Best New Horror 14
Author: Stephen Jones
Date: 2003-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Anthologies; Short Stories; Fiction
Description: The finest exponents of horror fiction writing today, Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, Ramsey Campbell, Kim Newman, Graham Joyce, Paul McCauley, Stephen Gallagher, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Basil Cooper, Glen Hirshberg, Jay Russell, feature in the world's premier annual horror anthology series, another bumper showcase devoted exclusively to excellence in macabre fiction. To accompany the very best in short stories and novellas is the year's most comprehensive horror overview and contacts listing as well as a fascinating necrology. The finest exponents of horror fiction writing today, Neil Gaiman, China
Publisher: Robinson Publishing
Rights: All rights reserved

STEPHEN JONES lives in London. He is the winner of three World Fantasy Awards, three Horror Writers Association Bram Stoker Awards and three International Horror Guild Awards as well as being a fourteen-time recipient of the British Fantasy Award and a Hugo Award nominee. A former television producer/director and genre movie publicist and consultant (the first three Hellraiser movies, Night Life, Nightbreed, Split Second, Mind Ripper, Last Gasp etc.), he is the co-editor of Horror: 100 Best Books, The Best Horror from Fantasy Tales, Gaslight & Ghosts, Now We Are Sick, H.P. Lovecraft’s Book of Horror, The Anthology of Fantasy & the Supernatural, Secret City: Strange Tales of London and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Dark Terrors, Dark Voices and Fantasy Tales series. He has written Creepshows: The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Guide, The Essential Monster Movie Guide, The Illustrated Vampire Movie Guide, The Illustrated Dinosaur Movie Guide, The Illustrated Frankenstein Movie Guide and The Illustrated Werewolf Movie Guide, and compiled The Mammoth Book of Terror, The Mammoth Book of Vampires, The Mammoth Book of Zombies, The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, The Mammoth Book of Dracula, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories By Women, Shadows Over Innsmouth, Dancing With the Dark, Dark of the Night, Dark Detectives, White of the Moon, Keep Out the Night, By Moonlight Only, Exorcisms and Ecstasies by Karl Edward Wagner, The Vampire Stories of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Phantoms and Fiends and Frights and Fancies by R. Chetwynd-Hayes, James Herbert: By Horror Haunted, The Conan Chronicles by Robert E. Howard (two volumes), The Emperor of Dreams: The Lost Worlds of Clark Ashton Smith, Clive Barker’s A–Z of Horror, Clive Barker’s Shadows in Eden, Clive Barker’s The Nightbreed Chronicles and the Hellraiser Chronicles. You can visit his website at www.herebedragons.co.uk/jones

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THE
MAMMOTH BOOK OF

BEST NEW
HORROR

VOLUME FOURTEEN

Edited and with an Introduction by

STEPHEN JONES

ROBINSON
London

Constable & Robinson Ltd
55–56 Russell Square
London WC1B 4HP
www.constablerobinson.com

First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd 2003

Collection and editorial material
copyright © Stephen Jones 2003

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in
Publication Data is available from the British Library.

ISBN 1-84119-794-7
eISBN 978-1-78033-716-6

Printed and bound in the EU

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Horror in 2002

October in the Chair

NEIL GAIMAN

Details

CHINA MIÉVILLE

The Wretched Thicket of Thorn

DON TUMASONIS

The Absolute Last of the Ultra-Spooky,
Super-Scary Hallowe’en Horror Nights

DAVID J. SCHOW

Standard Gauge

NICHOLAS ROYLE

Little Dead Girl Singing

STEPHEN GALLAGHER

Nesting Instincts

BRIAN HODGE

The Two Sams

GLEN HIRSHBERG

Hides

JAY RUSSELL

The Unbeheld

RAMSEY CAMPBELL

Ill Met by Daylight

BASIL COPPER

Catskin

KELLY LINK

20th Century Ghost

JOE HILL

Egyptian Avenue

KIM NEWMAN

The Boy Behind the Gate

JAMES VAN PELT

Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

The Coventry Boy

GRAHAM JOYCE

The Prospect Cards

DON TUMASONIS

The Cage

JEFF VANDERMEER

Dr Pretorius and the Lost Temple

PAUL McAULEY

Necrology: 2002

STEPHEN JONES & KIM NEWMAN

Useful Addresses

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank David Barraclough, Kim Newman, Hugh Lamb, Nick Austin, Richard Dalby, Mandy Slater, Andrew I. Porter, Brian Mooney, Douglas E. Winter, Robert T. Garcia, Andy Cox, Rodger Turner and Wayne MacLaurin (sfsite.com), Harris M. Lentz III, Bill Congreve, Gordon Van Gelder, Sara and Randy Broecker, David J. Schow, Robert Morgan, Barbara Roden and David Pringle for all their help and support. Special thanks are also due to Locus, Interzone, Science Fiction Chronicle, Classic Images, Variety and all the other sources that were used for reference in the Introduction and the Necrology.

INTRODUCTION: HORROR IN 2002 copyright © Stephen Jones 2003.

OCTOBER IN THE CHAIR copyright © Neil Gaiman 2002. Originally published in Conjunctions 39: The New Wave Fabulists. Reprinted by permission of the author.

DETAILS copyright © China Miéville 2002. Originally published in The Children of Cthulhu: Chilling New Tales Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Mic Cheetham Literary Agency.

THE WRETCHED THICKET OF THORN copyright © Donald Tumasonis 2002. Originally published in All Hallows 29, February 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

THE ABSOLUTE LAST OF THE ULTRA-SPOOKY, SUPER-SCARY HALLOWE’EN HORROR NIGHTS copyright © David J. Schow 2001. Originally published in The Spook, Issue No.6, January 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

STANDARD GAUGE copyright © Nicholas Royle 2002. Originally published in Thirteen. Reprinted by permission of the author.

LITTLE DEAD GIRL SINGING copyright © Stephen Gallagher 2002. Originally published in Weird Tales, Issue #327, Spring 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

NESTING INSTINCTS copyright © Brian Hodge 2002. Originally published in Lies & Ugliness. Reprinted by permission of the author.

THE TWO SAMS copyright © Glen Hirshberg 2002. Originally published in Dark Terrors 6: The Gollancz Book of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Anderson/Grinberg Literary Management, Inc.

HIDES copyright © Jay Russell 2002. Originally published in Stranger: Dark Tales of Eerie Encounters. Reprinted by permission of the author.

THE UNBEHELD copyright © Ramsey Campbell 2002. Originally published in The Spook, July 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

ILL MET BY DAYLIGHT copyright © Basil Copper 2002. Originally published in Cold Hand on My Shoulder. Reprinted by permission of the author.

CATSKIN copyright © Kelly Link, 2002. Originally published as a limited edition in Catskin: a swaddled zine and McSweeny’s Quarterly, Winter 2002-03. Reprinted by permission of the author.

20TH CENTURY GHOST copyright © Joe Hill, 2001. Originally published in High Plains Literary Review, Vol. XVII, No.1-3, 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

EGYPTIAN AVENUE copyright © by Kim Newman 2002. Originally published in J.K. Potter’s Embrace the Mutation. Reprinted by permission of the author.

THE BOY BEHIND THE GATE copyright © James Van Pelt 2002. Originally published in Dark Terrors 6: The Gollancz Book of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.

NOR THE DEMONS DOWN UNDER THE SEA copyright © Caitlín R. Kiernan 2002. Originally published in The Children of Cthulhu: Chilling New Tales Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft. Reprinted by permission of the author.

THE COVENTRY BOY copyright © Graham Joyce 2002. Originally published in The Third Alternative, Issue 32, Autumn 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

THE PROSPECT CARDS copyright © Donald Tumasonis 2002. Originally published in Dark Terrors 6: The Gollancz Book of Horror. Reprinted by permission of the author.

THE CAGE copyright © Jeff VanderMeer 2002. Originally published in City of Saints and Madmen. Reprinted by permission of the author.

DR PRETORIUS AND THE LOST TEMPLE copyright © Paul McAuley 2002. Originally published on SciFiction, September 2002. Reprinted by permission of the author.

NECROLOGY: 2002 copyright © 2003 by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman 2003.

USEFUL ADDRESSES copyright © Stephen Jones 2003.

In loving memory of my father

‘Jim’ Jones

(1914–2003)

for all his support and encouragement over the years.

‘When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.’

—Samuel Johnson (1709–84)

INTRODUCTION

Horror in 2002

WITH THE CONTINUED SUCCESS of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter books overwhelming everything else, it comes as no surprise that the number of fantasy books (especially young-adult editions) published in 2002 was up significantly on previous years. Science fiction titles remained roughly constant, while horror was down slightly on the previous year’s high, with vampires and media tie-ins the most popular categories as usual.

Tor Books remained the biggest publisher of genre material in the United States, closely followed by Penguin Putnam, while HarperCollins led the list of publishers in the UK, with Orion/Gollancz in the runner-up position.

Media conglomerates Random House, AOL Time Warner and Vivendi Universal all had a less than spectacular year, mostly blamed on a slowing economy.

In January, California book retailer and publisher Advanced Marketing Services bought independent distributor Publishers’ Group West for $37 million. However, PGW’s sister company, Avalon Publishing Group, which owns Carroll & Graf, Thunder’s Mouth Press and other imprints, was not part of the deal after a separate buy-out by a group of Avalon employees, including PGW CEO Charlie Winton.

Long-time German genre editor Wolfgang Jeschke left imprint Wilhelm Heyne when the publisher was faced with a loss of $45 million on sales of $165 million. Meanwhile, John Jarrold left Simon & Schuster UK’s Earthlight in August. Jarrold had set up the imprint in 1997.

According to research in Britain, forty per cent of people no longer read anything at all, with the remainder averaging around just fourteen minutes a day with a book. Meanwhile, in June, a study of library users conducted by Wales University came to the shattering conclusion that children who read scary books are three times more likely to have nightmares.

In September, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling won a three-year New York court battle against Pennsylvania-born children’s author Nancy Stouffer, who claimed that Rowling had stolen the term “Muggles” from her 1984 book, The Legend of Rah and the Muggles. However, despite a number of similarities between the two books, the court ruled that Stouffer had lied and doctored evidence to support her claims. She was fined $50,000 for a “pattern of intentional bad faith conduct” and ordered to pay a portion of the defendants’ costs.

An American fan who had been stalking Rowling was deported from Britain in August, and the multi-millionaire author announced that she was expecting her second child in the Spring of 2003.

She also confirmed that she had plotted the sixth and final seventh novels in the series and, despite rumours she was suffering from writer’s block, that her long-awaited fifth instalment in the Potter saga, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, would be published by Christmas. (It wasn’t.)

Meanwhile, an American buyer purchased a ninety-three word synopsis of the fifth book at a Sotheby’s auction in London for £28,680 – that was around £20,000 more than the expected selling price and worked out at an incredible £300 a word! The money raised was donated to Book Aid International.

That was actually a better word-rate than Tom Clancy’s record-breaking $45 million advance for just two books, which New York Magazine estimated to work out at $42,694 per page or a measly $133 per word.

J.K. Rowling was also the UK’s top female British earner, with estimated receipts of £48 million from books and films – six times more than the income of the Queen of England! This was despite the fact that sales of Harry Potter books by Scholastic in the second quarter of 2002 totalled $25 million – $10 million below company expectations. However, Rowling’s projected sales of roughly $45 million throughout the year accounted for only 2.5 per cent of Scholastic’s total revenue.

In Stephen King’s From a Buick 8, which had a 1,750,000 first printing in the US, a vintage 1954 car found in police storage possibly held the secret to a gateway to another dimension.

Although initially rumoured to be written by King under the name “Joyce Reardon, Ph.D”, a character from the tie-in TV miniseries, The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer: My Life at Red Rose was actually written by the author’s friend, mysteries novelist Ridley Pearson.

King’s Three Complete Novels: Carrie/’Salem’s Lot/The Shining was an instant-remainder omnibus of more than 1,000 pages, and the writer also reiterated to the 27th January Los Angeles Times that he planned to stop writing books in the next year or so.

Clive Barker’s children’s book Abarat involved an epic journey by Candy Quackenbush to the eponymous twenty-five islands, a fantasy world filled with sorcery, mystery and fantastical characters. The first instalment of a proposed four-part “The Books of Abarat”, the volume featured more than 100 full-colour images painted by the author himself. Walt Disney Productions paid nearly $8 million for the film, theme park and multimedia rights to the concept.

From Dean Koontz, By the Light of the Moon involved an artist and a female comedian caught up in a mad doctor’s bizarre experiments. It had a 525,000 first printing.

