The Dark Page 6

  You see such things on a screen, a book jacket, on the bloody Internet for God’s sake, such images of Gothic horror, these evocations of dynamic terror. It doesn’t prepare you for the actual thing.

  There she was. And she was worse than anything anyone could ever physically mock up, or imagine.

  Her face was white, blue-white, and marked by the fringe of blood that was still unraveling down her right cheek, and yet never reaching her already bloodstained gown or the stairs. Her forehead was red and also bruised black, and quills of bone stood out of her hair (like a Spanish comb), which was otherwise clotted scarlet with blood. Her face had features, all sunken in and withered. It was a fallen monkey’s face, yet, too, like a mask—and in the place where her eyes had once been were only two bruised black sockets of nothing, each secured in her head by a shining silver pin.

  All I wanted was to run. It was the sum of my ambitions. And I couldn’t do it. Could not move.

  And so Sabia Trente came down the stair and right up to me, and I smelled her stink worse than dead rats or rotting bananas, and then she passed directly through me, like a dank, dust-laden wind.

  Perhaps I died for a split second when that happened. Perhaps my heart stopped. I don’t know, can’t remember.

  It was just that suddenly she was past me, and I was still rooted there, watching her glide, as if she moved on ice skates over a rink, through the drawing-room door.

  Darkness had come, premature night. Once before I’d seen this creature move across the room, seen her in the window. Now I saw her from the back. Saw her so clearly, solidly, even the creases of her dress and the bones of her corset under it.

  And I saw my Aunt Jennifer, too, sprawled on a brocade sofa, screaming now, shrieking, and trying to bury her head in the cushions.

  On which cue, Sabia Trente was raising up high a kind of stick, an iron thing like a wand with a strange, glowing tip—she hadn’t had it a moment ago—and I knew it was the poker from a fire that had been out for more than a century.

  She was going to return the compliment of the cloven brain-case, not on her murderous, no longer available Aunt Eugenia, but on the skull of Jennifer.

  I told you from the start, I don’t believe in ghosts. I don’t. I flatly refuse to. If I did, I think I would lose my mind for sure and for real and for good. And so, in those moments that lingered between Jennifer and me and the gates of Hell, I saw it all, what had truly happened, and why this thing was here, and what it was, and what to do about it.

  I was numb, had no feeling in my body, didn’t really seem to be in it, except perhaps sitting tiny and high up behind my own eyes, like a lone passenger left on a train hurtling driverless to destruction.

  For the train—me, driverless—was all at once rushing forward. It crashed headlong into the back of the stationary Sabia—I felt her—and I tore her apart with my hands, screaming myself now, over and over, “Go away! Get lost! Piss off—you don’t exist!”

  And she didn’t exist. She was only air, and then she and her poker were gone. And at the head of the stairs, the clock became a black cloud and then was gone, too, back to its place in reality along the corridor.

  I stood over Jennifer and I bawled at her now, “You made it up, didn’t you, you fucking old bitch—didn’t you?”

  She whimpered. I struck her across the head. Not so hard. It was much better than a poker would have been. Then I pulled her to a sitting position and shouted abuse at her until she spoke. “I didn’t … it was true … or at least in the book. Only not … not—”

  “Not what, you cow?”

  “Not that clock. Not that one.”

  SHE HAD WANTED to pay me out for all my seven-, nine-, and twenty-year-old transgressions against her. So she never quite lost track of me, and when the company folded, she was ready.

  Yes, I was to have been her skivvy. For I must be punished. And muddled as Jennifer had become, she had invested in the invented memory of me as a sensitive, nervy girl, ready to be dominated and scared witless by a contrived ghost story.

  Although, as she’d said, the story was true—at least in a bona fide book that carried the tale of the Trente murder and the haunted French clock. Even the piece about Shelley Terrence, though he had never lived in Jennifer’s house—all these events had gone on somewhere else. For that reason, she had had to copy out all the passages. To photocopy the printed text would have revealed too much and given the game away.

