Stephen Jones (ed)

by The Mammoth Book of Zombies (mobi)

  The last of the drawings had gone off to Dana Allard in Petersham, and Leverett, fifteen pounds lighter and gut-weary, converted part of the bonus check into a case of good whiskey. Dana had the offset presses rolling as soon as the plates were shot from the drawings. Despite his precise planning, presses had broken down, one printer quit for reasons not stated, there had been a bad accident at the new printer - seemingly innumerable problems, and Dana had been furious at each delay. But the production pushed along quickly for all that. Leverett wrote that the book was cursed, but Dana responded that a week would see it ready.

  Leverett amused himself in his studio constructing stick lattices and trying to catch up on his sleep. He was expecting a copy of the book when he received a letter from Stefroi:

  Have tried to reach you by phone last few days, but no answer at your house.

  I'm pushed for time just now, so must be brief. I have indeed uncovered an unsuspected megalithic site of enormous importance. It's located on the estate of a long-prominent Mass, family - and as I cannot receive authorization to visit it, I will not say where.

  Have investigated secretly (and quite illegally) for a short time one night and was nearly caught. Came across reference to the place in collection of 17th century letters and papers in a divinity school library. Writer denouncing the family as a brood of sorcerers and witches, references to alchemical activities and other less savoury rumours - and describes underground stone chambers, megalithic artefacts etc. which are put to 'foul usage and diabolic practise. 'Just got a quick glimpse but his description was not exaggerated. And Colin - in creeping through the woods to get to the site, I came across dozens of your mysterious 'sticks!' Brought a small one back and have it here to show you. Recently constructed and exactly like your drawings. With luck, I'll gain admittance and find out their significance -undoubtedly they have significance - though these cultists can be stubborn about sharing their secrets. Will explain my interest is scientific, no exposure to ridicule - and see what they say. Will get a closer look one way or another. And so - I'm off!

  Sincerely,

  Alexander Stefroi

  Leverett's bushy brows rose. Allard had intimated certain dark rituals in which the stick lattices figured. But Allard had written over thirty years ago, and Leverett assumed the writer had stumbled onto something similar to the Mann Brook site. Stefroi was writing about something current.

  He rather hoped Stefroi would discover nothing more than an inane hoax.

  The nightmares haunted him still - familiar now, for all that the scenes and phantasms were visited by him only in dream. Familiar. The terror that they evoked was undiminished.

  Now he was walking through forest - a section of hills that seemed to be close by. A huge slab of granite had been dragged aside, and a pit yawned where it had lain. He entered the pit without hesitation, and the rounded steps that led downward were known to his tread.

  A buried stone chamber, and leading from it stone lined burrows. He knew which one to crawl into.

  And again the underground room with its sacrificial altar and its dark spring beneath, and the gathering circle of poorly glimpsed figures. A knot of them clustered about the stone table, and as he stepped toward them he saw they pinned a frantically writhing man.

  It was a stoutly built man, white hair dishevelled, fresh gouged and filthy. Recognition seemed to burst over the contorted features, and he wondered if he should know the man. But now the lich with the caved in skull was whispering in his ear, and he tried not to think of the unclean things that peered from that cloven brow, and instead took the bronze knife from the skeletal hand, and raised the knife high, and because he could not scream and awaken, did with the knife as the tattered priest had whispered…

  And when after an interval of unholy madness, he at last did awaken, the stickiness that covered him was not cold sweat, nor was it nightmare the half-devoured heart he clutched in one fist.

  Leverett somehow found sanity enough to dispose of the shredded lump of flesh. He stood under the shower all morning, scrubbing his skin raw. He wished he could vomit.

  There was a news item on the radio. The crushed body of noted archaeologist, Dr Alexander Stefroi, had been discovered beneath a fallen granite slab near Whately. Police speculated the gigantic slab had shifted with the scientist's excavations at its base. Identification was made through personal effects.

  When his hands stopped shaking enough to drive, Leverett fled to Petersham - reaching Dana Allard's old stone house about dark. Allard was slow to answer his frantic knock.

