New Fears--New horror stories by masters of the genre

by Mark Morris

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Also Available From Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION by Mark Morris

  THE BOGGLE HOLE by Alison Littlewood

  SHEPHERDS’ BUSINESS by Stephen Gallagher

  NO GOOD DEED by Angela Slatter

  THE FAMILY CAR by Brady Golden

  FOUR ABSTRACTS by Nina Allan

  SHELTERED IN PLACE by Brian Keene

  THE FOLD IN THE HEART by Chaz Brenchley

  DEPARTURES by A.K. Benedict

  THE SALTER COLLECTION by Brian Lillie

  SPEAKING STILL by Ramsey Campbell

  THE EYES ARE WHITE AND QUIET by Carole Johnstone

  THE EMBARRASSMENT OF DEAD GRANDMOTHERS by Sarah Lotz

  EUMENIDES (THE BENEVOLENT LADIES) by Adam L.G. Nevill

  ROUNDABOUT by Muriel Gray

  THE HOUSE OF THE HEAD by Josh Malerman

  SUCCULENTS by Conrad Williams

  DOLLIES by Kathryn Ptacek

  THE ABDUCTION DOOR by Christopher Golden

  THE SWAN DIVE by Stephen Laws

  Contributors’ Notes

  Also Available From Titan Books

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM TITAN BOOKS

  Dark Cities: All-New Masterpieces of Urban Terror

  Dead Letters: An Anthology of the Undelivered, the Missing, the Returned…

  Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse

  Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse

  NEW FEARS

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785655524

  Electronic edition ISBN: 9781785655586

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP

  First Titan Books edition: September 2017

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  Introduction Copyright © 2017 Mark Morris

  The Boggle Hole Copyright © 2017 Alison Littlewood

  Shepherds’ Business Copyright © 2017 Stephen Gallagher

  No Good Deed Copyright © 2017 Angela Slatter

  The Family Car Copyright © 2017 Brady Golden

  Four Abstracts Copyright © 2017 Nina Allan

  Sheltered In Place Copyright © 2017 Brian Keene

  The Fold In The Heart Copyright © 2017 Chaz Brenchley

  Departures Copyright © 2017 A.K. Benedict

  The Salter Collection Copyright © 2017 Brian Lillie

  Speaking Still Copyright © 2017 Ramsey Campbell

  The Eyes Are White and Quiet Copyright © 2017 Carole Johnstone

  The Embarrassment Of Dead Grandmothers Copyright © 2017 Sarah Lotz

  Eumenides (The Benevolent Ladies) Copyright © 2017 Adam L.G. Nevill

  Roundabout Copyright © 2017 Muriel Gray

  The House of the Head Copyright © 2017 Josh Malerman

  Succulents Copyright © 2017 Conrad Williams

  Dollies Copyright © 2017 Kathryn Ptacek

  The Abduction Door Copyright © 2017 Christopher Golden

  The Swan Dive Copyright © 2017 Stephen Laws

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  INTRODUCTION

  I believe that the first adult horror novel I read was James Herbert’s The Fog back in 1976, when I was twelve or thirteen years old. But I’d been reading horror fiction for several years before then. Like many writers of my generation, I cut my genre teeth not on novels, but short stories—dozens of short stories, hundreds, maybe even thousands.From an early age I’d been a voracious reader—I still am—and in between the Enid Blytons, and Anthony Buckeridge’s Jennings series, and Doctor Who novelisations, and children’s classics like 101 Dalmatians, Charlotte’s Web, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Treasure Island, I read anthologies—mostly ghost and horror stories, some of which I owned, but many of which I borrowed from my local library.

  Anthologies I remember reading and loving in my preteen years include Nightfrights, edited by Peter Haining, Ghosts, Spooks and Spectres, edited by Charles Molin, Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery and a Target book edited by Freya Littledale called Ghosts and Spirits of Many Lands.

