The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories

by James D. Jenkins

  The ‘doomed love’ hypothesis was gaining ground at the tense household lunches. A blond, pale young English girl from Brighton. The melancholy of first love, the sadness of long distance, the apathy with which youths of his age usually regard everything unconnected to the object of their passion. But that was at first. When Carlos was merely sullen and aloof, being startled by any question whatsoever, diverting his eyes, refusing little Marta’s cuddles. Maybe she should have acted decisively then. But now Carlos had just said, ‘Come in. It’s open,’ and, plucking up her courage, she had no alternative but to push open the door.

  At first she couldn’t discern anything but a suffocating heat and a labored, plaintive breathing. After a while she was able to distinguish between the shadows: Carlos was seated at the foot of the bed and the only glimmers of light that had been able to penetrate his fortress seemed to be concentrated in his eyes. Or were they his eyes? Julia opened one of the window shutters slightly and gave a relieved sigh. Yes, that despondent boy, hidden behind impregnable sunglasses, his forehead sprinkled with gleaming droplets of sweat, was her brother. Except that she now found his paleness too alarming, his attitude too inexplicable, to go on justifying him in the eyes of the family.

  ‘They’re going to call a doctor,’ she said.

  Carlos was unfazed. He went on for several minutes with his head bent toward the floor, knocking his knees together, playing with his fingers as if he were performing a children’s song on the keyboard of a nonexistent piano.

  ‘They want to force you to eat . . . to leave this filthy room for good.’

  Julia thought her brother shuddered. ‘This room,’ she thought, ‘what is it that’s making him stay in this room so long?’ She looked around and was surprised that it was not as untidy as she might have expected. Carlos, from the bed, was breathing heavily. ‘He’s going to speak,’ she told herself, and, suffocated by the stifling atmosphere, she timidly pushed open one of the shutters and half opened the window.

  ‘Julia,’ she heard, ‘I know you’re not going to understand anything of what I might tell you. But I have to talk with someone.’

  A glint of pride lit up her eyes. As in times past, Carlos was going to make her a party to his secrets, turn her into his most faithful ally, ask her for help that she would rush to give him. Now she understood that she had acted rightly in standing guard beside that shadowy room, acting like a ridiculous amateur spy, enduring silences, measuring the dimensions of the lonely, scorching hot rooftop over and over again. Because Carlos had said: ‘I have to talk with someone . . .’ And she was there, beside the half-­opened window, ready to attentively take note of everything he might decide to confide to her, not daring to interrupt, not caring that he spoke in a low voice, difficult to make out, as if he feared to hear his own lips utter the secret reason for his unease. ‘It all comes down to a question of . . .’ Julia could not make out the final word muttered in a whisper, but she preferred not to interrupt. She took a crumpled cigarette from her pocket and offered it to her brother. Carlos, without looking up, refused it.

  ‘It all started in Brighton, on a day like so many others,’ he continued. ‘I lay down in bed, closed the window to forget about the rain, and I slept. That was in Brighton . . . Did I already say that?’

  Julia assented by clearing her throat.

  ‘I dreamt that I had passed my exams with flying colors, that they loaded me down with diplomas and medals, that all of a sudden I wanted to be here with all of you and, without thinking twice, decided to show up unannounced. Then I got on a train, an incredibly long and narrow train, and arrived here almost without realizing it. “It’s a dream,” I told myself and, extremely pleased, I did everything possible not to wake up. I got off the train and set off towards the house, singing as I went. It was the early hours of the morning and the streets were deserted. Suddenly I realized that I had forgotten my suitcase in the compartment, the gifts I had bought for you all, the diplomas and medals, and I had to return to the station before the train left again for Brighton. “It’s a dream,” I told myself again. “Imagine that I’ve sent the baggage by mail. Let’s not waste time. Worst case scenario, the plot will thicken later.” And I stop in front of the house.’

