Dark Steps
A collection of short stories
by Martin Pond
Dark Steps
Copyright © 2011 by Martin Pond
Smashwords edition
The right of Martin Pond to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted to him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
The following selections were previously published: ‘Waiting Room’ in Unthology No. 1 by Unthank Books, ‘Dream Feed’ in Issue 15 of Streetcake Magazine, ‘Near-Death Experience’ in Issue 4 of Alliterati Magazine.
For Daisy
Contents
Extract from Drawn To The Deep End
I stopped writing for a long time. Life got in the way. It never really went away though, the urge, the compulsion to put something new and original into words. In my youth I wrote copiously, science-fiction at first, then, as teenage years rolled into student days, about the sort of hedonistic lifestyle I imagined an idealised version of myself might lead. You’ll be pleased to learn this collection spares you any of the above.
So I wrote a lot, but then I just stopped. The real world of work came along. Free time was at a premium, and writing time scarcer still. So I filed away my ideas and that was that. Until 2007, when a friend who would later become my partner suggested I pick it up again. So I dug out some of those ideas that I’d filed away but, with fifteen more years reading under my belt, recognised most of them for what they were: pretty poor. If I was going to do this, I reasoned, I should do it properly. That’s how I came to enrol on a ten-week Introduction to Creative Writing course. Sufficiently fired up by that, I then took a year-long diploma, and really started to think about the mechanics of writing, the craft. And I’ve been refining my take on that craft ever since. These stories are some of the results
Waiting Room is a piece of speculative fiction originally written in 2009 as part of the assessed work for the diploma... and it was written in one hell of a hurry, less than 24 hours. I needed something short to bring my portfolio up to the required length, and this is what I came up with. With only the tiniest amount of editing, I later submitted it to Unthank Books for inclusion in the 2010 edition of their annual Unthology and, to my surprise, they accepted it. It was my first prose submission and it got published, in a real book, just like that. I did launch events and readings. I signed books. And I dared to dream that this writing lark might be very easy. Of course that is not the case, but sometimes, even if only for a few seconds, it doesn’t hurt to dream.
Speaking of which, I wrote Dream Feed a couple of months after the birth of my son. It’s not hard to see where the inspiration came from, is it? The story almost wrote itself, although the heightened state I felt in those early months no doubt powered my pen. It’s also an exercise in writing what I like to read – the unsettling short story with a twist ending. I write a lot of those, haven’t you noticed? Dream Feed was my first successful online publication, appearing in Issue 15 of Streetcake Magazine in January 2011.
Egg is what happens when I try to write to a theme – “write a story about Easter”. It’s also what happens when I try to write flash fiction, although I find it very difficult not to overwrite. After I’d finished the story I realised it owes quite a lot to a novella by Richard Bachman, but then aren’t we all a product of our influences? There’s nothing new under the sun, after all. I guess I should admit to a hole in my research too – I don’t know if it’s “surprisingly easy” to make brucine from household ingredients. Somehow, I doubt it is. It doesn’t matter – I just remembered the poison from the Charles Bronson film The Mechanic, and it served the story. It’s all about what serves the story.
When it comes to CCTV, the UK is the most surveilled nation on the planet. That’s where the idea for Near-Death Experience came from. As a story, I workshopped it almost to breaking point with the little writing group I attend, and I vividly remember the most amazing euphoria as, reading it aloud to my writing friends, I revealed the denouement, my twist ending. I later identified that feeling as the belief that I had written something that was, if not brilliant, then at least good. With a few tweaks from the workshop, I submitted this to a few magazines and, in May 2011, it became my second online publication, appearing in Issue 4 of Alliterati Magazine.
A Bit Christmassy is another stab at a themed story, this time with the theme being “festive ghost story”. I have always found it hard to write to a theme, and usually find myself trying to bend the theme to suit my will. Not this time though, I stuck to the brief like glue. Maybe it was watching The Sixth Sense for the umpteenth time (please God, don’t let it be Ghost) but I was really rather taken with... well, I’d better not say. I believe that would be what is known as a spoiler...
Resolution is another story I workshopped pretty hard, although with a broadly different set of people. Trying to rewrite the original, largely unsatisfying last section I was asked, “Can’t it have a happy ending?” Well no, frankly – it seems that I don’t generally do happy endings. Just endings that I’m happy with. That’s why this collection is called Dark Steps, after all.
