The New Uncanny (4 page)

Could the imitator have gone away? Might they have fled as soon as he’d had the receptionist phone the room? He was convinced that he’d heard them imitating his subsequent protests, but if he was left alone at last, surely it was all that mattered. He listened to the hush until it let him breathe freely and slowed his heart, and then he reached to lay the pillow down. His knuckles bumped the headboard, and he heard an answering rap through the wall.

He might have grabbed the phone to demand another visit from the staff or, better, have dashed into the corridor to cause uproar outside 339, ensuring that the intruder couldn’t escape unseen this time. Instead he spoke, quite conversationally. ‘I know you’re there.’

‘I loathed her hair.’

He wanted to believe he’d misheard or imagined the voice, which was more muffled than ever. Even when Elizabeth’s hair had grown so thin her scalp showed through, he’d stroked it in the hope she would forget about its state. He hardly knew whom he was addressing as he objected ‘I never said that.’

‘I never said fat.’

‘That’s right, I didn’t.’

‘That’s right, I did it.’

‘No, not that either.’

‘Oh, what a liar.’

‘That’s just not true.’

‘That just stopped you.’

Ferguson had begun to feel trapped in an infantile game by someone who’d succumbed to their second childhood, if not worse. He could hardly wait for them to finish echoing or rather misrepresenting him before he responded – he was becoming desperate to think of an answer they couldn’t turn into a gibe. He might have imagined he was being tricked into selecting words his tormentor found it easy to mishear. Although he tried to take his time, the best he could produce was ‘What a lie.’

The indefinite voice didn’t bother imitating his pause. ‘Watched her die.’

While there was no denying this, he didn’t need to admit ‘That’s true.’

‘Not you.’

He was afraid his words might take him unawares. ‘All right,’ he mumbled, ‘let’s have silence.’

‘All right, let’s have slyness.’

He found his mouth with a hand, flattening his lips to keep in any further inadvertent speech. He ached to sleep, but suppose it released his voice? Even the notion of dozing made him feel threatened by a dream – an ill-defined image of somebody wakening in a dark place and struggling to communicate by whatever clumsy methods they still had. His mind recoiled, but staying awake was no refuge. Soon the voice in the next room began to speak.

He bore it mutely as long as he could, and then he tried to deny all it said. No, he hadn’t ever even slightly wanted her to die. No, he hadn’t grown tired of holding her hand as she lay in bed open-mouthed as a stranded fish. No, he hadn’t wished as her hand grew slack yet again that this time it had slackened for good. No, he hadn’t been disgusted by having to dab at her drool and deal with her other secretions. No, he hadn’t sneaked out of their room to pray for an end to it all. By now he was striving to blot out the voice, but it went inexorably on until he lost any sense of which of them was trying to contradict the other. ‘All right,’ he cried at last. ‘I did, but only for her sake.’

If this was echoed, it was by the flatness of the hotel room. He felt abruptly far too alone in the dark. When he switched on the light, the room looked as impersonal as a hospital ward – the kind of ward where Elizabeth hadn’t wanted to spend her last weeks. His scattered belongings were at best pathetic attempts to make some kind of claim for his presence. ‘I shouldn’t have come,’ he whispered. ‘There’s nothing here.’

He didn’t know who was supposed to overhear this, or perhaps he did. ‘It didn’t mean anything with those girls,’ he tried saying. ‘They wouldn’t have wanted me. Nobody would.’

He was hoping to be contradicted, but the only sounds were his – the creak of the bed as he shifted his weight, the intermittent urgency of his heartbeat. ‘You’re still there, aren’t you?’ he said louder. ‘Say you’re there. Say anything you like.’

His voice made the room sound as small and flatly featureless as a cell. So did his rapping and then knocking on the wall. It was too late to wonder what he’d done to earn the answering silence. If he caused much more noise the hotel staff might intervene again and drive away for good whoever had been there. He could still use the phone, and he keyed 339, though his fingers were so unsteady that their fat tips almost added extra numbers. He heard the other phone ring in the dark, and continue ringing and at last fall silent, because he’d laid the receiver to rest in its cold plastic trench. After that there was silence – for all the long night, silence.

