New Fears II--Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre by Mark Morris

Author:Mark Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

SENTINEL

Catriona Ward

Anna droops in the green wing chair, black skirts spread about her. Night comes in through the open doors, warm and speaking. Wisteria, oleander, flowers that bloom as briefly as a gasp. The distant road is quiet. No neighbours but the dark and the trees. She thinks of the afternoons she spent as a child under the spreading reaches of those woods. She swore she’d get away from here and she did. But death has hurtled her back, the pendulum swinging over the fixed point.

Ma died the day after Anna came home, as if that had been the signal. By the end her faculties were blunted into nothing by stroke. She stared ahead or inwards. You could raise her arm and it would stay there. Her face was a carnival mask. Her lip drew up over her yellow teeth in a gunslinger’s snarl. Her body seemed barely tenanted. There was no sign of her passing. It was the nurse who told Anna that she held the hand of a corpse.

Sweat prickles on Anna’s brow, her palms. She should put out the lights, go upstairs and sleep. But she does not. If she sleeps now, her mother is truly dead and buried. When she next opens her eyes it will be to a world without Ma.

Her legs ache. Funerals require so much standing. Images flicker through Anna’s mind like sparks from bad circuitry. The Reverend’s red, sore nose, dripping. Soft rain on black umbrellas. Fresh-turned earth. Curling sandwiches, picked over by many fingers. The slight clunk, like a turnstile, as the coffin settled into the ground. Anna had hoped to feel lighter afterwards—that one burial might serve for all the past. She had wondered if she might feel free. She feels tired.

Boxes are piled high against the walls. Her mother’s possessions sit eyeless in the cardboard dark. Anna feels that they are judging her or planning something. The tiny glass figurines, each requiring careful individual wrapping. The collections of commemorative spoons and tea towels. The hundreds of plastic bags tucked into every crevice. Under cushions, behind radiators, at the back of cupboards. How can there be so many? What emergency would require them?

A thin wail trickles down the stairs. Pearl.

Anna starts, shivers, and goes to her daughter with relief. It is good to busy herself with life.

* * *

The tiny box room is hot, full of Pearl’s breath. They both sleep here. Next door is the dark bedroom where the apparatus of illness still stands; an IV drip swaying gently on an unfelt breeze.

Pearl is a small resentful shape curled on the inflatable mattress on the floor. Her head is silken under Anna’s hand. How can anything be so soft? The pyjamas with dragons on them, the plump, perfect limbs—Anna lets herself feel the animal joy in her daughter’s physical being. “You were so good today,” Anna says. “Such a brave girl.”

“I want to go home,” Pearl says. “I don’t like it here.”

“We will,” Anna says. “But now you sleep.”

Pearl clutches at Anna, tugs her hair.

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