The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories

by James D. Jenkins

  The thing that had come out of Anne’s mouth shifted, its cries almost lost in the sounds from outside. It looked strange in the gaslight, a tiny newborn chick, smaller than usual, midnight black from beak to claw. It was slick with bile and blood and saliva. Anne was slumped in pain beside it, her mouth opening and closing, no words coming out. I looked at the chick. Its eyes were held closed by a thin keloid that made them look as if they were sewn shut with irregular dark thread. It mewled angrily at me, an un-­chick sound, surprisingly loud, coming from such a diminutive creature. It was vile and disgusting, but it was also what was keeping my friend from dying.

  Like I said, there are many choices I could have made. I could have not answered the letter, or come to see Anne, or stayed for so long, but I did, even though I knew what it would eventually lead to, because I could not bear to see my friend suffer.

  I held out a hand. The chick hopped onto it. It was half the size of my palm, and it stank, its feathers slick from Anne’s insides. I shuddered. I could hear the birds trying to get at it from outside. I could feel my belly rumbling, clamoring for this new source of nourishment. The birds stabbed their beaks into the thatched roof and bamboo walls, but the house held. I tried not to let their cries distract me. I closed my eyes and put the chick in my mouth.

  It slid down my throat effortlessly, leaving behind a not unpleasant aftertaste much like cotton candy. I felt it move inside me, through me, weaving through passageways impossible to define by conventional anatomy, until it settled in the pit of my stomach, a calm, quiet presence. Anne took my hand, weakly.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  I moved towards her and held her, listening as her breathing became softer and more shallow, until her breath disappeared altogether.

  When I leave for the barrio the next day, the birds are gone, and – I realize with a start – I am not hungry anymore.

  José María Latorre

  Snapshots

  We opened this book on a high note and wanted to end it with a bang as well. So, last but certainly not least (indeed, it was the first story we selected for the book), we’re pleased to offer this delightfully macabre tale by José María Latorre (1945-­2014), a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction best known in his native Spain for his film criticism, but who also published a number of fine horror tales. This story was previously selected for a 2011 anthology of the best contemporary horror stories from Spain and has also been published in Polish and Italian, but makes its first English appearance here.

  The flash from the photo mechanism hidden in the bowels of the machine dazzled him more than usual when it shot its four successive lightning flashes in his face. Then he seemed to vaguely remember that one of the times he had squinted or frowned, but that didn’t justify the fact that the four photos proffered to him on a still-­wet strip of cheap cardstock, literally vomited from one of the machine’s openings, showed the face of a different man: he did not recognize himself either in the facial features, or the gray hair, or the terrified expression of the person in the photos. Nor did it explain the unpleasant sensation, a mixture of disgust, anxiety, and fear, that he had experienced when he sat down on the stool and rotated it to adjust his tall stature to the height of the black arrow that had been marked beside the instructions for how to use the machine. Nor the strange, revolting odor that had assailed him when he entered the booth and had unsettled him just like, he thought, one is unsettled by the smell of a room opened after its having been closed up for several years, and the peculiar odor of cemeteries in summer. It smelled the way he figured old mausoleums and crypts must smell. An absurd, inexplicable smell since the interior of that instant photo booth was continuously ventilated, for it was insulated only by a small black cloth curtain and because it was not summer, but winter. He almost smiled at thinking that he wasn’t in a cemetery either, or a crypt, or a mausoleum. But it smelled musty, a smell of accumulated dust and decomposing organic matter. And the four photographs the machine had given him after a sort of growling sound were not his. The only possible explanation was that they belonged to the previous user, since in those automatic machines the photos were delayed a certain time in coming out, sometimes several minutes even: it had happened to him once years ago; a defect in the machine, they told him. Maybe the previous user, the owner of that aged, frightened face, had gone off, tired of waiting for photographs he wasn’t receiving and thinking that he would have to contact the name and telephone number indicated on a small metal plaque and demand a refund. There are machines that are faulty and others that are out of order, thought Elias, and this was one of them, which could mean that his photos would not come out or, in the best case scenario, would be delayed several more minutes in emerging. He would wait; he was in no hurry. For a few moments, the situation struck him as funny, thinking about the possibility that because of some defect or malfunction the machine was daily bestowing on some customers the photographs of others.

