The Mammoth Book of Terror

by Stephen Jones

  “I’ll take a little walk,” I said quietly, almost daring him to make any objection. “Just a stroll round the grounds.”

  His head was averted when he answered. “An excellent idea, sir. But it might be well if you kept to the drive. The woods are dangerous at this time of year. The undergrowth conceals boggy patches that can trap the unwary. I entreat you, sir. Keep out in the open.”

  “I will not take any unnecessary risks,” I promised.

  As I walked across the drive I knew he was watching, darting from window to window and possibly sighing with relief when I turned right and skirted the woods, wading through knee high grass until I came to an overgrown hedge that was breached by an old stile. This I climbed, then after making certain that I could not be seen from the house, entered the woods.

  Dense undergrowth impeded progress, whippy twigs stung my groping hands as though some rustic deity were trying to protect its gloomy retreat from invasion. I veered left looking for the path my nocturnal visitor had taken the night before. Eventually I stumbled on to it; a barely perceptible parting that ran through stunted ferns and crumbling leaf mould; a ghost path which had died long, long ago.

  To this day I am not certain how long I followed that narrow, almost non-existent trail, but suddenly I found myself facing a large clearing in which stood a snug, red-bricked cottage. It was familiar, yet more than a little disturbing. I tried to remember where I had seen such a cottage before, but could only conjure up mental pictures torn from brightly illustrated books, last seen before cosy nursery fires. Woodland cottage, elderly loving parents, a beautiful daughter who held intimate conversations with loquacious rabbits and other members of the animal kingdom.

  A sloping red-tiled roof, two windows up and two down, a green door in the centre; a crazy paved path that divided a flower-rich garden; all protected by a white picket fence broken by a green gate. Dazzling white curtains masked the windows, flaming red geraniums enhanced the lower window sills, while blue smoke drifted up from two squat chimney pots.

  Fear – apprehension – flowed back before a feeling of supreme contentment, creating the ridiculous impression that I – a wanderer on the vast plains of time – had at last come home. But below the surface, under the crust of self-deception, unwelcome knowledge seethed and threatened to manifest as indisputable fact. But I also knew with an unquestionable certainty, that in this place fantasy and reality were but two meaningless words man had created for his convenience. The truth was much more complicated.

  I opened the gate, closed it carefully behind me, then walked slowly up the path and mounted the single, hearth-stoned step. I tapped on the green door and waited with keen expectancy for someone to welcome me. The door drifted open and I looked upon the model parents; those that we, when young and misunderstood, always wished for but rarely, if ever had. The woman could have been a youthful fifty or a mature forty; auburn hair, gentle dark eyes and a smiling mouth – the eternal mother for a perpetual child. The man! Those who can, think of Ronald Colman – handsome, grey-haired, urbane, neither young or old; a man of the world who had the ability to dismiss fear with a single word, banish doubt with a charming smile.

  It was he who stretched out a long-fingered hand and said:

  “Why, it must be the young man who is staying at the big house! Cathy has been on tenderhooks all day. Come in, my dear fellow. I am so pleased to see your ankle is better.”

  Mother blushed and appeared quite willing to kiss me if given the least encouragement; and both made me feel like the prodigal son arriving home for his share of the fatted calf.

  I was drawn into a narrow passage, then ushered into a comfortable parlour (that definition came most easily to mind) that smelt faintly of warm damp and the cloying aroma of decay. But there the bright red wallpaper looked as if it had been recently put up, the furniture newly purchased from a Victorian store, the patterned carpet delivered that morning from the factory.

  Mother gave me a wonderful smile and motioned me to a deep fat armchair, while Father stood in the doorway and called out:

  “Cathy, come down, dear. Your friend has arrived.”

