A HAZY SHADE OF WINTER

by Simon Bestwick

  A HAZY SHADE

  OF WINTER

  Simon Bestwick

  A HAZY SHADE OF WINTER

  ISBN: 9781553101642 (Kindle edition)

  ISBN: 9781553101659 (ePub edition)

  Published by Christopher Roden

  For Ash-Tree Press

  P.O. Box 1360, Ashcroft, British Columbia

  Canada V0K 1A0

  http://www.ash-tree.bc.ca/eBooks.htm

  First electronic edition 2012

  First Ash-Tree Press edition 2004

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over, and does not assume responsibility for, third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © Simon Bestwick 2004, 2012

  Introduction © Joel Lane 2004, 2012

  Cover artwork © Paul Lowe 2004, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  Produced in Canada.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction by Joel Lane

  A Hazy Shade of Winter

  Love Knot

  . . . And Dream of Avalon

  Come With Me, Down This Long Road

  Graven

  Severance

  Home from the Sea

  The Crows

  Malachi

  Close the Door, Put Out the Light

  The Wedding

  The Foot of the Garden

  Running Ragged

  Until My Darkness Goes

  Acknowledgements

  Sources

  A HAZY SHADE

  OF WINTER

  For William Neal Gillespie, 1911–92;

  Wish you were here to see this,

  And Terie Garrison:

  who kicked by butt, and thereby saved it.

  Introduction

  THIS BOOK IS THE FIRST COLLECTION of Simon Bestwick’s tales of supernatural horror. I don’t think it will be the last. These stories are quite a reading experience. They are disturbing, emotionally frank, thematically diverse, and rich in descriptive skill. Bestwick allies traditional story-structures with an uncompromising modernity of outlook. And he writes as if words were his—and our—only possible means of salvation.

  There’s not much I can tell you about Bestwick that you won’t learn from the stories themselves. (Or rather there is, but the blackmail money is sitting comfortably in my pocket.) He is young—just turned thirty—and a city-dweller. He is a discerning enthusiast of literature, films, and music, and he is well aware that aesthetics and politics cannot be kept apart. He approves of John Cage’s statement: ‘Life without order is chaos. Order without life is death.’

  I first encountered Bestwick’s fiction in a confrontational horror magazine called Nasty Piece of Work. Never one to take the easy route, he had contributed a gentle and tragic story about euthanasia. Even in those early days, his writing had an emotional charge that shouted from the page. Then he sent me the novelette ‘To Walk in Midnight’s Realm’ for my anthology Beneath the Ground (Alchemy Press, 2003). That story, a modern reworking of the Orpheus myth, demonstrated Bestwick’s talent for evoking the twilight world of the supernatural. It was horror, but it was also the truth.

  Like his contemporaries Paul Finch and Tim Lebbon, Bestwick cut his teeth on the British horror small press of the late 1990s. He shares Finch’s enthusiasm for the dynamics of classic weird storytelling. He shares Lebbon’s desire to say something personal about the world we live in and how we live in it. Indeed, Bestwick doesn’t just wear his heart on his sleeve: his entire circulatory system is out there, each blood vessel carefully stitched into place on his black leather jacket.

  The stories in this collection deal with issues such as bigotry, passion, betrayal, and violence. But they also show a quiet, evocative touch in their handling of supernatural themes and images. The menace of both urban and rural settings is skilfully conveyed. There is no shortage of ghosts in these stories, and they are rarely just glimpsed in the shadows. When a Bestwick ghost haunts you, you know about it.

  ‘A Hazy Shade of Winter’ has the kind of village setting that would often signify the most reassuring of ghost stories. But here Bestwick throws down a challenge to the reader: either leave your preconceptions at the door, or go back to your plate of muffins and leave this book unread. ‘. . . And Dream of Avalon’ is darker still, the friendships and romances of youth casting long and distorted shadows. ‘Come With Me, Down This Long Road’ creeps up on the reader in a manner reminiscent of the early Campbell. You know what’s going on before you know you know it.

  ‘Malachi’ might seem an odd inclusion in this book, since its war-torn landscape clearly belongs to a possible future. But even in the future, the phantoms of the past are not at rest. ‘The Wedding’ is set in the Latin America of the recent past, but its breathtaking conclusion is timeless. Notice how easily Bestwick moves from the personal to the political, and from the realistic to the weird. There’s a touch of Bradbury in this story, not least in its dark optimism.

  Two stories set resolutely in the here and now demonstrate Bestwick’s skill in characterisation. ‘Severance’ juxtaposes the weary tension of office politics with a raw and lyrical terror. ‘Love Knot’ weaves an appropriately tangled web of friendship, desire, and music, culminating in a supernatural encounter that is both tender and brutal. Both of these tales echo the harsh morality of the ghost story tradition.

