Horowitz Horror, Page 3

  She only just had time to realize that it was not Marlin who was holding her but her father. That her mother was standing in the doorway, staring with wide, horror-filled eyes. Isabel felt all the strength rush out of her body like the water out of the bath. The water was transparent again, of course. The maggots had gone. Had they ever been there? Did it matter? She began to laugh.

  She was still laughing half an hour later when the sound of sirens filled the room and the ambulance arrived.

  It wasn’t fair.

  Jeremy Martin lay in the bath thinking about the events of the past six weeks. It was hard not to think about them—in here, looking at the dents his daughter had made with the monkey wrench. The taps had almost been beyond repair. As it was, they now dripped all the time and the letter C was gone forever. Old water, not cold water.

  He had seen Isabel a few days before and she had looked a lot better. She still wasn’t talking, but it would be a long time before that happened, they said. Nobody knew why she had decided to attack the bathtub—except maybe that fat friend of hers and she was too frightened to say. According to the experts, it had all been stress related. A traumatic stress disorder. Of course they had fancy words for it. What they meant was that it was her parents who were to blame. They argued. There was tension in the house. Isabel hadn’t been able to cope and had come up with some sort of fantasy related to the bath.

  In other words, it was his fault.

  But was it? As he lay in the soft, hot water with the smell of pine bath oil rising up his nostrils, Jeremy Martin thought long and hard. He wasn’t the one who started the arguments. It was always Susan. From the day he married her, she’d insisted on . . . well, changing him. She was always nagging him. It was like that nickname of his at school. Mouse. They never took him seriously. She never took him seriously. Well, he would show her.

  Lying back with the steam all around him, Jeremy found himself floating away. It was a wonderful feeling. He would start with Susan. Then there were a couple of boys in his French class. And, of course, the head-master.

  He knew just what he would do. He had seen it that morning in a junk shop in Hampstead. Victorian, he would have said. Heavy, with a smooth wooden handle and a solid, razor-sharp head.

  Yes. He would go out and buy it the following morning. It was just what he needed. A good Victorian ax . . .

  Killer Camera

  The car-trunk sale took place every Saturday on the edge of Crouch End. There was a patch of empty land there; not a parking lot, not a building site, just a square of rubble and dust that nobody seemed to know what to do with. And then one summer the car-trunk sales had arrived like flies at a picnic and since then there’d been one every week. Not that there was anything very much to buy. Cracked glasses and hideous plates, moldy paperback books by writers you’d never heard of, electric kettles, and bits of hi-fi equipment that looked forty years out of date.

  Matthew King decided to go in only because it was free. He’d visited the car-trunk sale before and the only thing he’d come away with was a cold. But this was a warm Saturday afternoon. He had plenty of time. And, anyway, it was there.

  But it was the same old trash. He certainly wasn’t going to find his father a fiftieth birthday present here, not unless the old man had a sudden yearning for a five-hundred-piece Snow White jigsaw puzzle (missing one piece) or an electric coffeemaker (only slightly cracked) or perhaps a knitted cardigan in an unusual shade of pink (aaaagh!).

  Matthew sighed. There were times when he hated living in London and this was one of them. It was only after his own birthday, his fourteenth, that his parents had finally agreed to let him go out on his own. And it was only then that he realized he didn’t really have anywhere to go. Crummy Crouch End with its even crummier car-trunk sale. Was this any place for a smart, good-looking teenager on a summer afternoon?

  He was about to leave when a car pulled in and parked in the farthest corner. At first he thought it must be a mistake. Most of the cars at the sale were old and rusty, as worn-out as the stuff they were selling. But this was a red Volkswagen, L-registration, bright red and shiny clean. As Matthew watched, a smartly dressed man stepped out, opened the trunk, and stood there, looking awkward and ill at ease, as if he were unsure what to do next. Matthew strolled over to him.