  "Why, good evening, Colin! What a coincidence your coming here just now! The books are ready. The bindery just delivered them."

  Leverett brushed past him. "We've got to destroy them!" he blurted. He'd thought a lot since morning.

  "Destroy them?"

  "There's something none of us figured on. Those stick lattices - there's a cult, some damnable cult. The lattices have some significance in their rituals. Stefroi hinted once they might be glyphics of some sort, I don't know. But the cult is still alive. They killed Scott… they killed Stefroi. They're onto me - I don't know what they intend. They'll kill you to stop you from releasing this book!"

  Dana's frown was worried, but Leverett knew he hadn't impressed him the right way. "Colin, this sounds insane. You really have been overextending yourself, you know. Look, I'll show you the books. They're in the cellar."

  Leverett let his host lead him downstairs. The cellar was quite large, flagstoned and dry. A mountain of brown-wrapped bundles awaited them.

  "Put them down here where they wouldn't knock the floor out," Dana explained. "They start going out to distributors tomorrow. Here, I'll sign your copy."

  Distractedly Leverett opened a copy of Dwellers in the Earth. He gazed at his lovingly rendered drawings of rotting creatures and buried stone chambers and stained altars - and everywhere the enigmatic lattice work structures. He shuddered.

  "Here." Dana Allard handed Leverett the book he had signed. "And to answer your question, they are elder glyphics."

  But Leverett was staring at the inscription in its unmistakable handwriting: "For Colin Leverett, Without whom this work could not have seen completion - H. Kenneth Allard."

  Allard was speaking. Leverett saw places where the hastily applied flesh-toned makeup didn't quite conceal what lay beneath. "Glyphics symbolic of alien dimensions - inexplicable to the human mind, but essential fragments of an evocation so unthinkably vast that the 'pentagram' (if you will) is miles across. Once before we tried - but your iron weapon destroyed part of Althol's brain. He erred at the last instant - almost annihilating us all. Althol had been formulating the evocation since he fled the advance of iron four millennia past.

  "Then you reappeared, Colin Leverett - you with your artist's knowledge and diagrams of Althol's symbols. And now a thousand new minds will read the evocation you have returned to us, unite with our minds as we stand in the Hidden Places. And the Great Old Ones will come forth from the earth, and we, the dead who have steadfastly served them, shall be masters of the living."

  Leverett turned to run, but now they were creeping forth from the shadows of the cellar, as massive flagstones slid back to reveal the tunnels beyond. He began to scream as Althol came to lead him away, but he could not awaken, could only follow.

  7 - Charles L. Grant - Quietly Now

  The hills of northwestern New Jersey are low and ancient, densely forested and, for the most part, state protected. In those areas, however, which the state has kept clear there are children's camps and winter resorts, lakes natural and manmade, villages where only a radio tells them the year - and sufficient distances to exclude them all from New York City's commuting umbrella. Scarcely a wilderness by the Far West's standards, yet wilderness enough to make the ordinary tourist somewhat cautious after dark. And wilderness enough to spawn midnight stories of travellers wandering into the woodland and seldom returning.

  Stories resurrected during the time of the
darkmoon.

  There are nights, poets' nights, when the stars are perfect against a backdrop of perfect black, and the air is cool and the streams are running, and vision seems unlimited except for the moon. It could be crescent, it could be full, waxing or waning, yet darkened by a haze not born of a cloud. Silverlight becomes grey, shadows lose definition, and old-timers head for the nearest tavern or hearth.

  And travellers take walks, and the stories begin.

  And like everyone else who lived there year-round, Keith Prior read the inevitable news with a slow-shaking head and a continuing wonderment that city people could be so eternally foolhardy, so infernally stupid. The darkmoon was legend, a Halloween tale, but it didn't change the fact that people sometimes died. He thought it would have been sufficient for them to see one two-column photo of a spring-thaw corpse huddled in a small cave, of a partially devoured woman huddled beneath a tree, of a fleshless family unprotected in their tents, sleeping bags slashed and clothes rent at the seams. But at least once a year someone refused to heed common-sense warnings, and once a year the stories returned.

