New Fears II - Brand New Horror Stories by Masters of the Macabre

by Mark Morris

  Mr Haringa paused. The assortment of dark shapes within the crimson lights faded, brightening the room. The pocket watch dropped in volume, its tick-tock merely loud. When the teacher spoke, his voice no longer seemed to nestle in each student’s ear. He said, “In his years at sea, Conrad had heard tales that were no less fantastical than this one. He had taken them with enough salt to flavour his meals for the remainder of his life. His inclination was to do the same with the narrative Heuvelt had unfolded, admire its construction though he might. The very location in which Heuvelt delivered it, however, argued for its veracity with brute simplicity. All the same, Conrad found it difficult to accept that the boy who had seated himself at the front of the boat, where he had succeeded in prying open the pocket watch and was studying its hands, was the avatar of a god. He expressed his doubt to Heuvelt, who said, ‘You know the story of Tantalus? The king who served his son as a meal for the gods? Why, eh? Some of the poets say he was inspired by piety, others by blasphemy. It does not matter. What matters is that one of the gods, Demeter, ate the boy’s shoulder before Zeus understood what was on the table in front of them. A god may not taste the flesh of man or woman. To do so confuses their natures. Zeus forced Demeter to vomit the portion she had eaten, and he hurled Tantalus into Tartarus, where Hades was happy to devise a suitable torment for his presumption. Demeter had been duped, but Pan sank his teeth into the captain’s heart with full awareness of what he was doing. Nor did he stop after the organ was a bloody smear on his lips. He dined on the captain’s liver and tongue and used the hook to crack the skull to allow him to sample the brain. Sated, he fell into a deep slumber beside the remains of Diego de la Castille, captain in the Navy of his majesty, Phillip II of Spain.

  “‘In the days after, Pan changed. The Cimmerians had departed the ship once the god was asleep, taking with them the captain’s skin, whose pieces they would tan and stitch into a pouch to carry their infants. Alone, Pan roamed the ship, dressed still in the captain’s scarlet coat. He loosened the hook from its collar, cut a strip of leather from a crew member’s belt, and fashioned a necklace for himself. The captain’s remains he propped against the mainmast and sat beside, engaging in long, one-sided conversations with the corpse. He was becoming split from himself, you see, this’—Heuvelt gestured at the child—‘separated from this.’ He swept his hand to encompass their surroundings. ‘The Cimmerians, who had faithfully followed the god into a battle that had winnowed their numbers by a third, grew to fear the sight of him rowing toward them in the ship’s remaining boat, a strange tune, half-hymn, half-sea shanty on his lips. He was as likely to charge them with his sword out, hacking at any whose misfortune it was to be within reach of its edge, as he was to sit down to a meal with their elders. The sirens, too, learned to flee his approach, after he lured one of them to the ship, caught her in a trap made from its sails, and dragged her onto the deck. There, he lashed her beside the captain’s corpse and commanded her to sing for him. But the words that once had pleased the god now tormented him, and in a rage, he slew the siren. He loaded the captain’s body into the stern of the boat and roamed the islets of this place. He chased the herd of goats in and out of the water until they were exhausted and drowned. He hunted the flocks of bright birds roosting in the trees and decorated his locks with bloody clumps of their feathers. He piled stones on top of the rock opening in which he had tucked the head of the dismembered demigod, entombing him.

  “‘The transformation that overtook Pan’s form as man affected his form as nature, as well. In days gone by, the routes here were few. A fierce storm might permit access, as might the proper sacrifices, offered in locations once sacred to the god. Now the place floated loose in space. Its trees would be visible off the coast of Sumatra or in a valley in the Pyrenees. Rarely were those who ventured into the strange forest seen again, and the few who did return told of their pursuit by a devil in a red coat rowing a boat with a corpse for its crew.’

  “‘And you,’ Conrad said. ‘How did you come here?’

  “‘An accident,’ Heuvelt said. ‘The boiler had been giving me trouble, to the point of almost stranding me in the middle of the lake with a full load of passengers. Not very good for business. Compared to the trials I had faced on the open sea, it was modest, but a difficulty will grow to fit as much room as there is for it. I laboured over the boiler until I was sure I had addressed the fault, and then took the boat out. I should have stayed in. There was a heavy fog on the water. But so obsessed had I become with the problem that I could not wait to test its solution. I flattered myself that my skill at the wheel was more than sufficient to keep me from harm.

  “‘Harm, I avoided, but I stumbled into this place, instead. You will appreciate my wonder and my confusion. I spied our young friend balanced on the ship’s bowsprit, and when he challenged me, I knew enough of Greek and enough of Spanish to speak with him. Of course, I took him for an orphan (which from a certain point of view he was, abandoned by himself). Only later did I understand the peril I had been in. Our first exchange, halting as it was, gave me the sense that there was more to this boy than was apparent to my eye. When I left, I offered to take him with me, but he refused. For the gift of my conversation, though, Pan permitted me to depart unharmed.

