Best British Horror 2014 Read online

  He’d always give Karen a few days to get to know her daughters before he came for them. He wanted her to love them as hard as she could. He always seemed to know when it was the right time. With one doll, her very favourite, he had given her only until the weekend – it had been love at first sight, the eyelashes were real hair, and she’d blink when picked up, and if she were cuddled tight she’d say ‘Mama’. Sometimes Nicholas gave them as long as a couple of months; some of the dolls were a fright, and cold to the touch, and it took Karen a while to find any affection for them at all. But Karen was a girl with a big heart. She could love anything, given time and patience. Nicholas must have been carefully watching his sister, just to see when their heart reached its fullest – and she never saw him do it, he usually seemed to ignore her altogether, as if she were still too young and too silly to be worth his attention. But then, ‘It’s time,’ he would say, and sometimes it wasn’t until that very moment that Karen would realise she’d fallen in love at all, and of course he was right, he was always right.

  Karen liked playing in the woods by day. By night they seemed strange and unrecognisable, the branches jutted out at peculiar angles as if trying to bar her entrance. But Nicholas wasn’t afraid, and he always knew his way. She kept close to him for fear he would rush on ahead and she would be lost. And she knew somehow that if she got lost, she’d be lost forever – and it may turn daylight eventually, but that wouldn’t matter, she’d have been trapped by the woods of the night, and the woods of the night would get to keep her.

  And at length they came to the clearing. Karen always supposed that the clearing was at the very heart of the woods, she didn’t know why. The tight press of trees suddenly lifted, and here there was space – no flowers, nothing, some grass, but even the grass was brown, as if the sunlight couldn’t reach it here. And it was as if everything had been cut away to make a perfect circle that was neat and tidy and so empty, and it was as if it had been done especially for them. Karen could never find the clearing in the daytime. But then, she had never tried very hard.

  Nicholas would take her daughter, and set her down upon that browning grass. He would ask Karen for her name, and Karen would tell him. Then Nicholas would tell Karen to explain to the daughter what was going to happen here. ‘Betsy, you have been sentenced to death.’ And Nicholas would ask Karen upon what charge. ‘Because I love you too much, and I love my brother more.’ And Nicholas would ask if the daughter had any final words to offer before sentence was carried out; they never had.

  He would salute the condemned then, nice and honourably. And Karen would by now be nearly in tears; she would pull herself together. ‘You mustn’t cry,’ said Nicholas, ‘you can’t cry, if you cry the death won’t be a clean one.’ She would salute her daughter too.

  What happened next would always be different.

  When he’d been younger Nicholas had merely hanged them. He’d put rope around their little necks and take them to the closest tree and let them drop down from the branches, and there they’d swing for a while, their faces still frozen with trusting smiles. As he’d become a man he’d found more inventive ways to despatch them. He’d twist off their arms, he’d drown them in buckets of water he’d already prepared, he’d stab them with a fork. He’d say to Karen, ‘And how much do you love this one?’ And if Karen told him she loved him very much, so much the worse for her daughter – he’d torture her a little first, blinding her, cutting off her skin, ripping off her clothes and then toasting with matches the naked stuff beneath. It was always harder to watch these executions because Karen really had loved them, and it was agony to see them suffer so, But she couldn’t lie to her brother. He would have seen through her like glass.

  That last time had been the most savage, though Karen hadn’t known it would be the last time, of course – but Nicholas, Nicholas might have had an inkling.

  When they’d reached the clearing he had tied Mary-Lou to the tree with string. Tightly, but not too tight – Karen had said she hadn’t loved Mary-Lou especially, and Nicholas didn’t want to be cruel. He had even wrapped his own handkerchief around her eyes as a blindfold.

  Then he’d produced from his knapsack Father’s gun.

  ‘You can’t use that!’ Karen said. ‘Father will find out! Father will be angry!’

  ‘Phooey to that,’ said Nicholas. ‘I’ll be going to war soon, and I’ll have a gun all of my own. Had you heard that, Carrie? That I’m going to war?’ She hadn’t heard. Nanny had kept it from her, and Nicholas had wanted it to be a surprise. He looked at the gun. ‘It’s a Webley Mark IV service revolver,’ he said. ‘Crude and old-fashioned, just like Father. What I’ll be getting will be much better.’

  He narrowed his eyes, and aimed the gun, fired. There was an explosion, louder than Karen could ever have dreamed – and she thought Nicholas was shocked too, not only by the noise, but by the recoil. Birds scattered. Nicholas laughed. The bullet had gone wild. ‘That was just a warm up,’ he said.

  It was on his fourth try that he hit Mary-Lou. Her leg was blown off.

  ‘Do you want a go?’

  ‘No,’ said Karen.

  ‘It’s just like at a fairground,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

  She took the gun from him, and it burned in her hand, it smelled like burning. He showed her how to hold it, and she liked the way his hand locked around hers as he corrected her aim. ‘It’s all right,’ he said to his little sister gently, ‘we’ll do it together. There’s nothing to be scared of.’ And really he was the one who pulled the trigger, but she’d been holding on too, so she was a bit responsible, and Nicholas gave a whoop of delight and Karen had never heard him so happy before, she wasn’t sure she’d ever heard him happy. And when they looked back at the tree Mary-Lou had disappeared.