  Not, he thought, that he himself dwelled in a rustic log cabin and chopped wood for heat and hunted his meals and fashioned his wrappings from the pelts of the wild. That was a fancy he left to the movies, and his New York friends who thought he lived like a hermit.

  The Greenwitch Arms Apartments complex was much more a place to foster a recluse's nightmares.

  It had been constructed a decade before on a deserted farm just below a two-lane highway, sixty miles west of the Hudson River. Seventy-two two-story buildings of varicoloured brick shaded by oaks still reaching for the eaves; a dozen units to a building - the upstairs with a narrow slatted balcony, the downstairs with a concrete slab that masked as a patio. Nearly two thousand people who thought they lived in the country.

  It was May now, and warm, and the sky was of a blue better suited to a lover's eyes. He sat in his living room - a desk, two chairs, white walls buried behind unfinished bookcases - waiting for inspiration to lure him back to work.

  Outside, on the twenty-yard patch of grass and shrubs between his building and the next, was a large, red plastic wading pool currently invaded by an army of young children. They splashed and complained and laughed so loudly he was unable to concentrate on the research he was doing - reading for an article on the fantasy whims of poets and prophets, for a magazine he'd never heard of, but which paid fifteen cents a word.

  He sighed, and wondered if perhaps he shouldn't try calling Jane to apologize, though he had no idea if one was really necessary. It would be nice if he had to, because that would imply he might have another chance. But he doubted it. The affair had slowed to stasis during winter, had not thawed with spring. They were friends, they had drinks, he even visited now and then, but instinct warned him momentum had died. Probably, he thought sourly, he'd been pre-empted by Carl Andrews.

  Another sigh, mockingly melodramatic, and he rose to stand at the sliding screen door to watch the kids playing. He counted eight, all of them trying to wedge into the pool without touching the ground now muddy with spillage. Suddenly, two of them - a carrot-top and a white-blond - broke away in disgust and wandered listlessly toward him. They looked up and waved before he could back off. He slid the door aside, stepped out, and rested his forearms on the railing.

  "Hi, Uncle Keith!" A chorus high-pitched and pleasant. The title was honorary but he didn't mind it a bit.

  "Gentlemen," he said solemnly, and nodded toward the others. "Too crowded at the beach?"

  They scowled. They wore identical pairs of blue jogging shorts with gold piping. Chest, legs, arms bare and tanned. They seemed ill at ease, as if they missed having pockets in which their hands could hide.

  "Did you guys have a good time yesterday?" he said. "See any neat freaks in the city?"

  "No," said Peter, the carrot-top and older. "There wasn't anything but a bunch of dead animals. Bones and a lot of pictures. Nuts. Who wants to see bones?" And with a grimace of disgust he headed home, the first-floor apartment one over from Keith's.

  "Hey, don't worry about him," Keith said when Philip looked stricken at his brother's desertion. "It's hard being ten these days. He'll grow up, I promise."

  Philip considered, then shrugged with a rueful smile. "He still doesn't like it that Danny went away."

  Keith only nodded. Euphemisms for death irritated him without exception, and when they were used by children he felt annoyingly helpless. Especially in this case. Danny Ramera had been found in the woodland tract behind the schoolhouse across the highway. He'd been missing for five days, and the police medical team had judged death by exposure. No matter the temperature hadn't dropped below sixty-five for a week or more, and no matter the body had been discovered less than eighty yards from the school; the boy had been playing, had fallen, had struck his head on a rock, and Nature was blamed for doing the rest.

  That was the word circulated through the township, and that was the word accepted by the local paper.

  "Mrs German," Philip said suddenly, "thinks all those animals are damned or something because they're not human."

  "What?" Keith blinked slowly and leaned farther over the railing.

  The boy repeated himself, and Keith wondered what kind of teachers they were turning out these days. Jane, on the other hand -

  "I think, she's crazy," Philip declared.

  "Well… she is rather strange."

  "No, she's not," the boy said. "She's a vampire."

