Year's Best Horror Stories XVIII Part 27

Now he'd made it sound as if they were ruining his holiday. He patted Laura's cheek awkwardly, and then Virginia's, and leaned back from the open window. "Five o'clock here suit you?" Frank said. "If we're late, there's always the pub."

Kew agreed, and watched the car race away. The children waved without turning their heads, but Laura kept him in sight as long as she could. Just as the car reached the first bend, Kew wanted to wave his stick urgently, to call out to Frank that he'd changed his mind. Six hours out here seemed a more generous helping of solitude than even he needed. Then the car was gone, and he told himself that the family deserved a break from him.

He sat on a rustic bench outside the building striped with timber, and turned to the scribbled page while he waited for the door to be unlocked. He found he was able to read straight on to the end, not least because the ink appeared darker.

"There was a man so versed in the black arts that he was able to bide his time until the elements should open his grave; only the pa.s.sage of so many years, and the stresses to which the falling away of the land subjected the grave, twisted not only the coffin almost beyond recognition but also what laired within. Imagine, if you will, a spider in human form with only four limbs, a spider both enraged and made ungainly by the loss, especially since the remaining limbs are by no means evenly distributed. If anything other than simple malevolence let him walk, it was the knowledge that whoever died of the sight of him would be bound to him."

Kew s.h.i.+vered and grinned at himself. So he could still derive a frisson from that kind of writing, all the more pleasurable when he remembered that James had never believed in his ghosts. Was it really possible that Kew was holding in his hands an unpublished episode by James? He didn't know what else to think. He gazed along the path through the swaying gra.s.s and wondered what it led to that had produced the description he'd just read, until the sound of bolts being slid back made him jump.

The landlord, a hairy bespectacled man whose ruddiness and girth suggested that he enjoyed his beer, looked out at Kew and then at the book. "Bit out of your way if you're walking, aren't you?" he said, so heartily that it served as a welcome.

"Come in and wet your whistle, my lad."

A bar bristling with decorated handles and thick as a castle parapet marked off a quarter of the L-shaped room, beyond which were a few small tables draped with cloths, and a staircase guarded by a visitors' book. The landlord hauled on the nearest handle and gave Kew a pint of murky beer. "I was driven here," Kew explained. "I'm just about to start walking."

"Are you not using that book?"

"Why, do you know it?"

"I know all of that man's work that's set around this countryside. He had the touch, and no mistake." The landlord pulled himself a pint and drank half of it in one gulp. "But he didn't find anything round here that he wanted to write about."

Kew thought of showing the landlord the annotation but wasn't quite sure of himself. "Do you know if he ever came this way?"

"I should say so. He signed the book."

Excitement made Kew grip the handle of his tankard. "Could I see?"

"Certainly, if I can dig it out. Were you thinking of eating?" When Kew said that he better had, the landlord served him bread and cheese before unlocking a cupboard beside the stairs. Kew glanced at the handwritten paragraph to remind himself what the writing looked like, and then watched the landlord pull out visitor's book after visitor's book and scan the dates. Eventually he brought a volume to Kew's table. "Here he is."

Kew saw the date first: 1890. "He hadn't written any of his stories then, had he?"

"Not one." Kew ran his gaze down the column of faded signatures, and almost didn't see the name he was searching for. As he came back to it he saw why he had pa.s.sed over it: the signature bore no resemblance to the handwriting in the guidebook. He sighed, and then sucked in a breath. The signature directly beneath James's was in that handwriting.

Was the signature "A. Fellows"? He touched it with his fingertip, and tried to rub the cobwebby feel of it off his finger with his thumb. "Who was this, do you know?"

"Whoever came after Monty James."

The landlord seemed to be trying not to grin, and Kew gazed at him until he went on. "You'd think these East Anglians would be proud to have James write about their countryside," the landlord said, "but they don't like to talk about his kind of stories. Maybe they believe in that kind of thing more than he did. The chap who ran this place was on his deathbed when he told my father about that signature. It seems n.o.body saw who made it. It's like one of Monty's own yarns."

"Have you any idea where James had been that day?"

"Some old ruin on the cliff," the landlord said, and seemed to wish he had been less specific.

"Along the path outside?"

"If it was, there's even less there now, and you'll have noticed that he didn't think it had any place in his book."

The annotator had believed otherwise, and Kew thought that was a mystery worth investigating. He finished his lunch and drained his tankard, and was at the door when the landlord said "I wouldn't stray too far from the road if I were you.

Remember we're open till three."