The Inheritance is the first complete story I wrote after resuming writing in 2007. I had grand plans for this, once, although it never really turned out quite as I’d hoped. Reading it back I find I can get quite critical about it, particularly when I run it past my internal plausibility gauge. But I like to think that I was limbering up, re-immersing myself in the craft of writing. And without The Inheritance there would have been no Waiting Room, no publication, no book launches, no signings, nothing. So even though I now only really linger over the bits I’d like to rewrite, I include The Inheritance here for completeness and, selfishly, for nostalgia.
This collection concludes with an extract from Drawn To The Deep End, a novel that I have been writing in instalments and publishing, unedited, as a series of blog posts. The original purpose of writing Deep End this way was that it would make me write regularly. I also hoped to receive criticism from a wider audience and feed that criticism into the editing process. Oh, and it’s proof that you don’t need to know how a story ends to start writing it (a theory that used to stop me from starting a lot of stories). No, as Stephen King suggests in his excellent book On Writing, all you need is to put a character in an interesting situation and start writing. Okay, so I’m paraphrasing but the idea is that as you start writing you find out what happens to the character as you go along. And it seems to work, for me at least. From my opening scene, included in this extract, I’m now just over half-way through a novel-length work. You can read more about the Deep End project at drawntothedeepend.blogspot.com
Well, that’s enough introduction, don’t you think? What say we read some stories?
I’ve never been anywhere that was so white.
The walls are white, the ceiling’s white, the floor is all white tiles. The door in the far wall is white too. Even the magnetic lock thing that holds it shut is white.
In fact, the only thing that isn’t white is the bench I’m sat on. That’s stainless steel and it’s not really a bench, it’s just a long slab that sticks out of the wall. The edge is hurting the back of my legs.
I’ve been waiting about twenty minutes now. Well, I think so, they took my watch and phone off me when they signed me in, so I’m guessing but that’s how long it feels like. I said to Mum that we shouldn’t have got here so early but Dad got stroppy and said it was important and that every little thing could count towards the result. It didn’t hurt to be early, he said, not when every little thing counts.
I wish I knew more about what was going to happen next. Danny Roberts, he’s in my English class and he’s two days older than me, so he took his Test on Tuesday. I blipped him that afternoon and he got it, I know cos I put a receipt on it and that came back straight away. But he didn’t answer. I blipped him again yesterday, telling him not to be tight and to give me some clues about the Test, but I got a network error telling me the blip was undeliverable. Maybe he’s changed his phone.
I’ve more or less given up asking Mum and Dad about it, and why it’s so important. That’s cos every time I asked one or other of them would get angry. It’s alright when Dad shouts but when Mum does she goes red and shakes and I don’t like that, so I don’t ask any more. All Dad would say is that if they tell me about it the Centre will know, and we’ll be Flagged, and I’ll get an automatic fail. Even that’s more than Mum would say. All she’s done is try to get me ready for today. She’s been giving me tablets with fish oil in them, omega something; I said they tasted funny and that I didn’t want to take them. She shouted then, really shouted, about how I didn’t know what she’d had to do to get them. I took them after that. Then Mum took me to the park a couple of times last week so that I could run. That was a waste of time though, it takes hours to get to the park and when you finally do, well, there’s no room to do anything really, what with all the tents pitched everywhere. Mum says there used to be grass, but I don’t see where.
I did try looking on the net for something about the Test, or the Centre. I couldn’t find much really. It’s not the same anymore anyway, not like it was before Google and Bing and all the rest were closed down last year. I did find one site – Fight the Test, it was called – but all that had on it were theories and guesswork about what happens, there wasn’t anything concrete. I tried to go back there last week but they must have changed their address, cos I couldn’t find it.
I had a look at the Centre’s official site – that was mostly white too. It was funny though, they didn’t have much on there either. When we’ve done tests at school, they’ve usually given us past questions to look at, and I was hoping they’d have the same on the Centre’s site. But there was only one page, and that talked about the Test being “a matter of national importance” and “a way for every citizen to contribute towards the success and continuity of our great nation.” Then there was the slogan, “EARN YOUR PLACE!”, in big red letters, followed by a very long list of all the Centres around the country.
