House of Fear

by Joe R. Lansdale

  The door warped in the middle and seemed sure to break, but it held. And then everything went silent.

  I couldn’t say where Elizabeth was at that moment, but it seemed to me that she was in the dog run, standing there, or lurking there. The door no longer swelled, but the cold had grown so that it now filled the room. Our candle guttered out. The fire in the fireplace lost its warmth, and the flames grew low.

  And then there went up such a savage wail that I dropped to my knees with my hands over my ears. Matilda, she stood there, her arms spread. “Elizabeth,” she called out. “It’s me, Matilda.”

  The wail ended, but then the entire house shook, and the living room door to the dog run swelled again and vibrated.

  “It’s grown strong,” Matilda said, and then the door blew apart in thousands of fragments, one of them striking me in the head as I perched on my knees. It didn’t knock me out, but it hurt me badly, and it slammed me to the floor. The way pieces of the house were flying about, I stayed down, was so tight to the ground I felt as if I might become part of it.

  Then the thrashing and the howling of the wind stopped. I looked up. Much of the house was in wreckage around me. The fireplace still stood, but the flames had been blown out.

  I managed to get up. I called out for Matilda. No answer.

  Where the walls had once stood, there was just the night, and beyond I could see something dark moving past the barn toward the woods. It looked like a knot of ropy coils and thrashing sticks, and in its midst, trapped in all those sticks and coils, I got a glimpse of Matilda.

  I looked around and saw the axe lying by the fireplace, where I had split a few chunks of wood to start the fire. I picked it up and ran out into the night after Elizabeth. I was terrified, no doubt, but I thought of Matilda and felt I had no other alternative than to help her if I could.

  The thing moved swiftly and without seeming to touch the ground. Trees leaned wide as it proceeded, not trees from the grove, but all manner of trees, pines and oaks, sweet-gums and hickory. They made plenty of room for it to pass.

  What had felt like a long walk before only seemed to take moments this time, and soon I stood in the clearing, looking at the grove. The mass of limbs, the elemental, Elizabeth, was already closing in on the place, and there I stood with the axe in my hand, and absolutely no idea what to do with it; I felt small and useless.

  I’m ashamed to say I was frozen. I watched as the thing laid Matilda’s body on the ground, gently, and then the limbs whipped and sawed in all directions, and the coils of roots and boughs unknotted, and all those loose projections waved at the night sky.

  And then, it was gone. In its place was a young girl in simple clothes, and even though I had not seen early photos of Matilda, I had seen that very child in her features. It was Elizabeth, looking as Matilda had looked those long years ago when she discovered the grove. I was seeing Elizabeth in the same way Matilda had seen her; she was an invisible child no longer.

  Matilda was on the ground, but now she rose up on an elbow, struggled to sit. She looked directly at Elizabeth. As for me, I was frozen to my spot.

  “Elizabeth,” Matilda said. Her voice was sweet and clear and came to me where I stood at the end of the trail, looking at this fantastic occurrence; I think I was suffering from shock. “You don’t want to hurt me anymore than I want to hurt you.”

  The little girl stood there looking at Matilda, not moving. Matilda slowly stood up. She held out her hand, said, “We are friends. We have always been friends. Don’t be angry. I didn’t mean to leave. I had to leave.”

  The little girl reached out and touched Matilda’s hand. When she did, I saw a sort of whipping movement at the back of her head and along her spine. It was like what she really was, was trying to escape.

  “We are different, you and I, and both our times are ending,” Matilda said. This seemed like a bad time to bring such things up, but then again, I was uncertain there was a perfect way for dealing with what Matilda had called an elemental.

  The wind picked up and the trees in the grove waved at the night air. Matilda continued to talk, but I could no longer hear her. The howling wind was too loud. Limbs from trees, not only in the grove, but from the woods surrounding it, began to fly past me. The air filled with them. I crouched down, but one glanced against my head and knocked me out.

