Horror For Good - A Charitable Anthology

by Jack Ketchum

  "So what happened to the gold?" the tourist asked.

  Linda shook her head. "Never recovered. Some say that the General stored it in a hidden lock box in the safe room behind this door. We have no way of knowing."

  Another from the small crowd asked, "Haven't ya searched?"

  "Nope, we haven't a way to do so," she answered. "The door slammed shut after the General and his daughter came out in 1863 and it hasn't been opened since. There have been a few attempts to get in over the years, but it's a very thick door and the lock is very tricky. Some of the best locksmiths in the world have tried to pick their way in. None have succeeded."

  The college kid called out, "Mind if I try?"

  The other tourists laughed.

  "Be my guest," Linda said, stepping away from the door.

  The kid took two steps forward but then froze when Perry slid the muzzle of his .22 under his chin. Using the weapon to push the slacker away from the door, Perry said, "How's about y'let me give it a try first, huh?"

  Adelaide rushed to her brother's side, pulling her own gun and waving it at the crowd. Shocked, they backpedaled away until she screamed for them to stop, drop to the floor, and put their hands on the back of their heads. They all obeyed, even the gym shower stud. Their eyes were glassy, some tearing. Glancing back through the living quarters, Adelaide saw no signs of any of the guards. "Stay down and nothing bad has'ta happen ta any'all. But don't make this any harder, 'kay?"

  "I think I can—"

  Perry spun toward Linda and stopped her mid-sentence with a sharp blow across her face. She fell against the wall, lip bursting, and began to wail. Keeping his gun trained on her chest, he reached down, wiped a dollop of blood out of her quivering mouth with his thumb, and drew a cartoon heart over her right eye. "You stay down, too, honey-flower, or you're gonna make yourself an example."

  Linda changed. The perfectly composed, conservative host disappeared and a much humbler face emerged, defiant and proud, no more than a generation removed from the indignation of back country hill folk. She spit a glob of blood into his face.

  Reddening with fury, Perry wiped his eyes with his sleeve. For a moment he was still, and Adelaide thought his rage might dissipate, but then, in a flurry of spastic motion, he took hold of the cowering tour guide and wrestled her flat to the floor, swinging the .22 in wide arches, each blow kicking her head to one side, then the other. Turning her over, he pushed her face, mouth open, flat to the floor and jammed the gun under the base of her skull. Screaming, he pulled the trigger three times. The top half of her head, everything above the jawline, rocketed to the far wall.

  The tourists stirred, releasing a chorus of hushed, frenzied murmurs and muffled cries. One of her father's favorite aphorisms—and he had many, preferring them to any meaningful thoughts of his own—was Ernie Pyle's famous phrase "There are no atheists in foxholes," however, looking out at the tourists, Adelaide saw exactly the opposite. The few who chose to steal a quick upward glance did so with wide, faithless eyes. She and Perry hadn't robbed them of their wallets and rings, as her brother had promised her they would, but they'd stolen their faith.

  "Give 'em over," Perry said as he leaped to his feet and held out a hand. Adelaide flinched at the sight of his glimmering eyes and vicious, bestial expression. She knew the look too well. She reached down inside her coat to her waist and felt the brush of a long wooden handle. Digging deeper, into a tight pocket, she hooked her finger around the old key ring stored there and pulled it free. Heavy for their size, the edges of the two black, wrought iron keys had been smoothed by the decades, but they felt like a pair of razor-sharp weapons in her hand, instruments to be treated with the greatest amount of care and never entirely trusted. She'd felt that way ever since she'd pried them from her great, great grandfather's skeletal clutch. Avoiding her brother's intense, glowering eyes, she handed over the keys.

  He leaned in close to her ear and blew a pungent blast of chewing tobacco and tooth decay across her nostrils, forcing her head to turn in protest. "We'll celebrate tonight, just the two of us."

  Grunting, he turned to the door, slid the old black key into the lock and turned. The mechanism resisted. Rust and calcified grime trickled out of the keyhole as the lock's complex series of gears and tumblers turned. Finally, letting out a short, sharp shriek, the safe room door cracked open.