  I did not hear her descend the stairs, neither did it seem possible she had time to do so, for almost at once my moonlight girl was following her father into the room, her face enhanced by a faint blush. She said: “Hello, how is your ankle?” and promptly sat down in a chair opposite mine. Without hesitation I replied: “Much better thank you. It was so kind of you to help me,” and actually seemed to remember having my swollen ankle bound with a large silk handkerchief. But from then on I began to experience great concern about what I had done and said since entering the house, and what I might do in the immediate future. For example: I could remember Father stretching out his hand, but I could not remember if I had shaken it or not. For some reason this seemed to be very important. Maybe because Jenkins’ instruction kept crashing across my brain. “Make no contact . . . whatsoever.”

  Was sitting on a chair making contact? I gently pounded the arm of my chair with a clenched fist. It seemed solid enough, and that which the senses record must be real. Three pairs of eyes watched me; Mother kindly, father expectantly, Cathy lovingly. Father spoke:

  “We are so glad you came. It is very lonely sometimes.”

  Mother expelled a deep sigh. “We could not live without Cathy, but she needs new material. I think that’s what I mean.”

  Cathy’s lilting voice made me start.

  “What is the use of a book unless it has printed pages? Would you like to stay with us forever?”

  Truth wore a shroud as she hammered on the door of my brain, but I refused to admit her; face the grotesque dream. That lilting voice went on and on.

  “Fiction can only flourish in the garden of fact. Even my genius cannot snatch fantasy out of the air. And there must be romance. A beautiful young man who comes walking down the lane. He’s lost I think and is limping. Or maybe he’s escaped from a prison in which he was unjustly confined, or jilted by a girl in that cruel outside world. But here – in this refuge from ugly reality – he will find his true love. They will make unsullied love in the melancholy purple twilight and send beautifully composed dialogue drifting up to the dark dome of heaven. They will never grow old, not even when the sun reaches out and consumes its children.”

  Mother and Father had become as two wax statues that sat perfectly still with kindly smiles etched on their flawless faces. But Cathy moved. She stood up and stretched out slender arms. I did not surrender immediately for were there not three words blazoned across my brain in letters of fire? do not touch. But why? Could it be that long ago the original Cathy used to torment those gentlemen callers; flirt, tantalize, promise with her eyes, then draw back in pretended or real fear when they stepped over the line which separates reality from make believe? “Don’t touch me. Don’t ruin the dream.”

  Sex creates. Frustrated sex still creates.

  Fear made the hair of the back of my neck bristle; anger, unreasoning rage drove me forward – straight into those outstretched arms.

  That lovely face was transformed into a mask of naked terror and my God how she screamed. For a brief moment I clasped a slender body in my arms, gazed into wide, wide open eyes and tried to smother that unending scream with my mouth. Then suddenly it seemed as if a mighty cold wind came roaring through the woods; it blew away the cottage walls, turned the furniture into scattered rocks; and sent me hurtling down into a bottomless pit.

  When I recovered consciousness and had climbed up onto a strangely shaped boulder that had been so recently, a fat, deep chair, I was at last able to gaze upon the naked face of truth. I will be haunted by that ghastly knowledge until the day I die and it is one of the reasons why Wilfred Frazer never got his world-shattering story and why I am writing it now. Perhaps when it is once committed to paper I will be granted some peace of mind.

  The old house basked in the afternoon sun, its upper windows gleaming slabs of light, that to the fancif
ul might have resembled the eyes of a mythological monster newly awakened from a century-long sleep. When I emerged from the woods and began to cross the drive, my shadow elongated and went streaking out before me, as though it could not wait for me to enter the house. It was then that I realized what had been so dreadfully wrong with Cathy when she crossed the drive in moonlight.

  She had not cast a shadow.

  Even from the hall I could hear the harsh sobbing, punctuated by an occasional wailing cry. I walked slowly up the stairs, then entered the room where the remains of Caroline Fortescue, Lady Bramfield lay upon the great four-poster bed. Jenkins was on his knees beside it, mourning his dead.

  I said quietly: “When did she really die, Jenkins?”

  He looked at me reproachfully with tear filled eyes.

  “When you broke the dream, sir. When you touched. I warned you, sir. Do not touch, I said. Do not touch. You killed a living legend.”

  I went over to the bed and looked down at the thing attired in a rusty black gown. Where the eyes had been there were now two gaping holes. A wave of anger made me shout:

  “You lie, Jenkins. Lie to me – lie to yourself. She died long ago.”

