The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy

by Mike Ashley

  “Sounds like, yes,” she agreed. “Which prompts me to suggest you go easy, Max.”

  Pushing aside the three library books on the coffee table, he moved the legal tablet into writing range. “Listen, Jill, all of my occult reference books and manuscripts are still up in the attic, aren’t they?”

  “I bumped into them only last night when I was hunting for Stephanie’s bingo game, which she had a sudden wild urge to play.”

  “Can you pop up there and copy off a few of the strongest spells for getting rid of a demon?”

  “Sure. Are we talking about a demon summoned to aid somebody?”

  “No,” he said, “one brought forth to get revenge.”

  A soft night rain was falling. Max zipped up his windbreaker, went edging along beside the McNulty house. He carried an unlit flashlight in his hand.

  He waited in the bushes, watching the empty, rain-slick road which curved around the circle. After a few damp moments, he jogged across a slanting lawn, ran along a white driveway and, slowing, approached one of the unoccupied houses.

  Moving along close to the side of the house, he halted near the window of the den. As he’d anticipated, there was a flickering light inside.

  His watch face wasn’t in the mood to glow, so he had to squint to make out the time. Three minutes in front of midnight.

  He crept around to the rear of the house, let himself in by way of the kitchen door he’d left open during his afternoon visit.

  The part of the house he’d entered still smelled of fresh paint and new wood. As he walked, silently, toward the den, though, new odors hit him. The smells of brimstone, sweet strong incense, damp earth, decay. Not your usual suburban household scents.

  The whole house began to shudder.

  Windows rattled, floors creaked.

  It was like being directly over a quake.

  From the den came a woman’s voice. “You’ve got to go back!”

  There was a rumbling, rasping laugh. “The gate has been opened! I am unleashed.”

  “Yes, but you were only supposed to do one simple thing and then go back . . . home.”

  Again the awful booming laughter.

  All the pipes in the empty house began to shriek. Strange gurglings commenced underfoot. All the toilets were chortling.

  “You haven’t even succeeded in doing what I summoned you for. You’ve been making all sorts of annoying trouble for innocent people. It’s stubborn and . . . mean-minded.”

  “You should have reckoned on that when you allowed Morax into this world again.”

  “I looked up another new spell, and this one’ll bottle you up again.”

  Another evil laugh. “Your magic is not strong enough to stop me, foolish wench.”

  In the den Kate Tillman began, a shade nervously, to recite a spell in Latin.

  Max was standing quietly next to the oddly glowing doorway. He shook his head. “Outmoded spell, not a chance of working.”

  “I heed it not! It has no effect!” roared Morax. “Now I’ll once again torment your fellows.”

  “I really wish you’d go away. This hasn’t worked out at all. He’s even more stubborn than you.”

  “There is no way to stop me now. Each night at this enchanted hour I shall return to have my way.”

  “That’s another thing, you keep doing these silly things to people. Can’t you zero in on him, give him a real scare. I wouldn’t mind your messing up the rest of us if—”

  “Morax does as he pleases. None can stop such an all-powerful demon!”

  “Correction.” Max crossed the threshold, unfolding a sheet of yellow paper from his pocket. “This is a very effective spell, worked out by a demonologist working in tandem with a computer. Been tested on a lot tougher demons than you, always works.”

  Crouched just outside the magic circle, face illuminated by the flickering flames of the ring of votive candles, was Kate. A patch of smooth tan skin showed between the top of her white slacks and her green jersey. A hand pressed to her left breast, she was staring at the demon who stood within the circle.

  He was impressive. Over nine feet high, muddy green in color, covered with dry scales, his growling mouth packed with needle-like teeth. His bulging eyes glowing with an unsettling yellow light.

  “Impotent fool!” he warned Max. “I will visit numerous annoyances upon you.”

  Clearing his throat, Max said, “Okay, here we go. Zimimar, Gorson, Agares, Leraie, Zenophilus,” he read slowly and carefully.

  “Bah, this has no . . . I do feel decidedly . . .” Morax brought his terrible clawed paws up to his scaly face. “Gar . . .”

  “Wierus, Pinel, Belphegor,” continued Max.

  The demon was panting, snarling, spewing greenish smoke from his mouth and ears.