I PICKED IT up by the head, which had grown clammy inside the bag, drawing to it a fair amount of fluff and dirt, and pushed the obscene tongue back into its mouth. Then I blew away the black fibres from its eyes and lifted out the stiff, furry body, attached to its neck with rusted nails. The paws had been retracted by means of a small rotating mechanism contained within the bag handle itself, and I detached the connecting wires from the small circuit pad drilled into its back. Forcing my hand through the hole in its rear, around which in recent years I had positioned a small number of razor blades, I felt within for the concealed wooden handle. Locating it, and ignoring the pain along my forearm, I swerved the head slowly left and right, supporting the main body with my free hand while holding it up against my grubby mirror.

I’d come home to bury it, which was as good a place as any, despite my growing dislike of the mild southern winters. Yet, having stepped from the train carriage earlier that afternoon and sensed, by association I presume, the stretch of abandoned line passing close behind my old primary school, up towards the beach and the marshes beyond, I’d elected to burn it instead; on one of Christie’s stupid bonfires, if he was still up to building them.

Despite my plans, I’d felt inclined to unveil it mid-journey and hold what was left up against the compartment window as we passed through stations; my own head concealed, naturally. But I’d thought better of that; I dare say rightly. In any case the bag concealing it drew inevitable attention when, entering the underpass on my way back to the house, one of the legs shot out, startling two small boys who were attempting to hurry past. Years of adjustments to the inner mechanism had enabled the puppet’s limbs to extend outward at alarming speeds, so that when operated in the presence of suggestible onlookers, it looked as though the legs of some demonic creature, coarse and furred, had darted swiftly from an unseen crevice. Then, as happened rather beautifully on this occasion, the perturbed child, or children, more often than not would catch sight of a second, larger hole, carefully positioned at the rear of the bag to capture peripheral vision, and glimpse, within, its eye following them home. The effect, I am pleased to say, was rather stunning, yet, like any great performance, had taken me years of practice to perfect.

Christie had not been at home when I’d arrived, although as usual the front door had been left unlocked and the kitchen table crammed with large piles of rubbish awaiting destruction. Stacked among the old comics and clothes I’d found the familiar contents of my bedroom drawer, along with an old tube of my skin cream and a skull fragment I’d once dug up at the beach. Having retrieved these, I’d drunk a large measure of his whiskey, tried the lounge door, which, unsurprisingly, was locked, then taken my bag up to the bedroom. The walls had been re-papered again with spare rolls from the loft, familiar cartoon faces from either my sixth or seventh year. The boards were still damp, the floor slimy, and a strong odour of paste hung heavily in the cramped room. I’d opened a window – the weather was indeed horribly mild – and switched the overhead bulb off, favouring darkness for what I was about to do.

Although the body was that of a dog, Possum’s head was made of wax and shaped like a human’s, and I could not have wished for a more convincing likeness. Capturing even my old acne scars, yet with hair less neat and a gaunt quality reminiscent of the physical state I had embodied when the mould was made, the eyes were its greatest feature. Belonging to what had once been a bull terrier, both were former lab specimens, heavily diseased, preserved together for years in an old jar of formaldehyde. Several minor adjustments and refinements made by a past colleague, a long-dead teacher of science to whom my work had strangely appealed, had turned them into hard, bright, unique-looking decorations for Possum’s face. Deceptively cloudy until caught in the correct light, these two vaguely transparent orbs were the key to Possum’s success, and, despite patent similarities in our appearance, evidence of his own distinct personality.

My most recent addition to his look, nevertheless, had proved extremely effective. Having attached coloured flypaper to the tongue, which, like the body, was canine in origin, over the previous summer the mouth had accrued a large cluster of dead insects that dropped abruptly into view whenever the puppet licked or swallowed, usually scattering one or two dried bluebottles into my spellbound and horrified audience. A tiny battery-powered mechanism in the concealed handle allowed me to control rudimentary facial movements, although I had never once bothered learning how to throw my voice. Possum’s wide-eyed, open-mouthed stare penetrated well enough during his sudden appearances, without the need of vocal embellishment. Only ever revealing him at points in my plays when his presence was a complete surprise, his unnerving silence merely served to exacerbate his subsequent chaotic behaviour. Whether I had him devouring other characters without warning, perhaps even my hero or heroine, bursting through concealed walls or destroying with unrestrained violence my neat but tedious endings, Possum’s soundless, sudden presence held sway over my young audiences like no other puppet I’d ever built. He was a rule unto himself, and now he was beginning to do things I couldn’t allow.

