I picked up Father, and she took Mother. We laid a cloth upon the table and let the gritty grey particles trickle together, moving our heads back as fine dust began to form around the urns. And then we dared to go further, we mixed them with the tips of our own fingers, mingling them into one pile.
“Do you think this is legal, Annie dear?”
“They belong to us. I suppose we could eat them if we wanted to, with peas,” I replied frivolously, and to my utter shame.
All is now in the open between myself and Beth, I have shown her the recordings I made of their appearances and she affirms that they made no sense. “Perhaps you were in a trance, Annie,” she murmured. “But even if we must live once more with Mama and Papa, they cannot harm us one jot, you know.”
She was very calm, and I could not help but feel furious with her. “You make so little of it,” I shouted. “You think your sophistication can expunge them.”
“It is you who can expunge them, Annie, you alone. You must try mightily to let them go. They haunt you because you allow it.”
“Why can you not own that it is something we did together, and why can you not see that if you had not left, they would not be so very angry with us now?”
So our positions in this matter became fixed. We agreed that under no circumstances should we let our troubles become known to others. When tradesmen call it is she who has the task of speaking to them, and it is she who attends to our meals and comfort in the house. Although I feel she could be close to nervous exhaustion, she is wonderfully attentive to me most of the time; on that, I cannot fault her.
Now that November is nearing its end, strong winds blow against the yew hedges and the Quiet Garden is very much alive. Some dry snow has fallen, and more is likely in December. The bench close to the stone urn is swollen with damp and its tendrils of lichen so milky green in the summer, have taken on a darker hue. I spend much time there.
I wear the wide blue ribbons that hung limp in my hair when I was a child, so that they do not mistake me for Beth. I find new ways to appease them, thinking to charm them into placidity; I dance for them and sing the songs of our childhood that they never heard. I take meals to the garden for them. I lay the plates out carefully upon the ground; I fancy that mutton and peas are well tolerated. Sometimes I sense that the plates have been disturbed and call to Beth in my excitement. But it may be as she says—that an animal has ventured by and taken parts of the food, a fox, she suggests, or a domestic cat—for it is not I who eats them.
But lately a further development has occurred which has cast a new light on my duties. I have not yet told Beth because it is an escalation of a horrible kind, and the thing I most feared. It has become essential that I find a way of containing Mama and Papa within the Quiet Garden, for they have begun to venture from it in the last few days. It is as if over the months since my first encounters with them, they have gained new knowledge. They are like two children on the verge of intellectual discovery, and I sense their excitement, and with it their increasing malevolence. They wish to gain entry to the house, and I must at all costs stop this happening, for it is clear to me that once inside they will find Beth, for whom they hunger terribly.
Robert Shearman
SUFFER LITTLE CHILDREN
ROBERT SHEARMAN is an author and playwright who is probably best known for reintroducing the Daleks to the BAFTA-winning first season of BBC-TV’s revived Doctor Who.
His four short story collections—Tiny Deaths, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, Everyone’s Just So So Special and They Do the Same Things Different There—have, between them, won the World Fantasy Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Edge Hill Readers Prize and three British Fantasy Awards. Remember Why You Fear Me: The Best Dark Fiction of Robert Shearman is a recent omnibus collection of the author’s work.
“When I was a little boy,” recalls Shearman, “I was scared of stories. The ones read to me in class, the ones I was told on television. Words on the page used to scare me. Book covers alone could make me scream.
“My parents were concerned. The doctor suggested that maybe, to calm me down, I might like to think of numbers instead.
“I liked numbers. ‘3’ looked smiling and happy. ‘7’ was a bit stuck-up until you got to know him better, then he was all right. And every night I’d lie in my bed and stare up at the ceiling and think of numbers, my new friends.
“My bedroom ceiling was made up of fifteen unbroken tiles. (There were the edges of other tiles around the cupboards, but I didn’t count those, they had to be unbroken for the game to work. One of the fifteen was partially interrupted by the light hanging from it, and sometimes I counted it, and sometimes I didn’t.) And I would imagine on the first tile I would place the number ‘1’. And on the second, I’d double that, and I’d place the number ‘2’. And I’d carry on doubling, and by the time I reached my fifteenth tile, right above my head, I’d be up to ‘16,384’. I liked playing with doubling numbers. Whenever I felt awkward or nervous, I’d start doubling them in my head, and see how far I could get until I felt better. (And in fact, all these years on, I still do this.)
“The nightmares started when I began to believe the numbers might eat me. Because there weren’t just fifteen tiles in the world, there were billions. You carry on doubling the numbers on that many tiles, who knows what monsters you’ll end up with? And I dreamed regularly of armies of numbers, and an ever growing single number that just kept getting bigger and bigger, and I couldn’t squeeze all its digits on to a tile, no matter how small I tried to write it. And there are so many people in the world, but there are many more numbers than people—in a very real sense, the numbers will always outnumber us. And if they turn against us, if they even choose to see us, that’s it—we’re dead, we’re dead, we’re all dead.
“I had this nightmare a lot, until my parents weaned me off numbers and back on to books, back on to Enid Blyton.
“I still have the nightmare, once in a while. The last time was five months ago.
“This is a story about that nightmare.”
EVERYTHING SHE TAUGHT she’d learned from the books in her father’s study—and even then, only from the bottom shelves, she couldn’t have reached the top shelves without the ladder, and the ladder’s wooden rungs were lined with cracks that looked like spider webs. So, no geography, then (but her pupils would be English, so how much did they need to know about foreign lands?). Plenty of history, she liked the way the past could be packaged into neat little romances; they were like fairy tales but the difference was, these fairy tales were true. A smattering of French. A smaller smattering of Latin. Poetry. Fine art. She liked simple mental arithmetic, something about its solid rightness made her happy.
But what she taught didn’t matter; she was left under no illusions about that. Her task was to ensure the children were occupied and well-behaved, and that their wits were kept sharp to prepare them for proper education later. Children liked her, and that was the main thing. Adults didn’t, much; adults never quite knew what to say to her. She was unfailingly polite, but somehow always at one remove, everything she said sounded too considered and deliberate. But children seemed charmed by her.
In part, perhaps, that may have been the way she looked. She had such a very young face. Her cheeks were full and red like a baby doll’s. Her eyes, wide and innocent. The children instinctively might have recognised her as one of them, that for all the authority bestowed on her she belonged to their world, not the world of their parents. It was true that she always looked so serious and thoughtful, and she only rarely smiled. But that didn’t mean she ever looked disapproving, or in judgement of them. She seemed to be a little girl who wanted to be all grown up. Children understand that. They want the same thing.