The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories

by James D. Jenkins

  Vili talked less and less; he would instead broadcast a sort of feeling, like a radio station. I’m ready, he broadcast to me, I’m ready to die. He had suffered enough; his eyes couldn’t see anything but red, every single breath was an agony. He asked me both verbally and non­verbally to end all of this.

  Naturally, I resisted for a long time. Though I killed off many other plush toys just so Vili could live, killing Vili was a different matter. On the other hand I also knew that Vili had to die. My mother’s prophecy had to be fulfilled, otherwise all this suffering would have been in vain.

  Meanwhile, the girl’s plush toy died as well – she found him in the middle of her room upon returning from school. The filling was still pouring out of his emaciated body, his hands stretched forward as if he was still trying to reach something. The girl read up on the topic, and she found that the only way to prevent our plush toys from resurrecting was to bury them together with an onion – at least that’s how I understood it at that time.

  She acted according to her theory: she placed the corpse into a resealable plastic bag and poured some onion around it. The plush toy didn’t return. We all felt relieved by learning that, except for our friend with the glasses, since Nyinyi was still haunting around his house. Several dogs and cats went missing, and one night someone tried to break into the apartment through one of the ground floor windows. The policemen who arrived on the scene found only cotton wool.

  Vili was incessantly begging to die, night after night and morning after morning, hardly allowing me a moment of rest. At the same time a new theory started to circulate among my friends, prompted by the increasingly aggressive activity of Nyinyi – that our plush toys crave death because it breaks the bond between them and humans so they don’t have to serve us children anymore, and they can roam the world equipped with the power of the grave, equipped with the power of the Black Emperor. We deduced that there must be more plush toys like Nyinyi out there, they might be gathering in the canals and at the bottom of forgotten cardboard boxes, scheming viciously, planning their revenge on us who created them, gave them voice and life, only to eventually take it away from them.

  Vili’s odor became unbearable, and he couldn’t articulate his words anymore. His voice was like a slightly open door through which the coldness of the grave could reach me. I couldn’t stand watching him suffer anymore, and I couldn’t bear my own exhaustion either.

  I used the knife and the scissors. I feel ashamed recalling this – I stood over him for hours with the blades in my hand and I cried. My hands shook; whatever I had done before didn’t matter now, only this one act of murder. Vili begged me incessantly to do it, he tried to catch my eyes with his red, blind ones. At last I did it, I forced myself to cut him open as meticulously as I did with the other toys. After the first cut, for a brief moment, he was his old self again, the old Vili. I chose the harder path, and this made the ensuing hours somewhat easier; the silence in my head, the complete absence of Vili. I howled loudly over Vili’s body until my mother found me upon her return from the shop. She caressed my head while I hugged her legs, seeking safety and compassion. She soothed me, and then she said that one sentence, which I think made me hate her forever.

  Don’t cry, it was just a plush toy.

  My mother explained to me that you have to make the cadaver resemble its living counterpart as best as you can – you can’t bury a person with their insides and limbs scattered all over in the coffin. We reassembled Vili’s body, pushing back as much stuffing as possible, stapling his skin together so he would resemble his old self again. He didn’t – his body was the most horrible sight; his face was a deformity, his friendly smile now a cut-­up grin of insanity. We placed the body in a plastic bag. I demanded that we put some onion into the bag as well – my mother gave in, chopped a bit of red onion and sprinkled it beside Vili. Then we buried the bag in the back yard – I also placed a small cross on the grave. My mother offered me sweets again, then ordered me to tidy my room.

  The next morning, I found the cross fallen over, and the grave disturbed, as if the earth had been moved from below. The school bag dropped from my hands because I knew that Vili had returned.

  Of course, I had alternative theories as well. It could have been an animal that dug up the body, or even a person, a poor child who could only afford dead toys. Perhaps it was Nyinyi who had come for Vili so as to take his distorted body and present it at a gathering of the undead: Look, this is what mankind does to us.

  The girl explained to me how it happened, not then, but years later, as an adult.

  We met in a shopping center. My cart contained only two bottles of vodka and a six-pack of beer. She was the one to notice me and called my name in a tone which implied she was happy to see me, as if I was a good old friend, a link to a carefree period of the past. When she called my name I trembled as if she had struck me, and I felt ashamed for not recalling hers. I smiled at her as best I could to camouflage my embarrassment. The girl had become a mother, her daughter standing by the basket with her head down and a plush toy in her hands – Vili. My throat went dry when I saw Vili; of course I knew it was not my Vili, just another, similar plush toy.

  I saw a tiny lesion on the neck of the toy. The girl, who was now a mother, was smiling at me. It’s like yours was, she said and leaned closer to me so she could whisper in my ear. Sadly, she whispered, and I could smell chamomile on her breath, sadly, she got infected with some kind of disease. This plush toy is dying, and my daughter has to accept it.

  I dropped the basket, the bottles of vodka smashed against each other, pouring their contents all over the floor, and I felt the urge to throw myself to the ground and lick it all up. I know why yours came back, I figured it out, she continued and I wanted to run but my body didn’t obey. I listened carefully to what she had to say, and we agreed to have coffee or tea some time, but we didn’t exchange numbers, and I vomited in the restroom for hours until the security guards kicked the door in.