  “‘Thereafter, I might have avoided the western end of the lake. Whether I judged my experience a waking dream or a visit to fairyland, I might have decided not to repeat it. As you can see, I abandoned prudence in favour of the swiftest return I could manage. I half-expected the way to be closed: I had made inquiries of several of my passengers the next day, and no one expressed any knowledge of strange rivers amongst the mountains. Yet when I searched for it that night, the passage was open. More, my young friend was eager to see me. Since then, I have visited whenever the opportunity has presented itself. I have learned my way around the tongue Pan and the Spaniards cobbled together. As I have done so, I have had his story, a piece at a time, in no order. The majority of these fragments, I have assembled into the tale you have heard; though there remain incidents whose relation to the whole I have yet to establish.

  “‘From the beginning, I had the conviction I must save this child, I must rescue him from this place. My own son died of a fever shortly after he learned to walk, while I was away at sea. I understood the influence this sad event exerted on my sentiments, but the awareness did nothing to diminish them. Each time I voyaged here, I brought candy, cakes, toys, whatever I guessed might tempt the boy away. After I understood what he was—as much as any man could—I continued my efforts to bring him with me. For if it is accounted a good deed to help a child out of misfortune, what would it mean to come to the assistance of a god?

  “‘Only the timepiece,’ Heuvelt nodded at it, ‘has continued to interest him. Every time I remove it from my pocket, it is as if he sees it anew. It fascinates him. Occasionally, I believe it frightens him. I have told him that, should he come with me, I will make a gift of it to him. The lure of the watch is strong, but not yet greater than the fear of venturing forth from his home. I think he will choose to accompany me into the world of men. It is why I have been able to travel the waters here so often. For the trespass he committed against his divinity, he must atone.’

  “‘What form would such a thing take?’ Conrad said.

  “‘I do not know,’ Heuvelt said. ‘Perhaps he would live as a mortal, resolve the conflict in his being by walking the path we tread all the way down to the grave. Or perhaps he would require more than a single lifespan. How long is needed for a god to atone to himself? He might spend centuries on the effort.’

  “There was a clatter from the front of the steamboat. Conrad glanced in that direction to see the child leap onto the railing and from there up to the roof. Another astonishing jump carried him from the boat to the tip of the ship’s mainmast, which he caught one-handed and used to swing onto the mast. While he was running down the spar to the ship, Heuvelt brought the boat’s speed up and turned the wheel in the direc
tion of home. The child had left the watch on the deck; Conrad retrieved it and handed it to Heuvelt, who tucked it into his coat with a sigh. ‘The next visit,’ he said, ‘or the one after that, perhaps.’

  “Although Conrad remained at the Swiss spa another two weeks, and continued to take the ferry every day, he and Heuvelt did not discuss their voyage to the wrecked galleon and their encounter with the figure Heuvelt claimed was a god gone mad. He understood that the man had given him a gift, shared with him a secret mysterious and profound. But there was too much to say about all of it for him to know where or how to begin, and as Heuvelt did not broach the topic, Conrad chose to follow his example. Heuvelt did not invite him on a second expedition.

  “Nor would Conrad speak or write of the trip until the last years of his life, when he spent fifteen pages of a notebook detailing it, more or less as I’ve related it to you. By then he had been contacted by a number of critics, each of whom wanted to know about the sources of his fiction. He’d never made any secret of his life on the sea, but many of the letters he received sought to connect his biography to his writing in a way that stripped the art from it. He grumbled to his friends, but he answered the inquiries. He also recorded his experience in the Swiss mountains. Once he was finished, he turned to a fresh page and listed the titles and dates of a handful of narratives: ‘The Great God Pan’ (1890), ‘The Story of a Panic’ (1902), The Little White Bird (1902), The Wind in the Willows (1908), Peter and Wendy (1911). Under these, he wrote, ‘A coincidence, or a sign Heuvelt at last succeeded in his quest, and delivered the god to his long exile?’ Not long after writing these words, Conrad died.

  “In the interest of scholarly integrity, I should add that the majority of Conrad scholars consider the notebook story a bizarre forgery. Even those few who accept it as Conrad’s work dismiss it as a five-finger exercise. It’s an understandable response. How could such a tale be anything other than pure invention?”

  The pocket watch stopped. With a click, the crimson lights switched off, flooding the classroom with darkness. Something vast seemed to crowd the space with the students. Mr Haringa’s voice said, “Aidan, would you get the lights?”

