The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

see what else was there.

“Silly,” she said. She reached for the door.

“You’re just stuck here,” Peter says. “Don’t you see that?”

“But I like it here.”

“You used to enjoy travelling. All those weekends we spent down in Cornwall when we were courting. The tour of Scotland in the motor home. Don’t you want to do all that again?”

It always goes the same way.

So Peter packs a bag and leaves. He says he is going hiking for a weekend in the Lake District, but he never comes back. His body is never found.

Penny insists that Peter is still alive somewhere, and that drives a rift between her and her daughter. Because there was never any tension between Belinda and her father, and if he is still alive, she says, he would contact her.

“No,” Penny says whenever the subject is brought up. “He’s not gone. Not Peter. He’s out there somewhere, waiting for me to join him. And one day, I will.”

Belinda never believed that she would. In truth, neither did Penny. But discovering that she only had months to live had changed something fundamental about the way she viewed the world. Before, she had felt safe and secure in her own small bubble of existence. Now, she already sensed that everything else was moving on. Leaving her behind. She was a dead woman walking, and she had one more chance.

She paused with her hand on the door handle. It was metal, curved, and vaguely warm, as if someone gripped it on the other side. It was only a tower, and a room. Perhaps there was a chair up there, and she could sit and look out over the landscape, watching the sunset over a hillside instead of her neighbours’ rooftops for the first time in—

Tap, tap, tap.

The sound was closer. Beyond the door, up whatever staircase might have been built within the tower. Peter, tapping his foot impatiently against the chair’s leg.

Penny gripped the handle tighter, but was suddenly certain that there was someone directly on the other side of the door, holding the handle, ear pressed to the wood, smiling expectantly as they waited for her decision.

My little rose, Peter says, sometimes you’re so scared of the smallest things, so fragile and sensitive. It’s a hard world, hardy and impartial. But I’ll look after you. Sweet Penny.

She let go of the handle and took two steps back until she nudged the landing balustrade. The tapping had stopped, but the silence was worse.

“Stupid woman!” she berated herself, and she started singing to fill the space. Still singing, she searched through the set of keys until she found one that locked the tower door. She paused again then, listening for movement on the other side. But there was none.

“Of course not,” she said. “Just an empty room, and dust.”

Hungry, thirsty, a little angry with herself for being so easilyscared, Penny went down to the kitchen and switched on the kettle. She’d brought everything she needed to make tea and cook a simple meal, but as the kettle boiled she opened the back door and looked out onto the wild garden again.

Water bubbling and steaming behind her, she walked outside, fiddled with the key ring until she had removed the key to the tower door. She threw it as far as she could into the garden, turning away so that she did not even see where it landed.

“There,” she said. “That settles it. The house is way big enough for me anyway.” She entered the house again, not once looking up.

And not looking up meant that she felt watched.

Penny ate her fried egg sandwich. She’d speckled it with cayenne pepper, because Peter used to like that, and so spent the next half an hour sipping milk from the bottle and trying to lick the burn from her lips. And she tried to make sense of the house around her as the light outside changed.

She missed her little three-bedroom house. Living room, kitchen, dining room, spacious hallway, stairs, three bedrooms, bathroom, she had always known where she was in that house in relation to every other room. Her awareness had always filled the entire place, when Peter was there with her and, later, when he was gone. It had been more than a home, and sometimes she’d forgotten where she ended and the house began.

She wasn’t like one of those strange people who never liked to go out. She went out plenty, to the shops and garden centre and to the chip shop on a Friday. But she always looked forward to returning home.

Now, the new house hung around her like something waiting to pounce. There was no sense of equilibrium here. The first floor felt as though it sought to crush the ground floor. The kitchen was too large, crushing out the dining room, storage room, and pushing into the corner of the quirky living room.

Penny felt vaguely dizzy, as if some part of the house was constantly moving, just slightly. Even when she closed her eyes and hung onto the table, the feeling persisted. Perhaps it was the landscape moving, and the house remained still.

And above it all, the tower.

Maybe Belinda is right, she thought, squeezing her eyes against the idea. But it could not be shunned. Maybe he is lying dead out there somewhere, gone to bones and dust. Worms in him. And he’d have died alone, perhaps with a broken leg or a heart attack, under lonely skies without me to be there with him. Without me. She opened her eyes when she felt the first tears squeezing out.

“Don’t be soft, Penny,” Peter says, and for an instant she looked around, certain that she actually heard those words spoken. The natural direction for her to look is up. “I’m fine. You know I am. Fine now that you’ve made the break, and taken the risk. And how does it feel, my rose? How does it feel?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Penny said. Even the way her words echoed was unfamiliar. “I’m a little bit afraid.”

“Don’t be, my darling,” Peter says. Penny had not heard such love in his voice for many years.

Dusk approached. In the valley, it was a wild time. The breeze increased, rustling the trees along the edge of Penny’s new garden. Dogs barked from somewhere far off. Birds flitted overhead and, sitting out in the garden, Penny watched them circling the tower. None seemed to land. She could not blame them. There was something so intrinsically wrong there, but she was doing her best to steer her attention away from its upright bulk. To give in to the tower would be to admit defeat.

“I might just as well go home,” she said. The overgrown garden dampened her voice, and her words quickly faded to memory. This was going to be her home for now on.

She walked around the garden with a glass of wine. She had never usually drunk wine except on Friday evenings, and then only a glass or two after eight o’clock. Now it was Tuesday, barely six-thirty, and she loved the feel of the glass in her hand, the fruity taste of wine on her lips.

The garden was larger than she had thought at first. Either that, or the boundaries were poorly marked and she was strolling across open hillside. She always felt the bulk of the house to her left, but most of her attention was directed downwards, at the twisted vegetations, long grass, and exposed tree roots that sought to trip her. She stepped over and around obstructions, and thought perhaps tomorrow she would walk further into the hills. There was a famous trail up on the ridge, so Mr Gough had told her. Popular with walkers. Peter had been a walker.

“I was a sitter,” she spoke to the garden. “A not-doer. A nothing. A. waste of space.” She hated the term, because Peter had used it referring to her on more than one occasion. “Waste of space.” She looked across at the house, the looming tower, and realised that she now stood in its shadow.

The sun touched the hillside beyond, and cast a palette of reds and oranges around the tower’s stark lines. The glazed room on top was exposed to the sunset. There was a solid shadow within, as if a shape was standing in the centre of the room. And Penny wondered what would change were she to suddenly disappear, and what would fill the space she had left behind.

She began to cry. It was dislocation and fear, but also a growing sense that time had passed her by. She had never, ever thought like this before, even when Peter had angrily insisted that he only had one life, and he would not let it fritter away waiting for her.

Penny thought that moving here had opened up her view on things, and she could see a mile along the valley to the ridge behind which the sun hid for the night.

“Don’t be sad,” Peter says. His voice is stronger than the breeze, brighter than the sunset, and more meant