The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant
Volume 1: Nightmare Seasons
By Charles L. Grant
Necon Classic Horror #21
Introduction by Don D’Ammassa
Cover by Matt Bechtel
A Digital Edition Published By Necon E-Books
This Edition © 2011 The Estate of Charles L. Grant
Cover © 2011 Matt Bechtel
Introduction © 2011 Don D’Ammassa
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Introduction
I first became aware of Charles L. Grant with the publication of “Come Dance With Me on My Pony’s Grave” in 1973, one of his earliest short stories, and within a very short time he had become one of the names I actively looked for in magazines and anthologies. His particular style became known as quiet horror, more concerned with mental turmoil and suggestion than with explicit gore and violent sequences. Several excellent novels followed during the next few years, but it was always his shorter work that I liked best, and when Nightmare Seasons appeared in 1982 it became my favorite of his books and remains so today. I wasn’t the only one impressed — it won the World Fantasy Award.
Grant had a gift for bringing his settings to such vibrant life that he could spend an entire paragraph describing how a discarded plastic coffee cup rolled around in a gutter and hold our attention. The wind blowing down a street could be infused with a hint of personality and act as though it had a will of its own. Cash registers have voices and the weather itself is a persistent minor character. Even the most mundane inanimate objects can possess a kind of primordial intelligent purpose. The little background details that many authors are content to sketch in are brilliantly illuminated in these stories, and they help generate the tension as much as the overt events in the plot.
All four novellas take place in Oxrun Station, the imaginary New England town that was the setting for many of Grant’s novels and short stories, each in this case set in a different decade and a different season of the year. The stories gathered here have at least two distinctive themes that intertwine among the various plots. The first concerns the potentially destructive power of love when it demands too much. The other is the tragedy of loneliness and the danger it poses for those so afflicted. The latter two complement the others because loneliness is in one sense the extreme opposite of obsessive love.
The horrors revealed here break the rules we believe to be absolute. They aren’t vampires who can be dispatched by stake or garlic, or werewolves fearful of silver. In fact we never learn much about their nature, their origins, or how they might be defeated. Evil also strikes out at random. Its victims did nothing to deserve their fate. It is the lack of order, of cause and effect, that is particularly chilling because it means that none of us are safe. The victims’ plight resonates with the reader because each is an ordinary person who did nothing to deserve their fate. They are no more good or evil than the rest of us, but while they live ordinary lives, they suffer extraordinary deaths.
“Thou Need Not Fear My Kisses, Love” takes place in the spring of 1940. Samantha England, a professional woman with ambivalent feelings about her life, comes home one night to find the severed foot of her lover lying in front of her house. The story evolves from her psychological problems because she was already troubled, feeling confined by her house and her life choices. From this evolves a tensely atmospheric story and while horrible things do happen, they do so off stage because the real action is within the mind of the protagonist. Samantha is admired, perhaps even loved, by several men, but love can be a destructive force, as she will discover. Not everything is at it appears, a phrase that applies to a great many of Grant’s stories.
“Now There Comes a Darker Day” moves forward to the summer of 1950. This story also revolves around a group of men who become obsessed with the same woman, a mysterious figure accompanied by a silent, enigmatic child. As her allegiance moves from one man to the next, those she abandons suffer more than mere disappointment. The narrator becomes aware of the pattern of events but discovers that not even foreknowledge can provide immunity
“Night’s Swift Dragons” advances to autumn of 1960. A handful of postal workers are besieged by a gang of what appear to be bikers, but they are actually something far worse. The local postmaster, who feels isolated and distant from his co-workers, will experience a bizarre revelation. It’s one of Grant’s rare excursions into graphic horror and it’s a good one.
The last story takes place in the winter of 1970. ”The Color of Joy” is a Christmas story whose protagonist is the daughter of one of the postal workers in the previous story. She has never gotten over the death of her mother, and later her brothers, and while she is the center of a circle of devoted friends, she finds it difficult to relate to others. Melissa believes she is happy, but if so, why does she keep imagining that someone is watching her? And does she really understand how her friends feel about her?
Writers come and go in the horror field just as they do in every genre but only a handful leave of permanent mark. Charles Grant was one of those few, and his mark is a big one.
Don D’Ammassa
Providence, RI
November, 2011
Prologue
Winter . . . and rain.
During the blade-sharp days of a January cold snap, during the hours when snow immobilizes and breath turns to short-lived fog, there are the dreams of summer, of green, of walking with no particular purpose except to savor across the playing fields of the park beneath hickory and ash and white birch of such luxuriantly thick foliage that even the still air seems hazed with mint. In part it is a steeled defiance of a numbing temperature that reduces animals to hibernation and man to bitter complaint; and in part it is a hypnotic gesture to the pleading of one’s senses for an earnest reassurance that this sort of weather will not last, that there will indeed be a time when warmth beyond the hearth is a reality in spite of the fact that it seems now like nothing more, and nothing less, than an attic memory.