Anne Rice’s Blackwood Farm brought together elements from both her “Vampire Chronicles” and “Mayfair Witches” series. The book, which had a 500,000 first printing, featured the vampiric Quinn Blackwood, haunted by a blood-drinking doppelgänger. His only hope was to travel through time to find the legendary Vampire Lestat.

PS Publishing became Ramsey Campbell’s British publisher with The Darkest Part of the Woods, the author’s first new supernatural novel in four years, about the evil influence a Severn Valley village exerted over the members of a specific family. Peter Straub contributed the Introduction, and the numbered hardcover was available in a signed edition of 500 copies and a 200-copy slip case printing.

Written as a diversion while he was working on his Hugo Award-winning American Gods, Neil Gaiman’s dark fantasy for children, Coraline, was a huge critical and commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. Relating the adventures of the eponymous little girl in a bizarre, nightmarish mirror-world, the UK trade paperback wasn’t nearly as attractive as the slim American hardcover beautifully illustrated by the author’s long-time collaborator, Dave McKean.

Gaiman’s revisionist fairy tale Snow Glass Apples: A Play for Voices was issued with woodcut illustrations by George Walker and an Introduction by Jack Zipes in a signed, 250-copy limited edition from Biting Dog Press. A lettered edition sold out before publication.

To celebrate Gaiman’s stint as Guest of Honour at Boskone 39, The NESFA Press published Adventures in the Dream Trade, a collection of his more obscure stories, poems and non-fiction, in a hardcover edition of 2,000 numbered copies, of which 300 were signed by the writer and artist co-guest Stephen Hickman and issued in a slip case. Edited by Tony Lewis and Priscilla Olson, the book also featured an Introduction by John M. Ford.

Richard Matheson’s Hunted Past Reason was a new novel of psychological terror situated in the backwoods of Northern California, while Dan Simmons’s A Winter Haunting was a follow-up, set forty-one years later, to the author’s 1991 novel Summer of Night.

Best known for their epic fantasy collaborations, David and Leigh Eddings’s Regina’s Song was a departure for the writing team – a contemporary serial-killer novel set in Seattle.

After more than a decade away, Robert R. McCammon was back with a new novel (actually written in the mid-1990s). Speaks the Nightbird weighed in at nearly 700 pages and dealt with late-seventeenth century witchcraft in the American South. The book’s serialization in online magazine The Spook was cancelled after regional press River City Publishing expressed concerns about how sales might be affected.

The Straw Men, a novel about a secret society of serial killers, was Michael Marshall Smith’s most accomplished (and successful) book to date. Unfortunately, in today’s world of bean-counters his publishers on both sides of the Atlantic decided to put it out under the barely credible pseudonym “Michael Marshall” (despite a glowing cover quote from Stephen King). After carefully building his career for almost a decade, Smith’s publishers decided to ignore all his earlier triumphs (including numerous awards and film options) in a short-sighted attempt to “reinvent” an already well-established author.

Another writer to suffer the same ignominy was Mark Morris, whose psychological thriller Fiddleback appeared under the transparent byline “J.M. Morris” in an attempt by the publisher to ignore a fifteen-year career that encompassed nine previous novels and a short story collection.

The Facts of Life was a powerful new novel by Graham Joyce that told the story of a remarkable family of eight women living in the city of Coventry during and after World War II.

Better known for her “Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter” series, Laurell K. Hamilton’s A Caress of Twilight featured faerie-princess-turned-private-investigator Merry Gentry on the trail of a supernatural serial killer in Southern California. Meanwhile, Hamilton’s first “Anita Blake” volume, Guilty Pleasures, was reissued in hardcover for the first time, and the author signed a seven-figure deal with Ace Books for a further three novels in the series.

A crime scene cleaner discovered a link between several murders and a strange exotic species of Aztec insect in Graham Masterton’s Trauma, and a new species of human was revealed in Stranger by Simon Clark.

Douglas Clegg’s The Hour Before Dark began with the murder of the patriarch of a dysfunctional family haunted by memories of the past, while China Miéville’s third novel, The Scar, involved a prisoner’s journey and the search for the island of a forgotten people.

John Saul’s Midnight Voices was about the elderly residents of an exclusive Manhattan apartment block who sacrificed their younger neighbours so that they could prolong their own lives.

In The Cabinet of Curiosities, Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child brought back FBI agent Pendergast from Prey and Reliquary to investigate a missing scientist and his experiments in prolonging life a century before. John Connolly’s detective Charlie Parker investigated a cult which disappeared in rural Maine in The Killing Kind.

Willow, Wicked Forest and Twisted Roots were the first three volumes in the “De Beers” Gothic horror series published under the by-line of the long-dead V.C. Andrews®. Shooting Stars was an omnibus of the four Andrews novels comprising the titular 2001 series: Cinnamon, Ice, Rose and Honey. Andrew Neiderman was probably still responsible for the Andrews books and also published Dead Time and Under Abduction under his own name.

Eyes of the Virgin featured more Roman Catholic horrors from Thomas F. Monteleone, this time revolving around a piece of prophetic stained glass. The titular Demons turned the Earth into a living Hell in the two-part novel (one half reprint, the other original) by John Shirley.

Incorporating his 1993 short story “In the House of My Enemy”, Charles de Lint’s The Onion Girl was set in the author’s magical Newford and involved artist Jilly Coppercorn and a dark secret from her past.

A story about three seventeenth-century sisters and their love for a magical being formed the core of Kim Wilkin’s Fallen Angel, originally published in the author’s adopted home of Australia as Angel of Ruin.

In Thomas Sullivan’s Born Burning, an antique chair formed part of a dark family tradition, while Rodman Philbrick’s Coffins was set in the nineteenth century when members of the eponymous Maine family were dying mysteriously.

Owl Goingback’s Breed resurrected the old-cursed-Indian-burial ground plot one more time, as the Florida tourist town of St Augustine discovered that what was buried in its graveyard was more than legend. There were more small-town horrors unearthed in Bentley Little’s The Return, in which an ancient demonic beast was discovered during an archaeological dig, and Edo van Belkom’s Martyrs, where a demon was discovered beneath an old Jesuit mission in Canada.

The tenant of a new cottage was haunted by Welsh ghosts in Cloven, the second novel from Sally Spedding. A recently widowed woman discovered that she was sharing her home with a bereaved spirit in A Presence in Her Life by Louise Brindley, and Matthew Costello’s Unidentified was set in yet another haunted house.

A new bride could see ghosts in Where Darkness Lives by Robert Ross. A dead woman appeared in the body of another in Sleep No More by Greg Iles, and Hiding from the Light by Barbara Erskine involved the ghost of “Witchfinder General” Matthew Hopkins haunting a childhood home.

A man recovered his missing childhood memories in The Forgotten by Tamara Thorne, while a cursed lullaby proved fatal to infants in Chuck Palahniuk’s dark comedy Lullaby.

Something was taking infants and chickens from a small Texas town in David Searcy’s Last Things, and an ancient entity slept beneath the town of Sauls Run in Dale Bailey’s The Fallen.

A family of witches living in rural Alaska confronted an evil force in Stephen Gresham’s Dark Magic, and a woman could raise the dead in Haunted Ground, from the same author.

A coven of murderous mutant witches was killing the female population of a quiet New England town in Ed Gorman’s Rituals, which was dedicated to the memory of Richard Laymon.

All That Lives by Melissa Snaders-Self was about the Bell Witch, and a successful author’s latest book appeared to write itself in Shaun Hutson’s Hybrid.

A woman’s nightmares awakened a world of Mayan gods and demons in The Void by Teri A. Jacobs, and a demon caused others to commit mayhem in W.G. Griffiths’s Driven.

Following a near-death experience, a woman began experiencing visions in Quietus by cult movie actress Vivian Schilling. A family became involved in a secret invisibility experiment in Out of Sight by T.J. MacGregor, and a rapper-DJ used musical mind-control in Dmitry Radyshevsky’s The Mantra, translated by David Gurevich.

Packaged by Tekno Books, Ed Gorman and Kevin McCarthy, The Family Book 2: Into the Darkness by McCarthy and David Silva was the second volume in the series about mind manipulation.

Don D’Ammassa’s Servants of Chaos served up some Lovecraftian horrors off the coast of Massachusetts, Enoch’s Portal was the first volume chronicling the cult-busting exploits of A.W. Hill’s psychic detective Stephan Raszer, and in Sèphera Girón’s The Birds and the Bees the balance of nature turned against humanity.

In Jeffrey Ames’s Venom, Dallas cop Courtney Bedell found herself matching wits with a notorious serial killer, known to the police as “Fiddleback” because of the spiders of that name left on the bodies of his victims. A nearly blind woman was kidnapped by a religious fanatic who wanted to save her from Satan in Melanie Tem’s Slain in the Spirit, while Robert J. Randisi’s Curtains of Blood threw in everything but the kitchen sink as Bram Stoker’s theatrical production of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was disrupted by the mystery of Jack the Ripper.

Lisa Goldstein’s historical fantasy The Alchemist’s Door featured English magician Dr John Dee, who was exiled to Prague where he encountered Elizabeth Bathory and Rabbi Judah Loew helped him create a golem.

Robert Rankin’s The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse featured a psychopathic serial killer murdering the millionaire nursery-rhyme inhabitants of Toy City. Steve Aylett’s The Velocity Gospel and Dummyland were the second and third novels, respectively, set in the author’s equally bizarre alternate world of Accomplice.

Nancy A. Collins’s Dead Roses for a Blue Lady: The Sonja Blue Short Fiction Collection appeared from Crossroads Press with cover and interior artwork by Stephen R. Bissette. Published in an edition of 400 signed and numbered hardcovers, the book also included an interview with the author by Stanley Wiater, two original short stories and a previously unpublished novelette. A twenty-six-copy slipcased lettered edition for $165.00 was bound in leather with Italian endpapers and included a ribbon bookmark and an additional short-short story.

Darkest Heart was the fifth “Sonja Blue” novel from Nancy Collins, published by White Wolf. This time the renegade vampire met a kindred spirit in a man who had lost everything to the undead.

Set in the eighth-century court of Charlemagne the Great, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Night Blooming was the latest volume in the author’s “Chronicles of St Germain” series. This time the vampire protagonist became involved with a woman suffering from stigmata.

Whitley Streiber’s Lilith’s Dream was the author’s second sequel to The Hunger, while A Coldness in the Blood was the eighth entry in Fred Saberhagen’s long-running “Matthew Maule/Dracula” series, about the quest for a powerful Egyptian relic.

Underland was the fourth and final book in Mick Farren’s series of “Victor Renquist” counter-cultural vampire thrillers. This time Renquist battled ex-Nazis in a lost world beneath Antarctica.

Mary Ann Mitchell’s undead Marquis de Sade returned in Cathedral of Vampires, while Trisha Baker’s Crimson Knight was the second volume in a trilogy about vampire psychologist Meghann O’Neill.

Living Dead in Dallas was the follow-up to Charlaine Harris’s comedy/mystery Dead Until Dark. This time telepathic cocktail waitress Sookie Stackhouse travelled to Dallas in search of a missing vampire.

In Jim Butcher’s Summer Knight, the fourth volume in “The Dresden Files”, the war with the vampires was postponed as Chicago wizard Harry Dresden helped faerie queen Mab solve a murder amongst the Sidhe.

Karen E. Taylor’s Resurrection was the sixth in the “Vampire Legacy” series featuring the undead Deirdre and former detective Mitch. A sequel to Red Moon Rising, Billie Sue Mosiman’s Malachi’s Moon was packaged by Tekno Books and featured the titular dhampir – the offspring of a vampire and a human.

Wounds was Jemiah Jefferson’s second vampire novel and involved an encounter between her undead protagonist Daniel Blum and a stripper. Boston-based Lawson was an undead enforcer who took out renegade vampires with extreme prejudice in Jon F. Merz’s debut novel The Fixer. It was followed by The Invoker, featuring the same character.

Laws of the Blood: Deceptions was the fourth volume in Susan Sizemore’s series about vampire Enforcers, while Second Sunrise by David Thurlo and Aimée Thurlo was the first in a vampire mystery series featuring Native American detective Lee Nez, a half-human vampire who teamed up with a female FBI agent.

James M. Thompson’s Dark Blood was a sequel to the author’s Night Blood, a 100-year-old vampire awakened in contemporary San Francisco in Elaine Moore’s Retribution, and a plot to create vampire soldiers in the Balkans was at the heart of Team of Darkness by Tony Ruggiero.

Night Pleasures by Sherrilyn Kenyon (Kinley MacGregor) was the first volume in the “Dark-Hunters” vampire romance series. A young archaeologist in Paris was protected from a supernatural evil by a mysterious stranger in Shannon Drake’s romantic vampire novel Realm of Shadows, and a legendary vampire hunter awakened after centuries of sleep in Christine Feehan’s romantic Gothic Dark Legend.