  After the dark (which took a fraction of a second too long to disperse), the fluorescent lights were harsh, prompting most of the students to turn their heads aside, or lift their hands against it. By the time their eyes had adjusted, Mr Haringa was behind his desk, shuffling through the folders in which he kept his selection of relevant newspaper clippings. Without looking up, he said, “All right, people, you’re free to go. Thank you for indulging me. Don’t forget, next class we’re starting Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’. Anyone who feels particularly ambitious can take a look at ‘Byzantium’, which is a different poem.”

  Still half in a daze, the students rose from their desks and headed for the door, some shaking their heads, some mumbling, “What was that?” A pair of students, the girls who competed for the highest grades in the class, paused in front of the teacher’s desk. One cleared her throat; the other said, “Mr Haringa?”

  “Yes?” Mr Haringa said.

  “We were wondering: what do you think happened? To Pan? What did the Dutch guy do with him?”

  Mr Haringa straightened in his chair, crossing his arms over his scarlet waistcoat. “What do you think?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “You have no idea whatsoever?”

  “Can you just tell us, please? We have to get to Pre-Calc.”

  “All right,” Mr Haringa said. “We know Heuvelt was using the watch to lure Pan out of his world and into ours. The question is, once you have him here, how do you keep him here? Or—that’s not it, exactly. It’s more a matter of, how do you accommodate him to this place, with all its strangeness? I’d say the answer lies in language, story, poetry, song. He knew some Spanish, so you might begin by reading him Don Quixote, a little bit at a time. As his fluency improved, you could introduce him to Lope de Vega, who wrote a long poem about the Spanish Armada. Yes, the same one the galleon had been part of. Maybe you would move on to Bécquer, his Rimas y legendas. Then—you get the idea. You teach him other languages: French, Italian, Dutch, English. You introduce him to Racine, Boccaccio, van den Vondel, Shakespeare. You bind him to our world with narrative, loop figures of speech around him, weight him with allusions. Does this answer your questions?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Kind of?”

  “Didn’t you say Pan would have to atone for eating the captain?”

  “Ah.” Mr Haringa paused. “To be honest, I’ve wondered that myself. I have no idea. I’m not sure how the god would figure out what he had to do, especially if he was cut off from himself, from that fullness of being he had known before his trespass. I can picture him telling and retelling the story of that event in an effort to discover whether the answer lay somewhere in its details. In this case, your guess is just about as good as mine.”

  “Um, okay. Thank you.”

  “Yeah, thanks, Mr H. See you tomorrow.”

  After the class, Mr Haringa had a free period. Once the hallway outside his room had grown quiet, he crossed to the door and turned the lock. Returning to his desk, he unbuttoned the scarlet waistcoat and shrugged it from his shoulders, draping it on the back of his chair. He opened the white dress shirt underneath down to his navel. A raised white scar ran up the centre of his breastbone. His eyes focused on some distant internal image, Mr Haringa traced the ridge with the fingers of his right hand. Slowly, he dug his fingertips into the scar, grimacing as the toughened flesh resisted the tear of his nails. As his skin parted, he brought up his left hand to widen the opening. His sternum cracked and rustled. There was surprisingly little blood.

  The hook was slippery in Mr Haringa’s grasp. Exhaling sharply, he slid it from his chest. He swayed, gripping the chair with his left hand to steady himself. Tears flooded his vision; he blinked them away, raising the hook to view. Stained and discoloured with blood and age, the metal reflected Mr Haringa’s features imperfectly. The point of the implement had retained its sharpness. Mr Haringa brought the hook to his mouth and pressed its tip into his lower lip. He remembered the bitter taste of the captain’s heart, its chewiness.

  Si les dieux ne font rien d’inconvenant, c’est alors qu’ils ne sont plus dieux du tout

