Forgotten Fears (23 page)

JUST SEVEN DAYS. Seven days to turn a perfectly rational man into a quivering, broken-minded wreck. He held his head in his hands and slumped to the ground on his haunches, sliding down the oak counter. A low pained whine came from within him as he looked the face in the floor. It stared back at him, mocking and arrogant. It was supposed to have been the home of their dreams, a fresh start after a difficult period of their eleven year marriage. It was their chance to work towards putting things right, but now it had all changed. His Susan, his beautiful blonde haired, green eyed Susan with the playful, seductive smile, his Susan who had a way of bringing the best out of him and had made him a better man. Susan who had gushed over each and every room as the agent had shown them around the Victorian townhouse, envisioning how it would be, how it would work out. He had followed behind, momentarily forgotten as his wife proclaimed her love for the beautiful property.  The agent, smelling a sale as surely as a shark smells blood, proceeded to sell it to them, transitioning into his well-practiced pitch. Alex wasn’t as convinced and couldn’t see what she found so appealing about it. Where he only saw wood rot and damp, Susan saw original features and fittings that could be restored. Where he saw gutters and window frames in need of replacement, she saw a chance to modernize whilst retaining the charm of the building. The overgrown and weed filled garden that to him was hours of back breaking work, to her was filled with potential. ‘What about in the summer?’ she’d said, ‘when it’s all done we can sit out here and watch the sun go down.’ She was so convincing that even he had started to see the possibilities. It would be beautiful when it was completed. Not buying the house from that point on was never an option, and although disheartened by the amount of work it would require, he went along with it.

But it didn’t matter now.

None of it mattered because Susan was dead.

She was rolled up in the red rug that used to be in the very kitchen where he now sat and stared at the face in the floor. When they first discovered it they were curious but unafraid, as it wasn’t fully formed. It was more a suggestive thing at the time, the swirls and knots in the wood forming a vague form of an open-mouthed female face. Depending on the angle it was viewed from, it was either laughing or screaming.

Susan said she found it charming. He found it a little unsettling. It was a few days later that he noticed the face had changed, morphed into a different position.

The face was now less vague, it’s form easier to make out. The closer they looked, more details could be seen. The shape of an ear, the pained glare of the eyes which stared venomously out of the floorboards. The suggestion of if the face was screaming or not was now resolved. It was clear now that it was in the middle of what looked to be an agonised wail.

They didn’t want to discuss what it might have been, but they agreed that, charming or not, it had to go.  They hired an industrial sanding machine. And he spent the entire day sanding down the kitchen floor. When he was done, the wood that was once dirty and tired was now bright and clean and devoid of blemishes, face included.

That should have been the end of it, but less than a week later it started to reappear. At first, it was just a ghost of the eyes and the vague outline of the mouth, but there was no doubt what it was, the unblemished floor made it easier to spot. For the first time, they understood why perhaps they had been able to buy the place so cheaply. He and Susan had knelt beside it and leaned close, peering at the wood up close. It was cold to the touch and gave them both the urge to wash their hands as if they had been soiled somehow. It was at this point that the atmosphere in the house changed and they started to argue. Day by day, slowly but surely the face in the floor reappeared, only, this time, the face had changed. Instead of an anguished scream, the face in the wood now had a roar of rage, brow furrowed, eyes narrow and glaring, mouth turned down at the corners. It wasn’t alone. Other faces were starting to appear, ghostly forms swimming out of the wood and growing more and more visible with each passing day.

Susan wanted to leave the faces to come through, certain that they were trying to convey some kind of message. He just wanted to be rid of them because he simply had never believed. He had never believed in Bigfoot or aliens or things that creep around in the dark and wait until the lights go out before they come to get you. And as a sceptic with no rational explanation for what was happening, he decided that eradication was the best course of action and was also much easier to deal with than believing in the possibility that there could be something out there that he didn’t understand and that modern science could not explain by blaming temperature fluctuations, or mass hysteria or anything of the like. And even if they could, he wouldn’t believe them because as much as he might try to deny it, the face in the floor was looking at them and they could see it was angry.

As the faces grew more and more detailed, they, in turn, became more afraid.

Afraid to tell anyone what was happening, even afraid to sleep. As the fear increased, so did the intensity and regularity of their arguments. He had never laid a hand on her before the faces appeared, but now he had taken to regularly beating her, pounding her through sobs of rage and fear and wondering what the hell was happening to them.

Things reached crisis point and they knew they that they had to do something, and so with a wife sitting opposite him across the table who was bruised, hurting and unable to look him in the eye, he had applied for permission to replace the wooden floor with concrete, hoping that it would, at least, be an end to the whole thing.  However planning permission was denied—the building was listed, and even though they owned it, legally they couldn’t proceed with any work which may cause damage to the original features of the house, the kitchen floor of which was one.

Desperation won out over common sense, and so they decided to do it anyway. He spent a week tearing up the old wood, removing the faces which were now so clear that they could have been paintings delicately penned onto the wood. The old floorboards were burned and new floor re-laid. Now their period house had an out of place bare concrete floor, but they didn’t care. The removal of the faces meant they might have a chance to get their lives back on track and perhaps start to rebuild a little of the relationship they had already broken. For a few weeks, things went well. The arguments stopped, and the faces in the floor were forgotten, blocked out for the simple reason that thinking about them for too long was likely to send a person insane.

As Alex sat on the kitchen floor, lost in recollection, he couldn’t believe how quickly things had changed again.

The faces had started to reform a week earlier.