  The booth was located in the entrance to a street next to the Plaza Mayor, usually well frequented, beside a news­paper and magazine kiosk that at this hour had already closed its shutter, just as the bar across from it was also closed. Hadn’t it closed earlier than usual? It was colder than on the previous nights: that might be why Elias didn’t see anyone else around; cars, yes, the automobiles circulated at almost suicidal speeds, taking advantage of the scant traffic. While he kept his eyes fixed on the slot through which – if all went well – his photos would fall out, expelled from the guts of the machine, Elias thought that he shouldn’t have yielded to the temptation of having his photos taken that night, and specifically in that booth, since in reality he didn’t need them until the following day. He lit a cigarette, nervous, waiting on the sound that would indicate the arrival of the developed photos that were genuinely his, and threw the others on the floor. Ten minutes later he was convinced that the machine really was out of order. His first reaction was to leave; yet he didn’t. He pushed the curtain aside, and, conquering with difficulty his unease at the foul odor, he again performed the same operation as before, beginning with inserting the required coins in the slot. Waiting for the burst of the flash, he was startled at not recognizing himself in the mirror: his eyes were more sunken in their sockets and had bags under them; his hair was whitish and the features he saw reflected were not his. He could feel a tightness in his chest, which always happened when his nerves got the better of him, and he hurriedly left the booth once the four flashes indicated the new photographic operation was underway. His hands trembled; a pair of wrinkled hands with long, yellowish nails. It was colder than before, and, surprisingly, even the cars had stopped traveling through the street, which was now submerged in silence. Nonetheless, in the neighboring Plaza Mayor, the traffic seemed normal, judging from the sound of the vehicles. There could be no doubt that he had been the victim of an optical illusion; the four photographs would drop down shortly, they would be his, he would pick them up and get away from this place, forgetting the disagreeable incident. The anxiety was almost making it difficult to breathe.

  The strip of cardstock came out right away. He went on trembling as he picked it up: the individual in the photograph was not him, but it closely resembled the face he had just seen in the mirror. ‘What a lot of nonsense!’ he said aloud, as if trying to justify himself before an invisible witness. ‘The mirror couldn’t reflect any face but mine. I was the occupant of the booth, and I was also the one looking at myself.’ Yes, he had been the model for the photo, but the man photographed was a stranger. The silence that reigned in the street began to weigh on him; not even the traffic from Plaza Mayor reached his ears. What should he do? Get out of there and look for another mirror somewhere else to verify stupidly that he was still the same? Phone one of his friends to come to the photo booth and be witness to such an abnormal occurrence or else confirm that it was just a hallucination? The street had grown dark; the streetlamps were off and not a single light emerge
d from the houses, as if silence and darkness had conspired to plunge this fragment of the urban landscape into nothingness. He did not even glimpse a weak slit of light coming from a courtyard or a window, nor the flickering of a television in a half-­lit bedroom. Despite the insufficient streetlight, from where Elias was standing the Plaza Mayor seemed a movie set illuminated by the strong spotlights of a film team doing a nighttime shoot. ‘That’s all I needed, to have to deal with a power outage now,’ he thought to calm himself. He could understand a power outage, just as he could understand that he had been using a machine that was out of order, but why were no vehicles passing in the street? And above all, why did the light in the booth continue to glow when everything around it was shrouded in a mantle of darkness?

