The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories

by Stephen Jones

  While he has been straining unsuccessfully to distinguish his own words Mottershead has ceased to hear the commentary, but now he becomes conscious of it. “—in the last of his rare interviews,” the voice is saying. “The price of such intense commitment to his work may have been an inability to stop. At first this took the form of a compulsion to tell his stories to anyone who could be persuaded to listen. Later, immediately prior to his breakdown, he appears to have been unable to grasp reality except as raw material to be shaped. The breakdown may have been precipitated by the creative urge continuing to make demands on him after he had lost the power to write.”

  He can almost remember telling stories to people in the street, to anyone who wasn’t swift enough to elude him. He has the impression that the last such encounter may have been very recent indeed. Before he can seize the impression, his family enters the glade. They look younger, though their hair is already greying. They’re trying to coax him home from the woods, but he keeps dodging them, both his gait and his voice speeding up. His babbling sounds more like the voice he overheard on his way in. He is still failing to understand its words when he hears his family murmuring outside the room.

  He drags the cassette out of the player. He hasn’t remembered everything; he’s at the edge of a deeper blackness. He doesn’t want to face his family until he has managed to remember. He hugs the cassette to his chest with both hands as if someone is about to take it from him. When the plastic carapace begins to crack, he’s afraid that its contents may escape. He shoves the cassette into its case and stuffs the case into his pocket as he tiptoes to the door to hear what his family is murmuring about him. Before he reaches it, the voices cease.

  He clasps the doorknob and presses his ear against a panel, but can hear nothing. He throws the door open, and the women turn to gaze at him from the kitchen at the far end of the hall, while his son comes to the doorway of the dining-room. “Anything we can do, dad?” he says. “Want someone to sit with you?”

  “I’m fine the way I am,” Mottershead retorts, wondering how they can all have withdrawn so quickly from discussing him outside the lounge. He advances on his son, expecting to find that he has only been pretending to busy himself. But the table is laid; all four places on the dim tablecloth are set, except for one from which the steak knife is missing. He knows instinctively that it’s his place. “You aren’t finished,” he stammers, and makes for the stairs.

  The women continue to watch him. Under the fluorescent tube their hair looks grey with dust, their foreheads appear squashed by shadows. It seems to Mottershead that they may be about to transform, to reveal their true nature, of which these details are merely hints. His mind hasn’t quite cleared itself, he thinks. He mustn’t let this happen, not to them. “I’ll be upstairs,” he shouts. “No need to come looking.”

  “That’s right, you put your feet up,” his daughter says.

  “You’ve earned it,” his son adds.

  “Get some rest,” says his wife.

  Even this unnerves him; it revives an impression of his life with them, of how it became a monotonous descent by excruciatingly minute stages into a banality with which he felt they were doing their best to smother him. Or was that something he tried to write? He dashes upstairs to his room.

  He lies on the mattress and gazes at the branching cracks and peeling plaster overhead. The sight makes him uneasy, but so does the rest of the room: the shapeless bulging contents of the chest of drawers, the eternally open wardrobe, the blurred shapes in the wallpaper, where he can see figures flattened like insects if he lets himself. He closes his eyes, but shapes gather behind the lids at once. Should he switch off the light? He feels as if his sole means of finding peace may be to retreat into the dark. He hasn’t opened his eyes when his family enters the room.

  They must have come through the door from the corridor. Even if he sees them standing on the side of the room furthest from the door, they can’t have emerged from the wardrobe. “Having a snooze?” his son says. “That’s the ticket. We were just wondering if you’d seen a knife.”

  “Why should I know where it is?”

  “We aren’t saying you do,” his daughter assures him. “You have your snooze while we see if it’s anywhere.”

  He shouldn’t have admitted that he knows what they’re searching for; he feels that the admission has made them wary of him. As they peer into the wardrobe and poke through the drawers full of unwashed clothes and fumble at the heavy curtains, he’s sure that they are surreptitiously watching him. He inches his hands out on both sides of him and gropes under the mattress, but the knife isn’t there. Suddenly afraid to find it, he shoves himself off the bed.

  The three of them swing towards him as though they are affecting not to move. “We won’t be long,” his wife murmurs. “Just pretend we aren’t here.”

  “Bathroom,” Mottershead cries, thinking that he’ll be alone in there if anywhere. He sprints along the corridor, past the rooms whose shaded light-bulbs steep the single beds in crimson, and into the bathroom, clawing at the bolt until it finds the socket. He crosses his wrists and clutches his shoulders as he stares around him.

