The Valancourt Book of Horror Stories

by James D. Jenkins

  But there would be no such problem with Alicia. She had it all – in spades. No telling how far he’d go with a woman of such beauty and intelligence at his side.

  Governor, may I present my wife . . . Alicia.

  Could he imagine introducing Melina to the Governor? That dumpy little Hawaiian broad? Kevin chuckled as he poured himself another drink. Alicia worked the skewered bits of chicken deftly. The smell was delicious.

  Melina looked into the black depths of the bowl. The liquid moved in heavy, slow-motion swirls, like heated tar. A bluish mist began to rise.

  ‘Akua kahiko,’ Melina whispered as she inhaled the fumes. ‘Ha’awi a’u kaulike.’

  A small, greasy wave of nausea hit Kevin as suddenly as bad news. He put the drink down. And the cigar. Rubbed his face. A face that was suddenly clammy with sweat.

  ‘Kevin? You all right?’

  He looked up. And for a moment was disoriented. The tall tiki next to Alicia . . . had it really been that close to her? Hadn’t it been—

  ‘Kevin?’

  ‘Oh, I . . . I’m just a little woozy.’ He stood up. ‘It’s been a long day. I think I’ll just go splash a little water on my face.’

  Alicia frowned prettily. ‘I shouldn’t have made that drink so strong.’

  ‘You made it just fine. I’ll be all right.’

  Kevin went back to the house. But halfway there stopped and looked back. Alicia was bent over the grill, humming to the slow strains of ‘Bali Hai.’ Wavering light from the garden torches cast strange patterns on the tikis surrounding her. Almost as if they were . . . studying her, somehow . . .

  Something gave his spine an uneasy little squeeze. Kevin shook his head and continued on to the house, looking forward to that splash of cold water.

  Melina narrowed her eyes and stared into the terrible little bowl. And wasn’t surprised when one of the three little gods that held it up slowly turned its loathsome face to look up at her. Melina stared right back, looking directly into its beady eyes. They began to glow red.

  ‘Ha’awi a’u kaulike.’ Melina’s words were as soft as a butterfly’s wings. ‘Ha’awi a’u kaulike.’

  Kevin patted the towel against his face. And felt much, much better. It had been a long day. And an especially unpleasant one at that. And come to think of it, he hadn’t had anything to eat since Melina’s typically lackluster breakfast. He should’ve gotten something down before tackling that drink and cigar.

  ‘KEVINNNN!!!’

  It was Alicia’s shout, as loud and desperate as a siren, and Kevin felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end as he rushed from the bathroom—

  ‘Kevin!!! HELP ME!!!’

  This was followed by a terrible, rising shriek as Kevin ran through the house—

  ‘Alicia! My God, what is it?’

  Another scream exploded in the night – this one coarse, full of a sickening sort of despair. Kevin burst through the porch’s door and out into the yard—

  Alicia was nowhere in sight!

  Smoke rose from the skewers burning on the grill. The black fronds of banana trees framed the empty barbecue area.

  ‘Alicia!!!’ Kevin raced past the grill. ‘Alicia, where are you?’

  There was a rustling in the bushes and another scream went off like a cherry bomb. Kevin frantically pushed through palm fronds—

  ‘Alicia! Alicia!’

  There was another rustle – this one nearby – and Kevin crashed through the foliage, and—

  And—

  Kevin stood there, solid as a statue, his chest feeling like a sack of ice, his eyes wide as dinner plates. The sight of the nightmare before him exploded in his brain, a sight that made no sense, a sight he denied over and over even as the image refused to go away—

  Alicia was being held by the tikis!

  Tikis that had somehow come to a hideous sort of life, like the enchanted apple trees in The Wizard of Oz, their strange little hands holding Alicia’s arms and legs, their furious wooden eyes looking down upon her with a cold sort of rage, their sharpened mouths opening –

  ‘No!’ Kevin screamed. ‘No! No! NO!’

