Festival of Fear (25 page)

The woman came slowly toward him, and Mark took one step back, and then another, shifting the armchair so that it stood between them. But she stopped. Her skin was already shining, as if it were melting, and she closed her eyes. Mark waited, holding his breath. Katie was convulsing, one foot jerking against the leg of the coffee table, so that the empty beer cans rattled together.

The woman opened her eyes, and gave Mark one last unreadable look. Then she turned back toward the mirror. She took three paces, and it swallowed her, like an oil-streaked pool of water.

Mark waited, and waited, not moving. Outside the window, the rain began to clear, and he heard the whine of a milk float going past.

After a while, he sat down. He thought of calling the police, but what could he tell them? Then he thought of tying the bodies to the mirror, and dropping them into a rhyne, where they would never be found. But the police would come anyway, wouldn't they, asking questions?

The day slowly went by. Just after two o'clock the clouds cleared for a moment, and the naked apple tree in the back garden sparkled with sunlight. At half past three, a loud clatter in the hallway made him jump, but it was only an old woman with a shopping trolley pushing a copy of the
Wincanton Advertiser
through the letterbox.

And so the darkness gradually gathered, and Mark sat in his armchair in front of the mirror, waiting.

‘I am half-sick of shadows, said

The Lady of Shalott.'

Neighbors from Hell

Y
ou hear about these people, how they've experienced something so terrible that they totally blank it out, and don't remember that it ever happened at all. Like, they see their sister crushed in an auto accident, and when you ask them about it a couple of years later they stare at you and say, ‘What sister?'

I never personally believed that people could do that. I was convinced that if something really truly terrible happened to me, I'd be sweating about it every waking moment for the rest of my natural life.

But . . .

It was pretty horrible the way my grandmother died. I was working in The Blue Turtle Bar in Fort Lauderdale last summer when the phone rang and it was Mr Szponder, the super in my mother's apartment building. He said in his rusty old voice that she'd tumbled into a bath of scalding water and that she was now in intensive care at St Philomena's.

‘Oh, God. How bad is it?'

‘Bad. Thirty percent third-degree burns, that's what they told me. They don't expect her to make it. Not at her age.'

‘I'll catch the next flight, OK?'

I asked Eugene for the rest of the week off. Eugene had greasy black curls right down to the collar of his red-and-yellow Hawaiian shirt and a face like somebody had been using a pumpkin for a dartboard. He hefted his big hairy arm around my shoulders and said, ‘Jimmy . . . you take as long as you like.'

‘Thanks, Eugene.'

‘In fact, why don't you take forever?'

‘What do you mean? You're
canning
me? This is my grandmother I'm talking about here. This is the woman who raised me.'

‘This is also the middle of the season and if it's a choice between profit and compassion . . . well, let's just say that there isn't a Cadillac dealership in town which takes compassion in exchange for late-model Sevilles.'

I could see by the look in his pebbly little eyes that he wasn't going to give way and it wasn't even worth saying, ‘Screw you, Eugene.' It just wasn't.

I went back to the tattily furnished house I was sharing on Broward Street with three inarticulate musicians from Boise, Idaho, and a wide-eyed brunette called Wendiii who thought that the capital of Florida was ‘F.'

‘Hey, you leaving us, man?' asked the lead guitarist, peering at me through curtains of straggly, sun-bleached hair.

‘My grandma's had an accident. They think she's probably going to die.'

‘Bummer.'

‘Yeah. She practically raised me single-handed after my mom died.'

‘You coming back?'

I looked around at the bare-boarded living room with its broken blinds and its rucked-up rug and every available surface crowded with empty Coors cans. Somehow it seemed as if all the romance had gone out of the Fort Lauderdale lifestyle, as if the sun had gone behind a cloud and a chilly breeze had suddenly started to blow.

‘Maybe,' I said.

Wendiii came out of the john, buttoning up her tiny denim shorts. ‘You take care, you hear?' she told me, and gave me long, wet, open-mouthed kiss. ‘It's such a pity that you and me never got it on.'