  Max kept on reciting the spell.

  Morax shook, huddled in on himself, began to fade. Another moment and he was gone, even the smell of him.

  The candles sputtered and died, the house was silent again.

  Folding up the spell and slipping it away, Max crossed and touched Kate’s shoulder. “I’ll see you home.”

  Taking his hand, she got to her feet. “I . . . I wrote that book, you know.”

  “Curse of the Demon. Yeah, I figured that out,” he said, as he guided her to the doorway. “After comparing his earlier works with it.”

  “I was so dumb, I signed some wretched agreement with Boz that gave him 90 percent of all the profits and 100 percent of the credit,” she said. “Demonology has always been a hobby of mine. I did a really splendid job on that book. Thing is, I was timid and figured I needed someone like Boz Snowden to help me break into print.”

  They left through the back door. “So when he moved here, you followed. Deciding to go after a bigger share of the money the book’s earning.”

  “Yes, although Bronco doesn’t know that part of it,” she said. “He’s off in Ethiopia and Portugal and such places, never even knew I did the damn book.”

  “When you confronted Boz Snowden, he wouldn’t give in?”

  The rain was falling harder. Max put his arm around her slim shoulders.

  “He simply threatened me, wouldn’t listen at all,” she said. “He’s pretty vain; I think he’s convinced himself that Curse wasn’t a collaboration at all and that the book is entirely his. Well, I can get pretty mad and I decided to fix him good. The reason Curse is so good, Max, is because I really believe in demonology. And, damn it, it works.”

  “Somewhat too well.”

  “I summoned up Morax, that was easy, and ordered him to plague Snowden,” she explained. “Except the demon started plaguing the whole area, all the houses. I suppose, giving him the benefit of the doubt, it’s difficult to zero in on a small target. When I realized what was going on, I tried to send him off. Except, as you saw, I couldn’t control Morax. He kept coming back night after night to play his pranks. On top of which, Boz has been very stubborn and, even though I told him the weird happenings were happening because he’d cheated me, he hasn’t given in. All in all, it’s been an awful mess.”

  “Your library of occult literature isn’t broad enough for you to fool around with this sort of thing.”

  “How’d you know about my—”

  “You hid the books in the hall closet this morning before you’d let me in the house,” he replied. “I found ’em when I went to wash my hands.”

  “I should have expected that, you being a detective.”

  “Why’d you use the empty house as a base?”

  “I didn’t want to summon up a demon in our own place,” she said as they neared her home. “There might have been a mess, and Bronco is very fastidious. How’d you know I’d been using that particular place?”

  “I went through all the houses today, even the unoccupied ones. The remains of your magic circle showed on the floor,” he told her. “My guess was we had a demon who’d gotten out of hand and that you’d be going back each night to try to keep him from reappearing.�
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  “I’m sorry, more or less, that Morax made trouble for all the Circle people,” Kate said, moving free of him and climbing to her front door. “But I’m not at all sorry about Boz Snowden. I’d still like to put a few more curses on him.”

  Max said, “I know a good literary attorney in Manhattan. Suppose we go in and talk to him tomorrow.”

  “You mean I ought to use legal means instead of supernatural to get what’s rightfully mine?”

  “Slower but sometimes more effective.”

  She shrugged, resigned. “Well, since demons turned out to be so unreliable, I may as well go to the law.”

  “I’ll be driving into Manhattan tomorrow; you can come along.”

  “I’ll do that.” She opened the door. “Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

  He hesitated before answering, “You can.”

  THE UNPLEASANTNESS AT THE BALONEY CLUB

  F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre

  The second of our two ghost stories is an affectionate tribute to the club story, especially the Jorkens tales by Lord Dunsany. It’s also a slight nod to the Lord Peter Wimsey stories by Dorothy Sayers. F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre (1948-2010)–Froggy to his friends–was an American writer, playwright and journalist who contributed a number of amusing stories to Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine since his first sale in 1979. He is the author of the excellent Victorian science-fiction novel The Woman Between the Worlds (1994), as well as several pseudonymous novels.

