Figures of Fear: An anthology (7 page)

Stephen usually drank Merlot, and she thought that if she showed him that she didn’t disapprove of his drinking, so long as he did it in moderation, he might not feel that she was judging him so much. ‘You’re always
judging
me. Just because you’re a solicitor’s daughter. Who the
hell
do you think you are?’

She was waiting at the counter in the off-licence when she turned towards the window to make sure that there were no traffic wardens around. Standing outside the window, peering in at her, was the woman in the grey hat and the grey raincoat, with her Bedlington terrier beside her.

Lily was about to go outside and ask her what she wanted when the assistant took her bottles of Merlot from her and said, ‘Afternoon, madam. Like to put your card in?’

By the time she had paid and stepped out of the off-licence, the woman had gone. She looked up and down the High Street, but there was no sign of her.

She put Poppy and Jamie to bed early that evening and read them a story,
Chris Cross in
Snappyland
, about a boy who kept losing his temper until he was taken away by monsters who could all shout much louder than he could.

‘Mummy,’ said Poppy, as Lily tucked her in. ‘We’re not going to go away, are we?’

‘Of course not, sweetie.’

‘But Daddy is always shouting and makes you cry. I don’t like it when he shouts and makes you cry.’

‘Daddy has a lot of worry at work. Sometimes it makes him cross like Chris Cross in Snappyland. He doesn’t really mean it.’

‘I heard you tell Daddy that you were going to take us away.’

‘Well, that’s because
I
get cross, too. But I don’t mean it, either.’

‘That lady said you mustn’t take us away.’

‘Lady? What lady?’

‘She was standing outside the playground today and she called me. She said,
Poppy.
Then she said “your mummy mustn’t leave your daddy”.’

Lily stared at her. ‘What did this lady look like?’

‘She had a grey woolly hat and a grey raincoat and she had a dog that looked like a dirty lamb.’

‘And that was all she said? She didn’t tell you what her name was, or how she knew what your name was?’

Poppy shook her head. ‘The bell went and I had to go inside.’

Stephen still hadn’t come home by ten fifteen. Lily stood in the living room with a glass of Merlot in her hand, almost motionless, looking at herself in the mirror over the mantelpiece as if she were someone that she didn’t recognize. A thirty-five-year-old woman with blonde, short-cropped hair, and two black eyes that were now turning rainbow-coloured, as if she were wearing a pierrette’s mask.

She didn’t know whether to start supper or not. It was so late now that she herself had lost her appetite, and she didn’t know what state Stephen would be in when he eventually arrived home.

She was still standing in front of the mirror when the doorbell chimed. She went into the hallway to answer it. Through the green and yellow stained-glass window in the front door she could a dark distorted shape.

‘Who is it?’ she called out.

There was a moment’s pause, but then a woman’s voice said, ‘
Don’t open the door.
There’s no need to. But don’t take the children away
.’

‘What?’ she demanded. ‘Who are you?’

She unfastened the latch and threw the door open wide. In the porch stood the woman in the grey hat and the grey raincoat, her face as grey as newspaper. As soon as she saw Lily, she screamed out, ‘
Don’t take the children away!
Not tonight!
Something terrible will happen if you do!
’

Terrified, Lily slammed the door shut. After she had done so, she stood in the hallway quaking. From upstairs, she heard Poppy calling out, ‘Mummy! Mummy! Jamie’s wet the bed!’

She approached the front door again. The light in the porch was shining through the stained-glass window, but she couldn’t see the shape of the woman any more. She slid the security chain into place, and then she opened the door a little way.

The woman had disappeared. All she could see were street lights flickering through the trees, and all she could hear was the muffled sound of traffic.

She switched off the lights in the living room and she was just about to go upstairs to run a bath when the front door burst open with a deafening crash.

‘Lily! Lily? Where the eff are you?’

She went through to the hallway. Stephen was leaning against the open door, his hair sticking up like a schoolboy’s, his tie crooked. She could smell alcohol and regurgitated curry.

‘Stephen,’ she said.

‘Oh, you recognize me! You know who I am! That makes a change!’

He took three stumbling steps forward, lost his balance, and almost collided with her.