Maggie Shayne’s Twilight Hunger was another bloodsucking romance, and Out of the Shadows was an omnibus of Linda Lael Miller’s vampire romances Forever and the Night (1993) and For All Eternity (1994).

Garry Kilworth’s animal fantasy Vampire Voles was the fifth volume in the “Welkin Weasels” series, while Sparkle Hayter’s satirical novel Naked Brunch from No Exit Press featured werewolves.

Published by Carroll & Graf in hardcover, Glen Hirshberg’s first novel, The Snowman’s Children, was set in mid-1970s Detroit as two eleven-year-old boys tried to save their friend’s sanity against a haunting backdrop of murders committed by the serial killer of the title. The book came with cover quotes by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link and others.

Best known for her non-fiction books about Anne Rice, Katherine Ramsland’s debut novel The Heat Seekers was somewhat predictably the first in a new vampire series. Rice’s son Christopher also made his own novel debut with A Destiny of Souls, a Southern Gothic set in New Orleans involving white supremacists and the supernatural.

Ed O’Connor’s first novel, The Yeare’s Midnight, was a serial killer thriller in which police Inspector John Underwood discovered that the ritualistic murder of an Olympic athlete was connected with the works of classical poet John Donne.

Published by The Design Image Group, Tina L. Jens’s episodic debut novel The Blues Ain’t Nothin’: Tales of the Lonesome Blues Pub was set in the haunted Chicago establishment and featured its colourful proprietor, Miss Mustang Sally, and her enigmatic clientele. From the same imprint, D.G.K. Goldberg’s . . . Doomed to Repeat It was billed as “a modern Gothic” and involved a romance between a punk-cowgirl and an eighteenth-century Scottish ghost.

From Big Engine, Dead Ground by Chris Amies was a Lovecraftian first novel based around a 1930s archaeological investigation of a sacred temple on a Pacific Island.

An attempt to raise the Antichrist and the legend of a thing living in the bell tower haunted The Red Church by Writers of the Future winner Scott Nicholson. A college dropout was haunted by ghosts in C.W. Cannon’s Soul Resin, and a woman was drawn into her own nightmare world in Teri A. Jacobs’s debut novel, The Void.

M. John Harrison’s audacious novel Light was not only a literary space opera, but also involved a 1990s serial killer who was haunted by a terrifying presence called the “Shrander”.

In Jonathan Carroll’s White Apples, an advertising copywriter discovered that he had been resurrected from Purgatory by his one true love and their unborn child.

Tim Pratt’s Last Things was set in the East Texas town of Gilmer, where the inhabitants started seeing creepy scarecrows and believed in the coming Apocalypse.

The Devil had to live out his life as a human in order to be redeemed in Glen Duncan’s I, Lucifer. A man was haunted by his ghostly girlfriend in I’m a Believer by Jessica Adams, and Jolie Blon’s Bounce pitted James Lee Burke’s Southern sheriff Dave Robicheaux against a Cajun magic man who appeared to be involved in the brutal murders of young girls.

In Thane Rosenbaum’s The Golems of Gotham, a girl attempted to cure her father’s writing block by calling up the spirits of his dead parents.

Will Self’s Dorian was a contemporary “re-imagining” of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray set against the AIDS epidemic of the past twenty years. Death’s Enemy: The Pilgrimage of Victor Frankenstein was a historical novel told in the form of a biography of Dr Frankenstein by George Rosie.

Inspired by Frankenstein, Faust and Freud, Patricia Duncker’s The Deadly Space Between involved lesbianism, incest and the ghost of a mountaineer in the Alps.

A painter was hired to do a portrait without ever seeing his subject in Jeffrey Ford’s The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque, while sixteen of the author’s shorter pieces were collected by Golden Gryphon in The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant and Other Stories.

Published by Articulation, a new imprint of Do-Not-Press, Thirteen was an original anthology of stories each based around a nude by British photographer Marc Atkins. The thirteen contributors included Toby Litt, Julian Rathbone, Maxim Jakubowski, Mick Farren, Stella Duffy and Nicholas Royle.

Edited with an extensive Afterword by Stephen Jones, The Emperor of Dreams: The Lost Worlds of Clark Ashton Smith was #26 in Gollancz’s Fantasy Masterworks series. The paperback contained forty-three stories, two poems and an essay by the Weird Tales author, covering Smith’s publishing career from 1926 until 1989.

Also in the Fantasy Masterworks series, Black Gods and Scarlet Dreams (#31) collected fifteen classic stories (mostly from Weird Tales) by C.L. Moore, while William Hope Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland and Other Novels (#33) contained the title book plus The Boats of the “Glen Carrig”, The Ghost Pirates and The Night Land, along with a new Introduction by China Miéville.

HarperCollins’s less imaginative Voyager Classics series offered reprints of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and Other Novels of Terror (#29) and Michael Marshall Smith’s Only Forward (#36).

Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby was reprinted in the “Bloomsbury Film Classic” series, while the author’s The Stepford Wives was reissued by HarperPerennial with a new Introduction by Peter Straub.

Published by Night Shade Books in hardcover for the first time, Gods in Darkness: The Complete Novels of Kane collected Bloodstone, Dark Crusade and Darkness Weaves by the late Karl Edward Wagner in a single volume. Despite an appropriate cover painting by Ken Kelly, the book suffered from not having an Introduction to put the three novels in historical context or any interior illustrations. However, for anyone who had never read Wagner’s superior heroic fantasy, this omnibus was an excellent place to start. A slip case limited edition contained an extra illustration by Kelly and was also signed by the artist.

The Borrible Trilogy was a welcome and long-overdue omnibus of Michael De Larrabeiti’s young-adult novels The Borribles (1976), The Borribles Go for Broke (1981) and The Borribles Across the Dark Metropolis (1986). Hilaire Belloc’s 1907 book of children’s verse, Cautionary Tales for Children, was reissued with new illustrations by the late Edward Gorey.

From Penguin Classics, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror contained Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 short novel, a story and a related article, with an Introduction and notes by Robert Mighall. The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Nineteen Others was published by Random House and included a critical Introduction and notes by Barry Menikoff. Barnes & Noble Children’s Classics also got in on the act with yet another edition, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Stories, containing the title novel plus three additional stories, with an Introduction by Laura Victoria Levin.

Ramsey Campbell’s 1987 collection Scared Stiff: Tales of Sex and Death appeared from Tor Books with three added stories and a new Afterword by the author. Basil Copper’s 1994 novella “Beyond the Reef” was published in Germany in hardcover by Festa as Das Geheimnis von Innsmouth, limited to 400 signed and numbered copies.

Wake Up Screaming was a repackaging of sixteen stories by H.P. Lovecraft with a new Introduction by Poppy Z. Brite. With Lovecraft’s Library Vol.1, Hippocampus Press began a series reprinting some of the author’s favourite works with a reissue of The Metal Monster by A. Merritt. Introduced by Stefan Dziemianowicz, this edition restored close to 10,000 words of text that Merritt cut from the original.

Lovecraft at Last: The Master of Horror in His Own Words was a beautiful oversized hardcover from Cooper Square Press that reprinted the 1975 collection of correspondence between Lovecraft and Willis Conover. Illustrated throughout with letters, photographs and drawings, this impressive reissue also included a new Introduction by S.T. Joshi.

Joshi also contributed an Introduction and notes to the Penguin edition of Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories, which collected nine classic tales by Algernon Blackwood. From California imprint Stark House Press, a reprint of Blackwood’s 1914 collection Incredible Adventures contained five stories and a new Introduction by Tim Lebbon.

Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel Wieland, or The Transformation: An American Tale was reissued as a print-on-demand volume from Wildside Press.

Tor Books launched its Starscape imprint of young-adult books with titles by Joan Aiken, Patricia C. Wrede and Will Shetterly.

Sorcerers of the Nightwing was the first volume in Geoffrey Huntington’s (William J. Mann) “Ravenscliff” series and featured a young boy with supernatural powers, a Hellhole to another dimension and demonic clowns.

Midnight Predator by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes was about vampire-hunter Turquoise Draka in the city of Midnight, while Christopher Golden’s Wild Things was the fourth volume in the author’s Prowlers werewolf series.

The restoration of a Cornish watermill uncovered a lethal elemental force that should have been destroyed centuries ago in Demon Crossing by Louise Cooper.

Margaret McAllister’s Ghost at the Window involved a Scottish house that shifted through time, and a teenage girl discovered that her family hotel was haunted in Dead Gorgeous by Malorie Blackman. There were more ghosts in Face to Face by Sandra Glover and The Crying by Hazel Riley.

Garry Kilworth’s Nightdancer was a Polynesian horror story of age-old sorcery and deviousness striving for the soul of a modern boy.

Scholastic’s “Point Horror Unleashed” series continued with Moonchildren by Andrew Matthews and The Belltower by Samantha Lee.

Isobel Bird’s Circle of Three 13: And it Harm None, 14: The Challenge Box and 15: Initiation featured a trio of modern-day witches, while a teenage witch continued to discover her powers in Strife, Seeker, Eclipse, Reckoning and Full Circle, the latest volumes in Cate Tiernan’s Sweep (UK: Wicca) series packaged by 17th Street Productions.

The same packager was behind Blood War by Russell Moon, the third volume in the “Witch Boy” trilogy, and an orphaned teenager discovered that her relatives were witches in Wicked: Witch by Nancy Holder and Debbie Viguie.

Dead Wrong and Don’t Think Twice were the fourth and fifth volumes, respectively, in the T*witches series by H.B. Gilmour and Randi Reisfeld about twin sisters who fight evil with their supernatural powers. The sixth volume, Double Jeopardy, came packaged with a free hair-extension in the US!

In Darren Shan’s (Darren O’Shaughnessy) Cirque Du Freak #3: Tunnels of Blood and #4: Vampire Mountain, half-vampire schoolboy Shan investigated a series of killings by the murderous vampaneze and travelled deep into the vampire world. Meanwhile, in The Saga of Darren Shan: Book 6: The Vampire Prince, Book 7: Hunters of the Dusk and Book 8: Allies of the Night, the teenager discovered more about his strange destiny.

Universal Studios Monsters #4: The Mummy: Book of the Dead by Larry Mike Garmon involved three children battling the classic movie monsters.

The five stories in David Wisniewski’s Halloweenies were based on old movie clichés. Joan Aiken’s Ghostly Beasts collected fifteen stories and poems (two original), while Cat in Glass and Other Tales of the Unnatural contained eight stories by Nancy Etchemendy, illustrated by David Ouimet.

Selected by Edo van Belkom and published in trade paperback by Canada’s Tundra Books, Be VERY Afraid!: More Tales of Horror was the sequel to the Bram Stoker Award-nominated Be Afraid! It contained fourteen stories about real-life problems facing teenagers, by such authors as Tanya Huff, Tom Piccirilli, Michael Rowe, Robert J. Sawyer and the editor himself.

City of the Dead was another Canadian young-adult anthology, edited by Sharon Stewart and containing ten stories about spirits.

Veteran anthologist Peter Haining collected twelve stories in Scary! 2: More Stories to Make You Scream!, and in Beware! R.L. Stine Picks His Favorite Scary Stories, the popular children’s author included thirteen stories, four poems, a novel excerpt and a comic strip, by Ray Bradbury, Gahan Wilson and others.

According to a poll published in USA Today, 35 per cent of American adults expected to spend $150-$250 over Hallowe’en in 2002. In an attempt to influence them while they’re still young, there were numerous Hallowe’en-themed books aimed at pre-teens.

Written by Kathryn Lasky and illustrated by David Jarvis, Porkenstein concerned the horrific hog created by the lone porcine survivor of the Big Bad Wolf, while Tim Egan’s The Experiments of Doctor Vermin involved a pig who had car trouble on Hallowe’en night.

Illustrated by Emily Bolam, Georgie Adams’s The Three Little Witches Storybook featured a magical Hallowe’en party, and a mischievous witch collected other creeps in Fright Night Flight by Laura Krauss, illustrated by Henry Cole. A witch took care of the eponymous human baby in Halloweena by Miriam Glassman, illustrated by Victoria Roberts, and Barbara Olsen’s collages illuminated Suzanne Williams’s The Witch Casts a Spell, in which a curious girl and her cat joined a costume party.

The Bones of Fred McFee by Eve Bunting was about the toy skeleton of the title, with scratchboard illustrations by Kurt Cyrus, while a skeleton could not polish his bones because of his hiccups in Margery Cuyler’s Skeleton Hiccups, illustrated by S.D. Schindler.

Elizabeth Winthrop’s rhyming Halloween Hats was illustrated by Sue Truesdell, while Trick or Treat? by Bill Martin Jr and Michael Sampson involved a costumed Dracula in word games.

Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night by Nicholas Rogers looked at the holiday’s history. For younger readers, there was Halloween Is . . . by Gail Gibbons and The Real Hallowe’en: Ritual and Magic for Kids and Adults by Sheena Morgan.

Ray Bradbury’s One More for the Road contained twenty-five previously uncollected stories (eight reprints), the earliest dating from the late 1940s. Published by Ireland’s Salmon Poetry, I Live by the Invisible collected forty-seven poems, many original, by Bradbury. On 1 April, the 81-year-old author was honoured with the 2,193rd star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet reprinted twenty classic horror stories by Richard Matheson with a short Introduction by Stephen King.

Everything’s Eventual was King’s own collection, the first for nine years. It contained fourteen previously published “dark tales”, including the first English-language print publications of “In the Deathroom”, “1408” and “Riding the Bullet”, along with a new Introduction and story notes by the author. King questioned the future of short story collections and anthologies, and the author also admitted that he chose the order of contents by shuffling all the spades and a joker in a deck of cards.

Brian Lumley’s Beneath the Moors and Darker Places featured nine previously published stories (the earliest dating back to 1971), including the short novel of the title and a new Introduction by the author. “The Second Wish” appeared for the first time with Lumley’s preferred ending.

Caliban and Other Tales included the eponymous original short novel and five reprint stories by Robert Devereaux.

Frights and Fancies was the final volume of the late R. Chetwynd-Hayes’s uncollected short fiction, containing twenty stories (three original), plus an Foreword by editor Stephen Jones and an Afterword about time travel by the author.

Dark Terrors 6: The Gollancz Book of Horror was another bumper volume edited by Stephen Jones and David Sutton and containing thirty-three original stories and novellas by, among others, Ramsey Campbell, Christopher Fowler, Stephen Baxter, Basil Copper, Graham Masterton, David J. Schow, Michael Marshall Smith, Jeff VanderMeer, Les Daniels, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Tim Lebbon, Kim Newman, Richard Christian Matheson, Chico Kidd (a “Luís da Silva” adventure), Tanith Lee, Mick Garris and several newer names.

Despite the misnomer of its title, The Children of Cthulhu edited by John Pelan and Benjamin Adams featured twenty-one (mostly) original stories inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft by such eclectic writers as China Miéville, James Van Pelt, L.H. Maynard and M.P.N. Sims, Richard Laymon, Tim Lebbon, Mark Chadbourn, Paul Finch, Alan Dean Foster, Poppy Z. Brite, Steve Rasnic Tem, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Brian Hodge and a collaboration by the editors.

John Pelan also edited the paperback original The Darker Side: Generations of Horror. The unthemed anthology contained twenty-seven original stories from Simon Clark, Brian Hodge, Paul Finch, Poppy Z. Brite, Joel Lane, Richard Laymon, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Peter Crowther, Tim Lebbon and the editor himself.

Stranger: Dark Tales of Eerie Encounters edited by Michele Slung contained twenty-two stories (five original) by Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, Tabitha King, Lisa Tuttle, Thomas M. Disch, Muriel Gray, Jay Russell and others.

Guest-edited by Peter Straub, Conjunctions 39, published by New York’s Bard College, was subtitled The New Wave Fabulists. It contained essays by Gary K. Wolfe and John Clute, plus eighteen “uncompartmentalizable” stories by genre writers such as Kelly Link, M. John Harrison, Jonathan Lethem, Joe Haldeman, China Miéville, Andy Duncan, Gene Wolfe, Jonathan Carroll, Elizabeth Hand, Neil Gaiman and several others, including Straub himself. The anthology was illustrated throughout by Gahan Wilson.

Published by Syracuse University Press, The Literary Werewolf: An Anthology was edited by Charlotte F. Otten and contained twenty-two stories by Stephen King, Saki, Seabury Quinn, Brian Stableford, Fritz Leiber, August W. Derleth, Algernon Blackwood and Jane Yolen, amongst others.

The anonymously edited Four Dark Nights from Leisure contained a quartet of novellas by Douglas Clegg, Christopher Golden, Bentley Little and Tom Piccirilli. Darker Masques was an omnibus of the anthologies Masques III and IV, both edited by J.N. Williamson.

From Dover, Great Tales of Terror edited by S.T. Joshi contained twenty-three classic stories from such authors as Lord Dunsany, Walter de la Mare and E. Nesbit.

Edited by Leslie Pockell, The 13 Best Horror Stories of All Time included work by M.R. James, H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft, while The Colour Out of Space edited by D. Thin contained twelve stories of “cosmic horror” by, among others, Arthur Machen, Bram Stoker, Ambrose Bierce and, of course, Lovecraft.

Witches’ Brew edited by Yvonne Jocks (and an uncredited Denise Little and Martin H. Greenberg) contained twenty-four previously published stories, nine poems, a play excerpt and three essays, by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, Shirley Jackson, Dean Koontz, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kathryn Ptacek and others, including the editor (under the pseudonym “Evelyn Vaughan”). Little (and a still uncredited Greenberg) also published Familiars, an anthology of fifteen stories about witches’ familiars by such authors as Andre Norton, P.N. Elrod and Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Vengeance Fantastic featured seventeen original tales of revenge by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, P.N. Elrod, Alan Rodgers, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, Gary A. Braunbeck and others, edited with an Introduction by Denise Little and packaged by Greenberg’s Tekno Books. Greenberg and Brittany A. Koren edited Pharaoh Fantastic, which contained original “Ancient Egyptian” stories by fifteen authors, including Alan Dean Foster, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Tanya Huff and Mickey Zucker Reichert.

Lighthouse Hauntings: 12 Original Tales of the Supernatural edited by Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg included stories by Thomas F. Monteleone, Nina Kiriki Hoffman and Jane Lindskold, plus an Introduction by John Helfers.

Perceptively edited by Brian M. Thomsen (and an uncredited Martin H. Greenberg), The American Fantasy Tradition was a hefty 600-page hardcover anthology from Tor Books that reprinted forty-three classic stories by such notable North American authors as Washington Irving, Robert W. Chambers, H.P. Lovecraft, Manly Wade Wellman, R. A. Lafferty, Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, Ursula K. Le Guin, Henry James, Ambrose Bierce, Charles Beaumont, Avram Davidson, Henry Kuttner, Karl Edward Wagner, Harlan Ellison, Edith Wharton, Theodore Sturgeon, Jack Finney, Richard Matheson, Fredric Brown, Gene Wolfe, Michael Bishop and Ray Bradbury, among many others.

From Tindal Street Press, Birmingham Noir edited by Joel Lane and Steve Bishop contained twenty-three tales of crime and horror from the West Midlands city by Nicholas Royle, Paul Finch, Pauline E. Dungate, Mike Chinn and others, including both the editors.

Edited as usual by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifteenth Annual Collection contained forty-nine stories and poems from 2001 along with various summations and Honorable Mentions by the editors and others. The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 13 featured twenty-three stories and novellas, plus the usual Necrology and yearly round-up by editor Stephen Jones. The two books overlapped with just four stories, by Christopher Fowler, Glen Hirshberg, Elizabeth Hand and the pseudonymous “Gala Blau” (Conrad Williams).

Celebrated horror author Dennis Etchison adapted eight original scripts by Rod Serling for the first two volumes of The Twilight Zone Radio Dramas, released on audio CD and to selected radio stations by Falcon Picture Group. Hosted by Stacy Keach, the full-cast recordings also featured Lou Diamond Phillips, Jane Seymour, Blair Underwood and Ed Begley, Jr.

Two Plays for Voices was a two-hour audio recording of Neil Gaiman’s stories “Snow Glass Apples” and “Murder Mysteries” recorded by Bebe Neuwirth and Brian Dennehy respectively, supported by a full cast. It was available on cassette or CD from Harper Audio. Meanwhile, Gaiman himself read his book Coraline from Harper Children’s Audio, with original music by The Gothic Archies.

Laurell K. Hamilton’s A Caress of Twilight, a tale of erotic faeries, was produced unabridged on eight cassettes, read by Laural Merlington.

In April, The Science Fiction & Fantasy Zone was closed down. Founded in May 1998 by Anne Gay and Stan Nicholls, the electronic newszine was initially part of Internet Service Provider LineOne’s member content, averaging 130,000 visitors a month. However, since Italian media group Tiscali took over LineOne in 2001, financial “streamlining” resulted in staff cuts and the loss of “name” contributors and Tiscali eventually decided that it no longer wished to support the service.

After four years and thirty-two issues, Gary W. Conner’s online magazine Twilight Showcase ceased publication in August, and in December Garrett Peck’s electronic newsletter Hellnotes folded after five years. Peck had taken over the weekly electronic newsletter four months earlier from David B. Silva and Paul F. Olson. It was subsequently revived by Judi Rohrig.

The free downloadable PDF magazine The Spook contained new fiction by David J. Schow, “Edward Lee” (Lee Seymour) and others, while contributing editor Paula Guran interviewed Clive Barker, Dennis Etchison interviewed Richard Matheson, and Ramsey Campbell continued his regular opinion column.

Towards the end of the year, The Spook decided to change its title to the less-than-memorable Metropole. Editor Anthony Sapienza revealed that “The name change is only a key to help open new doors to the genre” after some advertisers were put off by the old name, while others thought “spook” was a racial slur. Novelist Daniel Quinn also became the magazine’s fiction editor.

Ellen Datlow’s busy Sci Fiction/scifi.com site featured new and classic reprint stories from, among others, William F. Nolan, Fredric Brown, R.A. Lafferty, Anthony Boucher, Robert Bloch, Gerald Kersh, Ray Vukcevich, Peter Beagle, Tom Reamy, James Van Pelt, Paul McAuley, J.R. Dunn and numerous others.

E-book publisher ElectricStory.com produced Ghosts and Other Lovers and My Pathology, two new collections of short stories by Lisa Tuttle, as HTML files (readable on any computer), or in Microsoft Reader and Mobipocket formats (for hand-held devices). The electronic volumes contained thirteen and sixteen stories respectively. From the same publisher came Colonel Rutherford’s Colt, an original novel by Lucius Shepard only available as an e-book.

Fans of the author’s work could visit the Clive Barker: Revelations website <www.clivebarker.dial.pipex.com> ably run by Phil and Sarah Stokes. A ring-bound limited edition of the site’s “Interviews” section was published as twenty-six lettered copies, each signed by Barker and the editorial team.

David Nordhaus’s print-on-demand DarkTales Publications closed operations in the autumn but continued selling backlist titles through its website at a 70 per cent discount. Along with two The Asylum anthologies edited by Victor Heck, authors published by the imprint included Mort Castle, Yvonne Navarro, Sèphera Girón, Michael J. Straczynski, Robert Weinberg, Nancy Kilpatrick, Edo van Belkom, J.F. Gonzalez and Steve Savile.

Before the imprint went under, DarkTales published Dead But Dreaming: Fifteen Tales of Cosmic Horror, a collection of Cthulhu Mythos fiction by Ramsey Campbell, Stephen Mark Rainey, Darrell Schweitzer, Adam Niswander and others, edited by Kevin Ross and Keith Herber. From the same publisher, True Tales of the Scarlet Sponge by Wayne Allen Sallee was a gory autobiographical memoir that included details of the author’s 1989 encounter with a moving automobile.

Warner dropped its proposed iPublish.com line of print-on-demand and electronic books, while iUniverse fired thirty-six employers and moved its headquarters from California to Nebraska in an effort to cut costs and concentrate on publishing first-time authors for a fee. The imprint’s print-on-demand titles included Grimoire de Solace, Vol.1: Lost Runes and Sorrows, a collection of twenty-one stories by Christopher Heath.

Britain’s print-on-demand publisher House of Stratus obtained further funding and resumed operating from a new address after apparently collapsing in 2001. Although mostly concentrating on crime and mainstream fiction, they had more than thirty Brian Aldiss titles, forty H.G. Wells books and five volumes by Algernon Blackwood available.

Teenage horror fan Tony Dickens discovered that he had powers that invoked a plague from the pages of Weird Tales in The H.P. Lovecraft Institute, a print-on-demand novel by David Bischoff.

A young woman’s village was destroyed by demons and zombies in Richard V. Mullenax, Jr’s The Four Warriors from iUniverse/Writers Club Press, and a girl searching for her missing godmother discovered dark magic in Coincidissonance by John Dimes, available from AmErica House.

Reflections of a Vampire by Damion Kirk was available from RahuBooks, while C.G. McGovern-Bowen’s Evil Seed from 1stBooks pitted the Earth itself against a cosmic psychic vampire. Slayer: Black Miracles was an omnibus of two vampire novellas by Karen Koehler about a tormented vampire hunter, from KHP Industries/Black Death Books. From the same author and imprint, a demon turned on those who created him in Scarabus.

