Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

‘This is wrong,’ Renata told them desperately. ‘This is wrong, this is not what happened. Can’t you hear me, don’t you understand me? None of this is true. It didn’t happen. It didn‘t happen!’

One of her cousins reached down and touched her shoulder gently. ‘I know it’s hard to believe. The human mind is so amazing, there are all sorts of things that it can do, including repressing memories that are too horrible for us to live with. But don’t worry. Wood Grove is a good place. They’ve got a great staff there, including Dan—’ she paused to smile over at him. ‘And it’s completely covered by insurance. They helped me. They and Dan helped me.’

‘And me,’ said the other twin, and put her hand on Jules’ shoulder. ‘And they’ve performed miracles with your brother. His personalities will never be integrated the way ours were, but he’s learned how to manage them better than a traffic cop in New York rush hour.’

Everyone gave a polite titter at her joke and Jules’ expression was an impossible combination of pride and nausea.

Dan leaned forward and put his hands on both sides of her face, turning her head gently so he could stare into her eyes. ‘The important thing to do right now,’ he said, ‘is relax. You’re among friends, you’re safe, you can stop denying and pretending. You’re a bad subject for hypnosis? Don’t worry, I can fix that. I can make you a good subject. I can. I’m very good at what I do.’

She tried to draw back but there was nowhere to go.

‘Next month at this time,’ Dan said gently, ‘next month, you’ll remember it all. You’ll have all those memories and you’ll be able to take them on and cope with them. I promise.’ He looked up at one of the twins. ‘You can phone for the ambulance now.’

* * *

Pat Cadigan’s short stories have recently appeared on the Omni website, and she contributed a quarter of Omni’s first round-robin story, ‘Making Good Time’. Anthology appearances include Killing Me Softly edited by Gardner Dozois and two edited by Ellen Datlow, Little Deaths and Lethal Kisses, while upcoming stories are due in Dying For It and David Garnett’s re-revived New Worlds. ‘ “This Is Your Life (Repressed Memory Remix)” was a direct result of my having read the book Victims of Memory: Incest, Accusations and Shattered Lives by Mark Prendergast,’ says Cadigan. ‘Prendergast’s book is exhaustively documented and researched, a scholarly investigation not of incest accusations per se, but of incest accusations that come strictly from what is commonly called “recovered memory therapy”. While Prendergast does not assume that everyone accused is innocent, he shows the horror of having your life suddenly torn apart by accusations that come seemingly from nowhere, that not only persist, but spread like a virus even when there is hard evidence to the contrary. In one particularly tragic case, a woman managed to convince her entire family that they had been Satanists who had abused her sexually throughout her childhood. Her father went so far as to turn himself in to the police as a child molester and served time in prison before the daughter had second thoughts about what she thought she remembered. The father never actually did manage to remember anything, but decided that he was in denial, or just suppressing — after all, why would his daughter accuse him unless it had actually happened? As a parent, I find this bloody chilling. I’d rather face a vampire or a zombie, thank you. And then it occurred to me that all of the people who recover memories always remember as victims — no one ever recovers a memory of being a victimizer, a perpetrator. And then I decided that maybe there was a horror story that might match the prospect of having your offspring accuse you of the unspeakable — the idea of your parent suddenly “remembering” years of abusing you, and the rest of your family deciding to help you remember it, too.’

Little Holocausts BRIAN HODGE

There must’ve been signs first. There always are — subtleties we’re afraid to imagine go any deeper than one day’s mood. So I don’t suppose it was until our latest funeral that I broke down and admitted that something inside Jared was truly changing, and not for the better.

This one had been particularly rough on Jared. Neither of us had been strangers to funerals over the past few years, but this time it was for an earlier lover of Jared’s, amicably parted from after a growing realization that all he and Terry had in them was the honeymoon.

People — lovers, especially — have a million ways of changing on you, most of them bad. Not inherently, maybe, but bad for you. Because you couldn’t or wouldn’t follow along.

You’ll hear people say that only the dead don’t change, but obviously they’ve never thought this through, because to the dead change comes naturally, as they seek their return to earth and air and water, while we survivors who loved them manage to forget all the flaws that kept things interesting. Remake them into idealized versions that we’d never be able to tolerate if they came walking back through the door this way, so perfect we’d eventually want to kill them all over again. You…you’ve changed, we’d accuse them, feeling somehow betrayed.

Terry had died at home — the virus, what else? — his current lover helping the nurses and hospice volunteers care for him. It’s where we gathered after the funeral, his brownstone apartment with vintage wood as solid as a bank vault and laid out shotgun-style, one long chain of rooms full of friends, acquaintances, strangers. Everybody was welcome, except for those righteous fuckers who’d showed up at the cemetery to gloat in the distance, toting picket signs.

SODOMITES REPENT, that was one of the gentler ones. Some of them got almost as ugly as the faces underneath, eyes frightened and angry, prissy mouths crinkled tight like drawstring purses.

“And those are the ones with the nerve to claim they’re made in God’s image?” Jared had whispered hoarsely in the cemetery.

“I’d always pictured God as better looking,” I said. “That doesn’t make much of a case for omnipotence, does it?”

He appeared not to have heard me, staring at this wretched Greek chorus. “But what if they are? What if they really are?”

At Terry’s apartment we threw our coats atop the pile already on the bed, Jared lingering over all the sleeves that seemed caught up in some pointless struggle for supremacy. I wondered if he was remembering being in this same bed three years earlier, maybe recalling a conversation or some good night’s love.

“Deja vu?” I said.

Or maybe he was thinking that here was where Terry must have died. Jared pushed hair back from his eyes, saying, “It’s felt like deja vu here all afternoon. I’m just getting way too familiar with days like this.”

“We’re here, we’re queer,” I murmured, “we’re dropping like flies.”

“And you’re not helping any, with your laughter from the gallows,” he said, so I just held him, limp and unresponsive even when I squeezed along the back of his neck, where he liked it, and would ordinarily flex back into my hand like Voodoo, our cat. “Was it this way for you when Serge died?”

I stiffened. “What way?”

“Remember that picture from Vietnam? Of that Buddhist monk? He’d set himself on fire in the middle of a street and just sat there burning. Didn’t move? Well… like I wish I had the kind of control he must’ve had, not to feel the flames,” Jared said into my neck. “That way.”

“Serge was different. You can’t compare the two.”

And Jared knew better. Serge and I weren’t broken up; not exactly. Serge hadn’t been sick. I felt something stir down deep, like the rusty scraping open of a hatch on a ship long sunk, and hurried to slam it shut again. In its saltwatery grave.