Scared to Death--Ten Sinister Stories by the Master of the Macabre Page 14

  The evening was a huge success. Mrs Browne had cooked lasagne, her signature dish, and although Mr Demszky hardly ate anything, he talked at length about his life in Hungary. It turned out that he had once owned a castle near Budapest and for fifty years has been one of the country’s most celebrated scholars. He had lectured in astrology, psychiatry and medieval history. He had actually been the head of a society that had been formed in the Middle Ages and which still met on certain days of the year to discuss philosophical issues. There had to be a full moon, Mr Demszky explained. Otherwise, the members – the BOSZORKÁNYS, as he called them – would not come out.

  “And what are you doing in England?” Mrs Browne asked.

  Mr Demszky paused for a moment. He looked from his plate to Mrs Browne and then from her to her son. “I came to meet people like you,” he said.

  In the weeks that followed, the Brownes saw a lot of their new neighbour, helping him in small ways or just popping in to see that he was all right. And Jeremy never walked up the road without the device plugged into his ears. It was incredible. Not only did it have his two favourite bands, but all the other music that he loved somehow found its way into the machine, as if arriving there overnight. Three days before Ed Sheeran released his new single, it magically appeared on his playlist. It seemed he only had to think of a tune – old or new – and he would find it … without even having to pay. And there was something else rather strange. The device didn’t seem to have a battery compartment or any socket to allow it to be plugged into a computer to recharge. In fact there were no plastic panels or visible screws at all. It was moulded together with just the single socket for the jack plug at the end of the earplugs, and the switches to start the whole thing up.

  But it never slowed down or stopped. For the first time in his life, Jeremy got into trouble at school. Headphones weren’t allowed, but Jeremy couldn’t resist plugging himself in between lessons, out in the yard, and he found himself dreaming about the music during lessons, ignoring whatever the teachers said. He wore it to and from school and kept it on in his room when he was doing his homework. He still went round to Mr Demszky’s from time to time – the garden was beginning to look delightful – and he worked all the harder with the music enveloping him, transporting him into its own world. Beyoncé, Oasis, Kings of Leon … the new tracks kept arriving and Jeremy kept on listening. At night, in bed, he still read books but he did so to the rhythms of Leona Lewis or Estelle and his parents became familiar with the tish-tata-tish-tata-tish sounds that came from their son every morning at the breakfast table.

  They became a little concerned. Like many other teenagers, Jeremy had begun to communicate less and less … but until now he had never been like other teenagers. He had been special. What had happened? All he did was listen to that wretched music. Irene Browne was the first to mention it. They didn’t talk to one another as a family any more, she said. She even began to think that meeting their neighbour might not have been such a good thing after all. He seemed to have snatched something of her son away, and she suggested to her husband that maybe it would be a good idea to remove the device, to give Jeremy a rest. But before either of the Brownes could act, something else happened which completely took their minds off modern music and earplugs. Jeremy became ill.

  It was hard to tell when it began. Maybe it was about two weeks after Mr Demszky had moved in, but on the other hand it could have actually started before he arrived. It appeared, initially, to be a sort of virus. Jeremy was tired all the time. He found it hard to get up and, in the evening, he went back to bed as soon as he could. He still had an appetite but he didn’t enjoy his food, eating it mechanically, without any sense of taste. His eyes seemed to have lost some of their colour. He moved more slowly and gave up his rugby training, saying that he didn’t feel like it. A strange rash appeared on the side of his neck. He began to wheeze.

  At first, the Brownes weren’t too worried. All teenagers, after all, like to stay in bed. But as Jeremy’s movements became increasingly listless, as he became quieter and more withdrawn, they decided to take him to see Dr Sheila McAllister at the local clinic for a quick check-up. Jeremy didn’t argue. He had to wait at the clinic for an hour and a half before he was seen, but he found the time passed quickly enough, listening to music, nodding his head in time to each track.