Published by Cosmos Books, Qinmeartha and the Girl Child Lochi/The Tomb of the Old Ones contained the title stories by John Grant and Colin Wilson, respectively.

Edited by the redoubtable Philip Harbottle, the first two issues of Fantasy Adventures (formerly Fantasy Quarterly) included new stories by Andrew Darlington, Tony Glynn and “David Somers”.

Cosmos also produced two 100,000-word collections of stories, essays and interviews by L.H. Maynard and M.P.N. Sims, Selling Dark Miracles and The Secret Geography of Nightmare, with Introductions by Hugh Lamb and Stephen Jones, respectively. The ever-expanding Wildside Press imprint also published a volume combining Maynard and Sims’ novella Moths with In the Mirror by Sarah Singleton.

Maynard and Sims had another collection out from Sean Wallace’s Prime Books, Incantations, containing fifteen stories (eight original), and the busy duo also edited Darkness Rising Volume Three: Secrets of Shadows for Cosmos and Volume Four: Caress of Nightmare from Prime. These entertaining original anthologies, containing seventeen and twenty stories respectively, included fiction from Chico Kidd, Monica J. O’Rourke, Paul Finch, D.F. Lewis and others, plus some classic reprints introduced by Hugh Lamb and Rhys Hughes.

Also from Prime, Nowhere Near Milkwood was a collection of more than thirty stories by Rhys Hughes, All Too Surreal featured eighteen tales (two original) by Tim Waggoner, and Old Ghosts and Other Revenants contained twelve stories (two original) by J.F. Gonzalez. Tourniquet Heart edited by Christopher Teague contained thirty-six stories and three poems by such writers as Ramsey Campbell, Christopher Fowler, Steve Rasnic Tem, Paul Finch, Rhys Hughes, John B. Ford, Carol Anne Davis and others.

Prime Books also announced that it had acquired Jeff VanderMeer’s idiosyncratic Ministry of Whimsy Press, which would become a print-on-demand publisher.

Stalking the Demon: Tales of Sex and Insanity was a collection of eighteen dark-fantasy stories (thirteen original) by Bryce Stevens, published by Australia’s on-demand imprint Jacobyte Books. The author also illustrated the front and back covers of the nice-looking trade paperback.

Marietta Publishing was launched over the Labor Day weekend with three trade paperback anthologies. Edited by Bruce Gehweiler, Frontiers of Terror included stories by Brian McNaughton, Tom Piccirilli, David B. Silva, Trey R. Barker, Gregory Nicoll, C.J. Henderson and others. Lin Carter’s Anton Zarnak, Supernatural Sleuth was the subject of Robert M. Price’s anthology, which collected all of Carter’s tales of the master of the mystic arts, along with new adventures by Joseph S. Pulver Sr., C.J. Henderson, and the editor himself. Finally, New Mythos Legends edited by Bruce Gehweiler was a collection of Lovecraftian stories by Norman Partridge, Hugh B. Cave, Tom Piccirilli, Don D’Ammassa, Stephen Mark Rainey, James S. Dorr and C. J. Henderson, among others.

Warfear: A Collection of Strange War Tales was an anthology of thirteen stories from Marietta, edited by James Shimkus, Byron White and Allen Tower and featuring fiction from Don D’Ammassa, Peter Garratt, Jeffrey Thomas, Mark McLaughlin and others, including the omnipresent C. J. Henderson.

Deborah Layne and Jay Lake’s Polyphony was a “slipstream” anthology from Wheatland Press containing twelve stories (one reprint) by Lucius Shepard, James Van Pelt, Andy Duncan, Ray Vukcevich, Bruce Holland Rogers, Carol Emshwiller and others. It was the first in a planned biannual series.

Stealth Press let all its genre staff go and suspended its 2002 publishing schedule, having gone through $1.3 million in venture capital in just over two years. The final title to appear from the classy small-press imprint was They Have Not Seen the Stars: The Collected Poems of Ray Bradbury.

At the end of the year, Monica O’Rourke’s Catalyst Press announced that it was placing all its 2003 titles on hold for six months while the company went through a reorganization process.

Meanwhile, Michael Marshall Smith’s 1994 debut novel, Only Forward, received its first official world hardcover publication from Subterranean Press in a signed edition of 750 numbered copies and twenty-six lettered copies.

Also from Subterranean, From Weird and Distant Shores was a collection of thirteen stories by Caitlín R. Kiernan (one an original co-written with Poppy Z. Brite) set in other writers’ universes. Along with interesting Afterwords to each story, the author also included an excellent Preface in which she argued both for and against writing media-related work. Nicely illustrated by Richard Kirk, the signed hardcover was limited to 600 numbered copies and twenty-six lettered copies.

From the same author and imprint, In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers was a hardcover novella, illustrated by Dame Darcy, featuring Kiernan’s character Dancy Flammarion from Threshold. It was available in both a trade edition and a 300-copy signed, limited edition with the extra chapbook On the Road to Jefferson.

Limited to 1,000 signed and numbered copies and a fifty-two-copy lettered edition, For a Few Stories More: The Lost Lansdale Volume Four contained twenty-one stories (seven reprints) by Joe R. Lansdale, including a previously unpublished mystery novel entitled “The Long Fall” plus a film proposal. Six of the tales were collaborations with other authors. Lansdale’s A Fine Dark Line was a restored edition containing 30,000 words of extra material, including two unused Prologues and an Afterword by the author.

Sex and Violence in Hollywood was a non-supernatural horror novel by Ray Garton, and Charles de Lint’s Wolf Moon was a twist on the werewolf myth, also limited to 1,000 signed and numbered copies from Subterranean.

Worlds Enough & Time contained five novellas (one original) by Dan Simmons, along with a new Introduction by the author. The William Ashbless Memorial Cookbook by James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers collected a number of recipes by the late fictional poet. It was available in a signed, limited edition of 750 copies and a 150-copy de luxe slip cased edition with an additional chapbook.

J.K. Potter’s Embrace the Mutation was a handsome-looking anthology from Subterranean Press. Edited by William Schafer and Bill Sheehan, it contained thirteen stories written around Potter’s distinctive photo-collages. Contributors included Michael Marshall Smith, Graham Joyce, Ramsey Campbell, Dennis Etchison, Elizabeth Hand, Poppy Z. Brite, Kim Newman, Peter Crowther and Norman Partridge, and there was an Introduction by the artist.

Nicely produced by Night Shade Books in hardcover, trade paperback and a signed slip cased edition of 150 copies containing a bonus compact disc of music composed by the author, Brian Hodge’s Lies & Ugliness collected twenty-one superior tales (two original) with story notes by the author.

Besides adding Ramsey Campbell to its roster of authors, Peter Crowther became the sole owner of PS Publishing and also issued Keep Out the Night edited by Stephen Jones and illustrated by Randy Broecker. The first in a series of new hardcover anthologies inspired by Christine Campbell Thomson’s “Not at Night” series of the 1920s and 1930s, Hugh B. Cave, Brian Lumley, Caitlín R. Kiernan, Sydney J. Bounds, Neil Gaiman, Poppy Z. Brite, Tim Lebbon, Dennis Etchison, Kim Newman, Michael Marshall Smith, Basil Copper and Ramsey Campbell were the authors who chose their own favourite stories and novellas. The book was limited to 500 numbered hardcovers and a 100-copy de luxe edition signed by all the contributors.

Firing the Cathedral was a new “Jerry Cornelius” novella by Michael Moorcock, in which his Swinging Sixties rebel responded to the events of 9/11. The PS publication was limited to 500 numbered paperbacks and 400 hardcovers, and Alan Moore contributed the excellent Introduction.

Other titles from the prolific PS included the novellas Blood Follows by Steven Erikson with an Introduction by Stephen R. Donaldson, and A Year in the Linear City by Paul Di Filippo with an Introduction by Michael Bishop. Mark Morris’s novella The Uglimen, in which the protagonist uncovered a dark family secret, had an Introduction by Stephen Laws, and Neil Gaiman contributed the Introduction to Mark Chadbourn’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, inspired by Richard Dadd’s painting of the same name. Each title was limited to 500 numbered paperbacks and 300 numbered hardcover copies.

From the venerable Arkham House, The Far Side of Nowhere was a new volume of twenty-nine of Nelson Bond’s own favourite uncollected SF and fantasy stories from 1939 to 1957, grouped under five thematic sections. Each tale was briefly introduced by the 92-year-old pulp writer. Also from Arkham and limited to 2,500 copies, John D. Harvey’s The Cleansing was a first novel about a Native American wolf god, Wanata, who returned every 100 years to hold humanity accountable for its abuses against nature.

The fourth volume in Haffner Press’s The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Spider Island contained twelve stories from 1936–38, several non-fiction pieces, a Foreword by Edward Bryant and a short 1936 interview and new Afterword by Williamson. A signed and slip case limited edition was available for $125.00.

A scientist experimented with immortality in The Blue Helix by William B. Eidson, illustrated by Rick Berry and published by Donald M. Grant.

Limited to 500 numbered and signed copies, A Stir of Echoes was Gauntlet Press’s sixth “Classic-Revisited” title from Richard Matheson. It included the original story, plus a never-before-published screenplay by Matheson, an Afterword by film director David Koepp, and a new Introduction by the author.

The Haunted Air was F. Paul Wilson’s latest “Repairman Jack” novel from Gauntlet. In his fifth adventure, the enigmatic protagonist found himself confronting rival spiritualists and a cult of immortals in a narrative that tied in to the author’s other supernatural series that began with The Keep.

Limited to 750 signed and numbered copies, Poppy Z. Brite’s Lost Souls: Tenth Anniversary Edition included two pages of the first electric-typed draft of the book, a lost chapter from an earlier draft, correspondence with Douglas E. Winter and editor Jeanne Cavelos, a short story entitled “Stay Awake” that takes place after the events of the book, and a new Introduction by the author.

Impact 20 was William F. Nolan’s first collection, reissued in a revised and expanded edition of twenty-three short stories by Gauntlet, along with the original Introduction and a new Afterword by Ray Bradbury and a Preface by Gary Braunbeck.

Bloodletting Press published Douglas Clegg’s 1990 novel Breeder with a new Introduction by Edward Lee in a limited edition of 500 and a leather-bound slip cased printing of twenty-six copies.

Clegg’s Nightmare House was the first volume in the “Harrow Trilogy”, a tale of the ultimate in haunted houses, available in an edition of 750 signed copies from Cemetery Dance Publications. Spider Moon was a new short novel of non-supernatural horror and crime from John Shirley, written especially for Cemetery Dance and limited to 1,500 signed copies.

Hallowe’en came to the pumpkin town of Orangefield with a vengeance in Al Sarrantonio’s novel of the same name, while a woman was stalked by a Monstrosity in the novel by Edward Lee.

Alien-possessed humans controlled the Earth in Darkness, Darkness, the first in Peter Crowther’s “Forever Twilight” series, and Cast in Dark Waters by Ed Gorman and Tom Piccirilli mixed voodoo, vampires and pirates in the sixteenth-century Caribbean. Both novellas were available from Cemetery Dance in editions of 750 numbered copies.

Nancy A. Collins’s second short story collection, Knuckles and Tales: Southern Neo-Gothic, featured two previously unpublished novelettes in the “Seven Devils Cycle”.

From Cemetery Dance Publications and edited by Richard Chizmar, Shivers was an anthology of new and reprint fiction from such authors as Bentley Little, “Jack Ketchum” (Dallas Mayr), Douglas Clegg, Edward Lee, Simon Clark, Nancy A. Collins, Graham Masterton, Tim Lebbon, Brian Keene, Thomas F. Monteleone, Peter Crowther, Jay Bonansinga and John Pelan.

Edited by bookseller and publisher Greg Ketter under his own DreamHaven Books imprint, Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores contained sixteen tales (two reprints) by authors such as Gene Wolfe, Ramsey Campbell, Charles de Lint, Lisa Morton, Jack Williamson, Melanie Tem, Rick Hautala and Harlan Ellison, along with an Introduction by Neil Gaiman. Published to celebrate DreamHaven’s twenty-fifth anniversary, many of the stories predictably fell into the “magic bookshop” variety. The volume was limited to 1,000 signed and numbered copies.

Cold Hand on My Shoulder: Tales of Terror and Suspense was a new collection of nine stories (four original) by Basil Copper, published by Sarob Press in a 300-copy limited edition. Illustrated by Randy Broecker, the hardcover volume also included an informative Introduction by Richard Dalby.

