The Mammoth Book of Extreme Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  He released his grip on the tiller and let the craft lead him with its knowledge of the map he’d shown it. His fingers gripped tightly into the eye holes of two of the skulls that formed his seat, and he held on so as not to be thrown overboard. Pyriphlegethon now blazed ahead of him, and the sight of its roiling flames, some flaring high into the night, made him scream, not with fear but exhilaration. The boat forged forward, cleaved the burning surface, and then was engulfed in a yellow-orange brightness that gave no heat. The frantic illumination dazed Charon, and he sat as in a trance, dreaming wide awake. He no longer felt the passage of Time, the urgency to reach his destination, the weight of all those things he’d fled on his holiday.

  Eventually, after a prolonged bright journey, the blazing waters became turbulent, lost their fire, and a thick mist rose off them. The mist quickly became a fog that seemed to have texture, brushing against his skin like a feather. He thought he might grab handfuls until it slipped through his fingers, leaked into his nostrils, and wrapped its tentacles around his memory.

  When the boatman awoke to the daily birth cry of Hell’s sun, he found himself lying naked upon his bed, staring up at the clutch of bat bones dangling from the cranial center of his skull home. He was startled at first, grasping awkwardly for a tiller that wasn’t there, tightening his fist around the shaft of the absent shallows stick that instead rested at an angle against the doorway. As soon as the shock of discovery that he was home had abated, he sighed deeply and sat up on the edge of the bed. It struck him then that his entire journey, his holiday, had been for naught.

  He frantically searched his thoughts for the slightest shred of a memory that he might have reached Oondeshai, but every trace had been forgotten. For the first time in centuries, tears came to his eyes, and the frustration of his predicament made him cry out. Eventually, he stood and found his cloak rolled into a ball on the floor at the foot of his bed. He dressed and without stopping to put on his boots or grab the shallows pole, he left his home.

  With determination in his stride, he mounted the small rise that lay back behind the skull and stood at the rim of the enormous pit. Inching to the very edge, he peered down into the spiraled depths at the faint red glow. The screams of tortured sinners, the wailing laments of self-pity, sounded in his ears like distant voices in a dream. Beneath it all he could barely discern, like the buzzing of a fly, the sound of the master laughing uproariously, joyously, and that discordant strain seemed to lace itself subtly into everything.

  Charon’s anger and frustration slowly melted into a kind of numbness as cold as the hallways of Satan’s palace, and he swayed to and fro, out over the edge and back, not so much wanting to jump as waiting to fall. Time passed, he was not aware how much, and then as suddenly as he had dressed and left his home, he turned away from the pit.

  Once more inside the skull, he prepared to go to work. There was a great heaviness within him, as if his very organs were now made of lead, and each step was an effort, each exhalation a sigh. He found his eel skin ankle boots beneath the table at which he’d studied the flesh map at night. Upon lifting one, it turned in his hand, and a steady stream of blonde sand poured out onto the floor. The sight of it caught him off guard and for a moment he stopped breathing.

  He fell to his knees to inspect the little pile that had formed. Carefully, he lifted the other boot, turned it over and emptied that one into its own neat little pile next to the other. He reached towards these twin wonders, initially wanting to feel the grains run through his fingers, but their stark proof that he had been to Oondeshai and could not recall a moment of it ultimately defeated his will and he never touched them. Instead, he stood, took up the shallows pole and left the skull for his boat.

  As he guided the boat between the two giant oaks, he no longer wondered if all his journeys across the Acheron were always the same journey. With a dull aspect, he performed his duties as the boatman. His muscles, educated in the task over countless centuries, knew exactly how to avoid the blue serpent and skirt the whirlpools without need of a single thought. No doubt it was these same unconscious processes that had brought Charon and his craft back safely from Oondeshai.

