Tremblay The Beast You Are: Stories

1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-80336-428-5
Verlag: Titan Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

A haunting collection of short fiction from the bestselling author of The Pallbearers Club, A Head Full of Ghosts, and The Cabin at the End of the World. Paul Tremblay has won widespread acclaim for illuminating the dark horrors of the mind in novels and stories that push the boundaries of storytelling itself. The fifteen pieces in this brilliant collection, The Beast You Are, are all monsters of a kind, ready to loudly (and lovingly) smash through your head and into your heart. In 'The Dead Thing,' a middle-schooler struggles to deal with the aftermath of her parents' substance addictions and split. One day, her little brother claims he found a shoebox with 'the dead thing' inside. He won't show it to her and he won't let the box out of his sight. In 'The Last Conversation,' a person wakes in a sterile, white room and begins to receive instructions via intercom from a woman named Anne. When they are finally allowed to leave the room to complete a task, what they find is as shocking as it is heartbreaking. The title novella, 'The Beast You Are,' is a mini epic in which the destinies and secrets of a village, a dog, and a cat are intertwined with a giant monster that returns to wreak havoc every thirty years. A masterpiece of literary horror and psychological suspense, The Beast You Are is a fearlessly imagined collection from one of the most electrifying and innovative writers working today.

Paul Tremblay has won the Bram Stoker and British Fantasy awards and is the author of Disappearance at Devil's Rock, A Head Full of Ghosts, The Cabin at the End of the World, Growing Things, Survivor Song and The Little Sleep and No Sleep Till Wonderland omnibus. He is currently a member of the board of directors for the Shirley Jackson Awards, and his essays and short fiction have appeared in Entertainment Weekly.com, and numerous year's-best anthologies. He lives outside Boston with his family.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Tremblay, Paul

Leseproben

I KNOW YOU’RE THERE

I know you’re there,” Silas Chen says.

His niece Victoria, crouching in the doorway separating the hallway from the kitchen, calls out, “But you can’t see me!”

Silas exchanges a weary half smile with his sister, Gwen. She is five years younger than Silas, a time stamp of permanent import on their relationship, even as the difference shrinks while their middle ages expand. When Silas was a child, he would hide on Gwen and pretend to be dead when she found him. Gwen would shake and tickle him, pinch his cheeks, and half laugh, half tear up while shouting, “This isn’t funny!” Silas imagined he played dead so well his arms, legs, fingers, and toes still wouldn’t move when he would eventually send those secret bodily messages to lift, wiggle, or twitch. The longer he remained play-dead, the more convinced he became that his body was a cage and he wouldn’t be able to move when he needed to, which both scared him and inexplicably thrilled him.

Gwen says to Victoria, singsong, “Someone should be in bed and not eavesdropping.”

Silas hopes Gwen won’t be too hard on her daughter. Victoria doesn’t know how to process the shock and grief any more than the adults do.

“I am not dropping!” Five years old, made of charged electrons, Victoria Muppet-rushes into the kitchen for the cover-blown tickle attack of her uncle. Silas, still in his chair, scoops her up and airplanes her over his head. While Victoria is airborne and giggling, her mom tersely ticks off the bedtime checklist: go to the bathroom, wash your face, brush your teeth, pick out one, only one, book for Daddy to read, and where is Daddy? Gwen falters, as though she said something she shouldn’t have. Maybe she did. Hell if Silas knows. He cannot provide comfort or answers for anyone else, never mind himself.

Victoria offers her bed to Uncle Silas again, and he declines, insisting the couch fits hits long body better. He presses the button of Victoria’s nose and kisses her forehead. She wipes it away and her maniacal laughter turns to tears. She tells him she’s sorry about Uncle David. He says, “Thank you. I am too.” He wants to ask if Victoria can stay a little longer. She would help keep the waiting trap of his thoughts from snapping shut. Silas swings her off his lap, her feet padding onto the kitchen tile, and says, “Bedtime, little Vee. Good night.”

She wipes her eyes and says, “I am big Vee,” and stomps out of the kitchen, toward the plaintive calls of her father.

Silas covers then wipes his face with one hand. Gwen asks if he wants more wine.

“Do you have to ask?” he says, and exhales a shudder. He holds in all the other shudders, the infinite queue of shudders, ones to be doled out in the coming days, months, years. The very thought of future years without David is a purgatorial burden. There is no segue to what he says next because he shouldn’t be quiet, not now when he is so ill prepared for the looming contemplative intrusion of silence, one surely to feature an endless replaying of what happened when he returned home after work.

After Gwen refills his glass with Pinot Grigio, he says, “I knew something was wrong the second I opened the door.” He pauses, honoring or damning what he will say next. “Do you want to hear this?”