Originally set to be published by David Marshall’s Pumpkin Books before that short-lived imprint collapsed, Ghosts & Other Lovers contained thirteen previously published stories and a new Introduction by Lisa Tuttle. It appeared from Sarob in a limited edition of 250 copies, illustrated by Paul Lowe.

Limited to 225 copies, The Dark Tales collected fourteen dark fantasy stories (two original) written over a fifteen-year period by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, along with an Afterword by the author. Journeys Beyond Advice contained seven stories (including three original novellas), along with a somewhat pretentious Afterword by author Rhys Hughes. Illustrated by Justin Phillips, it was limited to 250 copies. All Sarob titles were additionally published in fifty-two-copy de luxe signed and lettered editions.

Edited with a new Introduction by Hugh Lamb, and illustrated by his son, Richard, The Invisible Eye contained fifteen stories and a novella by nineteenth-century authors (Emile) Erckmann–(Louise Alexandre) Chatrian. The Ash-Tree Press volume was an expanded edition of the editor’s now rare 1981 Millington collection, The Best Tales of Terror of Erckmann–Chatrian, which he discussed in the Appendix.

Limited to 600 copies, Hauntings – The Supernatural Stories contained the most comprehensive collection of Vernon Lee’s (the pseudonym of Violet Paget, 1856–1935) supernatural stories ever published, including a previously uncollected tale, edited with an Introduction by David G. Rowlands.

Edited with an Introduction and notes by Jessica Amanda Salmonson, Sinister Romance: Collected Ghost Stories contained seven gentle supernatural tales by women’s campaigner Mary Heaton Vorse (1874–1966) along with a Preface by Jane Yolen. Stefan Dziemianowicz edited and introduced Not Exactly Ghosts: Collected Weird Tales, an omnibus of the title collection (1947) and Fires Burn Blue (1948) by Andrew Caldecott (1884–1951), containing twenty-five stories. Both volumes were limited to 500 copies.

Figures In Rain: Weird and Ghostly Tales was the first collection of short stories by Chet Williamson, with an Introduction by Joe R. Lansdale. It contained twenty-seven tales (two original), and was also limited to 500 copies.

Expanding upon the four stories included in the identically titled 1992 chapbook, No.472 Cheyne Walk: Carnacki: The Untold Stories also added eight (six original) spot-on pastiches of William Hope Hodgson’s psychic investigator written by either British author A.F. (Chico) Kidd or Australian Rick Kennett.

Schalken the Painter and Others by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814–1873) covered the period between 1838, when Le Fanu’s first supernatural tale appeared in the Dublin University Magazine, and 1861. Edited with an Introduction by Jim Rockhill and limited to 650 copies, it was the first of three volumes collecting together all of Le Fanu’s short supernatural fiction.

Edited with an Introduction by John Pelan, Off the Sand Road: Ghost Stories Volume One was the first of two volumes for Ash-Tree Press collecting together Russell Kirk’s supernatural stories. Editor Mike Ashley (who won the SF Research Association’s Pilgrim Award in June for Distinguished SF Criticism) contributed the Preface to The Mirror and Other Strange Reflections, the first collection of twenty-eight weird and supernatural stories by Arthur Porges. Both books were limited to 500 copies.

The Amazing Dreams of Andrew Latter by Harold Begbie was the latest volume in “The Ash-Tree Press Occult Detectives Library”, edited with an Introduction by Jack Adrian. It reprinted a series of six “dreamland” tales written in 1904 for the London Magazine and was also limited to 500 copies.

As usual edited and introduced by Jack Adrian, The Ash-Tree Press Annual Macabre 2002: Ghosts at “The Cornhill” reprinted fifteen stories from the Victorian periodical and was the first of two annual compilations highlighting the magazine’s supernatural content.

First published in 1935 and reprinted as an Ash-Tree trade paperback, Vampires Overhead by Alan Hyder was about an alien invasion of the Earth, with an Introduction by Jack Adrian. Gerald Biss’s 1919 werewolf novel The Door of the Unreal was reprinted with an Introduction by Stefan Dziemianowicz, while Divinations of the Deep collected five tales of cosmic horror by Matt Cardin.

Originally conceived as a 150-copy Christmas collection for members of The Ghost Story Society in 1994, Lady Stanhope’s Manuscript and Other Supernatural Tales was the first publication from Ash-Tree Press. Edited by Barbara Roden, it featured stories by Katherine Haynes, Christopher Roden, G. W. Howarth, Dale J. Nelson and Tina Rath. Reissued as part of the “Ash-Tree Press Occasional Booklet” series, it contained a new Preface to the second edition.

Published by Tartarus Press in an edition of 500 copies, James Methuen-Campbell’s biography Denton Welch: Writer & Artist was a study of the author (who died tragically in 1948), and included the first publication of three stories, a full bibliography and sixty-one illustrations, fifteen in full colour.

From the same imprint and limited to 350 copies, The Sacrifice and Other Stories by “Sarban” (John William Wall) contained four novella-length stories (two previously unpublished), while A Damask of the Dead collected the exotic and sensual poetry of John Gale, limited to 250 signed copies.

Stories from a Lost Anthology was the third collection by Welsh writer Rhys Hughes to be published by Tartarus, with an Introduction by Michael Moorcock. It was limited to 400 copies. Undesirable Guests and Other Stories was the first collection by William Charlton. Featuring fourteen tales of ghosts and unease, it was limited to 300 copies signed by the author.

Written With My Left Hand collected the stories of Nugent Barker, while William Sansom’s collection of twenty-five stories, Various Temptations, was introduced by Mark Valentine. Both were limited to 350 copies.

Limited to 400 copies, M.P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski contained six stories featuring the Decadent psychic sleuth, three written in “collaboration” with poet and literary researcher John Gawsworth, one of which was unfinished. Brian Stableford provided the Introduction, along with notes by R.B. Russell.

Stableford also translated French Decadent Jean Lorrain’s collection Nightmares of an Ether-Drinker in a handsome edition from Tartarus, limited to 350 copies.

Edited by John Pelan and Steve Savile and published by Midnight House, the late Fritz Leiber’s Smoke Ghost & Other Apparitions contained eighteen classic or obscure stories and a previously unpublished novelette. Featuring an Introduction by Ramsey Campbell, it was limited to 450 numbered copies.

Day Dark, Night Bright was a new collection of science fiction stories by Leiber, including a “lost” novelette, with an Introduction by John Pelan. Pelan also introduced The Harlem Horror, a collection of fifteen classic stories by Sir Charles Birkin, limited to 450 copies.

Cited as one of the thirteen best novels of supernatural horror by the late Karl Edward Wagner, Fingers of Fear by J.U. Nicholson had been unavailable in hardcover for more than sixty years. Illustrated by Allen Koszowski, the 450-copy edition included a new Introduction and a bibliography of Nicolson’s books by editor Douglas A. Anderson.

The enigmatic R.R. Ryan was the only author with three entries on Wagner’s list of the thirty-nine best horror novels of all time. Echo of a Curse, edited with an Introduction and essay by D.H. Olson, was the first volume in Midnight House’s programme to reprint the best of Ryan’s novels.

Also from Midnight House, Feesters in the Lake and Other Stories was a collection of all the weird fiction tales by Bob Leman, with a Preface by Jim Rockhill.

From Bereshith Publishing, Family Tradition was another “hard-core horror” novel by Edward Lee and John Pelan, about eel-seeking city slickers.

Earthling publications produced Brian A. Hopkins’s novella El Dia De Los Muertos in an attractive hardcover edition limited to 500 numbered and signed editions and fifteen lettered copies. The story involved an archaeologist awakening the Aztec gods in an attempt to save his marriage by resurrecting his dead daughter.

Richard A. Lupoff’s Claremont Tales II from Gary Turner’s Golden Gryphon featured thirteen stories (one original) ranging from hard-boiled crime to Lovecraftian horror, along with a new Introduction by the author and illustrations by Nicholas Jainschigg.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters Sherlock Holmes and Professor Edward Challenger teamed-up in London to fight the minions of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos in Ralph E. Vaughan’s novel Sherlock Holmes and The Terror Out of Time, published by Gryphon Books.

The Cannibal Within was a short novella by intellectual-history professor Mark L. Mirabello Ph.D, published by Mandrake at Oxford as a trade paperback.

From Delirium Books, Michael Laimo’s debut novel Atmosphere involved a police detective’s investigation into mysterious mutilations. It was available in a signed edition of 300 copies and was subsequently reprinted in mass-market paperback by Leisure.

Available in trade paperback, signed hardcover and a de luxe signed and numbered edition from Delirium, Guises collected ten stories (including three original novelettes) plus a volume of poetry by Charlee Jacob. Visions Through a Shattered Lens contained twenty stories (nine original) by Gerard Houarner and was available in a 300-copy signed hardcover edition.

Dark Demons: Tales of Obsession, Possession and Unnatural Desire by Kurt Newton collected sixteen stories with an Introduction by Michael Arnzen, while Maternal Instinct included a 40,000-word “hard-core horror” novella and four short stories by J. F. Gonzalez. Both were available in trade paperback and as 150-copy signed and numbered hardcover editions.

Also from Delirium, Dark Testament edited by Shane Ryan Staley featured twenty-one Biblical stories by Stanley C. Sargent, Don D’Ammassa, Charlee Jacob, Gerard Houarner, W. H. Pugmire, John B. Rosenman, Kurt Newton, Mark McLaughlin and others, along with artwork by Gak. It appeared in a hardcover edition of 200 copies signed by all the contributors. Publisher Staley also collected his own stories in I’ll Be Damned, with an Introduction by Brian Keene.

Unfortunately, Delirium’s future publishing schedule had to be cut back after a burst water pipe flooded its offices, damaging the imprint’s paperback inventory.

From Freak Press and edited by Kelly Laymon, Excitable Boys was a trade paperback anthology, inspired by the annual World Horror Convention “Gross-Out Contests”, which included such winners and runners-up as Rain Graves, Edward Lee, Brian Keene, Mark McLaughlin and Gavin Williams. It was illustrated by Gak.

Edited by Gerard Houarner and Gak, Dead Cats Bouncing from Necro Publications/Bedlam Press collected fifteen stories about deceased felines by Jack Ketchum, Edward Lee, Paul Di Filippo, Tom Piccirilli, Mick Farren, Yvonne Navarro, David Niall Wilson, John Skipp and others. It was published as a signed 400-copy trade paperback and a 100-copy hardcover.

Available as a 300-copy signed hardcover and a twenty-six-copy lettered and slip cased edition, Sex, Drugs & Power Tools was a collection of three “hard-core horror” novellas by Edward Lee (one original). Necro also reissued Lee’s 1992 novel Succubi in its first hardcover edition with restored text.

From Overlook Connection Press, Jack Ketchum’s 1995 novel Red involved an escalating dispute between a man and three troubled teenagers. It was available as a paperback, a signed slip case edition of 100 copies, and a twenty-six-copy lettered wood-cased leather-bound edition. The same publisher also reissued Ketchum’s 1989 novel The Girl Next Door, which retained a 1996 Introduction by Stephen King but dropped some other extraneous material.

James Van Pelt’s first short story collection, Strangers and Beggars, appeared in trade paperback from Fairwood Press. It contained seventeen stories (one original), loosely assembled under four categories.

Telos Publishing’s successful line of hardcover “Doctor Who Novellas” continued with Keith Topping’s Ghost Ship, in which the fourth Time Lord arrived on the Queen Mary in 1963 and struggled to save the passengers from the supernatural forces that haunted the luxury ocean liner. With a brief but informative Introduction by Hugh Lamb, the de luxe signed edition also included a full-colour frontispiece by Polish artist Dariusz Jasiczak.

In the same series, Foreign Devils by Andrew Cartmel involved the Doctor and William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder in a series of bizarre murders in Victorian London. The book also included a reprint of Hodgson’s 1910 story “The Whistling Room” and a historical Introduction by Mike Ashley.

With the BBC withdrawing its licence to publish Doctor Who volumes, David J. Howe and Stephen James Walker’s Telos Publishing expanded on its range of titles to include books on cult TV shows and a new horror/dark fantasy line. As part of the latter, a special twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Graham Masterton’s The Manitou featured a new Introduction by the author and for the first time reinstated the book’s original two-chapter ending. There was also a limited hardcover edition of 100 copies, signed by Masterton and including colour pre-production art from the 1978 film adaptation.

Also from Telos, Paul Finch’s Cape Wrath was an original trade paperback novel in which the disturbed spirit of a Viking berserker brought death and madness to the Scottish island community of Craeghatir.

Mariah of the Spirits and Other Southern Ghost Stories contained thirteen tales by Sherry Austin, published by Overmountain Press.

