Darker Terrors Page 15

  ‘No.’

  ‘Let me see that again,’ she said. He passed the paper to her. ‘This is so weird. I mean, it’s not funny, and it’s not even true.’

  Typed upon the paper was a brief description of the previous two years for Gordon and Belinda. It had not been a good two years, according to the typed sheet. Six months after they were married Belinda had been bitten in the cheek by a Pekingese, so badly that the cheek needed to be stitched back together. It had left a nasty scar. Worse than that, nerves had been damaged, and she had begun to drink, perhaps to numb the pain. She suspected that Gordon was revolted by her face, while the new baby, it said, was a desperate attempt to glue the couple together.

  ‘Why would they say this?’ she asked.

  ‘They?’

  ‘Whoever wrote this horrid thing.’ She ran a finger across her cheek: it was unblemished and unmarked. She was a very beautiful young woman, although she looked tired and fragile now.

  ‘How do you know it’s a they?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, transferring the baby to her left breast. ‘It seems a sort of they-ish thing to do. To write that and to swap it for the old one and to wait until one of us read it … Come on, little Melanie, there you go, that’s such a fine girl …’

  ‘Shall I throw it away?’

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know. I think …’ She stroked the baby’s forehead. ‘Hold on to it,’ she said. ‘We might need it for evidence. I wonder if it was something Al organised.’ Al was Gordon’s youngest brother.

  Gordon put the paper back into the envelope, and he put the envelope back into the box-file, which was pushed under the bed and, more or less, forgotten.

  Neither of them got much sleep for the next few months, what with the nightly feeds and the continual crying, for Melanie was a colicky baby. The box-file stayed under the bed. And then Gordon was offered a job in Preston, several hundred miles north, and since Belinda was on leave from her job and had no immediate plans to go back to work, she found the idea rather attractive. So they moved.

  They found a terraced house in a cobbled street, high and old and deep. Belinda filled in from time to time at a local vet’s, seeing small animals and house pets. When Melanie was eighteen months old Belinda gave birth to a son, whom they called Kevin, after Gordon’s late grandfather.

  Gordon was made a full partner in the firm of architects. When Kevin began to go to kindergarten, Belinda went back to work.

  The box-file was never lost. It was in one of the spare rooms at the top of the house, beneath a teetering pile of copies of the Architects’ Journal and The Architectural Review. Belinda thought about the box-file, and what it contained, from time to time, and, one night when Gordon was in Scotland overnight consulting on the remodelling of an ancestral home, she did more than think.

  Both of the children were asleep. Belinda went up the stairs into the undecorated part of the house. She moved the magazines and opened the box, which (where it had not been covered by magazines) was thick with two years of undis­turbed dust. The envelope still said Gordon and Belinda’s Marriage on it, and Belinda honestly did not know if it had ever said anything else.

  She took out the paper from the envelope, and she read it. And then she put it away, and sat there, at the top of the house, feeling shaken and sick.

  According to the neatly-typed message, Kevin, her second child, had not been born; the baby had been miscarried at five months. Since then Belinda had been suffering from frequent attacks of bleak, black depression. Gordon was home rarely, it said, because he was conducting a rather miserable affair with the senior partner in his company, a striking but nervous woman ten years his senior. Belinda was drinking more, and affecting high collars and scarves, to hide the spider-web scar upon her cheek. She and Gordon spoke little, except to argue the small and petty arguments of those who fear the big arguments, knowing that the only things that were left to be said were too huge to be said without destroying both their lives.

  Belinda said nothing about the latest version of Gordon and Belinda’s Marriage to Gordon. However, he read it himself, or something quite like it, several months later, when Belinda’s mother fell ill and Belinda went south for a week to help look after her.

  On the sheet of paper that Gordon took out of the envelope was a portrait of a marriage similar to the one that Belinda had read, although, at present, his affair with his boss had ended badly, and his job was now in peril.

