by Paul Kane
scary tales
volume one
by Paul Kane
A Things in the Well publication
Edited by Steve Dillon
Scary Tales Vol. 1 by Paul Kane
Published by and © Copyright Steve Dillon, 2018
All stories in this collection © Copyright Paul Kane
A Things in the Well publication.
Dedication:
For the brothers, without whom…
Copyright Notices
“Snow” © Copyright Paul Kane, 2016. First published by Stormblade Publications, 2016
“Sleeper(s)” © Copyright Paul Kane, 2013. First published by Crystal Lake, 2013
“Sin” © Copyright Paul Kane, 2017. First published in Nailbiters by Black Shuck Books, 2017
“Who’s Been…?” © Copyright Paul Kane, 2005. First published in Signs of Life by Crystal Serenades, 2005
“Giants” © Copyright Paul Kane, 2018 (Original to this Collection)
First Published 2018 by Steve Dillon for Oz Horror Con.
A Things in the Well publication.
ISBN: 9781980952503 (softcover)
ISBN: 2370000452047 (hardcover)
Cover Art: ‘The Nameless’ © Copyright Les Edwards, 1981. Used with permission.
Cover Design and all other artwork: © Copyright Steve Dillon 2018
Praise for Paul Kane’s Dark Fairy Tales
“Paul Kane is an excellent master of vivid description… The overall premise IS the story of Snow White. All the elements from the ‘original’ are there but
in Snow Kane has brought them into the modern world with a bang!”
(Fluffy Red Fox Horror Blog)
~
“While the overall story will be familiar, Kane has injected enough original
ideas of his own to ensure that Snow reads like a fresh new story…
You won’t be whistling while you work after reading this,
you’ll be whistling to keep the darkness away!”
(Ginger Nuts of Horror)
~
“Paul Kane has another winner on his hands with Snow.”
(10/10 Clive Barker Podcast)
~
“Sleeper(s) struck a chord with me. It resonates like the Nigel Kneale
and John Wyndham stories of old.”
(David Moody – Bestselling author of Autumn and Hater)
~
“Paul Kane is a superb author. I most highly recommend you read Sleeper(s).”
(Blaze McRob, Tales of Horror)
~
“It’s deadly certain that Sleeper(s) is no sleeper.
You’ll be up all night trying to get to the last page.”
(Mass Movement magazine)
~
“Compact of length and cinematic in scope, Sleeper(s) contains just enough punch for this reviewer to seek out the further works of Paul Kane.”
(Hellnotes)
~
“Sin: the references to the film Seven add a nice touch of style to the storyline. This excellent and surprising story is one of the highlights
in this collection and will impress many readers…
Highly recommended!”
(Rising Shadow)
~
“Who’s Been…? starts off as a Ken Loach-updated version of Goldilocks, all kitchen sink and unemployed alcoholics. But as the story closes in, the horror aspect kicks into gear, where Kane walks that fine line between real and supernatural horror.”
(Dark Horizons)
~
“RED not only tips its hat to ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ but ‘Peter and The Wolf,’ and ‘Who’s Afraid of The Big Bad Wolf?’ and every werewolf type motif in between... Kane does an incredible job of combining
horror and humour into one tasty morsel.”
(Cemetery Dance Magazine)
~
“RED is a gleefully gruesome tale that moves at an excellent pace…
It’s easy to sink one’s teeth into it and devour it with relish.”
(Hellnotes)
~
“RED is a beautifully visceral, dark tale and if any novella was
ripe for a film adaptation, it’s this one.”
(Barbie Wilde – Female Cenobite in Hellbound: Hellraiser II and author of Voices of the Damned)
~
“Pleasingly accessible, fast-paced and gloriously gruesome, Blood RED gives a fresh lick of paint (red, obviously!) to an old tale and adds a distinctly adult tone. Good fun!”
