The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection

THE VISITORS’ BOOK Stephen Gallagher

“Someone’s torn a page out of this,” she said, turning the book toward me. “Look, you can see.”

She was almost right. The page hadn’t been torn, it had been cut; taken out with a blade that had been run down the middle of the book as close to the centre as it was possible to get. It was the kind of cut you make when you don’t want your handiwork to be noticed. The only thing that gave it away was that when the book was closed, a slight gap appeared as if a bookmark had been lost in there somewhere. It made me faintly curious, but no more than that. I really didn’t think that it was any big deal.

“So it has,” I said, and tried to look more interested than I was.

Some time later, I remember getting it out of the drawer to look at it again. It was a big book, album-sized, and it was two-thirds filled with handwritten entries by many of the families who’d stayed in the summerhouse before us. Only one or two of them were in a language I could understand, and they gave a few hints about the place—how to puzzle out how the circuit breakers worked, where to get English newspapers two days out of date—as well as the standard, had-a-lovely-time kinds of sentiments. There were some people from Newcastle, others who’d come over from Dorset. Many of the others were Germans, a few French. Sally hadn’t come across the book until we’d been in the place for three days already, and then she’d found it while rummaging around in the sitting-room furniture for maps and brochures. When I eventually went back and brought it out again, I turned to the place where the missing page had been and looked at the entries before and after. I couldn’t remember anything of what had been written, but by then I was only interested in the dates. The gap seemed to correspond to a two-week period exactly one year before.

No, I remember thinking. It cant have any significance. All that it probably meant was that someone had messed up their entry and had taken the leaf out to try it again. The paper-cutter they’d used was still there at the back of the drawer, a little plastic block with just the corner of a razor blade showing.

When I turned the paper to the light, I could see that some of the missing writing had pressed through onto the next page. Not to the extent that I could make out any words, but enough to get an idea of the overall style. It was neat, it was rounded. A feminine hand.

And it didn’t match with any of the entries that came before or after.

But that was later. Back on that third day, there was no reason for the Visitors’ Book to bother me at all. I left Sally looking through the remaining pages, and went out onto the covered terrace on the front of the summerhouse.

“Watcha doing, Minx?” I said.

The Minx looked up at me from the table. On her birth certificate and by her grandparents she was called Victoria, but to us she’d been the Minx for so long that we had to make an effort to remember that she had any other name. She was four years old that autumn, and was due to start at school the following spring. She’d have her own books, nametabs, a uniform, everything. We’d always told ourselves that we could look forward to this—like all children she’d hit our lives like a hurricane, leaving us dazed and off-kilter and somehow feeling that we’d never quite be able to make up the ground again to become the people we’d once been—but I found that I wasn’t quite anticipating the event in the way that I’d imagined. I suppose I was just beginning to realise how closely the growing and the going away were entwined, and would ever be so.

“I’m colouring,” she said.

She was, too. She’d coloured the page in her book and a good piece of the old vinyl tablecloth around it. She’d coloured a cow blue, and the sky behind it black.

I said, “That looks really good. Are you going to do another?”

“I’ll do another next Tuesday,” she said, Next Tuesday being her way of indicating some undetermined time in the future. “Let’s go and look for froggies.”

“Clear your lunch away first,” I said, “or you’ll bring in all kinds of creepy-crawlies.”

She climbed down from the bench to the wooden planking of the terrace, and surprised me by doing what I’d asked of her. Then we set off down the steps and into the grounds to find some froggies.

It was a pretty good house. I’d felt a twinge of disappointment when we’d first rolled up the grassy drive after a long haul by road and ferry, but within a few hours of unpacking and beginning to unwind it had started to grow on me. It was bigger than we needed, but I liked the sense of space. So what if it was a little shabby round the edges and the shower arrangements were kind of spartan and the beds were dropped in the middle in a way that would have suited a hunchback perfectly and nobody else at all; after a while this only seemed to add to the atmosphere.

It was late, a quiet time of the year. Almost all of the other summerhouses, including the newer one that shared this grassy clearing in a thicket just a little way back from the beach, appeared to be unoccupied. When the road gate at the end of the driveway was closed, it was almost as if we were shutting ourselves into a private world. When the Minx had spotted the horde of tiny frogs that seemed to migrate across the drive at around four o’clock every afternoon, that more or less confirmed it. It seemed that we were going to be okay.