  The room is less of a refuge than he hoped, but at first he doesn’t understand why. Is it the sound like a faint choked gurgling, not quite able to form words, which is making him reluctant to sit on the lid of the toilet or lie in the rusty bath? Though it can only be the plumbing, it seems like a memory, or at least reminiscent of one. His gaze roams the bathroom and is caught by a gleam beside the sink: his open razor. If he’s made to feel trapped in the room, he doesn’t know what he might do. He scrabbles at the bolt, to get the door open before his family starts murmuring outside. The door bangs against the wall, and the heads crane out of the other rooms. His children appear flayed by the crimson light behind them, his wife’s hair looks matted with dust; they seem to have hardly any foreheads. The sight appals him, and he flees past them, flinching out of reach. There’s still somewhere he thinks he may be safe—the locked room.

  The key was in the lock earlier, but suppose it has been removed while he was wandering? As he runs downstairs and along the corridor, he feels as though his nerves are all he is. He glances into the dining-room in case the knife has reappeared, but now the other knives are missing too. Even seeing the key in the locked door doesn’t help; indeed, he wants to rush out of the house and never come back. But his hand is reaching with uncontrollable smoothness for the key. He turns it and pushes the door open, and switches on the light in the room.

  A thought arrests him on the threshold of the bare room, which is so brightly lit by a shadeless bulb that it seems to contain nothing but illumination. Does he mean to lock the door in order to keep his family out, or himself in? Have they hidden the other knives from him? His vision begins to adjust, and he sees the walls white as blank pages, glaring like the walls of an interrogation room. Someone is lying on the floorboards under the bulb.

  He can’t immediately distinguish who it is, but he thinks that whoever has been persecuting him and his perceptions has managed to hide in the room. Since they are lying where the light is brightest, why can’t he see them clearly? It occurs to him that he may not want to see. At once, before he has time to cover his eyes, he does. His family is in the room.

  They’re lying face up on the boards, their hands folded on their chests. His children’s heads are nearest the door, his wife’s feet are between them. At each of their throats a book lies open, pinned there by one of the knives driven deep. Their faces look as if someone has tried unsuccessfully to pull and knead and pummel them into a semblance of calm.

  For a moment he believes they’re watching him, though their eyes are dull with dust. But he’s unable to waken any life in their eyes, even when he grabs the flex and moves the light-bulb back and forth, making their eyes gleam and go out, gleam and go out. Falling to his knees achieves nothing; all he can see is the book at his wife’s throat. He finds himself reading and rereading one
sentence: As a child he hoped life would never end; when he grew up he was afraid it might not.

  He’s rather proud of having phrased that. Did he once write about doing away with his family, or wasn’t he able to write it? In either case, having already imagined the act and his ensuing grief may be the reason why he feels empty now, and growing emptier. He feels as if he’s about to come to an end. Anything is preferable to the lifelessness of the room, even the kind of day he has been through.

  He rises unsteadily and wavers to the door, where he switches off the light. That seems to help a little, and so does locking the door from the outside. “I’m better now,” he mumbles, and then he shouts it through the house.

  There’s no response. He can’t blame them for hiding from him while the fourth knife is at large, but if they’ll only stay with him they’ll be able to ensure that he doesn’t find it first. He runs through the ground floor, hoping to meet them in each room, switching off the light in each to remind him where he has already looked for them. He darkens the stairs and runs up, he turns off the lights in the bathroom, in his son’s bedroom and his daughter’s. Now only his and his wife’s room remains, and mustn’t he have had a reason to leave it until last? “Surprise,” he cries, starting to laugh and weep as he throws the door open. But nobody is in the room.

  He stares at the desertion, one hand on the light-switch. Even the meagre furniture seems hardly present. If he finds the knife he’ll use it on himself. Why does the thought seem to contain a revelation? He clutches at his eyes with his free hand as if to adjust his vision, then he gazes ahead, barely seeing the room, not needing to see. He’ll never find the knife, he thinks, because he has already turned it on himself.

  Perhaps only he is dead. Perhaps everything else was a story which he has been telling to keep himself company in the dark or to convince himself that he still has some grasp of the world. He has to believe that of at least the contents of the locked room. No wonder his search for his family has shown him empty rooms; dreams can’t be forced to appear. At least his instincts haven’t failed him, since he has been darkening the house. He needs the dark so that his story can take shape.

