The Mammoth Book of Terror (50 page)

I knew about the English Civil War, Cavaliers (wrong but romantic) versus Roundheads (right but repulsive), but I didn’t think that was what he was talking about. I shook my head.

“It means our willies aren’t circumcised,” he explained. “Are you a cavalier or a roundhead?”

I knew what they meant now. I muttered, “I’m a roundhead.”

“Show us. Go on. Get it out.”

“No. It’s none of your business.”

For a moment, I thought things were going to get nasty, but then Jamie laughed, and put his penis away, and the others did the same. They told dirtyjokes to each other then, jokes I really
didn’t understand at all, for all that I was a bright child, but I heard them and remembered them, and several weeks later was almost expelled from school for telling one of them to a boy who
went home and told it to his parents.

The joke had the word
fuck
in. That was the first time I ever heard the word, in a dirty joke in a fairy grotto.

The principal called my parents into the school, after I got in trouble, and said that I’d said something so bad they could not repeat it, not even to tell my parents what I’d
done.

My mother asked me, when they got home that night.

“Fuck,” I said.

“You must never, ever say that word,” said my mother. She said this very firmly, and quietly, and for my own good. “That is the worst word anyone can say.” I promised her
that I wouldn’t.

But after, amazed at the power a single word could have, I would whisper it to myself, when I was alone.

In the grotto, that autumn afternoon after school, the three big boys told jokes and they laughed and they laughed, and I laughed too, although I did not understand any of what they were
laughing about.

We moved on from the grotto. Out into the formal gardens, and over a small bridge that crossed a pond; we crossed it nervously, because it was out in the open, but we could see huge goldfish in
the blackness of the pond below, which made it worthwhile. Then Jamie led Douglas and Simon and me down a gravel path into some woodland.

Unlike the gardens, the woods were abandoned and unkempt. They felt like there was no one around. The path was grown-over. It led between trees, and then, after a while, into a clearing.

In the clearing was a little house.

It was a play-house, built perhaps forty years earlier for a child, or for children. The windows were Tudor-style, leaded and criss-crossed into diamonds. The roof was mock-Tudor. A stone path
led straight from where we were to the front door.

Together, we walked up the path to the door.

Hanging from the door was a metal knocker. It was painted crimson, and had been cast in the shape of some kind of imp, some kind of grinning pixie or demon, cross-legged, hanging by its hands
from a hinge. Let me see . . . how can I describe this best: it wasn’t a
good
thing. The expression on its face, for starters. I found myself wondering what kind of a person would hang
something like that on a playroom door.

It frightened me, there in that clearing, with the dusk gathering under the trees. I walked away from the house, back to a safe distance, and the others followed me.

“I think I have to go home now,” I said.

It was the wrong thing to say. The three of them turned and laughed and jeered at me, called me pathetic, called me a baby. They weren’t scared of the house, they said.

“I dare you!” said Jamie. “I dare you to knock on the door.”

I shook my head.

“If you don’t knock on the door,” said Douglas, “you’re too much of a baby ever to play with us again.”

I had no desire ever to play with them again. They seemed like occupants of a land I was not yet ready to enter. But still, I did not want them to think me a baby.

“Go on.
We’re
not scared,” said Simon.

I try to remember the tone of voice he used. Was he frightened, too, and covering it with bravado? Or was he amused? It’s been so long. I wish I knew.

I walked slowly back up the flagstone path to the house. I reached up, grabbed the grinning imp in my right hand and banged it hard against the door.

Or rather, I tried to bang it hard, just to show the other three that I was not afraid at all. That I was not afraid of anything. But something happened, something I had not expected, and the
knocker hit the door with a muffled sort of a thump.

“Now you have to go inside!” shouted Jamie. He was excited. I could hear it. I found myself wondering if they had known about this place already, before we came. If I was the first
person they had brought there.

But I did not move.

“
You
go in,” I said. “I knocked on the door. I did it like you said. Now
you
have to go inside. I dare you. I dare
all
of you.”

I wasn’t going in. I was perfectly certain of that. Not then. Not ever. I’d felt something move, I’d felt the knocker
twist
under my hand as I’d banged that
grinning imp down on the door. I was not so old that I would deny my own senses.

They said nothing. They did not move.

Then, slowly, the door fell open. Perhaps they thought that I, standing by the door, had pushed it open. Perhaps they thought that I’d jarred it when I knocked. But I hadn’t. I was
certain of it. It opened because it was ready.

I should have run, then. My heart was pounding in my chest. But the devil was in me, and instead of running I looked at the three big boys at the bottom of the path, and I simply said, “Or
are you scared?”

They walked up the path towards the little house.

“It’s getting dark,” said Douglas.

Then the three boys walked past me, and one by one, reluctantly perhaps, they entered the playhouse. A white face turned to look at me as they went into that room, to ask why I wasn’t
following them in, I’ll bet. But as Simon, who was the last of them, walked in, the door banged shut behind them, and I swear to God I did not touch it.

The imp grinned down at me from the wooden door, a vivid splash of crimson in the grey gloaming.