  Julia had to make an effort not to cut in. These things happened to her too and she had never considered them the least bit important. Since she was little she had been able to control some of her dreams, to know suddenly in the middle of the worst nightmare that she, and only she, was in absolute control of this magical series of images and that just by deciding to, she could get rid of certain characters, summon others, or speed up the pace of what was happening. It wasn’t always successful – for that she had to be conscious of ownership over the dream – and, what’s more, she didn’t find it especially fun. She preferred to let herself get involved in the strange stories as if they were really happening and she were simply the protagonist, but not the owner, of those unpredictable adventures. One time her sister Marta, despite her young age, told her something similar. ‘Today in my dream I was in charge,’ she had said. And now she suddenly remembered certain conversations on the subject with her classmates and she even thought she had read something similar in the memoirs of a baroness or countess that a friend had lent her. She lit the rumpled cigarette she was still holding in her hand, inhaled a mouthful of smoke and felt something rough and hot that burned her throat. When she heard her own cough, she realized that the most absolute silence reigned in the room and that it must have already been a while since Carlos had stopped speaking and she had given herself up to stupid fantasies.

  ‘Go on, please,’ she said finally.

  Carlos, after hesitating, proceeded:

  ‘It was the house, the house where we are now, you and I, the house where we’ve spent all our summers since we were born. And yet there was something very strange about it. Something tremendously disagreeable and distressing that at first I couldn’t put my finger on. Because it was exactly this house, except that by a strange gift or punishment I could see it from an unusual visual angle. I awoke sweating and shaken and tried to calm myself by remembering that it had only been a dream.’

  Carlos covered his face with his hands and stifled a groan. His sister thought he mumbled an unnecessary ‘until coming here’ and she relived, with a sense of disappointment, the transformation she had witnessed days earlier at the garden gate. ‘So that’s what it was,’ she was going to say, ‘just that.’ But she didn’t say a word this time either. Carlos had gotten to his feet.

  ‘It’s an angle,’ he continued. ‘A strange angle which, for all the horror it evokes in me, is nonetheless real . . . And the worst part is there’s no escape. I know that for the rest of my life I’ll never be able to free myself from it.’

  The final sobs made her look away towards the rooftop. Suddenly it made her uncomfortable to be there, not understanding much of what she was hearing, feeling definitely alarmed in the face of the breakdown of someone she had always believed to be so strong, healthy, and enviable. Maybe her parents were right and Carlos’s problems couldn’t be solved by kindness or by listening to his secrets. He needed a doctor. And her job was going to involve something as simple as getting out of that suffocating bedroom as soon as possible and joining in the rest of the family’s worry. ‘Well,’ she said decisively, ‘I had promised to bring Marta to the movies . . .’ But then she noticed that her facial expression belied her feigned calmness. In Carlos’s sunglasses she saw her own face reflected twice. Two heads with disheveled hair and very frightened, wide-­open eyes. That must be how he was seeing her: a girl caught in an ogre’s den, inventing excuses to quietly leave the room, awaiting the moment she could cross the threshold, take a deep breath, and take off running downstairs. And now, moreover, Carlos, from the other side of the dark lenses, seemed to have become spellbound scrutinizing her, and she felt below those two heads with disheveled hair and frightened eyes two p
airs of legs that were beginning to tremble too much for her to be able to go on talking about Marta or the movies, as if this were just an ordinary afternoon when Marta or the vague promise of taking her to the movies mattered. The shadow cast by a windblown sheet deprived her of the sight of her brother for a few moments. When the light returned again, Julia noticed that Carlos had approached even closer. He held the glasses in one hand; his eyelids were swollen and he had a delirious expression. ‘It’s amazing,’ he said in a faint voice. ‘You, Julia, I can still look at you.’ And again that preference, that uniqueness that he accorded her for the second time that afternoon put an end to her intentions with an unbelievable speed. ‘He’s in love,’ she said during dinner, and without appetite she ate a plate of tasteless vegetables that she forgot to salt and season.

