.

It began in the late afternoon. At least, that’s when whatever the guys had been holding in came to the surface.

Jennifer had decided to set the kitchen table for supper, just to add a touch of class. She appropriated some half burned candles from the living room, arranged them at the centre of the table and set out some of the matching Doulton she’d found tucked away at one end of the kitchen cabinets.

But this time, no one wanted to help. After setting the table, she had to cook while the guys stayed outside hacking up firewood they weren’t going to use and tinkering with the station wagon, which had run perfectly all the way up from the city. Then when they finally decided to come in, she had to serve the meal.

And when everything was on the table, they didn’t appreciate the effort. They passed up the wine she’d set out, drinking straight whiskey instead. The rare steak and scalloped potatoes she’d worked on so hard didn’t suit them. Nor did they bother to compliment her table even once. She could accept that kind of behaviour from George, but Lee certainly knew better.

To make things worse, after supper they both refused to leave the kitchen, even when Jennifer snatched the dishes away and whisked the crumbs off the tablecloth. They just sat there, sliding a half-gallon jug of bourbon back and forth between them and swigging it with that macho attitude men seem to adopt when they’re feeling down.

Jennifer saw what was coming and did everything she could to stay aloof. First, she busied herself with the dishes — it was her turn anyway — and when everything was dried and put away, she took the scraps outside to scatter them on the ground for the animals.

But when she got back, things had taken a nasty turn. During the thirty seconds she was outside, one of the guys had taken an old Smith & Wesson revolver out of a drawer in the living room. Now it was sitting on the kitchen table beside the jug. That was when Jennifer really wanted to disengage.

She took a glass of wine to the living room, built a nest for herself in front of the fire and started playing solitaire with a dog-eared deck of cards that had shared the drawer with the Smith & Wesson. Different games for different folks, she reckoned.

For more than two hours the scene changed gradually but predictably. It started with a little self-pity and a round of whiskey. Then it progressed to questioning the wisdom of the Almighty, who’d obviously made a mistake when he made the world the way it was, followed by another drink. Then more self-pity, this bout steeped in slurred introspection followed by agreement that most parents are ill-equipped for the job.

‘I wish you guys would grow up,’ Jennifer finally said, speaking over her shoulder but refusing to look around.

‘Maybe we have… at long last,’ Lee mumbled, his words punctuated by the scraping sound of the gun sliding across the table and the less metallic sound of the jug being set down hard.

Jennifer turned her head just enough to see what was going on in the kitchen. She hoped the guys wouldn’t notice. She didn’t want to encourage them.

George spun the cylinder and raised the gun to his temple. He cocked the hammer, left his thumb on it and tugged at the trigger until the action released. Then he let the hammer down very slowly.

‘You know you’re betraying your heritage,’ Jennifer said, turning back to the cards and shuffling the deck nervously. ‘Just accept what you are.’

‘That’s the hardest part,’ George sighed.

‘Then gut it out. If I can do it, you can. I’m just a dumb old girl, remember — the weaker half of the species. Isn’t that the way you put it once, George?’

She thought if she could provoke them, maybe they’d come into the living room and get their minds on something healthier. But it didn’t work.

‘Let’s do it,’ George said.

‘Why not.’ Lee’s voice no longer sounded like him. It was low and tense, with a bitter, icy edge.

Jennifer heard the sound of the cylinder spin and spin again. Then a second of silence followed by a raspy, metallic click and a loud sigh.

She refused to look but heard the ritual repeated twice more. Each time the harsh sounds grated on her nerves. And each time they seemed slower, further apart, as if the guys were losing their nerve. But it was probably just her apprehension that had thrown everything into slow motion.

After the third time, she turned and stared, but she quickly wished she hadn’t. The scene was more than she’d bargained for. Lee was pale, his face dotted with beads of sweat. George held the gun. His eyes were closed and his mouth slightly open. He sat completely motionless except for his left hand. It was resting on the table, beside the jug, and moving mechanically up and down in tight jerks.

‘I can’t believe you two.’ That was all she said. She wanted to say more, but it was obviously too late.

George laid the gun on the table, and Lee picked it up. He spun the cylinder and raised the old Smith & Wesson to his head.

Jennifer turned away, unwilling to watch any more of their sick game. To steady herself, she picked up her wine glass and started to take a long pull from it.

The explosion was sharp and much too loud. She jumped so hard the wine splashed all over her blouse, and through the ringing in her ears she thought she heard a short, desperate laugh from George.

She closed her eyes and didn’t open them again for a long time. She neither needed nor wanted to see what had happened.

Eventually, a wave of nausea came over her. It’s hard when your own kind dies, not like seeing a rabbit or a squirrel lying in the road. When it’s one of your own, it becomes a very personal thing.

Her stomach tightened so much she thought she was going to throw up, but it didn’t happen. That was good. She needed to be strong, at least for the rest of the night. There was still more to endure before she could go home again.

The last morning at the cabin was beautiful, though sad. By the time Jennifer awakened, most of the shock had worn off. Her hands still trembled a little, but that was normal for the morning after. For the most part, she was able to put it out of her mind while she watched the sun rise and helped load the station wagon.

She and George had run all night. He showed her the path through the rolling hills that led down to the valley. They explored the woods, ate their fill at one of the farms and even circled the town from a safe distance.

The valley was fantastic in the monochrome light of the full moon. All the sounds were happy, while the mingled scents of fireplace smoke and slowly cooking dinners floated on a gentle breeze that made Jennifer’s body feel cool and strangely liberated.

It was nearly dawn when they returned to the cabin. They got a few hours of sleep then jump-started with a pot of black coffee, cleaned up and prepared for the drive back to the city.

They laid Lee to rest in the graveyard behind the cabin. He had no relatives, nor anyone who would really miss him, and there was no reason to take him anywhere else.

The revolver still lay on the table in the kitchen. The last thing George did, after he’d packed their things and loaded the car, was to put it in the drawer it had come from and carefully place the box of silver-tipped bullets beside it. Both would be safe there until someone decided to use them again.

While George drove along the winding road that led down to the city, Jennifer curled up in the back seat and tried to get some sleep. The purr of the engine and the gentle beating of tyres on the old blacktop helped her relax. And she consoled herself by holding on to the thought that it would be a month until the next full moon.

Perhaps things would be different then.