  A strong gust of cold wind impelled Elias to take shelter in the booth. From within, holding his breath at times because of the unbearable stench, he heard the whistling of the wind as it kicked up such a racket that it seemed it would drag every sort of object along in its path. He closed his eyes to avoid falling into the temptation of looking at his reflection again, but he couldn’t resist the insane attraction the mirror exerted upon him. What he saw horrified him: the man he saw in the mirror was even older than before; his hair had fallen out, his eyes were sunken, scored with red veins and framed in black circles; his wrinkled face had taken on the same tone as the bags under his eyes. Elias looked at his hands: they were more wrinkled; the nails were long and yellowish. Running his fingers across his face, he noticed the rough feel of the withered skin. In the mirror, the elderly stranger repeated his same gestures, like a sad caricature in a distorting carnival mirror. Was there really such a thing as mirror creatures? Meanwhile the wind had intensified, its concert of malignant whistles growing more acute. Elias, paralyzed by fear, remained for a while listening to the onslaught of the gale against the photo booth. Later he peeked out, pushing the little curtain to the side, but the intense cold made him take refuge again within. Nevertheless, he was sweating, he could feel his clothes sticking to his body.

  Mechanically he inserted more coins into the slot, moved by a morbid curiosity, by a strange desire to see the image he had seen reflected in the mirror reproduced in the cardstock, by an urge to abnegate himself in the horror. Then he had to grab hold of the curtain, both he and it whipped by the wind, while he awaited the mechanical delivery of the quadruplicate photo. A sound even stronger than the wind surged from the bowels of the machine and the photo strip was subsequently deposited in the expected place. Unlike the other times, it had fallen upside down, exposing its sickly, provocative whiteness to Elias’s view. And although the wind was very strong, the card did not move a single millimeter from where it had fallen, as if it were held by unseen hands. He turned it over. The photos belonged to the same man as before, deformed by advancing age, but still recognizable despite everything. It was like a vision of what his own old age might be, a light illuminating death’s waiting room. The wind ceased then as suddenly as it had risen, and Elias, although gasping, was able to stand outside the booth. He breathed with difficulty, he must have a fever; his forehead and cheeks felt warm, but when he tried to check by raising his hand to them, the touch of the dry skin grinding against his wrinkled fingers produced in him such a sensation of horror and disgust that he wanted to scream. From his throat no scream came, only a death rattle. He pinched one of his hands so that the pain would pull him out of this bad dream; he hurt himself, but he didn’t wake up from any nightmare; he was awake and he could tell he was dying.

  The street was still immersed in darkness. Near the spot where Elias stood, the streetlamps of Plaza Mayor spread their light over the familiar place, over vehicles, stoplights, and houses, but for him the distance seemed to have been multiplied a hundredfold. And though he knew that wasn’t the case, neither was he going to start walking towards the Plaza: he had to have one more photograph taken, to prove to himself that none of what he was experiencing was real, or to demonstrate to the perverse monster in the machine that he wasn’t afraid of it. When he entered the booth once more, he couldn’t remember his name nor did he know why he was there at that late hour, having instant photos taken of himself. He still had some loose coins to insert in the machine. The last ones. He sat on the stool adjusted for his height and looked bravely ahead at the figure in the mirror, almost a skeleton with bones covered by ashen skin and clothed in a suit that hung off him as though he were a coat hanger, like a terrify­ing mannequin. This time the four flashes fired off by the machine produced a kind of blindness. He could hardly stand, and he had to catch hold of the curtain in order to emerge from the booth. Thus, clutching the rough cloth, he waited for the photos to come out, preceded by the usual noisy din. He strained to pick them up with one hand, without loosening his hold on the curtain with the other, and examined them in the interior light: the four photos were identical, there was no nuance to distinguish one from another, and they consisted of snapshots of a skull, with empty eye sockets and a hollow nasal cavity, its mouth open in a stupid, lipless grin. Elias fell to the ground before he was able to look at himself in the mirror again. The traffic had resumed, not heavy but still noisy. The last thing he saw were the bones of his right hand, which had ended up twisted into a grotesque posture only a few inches from his face, and he dedicated his final thought to imagining the newspaper headline announcing the strange appearance of a skeleton dressed in fashionable clothing inside an instant photo booth.

  Translated from the Spanish by James D. Jenkins

  About the Authors

  Lars Ahn is a Danish author and journalist. He has published one novel and two short story collections in Danish and has won two Niels Klim Awards for best Danish science fiction short stories. He was born in South Korea but was adopted as an infant and grew up in Denmark. His translated stories can be found in the anthologies Sky City and Unconventional Fantasy: Forty Years of the World Fantasy Convention.

