A Nest of Nightmares

The curtains were not drawn across that dark square of glass this night, either. And as I watched, a figure appeared at the window. A tall shape, a pale face looking out. And after a moment, as I still stared, confused, a second figure joined the first. Someone smaller – a woman. The man put his arm around her. I could see – perhaps I shouldn’t have been able to see this at such a distance, with no light on in the room – but I could see that the man was wearing a sweater, and the woman was naked. And I could see the man’s face. It was Phil. And the woman was me.

There we were. Still together, still safe from what time would bring. I could almost feel the chill that had shaken me then, and the comfort of Phil’s protecting arm. And yet I was not there. Not now. Now I was out in the field, alone, a premonition to my earlier self.

I felt someone come up beside me. Something as thin and light and hard as a bird’s claw took hold of my arm. Slowly I turned away from the window and turned to see who held me. A young man was standing beside me, smiling at me. I thought I recognised him.

‘He’s waiting for you at the centre,’ he said. ‘You mustn’t stop now.’

Into my mind came a vivid picture of Phil in daylight, standing still in the centre of the maze, caught there by something, standing there forever. Time was not the same in the maze, and Phil could still be standing where he had once stood. I could be with him again, for a moment or forever.

I resumed the weaving, skipping steps of the dance with my new companion. I was eager now, impatient to reach the centre. Ahead of me I could see other figures, dim and shifting as the moonlight, winking in and out of view as they trod the maze on other nights, in other centuries.

The view from the corner of my eyes was more disturbing. I caught fleeting glimpses of my partner in this dance, and he did not look the same as when I had seen him face to face. He had looked so young, and yet that light, hard grasp on my arm did not seem that of a young man’s hand.

A hand like a bird’s claw . . .

My eyes glanced down my side to my arm. The hand lying lightly on my solid flesh was nothing but bones, the flesh all rotted and dropped away years before. Those peripheral, sideways glimpses I’d had of my dancing partner were the truth – sights of something long dead and yet still animate.

I stopped short and pulled my arm away from that horror. I closed my eyes, afraid to turn to face it. I heard the rustle and clatter of dry bones. I felt a cold wind against my face and smelled something rotten. A voice – it might have been Phil’s – whispered my name in sorrow and fear.

What waited for me at the centre? And what would I become, and for how long would I be trapped in this monotonous dance if ever I reached the end?

I turned around blindly, seeking the way out. I opened my eyes and began to move, then checked myself – some strong, instinctual aversion kept me from cutting across the maze paths and leaping them as if they were only so many shallow, meaningless furrows. Instead, I turned around (I glimpsed pale figures watching me, flickering in my peripheral vision) and began to run back the way I had come, following the course of the maze backwards, away from the centre, back out into the world alone.

THE HORSE LORD

The double barn doors were secured by a length of stout, rust encrusted chain, fastened with an old padlock.

Marilyn hefted the lock with one hand and tugged at the chain, which did not give. She looked up at the splintering grey wood of the doors and wondered how the children had got in.

Dusting red powder from her hands, Marilyn strolled around the side of the old barn. Dead leaves and dying grasses crunched beneath her sneakered feet, and she hunched her shoulders against the chill in the wind.

‘There’s plenty of room for horses,’ Kelly had said the night before at dinner. ‘There’s a perfect barn. You can’t say it would be impractical to keep a horse here.’ Kelly was Derek’s daughter, eleven years old and mad about horses.

This barn had been used as a stable, Marilyn thought, and could be again. Why not get Kelly a horse? And why not one for herself as well? As a girl, Marilyn had ridden in Central Park. She stared down the length of the barn: for some reason, the door to each stall had been tightly boarded shut.

Marilyn realised she was shivering then, and she finished her circuit of the barn at a trot and jogged all the way back to the house.

The house was large and solid, built of grey stone a hundred and seventy years before. It seemed a mistake, a misplaced object in this cold, empty land. Who would choose to settle here. who would try to eke out a living from the ungiving, stony soil?

The old house and the eerily empty countryside formed a setting very much like one Marilyn, who wrote suspense novels, had once created for a story. She liked the reality much less than her heroine had liked the fiction.