  She had read the story one idle afternoon and become obsessed enough to weave it into her retribution for me. And so mad, mad Aunt Jennifer, who wouldn’t even pay to have her downstairs telephone repaired, forked out quite a sum to gain a rather poor reproduction of the Trente clock. This copy was then placed—unnailed—in the corridor by my elected bedroom. She had even arranged for its random striking.

  Well, she was off her head. And her loathing insanity and my allergic anger seem to have been enough. For, yes, I take part of the blame. Without my side of it, I don’t think it would have happened, she couldn’t have done it on her own.

  And what did happen?

  Neither Jennifer nor I had ever had a child—in my case, from choice, in hers, I don’t know. But we made a type of child between us, an offspring in that word’s purest and most dreadful sense. For we fashioned the ghost of Sabia Trente between us, brought it to its unlife, and made it run. If simply that, our projected hating energy would have been sufficient to make the vengeful poker and its blow fatal—I’ve got no idea. Maybe. After all, I stopped it. I must have thought so then.

  But, too, perhaps Jennifer and I merely hallucinated—visions of similar aspect experienced by more than one person at once aren’t uncommon in the annals of the supernatural or science.

  Whatever, as I said, this wasn’t a ghost story, although it has a ghost.

  And what happened afterward? Soon told. She did a lot of cringing and crying her dry, hard tears. But now I managed to make it clear I wouldn’t stay another hour in her house.

  I waited outside for the taxi, which took me away fast, so I just caught the 9:35 train to London. The phone? I hardly believe it myself—she, the arch-reviler of modernity, had a weeny little mobile tucked in her handbag.

  As I was going out of her door, she came scurrying at me from the now thick-lit shadows of the house and pushed a paper bag into my hand. I thought it probably contained some stale sandwiches to give me indigestion, or some already half-eaten sweets. I wanted to slap it to the ground, but something made me take it. Otherwise, we parted without a touch, or another word. I didn’t look at the paper bag until the train was drawing into London and I was going to throw it away. Inside was a hundred pounds in tens and a check for three thousand pounds. This was so obscene I felt nauseous. Or maybe that was only hunger, and the shock from everything else. I didn’t throw up. I did cash and spend the money. And what does that make me?

  I’M WONDERING, THOUGH, if you wonder … if, despite the clock’s being only a copy, yet somehow it did draw back the vengeance-seeking Sabia’s dead remnant, and only my vaunted stupidity drove her off. No. However, it’s your choice. Somebody said it isn’t the dead you need to fear, but the living. Too damn right.

  Since that night, I’ve heard nothing more from Jennifer. Years have elapsed. Now and then I ask myself what she does, alone, when it gets dark in that house.

  AFTERWORD

  One of my most favorite and therefore most feared ghost stories is by the wonderful M. R. James. I first saw “The Ash Tree” on TV, and it scared me stupid, as most of his tales do—there is an aching and remorseless chill to his stories I’ve found nowhere else, a sense of the sheer ease in falling into the trap, and the implacability of the Inescapable. I subsequently read the story many times. It still horrifies me. The ash tree itself, filled by Something Unspeakable, and all too able to destroy, broods on the tale. Its shadow falls across the pages, and the reader’s inner eye.

  TERRY DowLING was born in 1947 in Sydney, Australia, and always expec
ted that his creative efforts would be directed into music and songwriting. After time as a soldier and primary-school teacher, he completed two degrees and spent eight years performing his songs on Mr Squiggle & Friends, one of the world’s longest-running children’s television shows. He made his first professional sale in 1982 and continues to be one of Australia’s most respected and internationally acclaimed writers of science fiction, dark fantasy, and horror. In addition to editing Mortal Fire: Best Australian SF and The Essential Ellison, Dowling is the author of the linked collections Rynosseros, Blue Tyson, Twilight Beach, and Wormwood, and his short fiction is collected in The Man Who Lost Red, An Intimate Knowledge of the Night, Antique Futures: The Best of Terry Dowling, and Blackwater Days. His work has appeared in numerous “Best of” compilations and he has won many awards for his storytelling, the most recent being the Grand Prix at Utopiales in France for his computer game adventure, Schizm: Mysterious Journey.

