Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

death.

She turned a page and frowned down at a photo of an impossibly plush hotel in some ridiculously inaccessible vacation region. Perhaps that was because, instead of mourning her father, she was mourning the profound and lasting connection they had failed to achieve. As she got older, he’d just had less and less time for her, or her brother Jules. She thought now that probably he’d barely had time for their mother. But that had just been the way things were back then. His draftsman’s job consumed more of his time and attention. The company he’d worked for had been switching over to Computer Aided Design, trying to keep up with the rest of the corporate Joneses, and her father had had to re-train himself almost from scratch in a job that he had been proficient in — had thought he’d been proficient in — for almost twenty years. New developments had eaten up his time and hadn’t left much in the way even of bare bones behind.

And hadn’t it been that way for a lot of other families as well? Sure. We can’t all be jolly Italian dynasties, now, can we? No, we sure can’t.

What sadness there was for her in the occasion had much more to do with the absence of the man’s effect on her rather than the absence of the man himself. Maybe that was sadder than his death, she thought, and actually felt her throat begin to tighten.

Now, now. Let’s not go to pieces just because it’s an occasion that usually calls for it, she thought, sneaking a look at her seat-mate on the right as she pretended that she wasn’t dabbing tears from her eyes. No worries there; the woman had dozed off with her mouth open and her reading glasses a centimeter from the end of her prominent nose. She was a plump, middle-aged blonde made even plumper by masses of hair extensions artfully braided into her natural hair. Naturally- grown hair, Renata amended to herself; the colour was as acquired as the extra tresses. It wasn’t a bad job. Renata wouldn’t have known except that one tiny connection knot was peeking out at her near the woman’s left temple. She smiled at it, absently patting the greying brown hair fluffing over the back of her own collar.

Tell you what, Blondella, Renata thought at her; you don’t notice my tears and I won’t notice your hair-falsies. Is it a deal?

The woman went on sleeping silently, her breath inaudible in spite of her open mouth. Too bad. A snore as an inadvertent reply would have made her laugh at least inwardly and dried up her tears. She should have known, Renata chided herself, looking down at the ridiculous vacation hotel ad again. Comic timing, like so many other things, was just never there in real life. At least, not in her real life.

Her surprise at finding her brother waiting to meet her at the airport was almost enough to be honest shock. He was standing at the top of the escalators that slid down to the baggage carousel area, his face sad, worried and portentous, which was even more disconcerting. She had always described Jules to everyone as the sort of person the term even-tempered had been invented for. Unflappable Jules Adrian Prescott, who had raised his voice maybe three times a year, usually to say ‘Ow!’ after stubbing his toe or something. There had been times she had felt like telling him they could trade birth order and he could be the older Prescott kid, as he had always been more mature than she. Sometimes, though, she wondered if he didn’t frustrate the hell out of his wife, Lena.

The thought of Lena made her automatically look at Jules’ left hand; his wedding ring was gone. Now she was shocked, almost enough to draw back as he leaned forward to kiss her cheek and say something, but he looked so fraught that she shut up instead and submitted. For all she knew, he had accidentally left his ring in the bathroom after showering. Why add a stupid, intrusive, and possibly erroneous question to a time like this?

A time like what, though? Jules hadn’t been terribly close to their father, either.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asked her as he took her carry-on bag and steered her on to the escalator.

‘Okay, I guess, Julio,’ she said, using the old childhood nickname, in which the j was pronounced improperly as j and not h. ‘But you don’t look too good—’

‘Yeah, well, a time like this,’ he said almost offhandedly, and she felt a frisson as he unknowingly echoed her thoughts. ‘It’s all so—’ he shook his head and a sudden stray breeze rifled his thick brown hair like invisible fingers searching for something concealed there.

She looked up at him, puzzled. It’s all so what, Julio? she wanted to say, but the pain in his expression stopped her. Maybe if the non-relationship with their father saddened her, she thought suddenly, it was even more so for Jules. Maybe he’d been reflecting on everything he hadn’t had as his father’s son, on memories that should have been there to comfort and reassure but were not, never could have been, never would be. Did Lena understand? she wondered, anxious for him now.

They collected her one small bag from the carousel and then followed a silly, over-complicated route made even more convoluted by detours around awkwardly-placed areas of renovation hidden behind impassive wooden walls. Signs warned of dangers hidden behind their featureless facades. Apparently there were things back there that could maim you, cripple you, kill you without warning. But nothing reached out to harm them or so much as scare them as they made their way to Jules’ car in the parking garage. The walk took a good twenty minutes and during that time, Jules never did manage to complete the sentence that had ended with everything being so and she thought again that he was probably suffering from the realization that it was all just So what?

Her first thought was that her mother needed heart pills. Everything about her was grey, in a way that went beyond old age. Her skin looked as if it had been dusted with ashes only a few shades lighter than her hair, her lips might have moved a doctor to pronounce her cyanotic, and even the pupils of her eyes seemed to have lost all pigmentation. She sat, or rather sagged on a chair at the dining-room table, while Renata’s Aunt Daisy stood over her like a sentinel or a household servant waiting for instruction, occasionally squeezing one of her mother’s plump, rounded shoulders.

Daisy’s name was one of those ridiculous mistakes people sometimes made in christening their children. For Renata, the name Daisy had always suggested capriciousness and whimsy to the point of complete foolishness. But Daisy was serious, often humourless, and almost never emotional in any way. The only remotely daisy-ish thing about her was her yellow hair which was actually natural and looked dyed. It gave Renata another pause. Did anyone in her family ever get anything right? she wondered.

Jules had allowed her to carry in her own suitcase. Now he had vanished into another part of the house or into thin air, Renata wasn’t sure which. Daisy’s twin daughters were both there, one with her husband, the other with her female partner. The four of them were huddled near the antique sideboard where the good china and crystal sat safely in the dark of the cabinets most of the year, emerging only for Christmas-season dinners. On the mirror-shiny surface, kept that way by her mother’s monthly polishings, a collection of photos of various family members gazed out over the room as if the frames were actually funny little windows in so many sizes and shapes that each subject had just happened to wander up to, and were now staring through with vague unease at all that went on.

Renata’s own vague unease snapped into precise clarity. There were no pictures on the sideboard now. Someone had removed them, every single one, and she had never known that to happen, outside of her mother’s regularly scheduled cleaning sessions. She put her bag down where she stood and looked around, unease beginning to mutate into suspicion.

On the other side of the room, Mrs Anderson from next door was standing by a tall bookcase with the O’Briens from across the street. The three of them looked exhausted, as if something — her father’s death, or something unrelated except for timing? — had been draining them of every bit of energy and endurance. It was how another of her co-workers, a pretty young woman in accounting services, had looked after seeing her sister through a long and terrible death from AIDS.

But if Mrs Anderson and the O’Briens had been through something similar, it couldn’t have been with her father, Renata thought. Her father’s final heart trouble had dragged on a bit, but it had not been that kind of ordeal. Even if it had been, she couldn’t imagine that these people would have been involved to such an extent.