‘Get away from me,’ she told him.

‘Get
away
from you? That’s not what you said on our wedding night, you bitch!’

‘Stephen, you’re drunk and you stink. Go upstairs and take a shower and go to bed.’

Stephen stood in the hallway, swaying. He had a faraway look in his eyes, and he was smiling.

‘Stephen,’ she repeated, and it was then that he slapped her so hard that she bounced against the wall, knocking her head and jarring her shoulder.

She fell to the floor, but Stephen gripped the front of her dress, tearing it wide open. He dragged her on to her feet and slapped her again and again.

‘
You know what you are?
’ he kept yelling at her. ‘
You know what you are?
’

Both Poppy and Jamie were crying as she bundled them into her Meriva. She heaved the big blue travelling bag into the back and slammed the door.

As she climbed into the driver’s seat, Stephen reappeared in the porch.

‘Lily!’ he shrieked at her. ‘You’re not taking my kids, Lily! You’re not going anywhere, you bitch!’

He staggered down the front steps towards them. Lily turned the key in the ignition and revved the engine. Poppy was screaming now and Jamie was crying in a high, panicky whistle.

Stephen banged his fist on the Meriva’s rear window, and Lily put her foot down so that it hurtled out of the driveway in a spray of pea-shingle.

There was a deep, clumsy thump, and Lily saw a body tumbling in the air in front of her. It turned over and over before it hit the road, but immediately, another car ran over it and its arms flew up and its hands clapped together,
smack
, as if it were applauding.

Shaking with shock, Lily climbed out of the driver’s seat and stepped out into the road. The woman in the grey woolly hat and the grey raincoat was lying on her back, staring up at her blind-eyed.

Lily turned around. A small crowd had already gathered and the driver of the second car was phoning for an ambulance. Standing next to her front gate, however, was the same woman, in her grey hat and her grey raincoat, with her Bedlington terrier on its lead.

Lily walked across to her. The woman’s image appeared to ripple, as if she were seeing her through running water.

‘
You’re dead
,’ Lily whispered. ‘
That’s you, lying in the road. You’re dead
.’

‘I did try to warn you, Lily,’ the woman told her. ‘You should have walked out over a year ago, when he first started to hit you. But you were too frightened of being on your own. And – secretly – you
enjoy
being his victim, don’t you? It makes you feel wanted. You should have stayed. Because
now
look what you’ve done.’

Lily said, ‘I’m so sorry.’ But the woman turned around and walked away, leaving her dog standing on the pavement. As she turned the corner, and disappeared from sight, Lily called out, ‘
I’m so, so sorry!
’

THE NIGHT HIDER

D
awn was dreaming of Christmas and snow and jingle bells.

She was sitting in a black-painted sleigh, sliding across a frozen lake under a charcoal-grey sky. The steel runners hissed on the ice, the jingle bells jingled. Strangely, the sleigh seemed to be self-propelled, and as it came closer and closer to the edge of the lake, she began to worry about how she was going to stop it.

Help!
she called out, or thought she called out. But there was nobody in sight, only snowdrifts, and fir trees, and the louring grey sky, and the sleigh continued to glide across the ice with its runners hissing and its jingle bells merrily jingling.

Somebody help me!
She was panicking now, but seconds before the sleigh could reach the edge of the lake, she woke up, and opened her eyes. She wasn’t in a sleigh at all, she was lying in bed, in her own flat in Chiswick.

The jingling, however, carried on. She frowned, and listened.
Jing-a-ling-jing-ching
. She couldn’t work out where it was coming from, but she could hear it quite distinctly. How could she still be hearing the sleigh bells from her dream, when she was awake?

She lifted her head from the pillow and reached across to the bedside table for her mobile phone. As she did so, she heard a soft creaking sound, like a door being opened. The jingling grew louder for a moment,
jing-chingle-jing-ching
, but then it became softer, and more sporadic, as if the sleigh had come to a halt. Then it stopped altogether, and there was silence. She pressed her phone and saw that it was 2.37 a.m.

Another creak, but more like a floorboard this time. She sat up in bed, her heart thumping painfully hard. Her curtains were velvet, and tightly closed together, and so her bedroom was totally dark. Yet another creak, and now she was so frightened that she didn’t even have the breath to ask if there was anybody there.

