A Book of Horrors

by Stephen King

  The top of the wall was covered with vines, grey and leafless, as thick as his fingers and unpleasantly reminiscent of veins and arteries. This serpentine mass seemed to hold the stones together, though when he tried to step down the other side, the rocks once again gave way and he fell into a patch of whip-like vines studded with thorns the length of his thumbnail. Cursing, he extricated himself, his chinos torn and hands gouged and bloody, and staggered into the field.

  Here at least there was some protection from the wind. The field sloped slightly uphill to the next wall. There was so sign of a gate or breach. He shoved his hands into his pockets and strode through knee-high grass, pale green and starred with minute yellow flowers. He reached the wall and walked alongside it. In one corner several large rocks had fallen. He hoisted himself up until he could see into the next field. It was no different from the one he’d just traversed, save for a single massive evergreen in its centre.

  Other than the tree, the field seemed devoid of any vegetation larger than a tussock. He tried to peer into the field beyond, and the ones after that, but the countryside dissolved into a glitter of green and topaz beneath the morning sun, with a few stone pinnacles stark against the horizon where moor gave way to sky.

  He turned and walked back, head down against the wind; climbed into the first field and crossed it, searching until he spied what looked like a safe place to gain access to the lane once more. Another tangle of blackthorn snagged him as he jumped down and landed hard, grimacing as a thorn tore at his neck. He glared at the wall, then headed back to the cottage, picking thorns from his overcoat and jeans.

  He was starving by the time he arrived at the cottage, also filthy. It had grown too warm for his coat; he slung it over his shoulder, wiping sweat from his cheeks. Thomsa was outside, removing a shovel from the trunk of the car.

  ‘Oh, hello! You’re back quickly!’

  He stopped, grateful for the wind on his overheated face. ‘Quickly?’

  ‘I thought you’d be off till lunchtime. A few hours, anyway?’

  ‘I thought it was lunchtime.’ He looked at his watch and frowned. ‘That can’t be right. It’s not even ten.’

  Thomsa nodded, setting the shovel beside the car. ‘I thought maybe you forgot something.’ She glanced at him, startled. ‘Oh my – you’re bleeding – did you fall?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, well, yes,’ he said sheepishly. ‘I tried to find that fogou. Didn’t get very far. Are you sure it’s just ten? I thought I was out there for hours – I figured it must be noon, at least. What time did I leave?’

  ‘Half-past nine, I think.’

  He started to argue, instead shrugged. ‘I might try again. You said there’s a better Ordnance Survey map? Something with more details?’

  ‘Yes. You could probably get it in Penzance – call the bookshop there if you like, phone book’s on the table.’

  He found the phone book in the kitchen and rang the bookstore. They had a copy of the map and would hold it for him. He rummaged on the table for a brochure with a map of Penzance, went upstairs to spend a few minutes washing up from his trek, and hurried outside. Thomsa and Harry were lugging stones across the grass to repair the wall. Jeffrey waved, ducked into the rental car and crept back up the drive towards Cardu.

  In broad daylight it still took almost ten minutes. He glanced out to where the coastal footpath wound across the top of the cliffs, could barely discern a darker trail leading to the old field systems, and, beyond that, the erratic cross-stitch of stone walls fading into the eastern sky. Even if he’d only gone as far as the second field, it seemed impossible that he could have hiked all the way there and back to the cottage in half an hour.

  The drive to Penzance took less time than that; barely long enough for Jeffrey to reflect how unusual it was for him to act like this, impulsively. Everything an architect did was according to plan. Out on the moor and gorse-covered cliffs the strangeness of the immense, dour landscape had temporarily banished the near-constant presence of his dead wife. Now, in the confines of the cramped rental car, images of other vehicles and other trips returned, all with Anthea beside him. He pushed them away, tried to focus on the fact that here at last was a place where he’d managed to escape her; and remembered that was not true at all.