  Alicia writhed and squirmed in their wooden grasp, her eyes showing that she was terrified to the point of madness. The tallest of the tikis gave Kevin a slow look . . . a look of contempt and anger . . . and then opened its serrated jaws and clamped down on Alicia’s neck like a bear trap snapping closed. Alicia spasmed and screamed but it was a garbled sort of scream, as if it were coming from underwater, and a great fount of crimson shot from her mouth.

  The detective made another note on his pad. ‘So the neighbors called it in?’

  ‘Yes, sir. They said the owner is a Ms Alicia Ralley, but we haven’t found her yet. When we looked out back all we found was – ’ The young patrol officer shifted uneasily. ‘– well, just a lot of blood. All by the barbecue area. And the guy was out there, too – the one we’ve got cuffed in back of the car.’

  The detective glanced at the patrol car, where the blond man sat in the back seat, slowly rocking back and forth and moaning. He’d seen guys like this before. Guys that had lost their minds. It’s something you never forget. Mostly because of the eyes – big, round fruitcake eyes, like they were wild things that had been suddenly caged. Eyes that had seen something no amount of counseling or therapy would ever make them un-see.

  ‘He say anything?’ The detective asked. But already knew the answer.

  ‘Well . . . he was kind of babbling.’

  ‘Uh-huh. He give you any trouble?’

  ‘Not at first.’ By the patrol officer’s wide-eyed look, the detective judged this to be one of his first crime scenes. ‘When we got here we just found him sitting on the ground and hugging one of these wooden Hawaiian sculptures and crying like a baby. He came with us willingly enough . . . but man, when we tried to make him let that statue go, he really went crazy.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yes, sir, it took me and Phil and – I mean, Officers Harkins and Bartleby – it took all three of us to get him to pry it loose. He started screaming like a wild animal when we got it out of his hands. But then he quieted down once we got him inside the cruiser.’

  ‘This thing here?’ The wooden statue was lying on the ground. It was about three feet long, as big around as a paint can.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Any I.D. on the man?’

  ‘None yet. But we haven’t finished searching the house. Harkins and Bartleby are still out back looking for the woman, but honestly, it doesn’t look she’s anywhere around. Want me to help them or continue searching the house?’

  ‘I want you to put in a call to the Mobile Crime Lab. I want floodlights and every officer not involved on an active call out here. We’re going to search every inch of this place until we find Ms Ralley.’

  ‘Yes, sir!’

  The detective watched the patrol officer hurry back to his vehicle to place the call. Then sighed. It was shaping up to be one of those complicated nights. He took out a cigarette and lighted up. But stopped short of throwing the match on the ground. The Hawaiian statue the man had been cradling was there, looking up at him with its blank eyes. He’d seen these things increasingly of late – ‘tikis’, they were called. Sergeant Grumman had a few in his backyard by his pool. And he’d even seen a couple for sale at Home Depot. Funny things.

  But . . . this one was different. It didn’t seem to have the usual angry sort of scowl. No, this one had a mouth that was opened in something like surprise. And the eyes weren’t so much angry as . . . horrified.

  The top part was especially strange. Usually these things had a carving of a totem-like band or even a kind of Polynesian crown. But not this one. There were long, wavy lines instead . . .

  Like the flowing hair of a blonde woman.

  Elizabeth Jenkins

  ON NO ACCOUNT, MY LOVE

  Elizabeth Jenkins (1905-2010) was a writer best known for her nonfiction work, which includes biographies of Lad
y Caroline Lamb, Jane Austen, and Queen Elizabeth I. Of her thirteen novels, the most famous is The Tortoise and the Hare (1954), a finely drawn, perceptive story of a marriage threatened with ruin by the intrusion of another woman. Yet another author who was not known for horror fiction, Jenkins nonetheless explored the darkest recesses of human nature in her novel Harriet (1934), inspired by a real-life Victorian murder case and republished by Valancourt. ‘On No Account, My Love’, apparently Jenkins’s only ghost story, was first published in the third volume of Lady Cynthia Asquith’s famous Ghost Book series. It is a tale whose slow and leisurely build-up leaves the reader perhaps unprepared for the story’s chilling implications, which are not made evident until the very end.