This felt so like the protectiveness Kew had escaped earlier that he made straight for the path. Didn't anyone think he was capable of taking care of himself?

He'd fought in the war against Hitler, he'd been a partner in an accountancy firm, he'd run every year in the London marathon until his leg had crippled him; he'd tended Laura's mother during her last years and had confined himself to places where he could wheel her in her chair, and after all that, he wasn't to be trusted to go off the road by himself? James had followed the path, and it didn't seem to have done him any harm. Kew stuffed the book under one arm and tramped toward the sea, cutting at the ragged gra.s.sy edges of the path with his stick. The fields of pale gra.s.s stretched into the distance on both sides of him. The low cloud, featureless except for the infrequent swerving gull, glared dully above him. After twenty minutes' walking he felt he had scarcely moved, until he glanced back and found that the inn was out of sight. He was alone, as far as he could see, though the gra.s.s of the fields came up to his shoulder now. A chilly wind rustled through the fields, and he limped fast to keep warm, faster when he saw a building ahead.

At least, he thought it was a building until he was able to see through its broken windows. It was the front wall of a cottage, all that remained of the house.

As he came abreast of it he saw other cottages further on, and a backward look showed him foundations under the gra.s.s. He'd been walking through a ruined village without realizing. One building, however, appeared still to be intact: the church, ahead at the edge of the ruins.

The church was squat and blackened, with narrow windows and a rudimentary tower. Kew had to admit that it didn't look very distinguished -- hardly worth singling out for the guidebook -- though wasn't there a large gargoyle above one of the windows that overlooked the wide gray sea? In any case, the sight of the church, alone on the cliff top amid the fringe of nodding gra.s.s, seemed worth the walk. He threw his shoulders back and breathed deep of the sea air, and strode toward the church.

He needn't have been quite so vigorous; there was n.o.body to show off for.

He had to laugh at himself, for in his haste he dug his stick into a hole in the overgrown pavement and almost overbalanced. Rather than risk tearing the paper jacket by trying to hold onto the guidebook, he let the book fall on the gra.s.s, where it fell open at the scribbled page.

He frowned at the handwriting as he stooped carefully, gripping the stick, and wondered if exposure to sunlight had affected the ink. The first lines appeared blurred, so much so that he couldn't read the words "best left out" at all. Perhaps the dead light was affecting his eyes, because now he peered toward the church he saw that there was no gargoyle. He could only a.s.sume that the wind had pushed forward the withered shrub, which he glimpsed swaying out of sight around the corner closest to the sea, and a trick of perspective had made it look as if it were protruding from high up on the wall.

The church door was ajar. As Kew limped in the direction of the cliff edge, to see how stable the foundations of the building were, he discerned pews and an altar in the gloomy interior, and a figure in black moving back and forth in front of the glimmering altar. Could the church still be in use? Perhaps the priest was another sightseer.

Kew picked his way alongside the building, over illegibly weathered gravestones whose cracks looked cemented with moss, to the jagged brink, and then he shoved the book under the arm that held the stick and grabbed the cold church wall to support himself. Apart from the slabs he'd walked on, the graveyard had vanished; it must have fallen to the beach as the centuries pa.s.sed. The church itself stood at the very edge of the sheer cliff now, its exposed foundations sprouting weeds that rustled in the sandy wind. But it wasn't the precariousness of the building that had made Kew feel suddenly shaky, in need of support; it was that there was no shrub beside the church, nothing like the distorted shrunken brownish shape he'd glimpsed as it withdrew from sight. Beside that corner of the church, the cliff fell steeply to the beach.

He clutched the wall, bruising his fingertips, while he tried to persuade himself that the shrub and the portion of ground on which it stood had just lost their hold on the cliff, and then he shoved himself away from the wall, away from the crumbling edge. As he did so, he heard a scrabbling above him, on the roof.

A chunk of moss, too large to have been dislodged by a bird, dropped on the gra.s.s in front of him. He clapped his free hand to his chest, which felt as if his heart were beating its way to the surface, and fled to the entrance to the church.

The priest was still by the altar. Kew could see the blotch of darkness that was his robe, and the whitish glint of his collar. Thoughts were falling over one another in Kew's head: the guidebook was a late edition, and so the scribbled annotation must have been made decades later than the signature at the inn, yet the handwriting hadn't aged at all, and couldn't the words in the visitor's book which Kew had taken for a signature have been "A Follower"? The only thought he was able to grasp was how far he would have to run across the deserted land from the church to the inn -- too far for him to be able to keep up the pace for more than a few minutes. He dodged into the gloomy church, his stick knocking against a pew, and heard a larger movement overhead. "Please," he gasped, stumbling down the aisle into the dimness.

