The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories

by James D. Jenkins

  He couldn’t tear his gaze away from the horizon. Some frothy offshoots of cumulonimbus began to coagulate under the action of the wind, and for several moments they recalled a titanic face silhouetted in the sky, a bald head with white eyes, without a nose, its mouth curved in a sardonic sneer of disapproval. An explosion of low-­timbred, guttural thunder cancelled out its features and Ermes was assailed by fear.

  A primal, irrational fear, like he had never experienced before.

  And you could say he’d had plenty of fear in his life. He had experienced frequent panic attacks after the breakup with Daniela. On a couple of occasions he had thought he was dying. But now it was different. As if every cell of his organism, every recess of his mind, was vibrating with a terror that had nothing to do with death, with annihilation.

  His first idea, dictated by instinct, was to turn around. Stop the Scania and put the throttle in reverse, anything to put distance between him and those angry clouds, that deserted highway. He had to go back where he’d come from, maybe reach the truck stop with its strange harelipped barista and the disturbing yellow writing in the bathroom stall.

  He had to come across cars, people, someone.

  He lit a cigarette with parkinsonian movements, ordering himself to think rationally.

  A U-­turn was out of the question. He would risk prison and lose his job for what in all probability would turn out to be nothing but a flight of fancy, an illogical alteration in his mind, which had been chewed up by the stress of the past months.

  ‘Fuck!’ he swore. ‘Breathe. Breathe.’

  He had to proceed towards the next exit, the next junction. There was no other option, and he couldn’t be very far. How much time had passed since his last stop?

  He directed a questioning gaze at the digital tachograph and was hit by a wave of nausea. It should have shown the kilometers traveled, the time elapsed since his break at the truck stop, but the digital numbers had been replaced by seven simple characters, which fluttered on the display like a crazed sign:

  UIRONDA

  The cigarette slid from his lips onto his lap. He brushed it away with an irritated swipe of his hand, pulling the truck over to the shoulder.

  And descending from the cab so he no longer had to see that writing, his chest squeezed in a clamp, Ermes Lenzi realized he had stopped the Scania about ten meters from a road sign indicating a junction. The sheet metal sign was a dark yellow color, stained with rusty streaks. The writing, in an elegant and out-­of-­place cursive, left no room for logic.

  Next Exit – Uironda

  He remained standing there observing the sign, his arms hanging slack at his sides. The world – which world? – was cloaked in a terrifying, unnatural silence. Lenzi knelt down on the warm asphalt, bringing his hands to his face, a tormented statue of flesh erected to challenge the road and the imminent storm.

  After having tried to phone his ex-­wife and a couple of friends – no signal – Ermes climbed into the cab of the truck like a fat caterpillar. The pain had returned to gnaw at the base of his spine with the tenacity of a mastiff. Somehow the excruciating throbbing that tormented him brought him to a state of quiet resignation. Slumped in the seat, his hands on the wheel, he practiced the breathing exercises to treat panic attacks, trying to find a sense in the madness that he was living.

  Hadn’t there perhaps been days when he had wished to be the last man on Earth? Days in which the desire to disappear, to be alone, far away from problems, from anxiety, had become an obsession, a necessity?

  You’ve got your wish. No traffic, nobody to interact with, no nothing. Just you and the road, just you and a goal, finally: Uironda.

  He smiled, rummaging in his shirt pocket. There was one half-­crushed Camel left in the packet. He decided to save it for a better occasion. Then he turned the key, shifted into first, and advanced at a crawl, passing the road sign that had so greatly disturbed him.

  He would drive until he reached the next exit. No, he couldn’t turn back. And if that exit really led to Uironda, well . . . he would take it, enter the territory of superstition, of urban legend. Deep down he was only looking for a way to shake up his dull life, a distraction, a spark that would ignite anew his will to live, his curiosity. This could be his chance.

  Uironda.

  The storm had caught up with him. Carried on the wind, the first raindrops beat down on the Scania’s windshield. It was a dirty, yellowish rain that the windshield wipers struggled to sweep away, smearing the glass with greasy gunk. Maybe the storm was coming from Africa, loaded with sand and dirt. Ermes rolled up his window and accelerated, launching the truck into the fury of the elements.