  Finally, he was examined. Dr McAllister asked him if he was sleeping. Yes, certainly. He had no trouble getting to sleep. It was waking up that was the problem. Was he eating properly? His mother assured the doctor that Jeremy ate three proper meals a day, including breakfast, and that he always had plenty of fruit and vegetables, five portions daily just as the government recommended. The doctor took a blood sample. It did seem possible that Jeremy was anaemic. Or maybe there was something wrong with his thyroid gland. It was all very strange, but she was sure there was nothing serious to worry about. Generally speaking, Jeremy was in very good shape. This could all be down to a bout of flu. She told the Brownes to come back in two weeks if there was no change.

  Jeremy thanked her and slipped his earplugs back in. Robbie Williams took him out of the surgery and back onto the street.

  His situation got worse … much worse. Over the next few days, he became more and more listless. He took several days off school. Physically, he seemed to be shrivelling up. His cheeks, once so healthy and full of colour, were now sunken and pale. His eyes had lost their focus. Both his parents had stopped work to be with him, but he barely talked to them. Sometimes, it was as if he was far away. He lay in his room for hours at a time, listening to music, staring at the ceiling while he got thinner and thinner. He was still eating, but the food had no effect. His lips had begun to shrivel. His hair was turning grey.

  More doctors and specialists began to appear. Blood and urine samples were taken. It was thought he might have a serious viral infection. The Brownes were asked if he had been offered drugs. Jeremy was taken into hospital, where he was scanned from head to foot. Various illnesses – diabetes, thyrotoxicosis, tuberculosis and brucellosis – were suggested. Jeremy was tested for all of them. He was found to have none. For the first time, the word “progeria” was uttered. Progeria, a genetic disorder, was also known as the ageing disease. It was very rare. There was no known cure. But Jeremy didn’t hear any of it. He had gone rather deaf and he didn’t care anyway. Long after his parents had gone, he lay in his bed in the children’s ward, only partly aware of his surroundings, listening to music, the little device on the pillow beside him, the thick white cables snaking up to earplugs which seemed to be burrowing further and further into his head. Tish-tata-tish-tata-tish … the soft beat of the percussion whispered across the ward as the duty nurse walked quietly by.

  Briefly, he was sent back home again. There was nothing the hospital could do for him, and so it had been decided to send him to a specialist neurological clinic on the south coast. Scampi the dog had already been taken away to live with relatives in Yorkshire. On Jeremy’s last night in Elmsworth Avenue, Mr Demszky came to visit, bringing with him a box of Hungarian chocolates with pictures of folk dancers on the lid. It was only October and not yet cold, but he was wearing a black cashmere overcoat that reached all the way to the ground. His face was partially hidden by an old-fashioned floppy hat.

  “How is Jeremy?” he asked, still standing on the doorstep. For once, Mrs Browne had not invited him in.

  “He’s not well,” she said. The worry of the last weeks had changed her. She was short-tempered. She didn’t want to see her neighbour and she didn’t care if he knew it.

  “There is no improvement?”

  “No, Mr Demszky – and if you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to him. We’re leaving for Brighton tomorrow.”

  “I brought these…” He lifted the box.

  “Jeremy isn’t eating chocolates, thank you very much. We’ll let you know if there’s any news.” She closed the door in his face.

  Mothers can be irrational sometimes. It was only at that
moment that Mrs Browne remembered that Jeremy had fallen ill shortly after he had first met Mr Demszky. And at the same moment, she found herself thinking about the music player. Jeremy had always liked music, but since he had been given that machine he had become obsessed by it, listening to it twenty hours a day – at school, doing his homework, in the bath. Once, she’d actually torn it away to stop him listening to it during meals. Jeremy had screamed at her. She had never seen him like that before. She thought of the ugly slab of glass and plastic which was probably playing even now. It was almost as if…

  It was almost as if it was sucking the life out of him.

