The Year's Best Horror Stories 21

EYES LIKE A GHOST’S by Simon Clark

I found the cassette in the boxful of books I’d bought at the cancer shop. I never even realized it was in there until I’d brought the box home, balanced on the PVC hood of my daughter’s pushchair. Elizabeth would have played merry hell about that. The hood was already splitting in three places. Well, at the time, Elizabeth would be hammering at the till keys in the supermarket, so what the eye doesn’t see…

“Dad! A computer game!”

My seven-year-old son, who had been rooting in the box, rattled the cassette box excitedly above his head.

“I shouldn’t think so, Lee,” I said, pulling my gloves off. “Someone’ll have left it there by mistake.”

“Oh… music.” He pushed “music” out from his lips with disgust.

“Probably.”

“Music, crap music.” He threw the tape back in the box and returned to the television. Bart Simpson was spraying “EAT MY SHORTS” on the school wall.

“Someone phoned up,” called Lee, swinging his legs over the arm of the chair. “They said, ‘Can I speak to Martin Price?’ ”

“Well, that’s my name,” I said, “What did you tell them?”

“I put the phone down.”

“Didn’t you ask if you could take a message?”

Lee didn’t answer. The television had greater pulling power than me.

I toyed with the idea of delivering a lecture on manners but apart from the likelihood of it falling on deaf ears, the tape Lee had pulled from the box caught my attention. For some reason I felt pleased. The tape hidden among the books seemed a minor bonus. I intended a closer look but an annoyed yell from the kitchen signaled my daughter wanted release from her pushchair. And a biscuit… And a drink… And toys… And…

The tape would have to wait.

YOU CAN’T SEE ME, BUT I SEE YOU

I am Joseph Lawton. This happens:

I ride with you on bicycles I have painted golden, to where the trees paint the watery face of the river that shines beneath the sun. There we drink wine, eat sandwiches and you describe your paintings: tight, tight canvases all covered with ice-cream smiles, cats and gnomes and fishes and laughter.

Later, I play my guitar as you lie across the blanket and look up at the sky.

The sky is as blue as my guitar and full of music.

“The man on the telly said it was going to snow.” Lee gleefully bounced up and down on the sofa while looking out the window. “Snow, snow faster. Ally-ally aster.”

“Lee, stop bouncing. How many times have I got to tell you?”

He ignored me. “Can we get the sledge out?”

“If it snows. Have you seen my slippers?”

“Saw Jug chewing them.”

“Oh, bugger. Did you stop her?”

“No.”

“Thanks a lot, Lee.” Barefooted I crossed the room to where I’d left the box on the sideboard. The wood’s scratched to high heaven as it is… Elizabeth would scold. Not that she really minded. I knew she loved me and the kids more than anything. A long time ago she’d stopped worrying about pristine furniture and spotless carpets. I don’t believe there’s such a thing as a houseproud parent.

On top of the box lay the cassette. It might as well have been calling my name. I picked it up. Someone had turned the inlay card inside out as if ready to make a contents list but for some reason had never got round to it. Penciled very firmly in the corner of the card were the letters JL.

I glanced across at the stereo. A few minutes remained before Elizabeth returned home. I tapped the cassette thoughtfully against my chin.

I’d taken three steps toward the stereo when I stopped suddenly. My bare toes sank into wet pile.

“Lee.” I sighed. “Did you spill your pop this morning?”

“No,” he replied innocently, then continued his snow watch.

Kids make you philosophical. I dropped the cassette back in the box and went to hunt for a cloth under the kitchen sink.

MILES OF SMILES

I am Joseph Lawton. This happens:

“This is for you,” I say. I give her the ring with a diamond. She puts it on the third finger of her left hand. On the middle finger of her other hand is another ring set with an emerald as big as a man’s eye. She looks down at her new ring for a while; her hair the color of Turner sunsets falls across her face. Then she sits on the end of the bed and cries. I put my arm around her shoulder. These moments, I think, are precious.

Later she stands and tells me she will make a stir-fry.