  There were anthology series too—fifteen volumes of The Armada Ghost Book, six volumes of The Armada Monster Book, and four volumes of Armada Sci-Fi.

  And then, of course, there were the annual Pan and Fontana Books of Horror and Ghost Stories.

  My first encounter with one of these august editions was in 1972 when I was nine. The book in question was The 7th Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories edited by Mary Danby, and I was immediately captivated by the yellow-green photographic cover, depicting a rat slinking between glass containers on a laboratory bench. The book was owned by my cousin, and as soon as she showed it to me I knew I had to read it. To be honest, I can’t remember what I made of the stories at the time (though, perusing the contents, I see contributions from such genre luminaries as Gerald Kersh, Robert Bloch, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Marjorie Bowen and M.R. James), but I do vividly recall, a few years later, exactly how I felt after reading my first Pan Book of Horror Stories.

  It was New Year’s Eve 1975, and I was staying at a friend’s house. I was sleeping in a camp bed on the ground floor at the front of the house, in some kind of box room or study. As I recall, there was quite a bit of clutter in the room—boxes, clothes hanging up, stacked items of furniture. At bedtime I settled down to read the book I’d brought with me: The Eleventh Pan Book of Horror Stories.

  I’m not sure how much of the book I read that night, but I do know it was well into the early hours of 1st January 1976 when I finally turned out the lamp beside my bed and tried to settle down to sleep.

  I say tried, because as soon as I closed my eyes I started to imagine I could hear rustling sounds in the darkness; started to believe that some thing had emerged from hiding and was creeping towards my bed.

  Worse, opening my eyes to allay my fears only served to exacerbate them. Because in the gloom, with the only light a brownish glow on the closed curtains from the streetlight outside, I saw shapes that seemed to feed my imaginings. There was a tall figure standing by the wardrobe, a hunched mass beneath the windowsill. Snapping on the bedside lamp in rising panic, the tall figure would quickly disguise itself as a hanging item of clothing, the hunched mass a pile of boxes. But then I’d turn the light off, and after a few seconds the rustling would start again…

  In my fevered state, the long hours to dawn became a waking nightmare, and I eventually fell into an exhausted sleep only when the sky outside began to lighten and the shadows began to dissipate. Yet, oddly enough, although the experience left me drained, I now look back on it with a sense of nostalgia, even fondness. It showed me how powerful good horror fiction could be, and it certainly didn’t put me off seeking out more of it. On the contrary, over the next few years I devoured as many of the Pan and Fontana anthologies as I could get my hands on. They fuelled my imagination, and instilled in me a long-held belief that short fiction, perhaps even more so than novels, is the lifebloo
d of the genre.

  There’s nothing better than a well-crafted ghost or horror story. Short stories, if told well, can retain a real sense of dread throughout their twenty-or thirty-page length, and pack a real punch. All too often horror novels—perhaps because their authors feel a need to reward readers for the time they’ve invested in their work—end on a note of hope or redemption: the evil vanquished, the status quo restored. In short stories, however, there are no such restrictions, which is why short horror fiction tends to be darker and less reassuring, not to mention generally more ambiguous and experimental, than lengthier, more conventional works.

  As a child I loved the fearful anticipation of reading an anthology and not knowing what was coming up next. Would the next story be scary, funny, baffling? Would it be supernatural or non-supernatural? Would it contain witchcraft, a haunting, cannibals, demonic possession? Or would it be something even stranger, darker, altogether more difficult to define?

  The recent trend in the genre has been for themed anthologies; collections of stories about a particular subject. We’ve had books of werewolf stories and zombie stories; books featuring stories sharing common characters, or all set within a particular location. Undeniably many of these anthologies have been excellent, their contributors showing a great deal of invention and flair in the way they’ve subverted the restrictions imposed on them, and interpreted the various themes in their own way. Yet whenever I read a themed anthology, I always secretly find myself craving the kinds of anthologies I read in my youth, anthologies in which no restrictions were placed on the authors, and their imaginations were given free rein.

