Horror Express Volume Two

by Bentley Little

  You may gather I do not like the things.

  And I come into contact with them every day, more probably than anyone else you pass in the street in a year. They are an occupational hazard, lurking in quiet corners when I open the little doors to check on lonely gas meters, and I often have to poke my head into dingy little cupboards made of brick, down people’s side entries, or on the side of houses. Quiet, disused little sanctuaries, where they weave their webs in silence and secret, and sometimes blanket a whole gas meter in a thick clinging web. I can’t tell you how often one of these things has ran out to answer a chance tweak of its webbing, inches from my face, or how often I have caught the cobweb in my hair, or hit my head in shock and sudden fright as one darted towards my eyes or ear. Sometimes the older meters are covered with hessian sacking which I have to pull out, and that’s crawling with them.

  I hate the subtle, sticky, sickening sensation of cobweb. The tiny sound of it tearing when the web sticks to you, and if you are close enough and they are big enough, the actual sound of spider’s feet as they run across the web.

  For some reason, the big Wolf Spiders and House Spiders you get in Birmingham are monstrously huge. I have never seen them this big anywhere else in this country, and their webs are thick and clinging, often filled with dust, and they stick to you horribly. I carry a length of bamboo cane to remove them, but their owners have a nasty temper, and I have seen big Wolf Spiders rear up and hisssss, flailing their legs at an intruder.

  They are afraid of nothing. The females can grow to a hell of a size if they never lay any eggs, and they can kill.

  I know it sounds dramatic, but this is no joke. A friend of mine was working as a tiler for the summer, on an old Tudor house in Bournville which was being renovated. He was sitting on the ridge of the roof, tearing up the old ridge tiles, when he tore one up in particular and disturbed a spider which must have been there for years. It was right between his knees, and its stood on its back legs and screeched at him, flailing at the light. Don hated spiders, and it frightened him so badly that he threw himself away from it and lost his footing. He couldn’t stop himself from slipping, and he fell off the roof.

  He was dying when they got to him, and in terrible pain, but he was utterly serious when he swore it had spoken to him. Don died before he could tell anyone what it said. He wasn’t at all delirious, but they listened to him as a dying man who was completely serious in his last moments, and he swore it had spoken to him. His mates were livid with the thing and went looking for it with big sticks and pickaxe handles, but they couldn’t believe what they saw when they found it. The men swore it was bigger than a tarantula, and they were all pretty scared of it themselves. One of them finally trapped it in a big old sweet jar, and they sent it to the Natural History Museum, where the little murderer is now floating in preservative, the biggest English house spider ever captured alive, and the only one to kill a man.

  Lottie’s remark caused me some terrible nightmares. I dreamt that I was visited by ghosts, but not the soul reviving humanoid ghosts who called on Scrooge. These were the crystalline, transparent bodies of countless spiders I have killed since childhood, descending down through my ceiling, like little articulated glass sculptures filled with mist, on their shining umbilical cords. Hundreds and hundreds of them. I swatted at them like a lunatic, but my blows went right through them, and I heard their tinny little voices calling ‘Join us . . . join us . . . .’

  Every room in the house I went into, they descended like tiny parachutists, chanting the same thing, until at last, feeling utterly desperate, I ran into the toilet.... and when I opened the door, all that was in there was the open yawning funnel of a gigantic web, the entrance to the web of a spider of fantastic size, and I fell into it head first.....

  That’s when I woke up in a cold sweat, with a scream. I wouldn’t have wanted to confront the owner of that particular cobweb, and I was shaking like a leaf. I had to have a jolt of Scotch after that, and I spent an hour going around the house with a cricket bat looking for them, just in case. I didn’t find any spiders, but I flattened the living daylights out of an innocent woodlouse, and a couple of silverfish, and I felt rather guilty after that.