  The centrepiece of this collection, however, is the novella ‘Until My Darkness Goes’. It starts with the narrator buying a second-hand book, and readers may well have some inkling of what is coming next. But this is the kind of ghost story that reminds us what the genre is for. Its scrupulously crafted form is a means to an end: to take the reader into a realm of intense supernatural terror. This nightmare of persecution is reminiscent both of Crawford’s violent encounters with the undead and Le Fanu’s fatalistic visions of haunting without end. There are some wonderfully subtle touches, as when George Fuller’s son remarks ‘I was it for the funeral.’ The characters, both major and minor, are distinctive, the revelations skilfully handled, the prevailing atmosphere as dark and cold as a winter night six feet under the ground.

  One of the musicians who toured with the late, great Johnny Cash tells the story of a tour on which, under the influence of alcohol and amphetamines, they painted a series of Japanese hotel bedrooms black. It would take the whole night, but they painted it all: the pillows, the bookshelf, the vase, the face of the bedside clock. By the time you’ve finished reading ‘Until My Darkness Goes’, you may feel as though someone has done the same thing to your home.

  Joel Lane

  April 2004

  A Hazy Shade of Winter

  SNOW SWIRLED DOWN through the windy air of Christmas Day, plucked into spirals and mandalas as it fell. A soft white frosting covered the pavements and the roads like icing-sugar, lightly dusted the hedges and the wall around the church, even the gravestones in the cemetery as we passed through the lychgate on our way up the path. A Victorian angel, bow-headed, was capped with snow.

  In the day’s chill gloom, church lights blazed. They lit up the stained glass from within, and more lights spilled over the surrounding grounds, the stones, and the graves—and on that odd little corner they had in
the cemetery, a small, weed-grown patch, curiously unattended, unlike all the rest of well-verged churchyard, at the juncture of two of the walls. It was filled with lumpy, uneven ground, and small wooden crosses, often planted askew.

  I’d forgotten my gloves, but so had Karen, so it wasn’t so bad; our fingers warmed one another’s on the way in. Her parents followed.

  It was the first time I’d seen the inside of a church in more years than I cared to remember. I’d given up any belief in a God about the same time that I’d realised Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy were likewise tales for children. But Karen’s parents were both Christians, and she seemed to have inherited the faith. Still, we hadn’t had any real arguments like that yet, so I was hoping that there was enough common ground between my principles and hers for things to work out. We’d only been together about three months, but it was already serious enough for me to be spending the season with her and her folks. Not that there was really anywhere else for me to spend it. . . .

  The service was pretty much the usual. Various members of the church came up and told their little bit of the Nativity story; the focus seemed to be, as ever, on the birth of Christ, how he had come to unite all humankind in love, the Redeemer, the Messiah . . . you should know the drill by now. And nothing wrong with that, despite the really sharp-toothed atheist in me snarling: Messiahs, Redeemers . . . people always too chicken to take responsibility for themselves, always wanting someone else to come along and take all the complicated stuff away. . . .

  Atheist or not, though, I do have a soft spot for Christmas carols. ‘Silent Night’, ‘Hark, The Herald Angels Sing’—at times like that I really wish I could believe in God. And Santa Claus. And big floppy-eared rabbits called Harvey, if it comes to that.

  Well, that night, they played ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’. The organ notes swelled and boomed inside the church, and the voices of choir and congregation rose in more or less tuneful harmony.

  God rest ye merry, gentlemen, let nothing you dismay

  For Jesus Christ our Saviour was born upon this day

  To save us all from Satan’s pow’r when we were gone astray . . .

  Karen squeezed my hand throughout, but I couldn’t help casting a jaundiced eye round the congregation to begin with. Wondering how Christian they were the rest of the year round, how much they loved their neighbours and all the rest.

  But the mood gets to you. It was so much easier to go with the flow, accept and embrace the warmth and comradeship and love without inquiring too far into the depth of it. And before I knew it I was singing along with the rest.

  Now turn to one another, all you within this place

  And with true love and brotherhood each other now embrace

  And I’m not (too) ashamed to admit that’s exactly what Karen and I did.

  Oh, tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy,

  Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.

  The only odd note was at the tail-end of the vicar’s sermon.

  Most of it was of a piece with all they heard before: platitudes and sentiments of love and peace and compassion and so forth. The vicar was a white-haired old fellow with blue eyes bright behind half-moon lenses, shooting grandfatherly smiles at the children throughout. Until the very last.

  ‘We mustn’t forget,’ he said, face suddenly stern, ‘that our lord Jesus came to us for a very good reason: to rescue us from a very real danger. That danger was from Satan, from the Devil. We mustn’t forget that. We have to remember what He said to us and what that means, and keep that message alive in our hearts.

  ‘But we also have to watch for the Devil and his servants. People who come to tempt us away from what’s good. It isn’t hard to see what good is, what the right way is. But the Devil will try and make us think that it is hard, that it’s more complicated than it is. He’ll try to confuse us, and—in our confusion—lead us astray.