  Gesnil and Trinkthil inquired with great anticipation about his vacation when he met them on the far shore. For the demons, who knew no respite from the drudgery of herding sinners, even a few words about a holiday away would have been like some rare confection, but he told them nothing. From the look on Charon’s face, they knew not to prod him and merely sent the travellers forward to offer coins and take their places on the benches.

  During the return trip that morning, a large fellow sitting amongst the passengers had a last second attack of nerves in the face of an impending eternity of suffering. He screamed incoherently, and Charon ordered him to silence. When the man stood up and began pacing back and forth, the boat man ordered him to return to his seat. The man persisted moving about, his body jerking with spasms of fear, and it was obvious his antics were spooking the other sinners. Fearing the man would spread mutiny, Charon came forth with the shallows stick and bringing it around like a club, split the poor fellow’s head. That was usually all the incentive a recalcitrant passenger needed to return to the bench, but this one was now insane with the horror of his plight.

  The boatman waded in and beat him wildly, striking him again and again. With each blow, Charon felt some infinitesimal measure of relief from his own frustration. When he was finished, the agitator lay in a heap on deck, nothing more than a flesh bag full of broken bones, and the other passengers shuffled their feet sideways as not to touch it.

  Only later, after he had docked his boat in the lagoon and the winged demons had flown out of the pit to lead the damned up the flint hill and down along the spiral path to their eternal destinies, did the boatman regret his rage. As he lifted the sac of flesh that had been his charge and dumped it like a bale of chum over the side, he realized that the man’s hysteria had been one and the same thing as his own frustration.

  The sun sounded its death cry as it sank into a pool of blood that was the horizon and then Hell’s twilight came on. Charon dragged himself up the hill and went inside his home. Before pure night closed its fist on the river bank, he kicked off his boots, gnawed on a haunch of Harpy flesh, and lit the tallow that sat in its holder on the table. Taking his seat there he stared into the flame, thinking of it as the future that constantly drew him forward through years, decades, centuries, eons, as the past disappeared behind him. “I am nothing but a moment,” he said aloud and his words echoed around the empty skull.

  Some time later, still sitting at his chair at the table, he noticed the candle flame twitch. His eyes shifted for the first time in hours to follow its movement. Then the fire began to dance, the sheets of flesh parchment lifted slightly at their corners, the bat bones clacked quietly overhead. Hell’s deceptive wind of memory had begun to blow. He heard it whistling in through the space in his home’s grin, felt its coolness sweep around him. This most complex and exquisite torture that brought back to sinners the times of their lives, now worked on the boatman. He moved his bare feet beneath the table and realized the piles of sand lay beneath them.

  The image began in his mind no more than a dot of blue and then rapidly unfolded in every direction to reveal a sky and crystal water. The sun there in Oondeshai had been yellow and it gave true warmth. This he remembered clearly. He’d sat high on a hill of blonde sand, staring out across the endless vista of sparkling water. Next to him on the left was Wieroot, legs crossed, dressed in a black robe and sporting a beard to hide the healing scars that riddled his face. On the right was the young woman with the shining black hair and the red dot of a birthmark beneath her left eye.

  “…And you created this all by writing it in the other world?” asked Charon. There was a breeze blowing and the boatman felt a certain lightness inside as if he’d eaten of one of the white clouds floating across the sky.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” said Wieroot, “alt
hough it’s a shame you’ll never get a chance to put it to use.”

  “Tell me,” said the boatman.

  “God made the world with words,” he said in a whisper.

  Charon remembered that he didn’t understand. He furrowed his brow and turned to look at the young woman to see if she was laughing. Instead she was also nodding along with Wieroot. She put her hand on the boatman’s shoulder and said, “And man made God with words.”

  Charon’s memory of the beach on Oondeshai suddenly gave violent birth to another memory from his holiday. He was sitting in a small structure with no door, facing out into a night scene of tall trees whose leaves were blowing in a strong wind. Although it was night, it was not the utter darkness he knew from his quadrant of Hell. High in the black sky there shone a bright disk, which cast its beams down onto the island. Their glow had seeped into the small home behind him and fell upon the forms of Wieroot and the woman, Shara was her name, where they slept upon a bed of reeds. Beneath the sound of the wind, the calls of night birds, the whirr of insects, he heard the steady breathing of the sleeping couple.

