The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  “How could you know that?”

  Matilda shook her head. “I don’t know. But I always thought there was something dark in Elizabeth, and that it was just waiting to get out. And as I said, I was glad to move away. She was my friend, but I was glad to leave her.”

  “I think we both should leave her,” I said. “I admit defeat.”

  “Would you consider staying?” Matilda said. “Just one more night?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “So I can see her,” she said.

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “I feel as if I owe her,” she said. “I feel somehow responsible for how angry she has become.”

  “Why didn’t she show herself in the grove?” I said.

  “The trees were her,” Matilda said. “But this house, where she and I were happy, this is her focal point now. She wants you out.”

  “And I’m more than willing to go,” I said.

  “Will you stay?”

  Until moments before I had been ready to grab a few things, stick them in the car, and drive Matilda back to the retirement home, and drive myself back to my parent’s house, but she was convincing.

  I gave her a tour of the wrecked house, and even managed to put the kitchen door back in place while Matilda twisted the screws through the holes in the hinges. Then I made us a sandwich of peanut butter, and we sat at the dining room table and ate. About us was the carnage of the night before.

  I said, “Why didn’t she come in the living room?”

  “If I understand what you’ve told me,” Matilda said, “the opposite side of the house is where she’s strongest, and that’s because that’s where she and I played. The back bedroom was mine. She feels comfortable there, as if she belongs. This side was where the family congregated, and she preferred the privacy of the other side of the house. My parents had a bedroom there, and there was my bedroom, but my guess is she associates that side with me, and this side with the family. And another guess is that this is the heart of the house. The part that is most powerful.”

  “That’s two guesses,” I said.

  “You have me there,” Matilda said.

  “But she did come on this side, and she broke the door down.”

  “She’s getting stronger and less fearful of coming here. Maybe she could do at any time and just chose not to. Perhaps she didn’t have any intention of harming you, but just wanted you to go away, and is trying to scare you off.”

  “It’s working,” I said.

  “But I believe this is the strong part of the house, where the family was most comfortable. Some people claim all dwellings have a center, a heart, a source of power, something that is inherent, and something borrowed from the living things around or in it, and this place must be it.

  “American Indians believed all things had power, that they were alive. Rocks. Trees. They had spirits inside of them. Manitous, they called them. Nymph. Elemental. Manitou. Spirit. All the same thing... what I can’t decide is if Elizabeth is angry because I left, or because someone else has moved into the house. Most likely a little of both.”

  We waited in the living room. The only light was a fire in the fireplace and a single lit candle I had placed in a jar lid on the end table by the couch. The night came, and as soon as the sky darkened, I knew it was coming, and I wished then I hadn’t listened to Matilda, and that I had gone away as I had originally planned. There was a change in the air. It became heavy and oppressive, and within moments, on the back porch this time, I heard a heavy sound as if something were dragging itself.

  “It’s her,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “It is.”

  I looked at Matilda. The fire in the hearth tossed shadows over one side of her face, and in those shadows she looked so much younger. I thought I could not only see the woman she was, but I could almost see the child she had once been.

  There was a sudden wailing, like what I would think a banshee would sound like. Loud and raw and strange, it affected not only the ears, but the very bones inside of me. It was as if my skeleton moved and rattled and strained at my flesh.

  “My God,” I said.

  “She is of older gods,” Matilda said. “Calling to yours will do you no good.”

  The next sound was like thousands of whips being slapped against the house, as if an angry slave master were trying to tame it. I heard what was left of the glass in the kitchen and dining room windows tinkle out and to the floor.

  And then everything went silent. But I knew it wasn’t over, even though the silence reigned for quite some time. When it started up again, the sound was different. It was of the back door to the dog run being flung open, slammed back against the hall. Then there was a noise like something too large for the door pushing itself inside. I glanced toward the living room door to the dog run. It was swelling, and the cold from the dog run was seeping under it; the cold from outside, and the cold from Elizabeth.

  The door warped in the middle and seemed sure to break, but it held. And then everything went silent.

  I couldn’t say where Elizabeth was at that moment, but it seemed to me that she was in the dog run, standing there, or lurking there. The door no longer swelled, but the cold had grown so that it now filled the room. Our candle guttered out. The fire in the fireplace lost its warmth, and the flames grew low.

  And then there went up such a savage wail that I dropped to my knees with my hands over my ears. Matilda, she stood there, her arms spread. “Elizabeth,” she called out. “It’s me, Matilda.”

  The wail ended, but then the entire house shook, and the living room door to the dog run swelled again and vibrated.

  “It’s grown strong,” Matilda said, and then the door blew apart in thousands of fragments, one of them striking me in the head as I perched on my knees. It didn’t knock me out, but it hurt me badly, and it slammed me to the floor. The way pieces of the house were flying about, I stayed down, was so tight to the ground I felt as if I might become part of it.

  Then the thrashing and the howling of the wind stopped. I looked up. Much of the house was in wreckage around me. The fireplace still stood, but the flames had been blown out.

  I managed to get up. I called out for Matilda. No answer.