I didn’t like it when Mum and Dad dropped me off. Mum was all moist-eyed again, and I wondered if it was cos she was proud that I was going off to do my bit for the country, but she didn’t look proud, she just looked sad. She was doing that thing where you chew your lip to stop yourself from crying. Then she gave me a hug and I had to tell her to get off cos the pavement outside the Centre was rammed, like it always is, and everyone could see and it was embarrassing. Dad slapped me on the shoulder. I said, “See you later,” and Dad said “Do your best, son.” Mum didn’t say anything. I moved forwards so that the Centre’s entrance scanner could read me and the plain white, windowless door slid open. I stepped in and turned round to wave to Mum and Dad, but they were already being swept away in the crowd. That’s the problem now that all the pavements are one-way, Dad reckons: makes it hard to stand still.
When the door closed behind me I wondered what to do, and whether the test was starting straight away but before I had chance to worry about anything else a man appeared from another door on the opposite side of the hall. He wore a long white coat that made me think of Dr Anderson, but he didn’t look like a doctor. He didn’t smile like Dr Anderson either, and he didn’t have a badge or any pens in his top pocket. What he did have was a scanner like they have at school, and he swiped my code with that. Then he said, “Liam Bailey, 94738781?” and I said yes, cos he said it like a question which was funny cos he knew my name and number - he’d just scanned me. Then he said, “Can you confirm that you were born on June 16th 2009?” and he must have known that too, but I said yes anyway. Dr Anderson would have said happy birthday or something, maybe “You’re a teenager now!” in his rumbly voice, but all this man said was, “Follow me.”
We went through the doorway on the far side of the hall. That led into a long corridor with no doors or windows. At least the carpet wasn’t white. Walking along behind him, I noticed for the first time that the man had a mini-taser in his left hand, one of the ones that look like a pen. I recognised it straight away, cos it was the same make that all the teachers carry at school. Dad reckons he was tasered once, when he first met Mum. They were at some protest together and he reckons all he did was sit down in the road and a soldier shot him with a taser-net rifle. I asked what it had felt like and he said I couldn’t imagine. Then I asked what they had been protesting about. He said it was for the Procreation Alliance, or Defiance, or something like that, but then Mum came running in from the kitchen and shouted at him to shut up, saying did he want to get us all Flagged? And that was the end of that. I asked him again a few days later, when Mum wasn’t around, but all he’d say was, “It was a long time ago.”
I was just starting to wonder how long this corridor was when it opened out into a small square room, all white of course. On one side was a desk that looked like it was stainless steel, like the bench I’m sat on now. The only other colour in the place was a single, large poster on the wall behind the desk that had the Centre’s “EARN YOUR PLACE!” slogan on in red letters.
A woman sat at the desk. She was wearing a white dress a bit like a nurse’s and her hair was held back with a plain white ribbon. That almost made her look young, but her face was pale and waxy and old. I realised I was staring at her, and looked away quickly in case this was all part of the Test. Then she produced a scanner from a desk drawer, so I leaned my head forward so she could swipe my code. She said “Liam Bailey, 94738781?” just like the man had, and when I said yes she asked me to confirm my date of birth as well. She had a touch-PC on the desk in front of her, like the ones we used to have at school before they were taken away. Even upside down I could see my record on it. She tapped a button on the screen next to my photo and a progress bar appeared. Underneath, it said “Estimated time to completion: 44 minutes.”
Then she produced a clear plastic bag with a snap-top fastening and asked me to take off my watch and empty my pockets. I only had a couple of hundreds with me, and my phone, and the food coupon I’d been saving – they hardly seemed to fill the bag. Then she pulled out a metal tray and told me to take my shoes and belt off, and put them in the tray. I thought this was starting to get a bit weird but didn’t say so, I just did what I was told. Then she put the bag with my things in on top of the tray and the whole lot went back into her desk drawer.
Whilst all this was going on, the man that had brought me in from the Centre’s main entrance stood behind me, with his hands behind his back. He looked like one of the police that stand outside school, except without the face mask.
I was just getting up the courage to ask when the Test started, when the woman behind the desk said, “Take a seat in the waiting room please,” and pointed at a plain white door opposite her. She pressed something under her desk and the door slid open. The man stood aside and I went in, and that’s where I am now.
It’s hard to judge how long I’ve been sat in here, without a watch and everything, but it’s got be to well over half an hour now, easily. There are two light-boxes on the ceiling, one either side of a fine metal grill, and one of the boxes is humming. The light-box in my bedroom used to hum like that too, when I was little. One night, when Mum had come up to tuck me in, she said that the humming reminded her of b’s. I asked her what b’s were but she just sighed, kissed me goodnight and went downstairs. When I got home from school the next day, the light-box was gone.
