Dark Terrors 6 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology]

by Edited By Stephen Jones

  II

  ‘You understand I cannot promise you immortality. That is quite beyond medical science at the present time, and perhaps for all time, but what I can promise - even at your advanced age - is another forty or fifty productive years, during which you will feel and behave like a much younger man.’

  Professor Voss, a striking-looking person in his early fifties, with dark hair cut en brosse, sat behind a vast desk in his consulting room and spread well-manicured hands on the blotter in front of him. The sun was slowly declining behind the snow-capped mountains and casting great shadows over the town and placid lake below, while the well-regulated life of his household went smoothly on behind the grey metal door which led to the main building.

  Voss hesitated as he regarded the other, his faded grey eyes sparkling behind gold-rimmed spectacles. ‘You have not asked me the most important question, Mr Arkwright. Though I am sure it is at the forefront of your mind.’

  Caught off balance, the prospective patient was at a momentary loss. But Voss immediately put him at his ease.

  ‘You were going to ask me, surely, that if my treatment is so successful, why have I not experimented on myself?’

  Arkwright put up his hand in protest, but the Professor cut him short, though still with an amiable smile on his face. ‘But I have, my dear sir.’ He indicated the rows of metal filing cabinets against the far wall. ‘My experiments have been far more thorough and extensive than the world believes. And I have all the patients’ birth certificates available.’

  ‘I am impressed,’ Arkwright said.

  The Professor’s smile widened. ‘That is what they all say,’ he answered gently. ‘A new age is dawning, Mr Arkwright. Greatly prolonged life, renewed activity without pain or disease. Something the world has long been waiting for.’

  ‘I must apologise if I have inadvertently …’ his visitor began.

  ‘There is no need for any apology. We deal in hard facts here.’

  Arkwright changed the subject. ‘How long will the treatment take? Your young lady secretary told me …’

  Voss had a satisfied expression on his face now. ‘The young lady, as you call her, is over sixty! She was one of my first patients, and has been an invaluable help to me over the past years.’

  Arkwright sat back in his comfortable leather chair, lost for words for once.

  ‘You asked about the length of treatment. A month or so normally, give or take a few days, depending on the patient. You have kindly supplied me with your own medical records. You are in remarkably good health for a man of your age. As to the treatment, that would be expensive, of course …’ He paused, giving Arkwright an enquiring look.

  The author brushed the hidden query aside. ‘Money is of no importance,’ he said curtly.

  Voss gave him a slight bow. ‘I thought as much. But I have to ask these questions as a matter of form.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘As you can imagine, much of the procedures and details of the equipment used are secret,’ Voss continued. ‘I and my medical staff have spent thousands of hours, and I myself have poured a fortune into developing the finest possible equipment, to give near-perfect results.’

  He spread his hands wide on the blotter again. ‘Nothing in this life is perfect, as you know,’ he said disarmingly. ‘But we come very close to it. Apart from the treatment mentioned, there are many injections to a formula arrived at over a good many years.’

  Arkwright leaned forward in the chair. ‘And the results?’

  ‘Completely successful. I will show you some of the records here which you may peruse. Needless to say, the identities of patients will not be divulged. But I can assure you that patients I treated some fifteen years ago are alive and well and looking remarkably young for their real ages. You realise, of course, that enormous sums of money are involved. Other clinics and institutions would do anything to get hold of our formulae. That is why we have to observe absolute secrecy.’

  ‘How will the change take place?’

  ‘Very gradually, of course. About a year, in most cases. The hair will slowly turn black, or to its original colour. In bald patients, the hair grows naturally again. As they regress, wrinkles disappear, the skin becomes smooth and elastic and eventually a man or woman of about thirty emerges. Though I am afraid that some patients have had to change their identities and perhaps move to another town or even country. Some have abandoned old wives and taken young girls to their beds.’ He shrugged. ‘Regrettable, but I cannot help that.’

  ‘Of course not. When will we start?’

  ‘In two or three days, when you have settled down. I deal with only one patient at a time as the treatment takes up all the resources of the clinic. In the meantime I will show you to my private quarters, where an excellent dinner awaits us.’

  III

  Arkwright returned to England some while later, after his intensive course of treatment, still a little sceptical, despite the Professor’s assurances. He had spent a considerable sum of money, but that did not bother him at all. Despite all the documentary and photographic evidence the staff at the clinic had supplied him with, he was impatient to see tangible results, though he had been assured countless times that they would be slow in coming. However, the prognosis in his case, after exhaustive medical tests, was positive.

  Sure enough, over a month later Arkwright began to notice a slight darkening of the hair at the side of his head, while a certain stiffness in his limbs, which had persisted for some years, was disappearing.

  Though inwardly excited, it was still too early for him to assess the progress of the treatment, but he quietly made plans to retreat to an isolated house he owned in the West Country, where the metamorphosis, if indeed it did happen, would be unnoticed by friends and colleagues.

  There would be problems, he realised, if he suddenly reappeared in the world with an appearance akin to that of his own son, if he had ever had one. He would meet those contingencies in due course. So far as his literary career was concerned, his publishers had been using old publicity photographs for many years, so that would not present a problem.