But there are worse times than the cold. And there are worse illusions than memory.
There are the cruel teasing thaws that defy the season with a mercury grin; thaws that banish the snow, fill the streams, ofttimes clear the sky to a taunting deception of June’s soft blue.
And when there is no blue, there is the rain.
A lifeless, persistent, two weeks’ rain that begins without warning as a twilight mist and becomes during slumber an early-dawn drizzle lightly coating even the most pristine white with a dull ghost shroud of grey. It begins lightly, silently, and suddenly grows mad. Winds shift and rise, clouds darken and spill, and gutters hold too much, storm drains not enough, while the ground at every corner becomes brown and soggy and bespeaks the Brontes’ moors.
There is, then, a lethargy, an apathy, when even the best of relationships is strained to the breaking because there is warm out there beyond the streaking condensation on the windows, a warm that in its taunting is a lie, and a rain that gives no life.
For some ... for many, the obvious escape is in sleep beneath down quilts and electric blankets and in huddling and in
dozing (though the dreams that they wish for are not always the dreams they receive); for others there is the mechanical and time-killing routine of nine to five, a liturgy of complaints, a ritual of wishes; and for still others who have the luck and the means there is the literal escape to climes that still know the sun (though the escape they perform is as brief as the false thaw).
And finally, for those like me who take the seasons as they come, there are voyages in books. When the house grows too small and the shadows too real and the clock in the hallway talks death to itself. When the oven is merely hot and the sheets merely stiff and the dock in the hallway talks death to itself. When the floorboards creak and the furnace pops and the eaves sigh and the windows are too blind . . . and the clock in the hallway talks death to itself.
Winter ... and rain.
It is a time, then, for research, and for prodding myself into getting away from staring at the backs of my hands and cracks in the walls and back into the business that lets me live; and after two full days of burying myself rather effectively and productively in the Oxrun Station library, Nat Clayton took pity on my aching spine and piles of notes scattered over the blonde wood table and brought me a sandwich from the corner luncheonette, She was the first person I had met when I’d moved to the Station. and I was the only one she had told about the losing of the index finger on her left hand. Her soft sable hair was cut long for the winter, and there were more times than one when I envied husband Marc for the partner he had. Marc, on the other hand. envied my employment.
Neither of them, however, envied the stories I told.
The sandwich.
I grinned at Nat, probably stupidly, and ate while I leafed through an unnecessarily dry volume of Connecticut history. It was one of those moments when I was not exactly sure what I was looking for, one of those moments when I would know when I found it. A vague idea for the next book was swimming uncharitably distantly, and with luck I was hoping my browsing would find its definition. If it happened today, I had promised myself, I would begin work on that instead of the more commercial, billspaying one I had under contract.
Not that I ever did less than the best a book called for. But once in a while I wanted to have fun.
Especially now, in the rain and the warm/cold that made even the likes of Oxrun Station a place to ride by on the way to someplace bright.
An hour later, sandwich devoured and the history book closed in admission of failure (not to mention procrastination), I had resigned myself to a bout of artistic self-pity, with a few rounds of hearty depression thrown in for the crowd. And again it was dear Nat who saw my distress and realized it was a time when I could be interrupted without harm.
She came away from the horseshoe-shaped main desk and stood in front of me, holding out a book in her left hand. It was a slim volume, expensively bound in deep ebony leather, and the pages were virtually onionskin and edged with gold. The look of it demanded cautious handling, which I gave it while she told me how she had come by it.
“See, I was supposed to be getting something on Frost,” she said with a grin that anticipated one of my patented, cheap wisecracks. When it didn’t come, however, she only shrugged and touched thoughtfully at her cheek. “I tell you, I really do like Iris and Paul, no kidding. I mean, that store’s the best thing that ever happened to them since Paul retired. And don’t get me wrong, I think they’ve done a hell of a job there since Cyd ... well, since she took off like that for God knows where. But sometimes ... I mean, really. I ask for Robert Frost, for crying out loud, and I get something like this.” She gestured at the book as though it were a dead mouse. “Don’t know why I let Paul talk me into keeping it.” She gestured again, this time nervously. “Anyway, I started to read it last night, thought about you right away, and when I told Marc, he said I should let you have a look.”
I closed the book carefully.
“Oh, go ahead,” she said when I tried to push it back into her hand. “Go on, take it home. Really. It isn’t going to bite you, you know.”
I backed off slightly, palms up and out and shaking my head.
“Nat, you are talking to the world’s most accomplished fumbler and rare things destroyer. Olympics-class, at least. I have won gold medals for dropping a four-hundred-page unbound manuscript in the middle of Madison Avenue. I have been cited by world leaders for dropping Dresden china and signed crystal. I cannot comb my hair without first cracking my knuckles on the brush. No. I don’t want any part of this, m’dear.”