  Gordon rather liked his boss, but could not imagine himself ever becoming romantically involved with her. He was enjoy­ing his job, although he wanted something that would chal­lenge him more than it did.

  Belinda’s mother improved, and Belinda returned within the week. Her husband and children were relieved and delighted to see her come home.

  It was Christmas Eve before Gordon spoke to Belinda about the envelope.

  ‘You’ve looked at it too, haven’t you?’ They had crept into the children’s bedrooms earlier that evening and filled the hanging Christmas stockings. Gordon had felt euphoric as he had walked through the house, as he stood beside his chil­dren’s beds, but it was a euphoria tinged with a profound sorrow: the knowledge that such moments of complete hap­piness could not last; that one could not stop Time.

  Belinda knew what he was talking about. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’ve read it.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it’s a joke any more. Not even a sick joke.’

  ‘Mm,’ he said. ‘Then what is it?’

  They sat in the living room at the front of the house with the lights dimmed, and the log burning on the bed of coals cast flickering orange and yellow light about the room.

  ‘I think it really is a wedding present,’ she told him. ‘It’s the marriage that we aren’t having. The bad things are happening there on the page, not here, in our lives. Instead of living it, we are reading it, knowing it could have gone that way and also that it never did.’

  ‘You’re saying it’s magic, then?’ He would not have said it aloud, but it was Christmas Eve, and the lights were down.

  ‘I don’t believe in magic,’ she said, flatly. ‘It’s a wedding present. And I think we should make sure it’s kept safe.’

  On Boxing Day she moved the envelope from the box-file to her jewellery drawer, which she kept locked, where it lay flat beneath her necklaces and rings, her bracelets and her brooches.

  Spring became summer. Winter became spring.

  Gordon was exhausted: by day he worked for clients, designing, and liaising with builders and contractors; by night he would sit up late, working for his own self, designing museums and galleries and public buildings for competitions. Sometimes his designs received honourable mentions and were reproduced in architectural journals.

  Belinda was doing more large animal work, which she enjoyed, visiting farmers and inspecting and treating horses, sheep and cows. Sometimes she would bring the children with her on her rounds.

  Her mobile phone rang when she was in a paddock trying to examine a pregnant goat who had, it turned out, no desire to be caught, let alone examined. She retired from the battle, leaving the goat glaring at her from across the field, and thumbed the phone open. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Guess what?’

  ‘Hello darling. Um. You’ve won the lottery?’

  ‘Nope. Close, though. My design for the British Heritage Museum has made the shortlist. I’m up against some pretty stiff contenders, though. But I’m on the shortlist.’

  ‘That’s wonderful!’

  ‘I’ve spoken to Mrs Fulbright and she’s going to have Sonja baby-sit for us tonight. We’re celebrating.’

  ‘Terrific. Love you,’ she said. ‘Now got to get back to the goat.’

  They drank too much champagne over a fine celebratory meal. That night in their bedroom as Belinda removed her earrings, she said, ‘Shall we see what the Wedding Present says?’

  He looked at her gravely from the bed. He was o
nly wearing his socks. ‘No, I don’t think so. It’s a special night. Why spoil it?’

  She placed her earrings in her jewellery drawer and locked it. Then she removed her stockings. ‘I suppose you’re right. I can imagine what it says, anyway. I’m drunk and depressed and you’re a miserable loser. And meanwhile we’re … well, actually I am a bit tiddly, but that’s not what I mean. It just sits there at the bottom of the drawer, like the portrait in the attic in The Picture of Dorian Gray.’

  ‘“And it was only by his rings that they knew him.” Yes. I remember. We read it in school.’

  ‘That’s really what I’m scared of,’ she said, pulling on a cotton nightdress. ‘That the thing on that paper is the real portrait of our marriage at present, and what we’ve got now is just a pretty picture. That it’s real and we’re not. I mean,’ she was speaking intently now, with the gravity of the slightly drunk, ‘don’t you ever think that it’s too good to be true?’

  He nodded. ‘Sometimes. Tonight, certainly.’