“Have you found any?” she asked brightly, but I had to tell her that I hadn’t. She liked to hold them on her hand. By now they probably just sat there toughing it out and thinking, Oh, shit, not again and Why me, God, why me?

“No,” I said. “It’s the wrong time of day. Look, I saw a bike in the garage yesterday. Why don’t you ride it around the garden?”

“A big bike?” she said warily.

“No, just a little bike.”

So we spent the afternoon playing with the house’s rusty old tricycle and a football that we’d picked up from Willi’s Market about a half-mile down the shore road, and after we’d eaten picnic-style out on the terrace we all took a walk along the beach until it was too cold for everybody but the Minx, who had to be picked up out of the sandhole that she’d dug and carried home squalling.

And as we were tracing our way back through the upturned boats and then across the strip of coarse grassland that divided the shoreline from the shore road.

I found myself thinking: Maybe the people who wrote the page weren’t the ones who took it out. Maybe it was something that the owners didn’t want the rest of us to see.

The owners.

Those shadowy people who weren’t actually present but whose mark was everywhere, so that they seemed to stand just out of sight like a bunch of watchful ghosts. Their pictures, their ornaments, their old castoff furniture—their house. Maybe they came in after each new tenant and read the book, and there was something here that they’d censored.

Maybe.

Exactly what I had in mind, I couldn’t have said. Something uncomplimentary, some insult even; written by someone who perhaps didn’t have a good time and blamed the place and not themselves for it. Or worse. It could have been something worse. I was surprised to find that the possibility had been playing on my mind.

I said nothing to Sally, but I decided there and then that I’d think about it no further. I mean, you worry at something to which you know you can never find the answer, and where does it get you?

Nowhere. So I thought I’d better stop.

That night, after the Minx had been installed in her room and had exhausted every avenue for stories and drinks and had eventually exhausted herself as well, we got a couple of the local beers out of the fridge and turned on the sitting-room lights. Sally flicked through some of the magazines that she’d picked up on the boat coming over, and I hunted around for the paperback I’d been reading. I’m not much of a reader, and thinking of the two weeks that lay ahead I’d bought the book for its size and weight as much as for any other reason. Every other page was dotted with CIA and MI5 and KGB, and the plot went on and on and had about as much grip as a wet handshake; after a while I gave up looking for it, and went over to the shelves instead.

There had to be something here I could read. There was a cabinet full of books and overseas editions of the Readers Digest, most of them probably abandoned and accumulated from visitors over the years, but there wasn't much that was in the English language. There was a fat book by Leon Uris that I put back because it looked such heavy going and, besides, I'd already seen the movie, and an old and brittle Agatha Christie which, on a quick check, appeared to have lost its last ten pages. The only decent bet seemed to be a two-fisted private eye story titled Dames Die First.

When I pulled it out, a photograph dropped to the floor. It had been between the books. I picked it up and looked at it, and saw that there was the sign of a crease across the middle. At a guess, it had been slipped in between the volumes for the pressure to flatten it out, and then it had been forgotten. It was of a blonde girl of about six or seven, and if it had been taken anywhere around here I didn't recognise the spot. I carried the picture over to the chest of drawers and then started to go through them, much as Sally had earlier in the day. After a while I became aware of her watching me.

“What’s the matter?” she said.

“Just checking on something.”

She didn’t seem to think much of my answer, but it was the best one I had. As she was laying down her magazine to come over, I found what I was looking for; another, different photograph that lay in one of the drawers underneath some boxed games and out-of-date timetables.

It was a family group. Nothing formal, just a snapshot. The house was recognisable in the background, although they’d added to it since. These, I’d been guessing, were the people who actually owned the place and who let it out through an agency for the times when they didn’t need it themselves.

I laid the two photographs side by side on top of the dresser. The girl who appeared in one didn’t appear in the other.

Sally picked up the portrait shot and said, “She doesn’t look local,” before dropping it again and going on through the kitchen toward the bathroom.

Yeah, fine.

That’s probably what I’d been thinking, too.

Saturday came around.

I didn’t actually realise that it was Saturday until I saw a strange car coming up the driveway that morning. At first I thought that it was somebody on their way to speak to us, but the car turned off and pulled in by the other of the two houses that shared the driveway and the private clearing at its end. Suddenly it didn’t seem so private any more.