  Flavius Ardelean is a writer of fantasy and horror for adults and children. He is the author of six novels and three short story collections, for which he has received multiple awards and nominations in his home country. He has an MA in Publishing from Oxford with a dissertation on the field of international horror publishing and is an affiliate member of the Horror Writers Association.

  Christien Boomsma has been writing since she learned her first letters, but her professional career didn’t begin in earnest until she won the Paul Harland Prize for Dutch-language fantastic literature in 2004 and 2006. She focuses on works for young readers, with titles like Schaduwloper [Shadow Walker] (2014) and Vuurdoop [Baptism of Fire] (2015). Her love for horror started in 2006 when she wrote a ghost story for her own children. She became intrigued by the interplay of darkness and evil, slowly and inexorably creeping closer. That finally resulted in the collection of twelve modern ghost stories Spookbeeld [Spectre] (2012) and a number of horror stories for adults. ‘The Bones in Her Eyes’ came about after she ran over a cat one night. She was struck by the strange, clear look in the cat’s eyes – even though it was already dead. A look that even now is still fresh in her mind and has caused her its share of nightmares.

  Bernardo Esquinca’s fiction is characterized by a fusion of the genres of the supernatural and the crime novel. Born in Guadalajara in 1972, he is the author of several novels and story collections, including one translated into English, The Owls Are Not What They Seem (2014). He has been a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte and in 2017 won the Premio Nacional de Novela Negra. He has also written screenplays and audio series. He lives in Mexico City with his daughter Pía and his Xoloitzcuintle dog, Ramona.

  Anders Fager was born in 1964 in Stockholm. After a career as an army officer and game designer he turned to writing full time in 2009, when he released his first volume of Lovecraftian short stories, Svenska kulter [Swedish Cults]. The book was a critical success and a hit with readers and led to an expanded version, Samlade Svenska kulter [Co
llected Swedish Cults] in 2011. His works have been published in Finland, Italy, and France, where he became the only Swedish writer ever to have been nominated twice for the Grand Prix de l’Imaginaire. He lives in Stockholm with a tank full of fish and is very happily married.

  Cristina Fernández Cubas was born in Arenys de Mar, Barcelona, in 1945. Since the publication of her first volume of short stories in 1980, she has become an undeniable point of reference for the generations of short story writers to have followed. She has been translated into eight languages. Her most recent collection of stories, La habitación de Nona, once again proved her mastery in this genre, winning both the prestigious National Book Prize in Spain and the equally prestigious Premio de la Crítica, among other noteworthy prizes.

  Ariane Gélinas is the literary director of the journal Le Sabord as well as the artistic director of Brins d’éternité. She also edits reviews and columns on speculative fiction in Lettres québécoises and Les libraires. She is the author of Les villages assoupis (Prix Jacques-­Brossard, Arts Excellence and Aurora/Boréal) and the collection Le sabbat des éphémères. Her novels Les cendres de Sedna (Prix Arts Excellence and Aurora/Boréal) and Quelques battements d’ailes avant la nuit appeared in 2016 and 2019 respectively.

  Marko Hautala is a Finnish writer of literary horror whose work has been translated into eight different languages, including the novel The Black Tongue, published in English in 2015. One of his novels was recently optioned for a film. In his native Finland, Hautala has received the Tiiliskivi Prize, Kalevi Jäntti Literary Prize and has been nominated for the Young Aleksis Kivi Prize.

  Flore Hazoumé was born in Brazzaville, Congo, the daughter of a Beninese father and a Congolese mother. She grew up in France and is now a citizen of Ivory Coast, where she has lived for more than thirty years. She is the author of ten books, including novels, story collections, and works for young adults. Her writing deals with themes connected to African societies, contemporary history, and family. She is at present head of the nongovernmental organization Audace-­C, which works in the fields of art, culture and education, and she is the founder of Scrib Magazine.