  And one last memory followed. Charon recalled Wieroot drawing near to him as he was about to board his boat for the return journey.

  “You told me you committed murder,” said the boatman.

  “I did,” said Wieroot.

  “Who?”

  “That god whose skull you live in,” came the words which grew faint and then disappeared as the night wind of Hell ceased blowing. The memories faded and Charon looked up to see the candle flame again at rest. He reached across the table and drew his writing quill and a sheaf of parchment towards him. Dipping the pen nib into the pot of blood that was his ink, he scratched out two words at the top of the page. My Story, he wrote, and then set about remembering the future. The words came, slowly at first, reluctantly, dragging their imagery behind them, but after a short while their numbers grew to equal the number of sinners awaiting a journey to the distant shore. He ferried them methodically, expertly, from his mind to the page, scratching away long into the dark night of Hell until down at the bottom of the spiral pit, in his palace of frozen sighs, Satan suddenly stopped laughing.

  THE DETWEILER BOY

  Tom Reamy

  Tom Reamy’s life was cut tragically short when he died in November 1977 aged only 42, only three years after his first professional story sale and a matter of months before his first novel, Blind Voices was published. His few published stories were collected posthumously in San Diego Lightfoot Sue and Other Stories (1979). Reamy had been well known in science-fiction and fantasy fandom for some years, and published what many regarded as the most beautifully produced of all amateur magazines, Trumpet. This later metamorphosed into Nickelodeon, where Reamy helped encourage the careers of several local writers, including Howard Waldrop. Reamy worked in the aerospace industry, but when that wound down in the early seventies he turned his hand to printing and graphic design. He also helped publish another beautiful magazine of the seventies, Shayol, which published early material by Pat Cadigan and, again, Howard Waldrop. Reamy was a craftsman and seldom satisfied with his stories, and so completed only a few. Yet his work immediately attracted attention and in 1976 he won the Campbell Award as Best New Writer. I was keen to include one of Reamy’s stories in this volume and settled on the following, which is the closest this anthology comes to extreme horror.

  The room had been cleaned with pine-oil disinfectant and smelled like a public toilet. Harry Spinner was on the floor behind the bed, scrunched down between it and the wall. The almost colourless chenille bedspread had been pulled askew exposing part of the clean but dingy sheet. All I could see of Harry was one leg poking over the edge of the bed. He wasn’t wearing a shoe, only a faded brown and tan argyle sock with a hole in it. The sock, long bereft of any elasticity, was crumpled around his thin rusty ankle.

  I closed the door quietly behind me and walked around the end of the bed so I could see all of him. He was huddled on his back with his elbows propped up by the wall and the bed. His throat had been cut. The blood hadn’t spread very far. Most of it had been soaked up by the threadbare carpet under the bed. I looked around the grubby little room but didn’t find anything. There were no signs of a struggle, no signs of forced entry – but then, my BankAmericard hadn’t left any signs either. The window was open, letting in the muffled roar of traffic on the Boulevard. I stuck my head out and looked, but it was three stories straight down to the neon-lit marquee of the movie house.

  It had been nearly two hours since Harry called me. “Bertram, my boy, I’ve run across something very peculiar. I don’t really know what to make of it.”

  I had put away the report I was writing on Lucas McGowan’s hyperactive wife. (She had a definite predilection for gas-pump jockeys, car-wash boys, and parking-lot attendants. I guess it had something to do with the Age of the Automobile.) I propped my feet on my desk and leaned back until the old swivel chair groaned a protest.