  I know exactly what the cause of this fear was and when it happened. When I was six years old I was watching the TV with my mum and dad, and we had a Cotswold Stone Mantelpiece. There was a small jagged hole in the corner, just by the armchair I was sitting in. All of a sudden, I noticed an odd movement, and realised that my father was coming towards me with an odd fixed look, obviously trying to be reassuring, and before I could say anything he scooped me out of the armchair and dropped me into the opposite one on the other side of the room. My mother was as puzzled as I was, but he just waved her across to where I was without looking around, and said ‘Go over by the Bab, I’ll get a glass and catch it!’

  A huge house spider had emerged from this hole at the side of the mantelpiece, and was sitting by the bottom of a letter on the shelf. It must have come down the chimney, attracted by the warmth of the fire on a cold winter’s night. I had been leaning on the arm of the chair, and it must have emerged inches from my face, and luckily my father happened to look around and see it. My mother couldn’t stand spiders, and she rushed me into the hall till Dad had got rid of it, but it gave me a terrible fright, and I refused to go back into the lounge until Dad had filled in the hole. I had nightmares for weeks after that, and have been, and I am not ashamed to admit it, scared stiff of spiders ever since. And as I say, the ones we get in Birmingham in England are huge.

  Didn’t Tolkien create Shelob? And he came from Birmingham . . . I can’t watch that film of ‘The Return of the King’ because of Shelob, and I love ‘The Lord of The Rings’.

  I tried to forget what Lottie had said, but it played on my mind. I have killed hundreds of spiders since my childhood, and I have always been uneasy about the idea that it’s bad luck.

  The dream reoccurred until I was frightened to close an eye. Always the crystalline transparent bodies of the things gleaming in the twilight, and their piping, seductive little calls of ‘join us . . . join us . . . ’

  I put it out of my mind during the daytime hours, in so far as I could, until one afternoon when I couldn’t ignore it anymore.

  I had to check the meter in a disused Council depot over in Shirley, the kind of place formerly owned by the old Birmingham Parks Department, and manned now by one old Security Guard; a guy from Manchester called Fred.

  Some of the outbuildings hadn’t been used in fifteen years, and he led me across the courtyard cheerfully with a mug of tea.

  ‘This way, son. It’s just up by the top of the water closet in the Thunder Box. God knows why they put it in there, it’s a bit embarrassing for someone in your line of work, I’d have thought, especially if it’s being used, but don’t worry, no-one uses it now, so you won’t be disturbed.’ He was turning the door handle with a slightly sickly grin, ‘I just hope you aren’t scared of spiders . . . ’

  Did he have to say that?

  ‘See ya later, our kid,’ and he left me too it.

  The cobweb was so thick across the window you could just about see a grey light filtering in as though through a gauze.

  The room was about five feet long by about three and a half across, with a tiny sink, and an old fashioned upright water closet, one of those huge plastic tanks with a hanging chain, at about head height. I could hardly see it for hanging spider’s webs, and the meter was up in there somewhere, right in the middle of it.

  I could not enter the room. It wasn’t a matter of not wanting too, I just couldn’t do it. I stood as if I was paralysed just outside the doorway.

  Ancient dusty webbing rounded out the corners of the room, and the window ledge, in great uneven curves. Everywhere I looked there were the sinkholes of spiders funnels going back into the recesses, some of them really very big indeed, and the debris of dead insects long since gone to glory. Beetle carapaces, strangled butterflies
, the broken wreckage of murdered daddy longlegs torn limb from limb. There were the dismembered bodies of ladybirds, and wasps and bumble bees; it was some kind of macabre insect slaughterhouse. The webbing had spread across the ceiling in great hanging blankets, up the window itself, over the filthy frosted glass, and all over the water tank of the toilet. It encircled the pipe where it descended down, and was draped across to the hanging toilet chain.

  There was a fresh new toilet roll in there. Surely to god no-one used it! Nothing would have made me reach for that toilet brush, never mind contemplate a comfort stop, and it chilled me to see a hole torn through the webbing, where it hung in tattered strips, where someone had recently changed the light bulb.