I’ve been sat here all this time and the only thing that has happened is the smell has changed. Just in the last minute or so, there’s been a faint sweet smell coming from somewhere – it reminds me of the sugarex we used to have, before food coupons. It’s making me feel hungry – breakfast seems ages ago. Mum got me up early today, to make sure I’d be ready for the Test, so maybe that’s why I feel so tired now. That and the buzzing light-box, maybe. I can hardly keep my eyes open. It won’t hurt if I just lay down for a bit, will it, just put my feet up on the bench and close my eyes for a few minutes, have a nap. I’m sure that nurse woman will call me when it’s time to take the Test, and this way I’ll be properly rested for it.
Now my eyes are closed, all I can sense is the light-box hum and the sugarex smell. That’s definitely getting stronger, I can almost taste it now. My tummy’s rumbling - maybe I’ll spend my food coupon after the Test. Right now though, so tired… just a nap, a little one… it won’t hurt, will it?
The first time I heard the voice, I thought I had imagined it.
I put it down to tiredness. After three months of sleep-disrupted nights, we had finally moved Emma into her own room. She took to it brilliantly, going down without fuss and sleeping almost immediately in the cot that we’d borrowed from Jen’s sister. We waited outside the bedroom door for the cries to come but, when none did, Jen and I collapsed into each other’s arms, unsure whether to laugh or cry. In the end, I think we did a bit of both.
That first night, after Jen had gone to bed herself, I sat up waiting to do Emma’s dream-feed at 11.30. The TV was on quietly in the background, the fire was crackling contentedly and the sibilant hiss of the baby monitor conveyed Emma’s gentle breathing. I’ll admit that I was getting drowsy, curled up in the armchair with the remains of the paper and a mug of tea for company. Tiredness was catching up with me, the three months of endless activity and no sleep since Emma’s birth finally taking their toll. I jerked myself awake a couple of times, at least. So it was easy to put it down to tiredness.
...dormitum...
One word, almost lost in the background white noise of the monitor, like a whisper. It was enough to make me sit up though. I rubbed my eyes and picked up the monitor, as if that would help me hear it better. After a gulp of cold tea I remembered I could just turn the volume up, but there was no repeat of the word, just that white noise.
I jumped in my chair as the monitor started to vibrate in my hands. The temperature warning - Emma’s room was getting too cold. Choosing to ignore the way the alarm had made my pulse quicken, I hurried upstairs to the nursery. Emma seemed completely untroubled though, her breathing soft, slow and regular. I checked her tiny hands and they were chilly, so I popped some scratch-mitts on her as gently as I could, then checked the zip on her sleeping bag was fastened all the way up. Emma didn’t murmur, merely stretching out one arm to pull Rabbit, the unimaginatively named soft toy, closer to her. By the time I got back downstairs, that whispered word was a fading memory, lost like a dream on waking.
That first week, Emma slept so well that we started to fantasise about her sleeping through the night. “Can you imagine,” Jen had said, “a whole night’s uninterrupted sleep?” She laughed, but her tiredness gave that laughter an edge. “No, I can’t even begin to imagine,” I replied, laughing too. But Emma was undeniably sleeping better in the nursery than she had in our room, even though it was pretty chilly in there and we had to leave the radiator on all night. I wondered if she just preferred the cot to the Moses basket, or perhaps that she had been disturbed by Jen and I being in the same room as her. Whatever the reason, we were able to start moving her 3am feed back and, after another week in the nursery, that had become her 5am feed. Even then, Emma barely stirred as I lifted her from the basket and slipped the teat into her Cupid’s bow mouth. She fed as vigorously as ever though, one hand resting gently on the bottle.
The second time I heard the voice, I was wide awake. I was whiling away the time until Emma’s dream-feed by watching Match Of The Day. The game itself was dull and I had lost interest, but was sort of half-listening to the puerile banter subsequently batted back and forth between Lineker and Hansen.
...I dormitum…
Two words, quiet but unmistakable, like someone had whispered them at the furthest point of the monitor’s range. I leant forward in my chair to listen more carefully, eyes half closed, head canted over to one side. There was no repeat. I sat listening until the hairs on my arms went back down and the goosebumps smoothed out. I had just sat back in my chair, dismissing it as interference from a radio station or something similar, when the monitor starting to vibrate harshly from the coffee table. Its blue LEDs read 16.9 – surprisingly cold, given how mild the day had been for late November. I left Lineker and Hansen to their squabble, and went upstairs to check on Emma and adjust the radiator.
