The August Editor's Pick Story is by Richard Hill

Please feel free to visit Richard at: richard.hill537@ntlworld.com

YOU SAID ALWAYS AND FOREVER
(for Jeani Rector)

by Richard Hill

When she opened her eyes and looked out of the window, Jane thought that she and the cottage were sinking, that she was still lost in a maze of her dreams. Only when she was fully awake did she realise that the wind from the moors was driving the thick snowflakes upwards; that like so much of her life, it was an illusion. She felt for a moment as if she were inside a glass paperweight, like the one her grandmother had kept on her mantelpiece, that some giant hand had shaken her world, sending the fat feathery snowflakes swirling around the cottage turning the tiny bedroom brighter and lighter than it had ever been, filled with the cold light of the white world outside.

For a moment Jane felt a flicker of happiness, snug in the warmth of her bed, before it was drowned in the familiar ache of her loneliness. She wondered what Mike was doing. She thought of him every morning, when she woke to the emptiness of the cottage and the endless emptiness of the moors and the world beyond. He would be holding that woman in his arms, they way he had once held her. The tears prickling against her eyes, Jane pulled herself out of bed. Even with the heating at its highest the cold tightened her skin after the warmth of the bed, and she worried again about the oil running out, or the electricity failing, and the sadness rose in her again. Why had he left her like this, alone and helpless, not knowing what to do? She had a child’s fear of being abandoned and lost, of freezing to death, alone and unnoticed. Mike was still her husband, her next of kin, wasn’t he? They would call him to identify her. Perhaps then he would realise what he had done to her.

Jane stepped into the bathroom and stared at the pale face in the mirror.

"Got to get on!" Her voice sounded too loud in the silent cottage. "Still talking to yourself, I see. Or should it be hear?"

Mike had turned her into a cliché, the deserted wife left talking to herself, the wronged woman, the fool, the cuckold.

"Can you be a female cuckold?" She stared at her reflection, running the taps, waiting for the water to run warm.

"Oh Christ!" she began to cry, sponging away her tears, towelling away at her sorrow. She pulled a stiff upper lip at her reflection and went back into the bedroom. Looking down at the crumpled clothes thrown onto the floor she decided not to get dressed. If she spent the day wearing a bathrobe, who was there to know or to care? She was snowed in, the roads around her blocked, and there was no sign of the snowfall ever ending. She had plenty of supplies and she had enough work to do putting the next edition of her online zine ‘Frightfull’ to bed. Her only fear was that if it snowed for long enough it might cut off the electricity to the cottage.

Jane still half-expected Mike to return, to hear the solid slamming of the car door and his voice shouting from the hall, but she knew that her hopes and her imagination were failing her, just as he had.

The darkest of her imaginings were that he had planned everything from the beginning, and that he had known Samantha long before they had moved to Arrowdale. Mike had always been spontaneous, given to spur of the moment decisions and actions, and his plan to take up the partnership of a small law firm in a Yorkshire market town had seemed totally in character. He was someone who needed change, and every few years he would grow restless. The plan was for her to give up the day job and edit the magazine full-time. The dream of a cottage in the country seemed not only sensible but attractive, and his practice was less than two hour’s drive away. She had only learned that his new partner, Sam, was Samantha when it was too late to do anything.

Something was moving in the kitchen. Jane stepped to the door, listening hard. She thought she heard a furtive, shuffling noise, someone creeping. She moved slowly to where she could see into the room, but it was empty. For days now she had felt the presence of someone, always out of sight; a flicker of movement in the corner of the eye, the half heard sound of another. But there was no one. To take possession of the kitchen, she made a mug of coffee, pushing back her unease.

They had bought the cottage in the summer, only weeks before they moved. The drive from the little town had been charming and soothing, driving to their new home in a flickering tunnel of green. Only now that Mike had left her did Jane realise just how isolated the place was. And now this foul winter and the blizzard had made her a prisoner. He had begun working later and later ‘to get the firm moving’ then staying in town on weekends and finally, carefully, reasonably, he had left her and moved in with Samantha. He had exchanged one partner for another partner. She had made what Mike had called ‘a scene’ at his office, repeating it over again, the best joke of all, a partner for a partner, her laughter going on and on until it turned into a scream.

And now there was Nemo.

Editing an online magazine meant that contact with her contributors was easy and difficult. Easy, because the correspondence between her writers and illustrators was almost instant, and difficult because she had no protection from those who were awkward or too demanding; Nemo was both. The illustrations he had sent her were far too crude and hateful to use, and she had told him so, at first tactfully and finally bluntly. She had used the word hateful, a word he had objected to more than any other, crude drawings of foul things being done to a woman. But if Nemo’s drawings had portrayed hate, his emails shrieked with not just hatred but with threats, so that Jane dreaded seeing his name in her inbox, and lately they had become just graphic details of what he intended to do to her.

