The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 16

by Stephen Jones

Today she dresses in her dark brown dress suit. She thinks of these as her interview clothes, as opposed to her lecture clothes or her knocking-about-the-house-clothes. Now she is in retirement, she wears her knocking-about-the-house-clothes more and more. She puts on lipstick.

  After breakfast, she washes a milk bottle, places it at her back door. She discovers that next-door’s cat has deposited a mouse-head, and a paw, on the doormat. It looks as though the mouse is swimming through the coconut matting, as though most of it is submerged. She purses her lips, then she folds her copy of yesterday’s Daily Telegraph, and she folds and flips the mouse-head and the paw into the newspaper, never touching them with her hands.

  Today’s Daily Telegraph is waiting for her in the hall, along with several letters, which she inspects, without opening any of them, then places them on the desk in her tiny study. Since her retirement she visits her study only to write. Now she walks into the kitchen, and seats herself at the old oak table. Her reading glasses hang about her neck, on a silver chain, and she perches them on her nose, and begins with the obituaries.

  She does not actually expect to encounter anyone she knows there, but the world is small, and she observes that, perhaps with cruel humour, the obituarists have run a photograph of Peter Burrell-Gunn as he was in the early 1950s, and not at all as he was the last time the professor had seen him, at a Literary Monthly Christmas party several years before, all gouty and beaky and trembling, and reminding her of nothing so much as a caricature of an owl. In the photograph, he is very beautiful. He looks wild, and noble.

  She had spent an evening once, kissing him, in a summer-house: she remembers that very clearly, although she cannot remember for the life of her in which garden the summer house had belonged.

  It was, she decides, Charles and Nadia Reid’s house in the country. Which meant that it was before Nadia ran away with that Scottish artist, and Charles took the professor with him to Spain, although she was certainly not a professor then. This was many years before people commonly went to Spain for their holidays; it was an exotic and dangerous place in those days. He asked her to marry him, too, and she is no longer certain why she said no, or even if she had entirely said no. He was a pleasant-enough young man, and he took what was left of her virginity on a blanket on a Spanish beach, on a warm spring night. She was twenty years old, and had thought herself so old . . .

  The doorbell chimes, and she puts down the paper, and makes her way to the front door, and opens it.

  Her first thought is how young the girl looks.

  Her first thought is how old the woman looks. “Professor Hastings?” she says. “I’m Greta Campion. I’m doing the profile on you. For the Literary Chronicle.”

  The older woman stares at her for a moment, vulnerable, and ancient, then she smiles. It’s a friendly smile, and Greta warms to her. “Come in, dear,” says the professor. “We’ll be in the sitting room.”

  “I brought you this,” says Greta. “I baked it myself.” She takes the cake-tin from her bag, hoping its contents hadn’t disintegrated en route. “It’s a chocolate cake. I read online that you liked them.”

  The old woman nods, and blinks. “I do,” she says. “How kind. This way.”

  Greta follows her into a comfortable room, is shown to her armchair, and told, firmly, not to move. The professor bustles off, and returns with a tray, on which are tea cups and saucers, a teapot, a plate of chocolate biscuits, and Greta’s chocolate cake.

  Tea is poured, and Greta exclaims over the professor’s brooch, and then she pulls out her notebook and pen, and a copy of the professor’s last book, A Quest for Meanings in Children’s Fiction, the copy bristling with post-it-notes and scraps of paper. They talk about the early chapters, in which the hypothesis is set forth that there was originally no distinct branch of fiction that was only intended for children, until the Victorian notions of the purity and sanctity of childhood demanded that fiction for children be made . . .

  “. . . well, pure,” says the professor

  “And sanctified?” asks Greta, with a smile.

  “And sanctimonious,” corrects the old woman. “It is difficult to read The Water Babies without wincing.”