He hardly knew what he was saying or doing, but where else could he go for help except to the priest? He wished he could see the man's face, though rather less fervently once the priest spoke. "It brought you," he said.

It wasn't just his words but also his voice that disturbed Kew. Perhaps it was an echo that made it sound so hollow, but why was its tone so eager? "You mean the book," Kew stammered. "We mean what you read."

Kew was almost at the altar now. As his eyes adjusted, he saw that what he'd taken to be dimness draping the pews and the altar was a ma.s.s of dust and cobwebs. More than the tone and timber of the voice, its forced quality was beginning to unnerve him. "Your friend James thought it, but he didn't write it," the voice said. "We inspired him, and then I had to write it for him."

If James had used the handwritten paragraph in one of his tales and identified the setting as he tended to, Kew thought with the clarity of utter panic, more people would have visited this church. He was backing toward the door when he heard something clamber down from the roof and land just outside the doorway with a sound like the fall of a bundle of sticks and leather. "James nearly saw, but he didn't believe," said the figure by the altar, and stepped into the light that seeped through a pinched grimy window. "But you will," it said out of the hole that was most of its face.

Kew closed his eyes tight. His panic had isolated a single thought at the center of him: that those who died of seeing would be bound to what they saw. He felt the guidebook slip out of his hands, he heard its echoes clatter back and forth between the walls, and then it gave way to another sound, of something that scuttled lopsidedly into the church and halted to wait for him. He heard the priest's feet, bare of more than clothing, begin to drag across the floor toward him. He turned, frantically tapping the pews with his stick, and shuffled in the direction of the door. Beyond it was the path, the inn, and his family at five o'clock, further than his mind could grasp. If he had to die, please let it not be here! What terrified him most, as he swung the stick in front of him and prayed that it would ward off any contact, was what might be done to him to try and make him look.

The Horse Of Iron & How We Can Know It & Be Changed By It Forever.

by M. John Harrison.

M. John Harrison's most recent novel, Climbers, (Gollancz, 1989) is a mainstream novel dealing with the author's strange hobby of climbing rocks. Of it, Texas emigre fantasy writer Lisa Tuttle says: "it is about a group of people with a particular obsession (even weirder than SF fans) and their ways of enriching/escaping from/making sense of their ordinary daily lives in sordid contemporary Britain. It is written in a 'realistic' mode so heightened as to be hallucinatory. It's brilliant."

M. John Harrison is the most accomplished stylist among British science fiction/fantasy/horror writers working today. Born on July 26, 1945 near Catesby Hall, Harrison now lives in Peck-ham in southeast London. His books include The Committed Men and The Centauri Device (science fiction), In Viriconium and Viriconium Nights (fantasy), The Ice Monkey (horror), and Hot Rocks (with Ron Fawcett) and Climbers (climbing). Frankly, it's really impossible to categorize any of these, as readers of Harrison's work will readily agree. Harrison reports that he hasn't written much fantasy of late, and that after completing his current novel-in-progress, The Course of the Heart, he will probably drift exclusively into the mainstream. I would call that extremely depressing news, but then how does one distinguish between Harrison's mainstream writing and his horror/fantasy?

Recently I switched on in the middle of a television arts program. Two men were molding in bra.s.s something which looked at first sight like the stripped carca.s.s of a turkey, that exact, sharp-edged cage of bone which reveals itself so thoroughly through all the strips and flaps of flesh after Christmas dinner. It turned out, though, to be something less interesting, a cla.s.sical figurine, a Poseidon or Prometheus which systematically lost its magic as the layers of casting plaster were knocked off carefully with the back of an axe. This was so essentially disappointing -- a striptease in which, by removing veils of strangeness and alien signification, the sculptor revealed a value ordinary and easily-understood -- that to replace it I turned off the TV and imagined this: Another foundry, somewhere in the night, somewhere in history, in which something like a horse's skull (not a horse's head: a skull, which looks nothing like a horse at all, but like an enormous curved shears, or a bone beak whose two halves meet only at the tip, a wicked, intelligent-looking purposeless thing which cannot speak) came out of the mold, and all the founders were immediately executed to keep the secret. They had known all along this would happen to them.

These men were the great craftsmen and engineers of their day. They could have looked for more from life. Yet they crammed down their fear, and got on with the work, and afterward made no attempt to escape.