  Perry grunted as he pushed against the heavy door. The hinges turned with a protesting scream, almost human, and the room filled with a cloud of fine dust that smelled and tasted like smoke. Gesturing out to the men and women on the floor, he said, "You stay here with them all." Louder, he added for the tourists, "Y'all get outta line with my sister, she'll make sure the police'll need a whole heap of chalk when they get here."

  Adelaide moved the aim of her gun from one to the next, making sure they knew what it felt like to have the weapon trained on each of them. The uneven floor helped out her cause; a wandering rivulet of blood trickled its way from Linda's stumped head through the crowd. She could tell from the look in their eyes they wouldn't dare move unless commanded to do so.

  Pulling his handkerchief from his back pocket, Perry took a deep breath, covered his mouth, and disappeared beyond the door. With him gone, the gun in her hand felt insufficient to control the crowd; a sudden charge by the men in the group would overtake her, even if she squeezed off a few shots. The stopping power of a handgun was less potent than many believed, she knew this and had seen the scenario play out in a boxcar in Atlanta. She wished she'd found a way to bring her brother's Browning Auto 5. That twelve-gauge shotgun could take down a steer.

  Still, they were terrified and unlikely to try anything.

  She hoped. Under pressure, people became unpredictable.

  Inside the dark room, Perry coughed. From the echo, he sounded farther away than she would have guessed. Family lore never discussed the size of the room, only that it was bored out of the mountain, below the foundation, so she'd always assumed it to be a small, confined space. Not so, apparently.

  The trail of Linda's blood trickled past the tourists and down the short hall beyond. Following a groove in the concrete floor, it turned and flowed right, avoiding the guard station, and entered the living quarters.

  The thunder of boots descending the stairs hit Adelaide's ears. Captivated by the movement of the blood, she hadn't noticed the advance of the footfalls, and from the sound of it, four guards were moving in fast. Adjusting her grip on the handgun, she squeezed the trigger and sent a wild shot into the stairwell. The footsteps stopped with a rustle and a few shouts.

  Drawing a deep breath, she yelled, "Don'tchu come down here—"

  "—please," one of the tourists begged, "let us go—"

  Another voice, this one female, groveled, "—please—"

  The footsteps on the stairs began again, now cautious, but continuing down. The guards would be at the landing in a minute or less. She tugged the trigger again. Dust burst from the wall above the stairwell's mouth where the bullet struck. Adelaide took a quick backward step.

  "—please, Miss, please let us—"

  She heard a voice in her head, her own voice when she was younger, pleading for release, begging Perry to let her go, to get off her, to stop hurting her. Hands shaking, she fired two more shots. Far off target, they ricocheted off the quarry-rock walls.

  "—God, don't shoot, don't—"

  Tears came, reducing her eyesight to an unfocused, moving watercolor painting. She wiped her face and took another step back. Her foot slid on Linda's blood trail, but she righted herself before losing her balance, free hand clutching the safe room's door. It felt colder than any metal surface she'd ever touched, colder even than the keys she'd recovered from great, great Grandfather Spratlin's grave.

  Two dark silhouettes appeared in the stairwell landing, guns raised. Never a great shot, Adelaide knew she had no chance of hitting them, not from this distance with blurry eyesight. Catching a fleeting glance of the men as they stormed into t
he living quarters, she frowned. They weren't guards. Cops? No, the uniforms were wrong.

  Bolting into the safe room, she slammed the door closed.

  Screaming for her brother, she spun in the darkness. Unsettled dust buzzed around her like an endless swarm of riverbed mosquitoes. The first breath she took inside the room brought her to her knees in a coughing fit. Face flushing, she lifted the collar of her shirt over her nose.

  Perry's hands clamped down on her arms. Coming in close, he asked in a coarse, angry voice, "What th'fuck happened?"

  "Cops," she lied.