  And then she talks about ways that artists used to draw children – as adults, only smaller, without considering the child’s proportions – and how Grimms’ stories were collected for adults and, when the Grimms realized the books were being read in the nursery, were Bowdlerised to make them more appropriate. She talks of Perrault’s “Sleeping Beauty in the Wood”, and of its original coda in which the Prince’s cannibal ogre mother attempts to frame the Sleeping Beauty for having eaten her own children, and all the while Greta nods and takes notes, and nervously tries to contribute enough to the conversation that the professor will feel that it is a conversation or at least an interview, not a lecture.

  “Where,” asks Greta, “do you feel your interest in children’s fiction came from?”

  The professor shakes her head. “Where do any of our interests come from? Where does your interest in children’s books come from?”

  Greta says, “They always seemed the books that were most important to me. The ones that mattered. When I was a kid, and when I grew. I was like Dahl’s Matilda. Were your family great readers?”

  “Not really . . . I say that, it was a long time ago that they died. Were killed. I should say.”

  “All your family died at the same time? Was this in the War?”

  “No, dear. We were evacuees, in the War. This was in a train crash, several years after. I was not there.”

  “Just like in Lewis’s Narnia Books,” says Greta, and immediately feels like a fool, and an insensitive fool, “I’m sorry. That was a terrible thing to say, wasn’t it?”

  “Was it, dear?”

  Greta can feel herself blushing, and she says, “It’s just I remember that sequence so vividly. In The Last Battle. Where you learn there was a train crash on the way back to school, and everyone was killed. Except for Susan, of course.”

  The professor says, “More tea, dear?” and Greta knows that she should leave the subject, but she says, “You know, that used to make me so angry.”

  “What did, dear?”

  “Susan. All the other kids go off to Paradise, and Susan can’t go. She’s no longer a friend of Narnia because she’s too fond of lipsticks and nylons and invitations to parties. I even talked to my English teacher about it, about the problem of Susan, when I was twelve.”

  She’ll leave the subject now, talk about the role of children’s fiction in creating the belief systems we adopt as adults, but the professor says “And tell me, dear, what did your teacher say?”

  “She said that even though Susan had refused paradise then, she still had time while she lived to repent.”

  “Repent what?”

  “Not believing, I suppose. And the sin of Eve.”

  The professor cuts herself a slice of chocolate cake. She seems to be remembering. And then she says, “I doubt there was much opportunity for nylons and lipsticks after her family was killed. There certainly wasn’t for me. A little money – less than one might imagine – from her parents’ estate, to lodge and feed her. No luxuries . . .”

  “There must have been something else wrong with Susan,” says the young journalist, “something they didn’t tell us. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been damned like that – denied the Heaven of further up and further in. I mean, all the people she had ever cared for had gone on to their reward, in a world of magic and waterfalls and joy. And she was left behind.”

  “I don’t know about the girl in the books,” says the professor, “but remaining behind would also have meant that she was available to identify her brothers’ and her little sister’s bodies. There were a lot of people dead in that crash. I was taken to a nearby school – it was the first day of term, and they had taken the bodies there. My older brother looked okay. Like he was asleep. The other two were a bit messier.”

  “I suppose Susan
would have seen their bodies, and thought, they’re on holidays now. The perfect school holidays. Romping in meadows with talking animals, world without end.”

  “She might have done. I only remember thinking what a great deal of damage a train can do, when it hits another train, to the people who were travelling inside. I suppose you’ve never had to identify a body, dear?”

  “No.”

  “That’s a blessing. I remember looking at them and thinking, what if I’m wrong, what if it’s not him after all? My younger brother was decapitated, you know. A god who would punish me for liking nylons and parties by making me walk through that school dining room, with the flies, to identify Ed, well . . . he’s enjoying himself a bit too much, isn’t he? Like a cat, getting the last ounce of enjoyment out of a mouse. Or a gram of enjoyment, I suppose it must be these days. I don’t know, really.”

  She trails off. And then, after some time, she says, “I’m sorry dear. I don’t think I can do any more of this today. Perhaps if your editor gives me a ring, we can set a time to finish our conversation.”

  Greta nods and says of course, and knows in her heart, with a peculiar finality, that they will talk no more.

