Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  He looked at me, and his gaze seemed to peer into my very soul, summing me up and finding me worthless. ‘I feel sorry for those of you who apprehend only...’ he gestured with a long, thin hand, ‘only this. Oh, there are realities out there so strange and bizarre, if only you could allow your mind to see them.’ He shook his head bitterly. ‘But you’ve all been conditioned by the modern world, the crass information media which doesn’t allow for any historical perspective other than the immediate. The difficult thing is to decondition oneself, to see beyond what is only superficially apparent.’ He paused, then shot me a glance. ‘But it’s frightening, Simon...Believe me, when you begin to see these other realms, at first you are lost, with nothing to guide you, no prior experience to make sense of things...Sometimes I am terrified.’

  I was aware of my heartbeat. I poured a stiff measure of whisky into my mug and drank. Beauregard seemed on the edge of a revelation. I felt that now he would tell me something that might explain the enigma of himself, but as the silence stretched it came to me that he had said all that he was able: that it was my very lack of ability to comprehend anything other than the here and now that would render his explanations futile.

  I opened my mouth to speak. What I had to ask him seemed relevant and yet profane.

  ‘Is that. . .’ I began. ‘Last night, you were about to tell me what happened ... I mean, you told Sabine, you showed her something. . .’

  He turned his head from the flames, his expression devastated. ‘I showed her, Simon, and I tried to help her cope with her new understanding, but she wasn’t strong enough. She could not bear the knowledge.’

  The silence stretched. I took another swallow of whisky, my head swimming. I had a vision of the superficiality of my life, my relationships and my work. It seemed then that I was granted a terrible insight into the fact that what I had known all along amounted to nothing - and that I was equipped to apprehend only this reality. It came to me that what drove Sabine to kill herself might be preferable, however difficult to accept, to an existence of continued ignorance.

  I found my voice, at last. ‘Can you show me?’ I whispered.

  His gaze seemed pained and full of compassion. It seemed to me that he wanted to share his burden then, but at the same time could not bring himself to be so cruel. ‘Simon, I’m sorry. I know you, and I know that you wouldn’t be able to accept. . .’ He smiled, and reached out a hand to touch mine in a gesture of intimacy I had always thought beyond him.

  We sat in silence, drinking, for what seemed like hours. I roused myself from sleep, sat up and yawned. Beauregard was still awake, staring into the dying embers with an ironic, unamused smile playing on his lips.

  ‘I’m turning in,’ I said.

  He looked at me. ‘Good night, Simon,’ he said, and there was something of a farewell in his tone.

  I slept soundly, anaesthetised by the drink, until the early hours. As I lay awake, I thought I heard again the sound of voices from down below - and something told me that they did not issue from the television.

  A part of me shied away from investigating, afraid of what I might find. Another part knew that I could not ignore my curiosity. I found my dressing-gown and hurried down the stairs.

  The same blue light leaked from the gap beneath the door, for all the world like the fluctuating glow of a TV set. I leaned my head close to the door, heard the rapid exchange of voices that might very well have been the charged dialogue of a drama series. I reached for the handle, knowing full well that the door would not open.

  I turned the handle and leaned forward with all my weight. Slowly the door gave, opened perhaps six inches. The strange thing was that I felt no scraping resistance, as I would if a piece of furniture had been wedged beneath the handle. Instead, it was as if I was pushing against a constant, forceful pressure from within. I lodged my slippered foot in the opening and peered through.

  The light had intensified, bathing my face with a dazzling blue radiance. As I screwed my eyes shut to filter the glare, I heard a woman’s voice: ‘You didn’t think for a minute that you could get away? Even here, in this Godforsaken wilderness?’

  Then Beauregard’s: ‘I hoped, of course. I should have known...’

  The woman laughed. ‘Even they couldn’t help you!’

  ‘They did, for a while.’

  ‘For a while, yes. It was only a matter of time before I overcame their resistance.’

  I choked. I had an awful premonition. I had heard the woman’s high, stilted accent before, long before - twenty years ago, to be exact.

  My eyes became accustomed to the light, and I stared, and saw at the source of the lapis lazuli radiation the figure of a woman: she was thin, dressed like a hippy, with a cheesecloth shirt and flared denims; she had her hair coiled in familiar braids and wore fastidious, John Lennon glasses.

  Sabine...

  Beauregard was kneeling before her, like a supplicant before some vision. On his face was an expression of such tortured anguish that the features of the Beauregard I knew were almost indistinguishable.

  ‘What do you want from me?’ he cried.

  Sabine laughed. ‘I want to show you what it is like,’ she said.

  I could take no more. Whether in fright, or an inability to hold open the door against the pressure from within the room, I staggered backwards with a cry. The door snapped shut, and I was pitched into relative darkness. Sobbing, I clawed my way to the banister and staggered up the stairs. I made it to my room, switched on the light and curled myself into a protective ball, shaking with delayed and paralysing shock at what I had witnessed.

  I must have slept, against all odds, though fitfully. I came awake often, and always the first vision that greeted me was that of the blue light with Sabine at its centre.