I lean back across the bed, play the guitar and sing. It sounds like the golden bells that hang in the smiling trees of paradise.

I know I love her, because they told me so.

“See you tonight, Martin. Chops all right?”

“Perfect, love.” I kissed Elizabeth, then Lee, then Grace, sitting so warmly wrapped up in her pushchair that only her eyes peeped over the blanket.

They waved me good-bye in a line as I drove away from the house. I watched the figures grow small in my mirror, still waving like a family from the Waltons.

My hand groped across the back seat among the toys and my plastic sandwich box, then closed over the small, sharp cornered box of the cassette. I snapped the tape into the car’s stereo.

For a second nothing much happened, just the hiss of the old tape. Then emerging from the hiss, almost growing from it rather than a recording came a voice.

“Yes.” A male voice; in his twenties perhaps. No accent. You could imagine the man nodding as he spoke, as if acknowledging he was ready.

More tape hiss then in a flat voice. “This is it.”

I was ready to eject the tape in favor of the radio. My surprise find was turning out to be a nonevent. Then the music started.

A guitar, slightly out of tune, as if the strings lacked the proper tension. I’d played electric guitar in the youth club band as a teenager, but I wasn’t even sure if I was listening to an electric or an acoustic.

The strumming chords were fumbling, hesitant. A pause. Then the guitar started again. This time vigorous, with a newfound sense of assurance.

When the man began to sing I nearly switched off. The voice sounded flat and very nearly tuneless.

A wannabe pop star, I decided, with all the talent of a no-hoper in a tailspin, had simply been filling a Sunday afternoon. But my hand paused on the switch. The dirge had almost been laughable, yet as I listened to the lyric a quirky kind of charisma began to shine through.

The first song sounded faintly psychedelic with repeated reference to “the black bear that sleeps by my head,” and “I may be tall but I feel so small.”

I became so engrossed in the songs, their stark beauty so unearthly, that I drove on a kind of autopilot, not noticing the queues of traffic over the bridge into town.

The strange lyrics and hypnotic guitar filled the car. I upped the volume. There was a trembling tenderness and sincerity in the voice; the words wound their way around my brain like spiderwebs. They stuck. The songs made me think of a child who had seen or experienced something profound; something they did not understand, yet which they desperately, desperately tried to describe using the only imagery they had available to them. The effect was of an attempt at communicating a transforming experience but failing. Yet even in failure some essence of the message filtered through—and its power winded me.

SMILE? THIS MIGHT HAPPEN TO YOU

My name is Joseph Lawton. This happens:

“There’s one! And there’s another!” cries Sophie excitedly.

“How many’s that?” I ask. “Have you kept count?”

“Have you, silly?” she laughs. We are both giggling. The cat watches us; it jumps from the sofa to the drawers then back again. She knows.

“What do you think they are?” She holds my bare arm under the table lamp. “Can you feel them? Do they itch?”

At first I’m not sure. “No… Not itch. No, but I felt a tingling.”

“Hold still, silly.” She looks at my arm so closely her hair washes over my skin like cool silk. “They are on both arms. Look. There must be… four, five… Six. That’s just on this forearm… Here. Oh! I think they really are, you know.”

“What?”

“Ancient writing. Yes! Sumerian cuneiform.” She looks up at me, her eyes shining. She is beautiful.

Then I gaze at my arms. They are covered with white marks under the skin, like tattoos without color. It started yesterday as I lay on the bed playing my guitar. This morning my arms are covered with ancient cuneiform symbols—stars, squares, spiky pennants, snowflakes, crooked crosses, tactile swastikas: ghosts’ tattoos. Something marvelous is happening to me.

“I recognize this one,” says Sophie. “This is Ishtar. A Sumerian goddess.”

“Ishtar,” I whisper. She looks quickly up at me with her eyes shining like diamonds. “She is sending you a message. We have to copy these down and take them to someone who can read them.”

On the little table in the corner of the room the television shows a film in black and white. A ghost with sparking eyes and graveyard teeth plays a violin as the gates to a thundering hole in the earth open. There is movement behind the gate. The ghost plays faster. I recognize the music. Because it is mine.

