Remember Why You Fear Me (52 page)

His eyes were wet, and they couldn’t tell if he were crying or rheumy.

“This world can’t be all there is,” he breathed. “It can’t be. I have faith. There
must
be a way out.” He opened his spindly arms wide. “Give me a hug.”

So they did.

“Because,” said God. “You loved me once. You loved me once, didn’t you? You loved me once. You loved me. Tell me you loved me. Tell me you loved me once. You loved me. You loved me. You loved me.”

They buried their father in the back garden that night. It wasn’t a grand garden, but it was loved, and Cindy and Steve had planted flowers there, and it was good enough.

Then they went indoors, and they began looking for the dark space at the centre of the world. They’d been to Tenerife and to Venice, they’d seen no dark spaces there. So they looked in the kitchen, they cleared out the pots and the pans from the cupboard. They looked in the bathroom behind the cistern. They looked in the attic.

They decided to go to bed. It had been a long day. And Steve offered Cindy his hand, and she took it, a little surprised; he hadn’t offered her a hand in years. They both liked the feel of that hand holding thing, it made them seem warm and loved. They climbed the stairs together.

They looked for the dark space in the bedroom too, but it was nowhere to be found.

They got undressed. They kicked off their clothes, left them where they fell upon the floor, stood amidst them. They came together, naked as the day they were born. They explored each other’s bodies, and it was like the first time, now there were no expectations, nothing defensive, nothing to prove. He licked at her body, she nuzzled into his. Like the first time, in innocence.

She found his dark space first. It was like a mole, it was on his thigh. He found her dark space in the shadow of her overhanging left breast.

She put her ear to his thigh. Then he pressed his ear against her tit. Yes, there were such whispers to be heard! And they marvelled that they’d never heard them before.

She slid her fingertips into his dark space, and they numbed not unpleasantly. He kissed at hers, and he felt his tongue thicken, his tongue grew, all his mouth was a tongue. They both poked a bit further inside.

They wondered if they could squeeze themselves into something that was so small. They looked at each other for encouragement, but their faces were too hard to read. They wondered if they could dare. And then she smiled, and at that
he
smiled. And they knew they could be brave again, just one last time. They pushed onwards and inwards. And they went to someplace new.

The editors of this volume have asked me to give a brief overview of the life and works of R
_____
S
_____
, and I shall say at the outset that I have misgivings about the enterprise. The enterprise being not merely the introduction itself, but the very publication of this collection. I do not think S
_____
would have wanted to have seen his books back in print; indeed, I am quite sure not. And I do not think that the motives behind their reissue are of the best either; the letter I received this morning urging me once again to change my mind and write about
S
_____
speaks—and I quote—of “the public’s fascination and appetite for the ‘Master of the Macabre.’” I put it to you that the fascination is not with the stories themselves, which I suspect to be no better than the rest of their genre, but with the author himself, and a rather prurient curiosity about the manner of his death. I put it to you, too, the reader, holding this book in your hands, that the aforementioned appetite is sensationalism of the worst kind, and I say, shame on you, sir, shame on you.

But nonetheless, and much to my surprise, I find myself writing. There is a storm outside; there is a draft in my study that I cannot locate nor still; the very candle by which I work is guttering. And I am not without a sense of humour, no matter what my students claim, and I can see the irony of a night like this, the very setting of so much of S
_____
’s work, a setting which lets the mind fancy about ghosts and witches and wendigos. So, here I put this before you, if not with my blessing. And this way I may at least hope, with the book on sale, that Margaret may be given some money.

I do not say that S
_____
’s interest in writing supernatural fiction was beneath him. Every man must have a hobby. I myself am quite a keen golfer, with a handicap of sixteen above par, and I take great pleasure in that, but would also venture that it in no way intrudes upon my academic reputation. The same was not true of S
_____
, and that was his curse. He was a scholar of some undeniable merit, and although many critics would claim that his analysis of fourteenth century poetry yielded little fresh insight, I’ve never heard anyone suggest that his research was anything less than thorough and his theories anything less than cogent. But there is surely no question that whatever his academic prowess, in the last few years of his life any renown he had was for his ghost stories. It wasn’t even as if he had published that many; he wrote one a year, as I understood it, always performed on Christmas Eve during the university celebrations. This was the sum total of his literary fame, or shall I say, notoriety: no more than three thousand words per year, and all three thousand melodramatic mumbo-jumbo.