  A waiter arrived with our brandy and cigars, and someone raised the subject of ghosts. My friend Maltravers had the first go, and we listened in hushed astonishment as he recounted an eerie incident that had befallen him one night during his years as a rubber-trader along the Burma Road, where he encountered a beckoning wraith that attempted to sell him some double-glazing.

  It then fell to Smythe-ffolliott to regale us with his account of the ancient Saxon curse that has blighted his ancestral home and preyed upon his family for twenty-seven generations: something to do with a haunted jar of Vegemite, which apparently has also been in his home for twenty-seven generations. The hideous jar of unholy Vegemite follows its victims up and down the stairs at night, calling out to them in a sepulchral voice and demanding a loaf of sliced bread so that it can turn itself into haunted sandwiches.

  The next supernatural tale was that of our club’s newest member, young Chundermutton, who proceeded to describe his nocturnal encounter with a strange headless apparition that crept towards him on twisted limbs in the moonlight and made piteous moans. At this point I interrupted him to ask how a headless apparition – having no head, and therefore lacking a mouth – could possibly make any sort of moans, piteous or otherwise. This led to a brief exchange of opinions between Chundermutton and myself, during which his throat found itself lodged in my Masonic handshake, and he attempted to employ certain oriental techniques in a campaign to dislodge my pancreas from its rightful position. Maltravers and Smythe-ffolliott were obliged to come between us with the soda-water siphon and the smoking-room’s third-best spittoon, and eventually a truce was negotiated.

  “What we want here is Blenchcroft,” said Maltravers, nodding towards the nearby armchair customarily occupied by our club’s most distinguished member. Tonight, the fabled armchair was unaccountably empty . . . although its antimacassars could be seen moving eerily of their own accord, as if possessed by either poltergeists or blackbeetles. “Good old Blenchcroft always has a cracking good ghost story for us, what?” As he spoke, Maltravers applied marmalade to a kipper, and tucked it away in his waistcoat for future reference. “Pity that Blenchcroft isn’t here just now. What d’you suppose could have happened to him?”

  At that moment, a distant rattling of chains was heard within the walls. This could mean only one thing: someone was coming up in the lift. Our club’s passenger-lift has not been repaired since the Siege of Mafeking, and the chains which support the elevator’s counterweight have rusted nearly all the way through. Now, without rising from our chairs, we all turned our heads towards the lift’s glass-paned doors, knowing that soon they would slide open – the doors, I mean; not our heads – and the lift’s unknown occupant would arrive to confront us.

  As the elevator’s doors wheezed open, I glimpsed a familiar figure dressed in our club’s livery: old Staveacre, the ancient lift-attendant who has served our distinguished club these past fifty-nine years. Reflecting upon the elderly retainer’s long and faithful service to our club, it occurred to me that we really ought to start paying him wages. “Your floor, sir,” old Staveacre croaked, and the lift’s passenger stepped forth into the clubroom. As the doors slid shut and the elevator descended, I rose to greet the newcomer . . . and gasped.

  It was Blenchcroft. Yet I barely recognized him. His face was all pale, like parchment. His hands trembled, his knees shook like castanets. His eyes were like two hollow sockets. (I keep a hollow socket handy at all times, for purposes of comparison.) With an effort, Blenchcroft staggered across the clubroom to his accustomed armchair, and sank into it gratefully. “A drink!” he quavered, shuddering spasmodically. “In heaven’s name, man! Someone fetch me a drink!”

  “Spot of whisky and soda?” asked Smythe-ffolliott brightly. He reached into his pocket and took out a sheet of A4 writing-paper. In its centre was a spot of whisky and soda. Blenchcroft ignored this, preferring to invert the communal jeroboam of brandy and drain its contents into his gullet. At last, when he seemed to have regained his nerve, he let the bottle fall empty upon the Axminster carpet, and he sat gazing wordlessly into the fireplace. He did not speak. A vein twitched in his forehead. A peculiar expression played across his face, flickering from his lips to his eyebrows and back again without a return ticket.

  Chundermutton broke the silence: “What is it, man? You look as if you’ve seen . . .”

  “I have,” said Blenchcroft mournfully, in the tones of a man who has met his own doom. We all kept still, and waited for him to continue.