The family got out and we nodded to each other. They didn’t seem to have brought much in the way of luggage and they went straight into the house as if they already knew their way around. My guess was that they were another set of owners, just up for the weekend. I went back into our own place and warned Sally and the Minx, just in case either of them happened to be wandering around after a shower in less than their underwear. There was just a stretch of open ground between the two buildings, nothing screening them at all. The other house was newer, neater. I know it was theirs, but I couldn’t help thinking of them as intruders.

I looked at the two children. Neither of them was anything like the girl in the photograph.

So then I wondered if they might be able to tell me what had happened here, in this same week exactly one year before.

But I never asked.

On Sunday we took the Minx on a long drive to the zoo, where she acted up so much that we had to threaten to leave her there and halfway meant it. When we got back late in the afternoon, our short-term neighbours were apparently loading up to go. We nodded as we passed just as before, and then they went.

I gave it a few minutes after their departure and then I took a walk down the driveway to check that the gate was secure; the driveway curved and was lined with dense bushes, so the gate couldn’t be seen directly from the house. The Minx came after me, on the prospect of froggies. She squatted down looking hopefully at the ground while I rattled the wide gate, but the bolt was secure.

“Why are you doing that?” she said.

“So that we can let you wander around without worrying about you getting onto the road where the cars are,” I told her. “Haven’t you noticed how one of us checks on it every morning?”

“I check on it too,” she said.

“Really.”

“Yes,” she said. “Someone keeps coming in and leaving it open.”

Either the frogs had already been and gone, or else they were getting wiser and waiting. We walked back up to the house. The day was dying and the shadows were long and deep, and the houselights glowed yellow-on-blue like a twilit jack-o’-lantern. The Minx took hold of my hand as we climbed the wooden steps. Only a couple of hours before, she’d been winding me up to bursting point outside the monkey house and she’d known it. Now this. I couldn’t help thinking, and not for the first time, that the worst thing in the world for me would be to lose her.

And, of course, eventually to lose her was one of the few things in my life that could fairly be called inevitable.

With only a few days left of our stay, we found ourselves less inclined toward loading up the car and going looking for late-season amusements and so instead we just stayed around the place. I’m not exactly sure what we did, but the time carried on leaking away from us anyway. Anything we needed, we could usually get it from Willi’s Market. The only problem was that we couldn’t mention the name of the place when the Minx was in earshot without her latching onto it and getting us helpless with laughter.

Sometimes the Minx walked down with me. Thursday was one of the days when she didn’t.

It was a rambling, one-storey building set back from the road with space for about half a dozen cars in front of it, and although it wasn’t big it sold just about everything from fresh bread to padlocks. It was clean and it was bright and it was modern, and the only note that jarred when I compared it to similar places back home was the sales rack of shrink-wrapped pornography stuck in there by the checkout between the Disney comics and the chewing gum. One man seemed to run the place on his own, at least at this quiet time of year when there were only the few locals and late visitors like ourselves to keep it ticking over. He wore a sports shirt and glasses and combed his thinning hair straight back, and whenever I went in we communicated entirely by nods and signs and smiles.

As he was punching up my stuff on the till, I brought out the little girl’s picture and showed it to him.

He paused in his work and looked at the picture. He wasn’t certain of why I was doing this, and so he looked closely without any reaction other than mild puzzlement for a few moments. Then he glanced up at me.

He shook his head. There was sadness and sympathy in his eyes.

And he said something, and right there and then I’d have given almost anything to know what it was; but I just took the picture from him and stowed it away again, and I nodded my head as if I understood. The words meant nothing to me, but I thought I knew the tone of them.

It was the tone, I believed then, that one would use when speaking of someone else’s tragedy.

As I was walking back along the side of the shore road, I felt as if the formless apprehensions of the past few days had suddenly come together and made a creature with a name. Its name was dread, and it sat in me like an angry prisoner with no sight of daylight. A few cars zipped by me, one with a windsurfing board on its rack. I knew I’d closed and bolted the gate behind me, I knew it, and yet . . .

In my mind’s eye I could see the Minx running hell-for-leather down the drive, giggling in mischief the way she often did, with Sally screaming a warning and falling behind and the Minx too giddy to realise what she was being told . . . Someone keeps coming in and leaving it open, she’d said, and I’d paid her no attention . . .