  ‘I’m going across the seas,’ he said. ‘I’m going to fight. And every man I kill, listen, I’m killing him for you. Do you understand me? I’ll kill them all because of you.’

  He kissed her then on the lips. It felt warm and wet and the moustache tickled, and it was hard too, as if he were trying to leave an imprint there, as if when he pulled away he wanted to leave a part of him behind.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘I love you too.’

  ‘Don’t forget me,’ he said. Which seemed such an odd thing to say – how was she going to forget her own brother?

  They’d normally bury the tribute then, but they couldn’t find any trace of Mary-Lou’s body. Nicholas put the gun back in the knapsack, he offered Karen his hand. She took it. They went home.

  They had never found Nicholas’ body either; at the funeral his coffin was empty, and Father told Karen it didn’t matter, that good form was the thing. Nicholas had been killed in the Dardanelles, and Karen looked for it upon the map, and it seemed such a long way to go to die. There were lots of funerals in the town that season, and Father made sure that Nicholas’ was the most lavish, no expense was spared.

  The family was so small now, and they watched together as the coffin was lowered into the grave. Father looking proud, not sad. And Karen refusing to cry – ‘Don’t cry,’ she said to the daughter she’d brought with her, ‘you mustn’t cry, or it won’t be clean,’ and yet she dug her fingernails deep into her daughter’s body to try to force some tears from it.

  Julian hadn’t gone to war. He’d been born just too late. And of course he said he was disappointed, felt cheated even, he loved his country and whatever his country might stand for, and he had wanted to demonstrate that love in the very noblest of ways. He said it with proper earnestness, and some days he almost meant it. His two older brothers had gone to fight, and both had returned home, and the younger had brought back some sort of medal with him. The brothers had changed. They had less time for Julian, and Julian felt that was no bad thing. He was no longer worth the effort of bullying. One day he’d asked his eldest brother what it had been like out there on the Fro
nt. And the brother turned to him in surprise, and Julian was surprised too, what had he been thinking of? – and he braced himself for the pinch or Chinese burn that was sure to follow. But instead the brother had just turned away; he’d sucked his cigarette down to the very stub, and sighed, and said it was just as well Julian hadn’t been called up, the trenches were a place for real men. The whole war really wouldn’t have been his bag at all.

  When Julian Morris first met Karen Davison, neither was much impressed. Certainly, Julian was well used to girls finding him unimpressive: he was short, his face was too round and homely, his thighs quickly thinned into legs that looked too spindly to support him. There was an effeminacy about his features that his father had thought might have been cured by a spell fighting against Germans, but Julian didn’t know whether it would have helped; he tried to take after his brothers, tried to lower his voice and speak more gruffly, he drank beer, he took up smoking. But even there he’d got it all wrong somehow. The voice, however gruff, always rose in inflection no matter how much he tried to stop it. He sipped at his beer. He held his cigarette too languidly, apparently, and when he puffed out smoke it was always from the side of his mouth and never with a good bold manly blast.

  But for Julian to be unimpressed by a girl was a new sensation for him. Girls flummoxed Julian. With their lips and their breasts and their flowing contours. With their bright colours, all that perfume. Even now, if some aged friend of his mother’s spoke to him, he’d be reduced to a stammering mess. But Karen Davison did something else to Julian entirely. He looked at her across the ballroom and realised that he rather despised her. It wasn’t that she was unattractive, at first glance her figure was pretty enough. But she was so much older than the other girls, in three years of attending dances no man had yet snatched her up – and there was already something middle-aged about that face, something jaded. She looked bored. That was it, she looked bored. And didn’t care to hide it.

  Once in a while a man would approach her, take pity on her, ask her to dance. She would reject him, and off the suitor would scarper, with barely disguised relief.

  Julian had promised his parents that he would at least invite one girl on to the dance floor. It would hardly be his fault if that one girl he chose said no. He could return home, he’d be asked how he had got on, and if he were clever he might even be able to phrase a reply that concealed the fact he’d been rejected. Julian was no good at lying outright, his voice would squeak, and he would turn bright red. But not telling the truth? He’d had to find a way of mastering it.

  He approached the old maid. Now that she was close he felt the usual panic rise within him, and he fought it down – look at her, he told himself, look at how hard she looks, like stone; she should be grateful you ask her to dance. He’d reached her. He opened his mouth to speak, realised his first word would be a stutter, put the word aside, found some new word to replace it, cleared his throat. Only then did the girl bother to look up at him. There was nothing welcoming in that expression, but nothing challenging either – she looked at him with utter indifference.

  ‘A dance?’ he said. ‘Like? Would you?’

  And, stupidly, opened out his arms, as if to remind her what a dance was, as if without her he’d simply manage on his own in dumb show.

  She looked him up and down. Judging him, blatantly judging him. Not a smile upon her face. He waited for the refusal.

  ‘Very well,’ she said then, though without any enthusiasm.

  He offered her his hand, and she took it by the fingertips, and rose to her feet. She was an inch or two taller than him. He smelled her perfume, and didn’t like it.