I attended his final ghost story reading. There was an undeniable excitement in the air, and I allowed myself to share in it in spite of myself. The undergraduates all dressed in their gowns, and drinking wine and ale, and eating pork and steak, and singing Christmas carols and songs of an altogether more secular nature. S
_____
sat up on high table, of course, and looked shrunken in on himself, not conversing, not eating, barely taking part in the festivities at all—but then, when the port was served, and cigars were lit, the lights were lowered, and S
_____
got to his feet—and it seemed to me that he was suddenly
transformed
. He seemed much taller, much younger, and at once the room fell silent in ready anticipation; there was no need to call for silence, this performance is what we all had been waiting for.
And S
_____
read, and we all shivered in the hope of something frightening that would put our nerves jangling and let reel our darkest imaginings. I do not think S
_____
was a natural actor. Even as a lecturer he had a propensity to mumble, and as a reader, merely reading the words in front of him, he was inclined toward halting monotone. And I do not think that the story was a good one, even by his standards: the tale of a ghost in a hotel preying upon the residents within seemed to me rather stale and obvious, and painfully lacking in theme or subtext. But what could not be argued was the
authority
with which
S
_____
spoke, the way there was no other sound to be heard save his voice for the full half hour, in a hall large enough to fit five hundred (and had done so, easily, to bursting) and had only so recently rung loud with the unfettered boisterousness of youth. As S
_____
read of his ghosts and demons, there was a change in the atmosphere. It seemed to grow colder. It seemed to grow darker. There was an almost preternatural stillness to the air, I fancied that time itself had stopped, or at least
slowed
, that I would look outside the window and the branches would only be inching in the wind and the snow would fall at half speed. And by the time he had finished, the world seemed a more mysterious, and unsettling, and more
remarkable
place to live.

I only discussed his horror writing with S
_____
on two occasions, many years apart. And his answers were contradictory, and I like to think that the first time was the
correct
answer nonetheless—back before he’d made a name for himself, even so, back before he’d been defined and limited by his own peculiar imagination. I asked him, simply enough, why it was he put such focus upon his tales of the uncanny, and I asked, I think without judgment—and he blushed (as well he might) and told me that it was really all about trying to make people
laugh
. That was it. He thought that within his flights of fancy there was something so absurd that it would amuse people, that delight could be taken in the dissonance between what they expected and what they received, like the way a child giggles in a hall of mirrors seeing himself fat or tall. But something always went wrong with the punchlines to his jokes, he said. What he’d hoped would elicit a chuckle would instead produce a gasp; the tightrope, he argued, between comedy and horror was really very narrow, and his problem was he just kept falling off it. As a little boy his attempts to make his parents laugh only made them recoil; he gave his sisters nightmares with the jolly adventures he’d dream up for their dolls to entertain them. And pretty soon he realized that if he couldn’t win anyone’s heart with ready wit, he wouldn’t try; he’d let that dissonant way he looked at the world—a way that deep inside still would make him chortle, he alone still found full of jest—be as unnerving and twisted as one could wish. If he couldn’t make them love him, he’d make them fear him a little. And at this he blushed even deeper, and of course I knew the reason why.

The reason why was Margaret. Of course he loved Margaret, just as I did; she was an outsider. We were all of us outsiders there, at a university which was based upon privilege and rank, where most students could trace back their family’s college attendance as far as their great grandfathers. S
_____
was the first person in his family to go to university; so was I; his father was in trade; so was mine. And it sounds an unlikely contrivance now that we met on our first day there, but it was true; it was as if we wore badges telling the other undergraduates that we didn’t belong, they smelled out we were frauds at once, and the way they so blatantly excluded us made it all the easier for us to find each other.