  And in any case, many of his old friends and colleagues had died off as the years had passed and he had no living relatives. He had not realised this sort of situation would arise, and he had to carefully think out a plan of campaign. In the meantime he revelled in returning strength and ability, and once again he was busy at his writing desk, where the rattle of his portable typewriter was heard at ever-increasing periods as various plot points came to him.

  He retained his present house and staff and would keep in touch by telephone when he reached his secondary home. He had already made arrangements to have his important correspondence sent on. A month later he was installed in his new quarters, where he had a permanent housekeeper and a gardener. Later, he would move to a hotel and change quarters from time to time until the transformation was complete. Beyond that, he had nothing worked out.

  After the year was up, he looked in the mirror of his hotel room on the South Coast and saw a vigorous young man of about thirty looking back at him. His new life had begun.

  IV

  Dr Poole, busy examining specimens under the microscope in the clinic in Lausanne, was suddenly interrupted by a sharp exclamation from Professor Voss, who was studying various documents at his desk on the other side of the laboratory.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Come and look at this.’

  Poole crossed to peer over his colleague’s shoulder at the national newspapers spread out before the Professor. Large headings on most of the front pages gave the startling news of the sudden death of the great author, Joshua Arkwright, during a tennis match in Cannes. While Poole sat down at the desk to study the reports with increasing sadness, Voss crossed to the far corner of the huge room and dialled the international operator. He was engaged in a long conversation in English before putting down the receiver. He came back rubbing his hands.

  ‘This is trag
ic indeed,’ Poole observed.

  Voss sat down in his big padded chair and said nothing for a long moment. ‘Well, he had six good years, my dear Poole. In that time he penned half a dozen wonderful books, had children by two different women, and was currently engaged to a beautiful girl of eighteen.’

  Poole stared at him open-mouthed.

  ‘Not a bad record,’ Voss went on, ‘considering that his real age was ninety-two.’

  ‘But what actually happened?’ Poole asked. ‘It gives few details here, merely listing all his achievements during his lifetime.’

  Voss gave him a grim smile. ‘He was playing several tennis matches under the blazing sun!’

  Poole was thunderstruck. ‘But surely you warned him about overexertion?’

  Voss nodded. ‘Naturally. But I can understand why this happened. He was a vigorous young man in the prime of life. I have been speaking to the pathologist who carried out the autopsy. His body had been returned for burial in England, of course, as you have just read.’ He stared at Poole, with a cynical expression on his face. ‘His heart was absolutely withered, if I may use a non-medical term. Of course he was warned. This is something we must look at for the future.’

  He gave a short, mirthless laugh. ‘After all, I am myself a hundred and five years old, am I not? But I know how to behave sensibly.’ He shrugged. ‘The exuberance of youth! There lies the danger . ..’

  Basil Copper worked as a journalist and editor of a local newspaper before becoming a full-time writer in 1970. His first story in the horror field, ‘The Spider’, was published in 1964 in The Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories, since when his short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, been extensively adapted for radio, and collected in Not after Nightfall, Here Be Daemons, From Evil’s Pillow, And Afterward The Dark, Voices of Doom, When Footsteps Echo, Whispers in the Night and, more recently, Cold Hand on My Shoulder from Sarob Press. Along with two non-fiction studies of the vampire and werewolf legends, his other books include the novels The Great White Space, The Curse of the Fleers, Necropolis, House of the Wolf and The Black Death. He has also written more than fifty hardboiled thrillers about Los Angeles private detective Mike Faraday, and has continued the adventures of August Derleth’s Sherlock Holmes-like detective Solar Pons in several volumes from Fedogan & Bremer. As Copper explains about the preceding story, ‘It comes from recent TV and radio coverage on new scientific discoveries, using stem cells to extend lifespan. It was announced that injecting mice and other small rodents with the relevant cells had actually increased their longevity by fifty per cent, and they hoped to be able to do the same for human beings in due course. That was the premise, but first I started with the twist at the end. The genesis of the title comes from a piece of dialogue uttered by Boris Karloff in one of my favourite horror films, The Black Castle.’

  <>

  Your Shadow Knows You Well

  NANCY KILPATRICK

  You are here by mistake. Everything is a mistake with Russell. You came to Mexico because he willed it, or so it seems to you.

  This is not the type of vacation you enjoy. Russell, though, is enamoured with the exotic, the bizarre, especially the macabre. Particularly with death. You made a weak attempt to dissuade him from entering El Museo de las Momias - the nearly-missed brass sign on the building adjacent to the cemetery, the unmanned ticket booth, the unlocked door, no visitors but the two of you. ‘It’s like a horror movie,’ you said but, as happens so often, Russell ignored you.

  And now you stand in a dusty, claustrophobic room, the door to the outer world slamming shut behind you, as if annihilating all life outside - if this was a horror movie, the door would be locked, and you are not quite sure if it is or isn’t but you cannot bring yourself to check, and you know that Russell will not.

  Your eyes take long moments to adjust to the dimness. Your lungs fill with what you know to be the powdery casings of insects, and the unpleasant scent of mould. Every instinct in you screams flee! Almost every instinct. The voice in your head that orders you to please Russell dominates. He turns suddenly and touches the flesh of your upper arm, and all thoughts of escape vanish.