Now she tells me
, I thought. But my taxi had drawn up outside, and it was time to go. She lifted her elbows and took a little silver crucifix from around her neck and gave it to me.

‘I can't take this.'

‘Then borrow it, and bring it back safe.'

In Chicago the sky was dark and the rain came clattering down like bucketfuls of nails. I hurried across the sidewalk outside St Philomena's with a copy of
Newsweek
on top of my head but it didn't stop water from pouring down the back of my neck. The hospital lobby was lit like a migraine and the corridors were crowded with gurneys and wheelchairs and people arguing and old folks staring into space and nodding as if they absolutely definitely agreed that life wasn't worth living.

A tall black nurse led me up to intensive care, loping along in front of me with all the loopy grace of a giraffe. My grandmother lay in greenish gloom, her head and her hands wrapped in bandages. Her face was waxy and blotched and her cheeks had collapsed so that you could see the skull underneath. She looked as if she were dead already.

I sat down beside her. ‘Grandma? It's me, Jimmy.'

It was a long time before her eyes flickered open, and when they did I had a chilly feeling of dread. All the blue seemed to have drained from her irises and it was obvious that she knew that death was only hours away.

‘Jimmy . . .'

‘Mr Szponder told me what happened, grandma. Oh, Jesus, what can I say?'

‘They're keeping me comfortable, Jimmy, don't you worry.' She gave a feeble, sticky cough. ‘Plenty of morphine to stop me from hurting.'

‘Grandma . . . you should have had somebody looking after you. How many times did I tell you that?'

‘I never needed anybody to look after me, Jimmy. I was always the looker-afterer.'

‘Well, you sure looked after me good. Nobody could have raised me better.'

Grandma coughed again. ‘Promise me one thing, Jimmy. You will promise me, won't you?'

‘Anything. Just say the word.'

She tried to raise her head, but the effort and the pain were too much for her. ‘Promise me you won't think bad of your mother.'

I frowned at her and shook my head. ‘Why should I think bad of her? It wasn't her fault that she died.'

‘Try to understand, that's all I'm saying.'

‘Grandma, I don't get it. Try to understand
what
?'

She looked at me for a long time but she didn't say anything else. After a while she closed her eyes and I left her to sleep.

I met her gingery-haired doctor on the way out.

‘What chances does she have?' I asked him.

He took off his eyeglasses and gave me a shrug. ‘There are times when I have to say that patients would be better off if they could come to some conclusion.'

‘
Conclusion
? She's a human being, not a fucking book.'

I took a taxi over to her apartment building on the South Side, in one of the few surviving streets of narrow, four-story Victorian houses, overshadowed by the Dan Ryan Expressway. It was still raining and the expressway traffic was deafening.

I opened the scabby front door and went inside, carrying a brown paper shopping sack with six cans of Heineken and a turkey sandwich. The hallway was dark, with a brown linoleum floor and an old-fashioned umbrella stand. There was a strong smell of lavender floor polish and frying garlic. Somewhere a television was playing at top volume, and a baby was crying. It was hard to believe that I used to think of this building as home.

A door opened and Mr Szponder came out, with his rounded face and his saggy gray cardigan. His gray hair was swept back so that he looked like a porcupine.

‘Jimmy . . . what can I say?' He held me in his arms and slapped my back as if he were trying to bring up my wind. ‘I always tried to look out for your grandma, you know . . . but she was such a proud lady.'

‘Thanks, Mr Szponder.'

‘You can call me Wladislaw. What do you like? Tea? Vodka?'

‘Nothing, thanks. I could use a little sleep, that's all.'

‘OK, but anything you need.'

He gave me a final rib-crushing squeeze and breathed onions into my face.

Up on the fourth floor, grandma's apartment was silent and gloomy and damp. It seemed so much more cramped than it had when I was young, but very little had changed. The sagging brown velvet couch was still taking up too much space in front of the hearth, and the stuffed owl still stared at me from the mantelpiece as if it wanted to peck out my eyes. A framed photograph of a sad-looking seven-year-old boy stood next to the owl and that was me. I went through to the narrow kitchen and opened the tiny icebox. I was almost brought to tears by grandma's pathetic little collection of leftovers, all on saucers and neatly covered with cling wrap.