  She shivered. ‘Maybe really I am a drunk with a dog-bite on my cheek, and you fuck anything that moves and Kevin was never born and – and all that other horrible stuff.’

  He stood up, walked over to her, put his arms around her. ‘But it isn’t true,’ he pointed out. ‘This is real. You’re real. I’m real. That wedding thing is just a story. It’s just words.’ And he kissed her, and held her tightly, and little more was said that night.

  It was a long six months before Gordon’s design for the British Heritage Museum was announced as the winner, although it was derided in The Times as being too ‘aggressively modern’ and in various architectural journals as being too old-fashioned, and it was described by one of the judges, in an interview in the Sunday Telegraph, as ‘a bit of a compromise candidate – everybody’s second choice’.

  They moved to London, letting their house in Preston to an artist and his family, for Belinda would not let Gordon sell it. Gordon worked intensively, happily, on the museum project. Kevin was six and Melanie was eight. Melanie found London intimidating, but Kevin loved it. Both of the children were initially distressed to have lost their friends and their school. Belinda found a part-time job at a small animal clinic in Camden, working three afternoons a week. She missed her cows.

  Days in London became months and then years, and, despite occasional budgetary setbacks, Gordon was increas­ingly excited. The day approached when the first ground would be broken for the museum.

  One night Belinda woke in the small hours, and she stared at her sleeping husband in the sodium yellow illumination of the street-lamp outside their bedroom window. His hairline was receding, and the hair at the back was thinning. Belinda wondered what it would be like when she was actually married to a bald man. She decided it would be much the same as it always had been. Mostly happy. Mostly good.

  She wondered what was happening to the them in the envelope. She could feel its presence, dry and brooding, in the corner of their bedroom, safely locked away from all harm. She felt, suddenly, sorry for the Belinda and Gordon trapped in the envelope on their piece of paper, hating each other and everything else.

  Gordon began to snore. She kissed him, gently, on the cheek, and said, ‘Shhh.’ He stirred and was quiet, but did not wake. She snuggled against him and soon fell back into sleep herself.

  After lunch the following day, while in conversation with an importer of Tuscan marble, Gordon looked surprised, and reached a hand up to his chest. He said, ‘I’m frightfully sorry about this,’ and then his knees gave way, and he fell to the floor. They called an ambulance, but Gordon was dead when it arrived. He was thirty-six years old.

  At the inquest the coroner announced that the autopsy showed Gordon’s heart to have been congenitally weak. It could have gone at any time.

  For the first three days after his death, Belinda felt nothing, a profound and awful nothing. She comforted the children, she spoke to her friends and to Gordon’s friends, to her family and to Gordon’s family, accepting their condolences gracefully and gently, as one accepts unasked-for gifts. She would listen to other people cry for Gordon, which she still had not done. She would say all the right things, and she would feel nothing at all.

  Melanie, who was eleven, seemed to be taking it well. Kevin abandoned his books and computer games, and sat in his bedroom, staring out of the window, not wanting to talk.

  The day after the funeral her parents went back to the countryside and they took both the children with them. Belinda refused to leave London. There was, she said, too much to do.

  On the fourth day after the funeral she was making the double bed that they had shared when she began to cry, and the sobs ripped through her in huge, ugly spasms of grief, and tears fell from her face onto the bedspread and clear snot streamed from her nose, and she sat down on the floor suddenly, like a marionette whose strings have been cut, and she cried for the best part of an hour, for she knew that she would never see him again.

  She wiped her face. Then she unlocked her jewellery drawer and pulled out the envelope. She opened it and pulled out the cream-coloured sheet of paper, and ran her eyes over the neatly-typed words. The Belinda on the paper had crashed their car while drunk, and was about to lose her driving licence. She and Gordon had not spoken for days. He had lost his job, almost eighteen months earlier, and now spent most of his days sitting around their house in Salford. Belinda’s job brought in what money they had. Melanie was out of control: Belinda, cleaning Melanie’s bedroom, had found a cache of five and ten pound notes. Melanie had offered no explanation for how an eleven-year-old girl had come by the money, had just retreated into her room and glared at them, tight-lipped, when quizzed. Neither Gordon nor Belinda had investigated further, scared of what they might have discovered. The house in Salford was dingy and damp, such that the plaster was coming away from the ceiling in huge, crumbling chunks, and all three of them had devel­oped nasty, bronchial coughs.

