The Best New Horror 5

by Ramsay Campbell

  There was a bedroom wall which changed colors, turning from its normal rosy tint that was calm and pale in the moonlight to a quivering and luminescent green that rippled like the flesh of a great reptile. There was a little doll whose neck began to elongate until it was writhing through the air like a serpent, while its tiny doll’s head whispered words that had no sense in them yet conveyed a profoundly hideous meaning. There were things no one had seen that made noises of a deeply troubling nature in the darkness of cellars or behind the doors of closets and cupboards. And then there was something that people saw when they looked through the windows of their houses toward the house where a man named Andrew Maness now lived. But when anyone began to describe what it was they saw in the vicinity of that house, which they called the McQuister house, their words became confused. They did see something and yet they saw nothing.

  “I also saw what you speak of,” whispered the tall, bearded man who wore a flat-brimmed hat. “It was a blackness, but it was not the blackness of the night or of shadows. It was hovering over the old McQuister place, or around it. This was something I had not seen in Moxton even since the changes.”

  “No, not in Moxton, not in the town. But you have seen it before. We have all seen it,” said a man’s voice that sounded as if it came from elsewhere in the church.

  “Yes,” answered the tall man, as if confessing a thing that had formerly been denied. “But we are not seeing it the way it might be seen, the way we had seen it when we were outside the town, when we tried to leave and could not.”

  “That was not blackness we saw then,” said one of the younger women who seemed to be wresting an image from her memory. “It was something . . . something that wasn’t blackness at all.”

  “There were different things,” shouted an old man who suddenly stood up from one of the pews, his eyes fixed in a gaze of revelation. A moment later this vision appeared to dissolve, and he sat down again. But the eyes of others followed this vision, surveying the empty spaces of the church and watching the flickering lights of the many lamps and candles.

  “There were different things,” someone started to say, and then someone else completed the thought: “But they were all spinning and confused, all swirling together.”

  “Until all we could see was a great blackness,” said the tall man, gaining his voice again.

  A silence now overcame the congregation, and the words they had spoken seemed to be disappearing into this silence, once more drawing the people of Moxton back to the refuge of their former amnesia. But before their minds lost all clarity of recollection a woman named Mrs Spikes rose to her feet and from the last row of the church, where she sat alone, cried out, “Everything started with him, the one in the McQuister house.”

  “How long has it been?” one voice asked.

  “Too long,” answered Mrs Spikes. “I remember him. He’s older than I am, but he doesn’t look older. His hair is a strange color.”

  “Reddish like pale blood,” said one.

  “Green like mold,” said another. “Or yellow and orange like a candleflame.”

  “He lived in that house, that same house, a long time ago,” continued Mrs Spikes. “Before the McQuisters. He lived with his father. But I can only remember the stories. I didn’t see anything myself. Something happened one night. Something happened to the whole town. Their name was Maness.”

  “That is the name of the man who built this church,” said the tall man. “He was the first clergyman this town had seen. And there were no others after him. What happened, Mrs Spikes?”

  “It was too long ago for anyone to remember. I only know the stories. The reverend said things about his son, said the boy was going to do something and how people had to keep it from happening.”

  “What happened, Mrs Spikes? Try to remember.”

  “I’m trying. It was only yesterday that I started to remember. It was when we got back to town. I remembered something that the reverend said in the stories about that night.”

  “I heard you,” said another woman. “You said, ‘Blessed is the seed that is planted forever in darkness.’ ”

  Mrs Spikes stared straight ahead and lightly pounded the top of the pew with her right hand, as though she were calling up memories in this manner. Then she said: “That’s what he was supposed to have been saying that night, ‘Blessed is the seed that is planted forever in darkness.’ And he said that people had to do something, but the stories I heard when I was growing up don’t say what he wanted people to do. It was about his son. It was something queer, something no one understood. But no one did anything that he wanted them to do. When they took him home, his son wasn’t there, and no one saw that young man again. The stories say that the ones who brought the reverend to his house saw things there, but no one could explain what they saw. What everyone did remember was that late the same night the bells started ringing up in the tower of this church. That’s where they found the reverend. He’d hung himself. It wasn’t until the McQuisters moved into town that anyone would go near the reverend’s house. Then it seemed no one could remember anything about the place.”

  “Just as we could not remember what happened only yesterday,” said the tall man. “Why we came back to this place when it was the last place we wanted to be. The blackness we saw that was a blackness no one had ever seen. That blackness which was not a blackness but was all the colors and shapes of things darkening the sky.”

  “A vision!” said one old man who for many years had been the proprietor of McQuister’s Pharmacy.

  “Perhaps only that,” replied the tall man.

  “No,” said Mrs Spikes. “It was something he did. It was like everything else that’s been happening since he came here and stayed so long. All the little changes in things that kept getting worse. It’s something that’s been moving in like a storm. People have seen that it’s in the town now, hanging over that house of his. And the changes in things are worse than ever. Pretty soon it’s us that’ll be changing.”

  Then there arose a chorus of voices among the congregation, all of them composing a conflict between “we must do something” and “what can be done?”