“Take it,” she said. And at least she had the grace not to laugh at my wriggling unease.
“No, dammit, That thing there is much too expensive: all you have to do is look at it to know that. Nope. I don’t want it. I don’t even want to breathe on it. But as long as it’s yours,” I added quickly, “what you should do, you know, is display it here, in a glass-fronted bookcase or something like that.”
She shook her head. The damned woman was actually enjoying herself.
“Natalie, please ... “ And I spread my hands over my notebooks, trying for the perfect attitude of supplication. “Look at all this stuff, huh? Do you have any idea what work I have to do now just to set things up? I’ve got to sort it, file it, absorb it, recheck it, rearrange it and then start writing. I wish I could help you, but I haven’t got the time, believe me. Thanks for the thought, but really, no.”
I looked away and began shuffling papers and note pads into something that looked like an official pile. I kept shaking my head-slowly, so she would think I was bemoaning the work yet to come when I got home.
Unfortunately, she knew me too well. She took the chair opposite and placed the book between us. She said nothing. She only stared.
Against all regulations I lit a cigarette, watched the smoke cloud her face, watched the book catch the light. I sniffed. I cleared my throat. I patted my shirt pocket to be sure my pen was there. “What’s it about?”
“Seasons.”
I squinted. “Seasons? What do you mean, seasons? Good lord, Nat, it isn’t poetry, is it?”
She shook her head. My left hand disobeyed orders and reached out, pausing only when I saw her grin.
“Take it,” she insisted gently. Then she glanced toward the tall, arched windows that made up the building’s front wall. “It’s the weather for it, believe me.”
I knew then there was no sense at all in trying to protest any further. Natalie was, among many other delightful and possibly sinful things, one of the most stubborn people I have ever met. If she was convinced that I would enjoy this book, then that was the end of it.
It did not occur to me until much later that “enjoy” was a word she had not used once.
I fussed around for another half an hour, just to show her the sacrifice I would be making through the loss of much-needed time to work, and walked back home. I ate. Showered. Defied the latest statistics and sat in front of the television set with the screen blank. And once I felt comfortable enough I picked up her book.
From Poe to Dunsany, Lovecraft to Bloch, there have been manuscripts and tomes found in bottles, chests, closets, desks, canes, candles, woodwork, hearths, musty shops tucked away on side streets no one ever noticed, and ships’ holds filled with scrabbling rats and stagnant water. All of them, according to the discoverer, emit a rather unwholesome and indefinable aura, enticing the reader deep into the supposed terrors therein, preternaturally seizing the imagination and wringing it dry of every vestige of emotion, of reason, of nightmares long dormant. And more often than not the manuscript turns lethal.
This volume, however, was nothing more than raised cool leather in my hands. Light, unimposing, handled cautiously only because I was afraid to do it damage and be damned for my clumsiness. I turned it around several times—front to back, side to side—and held it close to my eyes while I leaned back toward the lamp. I touched gingerly at the gold edges. I rubbed a finger against my chest, then brushed it timidly over the tooling. I turned it again. Twice more. Once brought it to
my nose to sniff for age. Then placed it in my lap and stared at it.
There was no title.
There was no mention of an author.
I rubbed my thumb over my chin, scratched at an eyebrow, took my glasses off and cleaned them. Then with a sigh loud enough to alert the world to the birth of a new martyr, I picked it up again.
Nothing on the first five pages but yellowing age stains and blotches of what might have been perspiration, or tears; nothing quite so dramatic as dried smears of blood.
A private edition, apparently, albeit one of reasonably respectable age and involved wealth.
The printing was so finely done it seemed etched on water, but there were no illustrations or illumination work.
I read quickly at first, not really slowing down until I realized with a somewhat delighted start that this was a series of accounts of Oxrun Station and how it had been at various moments in its recent past.
I do not say “history”; there are too many implications of truth in that word.
Yet, to be honest, it did not give me, simply by holding it, uneasy sensations of shadows pressing over my shoulder, or unnameable presences lurking about my windows. It was, I judged, a book and nothing more. And like all books, it could do nothing to me that I did not permit.
And so, with cigarettes and a not-so-fine brandy to hand, I read it.
Forgetting the time, and the cigarettes, and the brandy, and the cold.
But not forgetting at all that I was still in Oxrun Station. And it was winter ... and it was raining.
Part I: Spring, 1940 — Thou Need Not Fear My Kisses, Love
Moving
The wind in slowtime to the drift of the night’s clouds. It barely shifted the clinging spring mist that hung over the Station, barely chilled the uncomfortably early heat the afternoon’s long rain had been unable to banish.
The wind in slowtime, Touching the back of an ear like a feather, trying to budge the nightweight of a curl.
The Complete Short Fiction of Charles L. Grant Volume 1: Nightmare Seasons (Necon Classic Horror) Page 1