  Why hadn’t they come in with a Vax and cleaned it all out, I asked myself. But then I wondered, what would you have disturbed if you started tearing all that down, and I understood why they just changed the bulb and got the hell out of there. But they had put their hand up there, in amongst all of that . . . And I had to service the meter.

  Not on your life.

  One thing was for certain: Nothing on God’s green earth was going to get me into that room.

  Sometimes you can’t find a meter. Sometimes a householder was out, or they were inaccessible. It’s not unknown, and we help each other out. A friend of mine is scared of dogs, and I swap calls with him for houses where residents have them. Someone else could come and do this; I’d swap with one of the guys, and buy them a pint. Not tell them too much about it. My phobia was well known at work, they’d understand. There was no way I was going in there . . .

  I reached out to shut the door, very carefully, and it had almost closed, when I thought I heard something. Something I really couldn’t have heard.

  It froze me with fear for a moment, and I stood listening ferociously.

  And just as I had convinced myself I was imagining things, I heard it again. A tinny, scratchy voice, which spoke in a tone that was just about audible, from somewhere in that mass of dusty silk, and it said ‘Join us . . . ’

  It was indescribably sweet, like the voice of an elf, a tiny, singing siren which was a thousand times more compelling than the voice in my dreams, and I found myself quietly entering the room as if in a dream, closing the door behind me, and sitting down on the closed toilet seat......

  And as I sat there, I heard a shifting and shuffling, the sound of something moving about which must have been the size of a fox or a cat, and it was only now I noticed a huge opening above the door. It was a cavity into the roof which was mainly hidden by cobweb, and even as I noticed it, I realised that I was being watched.

  And I saw that a face from too many of my nightmares was watching me, with many clustered eyes. There was an extraordinary sadness in those jet black clusters, catching the dim light, some of them the size of golf balls. All I could see was its eyes in this dim light, and then with a voice as rich and smooth as the most accomplished seductress, it said ‘Join us . . . ’

  Somehow I had a compulsion to turn on the light. It said nothing else, but somehow I knew it wanted me too, and for a few seconds I did as I was compelled. What I saw then revealed to me that spiders that are killed are ultimately revenged, and even as I saw their champion, their god, or whatever you wish to call it, with its abdomen the size of a football, I saw behind it the remains of its meals. I turned off the light, and it gave me that same sad look again, almost one of sympathy, and withdrew into its den.

  Then a thousand transparent glasslike beings, the ghosts of a thousand arachnids I had dispatched to the land beyond the veil, slowly descended down around me and began to do their work.

  I couldn’t move my legs, but somehow I didn’t want to. I could hardly feel anything from the hundreds of tiny bites I had received, and the web slowly rose up my body like a cocoon. I knew that before long I would be hoisted gently up through that hole, like many before me who had killed these creatures, and as I felt the tingle of their spinning legs I knew exactly how true that old wives tale was.

  It’s very bad luck to kill a spider.

  Guy N Smith

  THE HANGMAN

  Ballinger wanted to scream out 'you can't hang me because there isn't a death penalty' but somehow the words would not come, just torturous vibrations in his mind. He was going crazy but there was no getting away from the fact that they were going to execute him in about five minutes. He glanced at the clock on the wall for the hundredth time. Five minutes to nine. Five minutes until he started out on the infamous Nine O'clock Walk!

  He tried to think, a last desperate attempt to collate his thoughts. It wasn't easy but that was because they invariably tranquilised a condemned man, numbed his brain so that everything was just a bad dream from which you thought you would wake up any second. Only you wouldn't because it was real. He was going to die, kicking on the end of a rope until his neck broke.