  He released her, something he hadn't done when she'd begged him in their adolescence, and stepped away. Pocketing the handgun, she lit her cigarette lighter. Through the haze of the swirling dust, she saw him turn away from her and move out of the light's reach.

  "We'll deal with that in a moment," he muttered.

  She followed him. The safe room wasn't a room at all; smooth, rounded walls reached up to a low, elongated dome ceiling: it was a short, terminated tunnel. Not the large room she suspected, the acoustics were misleading in the extreme, even her breathing echoed.

  Fists pounded on the metal door. Spinning, Adelaide saw the impossible: the heavy, impenetrable door shook with each blow. A century and a half of attempts to break into the safe room had failed, but now the fists of a handful of men threatened to bring the door down. Perhaps, she thought, that the seal had weakened when it was opened. Maybe the rust and decay was all that held the hinges together?

  At the back of the room, the dust cloud thinned. Pulling his handkerchief away from his face, Perry dug at the wall, his hands uncovering the outline of a metal box hidden in a recess in the stone. "Help me."

  Sliding alongside him, she worked to uncover more of the box. Once the dirt was removed, Adelaide was shocked by its condition. Untouched for several lifetimes, it looked new. In its center, Perry used his thumbnail to expose a keyhole. He grinned, revealing his incomplete set of uneven, black-tipped teeth.

  "Hold the light still," he commanded her.

  The pounding on the door intensified. Plumes of dust snaked back to the rear of the safe room.

  Perry inserted the smaller key into the lock and turned.

  The key snapped off at its midsection.

  Disbelief spread across Perry's face like a falling shadow.

  Adelaide reached down for the wooden handle tethered to her belt. She tightened her hand around the shaft, tore it free, and brought the mallet up over her head. Perry had just enough time to open his mouth in surprise before she brought the hammer down on the side of his face. Bone shattered. Perry staggered back, dropping the key ring.

  "I sawed that key down last night," she told him as he held his head and scooted across the floor, away from her. One hand darted into his coat for his .22. Adelaide pulled her gun first, freezing him in place.

  Stuttering, his mouth quivered as he spoke. "We c-c-c-oulda been r-r-rrich..."

  "Can't buy happiness, brother," she said, reaching down and taking his gun. She swung the mallet again, hitting the same spot. He screamed and kicked away, leaving a trail of blood behind. "Maybe it all ain't your fault, that's something I been thinking. Maybe it's a curse, our family, y'know? Maybe we have no choice but to play the damned thing out."

  As Perry curled into a fetal ball, Adelaide dropped the mallet. Perry had used it to kill so many of her pets, but now its killing days were over. She strode into the whirling surf of airborne dust, reaching down to retrieve the key ring as she moved. She didn't bother to cover her mouth or nose. Inhaling, she took a deep drag from her family's history. She tasted blood, fear, desperate tears, the salt of their skin against hungry lips.

  Sliding the key into the door lock, she wondered if this offering of blood would pay her family's long debt. She pushed the heavy door open. The prison beyond the door was not a museum. And the distorted and tortured faces massed outside were not tourists and police officers. Spotted by blood, they wore the uniforms of Federal troops. They rushed inside, makeshift shanks and bludgeons swinging. They passed, oblivious to her, and descended on Perry. He screamed as they overtook him.

  Stepping through the doorway, Adelaide ran a hand over her stomach, closed the door, and wondered whether she should consider the child within her to be her son, or her brother.

  —Ramsey Campbell

  The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as "Britain's most respected living horror writer". He has been given more awards than any other writer in the field, including the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association and the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild. Among his novels are The Face That Must Die, Incarnate, Midnight Sun, The Count of Eleven, Silent Children, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Overnight, Secret Story, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, The Seven Days of Cain and Ghosts Know. Forthcoming is The Kind Folk. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead and Just Behind You, and his non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably. His novels The Nameless and Pact of the Fathers have been filmed in Spain. His regular columns appear in Prism, All Hallows, Dead Reckonings and Video Watchdog. He is the President of the British Fantasy Society and of the Society of Fantastic Films.

