The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories

by Stephen Jones

  He lets his attention drift heavenwards, or at least towards the twig-like cracks and peeling leaves of plaster which compose the ceiling. When his pretence of indifference produces no response, he sneaks a glance at his audience. How can the back of every head be facing him? “Anyone who’s read anything,” he says, attempting a careless laugh. “Someone must have read me or I wouldn’t be here.”

  The pink-scalped man rears up, knotting the belt of his faded and discoloured overcoat which could almost be a dressing-gown. “Remind us,” he says.

  At least the audience is watching Mottershead, but without warmth. “I expect you’ll have heard of Cadenza. That was my best book.”

  “Who says?” his interrogator demands.

  “I do.” There must have been reviews, and surely Mottershead had friends who gave him their opinions, but where those memories should be is only darkness. “I put everything I could into that book, everything of myself that was worth having. It’s about the last days of a man who knows he’s dying, and how that gives new life to everything we take for granted.”

  “How does it end?”

  “I’ll tell you,” Mottershead says, only to discover that the dark has swallowed that information too. “Or perhaps,” he corrects himself hastily, “someone who’s read it should.”

  The doughy faces slump. Nobody has read the book. The bald man’s stare is probing his thoughts, and he feels as if he’s being asked “Why do you write?”—being compelled to answer “Life is shit and that’s why I use up so much paper.” He’s opening his mouth—anything to break the breathless silence—when it occurs to him that he needn’t try to recall the end of the book. He grabs the rucksack and, placing it on the table in front of him, unfastens the buckles and opens it towards his audience like a stage magician, displaying the book. “This is me.”

  It’s immediately obvious that he has blundered somehow. “I beg your pardon. This is I,” he says, and when their expressions grow more unconvinced: “This am I? I am this?”

  The bald man smirks. “I should let it drop.”

  They needn’t quiz Mottershead’s grammar; some of them are bound to have perpetrated worse. Losing patience, he lifts the book out of the rucksack, and sees why they are unimpressed. His name is no longer on the cover.

  He must have torn the jacket as he shoved the book into the rucksack; it’s missing from the front of the book and from the spine, the binding of which is blank. He pulls the rucksack open wide, then forces it inside out, but nothing falls from it except a scattering of soil.

  “Har-rumph,” the red-faced man pronounces, and several heads nod vigorously. The man with the pink scalp, whose cap fits so snugly that it seems to be flattening flesh as well as any hair which the headgear conceals, stares wide-eyed at Mottershead. By God, he’ll show them he wrote the novel. He throws it open, its cover striking the table with a sound like a lid being cast off a box, and finds that the copyright and title pages have been torn out. There’s no trace of his name in the book.

  He can still display the photograph inside the back cover, which seems impatient to be opened; he’s almost sure that he feels the book stir. He picks it up gingerly, but the table beneath it is bare. He squeezes the volume between his hands and lets it fall open.

  Perhaps his face is on the flap, but so is an object which has been squashed between the cover and the flyleaf. It’s where he remembers the photograph to have been, and the markings on its back are very like a face. Despite its having been flattened, it retains some life. He has barely glimpsed it when it raises itself and, staggering rapidly off the book, drops into his lap.

  He screams and leaps to his feet, hurling the book away from him. The object, whose welter of legs makes it appear to have doubled in size, falls to the floor and scuttles through a crack beneath the skirting-board. The audience watch as if they’re wondering what further antics Mottershead may perform in a vain attempt to shock them into responding. “I’ll show you,” he babbles. “Just talk among yourselves while I fetch a book.”

  Everyone turns to watch him as he heads for the door, forcing himself to walk as though he doesn’t feel like running out of the room. Nobody speaks while he struggles with the mechanism of the door, twisting a knob above the handle back and forth until he hears a click and the door swings open. He steps out and pulls it to behind him.