  He would always remember the contents of the trunk. It was strange. He had a bad memory. There was a show on TV where you had to remember all the prizes that came out on a conveyor belt and he’d never been able to manage more than two or three, but this time it stayed in his mind . . . well, like a photograph.

  There were clothes: a baseball jacket, several pairs of jeans, T-shirts. A pair of Rollerblades, a Tintin rocket, a paper lampshade. Lots of books; paperbacks and a brand-new English dictionary. About twenty CDs—mainly pop, a Sony Walkman, a guitar, a box of water-color paints, a Ouija board, a Game Boy . . .

  . . . and a camera.

  Matthew reached out and grabbed the camera. He was already aware that a small crowd had gathered behind him and more hands were reaching past him to snatch items out of the trunk. The man who had driven the car didn’t move. Nor did he show any emotion. He had a round face with a small mustache and he looked fed up. He didn’t want to be there in Crouch End, at the car-trunk sale. Everything about him said it.

  “I’ll give you a tenner for this,” someone said.

  Matthew saw that they were holding the baseball jacket. It was almost new and must have been worth at least fifty dollars.

  “Done,” the man said. His face didn’t change.

  Matthew turned the camera over in his hands. Unlike the jacket, it was old, probably bought secondhand, but it seemed to be in good condition. It was a Pentax—but the X on the casing had worn away. That was the only sign of damage. He held it up and looked through the viewfinder. About twenty feet away, a woman was holding up the horrible pink cardigan he had noticed earlier. He focused and felt a certain thrill as the powerful lens seemed to carry him forward so that the cardigan now filled his vision. He could even make out the buttons—silvery white and loose. He swiveled around, the cars and the crowd racing across the viewfinder as he searched for a subject. For no reason at all he focused on a large bedroom mirror propped up against another car. His finger found the shutter release and he pressed it. There was a satisfying click; it seemed that the camera worked.

  And it would make a perfect present. Only a few months before, his dad had been complaining about the pictures he’d just gotten back from their last vacation in France. Half of them had been out of focus and the rest had been so overexposed that they’d made the Loire Valley look about as enticing as the Gobi Desert on a bad day.

  “It’s the camera,” he’d insisted. “It’s worn-out and useless. I’m going to get myself a new one.”

  But he hadn’t. In one week’s time he was going to be fifty years old. And Matthew had the perfect birthday present right in his hands.

  How much would it cost? The camera felt expensive. For a start it was heavy. Solid. The lens was obviously a powerful one. The camera didn’t have an automatic rewind, a digital display, or any of the other things that came as standard these days. But technology was cheap. Quality was expensive. And this was undoubtedly a quality camera.

  “Will you take ten dollars for this?” Matthew asked. If the owner had been happy to take so little for the baseball jacket, perhaps he wouldn’t think twice about the camera. But this time the man shook his head.

  “It’s worth a hundred at least,” he said. He turned away to take twenty dollars for the guitar. It had been bought by a young black woman who strummed it as she walked away.

  “I’ll have a look at that . . .” A thin, dark-haired woman reached out to take the camera, but Matthew pulled it back. He had three twenty-dollar bills in his back pocket. Twelve weeks’ worth of shoe cleaning, car washing, and generally helping around the house. He hadn’t meant to spend all of it on his dad. Perhaps not even half of it.

  “W
ill you take forty dollars?” he asked the man. “It’s all I’ve got,” he lied.

  The man glared at him, then nodded. “Yes. That’ll do.”

  Matthew felt a surge of excitement and at the same time a sudden fear. A hundred-dollar camera for forty bucks? It had to be broken. Or stolen. Or both. But then the woman opened her mouth to speak and Matthew quickly found his money and thrust it out. The man took it without looking pleased or sorry. He simply folded the notes and put them in his pocket as if the payment meant nothing to him.

  “Thank you,” Matthew said.

  The man looked straight at him. “I just want to get rid of it,” he said. “I want to get rid of it all.”

