Gutted: Beautiful Horror Stories (31 page)

They were dancing, the very middle of the dance floor, and all of their friends and family were laughing and chattering and dancing, too, around them, and Jason had her close by the waist and brought his lips to her ear and said, “What did your Mom mean by . . . ‘did you meet her yet’?”

Dana could feel invisible fingers, someone else’s fingers, lifting up the sides of her perfect smile.

“She’s old,” Dana said. But she wished she hadn’t. For the first time in her life she wished she’d just told Jason exactly what she knew Mom meant.

And yet, it
was
true. Mom
was
old. And drunk.

Jason smiled.

“The way she said it,” he said, “I thought she was talking about an old friend.”

Then people started to countdown and Dana kissed Jason before the number reached zero, not wanting to be so definite, so defined. And the kiss was a good one. And later that night, long after they’d driven Mom home and eaten fish sandwiches at the all-night diner, they made love. It was good love and Dana could tell Jason was happy. And yet, when he smelled her shoulders, smelled just behind her ear, Dana thought of the dog they once had, and wondered if Jason wasn’t looking, searching his wife for that old friend Mom had drunkenly spoke of in public.

***

A widow at sixty-six, but Mom was still alive. Dana went to the pet store shortly after Jason’s death but the cats seemed more perceptive than the dogs and the dogs were too perceptive as it was. It was something of a bad experience for her, that day in the pet store; she felt like all the animals were looking at the other people like they wanted to be taken home but looking at Dana like they were scared or confused. Like they thought it was wrong of her not to tell Jason that night, that New Year’s Eve, the truth about what Mom was talking about.

Even the birds seemed to know it, seemed to say,

That was your chance to bridge the gap. Your chance to be a kid again.

A worker at the pet store, a girl about nineteen, asked if she needed any help.

Dana smiled at the question.

“Miss,” the girl said before leaving her with the birds. “Can I just say that you are a
beautiful
woman.”

Dana smiled again. But she didn’t say anything, didn’t say thank you because what did this girl know about whether or not Dana was beautiful?

In that moment, quite suddenly, Dana had to hang onto the rack of birdseed for stability, to keep herself from falling.

It was the furthest she’d ever felt the split. The biggest the gap had ever gotten. The feeling was so overwhelming that she believed, momentarily, that her neck might split open, that she might suddenly be torn in two.

“Are you all right, miss?” the girl asked.

And Dana actually waited, innocently, waited with the girl for whomever she’d asked to answer.

***

Dana was singing in the backyard when a neighbor’s gardener heard her and couldn’t stop himself from walking over to tell her she had a lovely voice. The gardener was handsome, though Dana wasn’t sure she knew what beauty was anymore; wasn’t sure she had a concrete opinion on anything; the way life presented all these different scenarios that asked you to be so many different people in return. But something inside herself told her the man was handsome and kind and she asked if he wanted to come talk with her. He said he did and so they sat at the deck table and talked.

“You ever think of joining a choir?” the man asked.

Dana shrugged. It felt good to shrug. Somehow the simple gesture exemplified how she saw herself.

“I did once,” she said.

“I sing, too,” the man said.

Then he started to sing.

Dana listened and wondered what she thought of his voice. Was it pleasing and romantic? Or was it nasally and overdone? Part of her wondered if it mattered at all what he sounded like. Another part of her, like half, imagined herself telling him to stop.

She wiped her forehead with a napkin.

“How old are you?” the gardener asked.

“I’m seventy-nine years old.”

But was she? Yes, she finally agreed. Seventy-nine years old.

The gardener shook his head.

“I’m sixty-seven myself. Had we met in another lifetime, we may have been great friends.”

Dana felt a concrete reaction to this statement. It was refreshing; concrete.

“But we are meeting in another lifetime,” she said.

The man paused, thought about this, then laughed.

“I like that,” he said. “I like ‘we are meeting in another lifetime.’ Like the one I’ve been living hasn’t been the one I’ve thought I was living all along.”

Dana smiled. Could almost feel a second mouth, behind her own, smiling for her.

***

She’d been staring in the mirror for too long. Grease in her hair, ketchup under her nose, spinning, then staring into her face, eighty-something years old. She’d definitely been staring for too long because the woman who looked back was frightening. Not because she was ugly; no, never. The woman was indeed pretty, had aged almost unfairly well. What scared Dana was the look in the woman’s eyes, as though she was capable of doing different things than Dana was; able to move in a different direction; might blink when Dana, on this side of the glass, did not. At one point, Dana had to bring her wrinkled hands to her face to stop herself from looking. She was so sure the woman in the glass was about to say something, about to move, even the slightest bit, showing herself, completely, for the first time.

Dana crouched to her knees and ran her fingers through the grease in her hair, wiped the ketchup onto her fingers and looked at her fingernails. This was good; better than looking in the mirror. Dana was sure, as sure as she’d ever been of anything ever, that if she looked up, she’d see that other woman peering over the edge of the sink, eyes wide, wider than her own, this her, almost mockingly, as her lips moved independently and formed the words:

Have you met her yet?

***

She was in a hospital bed and the nurses were very nice. They fawned over her endlessly and loved the story about never naming the dog. They told her that ninety-nine years was an incredible run. To Dana it was more fitting than one hundred. She liked that. What she didn’t like was that she was not alone. The unit held two patients and the other one was quiet, too quiet, behind the curtain that divided them.

“Who’s there?” Dana called often and once a nurse told her it was woman. The nurses helped in this way, helped Dana forget about this other patient and how the curtain was kind of like a mirror the way it split two images of two people doing the exact same thing in dying.

Maybe because the nurse asked about her childhood, Dana often recalled her mom, long after the nurses left the room.