I popped open a can of beer and went back to the living room. So many memories were here. So many voices from the past. Grandpa singing at Christmas; grandma telling me stories about children who got lost in the deep dark forest, and could only find their way out by leaving trails of breadcrumbs. They looked after me as if I were some kind of little prince, those two, and when grandpa died in 1989 he left me a letter which said, ‘
There aren't any ghosts, Jimmy. Always remember that the past can't hurt you
.' To be honest, I never knew what the hell he was trying to tell me.

I tried to eat my turkey sandwich but it tasted like brown velvet couch and lavender polish and after two or three bites I wrapped it up again and threw it in the trash. I switched on the huge old Zenith television and watched this movie about a woman who thinks that her children are possessed. The rain spattered against the window and the traffic streamed along the Dan Ryan Expressway with an endless swishing noise, and out on the lake a steamer sounded its horn like the saddest creature you ever heard.

I woke up with a jolt. It was dark outside, and the apartment was illuminated only by the flickering light of
Wheel of Fortune
. The audience were screaming with laughter, but I was sure that I had heard somebody else screaming, too. There's a difference between a roller-coaster scream of hilarity and a scream of absolute terror.

I turned the volume down and listened. Nothing at first, except the traffic, and the muffled sound of a television from downstairs. I waited and waited and there was still nothing. But then I heard it again. It was a child screaming, a little boy, and when I say screaming this was a total freezing fear-of-death scream. I felt as if I had dropped into cold water right up to my neck.

I stood up, trying to work out where the screaming was coming from. It wasn't underneath me. It wasn't the next-door apartment, either. And this was the top story, so there was nobody living above.

Suddenly I heard it again, and this time I could make out part of what the child was screaming. ‘
Mommy
!
Mommy
!
No mommy you can't
!
Mommy you can't, you can't
,
you can't
! NO MOMMY YOU CAN'T!'

I went quickly through to grandma's bedroom, where the covers were still turned neatly back, and grandma's nightdress was still lying ready on the quilt. The screaming went on and on, and I could tell now that it was coming from the top-story apartment of the house next door. I thumped on the wall with my fist and yelled out, ‘
What's happening
?
What the hell are you doing
?'

The screaming stopped for a second, but then the child let out a high, shrill shriek, almost inhuman, more like a bird than a child. I hurried out of the apartment and ran downstairs, three and four stairs at a time. When I got to the hallway I banged on Mr Szponder's door.

‘Mr Szponder! Mr Szponder!'

He opened his door in his vest and suspenders with a half-eaten submarine sandwich in his hand. ‘Jimmy? Whatsa matter?'

‘Call the cops! It's next door, that side, there's some mother who's hurting a kid! Tell them to hurry, it sounds like she's practically killing him! Top floor!'

‘Hunh?' said Mr Szponder. ‘What do you mean, killing?'

‘Just dial nine one one and do it now! I'm going up there!'

‘OK, OK.' Mr Szponder dithered for a moment, uncertain of what to do with his sandwich. In the end he put it down on the seat of a chair and went off to find his telephone.

I ran down the front steps into the rain. The house next door was different from the house in which my grandma had lived. It was narrower, with a hooded porch, and dark, rain-soaked rendering. I bounded up to the front door and pressed the top floor bell-push. Then I hammered on the knocker and shouted out, ‘Open up! Open up! I've called the cops! Open the fucking door!'

Nobody answered, so I pressed every single bell push, and there were at least a dozen of them. After a long while, a man's voice came over the intercom. ‘
Who is this
?'

‘I live next door. You have to let me in. There's a kid screaming on the top floor. Can't you hear him?'

‘
What do you mean, kid
?'

‘There's a kid screaming for help. Sounds like his mother's hurting him. For Christ's sake open the door, will you?'

‘
I don't hear no screaming
.'

‘Well, maybe he's stopped but he was screaming before. He could be hurt.'