  “Who did it belong to?”

  The man shrugged. “Students,” he said—as if the one word explained it all. Matthew waited. The crowd had separated, moving on to the other stalls, and for a moment the two of them were alone. “I used to rent a couple of rooms,” the man explained. “Art students. Three of them. A couple of months ago they disappeared. Just took off—owing two months’ rent. Well, what do you expect! I’ve tried to find them, but they haven’t had the decency to call. So my wife told me to sell some of their stuff. I didn’t want to. But they’re the ones who owe me. It’s only fair . . .”

  A plump woman pushed between them, snatching up a handful of the T-shirts. “How much for these?” The sun was still shining but suddenly Matthew felt cold.

  . . . they disappeared . . .

  Why should three art students suddenly vanish, leaving all their gear, including a hundred-dollar camera, behind? The landlord obviously felt guilty about selling it. Was Matthew doing the right thing, buying it? Quickly he turned around and hurried away, before either of them changed their mind.

  He had just stepped through the gates and reached the street when he heard it: the unmistakable sound of shattering glass. He turned around and looked back and saw that the bedroom mirror he had just photographed with the new camera had been knocked over. At least, he assumed that was what had happened. It was lying facedown, surrounded by splinters of glass.

  The owner—a short, stocky man with a skinhead haircut—bounded forward and grabbed hold of a man who had just been passing. “You knocked over my mirror!” he shouted.

  “I never went near it.” The man was younger, wearing jeans and a Star Wars T-shirt.

  “I saw you! That’ll be five bucks—”

  “Get lost!”

  And then, even as Matthew watched, the skinhead drew back his fist and lashed out. Matthew almost heard the knuckles connect with the other man’s face. The second man screamed. Blood gushed out of his nose and dripped down onto his T-shirt.

  Matthew drew the camera close to his chest, turned, and hurried away.

  “It must be stolen,” Elizabeth King said, taking the camera.

  “I don’t think so,” Matthew said. “I told you what he said!”

  “What did you pay for it?” Jamie asked. Jamie was his younger brother. Three years younger and wildly jealous of everything he did.

  “None of your business,” Matthew replied.

  Elizabeth pushed a lever on the camera with her fingernail and the back sprang open. “Oh, look!” she said. “There’s film in here.” She tilted the camera back and a Kodak cartridge fell into the palm of her hand. “It’s used,” she added.

  “He must have left it there,” Jamie said.

  “Maybe you should get it developed,” Elizabeth suggested. “You never know what you’ll find.”

  “Boring family snapshots,” Matthew muttered.

  “It could be porn!” Jamie shouted.

  “Grow up, moron!” Matthew sighed.

  “You’re such a nerd . . . !”

  “Retard . . .”

  “Come on, boys. Let’s not quarrel!” Elizabeth handed the camera back to Matthew. “It’s a nice present,” she said. “Chris will love it. And he doesn’t need to know where you got it . . . or how you think it got there.”

  Christopher King was an actor. He wasn’t famous, although people still recognized him from a coffee commercial he’d done two years before, but he always had work. In this, the week before his fiftieth birthday, he was appearing as Banquo in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (“the Scottish play,” he called it—he said it was bad luck to mention the piece by name). He’d been murdered six nights—and one afternoon—a week for the past five weeks and he was beginning to look forward to the end of the run.

  Both Matthew and Jamie liked it when their father was in a London play, especially if it coincided with summer vacation. It meant they could spend quite a bit of the day together. They had an old Labrador, Polonius, and the four of them would often go out walking on Hampstead Heath. Elizabeth King worked part-time in a dress shop, but if she was around she’d come, too. They were a close, happy family. The Kings had been married for twenty years.

  Secretly, Matthew was a little shocked about how much money he had spent on the camera, but by the time the birthday arrived, he had managed to put it behind him and he was genuinely pleased by his father ’s reaction.