We became firm friends immediately.

And very soon, once we’d found the nerves to speak to her, Margaret was part of our group too—a female student, back in the times before that became a point of fashion, and from the middle classes as well.
S
_____
was very shy of her, I recall, and it was hard for him to introduce himself, as soon as he even got close he’d wring his hands and start to stammer so he looked less like a first class academic in the making than a babbling simpleton—I was, I think, much smoother with her, I was able to say hello and tell her my name and comment upon the weather and ask her the time. But it was to his credit that it was
S
_____
who invited her to go punting with us—he came back to the halls one day, and threw himself down on the chaise, and he looked so red I thought he was having a seizure. “I’ve done it,” he said, “I’ve asked her out. She’ll go punting with us on Sunday afternoon at two o’clock sharp.” I pointed out to him that I didn’t know how to punt, and nor did he; at this he turned even more red, he hadn’t thought of that. So for the next four days we neglected our studies, we spent our time on the river trying to master how on earth one can steer a wooden boat with a pole. I fancy by the time Sunday came both of us had achieved a certain halting proficiency; we had stopped falling in, at any rate; and we both had the blisters on our hands to prove it. But when Margaret came to join us, all of S
_____
’s training went in an instant, he didn’t know what to do with that pole, whether to push it or pull it or wave it about like an idiot—and I must admit, I too, I was tired and the weather was warm and I was not at my best. Margaret watched us struggle with the pole; we were both getting irritable with it, and with each other. “May I?” she asked, ever so gently, and we stepped aside, and
she
took the pole, and
she
took control, and S
_____
and I sat in the back and enjoyed the afternoon as she punted us up and down and all over the river.

I would say, where S
_____
and I were concerned, that I was the more attractive. I was more confident; I was taller; I had dark hair, where S
_____
’s was wispy and blonde like a girl’s; I was specializing in John Milton, who is the greatest poet of the English language, and S
_____
’s interest lay in Geoffrey Chaucer, who had palpable talent, of course,
but was rather too inclined towards bodily function jokes, and has always struck me as something of a dilettante. It was understandable that it was me that Margaret fell in love with. But this in no way affected our friendship with S
_____
, and indeed, we became an inseparable trio; Margaret and I would walk the streets of the city hand in hand, and
S
_____
would bound about us good-naturedly like an amiable dog trying to amuse. It worked. Margaret called us “the Three Musketeers”—and I didn’t like that, I thought that as students of English literature we should really avoid a reference to Dumas and concentrate instead upon our own heroes. I suggested we be called “the Three Metaphysicals,” after the great poets, Donne, Herbert and Marvell; but it didn’t catch on; no one could agree which one was Donne, which one was Herbert, which one was Marvell; after a while I gave up trying to persuade them and let Margaret and S
_____
have their way.

It occurs to me now I can’t recall which poet was Margaret’s own area of specialist interest. I’m sure it was one that I didn’t disapprove of, however; I would remember.

Later that term we celebrated our first Christmas together. There was a formal dinner on the Christmas Eve, and we wore our gowns, and ate, and drank, and looked quite the picture of academia, I think. And Margaret had had an idea; that we should have our own private party afterwards, in her room, and each person would bring along an entertainment to perform. There was wine, and I think it was where I smoked my first cigar; I’m pretty sure it was S
_____
’s first cigar, and he cried through the smoke, and we laughed; it was Margaret’s first cigar too, and she puffed away quite proficiently, and I felt very proud of her, I remember thinking that she was my girl. There was a dozen of us in all; Margaret’s social circle was rather wider than ours. One student sang a ballad, another played his violin really very reasonably indeed. I read aloud my own translation of one of Virgil’s Eclogues, and it went down very well, and afterwards I was given a round of applause, and I remember making a little bow. It was
S
_____
’s turn. “I’m going to read a story I’ve written,” he said. “Can we have the lights off, please?” Someone laughed and pointed out that if it was dark he wouldn’t be able to see to read; he hadn’t thought it through! S
_____
said quietly that he’d rehearsed it a lot, he knew his story by heart.