  It was like entering a tunnel filled with liquid dust. The vehicle’s headlights could barely cut through the rain to illuminate the center line.

  The digital tachograph went completely mad, showing sequences of figures and numbers apparently devoid of meaning. Every so often, like the flash of a strobe light, the name of the mirage junction appeared on the display, the non-­place that old truckers whispered about, men like Roby, the first – and last – person to pronounce Uironda in his presence.

  Ermes clenched his teeth and squinted his eyes, concentrating on driving, praying to get out of this storm as soon as possible. Violent gusts of wind assailed the trailer, making it swing on its suspensions. He had never driven in similar weather conditions. He was dealing with a freak storm that reduced visibility almost to zero. The wind’s cries were like the howls of a dying beast, and very soon in the overwhelming yellow clouds Ermes noticed some dark shapes outlined beside the windows, in front of the windshield.

  Disembodied shadows. Twisted hands that stretched towards him in an attitude of supplication. He tried to ignore them. And he decided to turn on the CB radio, tuned to channel five.

  ‘Is . . . is anyone listening? Over,’ he whispered into the receiver. He hardly recognized the sound of his own voice, a gritty rasp. ‘This is Ermes, is anyone there?’

  The radio crackled, a hiccup of static discharge and chopped-

  ­up syllables.

  ‘If . . . if there’s someone there, listen, I think I’m lost. There’s no one on the road and I’ve ended up in the middle of this storm that came out of nowhere and . . .’ Ermes swallowed saliva. He didn’t like the cracking in his voice. The tears at the corners of his eyes. He was about to give in to panic, to start crying and shouting like a child who has lost his mother in the supermarket. He pulled himself together. ‘If there’s someone there, respond please. I don’t know where I am. Over.’

  And finally someone spoke. A friendly, familiar voice. And just because it was so familiar, it was frightening.

  ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Si-­Simone?’

  It was his son. The words were faint, barely audible, coming from an unfathomable distance, but without a doubt from Simone’s vocal chords.

  ‘Yes, Daddy. When are you coming home, Daddy? I miss you.’

  Ermes Lenzi gave in to the irrational. He tried to calm the sobs that threatened to shake his chest. ‘Simo, Daddy’s coming soon, all right? Daddy’s coming soon and he’ll take you to the movies, okay? Daddy’s coming as quickly as he can.’

  The realization that he was lying came over him. The terrible certainty that he would never see his child again.

  ‘Mommy and I are waiting for you,’ Simone crackled through the receiver, and now the voice was his and yet not his. Altered by a liquid gurgling, more like the sound of a flooded engine than a human voice. ‘Mommy and I are waiting for you at home. In Uironda. Come.’

  ‘I’m coming. I’m on my way. Daddy’s coming, Simo.’

  On the other end, silence.

  Ermes Lenzi put his foot down on the gas pedal, his face disfigured by a mad grin.

  ‘There’s no escape from the road, the black whirlpools that swallow tar, take the junction, reach Uiro
nda, become part of this realm!’ he began to murmur.

  He continued thus until, after an interminable while, he found himself outside the storm once more, greeted by a night without stars, black and cold like damnation.

  A viaduct towards nothing, a strip of tar hurled towards a ghostly horizon. A one-­way asphalt road with no guardrails, suspended over the Abyss, on a dark blanket without reflections. This is what Ermes’ reality was reduced to. Everywhere he looked there was only impenetrable blackness. The Scania’s headlights barely lit up the asphalt.

  He proceeded at thirty per hour because if he made a single error, if he ran off the road, he was sure he would be precipitated into an eternal void of no return, like an astronaut lost in outer space. A sci-­fi movie he had seen with Daniela came to mind, a film whose title he didn’t remember. There was a spaceship, a metal colossus that moved thanks to propulsion from an artificially created black hole inside it, and there were nightmares that took form to drive the passengers to madness. How did that film end? Not well. Not well. Ermes told himself that happy endings are for the weak. That in real life happy endings were nothing but an illusion.

  Far off, on the right side of the road, a point of light materialized. Red. Perhaps a streetlight, or the emergence of a planet or a star.