  While the people of Moxton murmured and fretted in the light of lamps and candles, there was a gradual darkening outside the windows of the church. An unnatural blackness was overtaking the gray afternoon. And the words of these people also began to change, just as so many things had changed in that town. Within the same voices there mingled both keening outcries of fear and a low, muttering invocation. Soon the higher pitched notes in these voices diminished and then wholly disappeared as the deeper tones of incantation prevailed. Now they were all chanting a single word in hypnotic harmony: Tsalal, Tsalal, Tsalal. And standing at the pulpit was the one who was leading the chant, the man whose strangely shaded hair shone in the light of candles and oil lamps. At last he had come from his house where he had stayed too long. The bell in the tower began to ring, sounding in shattered echoes. The resonant cacophony of voices swelled within the church. For these were the voices of people who had lived so long in the wrong place. These were people of a skeleton town.

  The figure at the pulpit lifted up his hands before his congregation, and they grew quiet. When he focused his eyes on an old woman sitting alone in the last row, she rose from her seat and walked to the double doors at the rear of the church. The man at the pulpit spread his arms wider, and the old woman pushed back each of the doors.

  Through the open doorway was the main street of Moxton, but it was not as it had been. An encompassing blackness had descended and only the lights of the town could be seen. But these lights were now as endless as the blackness itself. The rows of yellowish streetlamps extended to infinity along an avenue of the abyss. Fragments of neon signs were visible, the vibrant magenta letters of the movie theater recurring again and again, as though reflected in a multitude of black mirrors. In the midst of the other lights hovered an endless succession of traffic signals that filled the blackness like mul
ti-colored stars. All these bright remnants of the town, its broken pieces in transformation, were becoming increasingly dim and distorted, bleeding their radiance into the blackness that was consuming them, even as it freakishly multiplied the shattered images of the world, collecting them within its kaleidoscope of colors so dense and so varied that they lost themselves within a black unity.

  The man who had built the church in which the people of Moxton were gathered had spoken of the ultimate point. This was now imminent. And as the moment approached, the gathering within the church moved toward the figure at the pulpit, who descended to meet them. They were far beyond their old fears, these skeleton people. They had attained the stripped bone of being, the last layer of an existence without name or description, without nature or essence: the nothingness of the blackness no one had ever seen . . . or would ever see. For no one had ever lived except as a shadow of the blackness of the Tsalal.

  And their eyes looked to the one who was the incarnation of the blackness, and who had come to them to seal his bond with that other one. They looked to him for some word or gesture in order to bring to fulfilment that day which had turned into night. They looked to him for the thing that would bind them to the blackness and join them within the apocalypse of the unreal.

  Finally, as if guided by some whim of the moment, he told them how to do what must be done.

  12 What is remembered

  The story that circulated in later years among the people of Moxton told how everyone had gathered in the church one afternoon during a big storm that lasted into the night. Unused for decades before this event, the church was strongly constructed and proved a suitable shelter. There were some who recalled that for weeks prior to this cataclysm a variety of uncommon effects had resulted from what they described as a season of strange weather in the vicinity of the town.

  The details of this period remain unclear, as do memories of a man who briefly occupied the old McQuister place around the time of the storm. No one had ever spoken with him except Mrs Spikes, who barely recollected their conversation and who died of cancer not long after the biggest storm of the year. The house in which the man had lived was previously owned by relatives of Ray Starns, but the Starns people were no longer residents of Moxton. In any case, the old McQuister place was not the only untenanted house in the skeleton town and there was no reason for people to concern themselves with it. Nor did anyone in Moxton give serious thought to the church once the storm had passed. The doors were once again secured against intruders, but no one ever tested these old locks which had been first put in place after the Reverend Maness hung himself in the church tower.

  Had the people of the town of Moxton ventured beyond the doors of the church they might have found what they left behind following the abatement of the storm. Lying twisted at the foot of the pulpit was the skeleton of a man whose name no one would have been able to remember. The bones were clean. No bit of their flesh could be discovered either in the church or anywhere else in the town. Because the flesh was that of one who had stayed in a certain place too long. It was the seed, and now it had been planted in a dark place where it would not grow. They had buried his flesh deep in the barren ground of their meager bodies. Only a few strands of hair of an unusual color lay scattered upon the floor, mingling with the dust of the church.

  CHARLES GRANT

  In the Still, Small Hours

  CHARLES GRANT has been described as “one of the premier horror writers” (Stephen King) and “one of the authors who have given us a new golden age of horror fiction” (Publishers Weekly).

  The undisputed master of “quiet” horror, as the following story proves, he made his fiction debut in 1968 with “The House of Evil” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Since then he has presented his own unique brand of dark fantasy in such novels as The Hour of the Oxrun Dead, The Nestling, The Tea Party, The Pet, In a Dark Dream, Stunts, Something Stirs, Raven and many others.

  His short fiction has been collected in Tales from the Nightside, A Glow of Candles and Nightmare Seasons, and he has edited the acclaimed Shadows, Midnight and Greystone Bay anthology series. The author also writes adventure fiction, fantasy spoofs and horror for young adults under a number of pseudonyms.