  This, then, is where New Fears comes in. In this first volume of what will hopefully become an annual showcase of the best and most varied short fiction that the horror genre has to offer, you’ll find a wide variety of stories and approaches, which will hopefully demonstrate how very wide—indeed, how almost limitless—the parameters of the genre can be. Within these pages you’ll find stories that explore ancient myths in new and innovative ways; stories of human evil; stories of unnamed and ambiguous terrors; stories where the numinous and the inexplicable intrude upon what we perceive to be reality in unexpected ways. There is humour here, and hope, and grief, and sadness, and regret, and impenetrable darkness. There are stories that will surprise you, and unsettle you, and shock you. But most of all there are stories that will grab you and draw you in and compel you to keep turning the pages.

  There is so much that this amazing genre of ours has to offer.

  New Fears 1 is only the start of the journey.

  MARK MORRIS

  February 2017

  THE BOGGLE HOLE

  by Alison Littlewood

  Tim’s grandad’s house wasn’t like a house should be. There were white lacy things on the chair arms, and the wallpaper had knobbly bits in it, and the television was too small and bulged out at the back. The carpet had a texture to it too, pale green ridges Tim could feel through his socks, and the worst thing, the thing he really didn’t like, was the silence that hung over it. It was like it lived there, that silence, like a creature that had moved in and swelled to occupy the space. Tim didn’t know how to banish it. He could only make it retreat, one leg at a time, into some corner or other; but he always knew the effect was temporary, that once he’d finished his game it would stealthily creep back, a bulbous, insidious thing that watched him always, waiting for its chance to pounce.

  Tim’s house didn’t have a Silence in it. Now it didn’t have Tim in it either, or his mum; she’d gone on holidays of her own, off to a golden beach with a man Tim scarcely knew. It wasn’t even summer. It was late autumn, all the fallen leaves already lying soggy in the gutters. He scowled when he thought of her, miles and miles away and having fun.

  “Penny for ’em, lad,” his grandad said, and Tim realised he’d come into the room behind him, padding on silent slippered feet. Grandad’s slippers were made of brown checked fabric and had holes in the toes. They were so ugly Tim wondered how he had ever come to buy them, but then old people were like that; they didn’t seem to care what anything looked like. He scowled again.

  “She’ll be back soon enough, lad,” Grandad said, and he glanced at the window, where the rain had begun to fall in a steady splutter. Tim couldn’t hear it but he could see it spitting against the glass.

  “I know you’d rather be in that there Bahaymas.”

  Bahamas, thought Tim, but he couldn’t be bothered to correct him.

  “’Appen I’ll tek you to a beach,” his grandad said. “You’ll see, it’s not ser bad. There’s nowt on them furren beaches, son. Just wait—ours has got treasures.”

  Tim looked up.

  “There’s fossils, an—”

  Tim sighed.

  “Aye, well. You’d rather them Bahaymas. Fair do’s, son.” Grandad sighed and pulled open a drawer in the sideboard. He took out his pipe, hiding the curve of it in his hand. “I’ll just pop for a puff, lad. She dun’t like it in t’ouse, you know.”

  Tim frowned as he watched Grandad shuffle towards the door in his slippers. He knew he wouldn’t bother changing into shoes to go outside. He always went in his slippers and he always talked about Grandma when he did it, and Tim didn’t know why; his gran had died years ago, before Tim could even form the memories to remember her by, and yet Grandad still tiptoed around her. She wouldn’t like this. She wouldn’t like that. He would whisper, as if she was there and listening and disapproving. Tim had a picture of a stolid woman with her arms folded across her chest; it didn’t tally with the photograph of a slender, dark-haired girl with laughter in her smile, which sat in an ornate frame on the mantelpiece.

  He looked out of the window to see Grandad settling into his usual seat on the rain-damp bench at the end of the garden, puffing on his pipe. The thumb of his left hand kept turning and turning the wedding ring on his finger, over and over, while he stared into the smoke.