  My cousin Hero is beautiful but unmindful of the fact. Though her husband has done well in his profession it has needed ceaseless energy on Hero’s part to keep up the domestic standard she thinks worthy of him and the children; therefore, capable and high-spirited though she is, she bears the stamp of care. Her beauty is the last thing in her mind, though sometimes when she fixes you with her keen blue eyes, intent on discovering just how misguided you have been so that she may put you right, the loveliness of her face, sharp as a cameo, astonishes even someone who knows her as well as I do.

  Decisiveness is one of Hero’s leading qualities, and a passionate conviction that she is right: not from any virtue of her own, but because she knows what the right is, and has joined herself to it. In the present degenerate state of society there is a great deal that is wrong, and against everything of the sort Hero is dauntlessly embattled. Her upright carriage, small as she is, and her great eyes filled with stern resolve give her rather the look of being posted on the ramparts. Her affection takes the form of a protective, almost proprietary interest in the ones she loves; she cannot help knowing what is best for them; she only wishes, for their sake, that they could see the facts as clearly as she does.

  Her kindness to me is of a critical sort, for I am, though so nearly related, entirely outside the strain of heredity that distinguishes my cousin. I am vague, unpractical, and, as she does not disguise from me, often downright silly in the management of my affairs. At the same time, there are matters into which I fancy that I can see farther than she can.

  These characteristics and the chiselled features and blue eyes that go with them, of which Hero is the present embodiment, have appeared in my mother’s family for four generations. They missed me, but my mother had them, so had two of her sisters. In all three, the look of blazing moral energy was tinged with a faint terror and desperation, as if they had been called on to sustain some ordeal like that of the Boy on the Burning Deck. It was not open to them to save themselves by failure, and they could see the flames licking up the ground in front of them. In the generation before my mother and her sisters, photographs of my great-aunts showed more faces with the unmistakable stamp of beauty, intensity and care; and behind these again, the fons et origo of all this, my great-grandmother. Hers was the mould of the family face and her descendants were startlingly like her; yet there was a great difference between them. Their beautiful faces, in early youth even, were strained and anxious; her expression, though intense, was confident: they were oppressed and she was triumphant.

  She was one of those people whose personality makes such a strong impression that it lasts a long while after death. Great-grandmother, with her strictness, her sternness, her domineering will, was an alarming story to us in our childhood though she had died long before we were born. As we grew up, I felt how much I should have disliked and shrunk from her. In Hero, her idea aroused a passionate resentment. Hero used to say, she would just have liked to see her trying it on with her. Indeed, she and great-grandmother would have been worthy of each other’s steel.

