really squinted, she thought she could see the dark silhouette of a head, but it was only for a moment before the image melted away and all that was left was that hand, pale and stark in the dimness.
As Chloe stared, the hand lifted itself from the arm of the chair, seeming to float in mid-air as it turned palm upwards and the bent old fingers curled back and then forwards again. The meaning was unmistakable – she was being beckoned closer.
This was not what Chloe had expected, and disappointment coursed through her. She could not talk to a hand, she could not receive the sympathy and understanding she so desperately craved from a hand, and yet she found herself moving forwards uncertainly anyway. When she stopped directly in front of the wheelchair, the hand stopped beckoning and reached up a little further, still palm upwards.
After a moment’s hesitation, Chloe reached out and took the lined, frail, bony hand in her own. The moment her fingers closed around it, she felt a jolt pass through her whole body. She gasped and tried to pull back but her fingers seemed to be glued into place for the briefest second, and then she found she couldn’t move her hand because she didn’t have one any more.
She tried to open her mouth to scream but she no longer had a mouth and so she could not utter a sound. She had no body whatsoever. All she had was a strange sense of lightness, as if she was floating. And when her eyesight cleared and her vision focused she saw her own face staring down at her, only it was not the face she knew from the mirror. The features were identical but this face was colder, harder, and looked strangely and horrifically triumphant as the red lips parted and the white teeth were bared in an awful smile.
Chloe was forced to watch in silence as, without a word, her body pirouetted on the spot with a sort of terrible grace before a cold laugh bubbled up from the imposter’s throat, and then, with one last glance in the direction of the chair, Chloe’s body turned and walked from the room, head held high, slamming the door behind her. Chloe struggled and struggled to scream and shout at her to come back but she couldn’t so much as whisper. When she looked down, she saw that there was nothing left of her. Just a smoky hazy outline of nothingness – the wisps of feelings and memories and emotions that had made her who she was before, all floating about loose like gases released from a sealed container. She could feel herself dispersing and dissipating already, becoming weaker and weaker – more and more like nothing every second.
In a burst of panic and horror, Chloe mustered up enough strength to drag all the pieces of herself tightly back together, putting all her energy and willpower into keeping herself whole. After what felt like hours of ferocious concentration, she thought she could see the faint outline of one of her fingers. The bell push on the wall gleamed at her sullenly in the candlelight – just about within reaching distance – and, with an exhausting effort of will, she managed to push it, causing the din of the bell to echo through the now-empty house.
A short while later, the whole world marvelled as ex-model Chloe Benn took the world of ballet by storm. It was unprecedented for someone so late to ballet to dance with such exquisite perfection. She was a phenomenally gifted natural, they said, the like of which had never been seen on the stage before. She was expected to be awarded the rank of prima ballerina before her twenty-third birthday, and there were even murmurings of the possibility of the prima ballerina assoluta rank – an almost unheard of honour ...
In the aftermath of her newfound success she was approached by her ex-husband, cautiously seeking a reunion.
“You look well,” he said. “Different. Have you dyed your hair? Perhaps we could get a drink some time? Catch up . . . ?”
His voice trailed off uncertainly; he seemed unnerved by the look on his ex-wife’s face. She stared at him in chilly silence for long, long moments before she finally opened her mouth and said in a voice that sounded unlike her own, “So you’re him? You look just like I imagined. Come here.” She beckoned with one slim finger. Something about her definitely seemed odd, but at least she hadn’t told him to go to hell as he had expected. Chloe’s ex- husband approached with cautious optimism, a foolish grin already starting to form itself on his foolish face.
“I thought we could—” he began, but didn’t get the chance to finish the sentence before Chloe grabbed the front of his shirt in a surprisingly strong grip and dragged him closer to press a kiss to his mouth.
He remembered Chloe’s kisses being sweet and soft and warm and gentle, but there was nothing gentle about this kiss. Her lips and tongue were shockingly cold and dry, like a corpse’s – or a reptile’s – and that coldness seemed to spread all the way through him at her touch. Her nails dug into the back of his neck hard enough to draw blood – he could feel the warm trickles running down his skin to stain his collar. It felt as if she was trying to suck his soul out through his mouth. He could barely breathe with her clamped to his lips like some terrible succubus, hissing a little with gruesome pleasure as he struggled madly in her tight grip.
He finally managed to detach himself from her, although she tore a piece from his lip as he pushed her away as hard as he could. He staggered back from her, his chest heaving with a nameless horror. For he knew, with a dreadful certainty, that whoever this woman before him was, she was not the woman who had been his wife. His blood dribbled down her chin and he watched in terrified fascination as she slowly, seductively, licked smears of it from her teeth, not bothering to clean it from her face before smiling brilliantly at him and saying, “Chloe sends her regards.”
Trembling in every limb, with a terror that he had not known since childhood, Chloe’s ex-husband barely noticed the warm, wet patch spreading down his trousers as he stumbled blindly away and ran from the room. The cold, creeping, delighted sound of Chloe’s laughter behind him was one that would haunt him in nightmares for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, back in Arietta House, the bell for bedroom five continued to ring frantically, day and night. No one ever heard it, since Chloe Benn had decided that the house should be torn down and a block of flats built in its place. The lost room would soon become part of a lost house. Just as it was supposed to.
Scairt
Alison Littlewood
The piper stood on the hill, all alone, his dark green kilt blowing in the breeze. Rannoch Moor was broad and windswept, great mounds disappearing into the distance, punctuated by the glisten of water.
Amanda couldn’t hear the bagpipes, only the continual grind of the car’s engine that had accompanied them for mile after mile. She saw the back of her grandma’s head in the passenger seat and Granddad’s sticky-out ears. There were white hairs growing out of them.
“Can’t we stop?” she asked.
Her grandma turned and Amanda pointed. Now she saw that the piper was standing in a lay-by. There was a line of parked cars, but there didn’t seem to be any people: only the piper.
Her granddad slowed, indicated, pulled in. There were brown spots on his hands. He parked the car and they sat there.
“Here, Amanda,” said Grandma. She opened her window, winding the handle around and around. Cold air and the sound of wind and the strange, strident call of bagpipes came in. Amanda twisted and looked out of the back.
“Here,” Grandma said again. She fumbled with her purse, undid the snappers and pulled out a coin. She pressed it into Amanda’s hand. It was twenty pence.
“For his hat,” said Grandma, gesturing. “There’s always a hat.”
Amanda slipped out of the car, jumping down on to the tarmac. Beyond the lay-by was nothing but tufts of grass, a line of green that gave way to burned orange and purple. The clouds were low and rippled and went on forever.
She walked towards the piper hearing a wheezing sound, a constant groan under the notes and the gulps of breath he took. She didn’t look at him. She saw only his legs, sturdy and bare. They were covered in curling hairs that shivered in the wind. She looked for a hat and saw a large black case with the shine of coins inside. She put down the twenty pence and walked away, feeling his eyes on her back. Still he played on, different notes each time, a tune she didn’t know.
Amanda climbed back into the car. The grind of the engine started and they drove away, onward, towards home.
“Well, isn’t that nice?” said Grandma. “A welcoming committee.” She started chinking china cups, putting them into saucers, her hands shaking.