  He shook his head violently and pounded the bed with clenched fists. “No . . . no . . . you’re wrong. She was more alive than you or I, or anyone who walks the earth today. She created her own world . . .”

  I grabbed his coat collar and pulled him to his feet. I placed my mouth within a few inches of his ear and whispered the awful truth. “Listen to me . . . don’t pull away, shut your eyes or plug your ears. That lovely creature that roamed this house at night, ran laughing along the passages, lived with make believe parents in a woodland cottage – that wasn’t the real ghost. Was it, Jenkins? Eh? That was how Caroline Fortescue saw herself-as maybe she once was. No, the real ghost was somewhere else. Where was that, Jenkins? Tell me.”

  When he struggled and cried out I released him and he fell across the bed. Suddenly I was very tired and wanted to be far away from this house of death. I spoke quietly.

  “Her dream world was so real she could not leave it, not even after death. So . . . so . . . she haunted her own corpse. Some personality fragment was able to delay decomposition, simulate the need for nourishment and dominate you, the necessary attendant. I don’t know how much longer this pretence could have gone on. Until you died possibly, for only you could maintain the great illusion. But before I go, satisfy my curiosity. How long has she been dead?”

  Jenkins got up and wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his jacket. “Thirty years, I think. Her decline was gradual, but I have not detected a heart beat for at least twenty years. But I never really admitted that, sir. I couldn’t.”

  I left Bramfield Manor and made my way towards the main gates without so much as a backward glance. I did not pay a visit to the inquisitive post mistress, but caught the first train to town. I told Frazer the truth: Caroline Fortescue had been dead for years and there was no story worth writing.

  A week later Bramfield Manor burnt to the ground. Whether this was the result of an accident, or Jenkins had decided to turn the house into one vast pyre, including himself as a funerary sacrifice, is a matter for interesting conjecture. Certainly two charred skeletons were laid side by side in Bramfield churchyard.

  I sometimes wonder if Jenkins would have considered this arrangement disrespectful.

  DAVID J. SCHOW’S COLLECTION of essays from Fangoria magazine, Wild Hairs, won the 2001 International Horror Guild Award for Best Non-fiction.

  The author’s more recent books include a new collection of living dead stories entitled Zombie Jam, the short novel Rock Breaks Scissors Cut, and a new mainstream suspense novel, Bullets of Rain. His earlier collections Seeing Red and Crypt Orchids have been reissued in new editions, and he edited Elvisland, a landmark collection of John Farris’s short fiction for Babbage Press.

  Schow lives in the Hollywood hills and continues to collect anything and everything to do with The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

  As the author observes: “Zombie fiction has become a subgenre. People know zombies, now, the way everybody knew what a vampire was, twenty years ago. Zombie fiction, like it or not, for better or worse, has arrived . . . and this probably isn’t the last you’ll see of it.”

  I OPENED MY EYES. It hurt. Someone was speaking.

  “Welcome to Phase Two debriefing, Mr Maxwell.”

  Here is my last memory:

  Not drunk, and in compute possession of my senes, I perform the ritual. That’s what it feels like – a ritual. Thousands before me have executed similar moves under comparable circumstances, in an equivalent state of mind. First consideration: hardware. I had chosen a classic, the military-issue Colt. 45 semi-auto, a golden oldie with a venerated history. For those of you who don’t know much about firearms, this pistol, originally made for the US Army, is designated the Ml 911Al. The standard clip is seven-plus-one, though larger magazines are obtainable. “Seven-plus-one” means seven cartridges in the clip with an extra round already chambered. If you wish to find out more about the damage index of various bullet types or need a lot of tech stuff, that information is abundantly available; I know enough to make the device work. Second consideration: The note. The inevitable note. The who, what, why and where of suicide. I had a single glass of white Bordeaux while composing it. Whoever discovered my reeking corpse, exsanguinated, cheesy clumps of hair and brain stuck to the walls and hardening on the carpet, would have to reconcile the ghastly display with my carefully-considered farewell memo. The stench of evacuated bowels and exposed organs, the nakedness of decay. Humidity and maggots. What farewell prose could out-vote that sad horror? I checked my gun a dozen times, finished my wine, and completed my note, blaming no one. Then I stuck the muzzle in my mouth and blew off most of the back of my head with a soft-nosed hollow point, for maximum reliability.