  No.

  Advancing, other crimson flowers blossomed in the darkness, reminding him of a swarm of fireflies on the motionless surface of a lake.

  They seemed to be the lights of a village, of a small town.

  Ermes felt he had almost arrived. He perceived it in a dull vibration in his chest, in his bones. His back pain had disappeared. He kept his eyes fixed on the bright beads that were taking shape on the horizon.

  Uironda?

  Without thinking, he rolled down his window and was struck by a warm wind that smelled of decay. He gasped for breath. He wondered what the all-­pervading darkness outside the cab would have whispered to him if only that darkness could talk. Would it have told him the story of Uironda, its genesis, its why? He hoped soon to have an answer to the swarm of questions buzzing in his skull.

  The street began to climb. At first gently, a false plain that made the old Scania’s motor rev up; then still more, still more, until Ermes had the sensation of proceeding vertically.

  Maybe he was.

  Lost in that ditch of darkness, he wondered if concepts like direction and gravity still had any meaning. The only thing he had to do was follow the road. Go with it, like he had always done.

  The lights were still there. Clearer now, closer. Red lights that cast a scarlet glow on a river or a road.

  He couldn’t wait to reach his destination. He sped up.

  And it was then that a noise worked its way through the awkward grumbling of the motor. It was coming from the rear cabin, the narrow space which for the past few months had been his home. Dull thuds, as if someone were throwing punches at the dividing wall or a violent struggle was being enacted. The blows ceased with a screech, a muffled wheeze, a shout.

  ‘Don’t do it. Ermes, stop, pleeeeeasehelpussssssss!’

  Ermes was about to stop the truck when the headlights illuminated a road sign, the first he’d seen since he had emerged from the storm.

  WELCOME TO UIRONDA

  A hundred meters further on the street forked to the left. The Scania, as if impelled by an invisible force, took the junction without Ermes’ having to turn the steering wheel. The wheels started to vibrate as the truck tackled a sharp bend overlooking a sea of darkness; for a moment it seemed that the vehicle had tilted forty-­five degrees toward the passenger side, so much that Ermes had to hang on to the wheel with all his strength. Finally, with a jolt, the old Scania stabilized and emerged from the curve spitting smoke in a deafening scream of pistons.

  And it appeared.

  Beyond the windshield.

  Ermes found it before him all of a sudden.

  Glistening, ruthless, dead.

  Uironda.

  The tires whistled on the asphalt, and the truck came to a stop a few hundred meters from the city walls.

  Immense pinkish walls, from which a tepid wind of death blew.

  The trucker got down from the cab, advancing towards the outskirts of the city-­mirage with watery eyes and gaping mouth.

  It wasn’t like Roby, the old trucker, had described it so many years earlier.

  No one who had died on the road, no architecture of sheet metal and cement.

  At least, not for him.

  For him, Uironda was flesh and torment. A colossal error – the final one – born of obsession, of the disintegration of that little he had managed to create in his existence.

  It took him long minutes to be able to embrace and comprehend the vastness and complexity of the vision, to identify the individual parts of it.

  From enormous, heinous acts derive enormous, heinous hells.

  At first he took in the minor details, if you could say that about thresholds and structures that were dozens of meters high: a nostril, a lip like a slimy snail, an ear. Afterwards, stepping back, trying to observe the panorama in its entirety, like an explorer who for the first time finds himself before an immense mountain chain, he had a fleeting view of the whole.

  Buttocks and legs, bellies and ribs, forearms and hands turned into plains, plateaus, hills, mountains. Hairs like alien trees, wrinkles like streets, blood like rivers.

  Everywhere, in the skin, destruction. Bare structures of tormented, lacerated epidermis, torn muscles, disarticulated joints. Immense wounds that had become doorways, gashes made into windows, bluish bruises like the mosaics of archaic, forgotten temples.

  His Uironda.

  Two colossal bodies entwined in a last embrace of blood, disbelief and pain, a frozen anatomical city on the autopsy table of final understanding.

  The bodies of a woman and a child.