  He had killed Milner all right but they couldn't prove it because they didn't have a body. In searing flashes his thoughts went back to the night of December 7th, remembered how it had been raining when he had parked his car and walked the last hundred yards to Milner's house. The jerk had been there all right, a pimply little toad who had made a fortune out of blackmail. Ballinger hadn't found out until afterwards that Milner was Boland's brother-in-law. In London's gangland area it paid to find out who was who, or rather to whom they were related before you took on a job. It was too late afterwards and Cranner had skipped town without forking out the ten grand for the killing. The job itself had been easy, a lock that a child could have picked with a paper-clip and a bullet from a silenced .32 that made scarcely a plop and a splat as it found its mark, made a neat round hole in the back of the skull.

  Ballinger had removed the body, taken it back to his workshop. Sometimes a killer tried to be clever but it was the novelty of the plan for disposing of the corpse that had appealed to him. For the past ten years he had been acknowledged as the finest sculptor in Britain and it offered a number of possibilities for an undercover hit-man. He'd done it once before, that grotesque statue in the Memorial Gardens, a World War 1 general that concealed human flesh and blood. He could do it again, that replacement of a bygone statesman which he had been commissioned to adorn the cobbled square of a northern market town. It gave you one helluva of a kick, and knowing that nobody else knew. If the body was approximately the right size it made the job a piece of cake, a coating of plaster snaped in readiness for the final hardening process.

  The council had had their statesman a fortnight before the deadlines and in some ways the satisfaction was a consolation for Cranner skipping town. Nobody would ever find Milner's body and they couldn't charge with murder without it. All the same Ballinger had been uneasy when he'd discovered the relationship between Milner and Boland. Still, if the police couldn't trace the killer then it was unlikely that Boland's mob could either.

  Ballinger glanced at the clock again. 8.57. He looked at the others in the room. Impassionate faces that he half-recognised. Two warders in plain clothes and the hangman dressed in traditional black with a highwayman-type mask covering the top half of his face. Archaic, brutal, a tradition dating back to bygone days when life was cheap and hangmen enjoyed their job. Legalised murderers . . . like this one! Funny how you couldn't stop staring at those eyes, felt them burning into you as though he was inflicting his own mode of torture upon you.

  Ballinger felt his mind going muzzy again. The arrest and trial were like remnants of some nightmare that were virtually gone on waking. He remembered them coming for him . . . funny thing, the police officer who walked into his studio and made the arrest was similar in a lot of ways to the hangman, the same eyes. The judge, too; you felt that you were found guilty before he even delivered his summing up. Ballinger couldn't remember any of that, only that he'd been taken to this dark cell which in many ways resembled his own dilapidated workshop-studio. How long he'd been here he had no idea; days, weeks, months? Interrogations that were meaningless because his lips mov
ed and his head nodded but he'd no idea what he was saying. Maybe he'd confessed, told them the body was in the statue. No, he wouldn't do that.

  They'd drugged him, turned him into a zombie but it didn't lessen the terror. Another minute and he'd be dead. Starting to panic but his limbs were leaden and he couldn't have fled even if they had shown him the open door. Those eyes, fixed steadily on him, seeming to dilate so that they burned right into his brain. You're going to hang, Ballinger, hang by the neck until you are dead!

  No, please don't. I didn't kill Milner. You can't hang me because there isn't a death penalty in this country. Country. The most you can give me is life.

  Ballinger felt himself moving awkwardly, one foot in front of the other, shuffling along at the head of this bizarre procession, the hangman's gaze burning into his back, driving him forward against his will. Everywhere was so dark, just a single bulb suspended by a frayed flex, just enough light to see . . . the gallows!

  Ballinger felt the bile rising in his throat, his stomach muscles contracting. He wanted to vomit but he couldn't manage it. All so horribly primitive, not a bit like he'd imagined; no trapdoor, no sophisticated mechanism to work the final drop. Just a pair of crude wooden steps, the kind he kept at home in his own shed, a hempen rope dangling into a noose that looked frayed as though it had been used many times before. So sordid, and afterwards they would bury his body in an unmarked grave filled with quicklime. Just the official records, no other way that anybody would remember him.