  * * *

  Boggle Hole didn’t look like much of a beach. It lay at the bottom of a narrow gully, a small cove of exposed rock with a stream running through it. The cliffs stretched away; they were the colour of pale sand. The beach was not the colour of sand. Mostly it was black, streaked with the bright-green slime of seaweed.

  “What d’you think?” asked Grandad.

  Tim tried not to scowl. Boggle Hole, he thought. South of Robin Hood’s Bay. Near Ravenscar. Such a thrill he had felt at the sound of the words, and now the reality was grey and bare and boring. He remembered when Grandad first told him about it. Boggle Oyle, he’d said. We’ll go to Boggle Oyle, and Tim had thought Oil, and wondered why they should want to go to an oily beach; the image in his head had been something he’d seen on television, blackened seabirds being dunked in washing-up bowls by solemn volunteers. Now he looked out at the dark beach under a dark sky and wondered how far off the mark he had been.

  “Aye, well. There’s a beach in summer. You can make sandcastles. It gets scoured off, though. Winter’s on its way.” Grandad sniffed the air, as if he could smell it coming.

  Tim sniffed too, and got only cold briny sharpness. He wondered if that’s what winter smelled like. He wondered too what kind of beach was only there for some of the time; that did have a whiff of the magical about it, as though it might appear when he turned his back.

  “There were smugglers used this beach,” Grandad said. When Tim looked up at him he winked, his face creasing in a hundred places. “Smugglers and maybe wreckers, too. And then there’s the boggle.”

  “The boggle?” Tim had thought it was just a name, a strange one, like lots of other names around here. He hadn’t known it was a thing.

  Grandad’s eyes brightened. “Come on, lad,” he said. “I’ll show you.”

  * * *

  The cave was a dark focal point, which the cliff swept towards as if pointing the way. As Tim skipped ahead he found there was some sand on the beach after all; clumps of it clung to his trainers like mud, sticking strands of weed
to the white leather. It occurred to him there was noise here too, not like in the house: gulls sounding like scrapping cats; the gritting of his feet; the distant growl of a car on the clifftop. Beneath it all the sea was shushing, as if telling everything else to shut up and listen.

  Inside the cave, though, it was quiet. He could still hear the sea but it was as if the cave had its own Silence inside it, a presence that was trying to keep the noise out. Then Grandad huffed and puffed his way inside, and the thought was gone.

  “This is it, lad.”

  Tim turned. “What?” He’d forgotten about the boggle, but he remembered when he saw the wink, the fissures in the old man’s face.

  “The boggle hole. This is it.” Grandad waved his hand around the pocked grey walls. “This is where it lives.”

  “What’s a boggle?”

  Grandad put his fingers to his lips. “All right, I’ll tell thee. But quiet, like. They don’t like being talked about.” He glanced around as he whispered, “A boggle is a sort of goblin. Some call ’em brownies, or hobs. This one ’ere’s a boggle. Along t’ coast there’s another bay called Hob Hole. That one—well, some used to take their kids there when they got t’ whooping cough. They’d ask the hob to cure ’em, and sometimes it did. It’s true, lad.” Grandad winked again.

  Tim hadn’t heard of the whooping cough, didn’t know what it was. He shook his head.

  “They say this ’ere boggle started out in Robin Hood’s Bay. But they play tricks, see, and this one played a trick so nasty they banished him. So now he lives here.”

  Tim cast his eyes around the cave. It wasn’t a big cave. There didn’t seem to be anywhere a boggle could hide. He looked quizzically at his grandad.

  “Oh, you can’t see him. Not unless he wants to be seen.” There was laughter in Grandad’s voice; Tim was no longer sure if it was a real story or something he’d just made up. “Unless…” Grandad raised one shaggy white eyebrow. “They say, if you look in something shiny, you can see t’ boggle’s face. Here.” He slowly worked the wedding ring from his finger and passed it to Tim. “Careful, now. Try that.” He opened his eyes wide as if in fear.