It Knows Where You Live (27 page)

She moved quicker than I’d thought possible. I didn’t think she was even capable of such speed. She darted round to my side of the table, raised her fist, and punched me in the side of the face. I tipped sideways from the force of the blow, reaching out to grab the edge of the table so I didn’t fall out of the chair. I didn’t fight back. It wasn’t worth it. She always won in the end.

“Bastard!” She left the room, slamming the door behind her. A minute later, I heard her crying. A short time after that, I heard her speaking to someone on the phone.
 

I didn’t know what to do so I left through the rear door. I walked down to the end of the street, turned left, crossed the main road, and went into the park. The gates were never shut. You could access the park twenty-four hours a day. Sometimes kids would go in there late at night and make a racket, but mostly it was quiet. I looked up at the silent trees, breathed in the still, quiet air. The sky seemed to draw away from me, creating space. My body was light. I felt as if I could skip off the surface of the world.

I went down to the skate park and stood beside the ramp. I closed my eyes for a while. When I opened them again, he was there with her, lying at her side: my ghost, that other self. He was exactly like me. Same face, same eyes, same clothes. His eyes were open and he was looking at me, but there was no judgement in them. His mouth opened, his lips moved, but he didn’t speak. There was nothing he could possibly say to put things right.

The plastic bag was still pulled tight over Alice’s face. Nothing about her had changed. She was the only unchanging thing in a constantly shifting world. She was an anchor, something I could cling to as the universe mutated around me. I realised that now. I only wished I’d thought about it when she was alive. Then things might have been different. Perhaps he wouldn’t have killed her.

I reached out and tore down the police tape, then entered the sanctity of the small area where Alice was laid to rest. There was a small gap between the two stiff bodies. It wasn’t much, but there was just about enough room to manoeuvre. I reversed and forced myself between them, feeling the hard surface of the skate ramp pressing into my spine. I wriggled slightly so I was snuggled in tight with my hands crossed over my chest.

I stared up at the distant night sky, at the stars, and the gaps between the stars. I wondered if there were any answers there, floating around in the cosmos, just waiting to be found. I moved my hands away from my chest and put my arms down by my sides. I opened my hands. Waited.

Not long after that, I felt a cold, cold hand slip into each of mine. My body trembled; my palms began to sweat. The sky above me first loomed towards me and then pulled back again, opening up like a vast cosmic doorway. I closed my fingers. They squeezed my moist hands. Their skin was cold and as dry as bone.
 

Slowly, everything began to make sense.
 

I never wanted to let go. So when I stood and stepped up through that giant open doorway, I took them both with me. I loved them. I wanted them to share in whatever I was about to discover.

STORY NOTES

The following stories are original to this collection:

Trog Boy Ran

I Live in the Gut

You Haven’t Seen Me

Hungry Love

Alice, Hanging Out in the Skate Park

The versions of all reprinted stories herein represent the author’s preferred versions.

Story Notes:

Just Another Horror Story

I wrote this as a submission to Des Lewis’s
The Horror Anthology of Horror Anthologies
project. It was the first short story I’d written for a while, and I was very pleased with the result. Des rejected the tale, but I felt that it was special and deserved a good home. Rather than send this elsewhere, I decided to hang on to it, and the story was one of the things that prompted the idea for this collection.

Barcode

This one was written in response to the global credit crunch, which then turned into the global recession we’re still going through. There’s not much more to say, I’m afraid. The story hopefully speaks for itself. Worth noting: this is probably the only story I’ve ever written that has a happy ending. I doubt the recession will have one.

The Row

The gorgeous Kahil Gibran quote at the beginning of this story inspired the whole thing. I love the notion of haunted people coming into contact, or colliding, with a haunted place, and the thought that sometimes, just sometimes, we are our own ghosts—and we are simply haunting ourselves.

When One Door Closes

Another response to the recession, when I kept hearing about friends who were made redundant and then struggled to find new jobs. The story is also a commentary on all kinds of industries (including publishing), where certain doors remain forever closed unless you know the right people.

The Chair

It began with me looking out of my bedroom window late one night to see an old kitchen chair on the footpath outside a neighbour’s house. What was it doing there? Who had put it there, and why? Then, an image—perhaps from a dream later that same night—of a woman with henna tattoos made from darkness writhing on her arms. She was sitting in the same chair, stiff and silent, and something had just left her side

Truth Hurts

Obviously this one’s about lies and liars, and about the damage caused by those lies. I love taking a metaphor and making it literal. The horror genre is a great tool for doing that, and the results can often be startling. Personally, I think this is one of the bitterest stories I’ve ever written.

