The Mammoth Book of Terror (58 page)

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.

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.

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN
born in Ireland and now lives in Atlanta, Georgia. She has published five novels:
Silk, Threshold, The Five of Cups, Low
Red Moon
and, most recently,
Murder of Angels
, and her short fiction has been collected in
Tales of Pain and Wonder, From Weird and Distant Shores, Wrong Things
(with Poppy Z.
Brite) and
To Charles Fort, With Love.
She is currently writing her sixth novel,
Daughter of Hounds.

Kiernan has a great affection for the sea, although her stories might lead you to believe otherwise.

As the author explains: “This short story is the third in a trilogy that began with ‘A Redress for Andromeda’ and also includes ‘Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea’.
All these stories centre on the Dandridge House and the fate of Meredith Dandridge, but I think ‘Andromeda Among the Stones’ is by far the most effective and fully realised of them all.
This is me playing with the short story as epic, something I’ve been reluctant to do for much of my writing career.

“The story was written in October 2002 and was composed entirely to
Empires
by VNV Nation (Metropolis Records, 2000).”

“I
S SHE REALLY AND
truly dead, Father?” the girl asked, and Machen Dandridge, already an old man at fifty-one, looked up at the low
buttermilk sky again and closed the black book clutched in his hands. He’d carved the tall headstone himself, the marker for his wife’s grave there by the relentless Pacific, black
shale obelisk with its hasty death’s head, and his daughter stepped gingerly around the raw earth and pressed her fingers against the monument.

“Why did you not give her to the sea?” she asked. “She always wanted to go down to the sea at the end. She often told me so.”

“I’ve given her back to the earth instead,” Machen told her and rubbed at his eyes. The cold sunlight through thin clouds enough to make his head ache, his daughter’s
voice like thunder, and he shut his aching eyes for a moment. Just a little comfort in the almost blackness trapped behind his lids, parchment skin too insubstantial to bring the balm of genuine
darkness, void to match the shades of his soul, and Machen whispered one of the prayers from the heavy black book and then looked at the grave again.

“Well, that’s what she always said,” the girl said again, running her fingertips across the rough-hewn stone.

“Things changed at the end, child. The sea wouldn’t have taken her. I had to give her back to the earth.”

“She said it was a sacrilege, planting people in the ground like wheat, like kernels of corn.”

“She did?” and he glanced anxiously over his left shoulder, looking back across the waves the wind was making in the high and yellow-brown grass, the narrow trail leading back down
to the tall and brooding house that he’d built for his wife twenty-four years ago, back towards the cliffs and the place where the sea and sky blurred seamlessly together.

“Yes, she did. She said only barbarians and heathens stick their dead in the ground like turnips.”

“I had no choice,” Machen replied, wondering if that was the truth, exactly, or only something he’d like to believe. “The sea wouldn’t take her, and I
couldn’t bring myself to burn her.”

“Only heathens burn their dead,” his daughter said disapprovingly and leaned close to the obelisk, setting her ear against the charcoal shale.

“Do you hear anything?”

“No, Father. Of course not. She’s dead. You just said so.”

“Yes,” Machen whispered. “She is.” And the wind whipping across the hillside made a hungry, waiting sound that told him it was time for them to head back to the
house.

This is where I stand, at the bottom gate, and I hold the key to the abyss . . .

“But it’s better that way,” the girl said, her ear still pressed tight against the obelisk. “She couldn’t stand the pain any longer. It was cutting her up
inside.”

“She told you that?”

“She didn’t have to tell me that. I saw it in her eyes.”

The ebony key to the first day and the last, the key to the moment when the stars wink out, one by one, and the sea heaves its rotting belly at the empty, sagging sky . . .

“You’re only a child,” he said. “You shouldn’t have had to see such things. Not yet.”

“It can’t very well be helped now,” she answered and stepped away from her mother’s grave, one hand cupping her ear like maybe it had begun to hurt. “You know that,
old man.”

“I do,” and he almost said her name then, Meredith, his mother’s name, but the wind was too close, the listening wind and the salt-and-semen stink of the breakers crashing
against the cliffs. “But I can wish it were otherwise.”

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

And Machen watched silently as Meredith Dandridge knelt in the grass and placed her handful of wilting wildflowers on the freshly-turned soil; if it were spring instead of autumn, he thought,
there would be dandelions and poppies. If it were spring instead of autumn, the woman wrapped in a quilt and nailed up inside a pine-board casket would still be breathing. If it were spring, they
would not be alone now, him and his daughter at the edge of the world. The wind teased the girl’s long yellow hair, and the sun glittered dimly in her warm brown eyes.