Figures of Fear: An anthology (25 page)

He reached into the pocket of his crumpled linen coat and produced a smooth black object that looked like a gourd. He laid it down on the fruit-box, next to the carving.

‘I don’t give refunds,’ said Jonquil, and gave a little cackle.

‘I don’t want a refund, thanks.’

‘How about a new arm?’

He looked down at his empty sleeve, pinned across his chest. He shook his head. ‘I can’t afford it. Not at your prices.’

She watched him walk away through the equatorial night. She picked up the witch-compass and put her ear to it and shook it.

Shikk – shikk – shikk
it whispered. Jonquil smiled, and set it back down on the upturned fruit-box, ready for the next customer.

RESONANT EVIL

M
artin drew into the curb and turned off the engine. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Tell me that isn’t perfect.’

Serena looked at the white two-story house with its patchy front lawn and its overgrown ninebark bushes and its peeling window frames. Six or seven of the uprights in the veranda rail were missing, which gave the house a gap-toothed appearance, and the shutters of one of the upstairs windows were hanging askew.

‘You didn’t say it was a fixer-upper,’ she said. ‘How much are they asking for it?’

‘Five nine nine. It’s a steal. It has five bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, and a totally private yard with a view of Little Pond if you stand on a stepladder.’

‘I don’t know. It looks like a whole lot of work. And I won’t be getting any more agile, will I?’

‘Just take a look inside,’ Martin coaxed her. ‘I promise you, you’re going to love it.’

‘Well, OK,’ said Serena, reluctantly. Martin climbed out of the car and walked around to open the door for her. Although she was six months’ pregnant, she was still quite skinny, except for her bump. Her long blonde hair was tied back with a pale blue scarf, and she was wearing a pale blue smock and tight black leggings. Her blue denim sandals had five-inch wedges but Martin didn’t mind because he was seven inches taller than she was, lean and dark-haired and gangling, more like a basketball player than a neuroscientist.

They walked up the path together and climbed the steps. Martin took out the key that the realtors had given him and unlocked the faded green front door. A corroded brass knocker was hanging on it, in the shape of a snarling wolf’s head.

‘Maybe I should knock first. You know – in case there are any ghosts still inside. I wouldn’t want to startle them.’

‘Don’t you go scaring me,’ said Serena. ‘The house looks creepy enough as it is.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Martin told her. ‘Ghosts are all in the mind. Trust me. I’m a professional.’

He pushed open the door and its hinges made a thick grating sound, as if they hadn’t been oiled for years. ‘Do you know who used to live here before? Vincent Grayling. How about that for serendipity?’

Serena peered into the hall. It was dark and airless, because all of the shutters in the house were closed, and it was panelled in brown-varnished oak. She stepped inside, her sandals crunching on the gritty oak floor. On the left-hand side of the hallway there was a steep colonial staircase, which led up to a galleried landing. Some of the risers were rotten and needed replacing, and four or five of the banisters were missing, like the veranda outside. A huge crystal chandelier was suspended from the ceiling, trailing cobwebs like rags.

She sniffed. ‘It smells like nobody’s lived here for
years
.’

‘They haven’t. Vincent Grayling died in 1957. The realtors told me that the house remained in his family, but none of them wanted to live here so they rented it until it got too run down. They wanted to sell it but they couldn’t agree on which member of the family was supposed to get the biggest share of the proceeds. It’s only come on to the market now because the last but one of them has gone to meet his Maker.’

On their right, a wide doorway led into a living room. Although it was so gloomy in there, they could make out a worn-out brown leather couch, two mismatched armchairs with stretch nylon covers, a ‘contemporary’ coffee table shaped like an artist’s palette and a standard lamp with a broken shade.

‘You don’t want to live here just because it was Vincent Grayling’s house, do you?’ asked Serena. ‘I mean – sweetheart – have you worked out how much it’s going to cost us to remodel? Not to mention all the new furniture.’

‘All right,’ said Martin, ‘I confess. Vincent Grayling is one of my great heroes. But look what we’d be getting for the money. There’s a much smaller house further down the street and it’s nearly eight hundred.’