(Mark Yon, SFF World)
~
“I loved the twisted take on Little Red Riding Hood. Who doesn’t love dark and twisted tales inspired by disturbing and unsettling fairy-tales? I loved every page. I had a great time reading RED and Blood RED!”
(5 * Review, Book Lover’s Boudoir)
~
“You cheeky bastard! Not only have you revamped the Robin Hood legend, now you have taken Little Red Riding Hood and turned what was already a dark fable into a descent into pure, action-packed horror… Thanks Paul!”
(Zero Signal Magazine on Blood RED)
~
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Steve Dillon for helping me to compile all these stories in one place. A huge thank you to Angela Slatter for her introduction, and to Les Edwards for allowing us to use his superb artwork for the cover. And a massive thank you to all the editors and publishers who were kind enough to bring out some of these stories originally. As usual, hugs and massive thank yous to all my friends in the writing and film/TV world, for their continual help and support in the past. A very special thank you, though, to people like Clive Barker, Neil Gaiman, Mandy Slater, Stephen Jones, Amanda Foubister, Alexandra Benedict, Christopher Fowler, Stephen Volk, Tim Lebbon, Kelley Armstrong, Peter James, Mike Carey, Barbie Wilde, John Connolly, Pete & Nicky Crowther, Simon Clark, Jason Arnopp and so many more. I couldn’t ask for better mates. Lastly, but never, ever leastly, a big words are not enough thank you to my supportive family and my wife Marie, who share my obsession with dark fairy tales. Love you guys more than anything.
Contents
Introduction by Angela Slatter… 7
Snow… 11
Sleeper(s)… 37
Sin… 134
Who’s Been? … 163
Giants… 184
Afterword – A Life of Scary Tales… 210
Introduction by Angela Slatter
“Terror is a passion which always produces delight
when it does not press too close.”
- Edmund Burke
When someone says “fairy tale” there are a series of ideas that modern readers associate with the term. Stories for kids, right? Happily-ever-afters, right? Fairy godmothers, high-end footwear, the triumph of plucky third – or seventh-born children over a wicked world, and good marriages after bad luck, right? What could be nicer than a fairy tale forest, a fairy tale castle, a fairy tale wedding, a fairy tale ending?
There’s surely a Disney-esque fantasy realm where you’re guaranteed happily-ever-afters, and the consequences of your actions are never too harsh or enduring. You can often talk your way out of trouble by means of a heartfelt apology or by the application of a magic wand.
But our first fairy tales (folk tales, really, is how they began, part of the oral tradition back when people used to talk to each other rather than text or IM) weren’t such pretty, easy things.
A fairy tale forest meant wolves and bears hopeful of their next meal lying in wait for the unwary, or robbers hopeful of their next bride/victim.
A fairy tale castle meant lots of locked rooms, and a husband who gave you the key to all of them even the one he forbade you to go into, then expected you
not to unlock the door… where you’d inevitably find the bodies of all your predecessors in various states of decay.
A fairy tale wedding meant your stepmother ended up dancing in red hot iron shoes, and most definitely not blaming it on the boogie.
A fairy tale ending meant you’d escaped the nasty designs of a member of your own family, but your only safety lay in marrying someone you didn’t really know all that well. Frying pan meet fire.
Yet that Burke quote above? That’s what people have started to think of fairy tales: that they don’t press too close. That they are delightful and controllable, manageable little harmless things… sure, harmless as a tribble on a spaceship… harmless as a mogwai fed after midnight and dunked in a bucket of water. Fairy tales do and should press too close; they breathe down our necks in the darkness, and they smell a bit like perfumed meat that’s about three days past its best. So, the fairy tale? Not so much of the child’s play, right?
I’ve long believed that folk and fairy tales are our earliest horror stories. They don’t just set out to scare and entertain, but also to warn us: if you stray from the path, you’ll probably end up a three-course meal for a woodland creature; break-and-enter a cottage and you’ll probably regret it because bears have a very strong sense of natural justice; and if your fiancé looks too good to be true, well then he probably is.
