Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,55

like fish in a tank. They were smiling. Ann groaned and began vomiting noisily into the sink. I held her shoulders. “Get them away,” she said indistinctly. “Why do they always look at me?” She coughed, wiped her mouth, ran the cold tap. She had begun to shiver, in powerful, disconnected spasms. “Get them away.”

Though I knew quite well they were there, it was my mistake that I never believed them to be real. I thought she might calm down if she couldn’t see them. But she wouldn’t let me turn the light out or close the curtains; and when I tried to encourage her to let go of the edge of the sink and come into the living room with me, she only shook her head and retched miserably. “No, leave me,” she said. “I don’t want you now.” Her body had gone rigid, as awkward as a child’s. She was very strong. “Just try to come away, Ann, please.” She looked at me helplessly and said, “I’ve got nothing to wipe my nose with.” I pulled at her angrily, and we fell down. My shoulder was on the dustpan, my mouth full of her hair, which smelled of cigarette ashes. I felt her hands move over me.

“Ann! Ann!” I shouted.

I dragged myself from under her—she had begun to groan and vomit again—and, staring back over my shoulder at the smiling creatures in the passage, ran out of the kitchen and out of the house. I could hear myself sobbing with panic—“I’m phoning Lucas, I can’t stand this, I’m going to phone Lucas”—as if I were still talking to her. I blundered about the village until I found the telephone box opposite the church.

I remember Sprake—though it seems too well-put to have been him—once saying, “It’s no triumph to feel you’ve given life the slip.” We were talking about Lucas Fisher. “You can’t live intensely except at the cost of the self. In the end, Lucas’s reluctance to give himself wholeheartedly will make him shabby and unreal. He’ll end up walking the streets at night staring into lighted shop windows.” At the time I thought this harsh. I still believed that with Lucas it was a matter of energy rather than will, of the lows and undependable zones of a cyclic personality rather than any deliberate reservation of powers.

When I told Lucas, “Something’s gone badly wrong here,” he was silent. After a moment or two I prompted him. “Lucas?”

I thought I heard him say:

“For God’s sake, put that down and leave me alone.”

“This line must be bad,” I said. “You sound a long way off. Is there someone with you?”

He was silent again—“Lucas? Can you hear me?”—and then he asked, “How is Ann? I mean, in herself?”

“Not well,” I said. “She’s having some sort of attack. You don’t know how relieved I am to talk to someone. Lucas, there are two completely hallucinatory figures in that passage outside her kitchen. What they’re doing to one another is…look, they’re a kind of dead white color, and they’re smiling at her all the time. It’s the most appalling thing—”

He said, “Wait a minute. Do you mean that you can see them too?”

“That’s what I’m trying to say. The thing is that I don’t know how to help her. Lucas?”

The line had gone dead. I put the receiver down and dialed his number again. The engaged signal went on and on. Afterward I would tell Ann, “Someone else must have called him,” but I knew he had simply taken his phone off the hook. I stood there for some time, anyway, shivering in the wind that blustered down off the moor, in the hope that he would change his mind. In the end, I got so cold, I had to give up and go back. Sleet blew into my face all the way through the village. The church clock said half past six, but everything was dark and untenanted. All I could hear was the wind rustling the black plastic bags of rubbish piled around the dustbins.

“Fuck you, Lucas,” I whispered. “Fuck you, then.”

Ann’s house was as silent as the rest. I went into the front garden and pressed my face up to the window, in case I could see into the kitchen through the open living room door; but from that angle, the only thing visible was a wall calendar with a color photograph of a Persian cat: October. I couldn’t see Ann. I stood in the flower bed and the