Poe's children: the new horror : an anthology - By Peter Straub Page 0,56

sleet turned to snow.

The kitchen was filled less with the smell of vomit than a sourness you felt somewhere in the back of your throat. Outside, the passage lay deserted under the bright suicidal wash of fluorescent light. It was hard to imagine anything had happened out there. At the same time, nothing looked comfortable, not the disposition of the old roof slates, or the clumps of fern growing out of the revetment, or even the way the snow was settling in the gaps between the flagstones. I found that I didn’t want to turn my back on the window. If I closed my eyes and tried to visualize the white couple, all I could remember was the way they had smiled. A still, cold air seeped in above the sink, and the cats came up to rub against my legs and get underfoot; the taps were still running.

In her confusion Ann had opened all the kitchen cupboards and strewn their contents on the floor. Saucepans, cutlery, and packets of dried food had been mixed up with a polythene bucket and some yellow J-cloths; she had upset a bottle of household detergent among several tins of cat food, some of which had been half opened, some merely pierced, before she dropped them or forgot where she had put the opener. It was hard to see what she had been trying to do. I picked it all up and put it away. To make them leave me alone, I fed the cats. Once or twice I heard her moving about on the floor above.

She was in the bathroom, slumped on the old-fashioned pink lino by the sink, trying to get her clothes off. “For God’s sake, go away,” she said. “I can do it.”

“Oh, Ann.”

“Put some disinfectant in the blue bucket, then.”

“Who are they, Ann?” I asked.

That was later, when I had gotten her to bed. She answered:

“Once it starts, you never get free.”

I was annoyed.

“Free from what, Ann?”

“You know,” she said. “Lucas said you had hallucinations for weeks afterward.”

“Lucas had no right to say that!”

This sounded absurd, so I added as lightly as I could, “It was a long time ago. I’m not sure anymore.”

The migraine had left her exhausted, though much more relaxed. She had washed her hair, and between us we had found her a fresh nightdress to wear. Sitting up in the cheerful little bedroom with its cheap ornaments and modern wallpaper, she looked vague and young; she kept apologizing for the design on her Continental quilt, some bold diagrammatic flowers in black and red, the intertwined stems of which she traced with the index finger of her right hand across a clean white background. “Do you like this? I don’t really know why I bought it. Things look so bright and energetic in the shops,” she said wistfully, “but as soon as you get them home, they just seem crude.” The older cat had jumped up onto the bed; whenever Ann spoke, it purred loudly. “He shouldn’t be in here, and he knows it.” She wouldn’t eat or drink, but I had persuaded her to take some more propranolol, and so far she had kept it down.

“Once it starts, you never get free,” she repeated. Her finger followed the pattern across the quilt. Inadvertently she touched the cat’s dry, graying fur, stared suddenly at her own hand as if it had misled her. “It was some sort of smell that followed you about, Lucas seemed to think.”

“Some sort,” I agreed.

“You won’t get rid of it by ignoring it. We both tried that to begin with. A scent of roses, Lucas said.” She laughed and took my hand. “Very romantic! I’ve no sense of smell—I lost it years ago, luckily.”

This reminded her of something else.

“The first time I had a fit,” she said, “I kept it from my mother because I saw a vision with it. I was only a child, really. The vision was very clear: a seashore, steep and with no sand, and men and women lying on some rocks in the sunshine like lizards, staring quite blankly at the spray as it exploded up in front of them; huge waves that might have been on a cinema screen for all the notice they took of them.”

She narrowed her eyes, puzzled. “You wondered why they had so little common sense.”

She tried to push the cat off her bed, but it only bent its body in a rubbery way and avoided her hand. She yawned suddenly.

“At