‘I always thought that Vincent Grayling was some kind of a nutball,’ said Serena, as she followed Martin along the hallway to the kitchen. ‘Didn’t he do some experiment when he spoiled the taste of people’s food just by showing them horrible pictures while they ate?’

‘That was one of his experiments, yes. And most of his research was pretty far out, I have to admit. But he did some incredible work on synaesthesia. That’s when you stimulate one sense, like for instance
hearing
, and it affects another sense, like
taste
. He discovered that some people, whenever they hear a telephone ringing, taste salt on their tongues.’

‘How about smell?’ said Serena. ‘I’m looking at this kitchen and I can definitely smell drains.’

The kitchen was still fitted in 1950s style, with green Formica worktops and a cream Westinghouse gas range, and wall cupboards with frosted-glass windows. The faucet was dripping monotonously into the sink, and all those years of dripping had stained the sink several shades of brown.

Serena pulled open the dome-topped Frigidaire. On the middle shelf there was a single Tupperware container with something black and speckled inside it. She looked at Martin, who could see that she was almost about to tell him that she wouldn’t move into this house if the entire MIT tug-of-war team tried to drag her into it.

‘First thing we’ll do is we’ll rip out this kitchen,’ he promised her. ‘We’ll put in one of those fancy American Range ovens with a banquet burner broiler, or whatever it’s called. And a fridge you could fit a family of Inuits into.’

‘Hmm,’ she said.

‘Come on upstairs,’ he said, taking hold of her hand. ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet.’

They gingerly climbed up the half-dilapidated staircase, until they reached the landing. ‘Can’t you imagine it?’ he asked her. ‘Your guests are waiting for you downstairs in the hallway, and
ta-da!
you appear right here, dressed up like Scarlett O’Hara. Slowly you descend the stairs, the chandelier shining on your diamond necklace …’

‘What diamond necklace?’

‘The diamond necklace I’m going to buy you when they make me head of my department.’

‘Do I really have to wait that long? I won’t be able to dress up like Scarlett O’Hara when I’m eighty-five years old.’

He gave her a playful slap on the bottom. ‘Oh ye of little faith. Now, just take a look at this – the master bedroom!’

He opened the door. The master bedroom was enormous, domin-ated by a huge four-poster bed with carved oak pillars and dusty orange drapes. In the centre of the opposite wall there was a pair of French windows, covered by shutters, so that the afternoon sunlight shone on to the floor in narrow parallel bars. Martin crossed over to the windows, pulled back the bolts which secured them, and then forced open the shutters.

Outside, a balcony overlooked the yard, which was crowded with blossoming cherry trees. Beyond the cherry trees they could see Little Pond, blue and sparkling, with two rowboats tied together in the middle of it, and children swimming.

Serena came out on to the balcony and stood there for a while, with her eyes half-closed. The warm wind blew a few stray blonde hairs across her forehead.

‘Well?’ asked Martin.

‘You’ve convinced me,’ she smiled.

They looked into all four of the other bedrooms. Three of them were quite small, and empty, without even a bed in them, but the fourth was almost as large as the master bedroom, and it had obviously been used as a study. The walls were lined with bookshelves, although there were no books on them now, apart from a dog-eared telephone directory and a residents’ association newsletter. In the worn beige carpet there were two rectangular indentations with a dark scuffed patch in between them, where a desk had once stood. A dusty black telephone with a rotary dial had been left on the window sill.

At the far end of the study there was a red-brick fireplace, and in the alcoves on either side of the chimney breast, oak-fronted closets had been built. Martin went over and tried to open them, but they were both locked, and neither of them had keys.

‘This would make a fantastic den for you,’ said Serena. She peered through the shutters to see what was outside. ‘There’s a girl next door, washing her car. She has thick glasses and a
very
large ass. I think I can trust you in here.’

‘Does that mean you want us to buy it?’

Serena reached up and put her arms around his neck and gave him a kiss. ‘I think you’ve persuaded me, yes. Let’s go talk to the realtors, shall we?’

It was seven more weeks before the paperwork was completed and they were able to move in. By now the air was feeling sharper every morning and the trees all around Little Pond were beginning to turn rusty-coloured.