  Where the walls had once stood, there was just the night, and beyond I could see something dark moving past the barn toward the woods. It looked like a knot of ropy coils and thrashing sticks, and in its midst, trapped in all those sticks and coils, I got a glimpse of Matilda.

  I looked around and saw the axe lying by the fireplace, where I had split a few chunks of wood to start the fire. I picked it up and ran out into the night after Elizabeth. I was terrified, no doubt, but I thought of Matilda and felt I had no other alternative than to help her if I could.

  The thing moved swiftly and without seeming to touch the ground. Trees leaned wide as it proceeded, not trees from the grove, but all manner of trees, pines and oaks, sweet-gums and hickory. They made plenty of room for it to pass.

  What had felt like a long walk before only seemed to take moments this time, and soon I stood in the clearing, looking at the grove. The mass of limbs, the elemental, Elizabeth, was already closing in on the place, and there I stood with the axe in my hand, and absolutely no idea what to do with it; I felt small and useless.

  I’m ashamed to say I was frozen. I watched as the thing laid Matilda’s body on the ground, gently, and then the limbs whipped and sawed in all directions, and the coils of roots and boughs unknotted, and all those loose projections waved at the night sky.

  And then, it was gone. In its place was a young girl in simple clothes, and even though I had not seen early photos of Matilda, I had seen that very child in her features. It was Elizabeth, looking as Matilda had looked those long years ago when she discovered the grove. I was seeing Elizabeth in the same way Matilda had seen her; she was an invisible child no longer.

  Matilda was on the ground, but now she rose up on an elbow, struggled to sit. She
looked directly at Elizabeth. As for me, I was frozen to my spot.

  “Elizabeth,” Matilda said. Her voice was sweet and clear and came to me where I stood at the end of the trail, looking at this fantastic occurrence; I think I was suffering from shock. “You don’t want to hurt me anymore than I want to hurt you.”

  The little girl stood there looking at Matilda, not moving. Matilda slowly stood up. She held out her hand, said, “We are friends. We have always been friends. Don’t be angry. I didn’t mean to leave. I had to leave.”

  The little girl reached out and touched Matilda’s hand. When she did, I saw a sort of whipping movement at the back of her head and along her spine. It was like what she really was, was trying to escape.

  “We are different, you and I, and both our times are ending,” Matilda said. This seemed like a bad time to bring such things up, but then again, I was uncertain there was a perfect way for dealing with what Matilda had called an elemental.

  The wind picked up and the trees in the grove waved at the night air. Matilda continued to talk, but I could no longer hear her. The howling wind was too loud. Limbs from trees, not only in the grove, but from the woods surrounding it, began to fly past me. The air filled with them. I crouched down, but one glanced against my head and knocked me out.

  THERE REALLY ISN’T much to tell after that, and as I warned it’s not all explained. But when I awoke, Matilda was leaning over me, cradling my head in her hands. I had been hit twice in one night, once hard enough to be knocked out, so I’ll admit that my memory of the next few minutes is hazy.

  I do remember that I looked in the direction of the grove and saw that it was gone, twisted out of the ground as if by a tornado. But I knew that storm had not been of this earth.

  When I was able to get to my feet, Matilda and I walked back to the remains of the house. There was really nothing left of it but that chimney. My car was fine, however, and we sat in it to recover. I got some Kleenex out of the glove compartment and held a wad of it to my wounded head.

  “What happened out there?” I asked.

  “Elizabeth was lonely,” Matilda said.

  That wasn’t exactly the answer I was looking for.

  “I saw her,” I said.

  Matilda nodded. “Besides me, you are the first. I suppose she no longer cared if she was seen. I can’t say, really.”

  “She was you?”

  “She was a form of me. She still is.”

  “Still is?”

  “I made her a deal. I would stay with her forever.”

  “But –”

  “She is inside me. She and I are one. It was my trade off. The grove must go. Her anger must go. And she could be with me until the end of my days.”

  I was stunned by this revelation, but I will tell you quite sincerely, I believed it; after what I had seen, I believed Matilda emphatically.

  “What happens then?” I said. “At the end of your days?”

  Matilda shook her head. “I don’t know. But you know what? I feel really good having her back, and I know now that though I’ve been happy all my life, I have on some level still been missing something. That something was Elizabeth. The grove didn’t make Elizabeth from its elemental powers, it pulled her out of me and gave her to me. She was another side of me, and she was a side I needed. A friend. I was happy because of her, not in spite of her, and now that the other part of me is back, my middle name, I feel refreshed. It’s like having a missing arm sewn back on.”

  We sat there and talked for a long time, and some of what she said resonated with me, but most of it was merely confusing. Suffice to say, the house was gone, the grove was gone, and I never saw Elizabeth again. Matilda and I claimed the house had been taken down by a tornado, and who was to argue. Who was to guess an elemental force from time eternal had torn it down in a rage, and that what remained of it was now inside Matilda. Or so she claimed.

  My head healed. You can still see a scar. I told Cliff the story, and he acted like he didn’t believe me, but I think he did. I have a feeling he may have seen something strange there before I did, but didn’t want to own up to it. Oddly enough, I never crossed William’s path again. But I’m sure he had an experience in the house as well and that’s why he left.