Oral to written, traditional to re-made, the fairy tale is a transforming thing, but each iteration has the same clarion call at its heart: fear. From the predatory-in-more-ways-than-one wolf in the woods to wives obliged to wear velvet ribbons around their necks. From the necrophiliac roots of Basile’s Sleeping Beauty to little men who offer favours then demand you guess their name or they’ll take your child in recompense. From recountings of pale ladies and cold lads to robber bridegrooms who look through you to their next lover before your flesh has had a chance to warm the cool metal of your wedding ring – before you’ve even stopped breathing. From the stepmothers who want to supplant you with their own offspring to princesses who go through the worst, save themselves, but always – always – bear the scars.
Sure, fear can make us panic, can make us run, sometimes straight into the arms of the monsters we’re desperate to avoid. But sometimes it can work in our favour: make us more alert; make us aware of patterns so we can predict what’s coming; make us concentrate our animal nature, make us more vicious, more willing to fight, more likely to survive. Fear is something we cannot escape, but it is something that might (with a bit of luck) as easily save us as kill us.
That’s the gift of the fairy tale, if you know where to look, how to read it, what to accept and what to refuse.
You can see – if you look closely, if you’re clever – the shape of those old tales in the new, everything from a weird tale to a ghost story to a horror story. You can divine the things we don’t understand, the things we fear, the things that go bump in the night – they’re all pressed up against the silk screens of our minds, silhouetted. They flicker in the corner of the eye like a zoetrope that might or might not exist: girls become birds, wolves become boys, witches devour whomever they please. They’re part of a long line of stories that are tricksy, never holding one form, but changing at a moment’s notice, influenced and inflected by the tongue that tells them.
But they all share a little bit of DNA, as do their tellers. A red thread travels heart-to-heart from those who took their primal fears and transmuted them into gold to their modern-day inheritors. Writers like Tanith Lee (“Wolfland”), Joanne Harris (“The Silken People”), Neil Gaiman (“Snow, Glass, Apples”), Margo Lanagan (“The Goosle”), Carmen Maria Machado (“The Husband Stitch”), Kelly Link (“Travels with the Snow Queen), and Clive Barker’s magnum opus, Weaveworld.
Dear reader, in this volume you’ll find just a few of the contributions to the genre by the prolific, talented and disarmingly pleasant Mr Paul Kane − five of them to be precise. Five re-made, re-imagined fairy tales: “Snow” reads like Snow White meets The Descent; “Sleeper(s)” has the feel of Sleeping Beauty enjoying a threesome with Warm Bodies and Zombieland; Cinderella and Se7en get into a clinch in “Sin”; in “Who’s Been…?” Fight Club gets roughed up by the Three Bears; and in “Giants” Jack and the Beanstalk meets big business.
Beware: the writing style is deceptive, conversational: you’re just having a drink with an old friend…who suddenly pulls a gun on you and tells you to get in the van, there’s no time to explain, you just need to trust him. So you do, then he doesn’t stay on the blacktop, does he? Nooooo, he pulls off onto a dirt road that winds through a dark forest and pulls up outside, you guessed it, a fairy tale castle. Next he tells you you’re going to crash a fairy tale wedding so get your sword and shield, get your magic dust, and watch out for the unicorns because they’re temperamental little mongrels. Right: you’re going in.
All of which is a long way of saying Paul Kane’s scary tales will take you (along with your worst wishes and darkest wants) down shadowy paths. Oh, you’ll find the happily-ever-afters are true, although not entirely happy − so perhaps they are all the truer for that. Three things to keep in mind: be careful what you wish for because you just might get it; listen to your fear because it might just keep you alive; and salvation – when it comes, if it comes – might just originate from a most unexpected place, so keep your eyes peeled.