  He put one hand on her waist, the other was left gently brushing against her glove. They danced. She stared at his face, still quite incuriously, but it was enough to make him blush.

  ‘You dance well,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I don’t enjoy dancing.’

  ‘Then let us, by all means, stop.’

  He led her back to her chair. He nodded at her stiffly, and prepared to leave. But she gestured towards the chair beside her, and he found himself bending down to sit in it.

  ‘Are you enjoying the ball?’ he asked her.

  ‘I don’t enjoy talking either.’

  ‘I see.’ And they sat in silence for a few minutes. At one point he felt he should get up and walk away, and he shuffled in his chair to do so – and at that she turned to look at him, and managed a smile, and for that alone he decided to stay a little while longer.

  ‘Can I at least get you a drink?’

  She agreed. So he went to fetch her a glass of fizz. Across the room he watched as another man approached and asked her to dance, and he suddenly felt a stab of jealousy that astonished him. She waved the man away, in irritation, and Julian pretended it was for his sake.

  He brought her back the fizz.

  ‘There you are,’ he said.

  She sipped at it. He sipped at his the same way.

  ‘If you don’t like dancing,’ he said to her, ‘and you don’t like talking, why do you come?’ He already knew the answer, of course, it was the same reason he came, and she didn’t bother dignifying him with a reply. He laughed, and hated how girlish it sounded.

  At length she said, ‘Thank you for coming,’ as if this were her ball, as if he were her guest, and he realised he was being dismissed. He got to his feet.

  ‘Do you have a card?’ she asked.

  Julian did. She took it, put it away without reading it. And Julian waited beside her for any further farewell, and when nothing came, he nodded at her once more, and left her.

  The very next day Julian received a telephone call from a Mr Davison, who invited him to have dinner with his daughter at his house that evening. Julian accepted. And because the girl had never bothered to give him her name, it took Julian a fair little time to work out who this Davison fellow might be.

  Julian wondered whether the evening would be formal, and so overdressed, just for safety’s sake. He took some flowers. He rang the bell, and some hatchet-faced old woman opened the front door. She showed him in. She told him that Mr Davison had been called away on business, and would be unable to dine with him that evening. Mistress Karen would receive him in the drawing room. She disappeared with his flowers, and Julian never saw them again, and had no evidence indeed that Mistress Karen would ever see them either.

  At the top of the staircase Julian saw there were two portraits. One was a giantess, a bejewelled matriarch sneering down at him, and Julian could recognise in her features the girl he had danced with the night before, and he was terrified of her, and he fervently hoped that Karen would never grow up to be like her mother. The other portrait, much smaller, was of some boy in army uniform.

  Karen was waiting for him. She was wearing the same dress she had worn the previous night. ‘I’m so glad you could come,’ she intoned.

  ‘I’m glad you invited me.’

  ‘Let us eat.’

  So they went into the dining room, and sat either end of a long table. The hatchet-face served them soup. ‘Thank you, Nanny,’ Karen said. Julian tasted the soup. The soup was good.

  ‘It’s a very grand house,’ said Julian.

  ‘Please, there’s no need to make conversation.’

  ‘All right.’

  The soup bowls were cleared away. Chicken was served. And, after that, a trifle.

  ‘I like trifle,’ said Karen, and Julian didn’t know whether he was supposed to respond to that, and so he smiled at her, and she smiled back, and that all seemed to work well enough.

  Afterwards Julian asked whether he could smoke. Karen said he might. He offered Karen a cigarette, and she hesitated, and then said she would like that. So Julian got up, and went around the table, and lit one for her. Julian tried very hard to smoke in the correct way, but it still kept coming out girlis
hly. But Karen didn’t seem to mind; indeed, she positively imitated him, she puffed smoke from the corner of her mouth and made it all look very pretty.

  And even now they didn’t talk, and Julian realised he didn’t mind. There was no awkwardness to it. It was companionable. It was a shared understanding.

  Julian was invited to three more dinners. After the fourth, Mr Davison called Mr Morris, and told him that a proposal of marriage to his daughter would not be unacceptable. Mr Morris was very pleased, and Mrs Morris took Julian to her bedroom and had him go through her jewellery box to pick out a ring he could give his fiancée, and Julian marvelled, he had never seen such beautiful things.

  Julian didn’t meet Mr Davison until the wedding day, whereupon the man clapped him on the back as if they were old friends, and told him he was proud to call him his son. Mr Morris clapped Julian on the back too; even Julian’s brothers were at it. And Julian marvelled at how he had been transformed into a man by dint of a simple service and signed certificate. Neither of his brothers had married yet, he had beaten them to the punch, and was there jealousy in that back clapping? They called Julian a lucky dog, that his bride was quite the catch. And so, Julian felt, she was; on her day of glory she did nothing but beam with smiles, and there was no trace of her customary truculence. She was charming, even witty, and Julian wondered why she had chosen to hide these qualities from him – had she recognised that it would have made him scared of her? Had she been shy and hard just to win his heart? Julian thought this might be so, and in that belief discovered that he did love her, he loved her after all – and maybe, in spite of everything, the marriage might just work out.