The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
Электронная книга - «The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection». Краткое содержание книги:
It was late, a quiet time of the year. Almost all of the other summerhouses, including the newer one that shared this grassy clearing in a thicket just a little way back from the beach, appeared to be unoccupied. When the road gate at the end of the driveway was closed, it was almost as if we were shutting ourselves into a private world. When the Minx had spotted the horde of tiny frogs that seemed to migrate across the drive at around four o’clock every afternoon, that more or less confirmed it. It seemed that we were going to be okay.
“Have you found any?” she asked brightly, but I had to tell her that I hadn’t. She liked to hold them on her hand. By now they probably just sat there toughing it out and thinking, Oh, shit, not again and Why me, God, why me?
“No,” I said. “It’s the wrong time of day. Look, I saw a bike in the garage yesterday. Why don’t you ride it around the garden?”
“A big bike?” she said warily.
“No, just a little bike.”
So we spent the afternoon playing with the house’s rusty old tricycle and a football that we’d picked up from Willi’s Market about a half-mile down the shore road, and after we’d eaten picnic-style out on the terrace we all took a walk along the beach until it was too cold for everybody but the Minx, who had to be picked up out of the sandhole that she’d dug and carried home squalling.
And as we were tracing our way back through the upturned boats and then across the strip of coarse grassland that divided the shoreline from the shore road.
I found myself thinking: Maybe the people who wrote the page weren’t the ones who took it out. Maybe it was something that the owners didn’t want the rest of us to see.
The owners.
Those shadowy people who weren’t actually present but whose mark was everywhere, so that they seemed to stand just out of sight like a bunch of watchful ghosts. Their pictures, their ornaments, their old castoff furniture—their house. Maybe they came in after each new tenant and read the book, and there was something here that they’d censored.
Maybe.
Exactly what I had in mind, I couldn’t have said. Something uncomplimentary, some insult even; written by someone who perhaps didn’t have a good time and blamed the place and not themselves for it. Or worse. It could have been something worse. I was surprised to find that the possibility had been playing on my mind.
I said nothing to Sally, but I decided there and then that I’d think about it no further. I mean, you worry at something to which you know you can never find the answer, and where does it get you?
Nowhere. So I thought I’d better stop.
That night, after the Minx had been installed in her room and had exhausted every avenue for stories and drinks and had eventually exhausted herself as well, we got a couple of the local beers out of the fridge and turned on the sitting-room lights. Sally flicked through some of the magazines that she’d picked up on the boat coming over, and I hunted around for the paperback I’d been reading. I’m not much of a reader, and thinking of the two weeks that lay ahead I’d bought the book for its size and weight as much as for any other reason. Every other page was dotted with CIA and MI5 and KGB, and the plot went on and on and had about as much grip as a wet handshake; after a while I gave up looking for it, and went over to the shelves instead.
There had to be something here I could read. There was a cabinet full of books and overseas editions of the Readers Digest, most of them probably abandoned and accumulated from visitors over the years, but there wasn't much that was in the English language. There was a fat book by Leon Uris that I put back because it looked such heavy going and, besides, I'd already seen the movie, and an old and brittle Agatha Christie which, on a quick check, appeared to have lost its last ten pages. The only decent bet seemed to be a two-fisted private eye story titled Dames Die First.
When I pulled it out, a photograph dropped to the floor. It had been between the books. I picked it up and looked at it, and saw that there was the sign of a crease across the middle. At a guess, it had been slipped in between the volumes for the pressure to flatten it out, and then it had been forgotten. It was of a blonde girl of about six or seven, and if it had been taken anywhere around here I didn't recognise the spot. I carried the picture over to the chest of drawers and then started to go through them, much as Sally had earlier in the day. After a while I became aware of her watching me.
“What’s the matter?” she said.
“Just checking on something.”
She didn’t seem to think much of my answer, but it was the best one I had. As she was laying down her magazine to come over, I found what I was looking for; another, different photograph that lay in one of the drawers underneath some boxed games and out-of-date timetables.
It was a family group. Nothing formal, just a snapshot. The house was recognisable in the background, although they’d added to it since. These, I’d been guessing, were the people who actually owned the place and who let it out through an agency for the times when they didn’t need it themselves.
I laid the two photographs side by side on top of the dresser. The girl who appeared in one didn’t appear in the other.
Sally picked up the portrait shot and said, “She doesn’t look local,” before dropping it again and going on through the kitchen toward the bathroom.
Yeah, fine.
That’s probably what I’d been thinking, too.
Saturday came around.
I didn’t actually realise that it was Saturday until I saw a strange car coming up the driveway that morning. At first I thought that it was somebody on their way to speak to us, but the car turned off and pulled in by the other of the two houses that shared the driveway and the private clearing at its end. Suddenly it didn’t seem so private any more.
The family got out and we nodded to each other. They didn’t seem to have brought much in the way of luggage and they went straight into the house as if they already knew their way around. My guess was that they were another set of owners, just up for the weekend. I went back into our own place and warned Sally and the Minx, just in case either of them happened to be wandering around after a shower in less than their underwear. There was just a stretch of open ground between the two buildings, nothing screening them at all. The other house was newer, neater. I know it was theirs, but I couldn’t help thinking of them as intruders.
I looked at the two children. Neither of them was anything like the girl in the photograph.
So then I wondered if they might be able to tell me what had happened here, in this same week exactly one year before.
But I never asked.
On Sunday we took the Minx on a long drive to the zoo, where she acted up so much that we had to threaten to leave her there and halfway meant it. When we got back late in the afternoon, our short-term neighbours were apparently loading up to go. We nodded as we passed just as before, and then they went.
I gave it a few minutes after their departure and then I took a walk down the driveway to check that the gate was secure; the driveway curved and was lined with dense bushes, so the gate couldn’t be seen directly from the house. The Minx came after me, on the prospect of froggies. She squatted down looking hopefully at the ground while I rattled the wide gate, but the bolt was secure.
“Why are you doing that?” she said.
“So that we can let you wander around without worrying about you getting onto the road where the cars are,” I told her. “Haven’t you noticed how one of us checks on it every morning?”