  A private ambulance came for Jeremy the next morning. He was able to walk out to it – but only just. His parents had to support him, one on each side. He was mumbling to himself, his eyes barely focused. He had lost a lot of his hair and his skin was grey and wrinkled. Some of his teeth had come loose. If any of the other residents of Elmsworth Avenue had been watching, they would have been shocked. He looked like a very old man.

  He did not have the device with him. At the last moment, acting on a whim, Mrs Browne had prised it out of his hand and she had left it in his room, on the table beside his bed. Jeremy had tried to complain, but the words barely came. He allowed himself to be led downstairs. Minutes later they were on their way to the North Circular Road, which would take them around London on their way to the south.

  Half an hour later, Jákob Demszky entered the house.

  By now he knew that the Brownes kept a spare key in the pot beside the front door, but even if it hadn’t been there he would have found it simple to break in. He opened the door and went straight over to the stairs. He had only been in the house a few times, but he had no trouble finding his way to Jeremy’s room as if he was being guided there by something inside. And indeed there it was, sitting where Mrs Browne had left it. Mr Demszky chuckled to himself – a strangely unpleasant sound. He reached out with a trembling hand and for a moment his fingers hovered over the device like a large bird about to land. Then he snatched it up and left.

  He walked back to number 66 and went directly to his study, one of the rooms that Jeremy had never visited. Had the boy gone in there, he might have been surprised by some of the ornaments on display: the human skull on its pedestal, the black candles, squat and half-melted, the golden cross that stood, upside-down, on the mantelpiece. It might then have occurred to him to go online and look up the English for boszorkánys – or indeed for tépõfarkas or gonoszul. But alas it was far too late. Jeremy’s eyesight had gone. It had failed long ago.

  Mr Demszky set down the device and put on a pair of spectacles, which were actually inch-thick magnifying glasses. They would have turned even a full stop at the end of a sentence into the size of a button. Squinting through the lenses with his round, watery eyes, he produced a tiny screwdriver and ran it over the device until he found four equally tiny screws in the base. Taking enormous care he unscrewed them, and the secret panel that Jeremy had never noticed fell off in his hands. The inside of the machine was exposed. There were no batteries … just a mass of circuits and a single switch turned to the left. Using the screwdriver, Mr Demszky slid the switch over to the right, into reverse, then screwed the panel back into place.

  With a contented smile, he picked up the earplugs and pressed them in. It gave him extra pleasure to know that, until very recently, they had been in Jeremy’s ears. Somehow it helped to connect the two of them. Mr Demszky did not like modern music. He turned on the device, rested his white hair against the back of his chair and began to listen to a symphonic poem by the Czech composer Antonin Dvořák. The music was dark and majestic. It flowed into him like a moonlit river and gratefully he absorbed it.

  Maybe it was a trick of the light. Perhaps not. A few minutes later, his skin had regained some of its colour and his hair was a little less white.

  POWER

  ARTHUR AND ELIZABETH REED had never expected to have children. Not to have any was something they had decided, almost from the moment they got married, and thirty years later they had no regrets. It wasn’t that they disliked children. It was just that they preferred a quiet life, spending what little money they had on themselves or their friends.

  When they met, Arthur was running the village post office which also sold sweets, stationery and other useful items to the inhabitants of Instow in Devonshire. He was a small, round-faced man who always seemed to be smiling and who knew all his customers by name. He lived in a very ordinary house at the end of a terrace, but with wonderful views of the sand dunes that rose up and down in yellow waves with the flat, blue sea on the other side.

  One of his customers was Elizabeth Williams, a cheerful, attractive woman who worked in the local bakery, just a few metres down the road. Nobody was really surprised when the two of them announced their engagement. And it seemed that the whole of Instow turned out for their wedding. The bakers gave them a cake with pink and white icing, three tiers high. They took a week off for their honeymoon, which they spent in Greece, and when they came back, Mrs Reed, as she was now, sold her flat and moved into her husband’s house.