  A SLOW STRONG wind took to the sky after midnight, dragging litter from the corners of every corner of the airport, dancing with the debris, mostly tattered paper, until it tired; and when it tired, it moved on, dragging grit across the windows like the clatter of muted hail, stinging the cheeks and closing the eyes of those who wandered outside because the inside was too quiet; snapping a flag on the pole near the terminal’s main entrance, the ropes slapping and whipping against the pitted metal shaft to ring a tuneless hollow bell; gusting now and then across the nearly empty parking lots, across the deserted entrance road, across the runways and grass between, startling pilots, wobbling planes, and moving on without a sound.

  It should have been cold, the wind that scoured the night-stained tarmac, and it should have had a voice – at the very least, a thunderstorm.

  The best it did, however, was a monotone hum as it slid across the panes of the observation deck, a sound so low and constant Lucas barely even heard it.

  But it was enough.

  It could have been a moan.

  And he shivered, only once, and blamed the faulty air-conditioning that, like everything else, was scarcely working these days. The only place he could find a small measure of peace was in this place, tucked away in the Dry Plains terminal that served the smaller, local flights.

  He lit a cigarette.

  The room was little more than a fairly wide corridor two-and-a-half stories above the ground, blank plaster wall on one side, an inward canted wall of glass on the other, and at their junction above his head a spotty row of fluorescent bulbs. The floor was carpeted, the carpeting worn, and at the north end, a heavy metal door with a small window, no handle or bar on either side, just a strong push to get it open. Although a waist-high metal rail ran the room’s length, no one had thought to install chairs or benches. To watch the landings, to watch the take-offs, as he did most every week, he had to stand.

  A chilly place.

  Unfriendly.

  Deliberately so, he gathered, because there was no money to be made here, no concessions, no machines, no poster advertisements, not even a water fountain.

  He didn’t care.

  He seldom stayed for very long, just long enough to watch the lonely three o’clock flight from Dallas make its landing. When it had taxied to its destination – a long extension from the main building off to his left, rounded at the end to accommodate a dozen gates – and the jetway umbilical made its connection, he would watch the handful of passengers ghost along the glass-wall corridor back toward the exits.

  He would watch, but he’d never see her.

  Tonight would be no different, yet there was a difference anyway.

  He was no expert, neither an engineer nor a former pilot, just a man who rented floor space in brand-new empty buildings, but he could tell that the aircraft coming in this summer night were having more than a little trouble. They landed more like stones than gliding birds to a welcome pond. They’d drop onto the runway hard, tires smoking at frantic brakes, and once, not an hour ago, a 727 fishtailed and he’d held his breath, hoping it would make it.

  It had.

  But only barely.

  The wind slapped the pane, shimmered it, and he blinked.

  A glance at his watch; he had an hour to go.

  Though the lighting wasn’t bright, barely bright enough to see the floor since only every other narrow bulb was lit, he squinted as he tried to make some sense of the still-black morning sky. There were stars, the moon long gone, but he couldn’t see a single cloud, or a blank spot up there that would tell him a cloud was passing. Nothing, as far as he could figure, that would signal unsafe weather.

  Nothing but the wind.

  Then he saw himself in the glass and gave himself a n
od and smile.

  In all the months he’d been coming here, no one had ever stopped him, no one ever asked why an ordinary-looking man in a decent suit, a decent tie, would make his way so late to this place just to watch the planes. And precious few of them there were these days, he thought as he crushed the cigarette beneath his heel. From midnight to one, an even dozen; from one to two there were only eight; and from two to dawn he’d be lucky to count them on the fingers of one hand.

  One night there hadn’t been any.

  A week ago, one had crashed on take-off, thankfully out of his sight.

  He leaned lightly against the railing, looking westward toward the main terminal. Lights and dim shadows and the glint of steel and polished plastic. It made him nervous; especially now. When he had arrived tonight, just after twelve-thirty, there hadn’t been a single soul inside. The ticket counters had been deserted, the shops closed and locked, not even a man with a broom working over the mirrored floor.

  Nothing.

  No one.

  He hadn’t heard a sound.

  As he hurried toward the covered walkway that led to the smaller building and the observation deck, his footsteps had followed him, echoing faintly, faintly mocking, until he’d found himself virtually on his toes, so as not to break the silence.

  And once he had arrived, he had almost stumbled and fallen, not realizing until he touched the cold railing for balance that he’d been holding his breath most of the way.

  He had shaken his head then, and he shook his head now, frowning, wondering what the hell was going on. If Joan had been here, she would have poked him in the side, teased him about omens, portents, the stuff that she claimed to believe, although she had never tried to force him to share her beliefs.

  “Either you believe or you don’t,” she had said that last time, the last night they had been together, waiting in the reception area for the call to her outbound flight. “But sooner or later, you’re going to have to admit that there are coincidences, and then there are coincidences that only look like coincidences.” Then she’d kissed him good-bye, a sisterly brush on his cheek, and he had hurried over here to watch her leave for Dallas, and points west.