Kane’s characters are believable and relatable, they’re fairy tale folk who pull themselves up by the bootstraps, out of the dark holes into which they’ve been pushed. Then they kick away the skeletal hands holding onto their ankles, and just get on with life. But they never lose the recollection of what happened, they never forget how close they came to being swallowed whole by the darkness. It’s this kind of memory that helps keep them − and you − alive when the terror does press too close.
“They’re fairy tales, Jim, but not as we know them…”
Angela Slatter
Brisbane, Australia
18 October 2017
Snow
The landscape was like a snowglobe.
A world turned upside down and shaken, the flakes falling like frozen tears. Like her tears as she ran. Tears from the pain, tears from the anger and disappointment – mainly in herself.
Everything was white, apart from the drops of red on snow-covered grass. A trail of them, blood escaping from her wounded shoulder, despite the fact she was trying to stem it – arm across and covering it with her hand, squeezing even though the agony was excruciating. She couldn’t leave any traces, nothing for him to find. To… follow. If he caught up with her, he’d finish what he’d started back there at the Jag. Back when he’d shot her.
Angela looked over her shoulder, breath coming out as a stream of mist. She couldn’t see any sign of him, but then she had doubled him up with that knee to the groin. The last she’d seen of Robert, he’d been bent over, rolling around in the snow, also with tears in his eyes. It had been pure instinct, when he’d grabbed her from behind – grabbed her coat, forcing her to shrug it off. She’d turned, still in shock from the damage he’d caused – the only reason he’d caught up in the first place when she’d begun to run away from him – and wham! It was a move she’d had to use a fair few times at university, to get rid of the slime-balls who wouldn’t take no for an answer.
“But… but you’re so beautiful. I only want a kiss.” Yeah, and the rest – but here, let me introduce your privates to a different kind of sensation. Men were all the same, she’d come to realise that; none of them could be trusted, especially where she was concerned. When they realised who she was; when they recognised her. Life wasn’t a Disney movie and there were no Prince Charmings around to sweep you off your feet. Only letches, who’d look at her a certain way, undressing her with their eyes.
So beautiful…
The way Robert did sometimes – though he’d look away when she caught him. Robert; her Uncle Robert. The person who was now trying to kill her.
He wasn’t her rea
l uncle, of course – not that it made his leering any more palatable – just her relative by marriage. Her father’s marriage to that bitch of a woman: her stepmother, Ruth.
Angela paused a moment, staggered sideways and leaned against a tree. She gritted her teeth as she looked down at her shoulder; took her hand away and hissed when she saw the blood staining the sleeve of her white T-shirt, traced the spots of crimson to the snow-covered ground below. Red on white, red on white.
Then she remembered something her dad had said to her when he was still alive – about the time her mother had broken the news to him that she was pregnant. It had been winter then, too, and they’d been walking through the park. Despite the cold, there had been a single red rose blooming nearby. “That’s how I knew what you’d look like,” he used to say, nodding at her ruby lips, the washed-out nature of her skin. Red on white… It was how she’d got her nickname, that ashen complexion – Victorian Pallor, some called it – a contrast to her raven hair.
Angela stared at her namesake, covering everything in sight: the grass; the trees. Covering her tracks as well, which was good. Covering the blood. Her real name had been chosen because she’d been their little angel, a gift from Heaven after they’d been told they couldn’t have children. Maybe they shouldn’t have, Angela often thought; then her mum wouldn’t have died giving birth to her, and her dad would still be–
Snap out of it, she told herself. Focus! Or you’ll be an angel for real when Robert catches up with you.
She clamped her hand over the exit wound again, shoved herself off the tree. Angela thought about calling out again, as she had when she’d first started running – just before that bullet had struck her. But there was nobody around to hear, they were in the middle of nowhere. It was the reason she’d been brought out here in the first place.
That’s what had first tipped her off, when there was simply too much time between buildings as she gazed out at the landscape, pretty as it was. That they were getting further and further away from civilisation, going up into the mountain regions.