  Either the readers at the tables are engrossed in their work or they’re consciously ignoring him. He tries to move quietly as he hurries from shelf to shelf. Once he identifies the fiction, surely he’ll find one or more of his books. All the shelves on this side of the top floor, however, hold only books about psychology and religion, arranged according to some system he can’t crack. He sidles between two tables, ensuring that he doesn’t brush against the Bible readers in front of him, and his buttocks bump a woman’s head. She’s wearing a rain hat which resembles a shower cap, and it must be this which deflates at the contact, but it feels as if her skull has yielded like a dying balloon, a sensation so disconcerting that the apology he means to offer comes out as “My pleasure.” Feeling at the mercy of his own words, he blunders to the edge of the balcony and clutches the handrail.

  If the fiction is shelved separately from the rest of the stock, he can’t see where; every visible shelf holds books larger than any novel, some as thick and knobbly as full-grown branches. As he runs on tiptoe to the down escalator, a sprint which takes him halfway around the perimeter, a few readers glower at him. They would be better employed, he thinks, in complaining about the muffled shouts and thumping, presumably of workmen, which have begun somewhere offstage. A stair crawls out of hiding and catches his heel with a clang that reverberates through the library, and he sails down to the counter.

  This is shaped like a symbol of hope, a curve stretching out its arms towards a way of escape. Two librarians with wide flat faces sit shoulder to shoulder at a table behind it, poring over a tome Mottershead takes to be an encyclopaedia of wild animals. He shuffles his feet, clears his throat, knocks on the counter. “Hello?” he pleads.

  One librarian removes her steel-framed spectacles and passes them to her colleague, who uses them to peer more closely at an illustration. “Better see what the row is,” he suggests.

  Mottershead is framing a tart response when he realises that even now they aren’t acknowledging him. Both raise their heads towards the shouts and pounding on the top floor. They could be identical twins, and their stubbly scalps, together with the pinstripe suits and shirts and ties they’re wearing, seem designed to confuse him. “Can you tell me where to find your fiction?” he says urgently.

  “You’ll see none of that here,” the man says without a glance at him.

  “What, nowhere in the library?”

  “Only books about it,” says the woman, watching someone moving behind and above him.

  “No need for fiction here.” The man returns her spectacles to her and nods at the book on the desk. It isn’t about animals, Mottershead sees now; it’s a study of deformed babies, open at a picture of one which appears to have been turned inside out at birth. He’s glad to be distracted by a commotion on the top floor, a door releasing a stampede of footsteps and a protesting hubbub—glad, that is, until he looks up.

  The uniformed man who admitted him has let the writers out of the room, which is indeed almost soundproof. They glare about the balcony, ignoring the shushing and tutting of the readers, and then several women brandishing handbags and manuscripts catch sight of Mottershead. They rush to the edge and point at him, crying “He locked us in.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Mottershead calls, but the entire library responds with a sound like the dousing of a great fire. “I didn’t mean to,” he confides to the librarians, who shrug in unison as the writers march away along the balcony. “Where are they going?”

  “Where they came from, I expect,” the male librarian says with satisfaction.

  “But I haven’t finished.” Mottershead flaps his arms, and is prepa
ring to shout when the stares of all the readers gag him. Perhaps he should let the writers go, especially since he hasn’t found a book to show them—but then he realises what he has forgotten. “I haven’t been paid.”

  The female librarian tosses her head to prevent her spectacles from slipping off her rudimentary nose. “No use telling us.”

  “Don’t you know who’s in charge?” Mottershead begs.

  “You want his holiness.”

  “The reverend,” her colleague explains.

  He’s pointing at the red-faced man whose entire vocabulary seemed to consist of false coughs, and who is making his way around the balcony towards the down escalator. Mottershead pads to the foot of the escalator, trying to phrase a demand which will be polite but firm. “I believe I’m to be paid now,” he rehearses as the red-faced man comes abreast of the escalator. The man marches past without sparing it or Mottershead a glance.

  Is there another public exit besides the one beyond the counter? Mottershead groans aloud and sprints to the opposite escalator, dodging irate readers who twist in their seats and try to detain him. He grabs the banister, which squirms as it slithers upwards, and runs up the lumbering stairs.