“I’m going out on site,” I told Brian. “I’ll be about an hour.”

Brian, his mouth crammed with a sausage sandwich, could only manage a nod.

I didn’t switch on the stereo until I parked my car at a rural paddock surrounded by trees without leaves. In eighteen months it would be buried beneath executive homes. Now it looked bleak.

I listened to the tape from end to end. It had its hooks deep inside of me.

More songs, some spangled with bizarre surrealist imagery. Some very plain. These plain ones were perhaps the most effective. They were sparse descriptions of what the singer might have been seeing from his window at that very moment. But all the songs carried this potent charge that was electrifying. And always the plod, plod, plod of the guitar. Often the songs did not end in the conventional way. They simply fell apart as if some joker had stolen the last sheet of music; then the singer faltered to a halt. Sometimes you thought the songs would continue as a change of key seemed to herald a new verse. Then the song would abruptly end. As I listened, gazing at the bare winter fields, I thought of God at the egg-crack of creation, rehearsing making Man and Woman only to break off in failure to toss away a part-formed torso, a fragment of head.

The collection of songs ended in a scrabble of fretwork sounds followed by the ringing thump of the microphone falling on the floor. The singer spoke for the last time; the voice weary, defeated: “That’s it. There is no more.”

I listened to the tape one more time before driving back to work.

When I walked through the door I thought I’d walked into the wrong office. I saw my name plate, MARTIN PRICE, on my desk, I knew the names of the dozen people sitting at their desks, but just for an instant they looked like strangers.

Brian, peeling the wrapper from a Mars Bar, looked out of the window.

“It’s starting to snow,” he said.

CONCRETE HANDS CLAP THE FUNERAL CLOWNS

My name is Joseph Lawton. This happens:

I know there are people who are suffering and who are unhappy now, while I, happy, warm and at peace, sit and play my guitar. Sophie stands at the kitchen table, buttering bread, slicing red cheese. She looks up and smiles at me. Sad people thoughts push roughly into my brain.

I try to forget. I cannot.

All over this world people are suffering pain. Someone must be to blame. My thoughts spill into the song. Maybe with the stars on my arms I can help.

“A sad song,” says Sophie, licking butter from her ring with the green stone as big as a man’s eye. “Oh, look. Don’t cry. Don’t be sad.” She walks to me, her bare legs look pale beneath her tassled skirt. Her hands that touch my face are cool and buttery.

The sorrowing voices of all the people that suffer fill my head. I imagine them crying out to me. Only I can save them. Only I can save them. They cry and they cry.

And that’s when I know Sophie must die.

I think you’ll find this interesting. I found the tape in a box of books in a charity shop. God knows who the singer is, but there’s a weird kind of charisma there, almost hypnotic. When you hear it, you’ll know. I thought you might consider it for one of your special limited edition albums. Anyway, have a listen, Bob, and let me know what you think. In the meantime I’m going to try and find the guy. I’ve got a couple of leads. Christ! Now I know what it feels like to be a detective!

I posted the copy of the tape to Bob Finch, an old school mate. He now owned three record shops and did some record producing. Very small time but his records were highly regarded.

Then I drove to the area of town which can adequately be described as “bedsit land.” Tree-lined Victorian avenues; redbrick houses subdivided into flats and bedsits. From some windows red bulbs glowed.

I parked the car and pulled an envelope from my jacket pocket. One of those brown municipal ones that litter drawers in every household. This one had fallen from a children’s illustrated book of fables I found in the box of books from the cancer shop. Penciled on one side: Ishtar—Sumerian goddess—arrives at the gates of the underworld—threatens to break down the gates and set the dead upon the living. On the reverse, a computer-printed label gave an address in this street. Flat 7b, Park View. The name, Joseph Lawton. I felt a rush of triumph. Coincidence be buggered! That matched the initials JL on the cassette inlay card. I had found him!

