For anyone who's interested, here's my attempt at a horror story. I couldn't enter it for Ori's competition as it was too long, thanks Hitler.
If anyone doesn't love this I'll personally come around to your home and kill you.
Waiting for that day
I: Foundations
As I was going up the stairs I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today.
I wish, I wish he’d go away.
I’ve been seeing men who aren't there for so long now, it's hard to figure out who’s real and who’s not. I meet people on the stairs, in the kitchen, in the garden- I have no idea if they're actually there or if I'm just dreaming them. Sometimes I even wonder if
I'm the dream; maybe all I am is a phantasm, a ghost haunting a house that isn't mine. I see pictures on walls and tables and bureaux and I don't recognise the faces smiling out at me. Smiling. Always smiling. People in photographs always seem happy, or if they're not, they make out that they are. I suppose it makes sense; who’s going to want to look at pictures of people scowling, or crying? You want happy memories. Not real ones. I guess that’s when they always make you say “Cheese!” Not quite sure why, but photographers always seem to think cheese makes people happy, or smile at least. Not me: I hate the damn stuff. Curdled cow’s milk in solid form. Ugh!
But though these people are invariably smiling in the pictures I look at, I don't know any of the faces. I try - Lord knows, I try. Sometimes I give myself a headache just trying to recall their smiling faces and fit names to them. A woman in a hospital bed with a tiny baby cradled in her arms, smiling of course: is that me? Me with my mother? I don't remember ever having a mother, though I suppose I must have had, at one point. People don't just spring into the world from nowhere. Even if I am a ghost, as I fear more and more these days I am, I must have had a mother once. Ghosts are just dead people, and every person, even if they're dead now, once had a mother. But if this is mine, she is a stranger to me. As is the silent, solemn looking baby. If that's me, then I don't even recognise my own face.
A man stands in another of these unfamiliar yet familiar photographs. He is holding what appears to be a fishing rod and wearing angling gear. Beside him is a young boy, maybe thirteen, fourteen years of age. The older man’s arm is around the shoulder of the boy, and they are of course smiling towards the camera, seeming to display what I would consider rather too much pride in the few tiny silver fish that dangle from the older man’s hand. Father and son, surely. But
my father? Am
I the boy looking pleased as punch (who is punch, and why is he always so pleased?) Standing beside my father? The man’s face is kindly, but betrays lines which speak to me of suppressed anger. Is the photograph a sham; a moment frozen in time, a lie captured for eternity? Do darker currents run beneath the surface of that placid face?
And here, standing in pride of place in the centre of my writing bureau, where I am now sitting as I write this, yet another photo. This time it is a colour one, the colours bright and vibrant despite the obvious age of the picture. Two people, very clearly in love and having just expressed that love by agreeing to share the rest of their lives together. The woman is not beautiful in the normal way one would consider beauty, but something about her speaks to me, and tells me that I am the other figure in the picture, beaming and sliding my eyes to the left, in her direction, just as the shutter clicked, as if I (if indeed it is me in the picture) can't bear even to tear my eyes off her for the brief moment the photographer requires us to look into the camera.
If there truly is such a thing as the look of love, it's passing between these two people.
And then, like a tragic postscript to the left of the wedding day photo, another one. This time, it's her alone, enclosed as if trapped by a small oval at the top of a piece of card that, while white in colour somehow contrives to be dark. There are words upon it, her name, age, address, in lovely tasteful flowing script. A poem, some more words, culminating in a wish: May she rest in peace.
Looking at the picture causes me sadness I can't explain or understand. The woman in both photographs, and the man in the wedding one, mean nothing to me. I have a feeling both should, but no matter how hard I try, no memory will surface, if indeed there is anything there to uncover or reveal itself.
If this is not my house, then those pictures have nothing to do with me, which would explain why I cannot recognise the people in them. If I am an interloper in someone else's house, these are someone else's photographs, someone else's memories. And yet, such thoughts bring me no relief, no peace. Somehow I know this is my house, those are my photographs and I should know the faces smiling out at me, but I don’t.
As for the men on the stairs (and everywhere else) who are not there but are there, they seem to have been here for as long as I can remember. Or not here. There doesn't seem to have been a time when they weren't. Though I'm sure I once lived here alone. I can't point to a specific time or date when they arrived, I couldn't tell you how they gained entrance to my house, or why I let them in, but a tiny voice in my head, growing quieter and more distant every day, whispers that it was not always so.
I suppose it would be fair to say I used to live mostly in the dark. I tended to be frugal with my electricity, to the point where I would ensure that if I was leaving one room to go to another, I would switch off the light in the room I was leaving. Save the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves. I was never a rich man - this much I know - and was constantly struggling to pay my bills. These days, I no longer let such things concern me. These days, lights burn in every room through the night, and voices mutter as I try to sleep. I once found myself worrying about my electricity bill, but oddly it never arrived. Nor did any others. Fearful that I would either be cut off, or that an even larger bill would drop onto the mat in the hallway, replete with warnings scrawled in red pen (though really, I know, printed out by a cold, unfeeling inkjet printer that does not even know what a red pen is, or any pen, come to think of it) about final payments and penalties, I rang the electricity company.
That is, I tried.
I remember distinctly punching out the number on the dialling pad on the landline, holding the receiver to my ear, hearing the chirruping ring sing its happy little tune like some imprisoned songbird trapped inside the phone's workings.
The next thing I remember, I was waking up the next morning, with (at the time) no recollection of having even made the call. Had I remembered, I could have checked the last-dialled number, to confirm if I had actually called the electricity company or had just dreamed it. Had I remembered. Which I did not. And so I didn't check. Because there was nothing to check.
But despite a lack of communication with – and more importantly, any payment to – the electric people, my supply was not discontinued, and though power continued to be expended and consumed throughout the night, every night, even at weekends, no bill ever arrived. And I don't just mean no electricity bill. No bills of any nature dropped through my letterbox. In fact, no post at all was delivered. No junk mail, no one-time-only special offers to join gyms, no cutprice sales at carpet and tile shops, no screaming adverts for holidays. No letters. No cards. No flyers. Even the ubiquitous agents of the local Indian takeaway seemed to give my house a wide berth. Look outside and you will see every single doorknob, letterbox, windowsill and gate festooned with menus from
A Taste of Mumbai, but my house stands as a pariah among houses, like the kid not picked for the soccer team or the wallflower at the disco, alone, untouched, avoided.
Unclean?
My memory, which I know will soon degrade like badly-stored fruit in the summer heat, tells me that it was not always this way. In fact, it reminds me that on more than one occasion I had made irate phone calls to the manager of
A Taste of Mumbai, the improbably-named Gerald Lynch (
very Indian!) and had even visited their premises once, to complain about the practice of their little munchkins slapping a menu on anything that didn't move (and, I'm perhaps not too reliably informed, but I would not be surprised, some things that do). My efforts had been rebuffed, and when I had in impotent anger phoned their head office, I had been left on hold for so long that there was only so much bad Indian covers of fifties rock and roll songs (the Indian Elvis? Give me a break!) that I could take, and I had hung up irritably, my mission unfulfilled.