  You follow him further in like the obedient dog you often envision yourself to be, beyond the entrance, into a chamber that somehow reminds you of the catacombs Russell took you to see in Paris, although here no bones are piled against the walls: Corridors stretch one after the other like the links of a chain. Each corridor leads to another room that from where you stand looks exactly like the one you are in. Surrounding you are horizontal wood and glass cases, an army of coffins, containing … what? You join Russell at one case and stare at the thing inside.

  It is a living human being. Or so it seems to you at first. The bony body is barely clothed - the worn leather of boots, a scrap of fabric at the crotch. The face - skin taut over bone - is familiar because the features seem so common. For a moment, it occurs to you to break the glass and free this man who is trapped in a living death. But as you stare, you realise there is no movement. The eyes must be plastic, the hair a wig, the lips twisted in a scream … All is so lifelike. It is as if you know this person, or knew him, and yet you are certain you have never met. And he is, after all, not real.

  ‘Great stuff!’ Russell enthuses. He moves to the case to the left, and you follow on his heels. Inside is another wax form, or a manikin of some kind. It must be, for these could not really be the dried remains of what were once breathing human beings, people like yourself, ordinary people - men, women, babies even - caught up in a life that allows too many expectations and fulfils too few. A life which no one gets out of alive, as Russell is fond of joking. For you, life often feels so terrifying that you fear your own shadow, so getting out alive is the least of your worries.

  You notice your shadow now. Pressed across the floor. A sombre black entity pasted into this grim environment. You contemplate the Jungian theory you studied at University when you had hopes of becoming a psychotherapist. The idea of the shadow intrigued you, opposite traits, rejected, which remain unintegrated into the personality: criminal as good man, policeman as thief. How alive and sparkling such concepts were to you ten years ago. How alien they appear to you now, distant thoughts that you cannot bring to bear on your own life and so they have become unimportant. Your shadow is disturbingly flat. It lies limp across the floor, halfway up the length of one case, as if directing you towards …

  Russell’s hand encircles your upper arm. He pulls you away. You are glad you did not need to see what your dark side finds so compelling.

  Russell stops and releases you and suddenly you feel a chill, and shiver. He does not notice, absorbed in reading aloud from a book he purchased in the town of Guanajuato. He translates the Spanish in an orderly fashion, as he does everything, identifying what is in each case, providing the history, if available. As he reads, the stories build to extreme proportions in your mind, injecting a deeper chill that crackles up your spine. The 250-year-old French doctor, who died away from home, his remains exhumed like all the others here for lack of payment for perpetual care. The fatally injured pregnant woman - there, in that case! A replica of her foetus, carved out of her body.

  ‘ “La momia mas pequeno del mundo” - the smallest mummy in the world,’ Russell tells you.

  What kind of place is this? Who has brought together all of these monstrous manikins? Russell’s voice is loud in the emptiness, faintly echoing, excited, his delight obvious. Suddenly you are struck by the horrifying realisation that you have blocked from your consciousness until now: these are not effigies at all, but mummified bodies, as if the secrets of the preservation techniques of Lenin and Perron have been rediscovered. The dead woman is frighteningly real. So is her foetus.

  ‘Somebody almost figured out how Lenin’s been preserved,’ Russell says. That you have always been in synch like this never ceases to amaze you. But there is one huge difference between you and Russell: this synchronistic connection delights him; with you,
it intensifies the mind-numbing realisation that eats through your soul like a cancer, making you wonder how your spirit became locked to his.

  You watch Russell race from case to case, grabbing the wooden edges, pressing his face to the glass, voice full of glee, the proverbial child in a candy store. It was his enthusiasm for life that attracted you to him in the first place. His daring contrasted with your shy, conservative nature. Because of Russell, you have been spared an ordinary life of home, career, children. You know you have seen and done things because of him that, left to your own devices and permitted to dawdle in your contained and timid little world, such extraordinary experiences would have passed you by. You have come to rely heavily on him, as if your very life depends on Russell’s - he holds the oxygen; each breath you lake is a gift because he shares his air. Without him, you would suffocate. That he knows this and uses physical contact to control you passes almost unnoticed now - by you, by everyone. You gave up freedom willingly at first and, after a decade together, slavery has become second nature.

  There are many cases here, many mummified corpses denied eternal rest. As you scan the room, you are most disturbed by the similarities. Each body seems so ordinary, like the neighbours and grocery clerks to whom you only say ‘Hello’ and ‘Lovely day’. Like your co-workers, whom you speak to out of necessity, to stave off the pain of isolation. These people who pass through your life so regularly, who are not your friends but are more than strangers. Your sister and brother, and your mother, all the family left that you are supposed to be close to, yet you often feel as if you do not know them. Real relationships have proven to be a burden, and when Russell entered your life, you gradually realised that you no longer needed most of them. No one else can understand your emotional bondage to Russell, not even you. Your few remaining confidantes look at you with pity, and have stopped suggesting that you leave him. You see them rarely now.