There was a long, long silence. She remained sitting upright, one hand gripping the bedcover, listening. She could hear her own blood rushing through her ears, so loudly that she wasn’t sure if she could hear somebody breathing, too. Was there somebody else in the room? How could there be, when her bedroom door was locked and her window was bolted? And yet she was sure that she could feel somebody’s presence. She sniffed, and she thought that she could smell something
burnt.

Very slowly and carefully, she leaned sideways until her fingertips found the button on the base of her bedside lamp. She stayed in the dark for a few seconds longer, still listening, and then she pressed it. Her bedroom was instantly lit up: her white wickerwork chair, with her smiling pink teddy bear sitting on it; her dressing table, crowded with creams and lipsticks and nail polish; her own watercolour painting, on the wall, of the blood-red autumn trees in Firestone Copse.

And standing by the door, with his hand reaching out for the handle, there was a man.

Dawn was too shocked even to gasp. The man was dressed entirely in black, with black hair and a black face, not African black but soot-black, although his eyes and his eyebrows and his mouth were ghostly white, as if he were a photographic negative. He was wearing a flat cap, although it looked frayed, or burnt into tatters, and his jacket was tattered, too.

He appeared to be grinning at her, or scowling. With his negative face, it was difficult for Dawn to tell which. He didn’t move. His hand remained two inches away from the door handle.

‘
Get out
,’ Dawn heard herself saying, although she said it so quietly that she couldn’t be sure if the man had heard her. He stayed where he was, motionless, staring at her with his black teeth bared. Then, with a harsh snortling sound, almost like a pig, he took a step toward her bed.

‘
Get out!
’ she screamed, but at that moment the bulb in her bedside lamp popped out, and she was left in overwhelming darkness. ‘
Get out!
Go away!
Don’t touch me!
’

She scrambled out of bed, although the bedcover twisted itself tightly around her left leg as if it were trying to stop her. She half-hopped, half-hobbled to the window and dragged back the curtains, so that her bedroom was lit up by the sodium lamp in the street outside. Panting with fear, she turned the key in the window lock and tried to pull up the window. It wouldn’t budge. The frame had been recently repainted and the window was stuck solid.

Dawn grasped both handles and tried again to heave the window up, although she knew she wasn’t strong enough. She was weeping with helplessness, tugging and tugging and gritting her teeth with effort.

She was ready to give up when she heard a door slam behind her – and then again, she heard jingle bells. She turned slowly around. The black-faced man had vanished. After a few seconds, the bells stopped, too.

‘Hallo?’ she said, although she knew how empty and ridiculous that sounded. ‘Hallo?’

She went across to the bedroom door and turned the handle. It was still locked, and the key was still in it. So the man couldn’t have gone out that way. She sniffed. She could still faintly smell something burnt, like paper, or wool, or horsehair.

She tilted her head sideways and looked quickly under the bed, even though it was a divan bed with less than a two-inch gap underneath it, and he would have to be as flat as a sheet of paper to have hidden himself there.

There was only one other place where the man could have concealed himself. He must have had been hiding in there all the time, and the thought made Dawn feel shivery and sick. She had come home at ten o’clock that evening, after working late at the restaurant, and she had taken a long shower and then sat naked in front of her dressing-table, with her hair in a towel-turban, filing and polishing her fingernails. Supposing he had been watching her?

She circled around the bed and approached the wardrobe. It was huge, and shiny, covered in light brown walnut veneer with darker streaks in it. It had a single door with an arched top that could almost have suited a chapel, with decorative Gothic beading around it. Dawn had always thought that the walnut veneer appeared to have the face of a werewolf.

The wardrobe had been given to Dawn last month by her Aunt Selina who owned an antiques business in Oxfordshire. All Dawn had really wanted was a simple Ikea flat-pack wardrobe, but Aunt Selina had insisted. ‘Let’s say that it’s a premature inheritance, for when I die. It’s worth a fortune, I promise you. It belonged to somebody quite famous, that’s what I was told. Cyril Connolly, or Charlie Chaplin. Somebody beginning with “C” anyway. I forget.’