  Thirty years is a very long time to describe in a few sentences, but for the Reeds, time seemed to slip past without even being noticed. They had been in their late twenties when they met, but suddenly they were in their late fifties. Arthur’s black hair had turned grey. He had to wear glasses to read. He found that he was forgetting where he had put things. And Elizabeth, after a series of minor illnesses, had become rather frail. When she went out walking, she carried a stick and could be seen waving it vengefully as if determined that the miles would not defeat her.

  In a strange way, age suited them. In fact newcomers to the village could hardly imagine that they had ever been young. And they were still completely happy in each other’s company, laughing at each other’s jokes or enjoying long silences. They had just about enough money. Their house was cosy and just the right size. All in all, they had no complaints about the cards that life had dealt them. They were looking forward to a long and comfortable retirement.

  As it happened, Elizabeth Reed had a younger sister called Janice. The two of them hadn’t seen each other for many years, mainly because Janice lived in Manchester which was a long way away and, since her marriage, had become increasingly uncommunicative. From a note scribbled in a Christmas card, Elizabeth had learned that Janice had a son. Another brief letter had informed her that Janice had divorced. After that … nothing. Elizabeth had written several times but got no reply. She even wondered if her sister was still alive.

  So she was very surprised to receive, one day, a telephone call from a man called Mr Norris who explained that he was a solicitor representing Janice. He wondered if the two of them could possibly meet. Elizabeth didn’t want to travel up to Manchester but Mr Norris assured her that he could easily come to Instow – and so it was arranged.

  The solicitor came down the following Wednesday afternoon. He was a thin, tired-looking man in a suit that seemed to have got quite badly crumpled on the train – or perhaps it had been like that when he put it on. He carried a battered leather briefcase which hung open to reveal a handful of legal documents, a newspaper and a half-eaten Kit Kat.

  “It’s very kind of you to see me, Mrs Reed,” he began. He spoke slowly and without very much emotion. “You too, Mr Reed.”

  Arthur Reed had of course stayed in with his wife. The two of them were sitting side by side on the sofa, holding hands.

  “May I begin by offering my condolences with regard to your sister.”

  Elizabeth had been fearing the worst, but even so the statement took her by surprise. “I didn’t even know she was dead,” she said.

  “Then I must apologise for breaking the news to you in this manner. Yes. I’m afraid to say that Janice Carter passed away two weeks ago.”

  “Carter?”

  “Her husband’s name. She married a man called Kevin Carter in 1995. You never met him?” Elizabeth said n
othing, so he went on. “They were married for ten years, but I’m afraid after that he left her.”

  “How did she die?” Elizabeth asked.

  “She had a nervous breakdown.” The solicitor took a breath. “She hadn’t been well for a long time. And I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but in the end she took her own life. She jumped off a bridge into the River Irwell.”

  “Why would she do a thing like that?”

  “She didn’t leave a note.”

  Both Arthur and Elizabeth blinked in surprise.

  “It’s clear that you had little connection with your sister,” Mr Norris went on. “Were you aware of her situation? I mean … her state of mind?”

  Elizabeth shook her head, dumbfounded. “I feel very bad about it now,” she said. “But Janice led her own life. She didn’t even give me her telephone number and she hardly ever wrote.”

  “We have been trying to contact her ex-husband,” Mr Norris went on. “But so far there’s been no trace of him. We believe he emigrated to New Zealand after the divorce. It’s possible he changed his name…”

  “Why would he do that?”Arthur asked.

  “I can’t imagine.”

  “He didn’t keep in contact with his son?”

  “No. And I’m glad you asked that, Mr Reed, as that’s very much the point of this visit. Craig is thirteen years old. He’d just started secondary school in Manchester when his mother did what she did. Right now he’s being looked after by the local authorities. There are no relatives on his father’s side of the family. And the only relatives we’ve managed to find on his mother’s side…”

  “…are Arthur and me.” Elizabeth completed the sentence.