  There really isn’t much to tell after that, and as I warned it’s not all explained. But when I awoke, Matilda was leaning over me, cradling my head in her hands. I had been hit twice in one night, once hard enough to be knocked out, so I’ll admit that my memory of the next few minutes is hazy.

  I do remember that I looked in the direction of the grove and saw that it was gone, twisted out of the ground as if by a tornado. But I knew that storm had not been of this earth.

  When I was able to get to my feet, Matilda and I walked back to the remains of the house. There was really nothing left of it but that chimney. My car was fine, however, and we sat in it to recover. I got some Kleenex out of the glove compartment and held a wad of it to my wounded head.

  “What happened out there?” I asked.

  “Elizabeth was lonely,” Matilda said.

  That wasn’t exactly the answer I was looking for.

  “I saw her,” I said.

  Matilda nodded. “Besides me, you are the first. I suppose she no longer cared if she was seen. I can’t say, really.”

  “She was you?”

  “She was a form of me. She still is.”

  “Still is?”

  “I made her a deal. I would stay with her forever.”

  “But –”

  “She is inside me. She and I are one. It was my trade off. The grove must go. Her anger must go. And she could be with me until the end of my days.”

  I was stunned by this revelation, but I will tell you quite sincerely, I believed it; after what I had seen, I believed Matilda emphatically.

  “What happens then?” I said. “At the end of your days?”

  Matilda shook her head. “I don’t know. But you know what? I feel really good having her back, and I know now that though I’ve been happy all my life, I have on some level still been missing something. That something was Elizabeth. The grove didn’t make Elizabeth from its elemental powers, it pulled her out of me and gave her to me. She was another side of me, and she was a side I needed. A friend. I was happy because of her, not in spite of her, and now that the other part of me is back, my middle name, I feel refreshed. It’s like having a missing arm sewn back on.”

  We sat there and talked for a long time, and some of what she said resonated with me, but most of it was merely confusing. Suffice to say, the house was gone, the grove was gone, and I never saw Elizabeth again. Matilda and I claimed the house had been taken down by a tornado, and who was to argue. Who was to guess an elemental force from time eternal had torn it down in a rage, and that what remained of it was now inside Matilda. Or so she claimed.

  My head healed. You can still see a scar. I told Cliff the story, and he acted like he didn’t believe me, but I think he did. I have a feeling he may have seen something strange there before I did, but didn’t want to own up to it. Oddly enough, I never crossed William’s path again. But I’m sure he had an experience in the house as well and that’s why he left.

  What else? Oh, the landlady got insurance money. Matilda and I stayed in touch until her death. I suppose she must have been ninety when she passed. They did discover one odd thing after her departure. Matilda had been confined to her bed, no longer able to walk, and in the last few months of her life, not capable of communicating. But during the night they heard a terrible noise, and when they rushed into her room they found her lying dead on her bed, but the room, well, it was torn apart. The window had been blown out and the bed clothes that had covered Matilda were missing, as if there had been some great suction that had take them away, carried them out the window, along with fragments of a busted chair and all the paintings and easels in the room.
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  They were all gone, and never found. There were a number of theories, but no satisfactory explanations. My explanation is Elizabeth. I like to think maybe Matilda’s soul went with her to some place nice and eternal. Again, I can’t say for sure, and I can explain it no further than that.

  I don’t know what else there is to say. That’s my story, and it’s just what happened to me. I apologize for it not being a made-up tale, considering so many stories told tonight were good, and highly imaginative, but that’s all I’ve got, and it’s true, so I hope it’ll do.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  Nina Allan is a regular contributor to magazines such as Interzone and Black Static, and her stories have featured in the anthologies Catastrophia, Year’s Best SF 28, and Best Horror of the Year Volume 2. She won Ireland’s Aeon Award in 2007 and has twice been shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Fiction. A first collection of her stories, A Thread of Truth, is published by Eibonvale Press. Her new book, Stardust, will be available from PS Publishing in autumn 2012.