  Anthea had been here, too. Not the Anthea he had loved, but her mayfly self, the girl he’d never known; the Anthea who’d contained an entire secret world he’d never known existed. It seemed absurd, but he desperately wished she had confided in him about her visit to Bennington’s house, and the strange night that had preceded it. Evelyn’s talk of superstring theory was silly – he found himself sympathising with Moira, content to let someone else read the creepy books and tell her what to do. He believed in none of it, of course. Yet it didn’t matter what he believed, but whether Anthea had, and why.

  Penzance was surprisingly crowded for a weekday morning in early March. He circled the town’s winding streets twice before he found a parking space, several blocks from the bookstore. He walked past shops and restaurants featuring variations on themes involving pirates, fish, pixies, sailing ships. As he passed a tattoo parlour, he glanced into the adjoining alley and saw the same rainbow-hatted boy from the train station, holding a skateboard and standing with several other teenagers who were passing around a joint. The boy looked up, saw Jeffrey and smiled. Jeffrey lifted his hand and smiled back. The boy called out to him, his words garbled by the wind, put down his skateboard and did a headstand alongside it. Jeffrey laughed and kept going.

  There was only one other customer in the shop when he arrived, a man in a business suit talking to two women behind the register.

  ‘Can I help you?’ The older of the two women smiled. She had close-cropped red hair and fashionable eyeglasses, and set aside an iPad as Jeffrey approached.

  ‘I called about an Ordnance Survey map?’

  ‘Yes. It’s right here.’

  She handed it to him, and he unfolded it enough to see that it showed the same area of West Penwith as the other map, enlarged and far more detailed.

  The woman with the glasses cocked her head. ‘Shall I ring that up?’

  Jeffrey closed the map and set it onto the counter. ‘Sure, in a minute. I’m going to look around a bit first.’

  She returned to chatting. Jeffrey wandered the shop. It was small but crowded with neatly stacked shelves and tables, racks of maps and postcards, with an extensive section of books about Cornwall – guidebooks, tributes to Daphne du Maurier and Barbara Hepworth, DVDs of The Pirates of Penzance and Rebecca, histories of the mines and glossy photo volumes about surfing in Newquay. He spent a few minutes flipping through one of these, then continued to the back of the store. There was an entire wall of children’s books, picture books near the floor, books for older children arranged alphabetically above them. He scanned the Bs, and looked aside as the younger woman approached, carrying an armful of calendars.

  ‘Are you looking for something in particular?’

  He glanced back at the shelves. ‘Do you have anything by Robert Bennington?’

  The young woman set the calendars down, ran a hand along the shelf housing the Bs; frowned and looked back to the counter. ‘Rose, do we have anything by Robert Bennington? It rings a bell, but I don’t see anything here. Children’s writer, is he?’ she added, turning to Jeffrey.

  ‘Yes. The Sun Battles, I think that’s one of them.’

  The other customer nodded goodbye as Rose joined the others in the back.

  ‘Robert Bennington?’ She halted, straightening a stack of coffee table books, tapped her lower lip then quickly nodded. ‘Oh yes! The fantasy writer. We did have his books – he’s fallen out of favour.’ She cast a knowing look at the younger clerk. ‘He was the child molester.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ The younger woman made a face. ‘I don’t think his books are even in print now, are they?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Rose. ‘I’ll check. We could order something for you,
if they are.’

  ‘That’s okay – I’m only here for a few days.’

  Jeffrey followed her to the counter and waited as she searched online.

  ‘No, nothing’s available.’ Rose shook her head. ‘Sad bit of business, wasn’t it? I heard something recently; he had a stroke I think. He might even have died, I can’t recall now who told me. He must be quite elderly, if he’s still alive.’

  ‘He lived around here, didn’t he?’ said Jeffrey.

  ‘Out near Zennor, I think. He bought the old Golovenna Farm, years ago. We used to sell quite a lot of his books – he was very popular. Like the Harry Potter books now. Well, not that popular.’ She smiled. ‘But he did very well. He came in here once or twice, it must be twenty years at least. A very handsome man. Theatrical. He wore a long scarf, like Doctor Who. I’m sure you could find used copies online, or there’s a second-hand bookshop just round the corner – they might well have something.’

  ‘That’s all right. But thank you for checking.’