  “It’s great!” Christopher exclaimed, turning the camera in his hands. The family had just finished breakfast and were still sitting around the table in the kitchen. “It’s exactly what I wanted. Automatic exposure and a light meter! Different apertures . . .” He looked up at Matthew, who was beaming with pleasure. “Where did you get it from, Matt? Did you rob a bank?”

  “It was secondhand,” Jamie announced.

  “I can see that. But it’s still a great camera. Where’s the film?”

  “I didn’t get any, Dad . . .” Matthew remembered the film he’d found in the camera. It was on the table by his bed. Now he cursed himself. Why hadn’t he thought to buy some new film? What good was a camera without film?

  “You haven’t opened my present, Dad,” Jamie said.

  Christopher put down the camera and reached for a small, square box, wrapped in Power Rangers paper. He tore it open and laughed as a box of film tumbled onto the table. “Now that was a great idea,” he exclaimed.

  Cheapskate, Matthew thought, but wisely said nothing.

  “Now, how does it go in . . . ?”

  “Here. Let me.” Matthew took the camera from his father and opened the back. Then he tore open the box and started to lower the film into place.

  But he couldn’t do it.

  He stopped.

  And slid into the nightmare.

  It was as if his family—Christopher and Elizabeth sitting at the breakfast table, Jamie hovering at their side—had become a photograph themselves. Matthew was suddenly watching them from outside, frozen in another world. Everything seemed to have stopped. At the same time he felt something that he had never felt in his life—a strange tingling at the back of his neck as, one after another, the hairs stood on end. He looked down at the camera, which had become a gaping black hole in his hands. He felt himself falling, being sucked into it. And once he was inside, the back of the camera would be a coffin lid that would snap shut, locking him in the terrible darkness . . .

  “Matt? Are you all right?” Christopher reached out and took the camera, breaking the spell, and Matthew realized that his whole body was trembling. There was sweat on his shoulders and in the palms of his hands. What had happened to him? What had he just experienced?

  “Yes. I’m . . .” He blinked and shook his head.

  “Are you getting a summer cold?” his mother asked. “You’ve gone quite pale.”

  “I . . .”

  There was a loud snap. Christopher held up the camera. “There! It’s in!”

  Jamie climbed onto his chair and stuck one leg out like a statue, showing off. “Take me!” he called out. “Take a picture of me!”

  “I can’t. I haven’t got a flash.”

  “We can go out in the garden!”

  “There’s not enough sun.”

  “Well, you’ve got to take something, Chris,” Elizabeth said.

  In the e
nd, Christopher took two pictures. It didn’t matter what the subjects were, he said. He just wanted to experiment.

  First of all, he took a picture of a tree, growing in the middle of the lawn. It was the cherry tree that Elizabeth had planted while he was appearing in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard just after they were married. It had flowered every year since.

  And then, when Jamie had persuaded Polonius, the Labrador, to waddle out of his basket and into the garden, Christopher took a picture of him as well.

  Matthew watched all this with a smile but refused to take part. He was still feeling sick. It was as if he had been half-strangled or punched in the pit of his stomach. He reached out and poured himself a glass of apple juice. His mother was probably right. He must be coming down with flu.

  But he forgot about it later when two more actors from “the Scottish play” stopped over and they all went out for an early lunch. After that, Christopher caught a bus into town—it was a Wednesday and he had to be at the theater by two—and Matthew spent the rest of the afternoon playing computer games with Polonius asleep at the foot of his bed.

  It was two days later that his mother noticed it.

  “Look at that!” she exclaimed, gazing out of the kitchen window.

  “What’s that?” Christopher had been sent a new play and he was reading it before his audition.

  “The cherry tree!”

  Matthew walked over to the window and looked out. He saw at once what his mother meant. The tree was about ten feet tall. Although the best of the blossom was over, it had already taken on its autumn colors, a great burst of dark red leaves fighting for attention on the delicate branches. At least, that was how it had been the day before.