  What else? Oh, the landlady got insurance money. Matilda and I stayed in touch until her death. I suppose she must have been ninety when she passed. They did discover one odd thing after her departure. Matilda had been confined to her bed, no longer able to walk, and in the last few months of her life, not capable of communicating. But during the night they heard a terrible noise, and when they rushed into her room they found her lying dead on her bed, but the room, well, it was torn apart. The window had been blown out and the bed clothes that had covered Matilda were missing, as if there had been some great suction that had take them away, carried them out the window, along with fragments of a busted chair and all the paintings and easels in the room.

  They were all gone, and never found. There were a number of theories, but no satisfactory explanations. My explanation is Elizabeth. I like to think maybe Matilda’s soul went with her to some place nice and eternal. Again, I can’t say for sure, and I can explain it no further than that.

  I don’t know what else there is to say. That’s my story, and it’s just what happened to me. I apologize for it not being a made-up tale, considering so many stories told tonight were good, and highly imaginative, but that’s all I’ve got, and it’s true, so I hope it’ll do.

  INTRODUCTION

  JONATHAN OLIVER

  THE WORD MAGIC, for many, will conjure up images of gentlemen in dinner suits pulling rabbits out of hats and producing bunches of flowers from their sleeves. For sure, you can find the popular image of the magician here – the entertainer reveals himself in both Alison Littlewood’s ‘The Art of Escapology’ and Robert Shearman’s ‘Dumb Lucy’ – but you will find much about the magical arts that may not be familiar to you within these pages.

  Genre fiction has had a long and complex relationship with magic. Horror fiction has often featured diabolists and their dealings with devils, cults pervade the works of pulp pioneers such as H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and magic is an integral part of fantasy fiction as a whole. What I am seeking to do with Magic, however, is not to fulfil your expectations but exceed and confound them. This is a collection of unusual fiction; indeed an anthology of the esoteric and arcane.

  One question that you’ll find repeated throughout is, what is magic for? The uses to which the arts of sorcery are tasked are often concerned with human desire. In Alison Littlewood’s poignant tale we have the child’s desire for magic and a magical existence come up against the realities of the world as experienced by adults. In Gemma Files’ story, ‘Nanny Grey’ we have a darker side of desire, where magic is used to lure a young man driven by sexual need into a horrific encounter. ‘First and Last and Always’ by Thana Niveau (a magical name if there ever was one) shows us how we can want something too much and how playing with magic, without true understanding, is a very dangerous undertaking. As it is in Will Hill’s story ‘Shuffle’, the structure of which is something of a trick in itself.

  The thing about magic, is that it often confounds understanding. And, of course, when we write about magic we are often trying to express impossibilities. Sophia McDougall demonstrates herself to be more than capable of this in ‘MailerDaemon’ in which a computer programmer finds herself with a gift she’s not sure she asked for, and Robert Shearman’s beautifully apocalyptic tale shows us the possibilities of an impossible love. In Audrey Niffeneggers’s story, ‘The Wrong Fairy’, we are given a glimpse into an impossible world through the eyes of the father of a very famous writer. While in Liz Williams’ ‘Cad Coddeau’ we are taken back into the time of legend, where myth and story grow into something impossibly beautiful.

  Of course, one of the most common uses for a spell is to help another. When the motivation is pure, this can bring about a positive change, as dem
onstrated in Storm Constantine’s story ‘Do as Thou Wilt.’ Lou Morgan, too, shows us an act of magical sacrifice in ‘Bottom Line’ that throws new light onto a morally ambiguous character. Sarah Lotz’s comic tale ‘If I Die, Kill My Cat’ shows the consequences of leaving an altruistic magical act unfinished. In Gail Z. Martin’s ‘Buttons’ we have a group of esoteric investigators whose mission it is to help people through the use of magic. In effecting magical change, however, the moral may not always be pure, as is clear from Dan Abnett’s politics-meets-magic story ‘Party Tricks’. Help sought also has a sinister side in Christopher Fowler’s story of magic gone wrong, ‘The Baby.’ Sometimes the magic user may not realise how far they have gone, as we can see when Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem introduce us to a mother who may not have her children’s best interests at heart in ‘Domestic Magic’.

  While these tales show many aspects of magic, it is worth remembering that the act of writing has its own magic. I hope, then, that you find as much enjoyment in reading the works of the prestidigitators herein as I had in gathering them together.

  Jonathan Oliver

  August 2012

  Oxford

  IF I DIE, KILL MY CAT

  SARAH LOTZ

  There are things in the following tale that are true. I’m not going to tell you what they are, but let me assure you that it’s none of the mundane stuff. After reading Sarah’s brilliant and witty story, I did wonder whether the UK government could look to the arcane arts to solve a few problems. Or maybe they already do that, and none of us realise.

  “THERE’S GOING TO be maggots,” Lindiwe sighed, batting at the blowflies bobbing around her breathing mask. Others gathered in clumps around the light fixtures and swarmed over the single mug upturned on the draining board. Save for the flies, the house was a typical Sea Point rental property: parquet floors, white walls, cheap appliances and minimal furniture.