  He paid for the map and went back out onto the sidewalk. It was getting on to noon. He wandered the streets for several minutes looking for a place to eat, settled on a small, airy Italian restaurant where he had grilled sardines and spaghetti and a glass of wine. Not very Cornish, perhaps, but he promised himself to check on the pub in Zennor later.

  The Ordnance map was too large and unwieldy to open at his little table, so he stared out the window, watching tourists and women with small children in tow as they popped in and out of the shops across the street. The rainbow-hatted boy and his cronies loped by, skateboards in hand. Dropouts or burnouts, Jeffrey thought; the local constabulary must spend half its time chasing them from place to place. He finished his wine and ordered a cup of coffee, gulped it down, paid the check, and left.

  A few high white clouds scudded high overhead, borne on a steady wind that sent up flurries of grit and petals blown from ornamental cherry trees. Here in the heart of Penzance, the midday sun was almost hot: Jeffrey hooked his coat over his shoulder and ambled back to his car. He paused to glance at postcards and souvenirs in a shop window, but could think of no one to send a card to. Evelyn? She’d rather have something from Zennor, another reason to visit the pub.

  He turned the corner, had almost reached the tattoo parlour when a plaintive cry rang out.

  ‘Have you seen him?’

  Jeffrey halted. In the same alley where he’d glimpsed the boys earlier, a forlorn figure sat on the broken asphalt, twitchy fingers toying with an unlit cigarette. Erthy, the thirtyish woman who’d been at the station the day before. As Jeffrey hesitated she lifted her head, swiped a fringe of dirty hair from her eyes and stumbled to her feet. His heart sank as she hurried towards him, but before he could flee she was already in his face, her breath warm and beery. ‘Gotta light?’

  ‘No, sorry,’ he said, and began to step away.

  ‘Wait – you’re London, right?’

  ‘No, I’m just visiting.’

  ‘No – I saw you.’

  He paused, thrown off-balance by a ridiculous jolt of unease. Her eyes were bloodshot, the irises a peculiar marbled blue like flawed bottle-glass, and there was a vivid crimson splotch in one eye, as though a capillary had burst. It made it seem as though she looked at him sideways, even though she was staring at him straight on.

  ‘You’re on the London train!’ She nodded in excitement. ‘I need to get back.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He spun and walked off as quickly as he could without breaking into a run. Behind him he heard footsteps, and again the same wrenching cry.

  ‘Have you seen him?’

  He did run then, as the woman screamed expletives and a shower of gravel pelted his back.

  He reached his rental car, his heart pounding. He looked over his shoulder, jumped inside and locked the doors before pulling out into the street. As he drove off, he caught a flash in the rear-view mirror of the woman sidling in the other direction, unlit cigarette still twitching between her fingers.

  When he arrived back at the cottage, he found Thomsa and Harry sitting at the kitchen table, surrounded by the remains of lunch, sandwich crusts and apple cores.

  ‘Oh, hello.’ Thomsa looked up, smiling, and patted the chair beside her. ‘Did you go to The Tinners for lunch?’

  ‘Penzance.’ Jeffrey sat and dropped his map onto the table. ‘I think I’ll head out again, then maybe have dinner at the pub.’

  ‘He wants to see the fogou,’ said Thomsa. ‘He went earlier but couldn’t find it. There is a fogou, isn’t there, Harry? Out by Zennor Hill?’

  Jeffrey hesitated, then said, ‘A friend of mine told me about it – she and my wife saw it when they were girls.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Harry after a moment. ‘Where the children’s writer lived. Some sort of ruins there, anyway.’

  Jeffrey kept his tone casual. ‘A writer?’

  ‘I believe so,’ said Thomsa. ‘We didn’t know him. Someone who stayed here once went looking for him, but he wasn’t home – this was years ago. The old Golovenna Farm.’

  Jeffrey pointed to the seemingly random network of lines that covered the map, like crazing on a piece of old pottery. ‘What’s all this mean?’