  Chaz Brenchley has been making a living as a writer since the age of eighteen. He is the author of nine thrillers, most recently Shelter, and two fantasy series, The Books of Outremer and Selling Water by the River. As Daniel Fox, he has published a Chinese-based fantasy series, beginning with Dragon in Chains; as Ben Macallan, an urban fantasy, Desdaemona. A British Fantasy Award winner, he has also published books for children and more than 500 short stories in various genres. His time as crimewriter-in-residence on a sculpture project in Sunderland resulted in the collection Blood Waters. His first play, A Cold Coming, was performed and then toured in 2007. He is a prize-winning ex-poet, and has been writer-in-residence at the University of Northumbria. He was Northern Writer of the Year 2000, and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne with two squabbling cats and a famous teddy bear.

  Eric Brown has won the British Science Fiction Award twice for his short stories and has published forty books. His latest include the novel The Kings of Eternity and the children’s book A Monster Ate My Marmite. His work has been translated into sixteen languages and he writes a monthly science-fiction review column for the Guardian. He lives near Cambridge, England, with his wife and daughter. His website can be found at www.ericbrownsf.co.uk.

  Christopher Fowler was born in Greenwich, London. He is the award-winning author of thirty novels and ten short story collections, and author of the popular Bryant & May mysteries. He has fulfilled several schoolboy fantasies, releasing a terrible Christmas pop single, becoming a male model, posing as the villain in a Batman graphic novel, running a night club, appearing in the Pan Books of Horror and standing in for James Bond. His work divides into black comedy, horror, mystery and tales unclassifiable enough to have publishers tearing their hair out. After living in France and the USA he is now married and lives in King’s Cross, London. His latest novel, Hell Train, is due out with Solaris in January 2012.

  Jonathan Green is a writer of speculative fiction, with more than thirty books to his name. Well known for his contributions to the Fighting Fantasy range of adventure gamebooks, and numerous Black Library publications, he has also written fiction for such diverse properties as Doctor Who, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Sonic the Hedgehog and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He is the creator of the Pax Britannia series for Abaddon Books and, to date, has written seven novels set within this steampunk universe. He currently divides his time between West London and rural Wiltshire. To find out more about his latest projects visit www.jonathangreenauthor.com.

  Garry Kilworth has just reached the biblical age of 3-score-years-and-10. As a creative writer he feels he is at his happiest with the short story form. He loves travelling, both inside and outside his own head. Garry lives quite close to the Dunwich in the tale in this collection and frequently walks the long and lonely beach below the cliffs, sometimes running into the ghost of MR James, who also set stories in the same location. On such occasions Garry does not forget to tip his hat to the great writer’s phantom and acknowledge that James’ story ‘Oh, Whistle, And I’ll Come To You, My Lad’ scared the pants off him when he heard it on the wireless programme The Man In Black at the age of 8.

  Terry Lamsley’s early stories were set in his then-home town of Buxton in Derbyshire, but lately he has widened his horizon somewhat. In 1994 his first collection Under the Crust was nominated for three World Fantasy Awards and was given the award for Year’s Best Novella for the title story. Since then his tales have appeared in a number of magazines, collections and anthologies, the most recent being The Very Best of Best New Horror edited by Stephen Jones and published by Earthling in 2010. For the past ten years he has lived an interesting life in Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

  Joe R. Lansdale is the author of thirty novels and numerous short stories and short articles, as well as comic and film scripts. He has been awarded the Edgar, eight Bram Stoker awards, the British Fantasy Award, the Herodotus Award, the Grinzani Cavour Prize for Literature, and many other recognitions. He has been recognized four times by the International Martial Arts Hall of fame, and occasionally teaches writing at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas where he is writer-in-residence. His novella, Bubba Hotep, was made into a cult film of the same name, and his story ‘Incident On and Off a Mountain Road’ was filmed for Showtime’s Masters of Horror, and he recently was Executive Producer of Christmas with the Dead, a forthcoming film based on his short story of the same title. It was directed by Terrill Lee Lankford from a script by Keith Lansdale.