  The dying embers of the coal-fire cast weird shadows across the clubroom’s walls. I should mention that ours is one of the oldest clubs in Pall Mall, and in consequence the rooms are furnished with several centuries’ worth of trophies and memorabilia collected in far outposts by our club’s distinguished members. From my vantage point in the centre of the clubroom, I had a fine view of the east wall, from which a splendidly preserved Anglo-Norman battleaxe hung check by jowl with an asagai war-spear which had briefly festooned the chest cavity of our club’s best yachtsman during the last Zulu uprising. Beneath these items were two display cases. The left-hand case contained a breech-loading harquebus which had seen duty during the War of Jenkins’ Ear. The right-hand case contained Jenkins’ ear. Not his famous ear, the one that caused so much bother; the Reform Club, I think, has got that one. This was Jenkins’ other ear; one of our club’s secretaries had obtained it at auction from Sotheby’s, and now it was stuffed and mounted in the clubroom.

  At long last, when all the world was silent as the tomb, Blenchcroft began to speak: “The day went normally enough, at first,” he told us. “I spent the morning in my usual fashion, evicting widows and orphans from my various properties. At noon I had rather a heavier luncheon than usual, and I went back to my office for a quick nap. That was when I had the nightmare . . .”

  “Objection!” Maltravers leapt out of his armchair and was on his feet at once, brandishing his leather-bound copy of the club’s regulations. “ ‘Rule Forty-Two: members telling ghost stories in the clubroom must confine their narratives to authentic paranormal encounters. Nightmares, being imaginary, are expressly forbidden.’ ” Maltravers snapped shut the booklet and sat down again. Unfortunately, he ruined the effect by missing his armchair, and landing headlong in an inglorious sprawl amidst the half-eaten scones of our previous meal.

  “If I may continue . . .,” said Blenchcroft irritably. “I was napping in my upstairs office. All of a sudden, I was awakened by the distant sound of hoofbeats – approaching
slowly, steadily – and the rumble of wheels against cobblestones. Some horse-drawn conveyance was coming towards me. I heard the wheels and the hoofbeats draw closer, and soon I could hear the contraption rattling in the street directly underneath my window. I expected the unseen vehicle to continue past, but just then the wheels and the hoofbeats abruptly went silent. For some reason, the unknown conveyance had stopped directly in front of my rooms. I got up from my chair, and went to the window.

  “I expected to see a dustman’s cart, or somesuch. Would to heaven that I had.” Blenchforth shuddered, and went on: “It was a black coach, pulled by a single black horse. There was a black plume in the horse’s browband. The coachman was wearing an old-fashioned undertaker’s rig: black frock coat, tall black hat, with a long black crepe ribbon dangling from the brim. He was seated sidelong on the driver’s board, so that I couldn’t see his face. But I saw that the coach was a hearse: in the rear compartment was a black coffin with silver handles. The lid of the coffin was missing. Looking down from my office window through the windows of the hearse, I could see that the coffin was lined with black satin . . . and it was empty. The coffin had no occupant.

  “Suddenly the driver of the hearse turned round, and looked up at my window. I saw his face . . .” At this point, Blenchforth broke off his narrative. He shuddered violently for a moment, then resumed: “I saw the undertaker’s face. It was ghastly, I tell you. His face looked very like a living skull. His limbs were thin, cadaverous. His eyes gazed into mine relentlessly, and he pointed one bone-fingered hand towards the empty coffin in his hearse. ‘Just room for one inside, sir!’ he intoned, in a voice like something from beyond the grave.”

  “Good heavens!” gasped Chundermutton, filching the marmalade-pot whilst he glanced at his pocket-watch to ascertain if the pawnshops were still open. “And then what happened?”

  “Well, then I woke up,” said Blenchforth, sounding vaguely embarrassed. “Turned out that it had all been a nightmare. I’d slept all afternoon, and now evening was coming on. So I decided to come down here to the club for my usual session of drunken debauchery. I rung to have my car brought round, but the garageman told me it wasn’t working. I should have to walk to the club.” Blenchforth paused, and fortified himself with several stiff bourbons before resuming his tale: “I walked to the nearest bus-shelter, and I saw that one of the bus routes – number thirteen – would take me directly past the club’s entrance. So I decided to wait for the bus.