  ONE THING ABOUT THE NIGHT

  TERRY DOWLING

  LIKE THE GOOD friend he was, Paul Vickrey had kept to our first rule. He’d told me nothing about the Janss place, hadn’t dared mention that name in his e-mail, but what precious few words there were brought me halfway around the world nineteen hours after it reached me.

  Access to hexagonal prime natural.

  Owner missing. Come soonest.

  Suitably vague, appropriately cautious in these spying, prying, hacker-cracker times, “prime natural” would have been enough to do it. But hexagonal! Paul had seen this six-sided mirror room firsthand, had verified as far as anyone reasonably could that it was probably someone’s personal, private, secret creation, and not the work of fakers, frauds, or proven charlatans muddying the waters, salting the lode, exploiting both would-be experts and the gullible.

  The complete professional, Paul had even arranged for an independent observer for us. Connie Peake stood with Paul Vickrey and me in the windy afternoon before 67 Ferry Street, the red-brick, suburban home overlooking the lawns and Moreton Bay Figs of Putney Park, which in turn looked out over the Parramatta River. She promised to be a natural in that other sense: someone with a healthy curiosity, an open and scientific mind, and a respected position in a local IT business, recommended to Paul by a mutual friend as someone unfamiliar with the whole notion of psychomantiums and willing to help.

  And now Paul was briefing her, giving her much of what he’d given me on our way from the airport. The Janss place would have been an ordinary enough, single-storied house except that its missing owner had bricked up his windows a year ago. At least a year, Paul was telling her, because it was all behind window frames and venetian blinds before then. Finally one of those venetians had fallen, revealing an inner wall of gray brickwork beyond, making 67 Ferry Street an eyesore and its reclusive owner an increasingly mysterious and unpopular neighbor.

  “Seems Janss was a nice enough guy at one time,” Paul was saying. “Friendly, always obliging. When he lost his wife and kids in the car accident, he went funny. He bricked up the windows, never answered the door. He abandoned the shed he was building in the yard, though he moved his bed out there and prepared meals and slept in the finished half. The neighbors still saw him around the place until two months ago.”

  “Surely local authorities did something,” Connie Peake said. “Contravening building ordinances like this.” We hadn’t known her long, but Connie definitely seemed the sort of person who used words like “contravening.”

  “They never knew,” Paul told her. “Not till the blinds in the living-room window there fell—in what used to be the living room anyway. Finally, neighbors did phone it in. The council investigated, and my contact arranged for me to be there soon afterward, as Janss’s solicitor.”

  Which he wasn’t, of course, but Paul was hardly going to tell Connie that. Who was to know that Janss hadn’t had one since the inquest three years ago? Bringing me from the airport, Paul had explained that there was a sister in Perth who had come over for the funeral but seemed to have moved since then.

  “A neighbor convinced them that they should break in, in case Janss had had a stroke or something and was lying there. He wasn’t. The place was abandoned. So they fitted a new lock and stuck an inspection notice on the back door. My contact told me about the room.”

  “And now you have a key.” His sangfroid had, quite frankly, astonished me.

  “I do. If anyone challenges me on it, I’ll say Janss and I had a verbal agreement. No paperwork yet.”

  “Provided he doesn’t turn up.”

  “Provided that, though I’d just say someone phoned claiming to be him. Very thin, I know, but it’s worth it. We have a window of opportunity here, Andy.”

  I could only agree. Hearing him talk to Connie now, I marveled yet again at how my only contact in this part of the world, a middle-aged former lawyer normally busy running his antique business, just happened to learn of this particular house halfway across the city, not through his usual antique-market channels but through an acquaintance who knew something about his interest in mirrored rooms.

  “I’d like to see it,” Connie Peake said, as if tracking my thoughts. “It’s cool out here.”

  It was. A chill autumn wind was blowing across the river from the southwest. The big trees in the park across Ferry Street took most of the force, heaving and churning under a rapidly growing overcast, but screened off much of the lowering sun as well.

  “Of course,” Paul said. “We have to go around back. There’s no front door anymore.”

  Connie frowned. “But—oh, it’s bricked up, too.”