  As soon as he’s three stairs short of the balcony he manages to heave himself onto it, using the banisters like parallel bars. The only door he can locate leads to the stockroom through which the guard brought him, but he shouldn’t be searching for a door. The red-faced man is returning to the down escalator, having replaced a hymn-book on the shelf.

  Mottershead clutches his aching skull. It will take him several minutes to run around the balcony to that escalator, by which time his quarry may well have left the building. “Reverend,” he calls desperately. “Reverend! Reverend!”

  The man seems not to hear him. Either he’s experiencing a vision which renders him unaware of his surroundings as he rides towards the ground floor or his title is only the librarians’ nickname for him. Mottershead lurches onto the stairs which are climbing doggedly towards him and clatters down, shouting “Hey! Hey! Hey!” Even now the red-faced man doesn’t look at him, though all the readers do; many of them start to boo and jeer. While Mottershead is managing to outrun the escalator, his quarry is descending at more than twice his speed. He’s only halfway down when the red-faced man steps onto the floor and strides past the counter.

  “My fee,” Mottershead screams. He lifts his feet and slides down, his heels clanking on the edges of the steps. At the bottom he launches himself between the tables, where at least one reader sticks out a foot for him to jump over. The exit barrier is executing a last few swings, but the red-faced man is already past the doors beyond it. Mottershead is almost at the counter when the man with the pink scalp steps into his path.

  “Let me pass,” Mottershead cries, but the man widens his glistening eyes and stretches out his arms on either side of him. The librarians are miming indifference, gazing at the roof. “Get away or I’ll buffet and belabour you,” Mottershead snarls, which earns him admonitory looks from the librarians. He’s poising himself to rush his tormentor when the man steps forwards, soles flapping. “Reverend Neverend said to give you this.”

  Is he protracting a joke which the librarians played on Mottershead? But he’s waving an envelope, brown as the wrapper of a book which has something to hide. Mottershead suspects that it contains a text he has no desire to read. “Didn’t he even have the grace to serve me with it himself?” Mottershead says for the readers to hear, and snatches the envelope. At once he realises that it’s full of coins and notes.

  The writers must have held a collection for him. Feeling exposed and clownish, he slips the envelope into his pocket, which he pats to convince himself that he hasn’t dropped the envelope, and wills the readers to forget about him. As he tries to sneak past the counter the messenger detains him, seizing his elbow with jittery fingers whose nails are caked with ink. “Can I talk to you?”

  “You have done.”

  “That was for the others. I want to talk about ourselves. We’ve lots in common, I can tell.”

  “Some other time,” Mottershead says insincerely, trying to pull away without looking at him.

  “There won’t be.”

  “So be it, then.” Mottershead attempts to stare him into letting go, but can’t meet the other’s eyes for long; they look as if being compelled to see too much has swollen them almost too large for their sockets. “I want to be left alone,” he mutters.

  “You know that’s not possible.”

  Mottershead feels black helplessness closing around his mind. He wants to lash out, to thump the man’s scalp, which he’s sure is plastic disguised not quite successfully as flesh. What would it sound like? The temptation dismays him. “Will you have a word with this person?” he says at the top of his voice.

  The librarians frown at him. “What about?” the female says.

  “About your dress code, I should think.”

  The man with the replaced scalp is wearing slippers on his bony feet, and if his buttonless garment belted with old rope isn’t a dressing-gown, it might as well be; certainly he’s wearing nothing under it except striped trousers like a sleeper’s or a convict’s. The librarians are still frowning at Mottershead, but he doesn’t care, because his outburst has caused his tormentor to flinch and loosen his spidery grip. He pulls himself free and knees the barrier aside, shouting “I think you’ve got some explaining to do” to freeze the man in case he considers following. He closes both hands around the heavy brass knob of the door and, having opened it just wide enough to sidle through, drags it shut behind him.

