Best Horror of the Year: 8 by Ellen Datlow

Author:Ellen Datlow
Language: eng
Format: azw
Tags: The Best Horror of the Year
ISBN: 9781597808538
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Published: 2016-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

THE ROOMS ARE HIGH

REGGIE OLIVER

A man that looks on glass

On it may stay his eye;

Or if he pleaseth, through it pass

And then the heav’n espy

—George Herbert

“You could always stay at old Ma Carsett’s, I suppose,” said Lockwood. “Never went there myself, but I heard good things. But of course you must always remember ‘the rooms are high.’”

“What do you mean ‘the rooms are high’?” Savernake asked. “I thought you said this place was inexpensive. Do you mean the prices are high?”

“No, no. Just ‘the rooms are high.’”

“You mean the rooms have high ceilings, or that they’re high up? Or what?”

“No. This is just what several chaps who’d been there told me: ‘the rooms are high.’”

“Didn’t you ask what it meant?”

“There seemed no point since I wasn’t going to stay there.”

“Then why are you telling me?”

“Just passing it on, old chap, since you are going there, or might be. ‘The rooms are high.’”

Lockwood gave him what Savernake assumed was meant to be an enigmatic smile. Savernake had known Lockwood since they shared a set of rooms in their first year at Oxford nearly forty years ago and was both amused and irritated by him. They had kept up this rather odd friendship, and at least once a year they would have lunch at Savernake’s club and at his expense. Savernake had become a solicitor and Lockwood an actor.

Lockwood was no fool but he had the actor’s tendency to vagueness and imprecision where facts and figures were concerned. This inability to impart an exact meaning concerning Mrs. Carsett’s rooms at Norgate was a typically annoying example.

It was not long after the death of his wife that Savernake felt the need to get away. None of the familiar reasons seemed quite to correspond with his feelings. His wife’s last illness had been too protracted for him to feel anything but relief when she finally went. At the same time, though childless, it had not been an unhappy marriage and Savernake sensed the loss of a valuable part of himself without being able to define precisely what it was. For several years while he had been looking after his wife Savernake had taken no holidays, despite the advice of friends that he must have “a break.” Now it was all over the need suddenly asserted itself, so that it became almost an obsession; and the fact that he could not define a precise reason for the need made it no less urgent. All the same this ignorance annoyed him: his solicitor’s professional deformity clamoured for unambiguous causes.

Abroad seemed the obvious place to go—a cruise perhaps—but this did not appeal. On a cruise he would be thrown into contact with people whom he neither knew nor wanted to know; abroad and alone he would be too much a stranger. It had to be somewhere in England where his isolation would be unremarked: he wanted a place of stillness and solitude with which he had a modicum of familiarity. Norgate came into his mind, the old resort on the Kent Coast.

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