At first, they had started as vague impressions in the concrete. The tried to convince themselves it was a blemish, an inconsistency in the concrete mix or a smudge of dirt or scuff of a shoe even though neither of them truly really believed it. For the first time they felt terror— true pure terror, unlike anything they had ever experienced before, as day by day, the faces in the floor started to reappear.  This time, they were clearer, horrific in detail as they melted themselves into the concrete. The screaming woman who seemed to be central to the phenomenon wore a smug, arrogant, gap-toothed grin. The wrinkles on her skin, the knowing glare in her eyes showing through in frightening clarity on the otherwise unblemished concrete. He imagined her in his head, speaking to him, telling him what he had to do to make them go away. For six days he lay awake at night, staring at the roof and listening to the old house creaking and moaning, and imagining that old hag faced woman in the floor pulling herself out of the concrete and coming to him, touching him with her cold, leathery fingertips and whispering in his ear with hot breath smelling of rot and earth.

Fear.

Sleep deprivation.

Insanity.

All viable excuses, but whatever spin he tried to put on it, the end result was the same. The last argument with Susan had gone too far, and with the voice of the hag woman in his head, he had given into an overwhelming and all-consuming rage. This time, it was more than a punch or grabbing her by the hair and screaming in her face. This time, he had strangled her, tendons bulging out of his neck like steel cables, hands clenching down hard on his windpipe as he glared through gritted teeth and imagining the old hag’s corpse breath in his ear telling him he was doing the right thing.

When it was done, sanity returned to him and he saw what he was responsible for. His wife lay dead on the floor, eyes bloodshot, the tip of her tongue protruding from her mouth. He had glanced to the old woman in the floor, the satisfaction on her face complete. He couldn’t bear to look at Susan anymore, and so had wrapped her in the carpet and moved her until he could decide how to tell the police what he had done. All of that had now changed, though Because Susan was back.

She was there in the floor with the old woman, her face somehow cut into the concrete in a series of smudges and scratches, the detail too real, too horrific. She was glaring at him, one more accusing face amongst the thirty or so others that now covered the concrete floor of the kitchen. Some of them were no more than fleshy skulls, empty eye sockets still able to stare. Others were young and vibrant, no more than children who he understood now had met their end in this house. Worse was the old woman, her smile ancient, knowing. Satisfied.

The human mind is a funny thing, he thought to himself as he wedged the barrel of the handgun into its mouth, the taste of oil and steel making it all so suddenly real.

After all, what is love, what is guilt, what is life?

He needed to be with her, needed to explain, and there was only one way to do that. The old woman’s voice in his head was telling him what he had to do. He looked at Susan’s glaring, furious face in the floor, hoping she would understand, hoping she would let him explain. He wondered what the next people would be like who would buy the house. He was sure he would see them from the floor alongside his wife and the others, forever a permanent fixture of this place. With the dead breath of the old hag in his ear, he closed his eyes and pulled the trigger.

GRANDPA

[This was supposed to be the opening story to Dark Corners when I initially came up with the idea for it being an interconnected series of stories. The old man in the story was supposed to appear in between each tale in Dark Corners and tell the grandson what had happened, in essence introducing each story ala The Crypt Keeper in Tales From The Crypt. In the end, I abandoned that idea but liked the introduction to the old man and the grandson, and so decided to create a new story from it which has been sitting around for the last couple of years until now.]

THE OLD MAN was close to death. With a wheeze, he pushed his frail body upright to enable him to establish eye contact with his grandson. Their eyes locked, the old man’s tired and weary, the boys bright and full of hope. With a shaking, liver-spotted hand, the old man lifted the oxygen mask to his face and inhaled deeply, his eyes never leaving the boy.

“Grandpa, are you alright? Do you need the nurse?” the boy asked as he rubbed his hands together.

The old man waved his free hand dismissively at the boy, then set the mask down beside him on the bed.  He was frail and thin, his leathery skin stretched over his bones.  The boy felt a pang of sorrow, and also a little revulsion. He couldn’t imagine ever becoming this way himself, clinging on to life by the fingertips.

“How old are you boy?” the old man asked, pushing a few strands of wiry, white hair away from his eyes.

“I’ll be fifteen next month Grandpa, you asked me last week, remember?” replied the boy. Lowering his gaze to the ground.

“Sixteen” the old man repeated, nodding slowly. “And are you a good boy?”

There was something in the old man’s eyes which the boy had never seen before. A brightness, or perhaps a nervous excitement. The boy shuffled on his chair by the bedside. “I – I suppose so. I mean I try to be.”

The old man nodded, and took another long breath on his oxygen mask, his hand shaking with effort.

“You have your father’s eyes. He looked just like you when he was your age. Of course, that was a long time ago.”

The boy did not know how to reply to that and instead looked down at his feet as he shuffled his weight on the chair. There was a lengthy silence, and the boy glanced around the room as he waited for his grandfather to continue. “Grandpa...you asked to see me. You said it was important.”

“Yes.  There is something that I have to tell you.” He replied, beckoning the boy closer.

The boy shuffled forwards on the plastic chair, its feet scraping on the polished floor, and was now close enough to pick up the faint smell of disinfectant and starch from the bed linen.

“Grandpa, I’m not sure I understand.”

The old man laughed, the sound morphing into a wet rasp and then a cough. The boy stood as to help, but the old man raised a hand. He waited as the old man finished coughing into a tissue, wishing he hadn’t seen the bloody residue left as he wiped his mouth.

“It has to be you boy...it has to be you.” The old man said, then coughed again, and for a second the boy thought that he would again need to bloody another tissue, but the cough subsided, and the old man settled for taking another long breath on the oxygen mask.