The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17

by Stephen Jones

  “ ‘Don’t concern yourself,’ he said, ‘I took no offence at the looks you gave my wife. How could you not? She’s a very beautiful woman, and I’d be surprised if a young man such as yourself didn’t try to seduce her. At least in his heart. But let me tell you, my friend: you could never satisfy her.’ He let this remark lie for a moment. Then he added: ‘Neither, of course, could I. When I married her I was already too old to be a husband to her in the truest sense.’

  “ ‘But you have a baby,’ I said to him.

  “ ‘The boy isn’t mine,’ Walter replied.

  “ ‘So you’re raising this infant, even though he isn’t yours?’

  “ ‘Yes.’

  “ ‘Where’s the father?’

  “ ‘I’m afraid he’s dead.’

  “ ‘Ah.’ This all began to seem very tragic. Elise pregnant, the father dead, and Walter coming to the rescue, saving her from dishonour. That was the story constructed in my head. The only part I could not yet fit into this neat scheme was Doctor Skal, whose cloaked presence at the door had so unsettled me.

  “ ‘I know none of this is my business –’ I said to Walter.

  “ ‘And better keep it that way,’ he replied.

  “ ‘But I have one more question.’

  “ ‘Ask it.’

  “ ‘What kind of Doctor is this man Skal?’

  “ ‘Ah.’ Walter set his glass down, and stared into the fire. It had not been fed in a while, and now was little more than a heap of glowing embers. ‘The esteemed Doctor Skal is a necromancer. He deals in a science which I do not profess to understand.’ He leaned a little closer to the fire, as though talking of the mysterious man had chilled him to the marrow. I felt something similar. I knew very little about the work of a necromancer, but I knew that they dealt with the dead.

  “I thought of the graveyard, and of Walter’s first words to me:

  “ ‘It would not be wise for you to sleep here tonight.’

  “Suddenly, I understood. I got to my feet, my barely sobered head throbbing. ‘I know what’s going on here,’ I announced. ‘You paid Skal so that Elise could speak to the dead! To the man who fathered her baby.’ Walter continued to stare into the fire. I came close to him. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? And now Skal’s going to play some miserable trick on poor Elise to make her believe she’s talking to a spirit.’

  “ ‘It’s not a trick,’ Walter said. For the first time during this grim exchange he looked up at me. ‘What Skal does is real, I’m afraid to say. Which is why you should stay in here until it’s over and done with. It’s nothing you need ever—’

  “He broke off at that moment, his thought unfinished, because we heard Elise’s voice. It wasn’t a word she uttered, it was a sob; and then another, and another, I knew whence they came, of course. Elise was at the graveyard with Skal. In the stillness of the night her voice carried easily.

  “ ‘Listen to her,’ I said.

  “ ‘Better not,’ Walter said.

  “I ignored him, and went to the door, driven by a kind of morbid fascination. I didn’t for a moment believe what Walter had said about the necromancer. Though much else that Hauser had taught me had become hard to believe tonight, I still believed in his teachings on the matter of life and death. The soul, he’d taught us, was certainly immortal. But once it was released from the constraints of flesh and blood, the body had no more significance than a piece of rotted meat. The man or woman who had animated it was gone, to be with those who had already left this life. There was, he insisted, no way to call that spirit back. And nor therefore – though Hauser had never extrapolated this far – was there any validity in the claims of those who said that they could commune with the dead.

  “In short, Doctor Skal was a fake: this was my certain belief. And poor distracted Elise was his dupe. God knows what demands he was making of her, to have her sobbing that way! My imagination – having first dwelt on the woman’s charms shamelessly, and then decided she was mad – now reinvented her a third time, as Skal’s hapless victim. I knew from stories I’d heard in Hamburg what power charlatans like this wielded over vulnerable women. I’d heard of some necromancers who demanded that their seances be held with everyone as naked as Adam, for purity’s sake! Others who had so battered the tender hearts of their victims with their ghoulishness that the women had swooned, and been violated in their swoon. I pictured all this happening to Elise. And the louder her sobs and cries became the more certain I was that my worst imaginings were true.

