The New Uncanny by Etgar Keret, Ramsey Campbell, Hanif Kureishi, Christopher Priest, Jane Rogers, A.S. Byatt, Matthew Holness, Adam Marek
Authors: Etgar Keret, Ramsey Campbell, Hanif Kureishi, Christopher Priest, Jane Rogers, A.S. Byatt, Matthew Holness, Adam Marek
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exactly the same position it had stood on the day Christie first arrived. It was still bare, all its decorations having been burned ceremoniously by him in the weeks following my bereavement. Now, instead, something horribly familiar sat at the top, where my Daddy had once lifted me to place the fairy.
It was the man’s dog mask, and although all I could now see through its cruel eyeholes was the damp wall beyond, I realised that it belonged to Christie, and that he’d worn it here with me all these years, waiting for my courage to awaken.
And below, beneath the tree, was my present, wrapped up in newspapers and tied at the top with an ancient ribbon. It was a large, odd-looking object, bearing an old gift tag addressed to me that hung, quite still, from a small thread of dull, red cotton.
As I got down on my knees and crawled towards the parcel, the thread began to twitch and twist. A faint rustling noise sounded from the wrapping, where the taut sheets had begun to bulge gently back and forth, as though something trapped beneath them were beginning to breathe. When its long leg burst through the paper and pawed violently at the carpet in front, teeming with life, I rushed forward, eager to unwrap the rest.
Seeing Double
Sara Maitland
HIS MOTHER HAD died when he was born. His mother had been young and at the end of a long and very hard labour, made more exhausting by the size of the baby’s head. The mid-wife had acted promptly, gathering in the baby and carrying it away. She had washed and dressed it, before bringing it back to the mother, with a delicate lawn and lace bonnet framing its sweet little face. The mother had taken the child in her arms and smiled, though wearily; but she had made no apparent attempt to count its toes, fingers, eyes and mouths, and after a moment the midwife had turned away to her immediate duties. When she turned back the mother was dead; her face was frozen in a strange rictus, which might have been the consequence of a sudden sharp pain or might have been terror. The midwife, a woman of sturdy good sense and addicted to neither gin nor gossip, deftly massaged the mother’s face back into a more seemly expression and closed her large blue eyes forever.
His father, a hero of the nation, loved admired and honoured, but now retired to his family home in the mountains, grew gentle and sad. He spent most of his time walking in the high hills above the forest or in his library where he was slowly but steadily compiling a taxonomy of the local flora and fauna. He took tender but perhaps slightly distanced care of his only son. He created a pleasure palace for the child – his own small suite of rooms, opening through large airy glass doorways onto a pleasant shaded portico and beyond that a delightful secluded garden with high walls, climbable trees and a pool designed for swimming in. At considerable expense, and to the irritation of the local community, he employed the midwife as a permanent nanny and found a blind but nimble servant to assist her.
The child grew, grew strong and straight and healthy. When he was old enough his father would sometimes take him up into the forests and the mountains beyond the forests where he learned the names of all the butterflies and many of the flowers. Sometimes at night they would climb together onto the roof of the house and watch the stars, and his father taught him to trace and see the patterns of the noble constellations and told him the ancient Greek stories that gave the patterns their names.
The Christmas that he was eight, his father gave him a train set and together they built and developed it. When it grew too extensive for the nursery floor, his father opened up the attics and they created a whole little world there, with electric signals and tiny model towns; and model mountains with tunnels through them, so that the boy could wait in eager anticipation for the engine to emerge from the darkness and sound its miniature horn. They made
It was the man’s dog mask, and although all I could now see through its cruel eyeholes was the damp wall beyond, I realised that it belonged to Christie, and that he’d worn it here with me all these years, waiting for my courage to awaken.
And below, beneath the tree, was my present, wrapped up in newspapers and tied at the top with an ancient ribbon. It was a large, odd-looking object, bearing an old gift tag addressed to me that hung, quite still, from a small thread of dull, red cotton.
As I got down on my knees and crawled towards the parcel, the thread began to twitch and twist. A faint rustling noise sounded from the wrapping, where the taut sheets had begun to bulge gently back and forth, as though something trapped beneath them were beginning to breathe. When its long leg burst through the paper and pawed violently at the carpet in front, teeming with life, I rushed forward, eager to unwrap the rest.
Seeing Double
Sara Maitland
HIS MOTHER HAD died when he was born. His mother had been young and at the end of a long and very hard labour, made more exhausting by the size of the baby’s head. The mid-wife had acted promptly, gathering in the baby and carrying it away. She had washed and dressed it, before bringing it back to the mother, with a delicate lawn and lace bonnet framing its sweet little face. The mother had taken the child in her arms and smiled, though wearily; but she had made no apparent attempt to count its toes, fingers, eyes and mouths, and after a moment the midwife had turned away to her immediate duties. When she turned back the mother was dead; her face was frozen in a strange rictus, which might have been the consequence of a sudden sharp pain or might have been terror. The midwife, a woman of sturdy good sense and addicted to neither gin nor gossip, deftly massaged the mother’s face back into a more seemly expression and closed her large blue eyes forever.
His father, a hero of the nation, loved admired and honoured, but now retired to his family home in the mountains, grew gentle and sad. He spent most of his time walking in the high hills above the forest or in his library where he was slowly but steadily compiling a taxonomy of the local flora and fauna. He took tender but perhaps slightly distanced care of his only son. He created a pleasure palace for the child – his own small suite of rooms, opening through large airy glass doorways onto a pleasant shaded portico and beyond that a delightful secluded garden with high walls, climbable trees and a pool designed for swimming in. At considerable expense, and to the irritation of the local community, he employed the midwife as a permanent nanny and found a blind but nimble servant to assist her.
The child grew, grew strong and straight and healthy. When he was old enough his father would sometimes take him up into the forests and the mountains beyond the forests where he learned the names of all the butterflies and many of the flowers. Sometimes at night they would climb together onto the roof of the house and watch the stars, and his father taught him to trace and see the patterns of the noble constellations and told him the ancient Greek stories that gave the patterns their names.
The Christmas that he was eight, his father gave him a train set and together they built and developed it. When it grew too extensive for the nursery floor, his father opened up the attics and they created a whole little world there, with electric signals and tiny model towns; and model mountains with tunnels through them, so that the boy could wait in eager anticipation for the engine to emerge from the darkness and sound its miniature horn. They made
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