  I should have used garlic, whereas my mother used onions, which didn’t possess any spiritual or symbolic power. Onions are unfit for keeping the dead on the other side, apparently.

  I was not aware of this as a child. I was weary and exhausted after finding the disturbed grave. I felt sick, and for a while I had a serious wish to die and have this whole thing over with.

  It only struck me at night that Vili might not return in the shape I remembered him. That he might resemble Nyinyi – and I started to be scared. For he swore to come back for me, didn’t he? Didn’t he plan to take revenge on the one who gave him life and death? I was certain then that he would return for me to drag me with him into the hole I dug for him in the back yard with my bare two hands.

  I was not wrong.

  The house went dark at midnight – the lights went out on the street as well. Power outage. Darkness surrounded me like thick cotton wool. I was paralyzed. My mother was asleep, my father on a business trip. I started to whimper, but I didn’t feel ashamed even back then, for this was the whimper of an animal in the mouth of the predator.

  I heard a noise from downstairs, then the voice of something heading up the stairs. The house was filled with the smell of the grave. Some hours earlier I had considered death to be a momentary blessing, but now I felt that death was not the end – something much worse was waiting, and it was coming for me.

  I could hear Vili’s voice again, louder and louder as he approached.

  Only it was not Vili anymore; wherever he was after I’d killed him and before he returned, he brought a piece of that place with him. His voice was the voice of death, like the munching of a thousand worms, it meant nothing but itself, emptiness – but to my terror, beyond the sound of maggots and decay it was the voice of my grandmother.

  Hail the Black Prince! Vili said. Hail the Black Emperor! he shouted, and showed me what the Black Prince was, what the Black Emperors were, for it was impossible to
express their nature with words, only with dreams and images; and I fell on my knees and prayed to them, the Black Lords. I was ready to worship anything just to prevent Vili from taking me to the bottom of the grave, as fodder to the Lords, as fodder to my grandmother who, at this time, I didn’t even know was dead.

  By then, I could hear Vili dragging himself towards my door. He smelled of rot and onion, and he tried to speak with a real voice, but whatever he meant to say, death and the earth he was choking on impeded him from doing so. He only growled quietly.

  He stopped in front of my room; the odor of death became insupportable. I was struck by the waves of genuine hate from under the doorstep. I knew that Vili would take me to where he had come from, and something changed in me.

  I’ll give you anything, just let me live, I whispered because I couldn’t even speak, you can take anything, you can take anyone, anyone but me! Please!

  I wasn’t taking the harder path then. Vili wouldn’t have approved were he alive. Alas, he was not.

  Vili waited a few seconds, then he went down the hallway, and I crawled under my bed and trembled until the morning came. I thought I wouldn’t sleep, but exhaustion got the better of me.

  When I woke up, in the daylight I thought it had only been a bad dream. Actually, nothing had happened. According to my therapist, everything I experienced or perceived as an experience that night was completely normal, a child’s mind struggling with the inconceivable. In the morning, I thought I would go to school as usual, but I wouldn’t talk to my friends anymore. I would leave all this plush toy stuff behind, after all it was indeed time for me to grow up. I crept out from under the bed and went to the kitchen to have breakfast.

  She was drinking chamomile tea, I could already smell it from afar. My mother was standing by the counter with a teacup in front of her. I stepped into the kitchen and greeted her, but she didn’t reply. The odd smile on her face, some sort of an idiotic grin, scared me to death. She gazed at one spot, senseless and emotionless, and I felt a knot forming in my throat. I called for her, but she didn’t react. Her hand rested on the mug, but she wouldn’t say a word, wouldn’t move, and I got furious, since everything was her fault, everything; that I was there, that I was alive, that she killed my toy, killed my childhood, and now she was not even able to say Good morning! Something snapped inside me, and I did the unimaginable. I stepped up to her and shook her as if I was shaking a tree to make its crop fall down.

  My mother’s teeth fell out of her mouth, her glass eyes dropped and clattered on the counter. Her skin opened up because there was no sewing to hold her together, her hair fell off her head.

  Her body unraveled, and there was nothing left in my hands but a handful of cotton wool.

  Translated from the Hungarian by Luca Karafiáth

  Cristina Fernández Cubas

  The Angle of Horror

  Cristina Fernández Cubas (b. 1945) has been called one of the most important Spanish writers to emerge since the end of the Franco dictatorship and has been credited with inaugurating ‘a renaissance in the short story genre in Spain’. She is the author of novels, short stories, drama, memoirs and biography, and in 2016 won the National Literature Prize for Narrative and the Premio de la Crítica Española for her collection Nona’s Room. Reviewing that book for The New York Times, critic Terrence Rafferty wrote that Cubas is ‘most interested in the ambiguities and periodic disturbances that plague the imagination, and reports on them with the appropriate sense of awe, even of dread. In the territory of the imagination, the threat of madness is never too far away, a dark cloud hovering’, a judgment equally applicable to the following story. ‘The Angle of Horror’, first published in 1996, is by now considered a classic of Spanish horror fiction and is often reprinted in Spanish-­language anthologies, although mysteriously it has never previously appeared in English.