  “At last I couldn’t bear it any longer, and I stepped out into the darkness to get her.

  “Herr Wolfram came after me, and caught hold of my arm. ‘Come back into the house!’ he demanded. ‘For pity’s sake, leave this alone and come back into the house!’

  “Elise was shrieking now. I couldn’t have gone back in if my life had depended upon it. I shook myself free of Wolfram’s grip and started out for the graveyard. At first I thought he was going to leave me alone, but when I glanced back I saw that though he’d returned into the house he was now emerging again, cradling a musket in his arms. I thought at first he intended to threaten me with it, but instead he said:

  “ ‘Take it!’ offering the weapon to me.

  “ ‘I don’t intend to kill anybody!’ I said, feeling very heroic and self-righteous now that I was on my way. ‘I just want to get Elise out of this damn Englishman’s hands.’

  “ ‘She won’t come, believe me,’ Walter said. ‘Please take the musket! You’re a good fellow. I don’t want to see any harm come to you.’

  “I ignored him and strode on. Though Walter’s age made him wheeze, he did his best to keep up with me. He even managed to talk, though what he said – between my agitated state and his panting – wasn’t always easy to grasp.

  “ ‘She has a sickness . . . she’s had it all her life . . . what did I know? . . . I loved her . . . wanted her to be happy . . .’

  “ ‘She doesn’t sound very happy right now,’ I remarked.

  “ ‘It’s not what you think . . . it is and it isn’t . . . oh, God, please come back to the house!’

  “ ‘I said no! I don’t want her being molested by that man!’

  “ ‘You don’t understand. We couldn’t begin to please her. Neither of us.’

  “ ‘So you hire Skal to service her? Jesus!’

  “I turned and pushed him hard in the chest, then I picked up my pace. Any last doubts I might have entertained about what was going on in the graveyard were forgotten. All this talk of necromancy was just a morbid veil drawn over the filthy truth of the matter. Poor Elise! Stuck with a broken-down husband, who knew no better way to please than to give her over to an Englishman for an occasional pleasuring. Of all things, an Englishman! As if the English knew anything about making love.

  “As I ran, I envisaged what I’d do when I reached the graveyard. I imagined myself hopping over the wall and with a shout racing at Skal, and plucking him off my poor Elise. Then I’d beat him senseless. And when he was laid low, and I’d proved just how heroic a fellow I was, I’d go to the girl, take her in my arms, and show her what a good German does when he wants to make a woman happy.

  “Oh, my head was spinning with ideas, right up until the moment that I emerged from the corner of the trees and came in sight of the necropolis . . .”

  Here, after several minutes of headlong narration, Haeckel ceased speaking. It was not for dramatic effect, I think. He was simply preparing himself, mentally, for the final stretch of his story. I’m sure that none of us in that room doubted that what lay ahead would not be pleasant. From the beginning this had been a tale overshadowed by the prospect of some horror. None of us spoke; that I do remember. We sat there, in thrall to the persuasions of Haeckel’s tale, waiting for him to begin again. We were like children.

  After a minute or so, during which time he stared out of the window at the night sky (though seeing, I think, nothing of its beauty) he turned back to us and rewarded our patience.

/>   “The moon was full and white,” he said. “It showed me every detail. There were no great, noble tombs in this place, such as you’d see at the Ohlsdorf Cemetery; just coarsely carved headstones and wooden crosses. And in their midst, a kind of ceremony was going on. There were candles set in the grass, their flames steady in the still air. I suppose they made some kind of circle – perhaps ten feet across – in which the necromancer had performed his rituals. Now, however, with his work done, he had retired some distance from this place. He was sitting on a tombstone, smoking a long, Turkish pipe, and watching.

  “The subject of his study, of course, was Elise. When I had first laid eyes on her I had guiltily imagined what she would look like stripped of her clothes. Now I had my answer. There she was, lit by the gold of the candle flames and the silver of the moon. Available to my eyes in all her glory.

  “But oh, God! What she was doing turned every single drop of pleasure I might have taken in her beauty to the bitterest gall.