  "So was my third mother-in-law, but I don't brag about it."

  "No, I mean it," Philip said, moving closer, craning his neck and squinting against the sun. "She's a real vampire."

  "No kidding."

  "Really! She keeps the shades down in her room all the time. She says she doesn't want us looking outside, but I know it's because vampires can't take the sun. And you know something else?"

  "No," he said. "What?"

  "She never leaves the school!"

  "That's because you don't see her," he said. "You leave before she does."

  The boy shook his head vigorously. "No, I mean it! She doesn't have a car and she never leaves. Really. I'm not lying."

  He smiled gentle tolerance for a boy who often seemed so much older than his years, and rubbed his chin thoughtfully against his forearm. "Listen, Phil, do you really think Mr Bonachek would allow one of his teachers to - "

  "He's right, you know."

  He scowled and rolled his eyes, a tongue-in-cheek indication that a Great Truth had been interrupted. Phil dashed away, avoiding his mother's outstretched arm to duck into his home. Moira Leary was short, slim for bearing two children a year apart, and wore oversized sunglasses that made her eyes too wide, too innocent for the dark lips glistening in the afternoon's heat. She was almost Jane's twin, though she seemed years older. He saluted her silently.

  "German's a vampire, right?"

  A hand lifted to shade her eyes. "If not that, something else again, believe me. She knows her stuff, don't get me wrong, but there are times when she acts like she's right out of the Dark Ages."

  "I would commiserate," he said, "but you'd only tell me that bachelors - especially ones three times divorced - don't know anything about raising children so what do I know anyway, right?"

  She laughed. "What're you working on now, Hemingway?"

  Several decidedly lecherous responses came to mind, but he discarded them reluctantly. Though he'd never met her salesman husband in the two years he'd been here, and though he was positive she'd made a pass at him more than once, he didn't dare consider her more than a friend - though it hadn't stopped him from sneaking a sex-starved glance once in a while. He grinned, she grinned back knowingly, and he told her about the article. She laughed again, brightly, brushed the bangs from her forehead and waved him a farewell.

  He waited until she was gone, then returned to his desk. A bored glance at his calendar made him realize with a start he'd promised Mike Bonachek he
'd talk this Monday to the fourth graders about a book of his they were using, on astronomy and NASA. My God, he thought, me and my big mouth.

  But it wasn't that bad, he admitted when it was over. The book had been read, and he'd been asked intelligent questions. The only argument he'd suffered centred on his refusal to believe in flying saucers; the classes - two jammed into a single room - had seen too much television, and they knew better.

  Five minutes before the talk ended, however, the room abruptly stilled. He turned automatically to the door, and just managed not to gape.

  Mrs German stood on the threshold. She was nearly six feet tall, slightly overweight, wearing a shapeless print dress whose colours had faded. Her hair was black and flat, her features sharp to the point of emaciation. Her shoes were brown, sturdy and laced, and he bet himself her dark stockings ended just above the knee with a darker band of elastic that left a red belt around her thighs.

  He couldn't help it; he glanced at Philip who grinned an / told you so.

  Jane Disanza smiled politely. "Yes, Mrs German?"

  The older woman did not turn. She kept her heavily veined hands clasped at her waist and stared at the class. "I am visiting all the rooms at Mr Bonachek's request. I'm sorry for the interruption. It seems someone had been prying at the basement lock." Her gaze was stern, condemnation without trial. "It is not permitted."

  The children said nothing; Jane said nothing; and Keith merely pursed his lips in a silent whistle and stared at the floor.

  "Not permitted," she repeated, and nodded once before leaving. There was a rustling quelled by a sharp word from Jane. A bee droning against a pane. A fussing with books until the bell finally rang and he found himself surrounded. He grinned, shook a few hands, and stood with a groan once the last child was gone.

  Jane had slumped into her desk chair, fluffed idly at the hair curling darkly to her shoulders. "Bitch," she said. "She's been here so long she thinks she owns the place. Hell, Keith, nobody wants to go into the stupid basement anyway, for God's sake."