Excelsior Entertainment’s Eden Studios imprint published The Book of More Flesh, editor James Lowder’s follow-up anthology to The Book of All Flesh, inspired by the zombie survival role-playing game All Flesh Must Be Eaten. It contained twenty-three original stories by Scott Edelman, Paul Finch, Scott Nicholson, Mark McLaughlin, Tom Piccirilli, Don D’Ammassa, Darrell Schweitzer and others.

Beautifully produced in hardcover by Sean Wallace’s Prime Books imprint, Jeff VanderMeer’s City of Saints and Madmen contained four previously published novellas about the author’s mysterious city of Ambergris, along with various notes, glossaries and stories, plus a fun Introduction by Michael Moorcock.

VanderMeer and Forrest Aguirre teamed up to edit Leviathan 3: Libri quosdam ad sciéntiam, álios ad insaniam deduxére, a hefty trade paperback anthology of twenty-seven mostly original horror stories from Ministry of Whimsy/Prime Books. The contributors included Michael Moorcock, Brian Stableford, Theophile Gautier, Carol Emshwiller and no less than six stories by the overrated Zoran Živković.

Jack Fisher’s Flesh & Blood Press from New Jersey issued Forrest Aguirre’s The Butterfly Artist, containing ten stories (four reprints); John Urbancik’s Shadows Legends & Secrets, collecting eight stories (two reprints); Paul Melniczek’s A Halloween Harvest, containing three stories, and William P. Simmons’s Becoming October, also featuring three stories (one reprint) plus an Introduction by T.M. Wright.

From the same imprint, Dark Voices: A Collection of Poetry from the Writers of Wicked Verse contained twenty-three poems by Charlee Jacob and others, edited by Jack Fisher and Nancy Bennett.

Produced by Durtro as a digipak, the text to Thomas Ligotti’s In a Foreign Town, In a Foreign Land was bound in as a fifty-nine-page booklet with a compact disk by Current 93, to be played at dusk at low volume while reading the text.

Ligotti’s My Work is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror was published by David Wynn’s Mythos Books in a hardcover edition of 1,000 copies. Illustrated by Harry O. Morris, it included the reprint stories “My Work is Not Yet Done” and “I Have a Special Plan for This World” along with the original novella “The Nighmare Network”.

Also from Mythos, Stanley C. Sargent’s The Taint of Lovecraft was an illustrated collection of nine stories (one original), nine poems (eight reprint) and two revised articles, edited by Robert M. Price with an Introduction by Richard Lupoff and interior illustrations by Allen Koszowski.

From Rainfall Books, Nocturnal Products contained thirteen stories by German author Eddie M. Angerhuber, edited by John B. Ford with an Introduction by Thomas Ligotti. Paul Kane’s collection Touching the Flame contained eighteen short horror stories and an Introduction by Simon Clark, from the same publisher.

Available as handsome trade paperbacks from Joe Morey’s Dark Regions Press in California, Ken Wiseman’s reprint collection Fourteen Fantasies from a Shop Called Imagination contained exactly what the title promised, while Tangled Webs and Other Imaginary Weaving collected fifteen fantasy stories (ten reprints) by Laura J. Underwood with an Introduction by Selina Rosen. Crawling Between Heaven and Earth contained eleven stories (seven reprints) by Sarah A. Hoyt, and Mary Soon Lee’s Ebb Tides and Other Tales featured twenty tales (sixteen reprints) and an Introduction by the author.

Following her tribute to Jack Finney’s pod people in 2000, editor Suzanne Donahue’s Succubus Press published the softcover themed anthologies What Walks Alone: A Creative Tribute to Shirley Jackson’s Novel “The Haunting of Hill House” and Red Jack. The former featured eight original stories, a listing of Shirley Jackson’s other work, plus short essays by Michael Marshall Smith, P.D. Cacek, Christopher Fowler, Jack Ketchum, Ramsey Campbell and others. The latter was an original collection of ten stories about Jack the Ripper from Steve Lockley and Jeffrey Thomas, among others. Each volume also included a story by the editor/publisher.

Angel Body and Other Magic for the Soul edited by Chris Reed and David Memmott was issue #24 of Sheffield’s Back Brain Recluse and #26 in Oregon’s Wordcraft Speculative Writers Series. The illustrated trade paperback anthology contained twenty-five stories and poems (seven reprints) from, among others, Don Webb, Andrew Darlington, Thomas Wiloch, Scott Edelman, Steve Sneyd, Denise Dumars and Bruce Boston.

From Hippocampus Press, Lovecraft’s Library: A Catalogue, Revised and Enlarged by S.T. Joshi provided comprehensive information on nearly 1,000 books owned by Lovecraft.

Edited by Joshi, Douglas A. Anderson and David E. Schultz, Eyes of the God: The Weird Fiction and Poetry of R.H. Barlow showcased the work of Lovecraft’s friend and original literary executor (1918–51).

Joshi and Schultz also teamed up to edit and introduce The Last Oblivion: Best Fantastic Poems of Clark Ashton Smith. The first major selection of Smith’s poetry in over thirty years, it included more than two dozen unpublished or uncollected works. As a bonus, the book contained a glossary, bibliography, indexes and two colour paintings by Smith. Also edited by Joshi for Hippocampus, The Black Diamonds was the first publication of a 90,000-word novel written by the fourteen-year-old Smith in 1907.

From Chaosium, The Book of Eibon edited by Robert M. Price was based around Clark Ashton Smith’s ancient tome, with additional contributions by Lin Carter, Joseph S. Pulver, Richard L. Tierney, Michael Cisco and others.

Also edited with an Introduction by Price, the second revised and expanded edition of Necronomicon: Selected Stories and Essays Concerning the Blasphemous Tome of the Mad Arab featured work by Manly Wade Wellman, Frederik Pohl, Robert A.W. Lowndes, Richard L. Tierney, Robert Silverberg, John Brunner, Fred Chappell, L. Sprague de Camp, Frank Belknap Long, Lin Carter and H.P. Lovecraft himself.

Meisha Merlin Publishing’s The Gossamer Eye collected new and reprint poetry and fiction by Mark McLaughlin, Rain Graves and David Niall Wilson, edited by Stephen Pagel. Lee Killough’s Wilding Nights appeared from the same publisher and featured werewolf homicide detective Alison Goodnight.

From Savoy Books, The Killer was a new, definitive printing of Colin Wilson’s 1970 serial-killer novel, which included an original Introduction by the author and dust-jacket art by Francis Bacon.

Published by Australia’s MirrorDanse Books and edited by Bill Congreve, Passing Strange was subtitled “A New Anthology of Australian Speculative Fiction” and contained thirteen original stories by such members of the Infinitas Bookshop Writers’ Group as Robert Hood, Kyla Ward and the editor himself. From the same imprint, Robert Hood’s Immaterial featured fifteen ghost stories (two original) and an interview with the author.

Agog! Fantastic Fiction was a new anthology published by Australia’s University of Wollongong and contained twenty-nine “Tales of Fantasy, Imagination and Wonder” (one reprint) by Leigh Blackmore, Terry Dowling, Stephen Dedman, Damien Broderick, Rick Kennett, Kyla Wood, Robert Hood and others, along with an Introduction by Sean Williams.

Attractively produced by Bob and Nancy Garcia’s American Fantasy Press, A Walking Tour of the Shambles: Little Walks for Sightseers, Number 16 was a chapbook novella by Neil Gaiman and Gene Wolfe (or Wolfe and Gaiman, depending on which variant cover-colour edition you purchased), published to tie in with the authors’ Guest of Honour stints at the Chicago World Horror Convention. Boasting a colour cover by Gahan Wilson and interior illustrations by Randy Broecker and Earl Geier, the macabrely funny booklet was a guide to a mythical area of old Chicago that had survived the Great Fire of 1871.

The enigmatic Sidecar Preservation Society continued its series of handsomely produced chapbooks with Red Harvest, a collection of the late Karl Edward Wagner’s poems and songs from his “Kane” stories, edited by Scott F. Wyatt and introduced and illustrated by Stephen Jones. Hain’s Island was a science fiction story by Ramsey Campbell with cover artwork by Rodger Gerberding. Both booklets were limited to just 200 copies, a number of which were bound in hardcover.

From the same imprint and limited to 150 copies, Tales of the Backveld contained two stories from 1926 by Francis H. Sibson, with a fascinating Introduction by D.H. Olson. Recall Dark Memories contained twenty-eight poems (five original) by W. Paul Ganley with an Introduction by Brian Lumley.

2 Creepy Stories from New York’s Small Beer Press contained just that, a pair of superior reprint tales by Kelly Link and Ray Vukcevich. Catskin: a swaddled zine was a strange little story by Link which answered the question: “Is this a cat?” It was published by The Fortress of Words/Jelly Ink Press as a small-sized booklet.

From Gauntlet Publications’ Edge Books imprint, Right to Life contained the 1998 title novella and two original short stories by Jack Ketchum.

Ketchum also introduced In the Spirit, a chapbook collection of three ghost stories (two original) by P.D. Cacek, published by Wormhole Books in a signed edition of 750 copies, a 250-copy hardcover edition and a lettered edition of fifty-two copies. From the same imprint came Twisted in the Dark, a collection of four mystery stories by Judith Post. Edgar Allan Poe’s Dark Dreams contained three poems by Poe, illustrated in colour by Alan M. Clark, and introduced by Edward Bryant with a biography of the author by Dawn Dunn. It was available as a 750-copy chapbook, a numbered hardcover of 250 copies and a fifty-two-copy lettered edition, signed by Clark, Bryant and Dunn. Wormhole also sent out Independence Day and Christmas cards containing short-short stories by Steve Rasnic Tem and Judith Post, respectively.

Illustrated with photomontages by Eric M. Turnmire, Where the Southern Cross the Dog: The Green River Stories published by Seattle’s Fairwood Press contained three supernatural tales (one original) set in the rural South by Trey R. Barker, with an Introduction by Steve Rasnic Tem. Barker’s other chapbook from Yard Dog Press, Veil of the Soul, was about the life of Edgar Allan Poe.

From the same publisher, Gary Jonas’s debut novel One-Way Ticket to Midnight involved an old blues musician and a serial killer of homeless people, while Jax Laffer’s The Blood Within featured telepathic twins and a cult of Satanic vampires.

Florida’s Camelot Books and Gifts, Inc. launched its chapbook line with Pansu, a slim volume by Poppy Z. Brite about demonic possession.

Nemonymous Two: A Journal of Parthenogenetic Fiction and Late Labelling contained eighteen anonymously published short stories whose authors would be identified in the following issue. Among those revealed as contributors to the first volume were Allen Ashley, Simon Clark, Rhys Hughes, Mike O’Driscoll and Jeff VanderMeer.

The Vengeance Jar and Other Stories collected three new supernatural adventures of ship’s captain Luís da Silva by Chico Kidd, along with an Introduction and Afterword by the author.

Mark McLaughlin’s Your Handy Office Guide to Corporate Monsters was an odd little booklet of blank verse published by Richard Geyer that introduced the reader to twelve ’orrible office workers such as “The Spittylicker”, “The Potbellied Smirkleflab” and “The Finickyfoofoo”. R. Chetwynd-Hayes would have been proud!

From Beccon Publications, Once There Was a Magazine . . . was a personal view of the classic 1940s pulp magazines Unknown and Unknown Worlds, compiled and annotated by Fred Smith and filled with useful indexes.

Despite winning a $500,000 judgement against his one-time business associate Ray Ferry in May 2000, 85-year-old Forrest J. Ackerman was forced to put his famed eighteen-room “Ackermansion” and collection of 300,000 science fiction and horror items up for sale to pay legal expenses estimated to be several hundred thousand dollars.

Although Ferry claimed to be destitute, a US Bankruptcy Court found the transfer of assets, including the Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine trade mark, to be fraudulent and “an unlawful scheme to defraud” Ackerman, who had not collected any of the judgement after Ferry and his associates decided to appeal the verdict.

On 12 November, the California Court of Appeal finally decided in Ackerman’s favour and affirmed the judgement against Ferry in its entirety. The Federal Court also issued an Order of Contempt against Ferry and fined him an additional $50,000.

Meanwhile, in late March, Ackerman had successful surgery to treat a massive blood clot on the brain and, the following month, made a full recovery from a case of septic shock and pneumonia.

Sporting a subtle title change and an improved interior design, Andy Cox’s beautifully produced The 3rd Alternative published four superior issues in 2002. Along with the regular book reviews by Peter Tennant and others, the magazine included fiction by Tony Richards, Ian Watson, Christopher Kenworthy, Gala Blau, Conrad Williams, Christopher Fowler, John Grant, Brian Hodge, Joel Lane and a superb novel excerpt by Graham Joyce. There were also articles and regular columns from Fowler, Allen Ashley and Gary Couzens, and interviews with M. John Harrison, Mark Morris, Alan Moore, Michael Marshall Smith, Mark Chadbourn and Neil Gaiman.