  Ramsey Campbell lives on Merseyside with his wife Jenny. His pleasures include classical music, good food and wine, and whatever's in that pipe. His web site is at www.ramseycampbell.com

  —Dead Letters

  By Ramsey Campbell

  The séance was Bob's idea, of course. We'd finished dinner and were lighting more candles to stave off the effects of the power cut when he made the suggestion. "What's the point? The apartment's only three years old," Joan said, though in fact she was disturbed by this threat of a séance in our home. But he'd brought his usual bottle of Pernod to the dinner party, inclining it toward us as if he'd forgotten that nobody else touched the stuff, and now he was drunk enough to believe he could carry us unprotesting with him. He almost did. When opposition came, it surprised me as much as it did Bob.

  "I'm not joining in," his wife Louise said. "I won't."

  I could feel one of his rages building, though usually they didn't need to be provoked. "Is this some more of your stupidity we have to suffer?" he said. "Don't you know what everyone in this room is thinking of you?"

  "I'm not sure you do," I told him sharply. I could see Stan and Marge were embarrassed. I'd thought Bob might behave himself when meeting them for the first time.

  He peered laboriously at me, his face white and sweating as if from a death battle with the Pernod. "One thing's sure," he said. "If she doesn't know what I think of her, she will for the next fortnight."

  I glared at him. He and Louise were bound for France in the morning to visit her relatives; the tickets were poking out of his top pocket. We'd made this dinner date with them weeks ago—as usual, to relieve Louise's burdens of Bob and of the demands of her work as a nurse—and as if to curtail the party Bob had brought their flight date forward. I imagined her having to travel with Bob's hangover. But at least she looked in control for the moment, sitting in a chair near the apartment door, away from the round dining table. "Sit down, everybody," Bob said. "Before someone else cracks up."

  From his briefcase where he kept the Pernod he produced a device that he slid into the middle of the table, his unsteady hand slipping and almost flinging his toy to the floor. I wondered what had happened in the weeks since I'd last seen him, so to lessen his ability to hold his drink; he'd been in this state when they arrived. As a rule he contrived to drink for much of the day at work, with little obvious effect except to make him more unpleasant to Louise. Perhaps alcoholism had overtaken him at last.

  The device was a large glass inside which a small electric flashlight sat on top of another glass. Bob switched on the flashlight and pressed in a ring of cork that held th
e glasses together while Marge, no doubt hoping the party would quieten down, dealt around the table the alphabet Bob had written on cards. I imagined him harping on the séance to Louise as he prepared the apparatus.

  "So you're not so cool as you'd like me to think," he said to her, and blew out all the candles.

  I sat opposite him. Joan checked the light switch before taking her place next to me, and I knew she hoped the power would interrupt us. Bob had insinuated himself between Stan and Marge, smacking his lips as he drained his bottle. If I hadn't wanted to save them further unpleasantness I'd have opposed the whole thing.

  A thick scroll of candle smoke drifted through the flashlight beam. Our brightening hands converged and rested on the glass. I felt as if our apartment had retreated now that the light was concentrated on the table. I could see only dim ovals of faces floating above the splash of light; I couldn't see Louise at all. Silence settled on us like wax, and we waited.

  After what seemed a considerable time I began to feel, absurdly perhaps, that it was my duty as host to start things moving. I'd been involved in a few séances and knew the general principles; since Bob was unusually quiet I would have to lead. "Is anybody there?" I said. "Anyone there? Anybody there?"

  "Sounds like you've got a bad line," said Stan.

  "Shouldn't you say here rather than there?" Marge said.

  "I'll try that," I said. "Is anyone here? Anybody here?"

  I was still waiting for Stan to play me for a stooge again when Bob's hand began to tremble convulsively on the glass. "You're just playing the fool," Joan said, but I was no more certain than she really was, because from what I could distinguish of Bob's indistinct face I could see he was staring fixedly ahead, though not at me. "What is it? What's the matter?" I said, afraid both that he sensed something and that he was about to reveal the whole situation as an elaborate joke.