Sammy had been right—it was the face of his dead grandmother.
That was when the nightmare really began. The frightened child within me and the adult George Ferguson both agreed they had stumbled on something monstrous, and that adrenaline-boosted flight was called for, yet—as in a nightmare—I was unable to do anything but move closer to the focus of horror. I stared at the old woman in dread. Her rawboned face, the lump beneath one ear, the very way she held her magazine—all these told me I was looking at May’s mother, Mrs. Martha Cummins, who had died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage more than two weeks earlier, and who was buried in the family plot.
Of its own accord, my right hand went snaking into the triangular opening and tapped the dusty glass. It was a timid gesture and none of the people within responded to the faint sound, but a second later one of the men raised his head briefly as he turned a page, and I recognised him. Joe Bryant, the caretaker at Sammy’s school. He had died a year ago of a heart attack.
Explanation? I couldn’t conceive one, but I had to speak to the woman who appeared to be May’s mother.
I turned away from the window and went to the black rectangle of the house’s rear door. It was locked in the normal way and further secured by a bolted-on padlock. A slick moisture on its working parts told me the padlock was in good condition. I moved further along and tried another smaller window in what could have been the kitchen. It too was boarded up, but when I pulled experimentally at the short planks the whole frame moved slightly with a pulpy sound. A more determined tug brought the entire metal window frame clear of its surround of rotting wood, creating a dark opening. The operation was noisier than I had expected, but the house remained still and I set the window down against the wall.
Part of my mind was screaming its dismay, but I used the window frame as a ladder and climbed through on to a greasy complicated surface which proved to be the top of an old-fashioned gas cooker. My cigarette lighter shed silver sparks as I flicked it on. Its transparent blue shoot of flame cast virtually no light, so I tore pages from my notebook and lit them. The kitchen was a shambles, and obviously not in use—a fact which, had I thought about it, would have increased my sense of alarm. A short corridor led from it in the general direction of the lighted room. Burning more pages, I went towards the room, freezing each time a bare floorboard groaned or a loose strip of wallpaper brushed my shoulder, and soon was able to discern a gleam of light coming from below a door. I gripped the handle firmly and, afraid to hesitate, flung the open door. The old people in the big armchairs turned their pink, lined faces towards mine. Mrs. Cummins stared at me, face lengthening with what could have been recognition or shock.
“It’s George,” I heard myself say in the distance. “What’s happening here?”
She stood up and her lips moved. “Nigi olon prittle o czanig sovisess!” On the final word the others jumped to their feet with strangely lithe movements.
“Mrs. Cummins?” I said. “Mr. Bryant?”
The old people set their magazines down, came towards the door and I saw that their feet were bare. I backed out into the corridor, shaking my head apologetically, then turned to run. Could I get out through the small kitchen window quickly enough? A hand clawed down my back. I beat it off and ran in the direction opposite to the kitchen, guided by the light spilling from the room behind me. A door loomed up on my left. I burst through into pitch darkness, slammed it, miraculously found a key in the lock and twisted it. The door quivered as something heavy thudded against the wood from the other side, and a woman’s voice began an unnerving wail—thin, high, anxious.
I groped for the light switch and turned it on, but nothing happened. Afraid to take a step forward, I stared into the blackness that pressed against my face, gradually becoming aware of a faint soupy odour and a feeling of warmth. I guessed I was in a room at the front of the house and might be able to break out if only I could find a window. The wallpaper beside the switch had felt loose. I gripped a free edge, pulled off a huge swathe and rolled it into the shape of a torch while the hammering on the door grew more frantic. The blue cone of flame from my cigarette lighter ignited the dry paper immediately. I held the torch high and got a flickering view of a large square room, a bank of electronic equipment along one wall, and a waist-high tank which occupied most of the floor space. The sweet soup smell appeared to be coming from the dark liquid in the tank. I looked into it and saw a half-submerged thing floating face upwards. It was about the size of a seven-year-old boy and the dissolving, jellied features had a resemblance to …
No!
I screamed and threw the flaming torch from me, seeking my former state of blindness. The torch landed close to a wall and trailing streamers of wallpaper caught alight. I ran around the tank to a window, wadded its mouldering drapes and smashed the glass outwards against the boards. The planking resisted the onslaught of my feet and fists for what seemed an eternity, then I was out in the cool fresh air and running, barely feeling the ground below my feet, swept along by the dark winds of night.
When I finally looked back, blocks away, the sky above the old Guthrie place was already stained, red, and clouds of angry sparks wheeled and wavered in the ascending smoke.
How does one assimilate an experience like that? There were some aspects of the nightmare which my mind was completely unable to handle as I walked homewards, accompanied by the sound of distant fire sirens. There was, for example, the hard fact that I had started a fire in which at that very instant a group of old people could be perishing—but, somehow, I felt no guilt. In its place was a conviction that it the blaze hadn’t begun by accident I would have been entitled, obliged, to start one to rid the world of something which hadn’t any right to exist. There was no element of the religious in my thinking, because the final horror in the house’s front room had dispelled the aura of the supernatural surrounding the previous events.
I had seen an array of electronic equipment—unfamiliar in type, but unmistakable—and I had seen a thing floating in a tank of heated organic-smelling fluid, a thing which resembled …
No ! Madness lay along that avenue of thought. Insupportable pain.
What else had I stumbled across? Granny Cummins was dead—but she had been sitting in the back room of a disused house, and had spoken in a tongue unlike any language I’d ever heard. Joe Bryant was dead, for a year, yet he too had been sitting under that naked bulb. My son was seriously ill in hospital, and yet …
No!
Retreating from monstrosities as yet unguessed, my mind produced an image of Dr. Pitman. He had attended Granny Cummins. He had, I was almost certain, been the Bryant’s family doctor. He had attended Sammy that morning. He had been in my home the previous day—perhaps when Sammy had come in and spoke of seeing people in the old Guthrie place. My mind then threw up another image—that of the long-barrelled .22 target pistol lying in a drawer in my den. I began to walk more quickly.
On reaching home the first impression was that May had gone out, but when I went in she was sitting in exactly the same place in the darkness of the lounge. I glanced at my watch and discovered that, incredibly, only forty minutes had passed since I had gone out. That was all the time it had taken for reality to rot and dissolve.
“May?” I spoke from the doorway. “Did the clinic call?”
A long pause. “No.”
“Don’t you want the light on?”