  “Those cries I’d heard – those sobs that had made my heart go out to her – they weren’t provoked by the pawings of Doctor Skal, but by the touch of the dead. The dead, raised out of their dirt to pleasure her! She was squatting, and there between her legs was a face, pushed up out of the earth. A man recently buried, to judge by his condition, the flesh still moist on the bone, and the tongue – Jesus, the tongue! – still flicking between his bared teeth.

  “If this had been all it would have been enough. But it was not all. The same grotesque genius that had inspired the cadaver between her legs into this resemblance of life, had also brought forth a crop of smaller parts – pieces of the whole, which had wormed their way out of the grave by some means or other. Bony pieces, held together with leathery sinew. A rib-cage, crawling around on its elbows; a head, propelled by a whiplash length of stripped spine; several hands, with some fleshless lengths of bone attached. There was a morbid bestiary of these things And they were all upon her, or waiting their turn to be upon her.

  “Nor did she for a moment protest their attentions. Quite the contrary. Having climbed off the corpse that was pleasuring her from below, she rolled over onto her back and invited a dozen of these pieces upon her, like a whore in a fever, and they came, oh, God, they came, as though they might have out of her the juices that would return them to wholesomeness.

  “Walter, by now, had caught up with me.

  “ ‘I warned you,’ he said.

  “ ‘You knew this was happening?’

  “ ‘Of course I knew. I’m afraid it’s the only way she’s satisfied.’

  “ ‘What is she?’ I said to him.

  “ ‘A woman,’ Walter replied.

  “ ‘No natural woman would endure that,’ I said. ‘Jesus! Jesus!’

  “The sight before me was getting worse by the moment. Elise was up on her knees in the grave dirt now, and a second corpse – stripped of whatever garments he had been buried in – was coupling with her, his motion vigorous, his pleasure intense, to judge by the way he threw back his putrefying head. As for Elise, she was kneading her full tits, directing arcs of milk into the air so that it rained down on the vile menagerie cavorting before her. Her lovers were in ecstasy. They clattered and scampered around in the torrents, as though they were being blessed.

  “I took the musket from Walter.

  “ ‘Don’t hurt her!’ he begged. ‘She’s not to blame.’

  “I ignored him, and made my way towards the yard, calling to the necromancer as I did so.

  “ ‘Skal! Skal!’

  “He looked up from his meditations, whatever they were, and seeing the musket I was brandishing, immediately began to protest his innocence. His German wasn’t good, but I didn’t have any difficulty catching his general drift. He was just doing what he’d been paid to do, he said. He wasn’t to blame.

  “I clambered over the wall and approached him through the graves, instructing him to get to his feet. He got up, his hands raised in surrender. Plainly he was terrified that I was going to shoot him. But that wasn’t my intention. I just wanted to stop this obscenity.

  “ ‘Whatever you did to start this, undo it!’ I told him.

  “He shook his head, his eyes wild. I thought perhaps he didn’t understand so I repeated the instruction.

  “Again, he shook his head. All his composure was gone. He looked like a shabby little cut-purse who’d just been caught in the act. I was right in front of him, and I jabbed the musket in his belly. If he didn’t stop this, I told him, I’d shoot him.

  “I might have done it too, but for Herr Wolfram, who had clambered over the wall and was approaching his wife, calling her name.

  “ ‘Elise . . . please, Elise . . . you should come home.’

  “I’ve never in my life heard anything as absurd or as sad as that man calling to his wife. ‘You should come home . . .’

  “Of course she didn’t listen to him. Didn’t hear him, probably, in the heat of what she was doing, and what was being done to her.

  “But her lovers heard. One of the men who’d been raised up whole, and was waiting his turn at the woman, started shambling towards Walter, waving him away. It was a curious thing to see. The corpse trying to shoo the old man off. But Walter wouldn’t go. He kept calling to Elise, the tears pouring down his face. Calling to her, calling to her —

  “I yelled to him to stay away. He didn’t listen to me. I suppose he thought if he got close enough he could maybe catch hold of her arm. But the corpse came at him, still waving its hands, still shooing, and when Walter wouldn’t be shooed the thing simply knocked him down. I saw him flail for a moment, and then try to get back up. But the dead – or pieces of the dead – were everywhere in the grass around his feet. And once he was down, they were upon him.