But who? Apart from our weekend neighbours, we were the only ones to be using the gateway at all. Wczs there someone who’d been prowling around the place, and I’d overlooked the evidence because it was the Minx who was telling me and I was so used to the workings of her imagination that I was dismissing the truth along with the usual dose of unreality?

Come to think of it, the garage door had been standing open when we’d gone to get the bike a few days before.

And I still hadn’t found that damned paperback, even though I was pretty sure of where I’d left it.

And there was the Visitors’ Book, which had planted the seed of my unease.

And the reaction of the checkout man in Willi’s Market, that had brought it into flower . . .

Pretty thin fabric, I know.

But by the time I reached the house I was running.

Sally saw me coming up the drive. I must have been a sight. Breathless, my shirt half-out, the bag of groceries crushed up against my side. She was out on a sun lounger in front of the house, and she raised her head and squinted at me. I slowed. Everything seemed normal, and I was a dope. But I wasn’t sorry.

“Where’s the Minx?” I said.

“She’s set herself up with a picnic on the porch,” she said. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” I said, almost sharply, and I walked past her and up the steps to the covered entrance. As my eyes adjusted to the shade, I could see the Minx; in a world of her own as she so often was, with plates and crockery from the kitchen set out on the outdoor dining table and her all-time favourite doll, clothes long gone and the rest of her distinctly frayed around the edges, propped up outside. She’d hijacked the big tub of margarine and a packet of biscuits, and Sally must have a opened a bottle of cola for her to round off the feast. She was just raising it to her lips and tilting it as I came into sight.

Nothing amiss here.

And then, in an instant, I saw that I was wrong.

I don’t know exactly what happens when you’re in a situation like that. You can see the most minor detail with the utmost clarity, and it burns itself deep into your awareness; but it’s almost as if the sheer volume of information suddenly slows the speed of processing, so that you don’t seem to act or react in any positive way at all. You see your own failure, even before it’s had the chance to happen. Disaster’s heading straight for you like a rocket, and your responses are moving like letters in the mail.

If I had any talent with a paintbrush, I could probably reproduce the scene exactly. The well-worn sheen on the checkered vinyl cloth. The sunlight, backlighting the Minx’s hair as she raised the bottle. The mismatched china and the scattering of crumbs. The open margarine tub, its contents churned like an angry sea. The last inch of flat cola.

And the live wasp in the bottle, floating toward the neck as the bottle was tilted.

She screamed and dropped the bottle, and clapped both her hands to her face. The wasp was on the deckboards now, buzzing furiously but too wet or too damaged to rise; she’d squeezed it between her mouth and the rim of the bottle as it had tried to escape, and it had reacted the only way it knew how. Which got no sympathy out of me at all. I stepped on it quickly, and it popped like a grape.

The Minx was still screaming as I hauled her up and onto my knee. Sally was already on her way up the steps. I tried to pull the Minx’s hands away, but she was hysterical. Sally was saying “What is it, what’s happened?” and I remember thinking, completely unfairly but in the lash-out, bite-anything manner of a run-over dog, that she should have been right there and this should never have been allowed to happen. Which makes no sense, of course, but that’s the way I was thinking. I don’t think it showed on the outside, but I was in a panic. I didn’t know what to do. We were in the middle of nowhere in a place where we didn’t speak the language, and there was a crisis here and I didn’t know what to do.

The stinger was still in the Minx’s lip, like a tiny yellow thumbtack. I managed to pick it out carefully with my thumbnail. And what then? I tried to have a go at sucking out the poison, but the Minx beat me away. Sally ran to the kitchen and brought back half an onion to rub the wound, but the Minx batted that away too. She was screaming for a plaster, the little-kids’ answer to every hurt. I handed her over and went for the first-aid kit in the car.

There were Band-aids, there were bandages, there was a folded-up sling for a broken arm. I’d bought the kit as a ready-made box and I don’t think I’d even looked into it since I’d taken a curious glance over the contents and then stowed it away in the car at least three years before. I fumbled it, and the contents went everywhere. I saw some antiseptic wipes and grabbed one up and went back to the covered terrace.

The Minx, still tearful, was quieter. Sally was rocking her and whispering Sshh, sshh, and the Minx was sobbing. I tore open the sachet and crouched down before them both and managed to get a few dabs in with the wipe. Her lip was already beginning to swell.