I leaned closer toward the mirror, reflecting on my most recent performance, and watched the sinking sun darken Possum’s face with shadow. I observed how his head continued to stir subtly of its own accord as my body’s natural rhythms gradually made their way into his, and I tried in vain to freeze his movements. Then, before it was fully dark, I took Possum outside.

There was no sign of frost, but the earth was suitably wet. I dropped him in the stagnant water tank behind the old shed, where he couldn’t get out, and threw mud and stones at him from my vantage point at the rim. I pulled faces at him until I could no longer see anything below me, then went back into the house. I considered waiting up for Christie’s return, but instead went straight to bed.

I awoke to find it beside me, the long tongue hanging out like a vulgar child’s. The head had been turned to face me in my sleep, and its eyes in the dawn light were a pale, milky yellow. As I sat up to scratch the tiny bites covering my legs and ankles, several dry houseflies dropped from the pillow onto my bed sheet. Later I found a dead wasp tucked inside my pyjama pocket. I pushed Possum to the floor, realising that his head had been wiped clean and his body scrubbed. Sensing that the parlour games had begun, I dressed quickly. I could hear Christie clattering about in the kitchen below, and I took the puppet with me when I went downstairs.

‘Good morning and thank you,’ I said, dumping Possum on the cluttered table. ‘Now please burn all your hard work.’

Christie, moving slowly with the aid of a stick, handed me a mug of strong tea and the ancient biscuit tin.

‘Good morning,’ he said, smiling under his thick, nicotine-stained beard. ‘The head is expertly made.’

‘As are the legs,’ I said, sipping my drink. ‘A perfect job.’

‘You wired them in?’ he asked.

I looked out at the garden. A huge bonfire had been piled ready.

‘I want it burned,’ I said. ‘That’s why I threw it out. You wasted your whole night. Now that’s funny.’

Christie laughed, which made me laugh.

‘I’m going for a walk,’ I added. ‘What are you doing?’

The old man hobbled slowly across the room, into the hallway.

‘I’m going to bed,’ he said, and began climbing the stairs. I waited until he was halfway up, then called out loudly.

‘Wasn’t your best.’

His prolonged silence I interpreted as a subtle joke, and went out into the garden. I inspected Christie’s mammoth bonfire, rummaging through the piles of ragged clothes and compost until I located some more of my old possessions buried within. I wasn’t upset to see my gloves there, but I rescued an old watch my father had given me on my eighth birthday and decided that I’d try and fix it. Deep within the piled rubbish was the inevitable road-kill, including a mangled fox. I sensed that this was the second of Christie’s seasonal parlour games and dragged it out by its tail. As I passed back through the house on my way to the front door I slung it halfway up the stairs, hoping that Christie might fall when he bent down to remove it. Then I zipped Possum up in my black bag and walked to the school.

I didn’t stop once along the lane, although I saw enough to know that my old classroom, the scene of Christie’s little stunt, had long since disappeared. An extension to the central building almost blocked my view of the playground, where the brick wall, over which I’d escaped, had been painted over with a large smiling face. I passed the second of two remote mobile classrooms, decorated with nativity displays, and continued on towards the familiar stone steps leading down to the abandoned station. I followed these onto the empty platform, examining the shelter on the opposite side of the track. Despite an abundance of thick spray-paint and several smashed windows, the place was abandoned. I stepped down quietly onto the disused line. The metal tracks had been ripped up long before I was born, and the banks on each side of the route, beyond the declining platform, were heavily over-grown. The ancient trail turned sharply to the left before reaching a small, concealed footpath that snaked off into the trees. I brushed aside overhanging branches as I forced my way along it, pausing several times to pinpoint exactly where I’d once built my secret camp. Further along I found the old tree I’d climbed to impress friends, and the small slope we’d raced down. Beyond these, hidden beneath the thickest trees, was the place I was looking for.