  The comment brought a thrill. More than Paul’s e-mail, more than seeing the dull-gray Besser bricks behind the window glass in the red-brick wall where the living room used to be. There was a prime hexagonal in there, in all likelihood a genuine psychomantium and more.

  Eric Janss had let the trees and bushes in his driveway and backyard grow tall. No curious neighbors could peer over their fences at us. Anyone seeing us arrive would be left with impressions of three well-dressed, professional-looking people talking out front, obviously there in some official capacity and driven inside because of the deteriorating weather.

  Paul unlocked the sturdy back door and we stepped into an ordinary enough combination laundry-bathroom. There was a washing machine, sink, drier, and water heater to one side, a toilet and a shower stall to the other. What looked like a closed sliding door at the end led deeper into the house.

  “It gets stranger from here,” Paul said for Connie’s benefit, closing and locking the back door behind us. “I’ll have to go first.”

  At one time, the sliding door would have led into a kitchen. Now, as Paul drew it aside, it revealed a short, dim passage of the same drab Besser brick we’d seen behind the front windows. At the end of its barely two-meter length was another door, made of wood, painted matte black. Paul switched on his torch, waited till we were all in the passage, and slid the first door shut behind us.

  “So most of the house is dead space or solid?” I asked, again for Connie’s benefit.

  “We can’t know without demolition or soundings, Andy. Janss probably brought in the mirrors through the French windows facing the yard, then bricked them up behind the frames. None of this is the original house plan. He pulled down interior load-bearing walls, pulled up flooring, and anchored the new construction in concrete.”

  “And the neighbors never knew?” I said. “Never saw him bringing in bricks or heard him doing renovations?”

  “Apparently not. He was just the reclusive, recently bereaved neighbor. Maybe he brought in stuff late at night or waited till people went on holidays. Who would have known? You saw how overgrown the driveway and backyard are.”

  “Can we get on with this please, Mr. Vickrey … Paul?” Connie said. ‘I’m supposed to be back at the office by five. You wanted me to see the room!’

  She didn’t mean it peevishly. She just had things to do; things no doubt set out very meticulously in
a busily filled diary. In another life she might have been a relaxed, even pretty, woman. But not here, not now, not this Connie.

  “Of course,” Paul said, and moved past us to push on the inner door. It opened with a spring-loaded snick.

  Other torches shone back at us immediately, dozens, hundreds of them, in a sudden rush of stars. It was like walking onto a television set, that kind of dramatic, overlit intensity.

  It was the single eye of Paul’s torch, of course, thrown back at us a thousandfold from the mirror walls of Eric Janss’s secret room.

  “Oh my!” Connie said. “It’s all mirrors!”

  Paul, bless him, had been right. This was a prime and, with any luck, a true prime natural.

  We stood inside a hexagonal room at least five meters in diameter but seeming larger because of the floor-to-ceiling mirror walls on all six sides. Even the wall behind us was mirrored, the door set flush in it as a hairline rectangle and barely visible, spring-latched to open at the slightest touch from either side. The floor was dark, varnished timber, but with little resilience to it; probably laid over concrete. The two-and-a-half-meter ceiling was matte black with a recessed light-fitting at its center. The only other features were an old-style bentwood chair and the reed-thin shaft of a candle stand next to it, a waist-high, wrought-iron affair and empty now. Whatever candle it had last held had burned right down. The chair and stand were at the room’s midpoint.

  Paul crossed to where two mirror walls came together and pressed a tiny switch concealed in the join. Soft yellow light from the ceiling fixture confirmed the reality, sent images of us curving away on all sides. What had already been a moderately large room now went on forever, every wall the wall of another room just like it, then another and another and another, on and on. It was as if you stood in, yes, a maze, or on a plain, or at the junction of promenades like those on the space station in Kubrick’s 2001, arching and curving off. Very large array came to mind. It was startling, riveting, overwhelming, all those linked, hexagonal chambers, all those countless Pauls, Connies, and Andys sweeping away in an infinite regress. You knew the room ended right there, hard and cold at silvered glass, yet that was nonsense now, impossible. We were at the center of a universe.