I was scared.

When the swelling grew steadily worse over the next half-hour, we loaded her into the car and went out looking for a hospital. I had no idea. We were already on the road and moving when I thought that I should have checked through the old brochures and guides for an area map which might have some indication on it. I had a terrific sense of desperation, as if there were a bomb ticking in the back of the car. I hardly knew what I was doing. In the end it was the cashier at a big Shell service area who marked the nearest hospital on a tourist map and then waved me away when I tried to pay for it.

Carrying the Minx into the Emergency Room, I felt like a wrecked sailor reaching the shore. I mean, for all I knew, she could have died—she could have been dying right then, and I’d have been no more useful. As it was they checked her over, gave her a couple of shots, painted the sting site with something, and then sent us away. The Minx stayed quiet in the back with Sally as I drove us all home. It was dusk when we got there, and it was to find that we’d gone off leaving every door and window of the place wide open. Even the gate at the end of the drive was swinging to and fro, and I knew that I’d stopped and jumped out of the car to close it behind us.

I knew that I’d never feel quite the same again, about anything. I’d crossed a line. I’d peeped into the abyss.

Nothing much more happened those last couple of days. I put the child’s photograph back on the shelf where I’d found it, and I made no further enquiries. The Minx looked like a defeated boxer, five rounds and then out for the count, but by the next morning we were even able to make jokes about it. They were morale-boosters, not the real thing, and I suppose they must have sounded pretty hollow to both of us. The camera stayed in its case for the rest of the trip. Nothing was said or agreed, but I think that this was something that none of us would ever want to be reminded of.

So, no more photographs.

We’d probably have gone home early if we could, but the boat ticket couldn’t be transferred. And, besides, there was so little time remaining. The weather held good, but we stuck around the house killing time as if on the rainiest of rainy days.

On the last day we packed almost in silence, and the Minx went for one last froggie-hunt while I loaded up the car. Sally stayed in the house. When I went inside to bring out the last few items—the boots, the overcoats, the radio ... all the stuff that didn’t belong in any particular box or bag—I found her at the big table in the sitting room. The Visitors’ Book was open on the table before her. She looked up, and she seemed almost defensive.

“We’ve got to write something,” she said. “It’s not the house’s fault. Not to put anything at all would be rude.”

I shrugged, and didn’t say anything. We hadn’t been saying much of anything to each other since the accident, at least not directly. I picked up the stuff that I’d come for and went out to the car.

Half an hour later, with everything loaded away and the house locked up for the last time behind us, we rolled down the driveway and out through the open gate.

“Say Goodbye, house,” Sally told the Minx, and the Minx turned and waved through the back window and said, “Bye!”

I stopped the car.

“I just realised, I left my sunglasses,” I said.

“I checked everywhere before we locked up,” Sally said. “Are you sure?”

“I only meant to put them down for a second,” I said. “I know where they are. Let me have the keys. ”

The keys were to be dropped off at the agents’ office in the nearest town as we drove on by to the ferry. Sally got them out of the big envelope and passed them forward to me, and I got out of the car and walked back up the drive. I left the engine running. This wasn’t going to take very long.

Already the house seemed different. No longer ours, it was a place of strangers again. I felt out-of-place, almost observed, as I walked up the steps with the door key in my hand. I could hear the car’s engine running at the end of the driveway, over on the far side of the bushes.

I entered the newly regained silence of the place. There was no sign of my sunglasses but then, I’d known there wouldn’t be; they were in their case, safe inside my jacket.

I didn’t have much time. I crossed the room to the chest of drawers and crouched, pulling open the one which I knew held the Visitors’ Book. It was uppermost on all the brochures, and I took it out and laid it on top of the chest before feeling around at the back of the drawer. Then I straightened, and opened the book to the latest entry.

I didn’t want to read it. In fact I’d turned the book around so that all of the entries were upside-down to me, on purpose. I didn’t know whether Sally had mentioned anything about how the visit had ended, and I didn’t want to. I spread the pages flat and I took a grip on the little cutter and I ran it, firmly and neatly, down the final page as close to the spine as I could get.

A firm tug, and it came out cleanly. I screwed it up and stuffed it into my pocket, for quiet disposal at a stopover point somewhere on the journey ahead.

And then I closed the book, returned it to the drawer, locked up the house, and walked away.

Forever.