Figures of Fear: An anthology by Graham Masterton Read Free Book Online

flicker-book. The wind blowing through the grass. The soft thumping sound as the sand collapsed and Sean was buried. The woman in the red billowy dress, and the sea continuing wearily to whisper to itself because the sea was like his ageing grandmother and had forgotten who he was.
    ‘Well, I’ll try it, like,’ Michael agreed. ‘What do I have to do?’
    Father Bernard with shaking hands poured some of the powder into a white envelope. ‘Three teaspoonfuls should be enough, stirred up well with hot water. Drink it about an hour before you go to bed.’
    ‘You said something about side-effects,’ said Michael, as he opened the door to leave.
    Father Bernard laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘Everything we do in life has side-effects, Michael. God be with you.’
    Kate was too tired to cook so they ordered a margherita pizza from Valentino’s and when it arrived they sat in front of the television and shared it out of the box.
    ‘You’re awful quiet,’ said Kate.
    Michael wiped his mouth on a paper napkin and swallowed a mouthful of warm red wine and then he leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.
    ‘You don’t think I’m a bad person, do you?’ he asked her.
    ‘Of course not! Whatever made you ask me that?’
    ‘I’ve never meant to hurt anybody, Kate, not ever. And if I have, they’ve been sins of omission, if you know what I mean. Not deliberate.’

    ‘You’re strange,’ said Kate, looking at him with those wide-apart blue eyes of hers that were almost indigo. ‘When you first came to live with us, Sean told me that you were a goblin child that none of the other goblins wanted. I suppose in a way it was kinder than crowing that your da and your ma had been killed in a car crash.’
    ‘Maybe Sean was right,’ Michael told her. ‘Maybe I am a goblin. I don’t remember my parents at all. What they looked like, of course, from the photos. But I can’t hear their voices, not at all. I can’t remember what they felt like.’
    Kate went upstairs for a bath first and Michael went into the kitchen and made her a mug of chocolate. He took out the envelope that Father Bernard had given him and tipped the powder into a tumbler. He sniffed it but it didn’t smell of anything at all. He poured hot water over it and stirred it until it dissolved.
    He held the tumbler up to the light. Saint Brónach’s Shrift was a pale agate colour, the same colour as Father Bernard’s eyes. Perhaps it would give him the same insight, too. He drank it, and it tasted very slightly bitter, but nothing more.
    After his bath, he and Kate sat up in bed and watched television for a while. He glanced at her sideways from time to time and wondered if she had really been in love with Sean and how young she had been when they first went to bed together – questions that he could never ask her.
    At the end of CSI: Miami , Kate twisted herself into her sheets and her blankets as she always did and went to sleep. Michael sat up a little longer but he was beginning to feel oddly light-headed, as if he had taken too many flu tablets.
    He switched over channels, and found that he was watching the same nature program about east African fishermen that he had watched last night, or thought he had watched. Here was the same wet shoreline, and the same fisherman walking slowly towards the screen, holding up that spiny devil firefish. Michael switched the television off while the fisherman was still a hundred yards away.
    He lay in the darkness for over half an hour, not moving. There was no wind tonight and no rain, only the throbbing of the oil tankers. The river amplified the deep drumbeat of their engines and sometimes he felt as if the whole house was throbbing, as if everything was going to be loosened, nuts and bolts and dovetail joints and screws, and finally shaken apart.

    He closed his eyes. When he opened them again it was daylight and the sun was shining through the windows and he was walking along the corridor at The Far Horizon