  I awoke finally with a bright winter sunlight slanting into the room. It was late. Hurriedly I dressed, fingers fumbling with my clothes. I made my way down the stairs, and as I approached the study I relived the events of the early hours. I knew that this time I had to confront Beauregard with what I had seen.

  He was no longer in the study. Not even his rucksack remained. I hurried to the door and flung it open. He had taken his leave, perhaps hours ago. A line of footprints, almost filled in by the new fall of morning snow, led away from the house and up the hillside to the far horizon.

  * * * *

  If this were a work of fiction, one of my stories Beauregard so despised, I would take pains to craft a satisfying denouement; I would explain everything and tie up all the loose ends, in the manner that Beauregard disdained in his marginalia. It would be a ghost story, and I would show the reader what horror he had made manifest to Sabine all those years ago. The apparition of Sabine would be a Tulpa, a spectre from Tibetan lore, returned to haunt Beauregard for showing her what should have remained his own, private secret.

  But life is not fiction; there are no neat resolutions and answers, no cosy denouements to satisfy and entertain. I have presented the incidents as they occurred, and for the sake of my sanity I prefer to think that what I saw last night was no more than the product of my drunken imagination, fuelled by lack of sleep, Beauregard’s recollections, and my own confused thoughts of the poor German girl who was driven, for reasons that will remain forever unknown, to end her life.

  I often think of Beauregard as I sit here and type my safe, satisfying little stories. I consider the torture of inhabiting a world that ordinary people are unable to perceive, and I see him walking, always walking, through freezing winter landscapes, pursued by the spectre of the young girl who forever haunts his guilty conscience.

  Eric Brown lives in Haworth, West Yorkshire, and is perhaps better known as one of Britain’s new generation of science fiction writers. He has published nine books -the novels Meridian Days, EnginemanandPenumbra-,the short story collections The Time-Lapsed Man and Other Stories and Blue Shifting, plus two children’s books, Untouchable and Walkabout. The first volume of the ‘Virex Trilogy’, New York Nights,
recently appeared from Gollancz, andParallax View,a short story collection written in collaboration with Keith Brooke, has just been published by Sarob Press. More than fifty of his stories have been published in such magazines and anthologies as Interzone, SF Age, New WorldsandMoon Shots.‘The eponymous Beauregard was extrapolated from the characters of two close friends who both live only marginally in this world,’ explains the author. ‘Their view of reality is frightening and hellish, as is Beauregard’s, though for entirely different reasons. Also, I wanted to write a story from the point of view of a writer who despises himself. And I’ve always wanted to write a Tulpa story. These three elements came together to produce “Beauregard”.’

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  * * * *

  Necromimicos

  NANCY KILPATRICK

  The dead bring her life. Since the moment of consciousness of their presence, Amulette, rather than dismiss them, begged the dead to remain. Amulette’s mother, father, grand-mere - the lucky one, for whom she is named - two sisters and baby brother, none understand her need for those who have passed. No one understands, really. Only Etienne.

  As she matured, her thinking on cemeteries altered. From vast and lovely gardens, they became her personal shopping mall. Wrought-iron gates, stone benches, candles encased in etched glass-and-brass holders, marble angels and cherubs, filigreed metallic crosses...Memento mori. The accoutrements of death, scanned by the eye of a selective consumer. Furnishings for the world between worlds where Amulette resides. The only place where she can exist.

  As the sun fades, Amulette leaves the city-din behind: stores dedicated to the here-and-now, or cheap imitations of the past. Inexhaustible vehicles. Food, entertainment, pursuits she cannot understand. People dressed of-a-piece - for a time she enjoyed classifying them: business, casual, post-grunge, retro hippy, neo-rave, Goth - the last those oh-so-sweet darklings in requisite chains, silver crosses clinging to black stretch velvet. To look at them reinforces her yearning.

  She turns up a small street and gracefully climbs the mountain with the lit cross atop. The homes en route are stone and wood, the estates of Outremont, where Montreal’s wealthy Francophones reside. These edifices oppress her with their blind devotion to one world only. She closes her eyes - this path is a trace memory, a former life, the Karma finally nullified.

  Soon she reaches broken sidewalks and barren fields, then the Jewish cemetery on the left, the tombstones too modern to be truly interesting. The graves are blanketed with flowers, the colours muted enough by moonlight to be bearable. Hours ago the gates to Mt Royal Cemetery were bolted, but when the guard naps, the footpath beneath the arched stones allows admittance.

  Just inside the Anglo burial grounds, she skirts by the monument to the Englishman killed by the French in a riot one hundred years ago, the inscription bitter. Then the suicides’ section of the cemetery -isolated crosses, separated from one another as they are separated from the rest of the graves - she knows she could end up here, or somewhere like it. Then the children’s graveyard - tiny sleeping angels, or baby lambs, nestled on low stone Bibles.

  She climbs upwards, passes through an arched metal gate. Veterans lie beneath the soil. Rigid row upon row of standardised soldierly markers...To die undifferentiated, she can think of nothing more painful.