  —Mallarmé

  For Fiona, and of course, for Jack

  THE DEAD THING

  Paul Tremblay

  It’s Thursday and instead of walking with Stacey to the skate park (it’s next to the high school so it isn’t a good place for people (especially seventh grade people (especially seventh grade girls people)) who aren’t in high school to go to unless you like the smell of weed, rape jokes, and getting cigarette filters and lit matches thrown at you), and instead of walking down the train tracks behind the driving school and to the combo gas station Honey Dew Donuts that this late in the day only has plain bagels and stale donut holes left, I decide to go straight home. I feel like I have to go even if I don’t want to because I worry something bad (or worse (worse than the bad that is everyday)) has happened or will happen to Owen, because the elementary school gets out fifteen minutes before the middle school and Owen is probably home and sitting on the couch and burning through another bag of sunflower seeds (eating seeds is how Owen deals with everything and he deals with a lot because he’s too young to know anything or understand like I do so he eats seeds because Dad figured out if Owen had a mouthful of seeds he couldn’t ask about Mom or cry as much so, yeah, sunflower seeds, the ones baseball players eat and spit, and Owen eats so many seeds most days he’s not hungry for dinner or breakfast or whatever food you try to put in front of him, and the kid is getting smaller instead of growing bigger, I swear), and what if Owen is watching TV and he accidentally swallows some of the seed shells (I’ve seen him swallow and scratch at his throat like he was dying and then be okay two seconds later and back with a mouth of seeds, my baby brother the world’s saddest gerbil) ins
tead of spitting the shells into a cup or an empty (or half-empty) can of soda and he’s choking for real, and Dad is passed out next to him on the couch or maybe he didn’t even make it to the couch today, so I’m going home because that feeling of something worse is stuck down in me. Stacey wants to come with me but I told her she can’t and it’s this joke between us how she never gets to go to my house when I go to hers all the time. She only jokes about it with me, which is why she’s the only one I’m totally honest with. I’ve told her why she can’t come. She says she gets it but I don’t think she totally gets it, and it’s not her fault because she hasn’t seen the house, and I mean the inside of the house because her parents have dropped me off so they’ve all seen the outside which is bad (blue paint is fine but the window frames’ white paint is coming apart and the yard is all overgrown) but like a normal bad. Maybe I should let her come home with me once and I can give her a tour and I’d start with the kitchen and tell her, hey, yeah, that’s the sink full of nasty dishes and flies as big as grapes and I keep two bowls (one for me and one for Owen) clean in my room, and don’t open the fridge, you won’t like it, but then I’d point at the walls, which is what she’d probably see first anyway, and using a fancy tour voice tell her that this is where Mom tore all the wallpaper off the walls because she was drunk or high or both, and Dad tried to stop her but she told him, don’t worry, I’ll put up new wallpaper and it’ll be great, and she said that to him while standing on the stained and splintery plywood, which would be the same plywood we’re standing on during the tour because a few months before she ripped down the wallpaper she jacked up all the linoleum tile because home improvement, right?, it was going to be a big project and make our kitchen look like the ones they show on those home improvement shows, and while in tour mode I’d whisper so no one else could hear me that Mom was super-drunk or high or both (and I could tell because her eyes would be red and big and she’d breathe only out of her mouth so it sounded like she was laughing and puking at the same time, and she looked like that when I saw her for the last time or the most recent last time because I don’t know yet if it’s a forever last time), so yeah, it was makeover time for the kitchen, and Dad was drunk or high or both (and I can tell with him because his face and body sags like he’s a human beanbag chair and he huffs more than speaks so the words come out of his nose) and Dad tried (not very hard, in fact, he sucked at trying) to stop Mom from buzzing through the floor tile but she told him to shut his assy mouth (that’s a direct quote) and that she’d put in the new laminate flooring herself and without his worthless assy ass because he was too lazy to do it, and I wouldn’t yell like they yelled while on the tour but I could do perfect impersonations of them fighting if I wanted to. I don’t know if Stacey would make it past the kitchen on the tour so it’s easier just to tell her that she can’t come over today, that I have to help Owen with something and I say something like it’s two different words (some thing) and we both laugh even though it’s kind of stupid and she says okay and tells me to FaceTime her after dinner and I can do that when I’m in my room because my room is like a bomb shelter of regular clean in a nuked house. So I walk home by myself listening to music on my phone and I like to pretend that dressed all in black I’m a shadow or a blur or like a smudge of someone that when you drive by you don’t really see them. I get home and I can hear the TV through the open front windows (no screens) and it sounds super-loud, louder than normal, and I panic because it sounds too loud and that has to mean something’s wrong, or some thing is wrong, so I run inside and drop my backpack and it bass drums on the kitchen floor, and I obstacle course past sagging garbage bags in the hallway to the TV room and Dad is on the couch asleep, passed out, whatever, and sports talking heads are shouting on the TV, but Owen isn’t there, maybe he’s already in his bedroom. I think about asking Dad where Owen is and I think again. I try to turn down the volume without the remote (because when I got close to the couch Dad grumbled something and there were black dots of seeds and shells all over the cushions and I didn’t want him to wake up and blame-yell at me about it) and I can’t find the stupid volume buttons on the side of the TV. The back slider off the kitchen crashes open so Owen must’ve been in the backyard and I somehow didn’t see him out there when I got home. I run back down the hallway and I want to yell, where’ve you been?, and say things to make him cry but I also know that’s not me so I swallow all that down to deal with later (I don’t eat sunflower seeds but I record messages on my phone and write things down and that’s how I deal) and I find him (and I always think that I’m finding him, like he’s lost) closing the slider real careful and slow with his foot, which is poked through the screen at the bottom and he shouldn’t be doing that because he’s making the rip in the screen bigger and we’ll get bugs (more bugs) and mice (more mice) in the house, but then I zoom in on what he’s carrying. Not that I can see it yet because his back is to me and he’s curled around and over whatever it is he’s carrying.