This was how I learned the secret of the horse, which I now give here, after first holding it across itself like a slip of paper, in a further intricating gesture:

1: THE FOOL.

A young man, in whose dark hair a single strand of gray has recently appeared, decides to set out on a series of excursions suggested by the fall of the cards.

Complex rules will determine the direction of each journey. For instance, the suit being WANDS, he will only go north if the journey is to take place in the second half of the year; or if the next card turned up is a Knight.

Equally intricate rules, whose algebraic clauses and counter-clauses he intuits with each new cast of the cards, cover the choice of South, West and East; of destination; even of the clothes he will wear: but he will always travel by train.

This decision is based on the relations.h.i.+p he has identified between the flutter of cards falling in a quiet cold room and the flutter of changing destinations on the mechanical indicator boards at railway stations. This similarity rests, he is willing to admit, on a metaphor: for while the fall of the cards is -- or seems -- random, the sequence of destinations is -- or seems -- controlled.

To represent himself in this affair, the young man -- or "Ephebe" -- has chosen THE FOOL. This card, therefore, will never turn up. He has subtracted it from the deck and keeps it beside him; each afternoon, as the light goes out of the room, it seems to fluoresce up at him from the table or the arm of his chair, more an event than a picture. We move forward through time by the deeply undercutting action of Desire. As THE FOOL steps continually off his cliff and into s.p.a.ce, so the Ephebe is always a presence attempting to fill the absence that has brought him forth. He is a wave tumbling constantly forward into each new moment, and his journeys are thus in every sense a trip. By following the journeys as they fall out, he believes, he will open for himself a fifth direction; and to help identify it he will bring back from each journey an object. These objects or donnees will eventually comprise both a "compa.s.s" and set of instructions for its use.

All the Ephebe's journeys begin from London.

2: THE MAGUS, representing Heterodox Skills.

Some are no more than commuter trips, on trains with automatic sliding doors and the interior design of buses. They arrive at the platform loaded with well-groomed, purposive people who seem prosperous but new to it: clerks and estate agents already a bit pouchy in the face, doing all they can with a s.h.i.+rt and a tie and a padded shoulder to pa.s.s themselves off as dangerous, successful accountants from the City -- men and women in their early twenties who pride themselves on looking like self-satisfied bullies.

Trains like this run hourly between Harrow and Euston, through a station called Kilburn High Road, the high walls of which are covered with the most beautiful graffiti. They are not scrawls whose content -- "LUFC w.a.n.kers die tomorrow" "No brains rule" -- and context are their only significance, but explosions of red and purple and green done with great deliberation and exuberance, shapes like fireworks going off, shapes that bulge like damp tropical fruit, with an effect of glistening surfaces. They are names -- "Eddie" "Daggo"

"Mince" -- but names which have been transformed from sign or label into ill.u.s.tration: pictures of names. After them everything else looks dull, the high brick walls of the next station -- Hampstead South -- -resembling the walls of some great windowless linear prison. The children who do this call it "bombing"; they bomb their personalities on to the walls.

When the train stops at Kilburn High Road the doors slide open as if it is waiting for someone and after a long time an old man gets on and goes to an empty seat. His overcoat is belted but he has no s.h.i.+rt on, so you can see clearly the ma.s.s of springy yellowish-white hairs between his withered old pectoral muscles. A rank smell comes up from him. As soon as the doors close, he rolls a cigarette and smokes it with relish, smiling and nodding around at the other pa.s.sengers. The men stare at their polished shoes. The women draw away and look angrily at one another as he pulls back his cuff to consult his watch. This grand gesture reveals the word FUGA tattooed inside his grimy wrist. "No one dare remind him," the Ephebe muses, "that this is a No Smoking carriage." And then: "We should live our lives the way those children sign themselves, bombing our names on to the prison walls inside our heads."

From this, his first excursion, he brings back a flattened cigarette stub, porous and stained brown at the end where the old man has held it gently between his lips.

3: THE HANGED MAN, representing "the descent of light into darkness in order to redeem it"; in its female aspect, "the Sophia of Valentinus."

New trains run on the line between Wakefield and Huddersfield. Inside them, next to every door, is a sign, which reads: PRESS WHEN ILLUMINATED TO OPEN. Illuminati everywhere should know about this sign. Between Wakefield and Huddersfield illumination is likely to come as a corollary of the abandoned factories visible from the train; the rubbish that clogs the shallow river; the dour failed lives in the houses beyond. What is the Ephebe to do on receiving it? Press the b.u.t.ton and jump out of the train?

In the overheated carriages of the 22.01 his journey pulls out like chewing gum; then snaps.