  It was not long before she realized she had acted stupidly. That night and those that followed the first visit to the attic. When she set herself up as go-­between between her brother and the world, when she took charge of making his untouched plates disappear from his bedroom; when, like the loyal ally she had always been, she revealed to Carlos the doctor’s diagnosis – acute depression – and the family’s decision to hospitalize him in a rest home. But now it was too late to go back. Carlos received the news of his imminent hospitalization with a surprisingly relaxed attitude. He put on his sunglasses – those impenetrable glasses he only dared to remove in her presence – declared his desire to leave the attic, walked arm in arm with Julia through some of the rooms of the house, greeted the family, answered their questions with reassuring phrases. Yes, he was fine, much better, the worst was past now, there was no need for them to worry. He locked himself for several minutes in his parents’ bathroom. Julia, through the door, heard the click-­clack of the metal cabinet, the crackling of paper, the dripping of eau de cologne. When he emerged, she found him neat and well-groomed, and he seemed much more tranquil and serene. She accompanied him to his bedroom, helped him get into bed and went down to the dining room.

  It was somewhat later when Julia suddenly felt frightened. She remembered the attic door’s lock, torn off by her father several days ago, her mother’s concern, the doctor’s meaningful gesture as he declared himself powerless against the pains of the soul, the click-­clack of the metal cabinet . . . A white, tidy cabinet in which it had never occurred to her to nose around, the medicine chest, her mother’s pride, no one else could gather such a quantity of medicines for any situation in such a small space. She ascended the stairs two at a time, panting like a greyhound, terrified at the possibility of giving a name to what was unnameable. Arriving at the bedroom, she pushed open the door, opened the shutters and rushed to the bed. Carlos was sleeping peacefully, without his inseparable sunglasses, unmindful of anxieties and torments. Neither the torrents of sun from the rooftop filtering in through the window, nor Julia’s efforts to wake him, got him to move a muscle. She surprised herself by wailing, yelling, leaning over the staircase and calling the names of the family. Afterwards everything happened unbelievably quickly. Carlos’s breathing was becoming weak, almost imperceptible, his face recovered at moments the quiet and tranquil beauty of other times, his mouth sketched a beatific and peaceful half-­smile. The evidence could now no longer be denied: Carlos was sleeping for the first time since he returned from Brighton, that second of September, the date she had colored red on her calendar.

  She didn’t have time to regret her stupid behavior, nor to wish with all her strength that time could turn backwards, that it could still be August and she would be sitting on the rooftop eaves beside a pile of notebooks awaiting the arrival of her brother. But she closed her eyes and tried to convince herself that she was still little, a girl who during the day played with dolls and collected stickers and who, sometimes, at night, suffered terrible nightmares. ‘I am the master of the dream,’ she told herself. ‘It’s only a dream.’ But when she opened her eyes she didn’t feel capable of going on with the deception. That terrible nightmare wasn’t a dream, nor did she possess any power to rewind images, alter situations, or even make that handsome and peaceful face regain the anguish of illness. Again the shadow of a windblown sheet took possession of the room for some moments. Julia turned her gaze again toward her brother. For the first time in her life she understood what death was. Inexplicable, incomprehensible, hidden behind an appearance of feigned rest. She saw Death, its horror and destruction, its putrefaction and abyss. Because it was no longer Carlos who was lying in the bed, but Death, the great thief, crudely disguised in another’s features, roaring with laughter between those red, swollen eyelids, revealing to all the deception of life, proclaiming her dark kingdom, her capricious will, her cruel and unshake­able designs. Julia rubbed her eyes and looked at her father. It was her father. That man seated at the head of the bed was her father. But there was something immensely disagreeable in his features. As if a skull had been made up with globs of wax, powdered and colored with theater makeup. A clown, she thought, a clown of the worst type . . . She grabbed her mother’s arm, and a sudden repulsion forced her to move away. Why was her skin suddenly so pale, so slimy to the touch? She ran out to the rooftop and leaned on the balustrade.

  ‘The angle,’ she groaned. ‘My God . . . I’ve discovered the angle!’