She slept through until seven for the first time that night.
I heard the voice twice more the following week, always after Jen had gone to bed and I was sitting up waiting to do the dream-feed. The first of these was much louder than the previous occasions… I dormitum… like whoever had spoken was right next to the monitor. I jumped in my seat at that, and was so convinced that whoever had said those words was in the nursery with Emma that I burst out of the living room and ran upstairs to check on her. She was fast asleep, her breathing – indiscernible on the monitor – was soft and shallow but regular. I moved her toy rabbit back within arms range, then turned the radiator up half a notch before I left the room. Jenny was standing on the landing, rubbing her eyes with the backs of her hands and shivering in her nightie.
“Everything alright?” she asked.
“Fine, just thought I heard something. Go back to bed, I’ll be up soon.”
And that was as close as we came to talking about the voice until afterwards.
The next night, waiting up to give Emma her last feed of the day, I turned the television off and sat listening. For an hour and a half I listened to the assonant hiss of the monitor, and during that time I heard nothing out of the ordinary, save for the woodpecker ter-terter-tert interference from my mobile when I received a text from Jack. Did I fancy a pint after work tomorrow? Well, I did – I hadn’t caught up with him properly since Emma was born, and besides it would be a chance to wet the baby’s head. I was about to text my reply when I heard the voice again. This time, it said something different.
…veni et lude…
I dropped my phone. The voice was so clear, it could almost have been in the living room with me. I bounded up the stairs two at a time and burst into the nursery so loudly I felt sure I would wake the baby. But she didn’t move. I peered over the side of the cot to look more closely; Emma had a little half-smile on her face, but looked pale in the blue glow of the nightlight. I couldn’t hear her breathing, however much I leant over, so placed a hand lightly on her chest until I could feel its gentle rise and fall. When I was finally sure that everything was alright, I turned the radiator up a notch and went back downstairs. Later, as I prepared Emma’s dream-feed in the bottle warmer, I tried to convince myself that what I was hearing must be interference from something, or somewhere. I’d heard the urban myths – if a little old lady somewhere could pick up Radio 2 through her fillings, then why not this? But what kind of words were they? If it was a radio signal, even pirate radio, what language were they broadcasting in? I think even then I knew that it wasn’t radio – I just didn’t want to rule out the only plausible explanation.
The next morning, Jen had lifted Emma out of the cot and had her half undressed for a nappy change before our daughter woke up.
Last Friday, I heard the voice again. Although the television was on for background noise, a bit of late-night chat show company, I had to rely on the day before’s Guardian crossword to keep me awake. The monitor was in its usual place on the coffee table next to me, steadily conveying static. If I’d been watching, I could have seen the temperature display slowly dropping: 19.8… 19.3… 18.4… 17.2… But I wasn’t. In truth, I was focused on thirteen across, and the voice was far from my mind. So when it spoke again, it was such a shock that the newspaper jerked violently in my hands.
…veni et lude… lude nobiscum…
There was something different about the voice this time – you know how you can hear in someone’s voice when they’re smiling? Or laughing? That’s what I heard. And this was no interference, radio or otherwise – there was no crackle, no wow or flutter, no hiss beyond the normal background hum of the monitor.
Somebody was in the nursery with Emma.
I ran upstairs, throwing on every light as I went. Flinging open the nursery door, I braced myself, ready to confront whoever was there. But there was no-one.
I crossed to the cot, taking immediate comfort from the pink and white stripes of Emma’s sleeping bag. In the diffused blue of the nightlight I could see her much-chewed toy rabbit, and underneath that a glimpse of white sleepsuit. But something… something was off. I rubbed my eyes and pushed aside the flowers and bumble-bee of the cot mobile. Though her sleepsuit was laying neatly inside her tightly-zipped sleeping bag, and her still-warm nappy tucked inside that, of Emma there was no sign.
I heard another voice then – a rough, jagged, inhuman voice. Emma? Christ, Jesus, Jen! JENNY! It was only when Jen came stumbling into the room that I recognised this voice as mine. For the first time since our daughter had moved into her own room, the nursery was suddenly filled with crying.