  Ermes screamed. That scream did not express fear or remorse. Simply astonishment, as every doubt left him, as he understood and remembered. He distinguished a hand the size of a cathedral raised towards the sky, manicured yellow-­painted nails the size of whales. Pinkish hills of battered breasts, the dark portal of a navel.

  Far off blazed what at first had seemed to him a surreal field of red-­tinted grain. The stems waved in the hot wind, pungent with decay.

  Hair so red that it called to mind a violent sunset.

  The childish mouth half-­closed in a vain attempt to escape the crushing asphyxiation.

  Simone.

  Ermes wandered a long time in the territories of Uironda. He considered the gigantic rosette of a neck without a head, separated from the body in a rage of senseless violence and thirst for vengeance.

  Daniela. Oh, Daniela, I’m sorry.

  The two windows of cerulean blue eyes in a face as large as Notre Dame.

  He slipped into each of the city’s orifices, under teeth archways and eyebrow columns; he passed through aisles of mucous membranes and caverns encrusted with earwax, his feet making squishy sounds in the ever-­present crimson puddles.

  He smelled the wounds and the cuts, where the knife had performed the martyrdom that no father and husband should ever carry out, he passed his trembling hands over the unusable tubes of the severed veins, stared crying at the buttresses of the vagina surmounted by the unusable altar of the clitoris. He heard the death rattle of nerve endings beyond repair.

  When he was too tired to go on, Ermes Lenzi lay down under the shadow cast by Daniela’s severed head, on a mattress of hair half-­covered in brain matter, contemplating the dark sky that was lit up by the blood of Uironda.

  He lit the last remaining Camel. It smelled of smog and bodily fluids.

  Simone’s glassy eyes, immense like only a child’s can be, studied him accusingly from the western extremity of the city-­mirage that had revealed the truth to him.
/>   My God, what did you do? My God my God my God . . .

  His back sent him a lash of perverse pain.

  The same pain experienced when he had crashed down on the rocks a few seconds after having jumped off the viaduct.

  The rotten wind ceased to blow.

  The bloody fluorescence of Uironda dimmed like embers from a forgotten bonfire.

  Not much time passed before Ermes Lenzi plunged into a dreamless sleep, the last Camel still clenched between his fingers.

  And as his eyelids closed, while the motionless Uironda embraced him like an authoritarian and terrible mother, the trucker knew that the city, with its load of hells and remorse, would be there waiting for him when he awoke.

  Glistening, ruthless, dead.

  For eternity.

  Translated from the Italian by James D. Jenkins

  Pilar Pedraza

  Mater Tenebrarum

  When we asked horror fans from Spain which Spanish writers should be included in an anthology of the world’s best horror stories, one name came up again and again: Pilar Pedraza. Pedraza (b. 1951) is a film professor at the University of Valencia, who over the past 35 years has also produced an impressive oeuvre of fiction, including both novels and short stories. Curiously, although Pedraza is well known to horror readers in her own country, where she frequently features in anthologies, and though there exists a book-­length study in English of her work, Kay Pritchett’s Dark Assemblages: Pilar Pedraza and the Gothic Story of Development (2015), none of the author’s work has previously appeared in an English translation. ‘Mater Tenebrarum’ (the title is Latin for ‘Mother of Darkness’) is probably Pedraza’s best-­known story; like much of her work it is a very Gothic tale, peopled with horror fiction mainstays like witches and vampires, and featuring her trademark blend of horror and macabre humor.

  The gravedigger Bastián emerged from the nightmare that had tormented him during the few hours of sleep he managed to get after his drinking binge the night before and opened his eyes to the light of an unpleasant day. His mouth was thick. A burning sourness rose from his belly to his throat. The efforts he made to belch brought on a fit of coughing. Remembering the work he had left not even half done, he muttered some blasphemies that didn’t give him the slightest relief. He was on the verge of yielding to the temptation to roll over and go back to sleep, but one of the voices in his head told him that he had to finish digging the grave if he didn’t want the people from the day’s first burial to arrive and find no hole for their deceased. The local council was so poor that he couldn’t afford an assistant to help with the hardest work, although sometimes the coal merchant’s son, the red-­headed Candido, who had devils in him, would lend him a hand in exchange for some tobacco.