  The moment she enters the Cimetière Notre-Dame des Neige, tension lifts from her body like a spirit ascending. Tombstones date back two hundred years. White, grey, patinaed with age. Celtic crosses. Crucifixes. Enormous angels, languid in mourning. Elaborate stone and metal-work, unique when created, nurtured by the harsh elements of a city prone to deep freeze. This is the only place where she feels truly French. Her ancestors knew how to care for those who sired them. Too few of the living have adopted their legacy: blooms decomposing; funereal candles flickering; poetic inscriptions, waiting. ‘Remember me, in your arms,’ she reads, her voice a call to other stranded souls.

  So quiet, amongst the dead. The living talk, move, do what they do for whatever reasons they can convince themselves lend relevancy. Amulette feels their energy - waves of scorching heat, sucking her towards oblivion. Incinerate or flee, there is no alternative, she knows. Only Etienne. But he is...where? There are no maps in the land of the dead. And so she tends those she finds by night, because someone must, and she is called to. And somehow this allows her to honour him.

  She stands silent, listening to crickets, absorbing the rays of the full moon, all the light she can tolerate. Here, on Montreal’s mountain, over seven hundred thousand dead exist in three adjoining cemeteries, creating a necropolis. Boxes of bones piled on newer boxes of bones, three and four layers deep, until the boxes burst open and the hungry earth swallows all that the worms refuse. During daylight, caretakers perpetually dig new graves. Pits, open for days, sometimes expose coffins, casket linings, hair and soil-matted death shrouds, human bones. Bits and pieces embroiled in transformation. Amulette climbs into the open graves to rebury these remains. The dirt, so deep, tastes of death-passion. She consumes it like vitamins, daily, an enrichment. Something to keep her going.

  In the darkness, back against the hill, dozens of old tombs now abandoned by the living line the higher ground, embedded in this sacred earth like babes cradled in a mother’s arms. Ornate iron doors, the complex stonework of the crypts themselves, all buried in grassy mounds. Family names mark the houses of the long dead, but one reads, simply: FATHER. The gate surrounding this crypt has disintegrated. Last winter, the heavy stone cross above toppled and shattered, blocking entrance, or exit.

  Much of the grille work of the doors of these crypts exposes to view the centuries-old coffins within. Large black or brown wood and metal chevrons, tarnished handles, and then the tiny boxes for dead babies, or those that were never born.

  One tomb draws her. She wonders if Etienne is related - LEBLANC, the family name. He must be, somewhere back in time. Over the door, a dozen feet above ground, a bird, sculpted in dark marble, wings a shroud protecting its body.

  Amulette climbs the mound to the top of the crypt. She lies face down, stretched across the earth, and reaches below, blind. Cold-feather wings; beak the hard harbinger of truth. As always, she cries chilly tears. For Etienne.

  The soul can linger in grief, lost at the edge of the flesh, paralysed, unable to inhabit any world. The body’s instincts to survive barely suffice. The breath of life flows from the mouth in soft moans of lonely despair. Life becomes a stasis and death offers no emancipation.

  Her tears wash the corbeau, bathing its head with holy water. She clutches its chest, where the heart is, wondering why Etienne abandoned her. She calls on all of the ancient deities to redeem her, but they are deaf.

  The dead around her stir. Through the strength of immobility they perceive her anguish in a way the living should but refuse to. Her soul is forlorn, fragmented, the cohesive element lost. But unlike the bones she protects and reburies, no elemental will succour her. She has ceased trying to understand, and has given up imagining. There are no more gods to petition.

  The heart of the bird begins to beat. Amulette feels it pulse through her being. Not hope but lack of hopelessness. For moments, what courses through her soothes like a salve to a wound. She breathes as though this is the first moment of life. Air fills her lungs and expands to each cell...This is the source she struggles to find. The living can no longer nourish her and she must eat of the dead.

  The moon beats against her back until she craves more darkness. With an ancient key she found and kept, the door to this home of the dead opens. She re-enters the void.

  The scent of corrosion. Air refusing to circulate the planet. Stillness bathed in black compresses her, forcing her to listen. Even the insects are silenced by the maelstrom of nothingness.

  Is life its own end? Why must a heart be deflated to receive?

  One casket lies apart from the others. Black. Simple. Silver etchings in the ebony, scrollwork she created. The hinged lid lifts easily. She is blind here, and
wants it that way. But her flesh possesses eyes that let her remember:

  His hair. His face. Lips as incapable of a smile as of a frown. Arms that once held her against the impacted ice that has become her prison, her friend.

  Her body trembles, face to face with the shell of him. She screams, powerless to create miracles. The dead listen in sympathy, but they can do nothing.

  She lies on top of him - what he hated - and adeptly turns them both so he is on top. The weight is not what it was, and this evokes in her grief. ‘Hold me!’ she pleads, but the arms do not move.

  A cry of despair rips from her chest. He is nowhere. She cannot locate him, cannot join him. And she cannot exist without him. But she does exist, caught in a web of anguish. If only the angel of death would kiss her! She longs for an embrace that will extinguish .. . But that is not her fate.