  Then I woke up.

  “Mr Maxwell? Ah. Glad to see you’re back with us. My name is – it’s okay, Mr Maxwell, you can open your eyes. It might sting a little bit. But it won’t harm you.”

  I tried to track the voice and realized I was strapped into a sort of dentist’s chair, reclined, with a lot of leads trailing to beeping machines. But this was not a hospital. I could taste blood in the back of my throat.

  “You’re probably a little bit thirsty, too,” said the voice. Sitting on a stool overseeing my position was a young woman in a smock. She had brilliant grey eyes, strawberry blonde hair, and an abundance of freckles. Her face was compressed and her haircut was not complimentary – she was more of a sidekick type, short and a bit stocky, cute instead of attractive. Eyeglasses on a chain. A bar-coded ID tag dangled from her pen pocket. “My name is Bonnie and I’m your caseworker. This is your preparation for what’s called a Phase Two debriefing; you might have heard of it, or read about it.”

  She tipped a pleated paper cup of water to my lips. My wrists were restricted. The water tasted too cold and invasive. I felt weary.

  “I know you feel like you want to go to sleep Mr Maxwell—” she consulted her clipboard. “Orson. But you can’t become unconscious as long as you’re hooked up, and we need to review a few details before we move on.”

  “I don’t understand.” My voice felt arid and abraded. I felt around inside my mouth with my tongue. No hole. I fancied I could still taste the lubricant and steel of the gun barrel. The egress where it had spit a bullet into my head was patched with something smooth and artificial.

  “That’s why we’re here,” said Bonnie. “Standard orientation for wake-ups. That’s what we call revised suicides – wake-ups.”

  “Revised?”

  “Yes. All wake-ups are selected on the basis of their stats and records. I’m not here to judge, just to prepare you for your reinsertion into the work force. You’ll have a meeting with an actual counselor later.”

  “Excuse me, Miss . . . Bonnie, I haven’t heard about this, or read about it, and I don’t know what you’re t
alking about. I do know that I feel terrible; I feel worse than I’ve ever felt in my life, and I don’t want to answer any questions.”

  She smiled and attempted to soften her manner by about a third of one degree. “Please try to understand. I know this is confusing and you probably are in some bona fide physical pain. But by killing yourself – committing suicide – you have forfeited any protest. You have to co-operate. It’ll seem difficult, for example, when you walk for the first time. But if you don’t want to walk, they’ll force you to walk, anyway. It helps to think of yourself as a newborn, not whatever person you used to be. You do not retain rights, as you understood them.”

  “I forfeited them.”

  “Correct. Now we try to minimize the discomfort of wake-up as much as we can, but ultimately, you’ll have to do what they’ll say until your obligations are discharged.”

  “Wait, wait . . .” My skull felt like a crockpot of acid, broken glass and infection. “What about my head?”

  “That’s sealed with a polymer cap. Your structural damage has all been repaired.”

  “What obligations? Do I have to pay for all this?”

  “Look,” she said, leaning closer. “We’re not supposed to discuss this with wake-ups. Counselors usually deal with inauguration. I don’t know anything about you, other than you wound up here. I don’t know what you did or why they picked you. I’m just here to smooth your transition into a wake-up.”

  “Why am I here?”

  She sighed and made sure the door to our room was closed before she spoke. “Most of the wake-ups? They killed themselves, or arranged accidents, to avoid substantial debt. That’s why they started the program: too many people were in arrears. Too much debt, foisted off onto relatives who couldn’t pay. Scam artists and fraudulent insurance claims that paid off triple on accidental death. It was like an open faucet of money, and eventually, it needed to be fixed. That’s why the government endorsed the wake-up program.”