Normally Jane would have ignored Nemo’s rantings, but since Mike had left she never felt normal, just lonely and sad and tired. And now she was not only alone but isolated. The phone still worked, and the internet, but the empty silence of the moors seemed to have moved into the cottage and into her soul. She switched on the radio and turned on her PC. She wasn’t hungry, so breakfast could wait until lunchtime. Working on the magazine was her escape as well as a chore and perhaps the new copy she was waiting for would take her away from the white blankness all around her.

The story she was waiting for was in her inbox and she printed it out, preferring to read submissions the first time as hard copy. She realised from the first few paragraphs that it would be as good as she had hoped. Finally, she decided to open the inevitable email from Nemo, steeling herself for another tirade about artistic integrity, his genius, and what he would do to her unless she stopped leading the international conspiracy against him. It was shorter than usual; just the one link, to her ‘More About Me’ column.

Jane stared at the screen. She never had the time or the inclination to update her blurb. It contained nothing about her private life and certainly nothing new. She clicked onto the link. Only the words ‘More About Me’ remained the same. Her photograph had been altered so that her face was old and lined, and her smiled had been turned into a sneer, and what had been a few banal facts about her life had been turned into a toxic mixture of boasts about her own superiority and invitations to fulfil her detailed sexual fantasies.

Jane felt as if she had been punched in the stomach, as if something foul had moved into the room with her. She heard herself sobbing, but now she was sobbing not out of sorrow but of fear. For too long she sat transfixed at what she saw in front of her until at last she knew what to do. She would phone Magic Al, her computer guru. Even his name made her feel better. He was magic. He would sort it out, track down what had been done back to Nemo. It had to be a crime. She would send the bastard to jail.

Her hands were shaking as she picked up the phone, surprised that it was working in this blizzard. She had read the words so many times: ‘His hand trembled’ or ‘Her hands shook.’ And now it was happening to her. When she spoke into the phone, her voice was tight with anxiety.

"Is Al there? I need to speak to Al; it’s Jane, Jane Allen."

The voice which answered sounded thin and distant, farther away than the miles which separated from the city, almost a whisper.

"Jane? This is Cathy. I’m afraid…"

Jane heard her own voice, too loud, too high, too fast.

"This man. The magazine. He’s done things. Awful things. To my web page. About me. My picture. Al has to change it back again!"

There was a long silence and then Cathy’s voice, more faint than ever. "There’s been an accident. This morning. On his way to the shop. A car hit him. He was on the pavement, but the roads are so icy. They say the car skidded onto the pavement. He’s dead."

Cathy’s voice finally broke, and she continued, "The car drove off. He killed my Al and just left him there. I’m sorry, I can’t talk any more. I’ll call back later."

"Don’t! Don’t go!"

Jane put down the dead phone and tried to process what Cathy had told her. Al was gone. He couldn’t protect her from what Nemo was doing. No one could help her. And then she realised that it must have been Nemo who had murdered Al, that he had been driving the car which had killed him, that he meant to kill her next. She had to stop him. Jane clicked open her email to reply to his last message. She would use his artwork, whatever it was, whenever he wanted, if only he would leave her alone.

"Leave me alone! Leave me alone!" she was barely conscious of the sound of her pleading as she crouched in front of the monitor and realised that his emails had disappeared. The last received message was dated three days earlier.

Jane’s fingers scrabbled through the messages for his contributions and his attached drawings but there was nothing from Nemo except an innocuous message delivered almost a week earlier asking whether she had reached a decision over his drawings. Despite the cold, Jane felt hot and dizzy. She had a separate folder for the ezine, but when she checked all her other folders and documents she could find no other messages from Nemo.

And then she was in the bathroom, staring at her hands, pink and strange, writhing around each other in the tiny sink. She lifted them and watched, fascinated, as the water dripped from their fingertips. She tried to remember what had happened, why she was in the bathroom washing her hands. The room was darkening. If it was still the morning, why was the world outside the window turning from the hard white of the day to the grey blue of evening? Jane stood listening to the silence and wondered where the day had gone, what had happened between her searching for Nemo’s messages and this moment she had fallen into.

She hurried back to her study. There was a new message from her publisher, asking why she hadn’t replied to his last two emails. There was nothing from Nemo, but she knew that he had taken control of her PC, changing and erasing. She opened her bio and felt the floor tilt under her. Her photograph had been deleted and in its place was a black frame with just her name and RIP. Her thoughts seemed to scatter. She thought of that day in York, when she had tripped on the cobbled road and the contents of her dropped handbag had spilled and rolled all around her. Mike had been with her to save her from falling, his strong arm around her waist. Mike, who had deserted her and left her at the mercy of a murderer. Jane pushed the PC off the table, smashing it on the stone floor.