Down

Inspired by various visits to cave systems in my youth, this is a short, creepy homage to the great Ramsey Campbell. Nothing more, nothing less: just a scary little story that takes place in the dark
 

Sounds Weird

I wrote this one for an anthology and then forgot to submit it. I’m always doing things like that—I have a rubbish memory. Sound is an often underused effect in horror fiction, and I tried to address that shortcoming with this brief tale. Again, it’s a very bitter piece, and the ending never fails to depress me. This is one of those stories of mine that affects me deeply, and I’m not too keen on the feelings of despair it invokes when I read it.

The Table

This one’s a sequel to
The Chair
, of course. The characters wouldn’t leave me alone; they had a lot more to tell. They still do. I have ideas for further stories in the sequence, titled
The Drawer
and
The Room
. Perhaps one day I’ll even write them.

The Sheep

My wife and I spent a long weekend in Corbridge, Northumberland, ostensibly because we needed a break. The trip was also a good excuse for me to do some research on a novel I was writing, and she’d never before experienced the beauty of Hadrian’s Wall. This story came out of that trip—it’s based on feelings and ideas I had when we did a long hike in the rain. Most of what’s written happened. The rest
could
happen.

Small Things

In modern life, we often forget about the tiny mechanisms that make our society work. The pleases and thank-yous, the small gestures and subtle indications, the admission that we actually see other people as human beings and not just two-dimensional characters in the film of our own lives. This might be what happens when all of that breaks down and we stop acknowledging even the smallest of charitable acts.

It Knows Where You Live

I needed a strong story to cap off this collection and felt that I already had the perfect title in place. This one examines a lot of themes that keep popping up in my short fiction, and it also embraces my love of cheap, tacky horror films. I just hope it doesn’t know where
I
live...

Trog Boy Ran

This was written for a proposed anthology the publisher Angry Robot was planning to put out. The theme was to use the name of the publisher and come up with a story. I used an anagram. The anthology idea died a death, but I finished the story because I liked it. Another inspiration for this story was Mini Motorbike Man. Now, Mini Motorbike Man was an imaginary man on a tiny motorbike I’d imagine driving along at the side of the motorway during long car journeys in my childhood. He’d leap over bushes and fences like Steve McQueen in
The Great Escape
, and always accompanied me when we had to travel far.

I Live in the Gut

Another one that was originally intended for an anthology, but I didn’t feel the finished story quite worked so I sent them something else instead (which was accepted). I went back to this one and did a few more drafts, teasing the story out. I think the end result is weird, creepy, and very sad. It’s the newest story here, and I feel it represents the current direction of a lot of my fiction.

It Won’t be Long Now

I wrote this for inclusion in a free eBook given away to regular readers by Michael Wilson at
This is Horror
, which is a review site for horror fans. I like the story a lot, and had every intention of including it in a collection so it might reach a wider audience.
 

You Haven’t Seen Me

This is Horror
again. This time I wrote the first thousand words of a story for a competition, and those who entered had to finish it off. The prize was that the story be published on the website. My wife suggested I write an ending myself, so I could see how it compared with the winner. Ray Cluley—a very fine writer himself—won the competition, and I’m happy to say his ending was a lot different to mine. Keen-eyed readers will spot that this story takes place in the vicinity of the Concrete Grove.

The Grotto

When writer, editor and publisher Ian Whates asked me for a Christmas story to contribute to a promotional eBook aimed at potential and existing Newcon Press readers, I had no idea what to write. Then the title came into my head, followed by an image of a small boy struggling with family commitments and looking for someone—or some
thing
—to help him. After that, the story kind of wrote itself.

Hungry Love

I was asked to write a story for a gay-themed horror anthology, a follow-up to a book in which a story of mine had appeared previously. The title came quickly, as did the basic concept, but it took me a long time (and several rewrites) to find the narrative voice and the core of the story. I liked the idea that somebody’s love could have a mind of its own, and it was a monster. It seemed funny and creepy, and I think the end result works well.

Alice, Hanging Out in the Skate Park

Somebody wrote these words in a Facebook update—I can’t remember the context, but it struck me as a great title for a story, so I went away and wrote it. My friend Stephen Volk was involved in the Facebook thread, and I think it both amused and exasperated him when I told him what I’d done.

Gary McMahon is the acclaimed author of nine novels and several short story collections. His latest novel releases are
Beyond Here Lies Nothing
(the third in the acclaimed Concrete Grove series, published by Solaris),
The End
(an apocalyptic drama published by NewCon Press) and
The Bones of You
(a supernatural mystery published by Earthling Publications), and his short fiction has been reprinted in various “Year’s Best” volumes.

Gary lives with his family in Yorkshire, where he trains in Shotokan karate and likes running in the rain.

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www.amazon.co.uk/Gary-McMahon/e/B004B6NN3A/

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ISBN: 978-0-9922182-4-9

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