  He turns off the last light and, pacing blindly to the bed, sinks onto the mattress. The room already seems less substantial. He lies back and crosses his hands on his chest, he closes his eyes and waits for them to fill with blank darkness. If he lies absolutely still, perhaps his family will come to him. Hasn’t he tried this before, more than once, many times? Perhaps this time there will be light to lead them into the endless sunlit forest. It does no good to wish that he could return to a time when he might have been cured of his visions—when he was only mad.

  For Penny and Alan

  and Timmy and Robin

  —SOME OF MY DARK TO FIND YOUR WAY THROUGH

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND CREDITS

  Special thanks to Herman Graf, Kim Lim, Susan Ellison, Peter and Nicky Crowther, Philip Harbottle, and Mandy Slater for their help with compiling this volume.

  “Introduction: Not to Be Read at Night” copyright © Stephen Jones 2018.

  “The Viaduct” copyright © Brian Lumley 1976. Originally published in Superhorror. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “v (New Orleans, 1956)” copyright © Caitlín R. Kiernan 2000. Originally published in Queer Fear: Gay Horror Fiction. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Homecoming” copyright © Sydney J. Bounds 1975. Originally published in The Ninth Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent.

  “Feeders and Eaters” copyright © Neil Gaiman 1990, 2002. Originally published in different form in Revolver. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent.

  “Nothing of Him That Doth Fade” copyright © Poppy Z. Brite 2000. Originally published in Aqua Erotica. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Unfortunate” copyright © Tim Lebbon 2000, 2002. Originally published in slightly different form in As the Sun Goes Down. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “One of Us” copyright © Dennis Etchison 2001. Originally published on thespook.com, Issue 3, October 2001. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Is There Anybody There?” copyright © Kim Newman 2000. Originally published in The New English Library Book of Internet Stories. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Dear Alison” copyright © Michael Marshall Smith 1997, 2002. Originally published in slightly different form in The Mammoth Book of Dracula: Vampire Stories for the New Millennium. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The Gossips” copyright © Basil Copper 1973. Originally published in From Evil’s Pillow. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

  “In the Fourth Year of the War” copyright © The Kilimanjaro Corporation 1979. From the author’s collection Shatterday. Reprinted by arrangement with, and permission of, the Author and the Author’s agent, Richard Curtis Associates, Inc., New York. All rights reserved. Harlan Ellison® is a registered trademark of The Kilimanjaro Corporation.

  “Invasion from Inferno” copyright © Hugh B. Cave 1937. Originally published in Thrilling Mystery, May 1937. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

  “The Art Nouveau Fireplace” copyright © Christopher Fowler 1989. Originally published in The Bureau of Lost Souls. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “These Beasts” copyright © Tanith Lee 1995. Originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, June 1995. Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

  “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back” copyright © Joe R. Lansdale 1986. Originally published in Nukes. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Needing Ghosts” copyright © Ramsey Campbell 1990. Originally published in Needing Ghosts. Reprinted by permission of the author. Punctuation and style follow the author’s preferred usage.

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  Stephen Jones lives in London, England. A Hugo Award nominee, he is the winner of four World Fantasy Awards, three International Horror Guild Awards, five Bram Stoker Awards, twenty-one British Fantasy Awards and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association. One of Britain’s most acclaimed horror and dark fantasy writers and editors, he has more than 145 books to his credit, including The Art of Horror Movies: An Illustrated History, the film books of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline and Stardust, The Illustrated Monster Movie Guide and The Hellraiser Chronicles; the non-fiction studies Horror: 100 Best Books and Horror: Another 100 Best Books (both with Kim Newman); the single-author collections Necronomicon and Eldritch Tales by H. P. Lovecraft, The Complete Chronicles of Conan and Conan’s Brethren by Robert E. Howard, and Curious Warnings: The Great Ghost Stories of M. R. James; plus such anthologies as Horrorology: The Lexicon of Fear, Fearie Tales: Stories of the Grimm and Gruesome, A Book of Horrors, The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories, The Lovecraft Squad and Zombie Apocalypse! series, and twenty-nine volumes of Best New Horror. You can visit his web site at www.stephenjoneseditor.com or follow him on Facebook at “Stephen Jones-Editor.”

  FROM THE SAME EDITOR

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