  “I told the Englishman to come with me, and I started off across the yard to help Walter. There was only one ball in the musket, so I didn’t want to waste it firing from a distance, and maybe missing my target. Besides I wasn’t sure what I was going to fire at. The closer I got to the circle in which Elise was crawling around – still being clawed and petted – the more of Skal’s unholy handiwork I saw. Whatever spells he’d cast here, they seemed to have raised every last dead thing in the place. The ground was crawling with bits of this and that; fingers, pieces of dried up flesh with locks of hair attached; wormy fragments that were beyond recognition.

  “By the time we reached Walter, he’d already lost the fight. The horrors he’d paid to have resurrected – ungrateful things – had torn him open in a hundred places. One of his eyes had been thumbed out, there was a gaping hole in his chest.

  “His murderers were still working on him. I batted a few limbs off him with the musket, but there were so many it was only a matter of time, I knew, before they came after me. I turned around to Skal, intending to order him again to bring this abomination to a halt, but he was springing off between the graves. In a sudden surge of rage, I raised the musket and I fired. The felon went down, howling in the grass. I went to him. He was badly wounded, and in great pain, but I was in no mood to help him. He was responsible for all this. Wolfram dead, and Elise still crouching amongst her rotted admirers; all of this was Skal’s fault. I had no sympathy for the man.

  “ ‘What does it take to make this stop?’ I asked him. ‘What are the words?’

  “His teeth were chattering. It was hard to make out what he was saying. Finally I understood.

  “ ‘When . . . the . . . sun . . . comes up . . .’ he said to me.

  “ ‘You can’t stop it any other way?’

  “ ‘No,’ he said. ‘No . . . other . . . way . . .’

  “Then he died. You can imagine my despair. I could do nothing. There was no way to get to Elise without suffering the same fate as Walter. And anyway, she wouldn’t have come. It was an hour from dawn, at least. All I could do was what I did: climb over the wall, and wait. The sounds were horrible. In some ways, worse than the sight. She must have been exhausted by now, but she
kept going. Sighing sometimes, sobbing sometimes, moaning sometimes. Not – let me make it perfectly clear – the despairing moan of a woman who understands that she is in the grip of the dead. This was the moan of a deeply pleasured woman; a woman in bliss.

  “Just a few minutes before dawn, the sounds subsided. Only when they had died away completely did I look back over the wall. Elise had gone. Her lovers lay around in the ground, exhausted as perhaps only the dead can be. The clouds were lightening in the East. I suppose resurrected flesh has a fear of the light, because as the last stars crept away so did the dead. They crawled back into the earth, and covered themselves with the dirt that had been shovelled down upon their coffins . . .”

  Haeckel’s voice had become a whisper in these last minutes, and now it trailed away completely. We sat around not looking at one another, each of us deep in thought. If any of us had entertained the notion that Haeckel’s tale was some invention, the force of his telling – the whiteness of his skin, the tears that had now and then appeared in his eyes – had thrust such doubts from us, at least for now.

  It was Purrucker who spoke first, inevitably. “So you killed a man,” he said. “I’m impressed.”

  Haeckel looked up at him. “I haven’t finished my story,” he said.

  “Jesus . . .” I murmured, “. . . what else is there to tell?”

  “If you remember, I’d left all my books, and some gifts I’d brought from Wittenberg for my father, at Herr Wolfram’s house. So I made my way back there. I was in a kind of terrified trance, my mind still barely able to grasp what I’d seen.

  “When I got to the house I heard somebody singing. A sweet lilting voice it was. I went to the door. My belongings were sitting there on the table where I’d left them. The room was empty. Praying that I’d go unheard, I entered. As I picked up my philosophy books and my father’s gift the singing stopped.

  “I retreated to the door but before I could reach the threshold Elise appeared, with her infant in her arms. The woman looked the worse for her philanderings, no question about that. There were scratches all over her face, and her arms, and on the plump breast at which the baby now sucked. But marked as she was, there was nothing but happiness in her eyes. She was sweetly content with her life at that moment.