  No one knew where she came from; her name was or was said to be Seymour, but she had been adopted by two maiden ladies and if she knew in what circumstances she never said. She was proposed to, at the then late age of twenty-nine, by a gentleman of modest means. We have her written reply in which she barely puts down her thanks for the honour of his regard before she says: ‘I must tell you that I have no fortune and no prospect of any.’ This letter amused my father for he said that when he proposed to my mother she immediately exclaimed: ‘Oh! But I am much older than you think I am.’ Our great-grandfather, like my father after him, paid no heed to these disclaimers. Miss Seymour became Mrs Standish and went to live in Derbyshire in a town that was rapidly developing as a health resort. Her husband died early, leaving her with several young children and little else beside the house they lived in. This was one in a crescent on the hillside, at what was then the top of the town. At that time the graceful curve of its façade stood out white against the murky violet of the hills, now the whole hillside has been engulfed in a tide of building development. The expansion was beginning in the 1860s and it gave Mrs Standish the opportunity of supporting her family by a girls’ boarding school. She made a really remarkable success of this project; before long she acquired the houses on each side of her own and these considerable premises were filled to overflowing with her young family, her employees and the girls under her care. The whole household was welded together under her vigilant and energetic rule. The domestic conditions were those of almost supernormal cleanliness, neatness, economy and punctuality, at the cost of many a red-armed servant girl crying on the back stairs, and the teaching was carried on with such gusto, the drilling in grammar and dates and tables and maps and principal exports had the stimulus of a round game, but a game slightly nightmarish in quality, a game played with tigers. The school throughout its long life, for it passed from hand to hand, till Magnall’s Questions gave way to the Examinations of the Joint Board, preserved intact its original tradition of thoroughness, enthusiasm and clear handwriting. The relentless driving that produced it had, one must suppose, a good effect on the average pupil but it bore hardly on the two extremes; it burdened the dull and in the intelligent and highly strung it induced a morbid conscientiousness. Mrs Standish’s own descendants were among the latter. An enlightened policy of child-care would have soothed and kept them back; Mrs Standish goaded them on till their talents were unnaturally burnished and their nervous systems a wreck. As Mama she had been formidable, as Grandmama she was a holy terror, and it was from that phase of her rule that the stories came of her severe discipline, the preposterous tales of what she exacted and what she wouldn’t allow, that made such an impression on the rest of us who had never seen her. One of her daughters was in love with a young man who sought her hand. They had met at choir practice but great-grandmother objected to his principles and forbade the match. She knew best, naturally. Our great-aunt developed what was called brain-fever and lay in bed for weeks. It was summer and the day of the school fête when parents came to a great tea-drinking, inspected needlework and listened to songs, recitations and piano pieces afterwards. Downstairs all was gaiety and commotion, white frocks, striped awnings, geraniums and strawberries on a fleet of glass plates. No one could be spared to watch the invalid, except my mother, a child of five, who was left in her aunt’s bedroom, perched on a high stool from where she could see the figure in the white bed with a bandage over its eyes, moving its head on the pillow very slightly but all the time. The child was told to come downstairs at once and tell somebody if the patient started to get out of bed. The white curtains were drawn across the sunny window, the walls were in shadow; the dreadful bandage round the head made it look like something on an ancient tomb near to where the little girls sat in church. From far below came up the sounds of the party, too far away to be of any help. The child sat transfixed in an agony of fright lest the terrible figure should begin to rise. My mother said she thought that if that had happened, she would have gone out of her mind with fear.

  The story used to fill me with indignation, for my mother communicated her sufferings to me in a way I never forgot, and I laid them, and a great deal of nervous unhappiness, at my great-grandmother’s doo
r. My mother, feeling sometimes that she had given an unfair impression, would say in contrite tones: ‘She had, I think, a wonderful way of giving pleasure by small things: these dolls that were kept in the drawing-room! They had their own tea-set and a trunk for their extra dresses and hats: we used to be allowed to play with them on special occasions. I have never forgotten the excitement and delight of seeing them put down on the yellow hearthrug.’

  ‘When everything was more or less horrid, I suppose anything that wasn’t did seem wonderful,’ I suggested. My mother said, it was not that, exactly. ‘So much of what she did was excellent; it was only . . .’ My mother broke off and sighed. ‘Only!’ cried Hero, sparkling with ire. ‘I should think it was, indeed! Only that she was an abominable old tyrant who made people’s lives a misery!’ My mother succeeded thoroughly in making us understand the harsh side of the régime but she could not with all her efforts induce us to see that there had been a part of it that was worth having.

  The school after four generations had been honourably wound up; the later phases of its existence had no distinctive interest for me, but whenever I met someone who had had, or heard of, first-hand experience of its early days, there was always brought to light some new detail of my great-grandmother’s reign; of hot afternoons when thirsty children were not allowed to go for drinks of water because, said Mrs Standish with inexor­able logic, drinking was drinking, and if you did not learn to control a desire for water, where would you be when wine and spirits were within your reach? And of festivals of delicious things, religiously kept: gooseberry pies and cream at Whitsun, hot rolls for breakfast on Sunday mornings and two or three times a term, a Sweet Saturday, when everyone was allowed to choose sweets and order sixpenny-­worth of them, and they were brought in to the big schoolroom in great baskets. No doubt the child of today, devouring chocolate and ice cream at all hours, has never had a gastronomic sensation like that produced by a single brandy ball under Mrs Standish’s aegis.