There’s two yous
, Mom once said.
And there always will be. There’s the you that you show to other people. Then there’s the you that you are inside. Now, since you’re just a kid, the two yous are much closer together than mine are. You might not even notice the split. But it’s there. You’re just not smart enough yet to see it. And the older you get, the more that split is gonna grow, breaking up the two yous, until you hardly recognize the you you are when you’re out of the house and the you you are when you’re not. I think it’s the best thing a person can do is to try and keep those two yous as close together as they can. It’s hard. It’s damn hard. But you gotta try, right?

Dana thought Mom was right, thought it was the smartest damn thing Mom ever said. She thought about this talk a lot and eventually she didn’t want to think about it but it kept coming back. One night, hoping for a distraction, she turned on the television that hung high up on the wall and dropped the remote control before she’d changed the station from static. It hit the floor.

Still nimble at ninety-nine, she turned onto her side to ring for the nurse, to ask them to remove the static from the screen, to put something entertaining on, perhaps a program featuring a woman who was sure of herself. Before the nurses came, in the blue light of the flickering static, Dana saw a ripple in the curtain that separated her from the other patient, the woman, and saw a hand, too, fingers, curl around that curtain’s edge.

Have you met her yet?

And as the curtain was pulled aside, Dana smiled, all on her own, smiled because Mom was right when she said it was hard, keeping them together,
damn
hard, but you gotta try.

And Dana believed she knew what she was gonna say, when the parting of the curtain was complete, she was gonna say what she should’ve said on New Year’s Eve forty-nine years ago, that it was hard, damn hard, but you gotta try.

Because there’s the you you are at any given time, and the you you get and give with; the one you often are and, always, the one you live with.

And Dana would tell the woman on the other side of the curtain that she believed she’d tried.

THE PLACE OF REVELATION

Ramsey Campbell

At dinner Colin’s parents do most of the talking. His mother starts by saying “Sit down,” and as soon as he does his father says “Sit up.” Auntie Dot lets Colin glimpse a sympathetic grin while Uncle Lucian gives him a secret one, neither of which helps him feel less nervous. They’re eating off plates as expensive as the one he broke last time they visited, when his parents acted as if he’d meant to drop it even though the relatives insisted it didn’t matter and at least his uncle thought so. “Delicious as always,” his mother says when Auntie Dot asks yet again if Colin’s food is all right, and his father offers “I expect he’s just tired, Dorothy.” At least that’s an excuse, which Colin might welcome except it prompts his aunt to say “If you’ve had enough I should scamper off to bye-byes, Colin. For a treat you can leave us the washing up.”

Everyone is waiting for him to go to his room. Even though his parents keep saying how well he does in English and how the art mistress said he should take up painting at secondary school, he’s expected only to mumble agreement whenever he’s told to speak up for himself. For the first time he tries arguing. “I’ll do it. I don’t mind.”

“You’ve heard what’s wanted,” his father says in a voice that seems to weigh his mouth down.

“You catch up on your sleep,” his mother says more gently, “then you’ll be able to enjoy yourself tomorrow.”

Beyond her Uncle Lucian is nodding eagerly, but nobody else sees. Everyone watches Colin trudge into the high wide hall. It offers him a light, and there’s another above the stairs that smell of their new fat brown carpet, and one more in the upstairs corridor. They only put off the dark. Colin is taking time on each stair until his father lets him hear “Is he getting ready for bed yet?” For fear of having to explain his apprehensiveness he flees to the bathroom.

With its tiles white as a blizzard it’s brighter than the hall, but its floral scent makes Colin feel it’s only pretending to be a room. As he brushes his teeth the mirror shows him foaming at the mouth as though his nerves have given him a fit. When he heads for his room, the doorway opposite presents him with a view across his parents’ bed of the hospital he can’t help thinking is a front for the graveyard down the hill. It’s lit up as pale as a tombstone, whereas his window that’s edged with tendrils of frost is full of nothing but darkness, which he imagines rising massively from the fields to greet the black sky. Even if the curtains shut tight they wouldn’t keep out his sense of it, nor does the flimsy furniture that’s yellow as the wine they’re drinking downstairs. He huddles under the plump quilt and leaves the light on while he listens to the kitchen clatter. All too soon it comes to an end, and he hears someone padding upstairs so softly they might almost not be there at all.

As the door inches open with a faint creak that puts him in mind of the lifting of a lid, he grabs the edge of the quilt and hauls it over his face. “You aren’t asleep yet, then,” his mother says. “I thought you might have drifted off.”

Colin uncovers his face and bumps his shoulders against the bars behind the pillow. “I can’t get to sleep, so can I come down?”

“No need for that, Colin. I expect you’re trying too hard. Just think of nice times you’ve had and then you’ll go off. You know there’s nothing really to stop you.”

She’s making him feel so alone that he no longer cares if he gives away his secrets. “There is.”

“Colin, you’re not a baby any more. You didn’t act like this when you were. Try not to upset people. Will you do that for us?”

“If you want.”

She frowns at his reluctance. “I’m sure it’s what you want as well. Just be as thoughtful as I know you are.”

Everything she says reminds him how little she knows. She leans down to kiss each of his eyes shut, and as she straightens up, the cord above the bed turns the kisses into darkness with a click. Can he hold on to the feeling long enough to fall asleep? Once he hears the door close he burrows under the quilt and strives to be aware of nothing beyond the bed. He concentrates on the faint scent of the quilt that nestles on his face, he listens to the silence that the pillow and the quilt press against his ears. The weight of the quilt is beginning to feel vague and soft as sleep when the darkness whispers his name. “I’m asleep,” he tries complaining, however babyish and stupid it sounds.