  And it was then that she noticed Marta was beside her, with one of her dolls in her arms and a nibbled candy between her fingers. Marta went on being a lovely child. ‘You, Marta,’ she thought, ‘I can still look at you.’ And although the phrase struck her brain with another voice, with another intonation, with the memory of a loved one she would never again see alive, it was not that which jolted her the most, nor which made her cast herself on the ground and beat the tiles with her fists. She had seen Marta, Marta’s expectant gaze, and in the depths of her dark eyes the sudden understanding that something was happening to Julia.

  Translated from the Spanish by James D. Jenkins

  Flavius Ardelean

  Down, in Their World

  Bram Stoker’s choice of Romania as the setting of Dracula was not accidental. The country has a rich folkloric tradition, full of terrifying creatures and legends. Yet Romanian horror fiction is a relatively modern phenomenon. Its origins can probably be traced to the ‘fantastic tales’ of writers like Mircea Eliade, author of the literary vampire novel Domnişoara Christina [Miss Christina] (1936), and its contemporary practitioners include Marian Coman, some of whose work has appeared in English, and Oliviu Crâznic, credited with the first modern Gothic novel in Romanian. But perhaps the most significant is Flavius Ardelean (b. 1985), who has published three collections of macabre fiction, some of which might be likened to Robert Aickman’s strange stories. The following tale, which appeared in Acluofobia (2013), is set among the peasants of rural Transylvania. For many in that region, even today, the boundary between the natural and supernatural worlds is not clear-­cut. Encounters with fairies or ghosts are not seen as out of the ordinary, and the notion of ‘bad places’ where one mustn’t venture is firmly ingrained. Transylvania’s aura of mystery and the supernatural pervades this story, in which several legendary creatures appear, including the ielele (fairies), ştima (spirit of the waters), and the vâlva, an entity that inhabits mines and comes in two varieties – good ones who lead you to buried treasure and evil ones who punish you for removing it. To complete the glossary of terms used in the story, ţuică is a potent home-­brewed brandy, the equivalent of Romanian moonshine, and mămăligă is a dish made of corn meal, not unlike Italian polenta.

  He had had a foreboding, but he had drowned it in a gram of tobacco and shot of ţuică. For courage.

  The sun had not yet come out from behind the mountains when the four men got their cart out on the street and bridled the horse in whispers, each of them chewing a cigarette stump between his teeth – four fireflies floating between the houses. They did not talk to one another, they knew it from their fathers and their fathers and their fathers: wh
en they set out before dawn they did not speak because sharp are the claws that guard the treasures of the depths, fiery are the eyes of the ştima, cursed is the voice of the fairies. So they were silent and took puffs from their cigarettes, three in the cart and one pulling the harness to the left and to the right, leaving the village and setting out towards the forests, towards the black chaos from which they would take the scrap iron that would allow them to live for another month.

  They were kinsfolk – brothers, cousins. Stelică, the youngest, wasn’t responsible for raising any children, as the others were, but it didn’t matter, money is money, his wife wakes up tomorrow or the next day knocked up and what then? What then? he thought and put out the unfiltered cigarette against the wood of the cart before throwing it into the surrounding darkness. He took out a chunk of mămăligă, broke some off and passed the rest on. The others, fumbling in the darkness for the mămăligă, threw their butts away as well and spit several times to clear the bits of tobacco off their tongues. Then silence (only the horse’s hooves and the men’s munching). From time to time, Nicu lit the lantern and illuminated around them and only then could the men look into one another’s eyes and their looks all masked the same thought: the fire in the stove last night, just a few hours earlier, when Stere awoke from a nap and secretly told them that he had dreamed about his grandma telling them not to go there if their lives were dear to them, that Piele would get hold of them, and their women would never see them again . . . Insufferable women! the men thought, swallowing their mămăligă. They had no choice. Where would they get money? Eh? Where would they get money? The women usually kept quiet and didn’t gather in the doorways when they left to steal the old iron, but just knelt down before the icons throughout the house and whispered prayers. But this time they had not said anything to the women. They had no business knowing that they were headed toward the Turk’s Mouth, that accursed place, maligned by many, but whose riches were sought after by even more. But fear is fear, as grandfather Tache, dead now these forty years, used to say, and each of them had a morsel of fear in his pocket when he set off.