I OWN DEAD COW HANDS. I OWN A VEGETABLE SOUL

My name is Joseph Lawton. This happens:

I wake Sophie who sleeps by my side. I tell her about my dreams. I tell her I must save thousands of sad lives.

“How?”

I tell her she has to die.

She looks at me as the sunshine pushes its way into our bedroom. Then she sits up, holds my armful of stigmata to her little bare breasts, and looks hard into my eyes and says, “All right.”

I feel happy, I feel sad, I feel GHOST. No I don’t know why I said that.

I feel transforming.

I make breakfast—a bowl each with one Weetabix and a handful of bran. Milk. There’s milk in the bowl for the cat. I have cat-shaped thoughts in my head. Black cat thoughts.

We go shopping.

In Poundstretcher I pick up a knife. It flashes like a solid sliver of light. Pure, pure light. Hygienic-looking.

“Is that the one?” she asked.

“Yes.” I put the knife in the basket. The time is 9:30.

She admires a picture of a black cat in a yellow frame. I take it from her and put it in the basket. “I’ll put it on the wall for you,” I say, then I pick up the knife and study the way it flashes Morse under the fluorescent lights. What messages, I wonder. The blade is long and clean. I know I will need it soon.

We go to the tills where she puts three packets of cherry sweets into the basket. Smiling, Sophie talks to the girl at the till. We pay £3.40. The time is 9:50.

Before I left the car I sat listening to the tape, looking up at the huge brick facade of the house; a molded brick plaque bore the legend PARK VIEW 1875. Which one of those lighted windows held Joseph Lawton? What did he look like? I imagined a young man with Christ-like hair; aesthetic build; a pair of burning eyes. Reclusive. Like one of those Victorian poets who starved in garrets. I pictured him walking, shoulders hunched, down this tree-lined avenue, so completely absorbed by his blistering visions that on one level he saw nothing; yet on a deeper level he saw everything.

This seemed so important to me now. Last week I found my old guitar in the loft, restrung it and was busy learning the songs from the tape by ear. They were an inspiration to me.

ORANGES, ORANGES, ORANGES IN YOUR HAIR

I am Joseph Lawton. This happens:

I sing to Sophie who sits on the wooden chair at the kitchen table. She looks at the picture on the wall. The cat within its yellow frame.

Her hair looks orange in the afternoon light. She smiles and fiddles with her ring with the green stone as big as the eye of a ghost.

I go drench the knife in boiling water and leave it on the drainer to dry. I know I will need the knife soon.

It is 3:30 p.m.

I begin my preparations. I take the blank cassette tape from the box under the bed. I blow the dust from the tape deck. The guitar has fresh strings. Microphones are checked and plugged into the deck.

The sheets of paper on which my songs are written are spread carefully on the table. There is a special order to this. Like a ceremony.

Sophie glances at my arms covered with the ghost white tattoos; Sumerian symbols of life, death, hope, love, death, rebirth, bitterness, black cats, tactile feelings, love-dove-shove… 4:15. Everything is ready.

Evening. Dark. Cold. Snow on the ground.

I stood in the avenue with its huge Victorian town houses and trees long since stripped of their leaves.

Loud voices argued nearby. That’s the kind of area it was.

“He is!”

“He’s not.”

“He’s going to do it, I tell you. He is actually going to do it.”

“He’s not.”

“Look at him. He’s decided. He’s crossing the street.”

Ignoring the voices I approached Park View. Most of the window frames looked rotten. The front door had been roughly painted purple. But there were enough scratches on it to show every color it had been painted since 1875. A dozen door bells set in an illuminated plastic panel caught my eye. A few had cards bearing handwritten names. Joseph Lawton was not among them.

I FEEL UNREAL I FEEL ALONE.

I am Joseph Lawton. This happens:

On the rug, the black cat sits licking her paw. It is 5:30.

“Sophie, are you frightened?”

“No,” she replies with a little shake of her head and watches me with her clear eyes.

“There is no hatred in this, “I explain. “I have read the messages. I must save lives. When I kill you I will be doing it for love.”

She agrees.