At Dewsbury a tired-looking woman gets up to leave the train. Round her neck she is wearing five or six gold chains, each bearing either her initial or her Christian name. They cling and spill between the tendons of her neck like a delicate gold net. She stands in front of the doors, which will not open for her. The sign is illuminated but she has not noticed it. Soon the train will pull away again and she will still be on it. She looks around with growing agitation. "I just can't work these doors out. Can you?" The Ephebe would like to be able to reply: "What you call yourself, who you claim yourself to be by putting on all your necklaces, is not as important as the act itself." That gesture he believes, of netting or fixing, is what actually identifies her. He would like to be able to explain, "People love you for the ident.i.ty in the act, an ident.i.ty so frail they must constantly help affirm it."

But all he actually says is, "I think you have to press the b.u.t.ton." At this the train gives a lurch, as if it has lost its patience.

From this journey the Ephebe brings back an item of personalized jewelry in the form of the name SOPHIA. The Aeon called Sophia, Valentinus reminds us, astonished to find herself separate from the Good, mistook for its light the tawdry, bluish flicker of the created world, and flung herself towards it. By desiring G.o.d so strongly she fell away from Him and into the city of Alexandria, where she still redeems herself daily as a prost.i.tute. (In some versions of her agony, Sophia becomes the city, and as library, language, labyrinth, is thus the instrument of Mankind's redemption. In others, rather than falling away from the Father, she denies herself to Him in reprisal for some never-defined unkindness to His children.)

4: THE LOVERS, representing "Alchemical Marriage" and the Concordance of Opposites.

Now the Ephebe lives along the line.

His journeys divide themselves between those on routes he has never traveled in his life -- such as the one that worms its way, stopping at every station from Shotton on round the coast, from Crewe to Bangor; and those he already knows by heart, so that he can recognize every power pylon, substation or battery hen house between, say, London St. Pancras and Sheffield Central.

He delights in the surprises of an unknown line.

Suddenly the sea is racing along by his shoulder, light spattering off it like frying fat. Later the train crawls past container depots, and a tank farm lit up mysteriously in the night. The guard announces, "Once again lays n gem I do apologize your late arrival and inconvenient cause," and the Ephebe wakes next morning in the Rose & Crown: where like some traveling salesman he feels obliged to guzzle bacon, eggs, sausage and hot tea while he looks speculatively out at the wet provincial street.

As a result of one of these journeys he drifts into a tranced, sensual affair with a young woman a little older than himself who runs her mother's boarding house. In the mornings she serves breakfast to the guests, while he lies in bed imagining the men as they watch her moving about the room with her tray. Though she has already brought him his own breakfast in bed, kissed him, watched him eat it with a kind of unfas.h.i.+onable pride in his appet.i.te, the Ephebe sometimes finds himself envying them what he thinks of as an intensely formal experience of her.

They see her only once or twice a year, at the beginning and end of a day. Some of them try to look down her blouse as she puts the crockery on the table; others are content to talk to her about the weather; yet others are hypnotized by the quick deftness of her hands as she lays out knife, fork and serviette, or calmed by the smell of her body beneath the smell of her perfume.

When he tries to explain this to her she laughs and tells him, "You're so greedy!"

This goes some way towards understanding though perhaps not far enough.

Increasingly, after she has taken away his breakfast tray, the Ephebe catches himself staring up through the attic skylight at the heavy white clouds, wondering if he can disguise himself and, like some boy out of a Medieval poem, appear one morning among the commercial travelers at the breakfast table to observe her un.o.bserved: and from this journey he brings back only the sound of her voice as she urges him, "f.u.c.k me. f.u.c.k me," in the night.

5: THE CHARIOT, representing Self Expression.

All journeys are enchanted.

It isn't so much that the landscape distracts you, as that something about the motion of the train -- something about the very idea of constant, rus.h.i.+ng, forward movement -- makes you restless and slow to settle to anything. You read a few pages of a book and look out at some swans on a ca.n.a.l. A newspaper opened suddenly just down the carriage sounds like rain spattering on the window.

Another chapter and you make your way down to the buffet or the lavatory.

Between each event a reverie pours itself, as seamless as Golden Syrup, as smooth as the motion of the train. You wonder what the weather will be like in Leeds or Newcastle, turn to the Independent to find out, read: "The world economy is likely to remain subdued."

Looking up from these words to a landscape of hedges and ponds, copses and little embankments, the Ephebe sees with amazement a strange vehicle bounding along beside the railway line.