She had to get away before Nemo got to the cottage, and then, when she stepped into the kitchen she realised that she was too late. The kitchen table was covered with felt tip drawings of a naked woman, hacked and battered. They were crude and childish but not of Jane. She stared at the slashed face in the drawings. It was always the same woman, but Jane’s hair was short and dark, and the woman in the drawings had long fair hair and blue eyes, not her dark ones. She picked up one of the drawings, holding it trembling like a fan in her hand.

The woman in the drawings looked, not like her, but her replacement in Mike’s heart….like Samantha.

Jane picked up one of her felt tips. The drawings had been made with the pens she used to mark copy, but she kept them in a drawer. Nemo must have had time to search the cottage. And then she heard his breathing and realised that it was too late for anyone to help her.

Jane yanked a knife from the block beside her and slashed at the sound in front of her and then swung round in panic when she realised that his breathing was behind her, soft and gentle as the falling snow brushing against the window. She had no idea how Nemo could make himself invisible, but Jane knew that she had to get out of the cottage. She ran out of the room, pushing over the table, racing down the hall, swinging the knife in an arc in front of her, clawing open the front door, running, his steady breathing in her ear.

Outside the cottage the freezing air filled her lungs with ice, and her feet burned with the cold, but Jane kept running towards the main road. It was almost dark now, the icy wind cutting through her robe, the snow thicker than ever. She might lose Nemo in this swirling white world if only she could keep running, but his steady breathing was still in her ears.

And then her head suddenly cleared. He was following her footprints in the snow. She wanted to sing Good King Wenceslas. The tune filled her head, almost drowning out the sound of Nemo behind her. But she was cleverer than he was. Let him follow her footprints – she would run in circles! He could run and run and never realise that she had tricked him! She began circling the field in front of the cottage as the night grew darker and colder.

She seemed to have run for hours and hours. It was becoming harder to breathe now, but the exertion had made Jane deliciously warm, warmer than she had been for days. She pulled of her cotton robe and threw it, a whirling white bird, into the snow; white lost in white.

"Follow that, Nemo!"

As her voice disappeared in the wind Jane realised that her breath too had left her. She sat down and then fell back onto the soft ground, tired beyond tired, wanting to sleep, lulled by the cold. She felt safe and warm. She thought of Mike, who had looked into her eyes and promised to love her until death do us part, who had deserted her, and now she had left both Mike and Nemo behind her; now she was done. She was alone where no one could hurt her.

As her mind slowed, Jane remembered what the name ‘Nemo’ meant. It was Latin for no man, for no one. That’s who he was, who everyone was. Satisfied, she drifted into sleep, feeling nothing but the cold soft kisses of the falling snow on her upturned face.

*****

Martin hated these editorial meetings. He knew that Louise had already decided on what she would include in the evening newsflash and he had far better things to do with his time, but at least the meeting was winding up at last.

Louise glanced down at the file in front of her and then looked across the table at him. "Did you find out any more about that dead woman on the moors?"

"The police are writing it off as an accident. She died of hypothermia; that kind of thing happens all the time if you go for a stroll naked in a blizzard. Seems her husband had dumped her for another woman a few months ago and she’d been living alone ever since. Her doctor was treating her for depression, but being snowed in alone for all that time must have pushed her over the edge."

Louise looked mildly interested. "Didn’t she get in touch with anyone?"

"She couldn’t. No phone. The landlines are still down, and there’s no mobile signal from out there. She had a PC but there was no internet connection either. She was totally isolated. Seems she spent most of her time making drawings of her ex-husband’s new woman. Pretty nasty ones, the police said."

"Too tacky for a closer; too depressing," Louise said and stood up. "We’ll go with the rescued coach tour. Forget the dead woman."

And the meeting was over.

Richard Hill considers himself as not primarily a horror writer, but just a writer. He has written for radio, TV, and for theatres like The Hampstead Theatre in London and The Everyman Theatre in Liverpool; in fact, he would write for anyone who would give him money for words. He has an MA in Victorian Literature from the University of Liverpool. 

Since Richard was first old enough to make annoying noises, he has played in bands in and around Liverpool. Afterwards, he headed up to the Editorial Office at the University of Liverpool, producing all their magazines and prospectuses, and taught Creative Writing there as well in their English Department.

Richard is currently co-writing a novel with fellow author Louise King about two serial killers. The Horror Zine will present this novel on our News Page as soon as it becomes available for sale.

Richard had a stroke four years ago.It still amazes him that his body hasn’t yet realized that if it does succeed in killing him, he’ll take it with him. Richard had to learn to walk and talk again but, knock on Formica, he’s good now, although now he’s used to one handed typing—which sounds more Zen than it is.