  Now, when she knocked on the door for the third time, looked through the keyhole without seeing anything, or paced angrily along the rooftop terrace, Julia realized she should have acted days ago, the very moment she discovered that her brother was hiding a secret, before the family took matters into their own hands and built up a fence of interrogations and reprimands. Because Carlos was still there. Locked in a dark room, feigning a slight indisposition, abandoning the solitude of the attic only to eat, always reluctantly, hidden behind opaque sunglasses, taking refuge in an unusual and exasperating silence. ‘He’s in love,’ their mother had said. But Julia knew that his strange attitude had nothing to do with the vicissitudes of love or disappointment. That’s why she had decided to stand guard on the top floor, next to the bedroom door, scrutinizing the slightest sign of movement through the keyhole, waiting for the summer heat to force him to open the window that looked out on the rooftop. A long and narrow window, through which she would leap in a single bound, like a pursued cat or the shadow of one of the sheets drying in the sun, an appearance so rapid and unexpected that Carlos, overcome by surprise, would have no other choice but to speak, at least to ask her, ‘Who gave you permission to burst in like that?’ Or else: ‘Get lost! Don’t you see I’m busy?’ And she would see. Would finally see what her brother’s mysterious activities consisted of, would understand his extreme paleness and would rush to offer him her help. But she had been keeping a close watch for over two hours and was starting to feel ridiculous and humiliated. She abandoned her lookout post by the door, went out onto the rooftop and once again counted, as she had done so many times over the course of the afternoon, the defective and broken tiles, the plastic clothespins and the wooden ones, the exact number of steps that separated her from the long, narrow window. She knocked on the window glass and heard herself say in a tired voice: ‘It’s me, Julia.’ Really she should have said, ‘It’s still me, Julia.’ But what did it matter now? This time, however, she pricked up her ears. She thought she heard a distant groan, the creaking of the bed’s rusty springs, some shuffling steps, a metallic sound, again a creak, and a clear and unexpected: ‘Come in. It’s open.’ And at that moment Julia felt a shudder very similar to the strange tremor that ran through her body days earlier, when she realized, suddenly, that something was happening to her brother.

  It had already been a couple of weeks since Carlos had returned from his first study trip. The second of September, the date she had colored in red on the calendar in her bedroom and which now appeared increasingly remote and impossible. She remembered him at the foot of the stairs of the British Airlines jumbo jet, waving his arm, and she saw herself jumping enthusiastically on the airport terrace, amazed that at eighteen he could still have grown even taller, returning his kisses and greetings, pushing her way through the crowd to welcome him in the lobby. Carlos had returned. A little thinner, quite a bit taller, and noticeably pale. But Julia found him even more handsome than when he left and paid no attention to her mother’s comments about the poor English food or the unmatched excellence of the Mediterranean climate. Nor, when they’d gotten in the car and her brother seemed happy at the prospect of enjoying a few weeks in the beach house and their father pestered him with innocent questions about the little blond girls of Brighton, did Julia laugh at the family’s wisecracks. She was too excited, and her head was buzzing with plans and projects. The following day, when her parents stopped overwhelming him with questions, she and Carlos would recount the summer’s events to each other in secret, on the roof like always, their swinging legs hanging over the eaves, just like when they were little and Carlos used to teach her how to draw and she used to show him her sticker collection. When they got to the garden, Marta came out to meet them, giving little jumps, and Julia marveled a second time at how much her brother had grown. ‘At eighteen,’ she thought, ‘how absurd!’ But she didn’t say a word.

  Carlos had remained lost in thought, contemplating the house’s exterior as though he were seeing it for the first time. He held his head tilted toward the right, his brow furrowed, his lips contracted i
n a strange grimace that Julia could not interpret. He remained motionless for a few moments, looking toward the housefront with the eyes of one who is hypnotized, oblivious to the movements of the family, the hustle and bustle of suitcases, the proximity of Julia herself. Afterwards, without hardly changing his position, he leaned his head on his left shoulder, his eyes reflected astonishment, the strange grimace of his mouth gave way to an unequivocal expression of fatigue and depression, he ran his hand along his forehead and, concentrating his gaze on the ground, he dejectedly crossed the paved garden path.

  During dinner, their father continued to take an interest in his conquests, and their mother went on worrying about his bad complexion. Marta told a couple of jokes that Carlos received with a smile. He seemed tired and sleepy. The journey, perhaps. He kissed his family goodnight and retired to bed.

  The following day Julia awoke very early, reviewed the list of reading recommendations Carlos had given her when he left, gathered up the notebooks in which she had jotted down her impressions, and climbed up to the roof. After a while, tired of waiting, she jumped down to the rooftop terrace. Her brother’s window was half closed but it didn’t appear there was anyone inside the room. She leaned out over the balustrade and looked towards the garden.

  Carlos was there, in the same position as the night before, contemplating the house with a mixture of astonishment and dismay, leaning his head first to the right, then to the left, fixing his gaze on the ground and dejectedly crossing the paved path that separated him from the house. It was then that Julia understood, all of a sudden, that something was happening to her brother.