  Tim Lebbon is a New York Times-bestselling writer from South Wales. He’s had twenty novels published to date, including Echo City from Orbit, The Secret Journeys of Jack London: The Wild for HarperCollins (co-authored with Christopher Golden), The Island, The Map of Moments (with Christopher Golden), Bar None, Fallen, Hellboy: The Fire Wolves, Dusk, and Berserk, as well as hundreds of novellas and short stories. He has won four British Fantasy Awards, a Bram Stoker Award, and a Scribe Award, and has been a finalist for International Horror Guild, Shirley Jackson, and World Fantasy Awards. Forthcoming books include another novel for Orbit in the UK, the zombie/SF novel Coldbrook, and the massive short story collection Ghosts and Bleeding Things from PS Publishing, as well as several other projects. Fox 2000 recently acquired film rights to The Secret Journeys of Jack London, and Tim and Christopher Golden have delivered the screenplay. His story Pay the Ghost is in development with a Hollywood studio, and several more of his novels and novellas are also currently in development. He is working on several TV and movie proposals, solo and in collaboration.

  Rebecca Levene has neither shame nor pride. She likes writing and rarely says no when someone asks her to do some. This might explain how she’s come to write a children’s adaptation of The Three Musketeers, a Beginner’s Guide to Poker, an extremely sweary video game and an erotic romance. She’s currently working on the third volume of her series of supernatural thrillers. The first two – Cold Warriors and Ghost Dance – are available from all good bookshops.

  Graham Joycehas said of Paul Meloy that ‘he is one of the best writers of short stories in Britain’ and, indeed, Paul has wonthe British Fantasy Award for his short fiction, much of which has been collected in the acclaimed Islington Crocodiles (TTA Press). When he’s not dreaming up dark and surreal worlds, he works as a psychiatric nurse.

  Adam Nevill was born in Birmingham, England, in 1969 and grew up in England and New Zealand. He is the author of the supernatural horror novels, Banquet for the Damned, Apartment 16, and The Ritual. He lives in London and can be contacted through www.adamlgnevill.com.

  Weston Ochse absolutely believes in haunted houses. He’s lived in two of them. He was able to come to terms with the ghost in the most recent haunted house, a lonely old man who died and was forgotten for months. But the entity that lives in the attic of his first haunted house is another story altogether. Although he was only eight years old when he lived between those vile walls, the entity still haunts him. That his mothe
r has dreams of it too is a cause for worry. Perhaps that’s what drove him to write dark fantasy. He’s won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize for Fiction. His work has appeared in comic books, magazines, How-To writing guides, anthologies and most recently, his collection entitled Multiplex Fandango. He lives in Southern Arizona within sight of the Mexican-US border.

  Sarah Pinborough is a horror, thriller and YA author who has had ten novels published thus far across that range. Her latest releases are The Shadow of the Soul (Gollancz, April 2011) – the second of the Dog-Faced Gods trilogy – and The Traitor’s Gate, (Gollancz, June 2011 under the name Sarah Silverwood) which is the second volume of The Nowhere Chronicles. Her short stories have appeared in several anthologies and she has a horror screenplay currently in development. Sarah was the 2009 winner of the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story, and has three times been short-listed for Best Novel. She has also been short-listed for a World Fantasy Award. Her novella, The Language of Dying (PS Publishing) was short-listed for the Shirley Jackson Award and won the 2010 British Fantasy Award for Best Novella.

  Christopher Priest was born in Cheshire, England. He began writing soon after leaving school and has been a full-time freelance writer since 1968. He has published eleven novels, four short story collections and a number of other books, including critical works, biographies, novelizations and children’s non-fiction. His novel The Separation won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the BSFA Award while the Hugo-nominated The Prestige was adapted for the big screen by director Christopher Nolan. His latest novel is The Islanders, available from Gollancz.