I walked around to the side of the playhouse and peered in through all the windows, one by one, into the dark and empty room. Nothing moved in there. I wondered if the other three were inside
hiding from me, pressed against the wall, trying their damnedest to stifle their giggles. I wondered if it was a big-boy game.

I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell.

I stood there in the courtyard of the playhouse, while the sky got darker, just waiting. The moon rose after a while, a big autumn moon the colour of honey.

And then, after a while, the door opened, and nothing came out.

Now I was alone in the glade, as alone as if there had never been anyone else there at all. An owl hooted, and I realized that I was free to go. I turned and walked away, following a different
path out of the glade, always keeping my distance from the main house. I climbed a fence in the moonlight, ripping the seat of my school shorts, and I walked – not ran, I didn’t need to
run – across a field of barley stubble, and over a stile, and into a flinty lane thatwould take me, if I followed itfar enough, all the way to my house.

And soon enough, I was home.

My parents had not been worried, although they were irritated by the orange rust-dust on my clothes, by the rip in my shorts. “Where were you, anyway?” my mother asked.

“I went for a walk,” I said. “I lost track of time.”

And that was where we left it.

We said our goodnights to Nora and she made each of us kiss her on her cheek, and she closed the door of the Diogenes club behind us. We walked down the narrow steps past the record shop, down
into the alley and back into civilisation.

The underground had stopped running hours ago, but there were always night buses, and cabs still out there for those who could afford them. (I couldn’t. Not in those days.)

The Diogenes Club itself closed several years later, finished off by Nora’s cancer, and, I suppose, by the easy availability of late-night alcohol once the English licensing laws were
changed. But I rarely went back after that night.

“Was there ever,” asked Paul-the-actor, as we hit the street, “any news of those three boys? Did you see them again? Or were they reported as missing?”

“Neither,” said the storyteller. “I mean, I never saw them again. And there was no local manhunt for three missing boys. Or if there was, I never heard about it.”

“Is the playhouse still there?” asked Martyn.

“I don’t know,” admitted the storyteller.

“Well,” said Martyn, as we reached Tottenham Court Road, and headed for the night bus stop, “I for one do not believe a word of it.”

There were four of us, not three, out on the street long after closing time. I should have mentioned that before. There was still one of us who had not spoken, the elderly man with the leather
elbow-patches, who had left the club when the three of us had left. And now he spoke for the first time.

“I believe it,” he said, mildly. His voice was frail, almost apologetic. “I cannot explain it, but I believe it. Jamie died, you know, not long after father did. It was Douglas
who wouldn’t go back, who sold the old place. He wanted them to tear it all down. But they kept the house itself, the Swallows. They weren’t going to knock
that
down. I imagine
that everything else must be gone by now.”

It was a cold night, and the rain still spat occasional drizzle. I shivered, but only because I was cold.

“Those cages you mentioned,” he said. “By the driveway. I haven’t thought of them in fifty years. When we were bad he’d lock us up in them. We must have been bad a
great deal, eh? Very naughty, naughty boys.”

He was looking up and down the Tottenham Court Road, as if he were looking for something. Then he said, “Douglas killed himself, of course. Ten years ago. When I was still in the bin. So
my memory’s not as good. Not as good as it was. But that was Jamie all right, to the life. He’d never let us forget that he was the oldest. And you know, we weren’t ever allowed
in the playhouse. Father didn’t build it for us.” His voice quavered, and for a moment I could imagine this pale old man as a boy again. “Father had his own games.”

And then he waved his arm and called “Taxi!” and a taxi pulled over to the kerb. “Brown’s Hotel,” said the man, and he got in. He did not say goodnight to any of
us. He pulled shut the door of the cab.

And in the closing of the cab door I could hear too many other doors closing; doors in the past, which are gone now, and cannot be reopened.

PAT CADIGAN IS A
two-time winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the author of fifteen books. Her fiction is included in many anthologies, including
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horrorand The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror
series,
TheMammoth
Booh of Vampire Stories by Women, Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Booh
of
Horror, The New English Library Book of Internet Stories, The Ex
Files: New Stories About Old Flames, Disco 2000, Dying For It: Erotic
Tales of Unearthly Love
and
A Whisper of
Blood
, and her short stories have been collected in
Patterns.

Born in Schenectady, New York, and formerly a resident of Kansas, she now lives and works in North London.

“‘It Was the Heat’ was the first thing I wrote as a full-time professional writer,” Cadigan explains. “It was also my love letter to the city of New Orleans, which
is one of the most gorgeous and inspiringly decadent (or decadendy inspiring) places I’ve ever visited.

“While almost all the locations are real, nothing like the events in the story ever happened to me in New Orleans; not even something as stultifyingly commonplace as a trashy fling in a
cheap hotel room. However, on a wander through the French Quarter, it’s easy to imagine all kinds of things. And a little jambalaya helps to stir things up even more. Personally, I recommend
it.”

Sure.

Right feeling, wrong name. Try again. And the thing is, they do. They try and try and try, and if they’re very, very unlucky, they find one of them.