Because their baby was expected in less than two weeks, Serena’s sister Emma came to help them move, although Serena was blooming. Her hair was shiny and her skin glowed and Martin had never seen her so happy. They were going to have a girl, and they had chosen the name Sylvia Martina.

‘Just because we’re naming her after you, Martin, that doesn’t mean I want her to be a neuroscientist,’ Serena had told him. ‘I want her to be a singing star.’

‘What
we
want her to be is irrelevant,’ Martin had replied. ‘My mom wanted me to go into the grocery business, like my dad. Can you imagine me in an apron, slicing salami?’

‘Actually, I just want little Sylvia to be healthy,’ Serena had said, resting her head against his shoulder. ‘I don’t care what she does, so long as nobody ever hurts her.’

On the third day, the sky was dark grey and it was raining hard, which made the trees rattle. Serena and Emma were cleaning the kitchen together, and Martin was waiting for a house-clearance company to take away the living-room furniture, which was out on the front veranda now, looking old and worn-out and sorry for itself.

He stood on the veranda watching the rain for a while. The truckers were over an hour late now and he wondered if they were coming at all. He went back inside. Serena and Emma were singing some Rihanna song in the kitchen, out of key, and laughing together, so he decided to leave them to it. He climbed the stairs to the study. All his books were up there now, in eleven cardboard boxes, and he could make a start on unpacking them.

His desk was there, too, although it looked distinctly out of place in a colonial room like this because it was made of chrome and smoked glass. He would have to see if he could find an antique one, with brass handles and an embossed leather top.

He went across to the closets beside the fireplace. He had asked the realtors if anybody in the Grayling family had keys for them, but there had been no response. The Graylings had never taken an interest in the house, except as an investment, and they probably didn’t even know that these closets existed, let alone where their keys might be.

He took out his Swiss army knife, opened out the longest blade, and slid it down the crack at the side of the left-hand door. He could feel the metal tongue of the lock, and he wiggled his knife from side to side to see if he could dislodge it from its keeper. It held firm, and so he gave up. He didn’t want to damage the colonial oak beading.

In a last attempt to open the door, he opened out the corkscrew and inserted it into the keyhole. He jiggled it, and twisted it, but the door still remained firmly locked. He took out the corkscrew and gave the door a frustrated thump with his fist. As he turned away, the lock softly clicked and the door opened up, almost as if somebody had very gently pushed it from the inside.

He stood and stared at it.
No
, he told himself,
you’re a neuro-biologist; you’re an associate professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. You do not believe in ghosts, or any kind of paranormal activity. Ghosts aren’t supernatural; they’re synaptic. Like you told Serena, they’re all in the mind.

Cautiously, he swung the door open wider. Inside, there were three shelves. The top shelf held half-a-dozen black hard-backed notebooks. On the centre shelf stood a portable record player from the late 1950s, cream and brown, an RCA Victor High-Fidelity autochange. On the bottom shelf there was a large cardboard box, with a lid, marked ‘
S-Disks #5 – #31
’.

Martin tried to lift the box out of the closet but it was so heavy that he had to drag it. When he opened the lid he found that it was full of long-playing vinyl records, all in brown paper sleeves. He picked out the first one and slid it out of its sleeve. On the white paper label in the middle there was scrawly purple handwriting: ‘
Lavender, recorded D
Lab, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, 08/13/54.
’

Lavender?
thought Martin. What the hell did that mean,
lavender
? How do you record lavender?

He lifted out the next record. ‘
Smoke
,
recorded D Lab, 77 Massachusetts Avenue,
08/21/54
’. Then, ‘
Lightning flash, 0.03 sec, recorded 76 Oliver Road, Belmont, 08/23/54.
’

Each successive record had a similar notation on its label. There were ‘Moving Shadows’, ‘Apples’, ‘Faces’, ‘Snow’, ‘Cold Fingers’ and ‘Child’.

He stood up and took down the notebooks. On the front of each of them was a white label with the same scrawly handwriting. The first one read ‘
Experiments in
Synaesthesia
,
1954–55. Vincent D. Grayling, PhD
.’ When he opened it, and read Vincent Grayling’s handwritten introduction, he began to understand what he had found.