  Belinda felt sorry for them.

  She put the paper back in the envelope. She wondered what it would be like to hate Gordon, to have him hate her. She wondered what it would be like not to have Kevin in her life, not to see his drawings of aeroplanes or hear his magnif­icently tuneless renditions of popular songs. She wondered where Melanie – the other Melanie, not her Melanie but the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God Melanie – could have got that money from, and was relieved that her own Melanie seemed to have few interests beyond ballet and Enid Blyton books.

  She missed Gordon so much it felt like something sharp being hammered into her chest, a spike, perhaps, or an icicle, made of cold and loneliness and the knowledge that she would never see him again in this world.

  Then she took the envelope downstairs to the lounge, where the coal fire was burning in the grate, because Gordon had loved open fires. He said that a fire gave a room life. She disliked coal fires, but she had lit it this evening out of routine and out of habit, and because not lighting it would have meant admitting to herself, on some absolute level, that he was never coming home.

  Belinda stared into the fire for some time, thinking about what she had in her life, and what she had given up; and whether it would be worse to love someone who was no longer there, or not to love someone who was.

  And then, at the end, almost casually, she tossed the envelope onto the coals, and she watched it curl and blacken and catch, watched the yellow flames dancing amidst the blue.

  Soon, the Wedding Present was nothing but black flakes of ash which danced on the updraughts and were carried away, like a child’s letter to Santa Claus, up the chimney and off into the night.

  Belinda sat back in her chair, and closed her eyes, and waited for the scar to blossom on her cheek.

  Neil Gaiman is credited with being one of the creators of modern comics, as well as an author whose work crosses genres and reaches audiences of all ages. He is listed in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as one of the top ten living post-modern writers, and is a prolific creator of wo
rks of prose, poetry, film, journalism, comics, song lyrics, and drama. ‘I had the idea for “The Wedding Present” several years before I wrote it,’ Gaiman recalls. ‘Some friends were getting married, and I thought “wouldn’t it be an interesting thing to give them a short story as a present?” Then I went out and bought them a toaster instead, because I knew what the story would be about, and suspected that it might not be the most welcome of wedding gifts. Each time I was invited to a wedding I’d wonder if finally the bride and groom would be right for this story, and, on reflection, I would get them a toaster, or a coffee-maker, or towels. Years passed, and the story remained unwritten. Then I began writing the Introduction to my short fiction collection, Smoke & Mirrors. In discussing where the stories came from, I used as an example that unwritten story idea. And then I thought, “Why don’t I write it now?” I had imagined it would be very short and fable-like, but it grew in the telling as the people came to life, and took over. My computer was off being repaired that week, so this was written in fountain pen in a blank notebook.’

  Family History

  STEPHEN BAXTER

  THE WALL RAN to the left of the road. It was a long, hummocky earthwork, like a line of beasts buried in the intense green that blanketed the ground. After two thousand years the mortar had crumbled to dust, and unruly life sprouted from the stones’ every frost-cracked crevice. The Wall itself was flanked by partially filled ditchwork, and punctuated by the remains of turrets and milecastles and forts; the surviving buildings were reduced to their foundations, which were moulded into eerie stone ripples by centuries of subsidence.

  The Wall marched for seven hundred miles, across the neck of the country, from Carlisle to Newcastle.

  Beyond the Wall there was only moorland waste: rowan trees clinging to rock outcrops, scattered farmsteads, knots of cattle diminished by the sweep of the landscape. The cattle seemed to glare, challenging, into Valler’s warm BMW. As if some remnant of their ancient wildness had yet to be bred out of them.