“If you want to talk, I’m here. But you don’t have to talk either. You don’t have to do anything.” Gwen satellites around the kitchen, carrying the empty bottle of wine, until she crashes it into the deep sink. She says sorry twice, quickly rinses her hands, then leans against the counter, her arms crossed.

He should wiseass a joke about how uncomfortable she is. The joke would help them both, but he’s not capable of it. He says, “I came home, maybe an hour early. David wasn’t at the dining-room table. His laptop wasn’t even open. Notebook and folders closed and neatly stacked. Right away, I knew. Maybe he’d stopped working already, but I fucking knew that wasn’t right. I ran around calling his name and I went into the TV room and he was just—he was on the floor, on his stomach, head turned away from me, toward the TV. The screen was blue.” Silas waves a hand, as though pantomiming the previous detail be stricken because it wasn’t necessary, or he didn’t have the time or the want to explain the blue screen. “He does his exercise DVDs in the morning, okay? So, David was in his exercise clothes. T-shirt and compression shorts. And, you know, his heart gave out. It must’ve happened right after I left, not too long after I left. Instead of me getting home in the afternoon an hour early and however many fucking hours late, what if I stayed an extra hour in the morning? Why would I have? I wish I stayed. I should’ve stayed.”

“Silas—it’s not your—you couldn’t have known—”

“He was dead. He’d been dead for hours, for the whole day. For what we call a day, right? It had been a long day for me at work too. That’s what I used to call a long day. I had no idea how long a day could be. No one does until you do. I haven’t seen—I haven’t seen many dead people. None, except for funerals. But David was dead, Gwen. I won’t go into—he was so clearly gone. His body was there and he was gone. He wasn’t there anymore. I didn’t know what to do. I—I said his name over and over, and I ran back to the kitchen, to like—what—get him a glass of water or something? I don’t know, I don’t know what I was thinking. Except I wasn’t thinking I could help him. I knew I couldn’t. Is that terrible? Is that awful?”

Gwen shakes her head and whispers, “No.”

“I didn’t leave him alone. I would not do that to him, not while he was still home. I was in the kitchen, but I could still see him, and if he could’ve, he would’ve been able to see me too. I called 911 and when I was on the line, giving them his name and my name and address, I turned slightly and I cupped a hand around my mouth and the phone so he wouldn’t hear, like I didn’t want him to be worried. And I wasn’t facing straight down the hallway to the TV room, I was turned, I could still see him, but I wasn’t really watching him either because I was trying to be all there, all together on the call. I didn’t want to screw that up. The call was the worst and most important thing in the world, and I couldn’t fuck it up. And then I swear, right before I hung up, I saw—movement.” Silas waves his hand by his temple. “I was facing this way’’—he turns his torso so Gwen is on his hard right—“like now. I’m not looking at you, but I can still see you without focusing directly on you.” He pauses and remains looking but not looking at Gwen. “David was on the floor, already permanently on the floor like he will be in my fucking head forever now, but I was turned so he was a blurry, peripheral background shape, and then—then the moment before it happened, I knew it would happen. I mean, I didn’t turn to fully see it, and I don’t know if I saw anything, but then I saw it anyway.”

“Saw what, Silas?”

“I was in the kitchen—again, not really looking at him—and I saw him lift his upper torso and turn his head. I hung up and ran back to the TV room and sat next to him and held his hand and I watched him. I watched him until the ambulance came. His head was turned, facing the kitchen and not the TV and that stupid blue screen. He was facing me.”

*   *   *

“Come sit with me on the bench. Share a pretend cigarette with me,” David’s mother, Janice Harrington, says. She hasn’t smoked in over two decades, but never passes on a chance to remind anyone and everyone how much she misses it. A tall white woman in her late sixties, she keeps manically fit (her own self-description) via competition. Prior to the pandemic, she played in pickleball tournaments two weekends out of every month. The tournaments are due to return later this summer.

Janice grabs Silas’s hand and gently pulls him toward a green, wooden bench under the shade of an oak tree’s weary branches.

Silas says, “I should help with the cleanup.” Friends and family gather trash, fold tablecloths, distribute leftover food, break down folding tables and chairs. His elderly parents, Fung and Catherine, oversee and coordinate the packing of Gwen’s minivan. Ninety minutes earlier, they brought everyone to tears and laughter, telling the slightly-embellished-for-effect story of meeting their future son-in-law, David, for dinner. A lovely evening that had ended, unbeknownst to them at the time, with David rushing to the ER because he’d accidently ingested a small amount shellfish.

Janice says, “Eh, let everyone else do it.”

The memorial service was held at Lynch Park, a green space and rocky beach jutting into Beverly Channel, and began with Silas kneeling on a seawall, emptying...