  That night, the professor climbs the stairs of her house, slowly, painstakingly, floor by floor. She takes sheets and blankets from the airing cupboard, and makes up a bed in the spare bedroom, in the back. It is empty but for a wartime austerity dressing table, with a mirror and drawers, an oak bed, and a dusty applewood wardrobe, which contains only coat-hangers and a dusty cardboard box. She places a vase on the dressing table, containing purple rhododendron flowers, sticky and vulgar.

  She takes from the box in the wardrobe a plastic shopping bag containing four old photographic albums. Then she climbs into the bed that was hers as a child, and lies there between the sheets, looking at the black and white photographs, and the sepia photographs, and the handful of unconvincing colour photographs. She looks at her brothers, and her sister, and her parents, and she wonders how they could have been that young, how anybody could have been that young.

  After a while she notices that there are several children’s books beside the bed, which puzzles her slightly, because she does not believe she keeps books on the bedside table in that room. Nor, she decides, does she have a bedside table there. On the top of the pile is an old paperback book – it must be over forty years old: the price on the cover is in shillings. It shows a lion, and two girls twining a daisy chain into its mane.

  The professor’s lips prickle with shock. And only then does she understand that she is dreaming, for she does not permit those books into her house. Beneath the paperback is a hardback, in its jacket, of a book that, in her dream, she realizes she has always wanted to read: Mary Poppins Brings in the Dawn, a book which P.L. Travers had somehow neglected to write while alive.

  She picks it up, and opens it to the middle, and reads the story waiting for her: Jane and Michael follow Mary Poppins on her day off, to Heaven, and they meet the boy Jesus, who is still slightly scared of Mary Poppins because she was once his nanny, and the Holy Ghost, who complains that he has not been able to get his sheet properly white since Mary Poppins left, and God the Father, who says,

  “There’s no making her do anything. Not her. She’s Mary Poppins.”

  “But you’re God,” said Jane. “You created everybody and everything. They have to do what you say.”

  “Not her,” said God the Father once again, and he scratched his golden beard flecked with silver. “I didn’t create her. She’s Mary Poppins.”

  And the professor stirs in her sleep, and afterward dreams that she is reading her own obituary. It has been a good life, she thinks, as she reads it, discovering her history laid out in black and white. Everyone is there. Even the people she had forgotten.

  Greta sleeps beside her boyfriend, in a small flat in Camden, and she, too, is dreaming.

  In Greta’s dream, the lion and the witch come down the hill together.

  She is standing on the battlefield, holding her sister’s hand. She looks up at the golden lion, and the burning amber of his eyes. “He’s not a tame lion, is he?” she whispers to her sister, and they shiver.

  The witch looks at them all, then she turns to the lion, and says, coldly, I am satisfied with the terms of our agreement You take the girls: for myself, I shall have the boys.”

  The girl understands what must have happened, and she tries to run, but the beast is upon her before she has covered a dozen paces.

  The lion eats all of her except her head, in her dream. He leaves the head, and one of her hands, just as a housecat leaves the parts of a mouse it has no desire for, for later, or as a gift.

  She wishes that he had eaten her head, for then she would not have had to look. Dead eyelids cannot be closed, and so she stares, unflinching, at the twisted thing her brothers have become. The great beast eats her little sister more slowly, and, it seems to her, with more relish and pleasure than it had eaten her; but then, her little sister had always been its favourite.

  Presently the witch removes her white robes, revealing a body no less white, with high, small breasts, and nipples so dark they are almost black. The witch lies back upon the grass, spreads her legs. Beneath her body, the grass becomes rimed with frost.

  “Now,” she says.

  The lion licks her white cleft with its pink tongue, until she can take no more of it, and she pulls its huge mouth to hers, and wraps her icy legs into its golden fur . . .

  Being dead, the eyes in the head on the grass cannot look away. Being dead, they miss nothing.

  And when the two of them are done, sweaty and sticky and sated, only then does the lion amble over to the head on the grass and devour it in its huge mouth, crunching her skull in its powerful jaws, and it is then, only then, that she wakes.