  He has emerged onto an avenue lined with shops beneath a heavily overcast sky. Display windows shine between tree trunks as far as the eye can see. Though the upper stories are obscured by foliage, it seems to him that the shops have possessed a variety of buildings; through the leaves he glimpses creatures so immobile they must be gargoyles, bricked-up towers like trees pruned to the trunk, domes green as mounds of moss. To his right, in the distance where the trees appear to meet, the sky is clear. He heads for the light, hoping it will help him think.

  Before long he sees that he’s approaching a bookshop, its windows full of paperbacks as bright and various as packets in a supermarket. Wasn’t Cadenza put into paperback? The thought of the book makes him shriek through his teeth; he has left the damaged copy and his rucksack in the library. He can’t imagine going back, but perhaps there is no need. Dodging the bicycles which are the only traffic, he crosses to the bookshop.

  The glass doors are plastered with posters for a book called Princess the Frog. The sight of eyes bulging at him from beneath crowned bridal veils confuses him, so that he grapples with the doors for some time before discovering that the right-hand door is locked into position. He shoulders its twin open and thinks he has cracked the glass. No, he has dislodged a poster, which the door crumples and tears. He steps over it and moves quickly into the shop, pretending he was nowhere near.

  Fiction is ranged around the walls. Anything by Mottershead ought to be on the shelves at the back of the shop. He’s passing the authors beginning with I when someone catches up with him. “May I help you?”

  “I’m looking—” Mottershead begins, and then his voice goes to pieces. He has been accosted by a frog in a wedding dress. In a moment he’s able to distinguish that the frog is an elderly woman, her leathery skin painted green with the make-up she has used to make her mouth seem wider. She’s holding the poster he crumpled. “I can find it myself, thank you,” he says in a voice so controlled it feels like suppressing a belch.

  “Keep in mind that we’re here.”

  Whether that is meant as a warning or as an offer of assistance, it aggravates the hysteria he’s trying to suppress. She has drawn his attention to her colleagues who are scattered about the shop, all of whom, including at least one man, are dressed as bridal frogs. This must be part of a promotion for the book which is advertised on the posters—there’s a mound of copie
s of the book draped with waterweed beside the cash desk. He clutches his mouth as he begins to splutter, and flees deeper into the shop.

  The letter M covers the whole of the back wall. He has the impression that the patterns formed by the print on the spines spell out several giant versions of the letter. His name is almost at floor level—Mottershead, in several different typefaces. He digs his fingers into the tops of the pages and tugs at the four books. No wonder nobody has bought them if they’re wedged so tightly on the shelf. He manages to tip them towards himself until he’s able to grasp the corners of the spines. He heaves at them, and without warning they fly off the shelf and sprawl across the floor.

  Before he can pick them up, the frog bride who originally followed him hurries over to him. “It’s all right,” Mottershead tells her, feeling his mirth coming to the boil again as he stoops to gather the books. “I’ll buy these if you’ll give me a carrier bag. I wrote them.”

  Does she think he’s lying? Disapproval stretches her mouth wide enough to render her makeup redundant. “Look,” he says, no longer wanting to laugh, “I assure you—” Then he sees the covers of the books he’s claiming to have written, and his jaw drops.

  The author’s name is undoubtedly Mottershead; it’s spread across the covers in large raised capital letters. The first name, however, is printed small to fit between the thighs of the girls whose naked bottoms are embossed on the covers. The books are called Eighteen, Seventeen, Sixteen, and Fifteen, and it’s clear from the faces gazing over their shoulders that these are the ages of the girls. He doesn’t need to focus on the author’s first name to be certain that he could never have entertained such thoughts, let alone admitting them on paper—but how can he convince the princess frog?

  “You’d better have them before I do any more damage,” he mumbles. If she will only take them, he’ll run out of the shop; he no longer cares what she thinks of him. But she shakes her head violently and clenches her greenish fists, further crumpling the poster, and two of her fellow frogs close in behind Mottershead. “Trouble?” the male bride croaks.