  ‘Let’s not forget that even Jesus wasn’t meek and gentle all of the time. He drove the moneylenders from the temple’—he wagged a finger at some of the children—‘as I’m sure you’ll remember from Sunday school.’ There was a ripple of laughter. Was it slightly nervous or was that just me? ‘When we see evil, when we witness it close to, we have to be strong and deal with it. Otherwise it will sneak and creep up on us, and corrupt those things we love and treasure.’

  He let that thought hang for a moment, and then smiled again. ‘But tonight, it’s Christmas. Not just a time for presents and trees, but a time for remembering Jesus, who was born for our sakes over two thousand years ago. I want to thank you all for coming. For remembering that.’

  A moment later the organist started up with ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’.

  ‘What was all that about?’ I asked Karen as we walked back down the path, her parents once more trailing behind us. I’d shaken hands with the vicar as I went. It had been like clasping a dead mackerel. Half-frozen.

  She cocked her head and frowned. Her hair was long and black, glossy as oil, falling over her collar, snaring snow from the wind. ‘What do you mean?’

  Except for two pink flushes of colour in her cheeks, her face was almost as white as the snow, the bones beneath fine as porcelain. I touched one pink cheek with my fingertips. ‘All that stuff about the Devil.’

  She shrugged. ‘You can’t just keep the bits you like and chuck out the rest, you know.’

  With anyone else, I’d probably have said that was exactly what the church had been doing for the last two thousand years, but I bit my tongue and remembered that some of the good guys had played for this team too. ‘Just didn’t seem the kind of thing you’d talk about at Christmas. Stuck out a bit from the rest, you know?’

  Karen shrugged, embarrassed. I touched her chin and tilted up her face, leaning forward to kiss her. But the second our lips met, her mother coughed sharply behind me, and she pulled away, face flushing, her blue eyes down.

  I was never too sure about her parents, for the simple reason that they never seemed too sure about me. It was Janice, Karen’s mother, who was the driving force of the household. Her father, Martin, seemed almost like a ghost, watery-eyed and thin-haired; even his moustache seemed little more than stubble, however hard he tried to cultivate it. He’d taken retirement on medical grounds after some industrial accident or another, and there always seemed something tenuous about him, as if his substance might scatter on the first breeze or dissolve in the dawn’s first rays.

  Janice . . . well, there’s an old proverb, isn’t there, that if you’re thinking of marrying a girl you should look at her mother, because that’s what she’ll become. I didn’t know what to make of her. Janice was like a forty-something-year-old version of Karen, except with shorter hair and maybe a bit heavier in figure. She wore glasses, and her eyes were dark instead of blue, but otherwise there was a lot in common. But if Martin was just plain vague, Janice was anything but. There was an intensity in her, almost as if she’d plundered her husband for presence and vitality and stocked herself with it. Not that she was ever rude or cold; she was the soul of politeness and hospitality, as shown by her inviting me up for Christmas, and the rules of the house, such as they were, were pretty relaxed. But all the same there was a sense of reserve. As though, I think, she hadn’t made up her mind about me, and wouldn’t give anything of herself away, behind the mask of manners and formula goodwill, until she had. It was a little uncomfortable, because it made me feel as though I was under constant surveillance, every move, gesture, word, added up and dissected, scrutinised.

  Privacy was hard to come by too. Everything was very much to be done as a family. It was frowned on to retire to your room for any real extended period, except at bedtime, and as for Karen and I both retiring together for any length of time . . . forget it.

  On the other hand, we were able to get a bit of time to ourselves by volunteering to wash up while her parents watched whatever was on TV that evening. I had no idea. I’d more or less given up watching TV, since I thought most of the st
uff on it was utter cobblers, which made for a further problem as, the dishes done, I was likely to be condemned to an evening of game shows and celebrity pantos.

  ‘Fancy nipping out for a walk afterwards?’ I asked Karen hopefully, drying a wineglass.

  She gave a small, rueful smile and shook her head, soaping up a plate. ‘Better not.’

  ‘Why not?’ I protested. ‘We can wrap up warm. Have a snowball fight if you want.’ And get away from the feeling of being under twenty-four hour observation, I managed not to add, and having to watch all of the next several hours of TV crap.

  Karen reached over and squeezed my hand; we both had to laugh when she did as she was still wearing her rubber gloves. She flicked soap at me and I flicked some back at her. But even then I couldn’t let it lie, could I? ‘Why not?’ I asked again.

  ‘Mum,’ she said at last, reluctantly. ‘She’s just a bit funny like that on Christmas Day. Likes us all to stay in together as a family.’

  ‘You aren’t five anymore,’ I said. I was irritated and trying not to show it. ‘You’re grown up now. You’ve got a life of your own.’

  ‘I know. But it’s Christmas. I know it’s not all easy for you. I really appreciate you making the effort. It’s important to me, Rog. That you get on with them as well as them with you. So just grin and bear it? Please?’