  “What did you find this time, Harry? A nest of international spies or an invasion from Mars?” I guess Harry Spinner wasn’t much use to anyone, not even himself, but I liked him. He’d helped me in a couple of cases, nosing around in places only the Harry Spinners of the world can nose around in unnoticed. I was beginning to get the idea he was trying to play Doctor Watson to my Sherlock Holmes.

  “Don’t tease me, Bertram. There’s a boy here in the hotel. I saw something I don’t think he wanted me to see. It’s extremely odd.”

  Harry was also the only person in the world, except my mother, who called me Bertram. “What did you see?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it over the phone. Can you come over?”

  Harry saw too many old private-eye movies on the late show. “It’ll be a while. I’ve got a client coming in in a few minutes to pick up the poop on his wandering wife.”

  “Bertram, you shouldn’t waste your time and talent on divorce cases.”

  “It pays the bills, Harry. Besides, there aren’t enough Maltese falcons to go around.”

  By the time I filled Lucas McGowan in on all the details (I got the impression he was less concerned with his wife’s infidelity than with her taste; that it wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d been shacking up with movie stars or international playboys), collected my fee, and grabbed a Thursday special at Colonel Sanders’, almost two hours had passed. Harry hadn’t answered my knock, and so I let myself in with a credit card.

  Birdie Pawlowicz was a fat, slovenly old broad somewhere between forty and two hundred. She was blind in her right eye and wore a black felt patch over it. She claimed she had lost the eye in a fight with a Creole whore over a riverboat gambler. I believed her. She ran the Brewster Hotel the way Florence Nightingale must have run that stinking army hospital in the Crimea.

  Her tenants were the losers habitating that rotting section of the Boulevard east of the Hollywood Freeway. She bossed them, cursed them, loved them, and took care of them. (Once, a couple of years ago, a young black buck thought an old fat lady with one eye would make easy pickings. The cops found him three days later, two blocks away, under some rubbish in an alley where he’d hidden. He had a broken arm, two cracked ribs, a busted nose, a few missing teeth, and was stone-dead from internal hemorrhaging.)

  The Brewster ran heavily in the red, but Birdie didn’t mind. She had quite a bit of property in Westwood which ran very, very heavily in the black. She gave me an obscene leer as I approached the desk, but her good eye twinkled.

  “Hello, lover!” she brayed in a voice like a cracked boiler. “I’ve lowered my price to a quarter. Are you interested?” She saw my face and her expression shifted from lewd to wary. “What’s wrong, Bert?”

  “Harry Spinner. You’d better get the cops, Birdie. Somebody killed him.”

  She looked at me, not saying anything, her face slowly collapsing into an infinitely weary resignation. Then she turned and telephoned the police. Because it was just Harry Spinner at the Brewster Hotel
on the wrong end of Hollywood Boulevard, the cops took over half an hour to get there. While we waited I told Birdie everything I knew, about the phone call and what I’d found.

  “He must have been talking about the Detweiler boy,” she said, frowning. “Harry’s been kinda friendly with him, felt sorry for him, I guess.”

  “What’s his room? I’d like to talk to him.”

  “He checked out.”

  “When?”

  “Just before you came down.”

  “Damn!”

  She bit her lip. “I don’t think the Detweiler boy killed him.”

  “Why?”

  “I just don’t think he could. He’s such a gentle boy.”

  “Oh, Birdie,” I groaned, “you know there’s no such thing as a killer type. Almost anyone will kill with a good enough reason.”

  “I know,” she sighed, “but I still can’t believe it.” She tapped her scarlet fingernails on the dulled Formica desktop. “How long had Harry been dead?”

  He had phoned me about ten after five. I had found the body at seven. “A while,” I said. “The blood was mostly dry.”

  “Before six-thirty?”

  “Probably.”

  She sighed again, but this time with relief. “The Detweiler boy was down here with me until six-thirty. He’d been here since about four-fifteen. We were playing gin. He was having one of his spells and wanted company.”

  “What kind of spell? Tell me about him, Birdie.”

  “But he couldn’t have killed Harry,” she protested.