“I hear them shouting from the street. Sophie, they have voices like ghosts—all in pain and crunching out. I have to save them.”

She sits on the settee, wearing a purple skirt and a white T-shirt. It bears the picture of a black cat playing with a ball of wool.

I smile, hoping it will stop her worrying. Lightly, I run the knife, like a single-toothed comb, through her hair. No, don’t be frightened, sweet Sophie, smile and smile and smile.

Once those voices that crunch and crack from the pavement are gone I will be happy again. We can ride the golden cycles to the river once more.

It all goes quickly. The knifing.

She took it very well. That pleases me. She doesn’t cry out or wriggle.

She just sits there as I press the knife into her neck. Three times there. Four times through the cat picture on her T-shirt.

I pull the knife out of her, wash it, and put it in the drawer.

When I return she still sits on the sofa, the hair about her white face looks very red.

“Will it take long?” she asked. “My neck is sore.”

“Not long, sweet Sophie.” I hold her hand and stroke her hair. “After you’ve left this place, will you still love me?”

She makes a little smile; then her eyes go cloudy.

At 6:15 pm she is dead. I prop her up with cushions so she can still see me. Then I switch on the tape deck. The voices in the street stop screaming at me; my arms are clean; and yet I feel as if all the magic that I once knew has gone. My world is cold and lonely now.

Now the guitar is in my hands. I sit on the chair by the table.

“Yeah.” I nod to Sophie. “This is it.” Softly, I begin to play my guitar.

I pushed open the door of Park View and stepped inside. I stopped suddenly. It was as if I’d been there before. Incongruously the place smelled pleasantly of cooking smells, especially garlic.

With no trace of hesitation I half-ran up the stairs to the second floor. No carpets made the sound of my feet echo up and down the stairwell.

When I reached a door with 7b written large in black felt tip, I stopped. For some reason I was holding my breath. Then it came. I don’t know why, but for some reason the place I was in suddenly scared me. The squares of carpets outside doors looked too thick, the doors too big for their doorways; nail heads swelled from the skirting boards in a way that was somehow disgusting, gray metallic stumps forcing outward. I closed my eyes to stop the images lodging like parasites inside my head.

The sickening feeling went as quickly as it came. I felt calm. Somewhere in the distance came the sound of a girl singing. A ballad, slow, haunting. Outside, trees gently waved in the breeze. The sense of peace was beautiful.

I knocked on the door. “Mr Lawton. I happened to come across a tape of your songs in a…”

Maybe that was better. Mentally rehearsing the greeting I knocked again.

“Hello?”

The door remained closed. I realized the voice came from behind me. I turned to see a girl. In her twenties, ginger hair; she wore a vaguely hippy-style dress and plain white blouse. There was a black cat in her hands which she stroked nervously.

“Hello,” I smiled. “I’m looking for the tenant.”

She wrinkled her freckled nose. “Sorry?”

I looked back at the door. “Does a man live there? A musician?”

“No… no. That one’s empty. It’s been empty for months.”

Gone. I was on the verge of swearing furiously, but the fury did not come. I felt a lightness oozing through my body; a pleasant sensation. And life looked different now. I looked, no, I felt different. Enlightened. I would become a different person. Something was happening to me. Something special.

“Is there anything else you want?”

Her voice pulled me back. I must have been staring.

“Yes there is,” I said firmly. “I need a place to stay. The empty flat will be fine.”

She stroked the cat in a shy but quietly pleased way. She liked me. “The landlord comes to collect the rent about now. You could ask him about the flat.” She looked up with the tiniest of shy smiles. “If you want… if you’re not in a hurry… you could wait for him in my flat. I’ve got some tea.” She rubbed the cat’s head. The green stone in her ring caught the light with an emerald flash.

As I followed her through the door she paused and looked back up at me. “What’s your name, mister?”

I smiled, feeling a liquid heat run through my body. “My name?” I reached out and ran my fingers through the cat’s coal-black fur. “My name’s Joseph Lawton.”

I followed her inside and shut the door.