  Her heart is pounding. She tries to wake her boyfriend, but he snores, and grunts, and will not be roused.

  It’s true, Greta thinks, irrationally, in the darkness. She grew up. She carried on. She didn’t die.

  She imagines the professor, waking in the night, and listening to the noises coming from the old apple-wood wardrobe in the corner: to the rustlings of all these gliding ghosts, which might be mistaken for the scurries of mice or rats, to the padding of enormous velvet paws, and the distant, dangerous music of a hunting horn.

  She knows she is being ridiculous, although she will not be surprised when she reads of the professor’s demise. Death comes in the night, she thinks, before she returns to sleep. Like a lion.

  The white witch rides naked on the lion’s golden back. Its muzzle is spotted with fresh, scarlet blood. Then the vast pinkness of its tongue wipes around its face, and once more it is perfectly clean.

  STEPHEN JONES & KIM NEWMAN

  Necrology: 2004

  AS ALWAYS, we continue to note the passing of writers, artists, performers and technicians who, during their lifetimes, made significant contributions to the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres, or left their mark on popular culture and music in other, often fascinating, ways . . .

  AUTHORS/ARTISTS/COMPOSERS

  One of Britain’s most distinguished authors of adult and children’s fantasy and ghost stories, Joan [Delano] Aiken OBE died on January 4th, aged 79. Best known for her “Dido Twite” or “Wolves Chronicles” alternative history series for young adults, which began in 1962 with the novel The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (filmed in 1988), she was the daughter of American poet and writer Conrad Aiken. The author of more than ninety volumes, including Midnight is a Place, A Bundle of Nerves, A Whisper in the Night, A Goose on Your Grave, Give Yourself a Fright, The Haunting of Lamb House, A Fit of Shivers, A Creepy Company, The Cockatrice Boys and The Scream, she was co-Guest of Honour at the 1997 World Fantasy Convention in London. The Whispering Mountain won the Guardian Children’s Book Prize in 1969, and she also won an Edgar Award in 1972 for the YA mystery Night Fall. Her final book, The Witch of Clattering Shaws, appeared in 2005.

&nbs
p; British-born poet and SF author Norman Talbot died of a heart attack in Australia on January 8th, aged 67. A co-founder of independent press Nimrod Productions, his books include The Book of Changes and Every Sonnet Tells a Story, and he had a story in the 1998 anthology Dreaming Down Under.

  Forty-year-old horror and suspense writer William Laughlin died of bone cancer on his birthday, January 13th. He also worked for independent comics and was the writer/creator of Macabrella, a horror anthology in the EC tradition.

  American author and teacher Jack Cady, best known for his collections of supernatural stories, died of bladder cancer on January 14th, aged 71. Cady worked as a tree high-climber, an auctioneer, a long truck driver, and in the Coast Guard before becoming a writer. His books include The Burning and Other Stories, The Well, The Jonah Watch, McDowall’s Ghost, The Sons of Noah & Other Stories, The Off Season, The Night We Buried the Road Dog, The Hauntings of Hood Canal and Ghosts of Yesterday. Horror novels Dark Dreaming and Embrace of the Wolf were published under pseudonym “Pat Franklin”. Cady’s fiction won the Atlantic Monthly “First” Award, the Nebula, a Philip K. Dick Award special citation, the World Fantasy Award, the Bram Stoker Award and the University of lowa prize for short fiction, amongst other awards.

  Horror and mystery author and scriptwriter William Relling, Jr. committed suicide in Pasadena, California, on January 22nd, aged 49. His novels include Brujo, New Moon, Silent Moon, Sweet Poison, Deadly Vintage and The Criminalist, and his short fiction has been collected in The Infinite Man and Along the Midway of the Carnival of Souls and Other Stories.

  Welsh-language author Islwyn Ffowc Elis, whose books include the 1968 SF novel Y Blaned Dirion (The Fair Planet), died the same day, aged 79.

  American arranger and composer Billy May also died on January 22nd, aged 87. Best known for his work with Frank Sinatra, he composed the theme for The Green Hornet TV series.