  Harry pulled his chair closer and traced the boundaries of Cardu with a dirt-stained finger. ‘Those are the field systems – the stone walls.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’ Jeffrey laughed. ‘That must’ve driven someone nuts, getting all that down.’

  ‘Oh, it’s all GPS and satellite photos now,’ said Thomsa. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t have this map earlier, before you went for your walk.’

  Harry angled the map so the sunlight illuminated the area surrounding Cardu. ‘This is our cove, here …’

  They pored over the map. Jeffrey pointed at markers for hut circles and cairns, standing stones and tumuli, all within a hand’s-span of Cardu, as Harry continued to shake his head.

  ‘It’s this one, I think,’ Harry said at last, and glanced at his sister. He scored a square half-inch of the page with a blackened fingernail, minute Gothic letters trapped within the web of field systems.

  CHAMBERED CAIRN

  ‘That looks right,’ said Thomsa. ‘But it’s a ways off the road. I’m not certain where the house is – the woman who went looking for it said she roamed the moor for hours before she came on it.’

  Jeffrey ran his finger along the line marking the main road. ‘It looks like I can drive to here. If there’s a place to park, I can just hike in. It doesn’t look that far. As long as I don’t get towed.’

  ‘You shouldn’t get towed,’ said Thomsa. ‘All that land’s part of Golovenna, and no one’s there. He never farmed it, just let it all go back to the moor. You’d only be a mile or so from Zennor if you left your car. They have musicians on Thursday nights, some of the locals come in and play after dinner.’

  Jeffrey refolded the map. When he looked up, Harry was gone. Thomsa handed him an apple.

  ‘Watch for the bogs,’ she said. ‘Marsh grass, it looks sturdy, but when you put your foot down it gives way and you can sink under. Like quicksand. They found a girl’s body ten years back. Horses and sheep, too.’ Jeffrey grimaced and she laughed. ‘You’ll be all right – just stay on the footpaths.’

  He thanked her, went upstairs to exchange his overcoat for a windbreaker, and returned to his car. The clouds were gone: the sun shone high in a sky the summer blue of gentians. He felt the same surge of exultation he’d experienced that morning, the sea-fresh wind tangling the stems of daffodils and narcissus, white gulls crying overhead. He kept the window down as he drove up the twisting way to Cardu and the honeyed scent of gorse filled the car.

  The road to Zennor coiled between hedgerows misted green with new growth and emerald fields where brown-and-white cattle grazed. In the distance a single tractor moved so slowly across a black furrow that Jeffrey could track its progress only by the skein of crows that followed it, the birds dipping then rising like a black thread drawn th
rough blue cloth.

  Twice he pulled over to consult the map. His phone didn’t work here – he couldn’t even get the time, let alone directions. The car’s clock read 14:21. He saw no other roads, only deeply-rutted tracks protected by stiles, some metal, most of weathered wood. He tried counting stone walls to determine which marked the fields Harry had said belonged to Golovenna Farm, and stopped a third time before deciding the map was all but useless. He drove another hundred feet until he found a swathe of gravel between two tumble-down stone walls, a rusted gate sagging between them. Beyond it stretched an overgrown field bisected by a stone-strewn path.

  He was less than a mile from Zennor. He folded the map and jammed it into his windbreaker pocket along with the apple, and stepped out of the car.

  The dark height before him would be Zennor Hill. Golovenna Farm was somewhere between there and where he stood. He turned slowly, scanning everything around him to fix it in his memory: the winding road, intermittently visible between walls and hedgerows; the ridge of cliffs falling down to the sea, bookended by the dark bulk of Gurnards Head in the southwest and Zennor Head to the northeast. On the horizon were scattered outcroppings that might have been tors or ruins or even buildings. He locked the car, checked that he had his phone, climbed over the metal gate and began to walk.

  The afternoon sun beat down fiercely. He wished he’d brought a hat, or sunglasses. He crossed the first field in a few minutes, and was relieved to find a break in the next wall, an opening formed by a pair of tall, broad stones. The path narrowed here but was still clearly discernible where it bore straight in front of him, an arrow of new green grass flashing through ankle-high turf overgrown with daisies and fronds of young bracken.