From the same publisher, the four latest issues of The Fix featured numerous reviews of short-fiction publications, along with columns by Peter Tennant, Mat Coward and James Van Pelt; an interview with Richard Chizmar; reminiscences by Neal Asher and Brian Aldiss, plus Ed Gorman, Martin Edwards and Paul Di Filippo’s lists of their Top Ten Stories. Also published by TTA Press and edited by Andy Cox, Crimewave 6: Breaking Point contained eleven dark crime stories by Mat Coward, Gary Couzens, Steve Rasnic Tem, Conrad Williams and others.

Meanwhile, the liquidators of Emagazineshop.com, which took online subscriptions to TTA Press and other magazines, returned monies to those who subscribed in June and July, during which time the company was trading fraudulently. Subscriptions taken before that time were still honoured by the publisher.

Cemetery Dance published four solid issues, edited by Richard Chizmar and Robert Morrish, and featuring stories by Graham Masterton, William F. Nolan, Ed Gorman, Hugh B. Cave, Gary A. Braunbeck, Bentley Little, Darrell Schweitzer, Andy Duncan, Gary Raisor, Kathryn Ptacek, Mark Morris, Brian A. Hopkins, Phil Rickman and Steve Vance. Along with interviews with Masterton, Gorman, Braunbeck, Hopkins, Rickman, Michael Slade, Gahan Wilson, Poppy Z. Brite and Robert Weinberg, there were excellent regular columns by Bev Vincent (on Stephen King-related news) and Thomas F. Monteleone (on being ripped-off by television), plus more non-fiction and reviews from John Pelan, Charles L. Grant, Poppy Z. Brite, Michael Marano and Paula Guran.

Edited by George H. Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer, Weird Tales celebrated its seventy-ninth year of publication with four more issues featuring fiction by Ashok Banker, Charles Harness, David Langford, Stephen Gallagher, Tony Richards, Tanith Lee, Ian Watson, Ian McDowell, James Van Pelt and Schweitzer, among others. Along with an interview with Tim Powers and non-fiction columns by S.T. Joshi (on Ramsey Campbell and Algernon Blackwood) and Douglas E. Winter (on Stephen King and Campbell), there was also some excellent artwork by George Barr, Tim Kirk, Russell Morgan and even a Virgil Finlay cover!

As good as Weird Tales looked, other DNA Publications such as Fantastic Stories of the Imagination and Dreams of Decadence: Vampire Poetry and Fiction were nothing more than glossy fanzines, despite featuring fiction by Tom Piccirilli, James S. Dorr, Gerard Houarner and Sarah A. Hoyt, among others.

Even Weird Tales wasn’t as good-looking as Black Gate: Adventures in Fantasy Literature. Published and edited by John O’Neill, this beautifully produced, perfect-bound quarterly included fantasy fiction by Mike Resnick, Darrell Schweitzer, Brian McNaughton, Michael McLaughlin, Tina L. Jens and Cory Doctorow, along with reviews, columns, and excellent interior artwork from Chris Pepper, Denis Rodier, Bernie Mireault, Richard Corben, Gabriel Morrissette, Chris Pepper and Chick Lukacs.

Along with a clever short story by David J. Schow and an interview with Clive Barker, the fifth issue of Horror Garage included a number of short-shorts by Richard Kadrey, Charlee Jacob, Edward Lee, Greg Kihn and Rudy Rucker originally intended for a cancelled charity anthology created by John Shirley. Shirley himself was represented with a story in the sixth issue, along with a new vampire tale by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, an interview with Ed Gorman and a fine article by Norman Partridge about the rivalry between Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. With this issue, Paula Guran announced that she would no longer edit the International Horror Guild Award-winning horror/music magazine following disagreements over the style and content of the publication. Assistant editor Michele Patterson resigned after Guran’s dismissal by publisher Rich Black, who took over all editorial duties himself.

Gordon Van Gelder celebrated five years as the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and the periodical surpassed the total number of issues (602) published by the world’s first regular science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, making it the second most prolific SF title after Analog.

The eleven issues of F&SF for 2002 (including an annual “double”) featured such writers as Harlan Ellison, Gene Wolfe, Jack Williamson, Steven Utley, Graham Joyce (a reprint), Carol Emshwiller, Thomas M. Disch, Gardner Dozois, William Browning Spencer, Don Webb, David Prill, Robert Sheckley, Scott Bradfield, Esther M. Friesner, Jack Cady, Lucius Shepard, Jeffrey Ford, Tanith Lee, the late Damon Knight, Terry Bisson, Ursula K. Le Guin, and another tale of Victorian ghostbuster Harry Challenge by Ron Goulart.

Along with the usual book reviews by Charles de Lint, James Sallis, Elizabeth Hand, Robert K.J. Killheffer, James Sallis and Michelle West, and film reviews by Lucius Shepard and Kathi Maio, the magazine’s popular “Curiosities” column featured recommendations by Stefan Dziemianowicz, David Langford, Gregory Benford, Paul Di Filippo, Jeff VanderMeer, David Westwood, Bill Sheehan, Mike Ashley and John Eggeling.

The cover of the December F&SFá showcased the last painting completed by artist Ron Walotsky, who died unexpectedly in July.

Edited by David Pringle, Britain’s premier SF magazine Interzone celebrated its twentieth anniversary by publishing only ten issues instead of the usual twelve. Along with the news and reviews columns, there was fiction from Thomas M. Disch, Don Webb, Mary Soon Lee, Michael Swanwick, Brian Stableford, James Lovegrove, Richard Calder, Darrell Schweitzer, Stephen Baxter, Eric Brown, Terry Bisson, Norman Spinrad, Geoffrey A. Landis, Peter T. Garrett and no less than four stories apiece by Mat Colborn and Serbian writer Zoran Živković.

Interzone also featured interviews with Živković, Kim Stanley Robinson, Harry Turtledove, Liz Williams, China Miéville, Bruce Sterling, Ted Chiang and Barrington J. Bayley, while TV reviewer Evelyn Lewes continued to annoy contributors to the letters column. Unfortunately, the struggling periodical was hit by a number of bad debts during the year.

Edited by Trent Jamieson and Garry Nurrish, Redsine was a quarterly magazine of dark fantasy and horror from Australia, published in the US by Prime Books in trade paperback format. The four issues from 2002 included fiction by L.H. Maynard and M.P.N. Sims, D.F. Lewis and David Mathew, Michael Kauffmann and Mark McLaughlin, Rhys Hughes, Michael Laimo, Jeff VanderMeer, Keith Brooke, Stepan Chapman, Brian Stableford, Monica J. O’Rourke and John Urbancik, plus interviews with Kim Newman, Tim Powers, Elizabeth Hand and Brian Stableford.

The two paperback-format issues of Paul Fraser’s Spectrum SF included stories by Mary Soon Lee, Neal Asher, a collaboration between Michael Coney and Eric Brown, and a serialized novel by Charles Stross, along with extensive book listings in “The Archive” section. The editor noted that the magazine’s future publication schedule would be “occasional”.

Ben Jeapes’s print-on-demand imprint Big Engine launched editor Liz Holliday’s bi-monthly 3SF in October with stories by Darrell Schweitzer, Lawrence Watt-Evans and Mary Soon Lee, along with interviews with Ian McDonald and George R.R. Martin. The December issue featured fiction from Gene Wolfe, Joe Haldeman, David Langford and others, plus interviews with Haldeman and Megan Lindholm.

Shawna McCarthy’s bi-monthly Realms of Fantasy remained one of the genre’s best-designed magazines. Although not strictly horror, except for Gahan Wilson’s insightful book-review column, it still featured superior fantasy fiction and articles by Bruce Holland Rogers, Liz Williams, Lois Tilton, Robert Silverberg, Terri Windling, Darrell Schweitzer, Karen Haber and others, along with a gallery of art by Frank Frazetta.

Patrick and Honna Swenson celebrated the birth of their son Orion with two issues of the usually quarterly Talebones. Along with fiction and poetry by Nina Kiriki Hoffman, James Van Pelt, Joel Lane, Bruce Boston, Darrell Schweitzer and others, the perfect-bound digest included interviews with Harry Turtledove and James P. Hogan, and numerous book reviews by, among others, Edward Bryant.

Mindfire Entertainment announced the acquisition of film magazine Cinefantastique after the untimely death of founding publisher Frederick S. Clarke in 2000. Editor-in-chief David E. Williams and editorial director Mark A. Altman planned to relaunch the title early in 2003. Mindfire also acquired CFQ’s sister publication, Femme Fatales.

A year after it was officially cancelled by publisher Sovereign Media, Sci Fi, the official magazine of the SciFi Channel, was revived by the channel itself under the aegis of its original editor, Scott Edelman. The bi-monthly issues contained all the expected features on the Star Wars and Matrix sequels, TV’s Smallville, Stargate SG-1 and Farscape, plus a special edition previewing Steven Spielberg’s miniseries Taken, which included a bonus CD-ROM. The magazine’s companion website, SciFi.com, attracted three million visitors per month.

Tim and Donna Lucas’s Video Watchdog kept to its monthly format with features on Dario Argento, Paul Verhoeven, William Castle, John Frankenheimer, Buckaroo Banzai, Mulholland Drive, Thirteen Ghosts, Hannibal, Harry Potter, The Others and TV’s The Outer Limits. Although the digest magazine could have done without the self-indulgent reviews of Charles Largent and a totally pointless interview with actress Kay Linaker, there was perceptive commentary from the always-reliable Bill Cooke, Shane M. Dallman, Kim Newman, David J. Schow, Richard Harland Smith and Douglas E. Winter. Journalist-turned-film director Joe Dante also joined the staff with a series of reprint reviews from three decades ago.

Canada’s glossy Rue Morgue included interviews with Herschell Gordon Lewis and David Friedman, along with numerous reviews, while Michael Stein’s Outré interviewed Ted V. Mikels, Tura Satana and artists Basil Gogos and Gahan Wilson. Stein’s companion title, Filmfax, looked at lost horror films, the careers of Yvette Vickers and Jack Elam, and the special effects of TV’s The Twilight Zone.

Despite initial worries by editor/publisher David Longhorn that the title would not survive due to lack of subscriptions, Supernatural Tales produced its third and fourth issues featuring well-chosen fiction by Steve Duffy, Joel Lane, Chico Kidd (another in the “Captain da Silva” series), Tina Rath, Michael Chislett, Don Tumasonis and others. Unfortunately, the presentation was as dull as usual.

Mythos Books published three more belated issues of Robert M. Price’s long-running Crypt of Cthulhu, including a special “Herbert West” edition. These included fiction and poetry by Robert E. Howard and C.J. Henderson (a new Solomon Kane story), August Derleth and John Glasby, Lin Carter and Laurence Cornford, Brian McNaughton, L. Sprague de Camp, Joseph S. Pulver Sr, Darrell Schweitzer and Richard L. Tierney, plus articles from T.G. Cockcroft and Wilum Pugmire.

Edited by John Navroth, Lovecraft’s Weird Mysteries #5 from Pentagram Publications contained four stories by Michael Vance, Reginald Bloom, Lyn McConchie and K.A. Laity, plus an article by Michael Ramaeur and artwork by Allen Koszowski. From the same publisher and editor, Midnight Carnival #4 contained five “unsettling” stories by Sharon Black, Lee Clark Zumpe, Jason Brannon, Vera Searles and Melody Clayton.

Also from Pentagram, the first issue of Navroth’s Diabolique: A Journal of Lost Literature was dedicated to the Symbolist/Decadent movement of the late-nineteenth century, with contributions by Brian Stableford, Ben Hecht, Charlee Jacob, Aubrey Beardsley and others. Hand-bound with an embossed signet linen cover, a ribbon bookmark was laid into the spine, and the limited-edition magazine came with a certificate of publication signed by the publisher.

Edited by Brian Lingard, Mythos Collector from Darktree Press was devoted to H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos. The latest three issues featured fiction and articles, along with interviews with Paul W. Ganley, S.T. Joshi and artists Steven Philip Jones, Allen Koszowski and Bernie Wrightson. Lingard’s Black Satellite #2 published weird horror and startling science fiction in the spirit of The Twilight Zone.

St Michael Amorel’s Cthulhu Sex featured stories, poetry and artwork aimed at an adult audience.

Gordon Linzner’s Space and Time published its usual two issues containing fiction and poetry by A.R. Morlan, Brian A. Hopkins and Brett Alexander Savory, Charlee Jacob, Trey R. Barker, Joey Froehlich and others, along with an article by Jack Ketchum, an interview with Owl Goingback, and some impressive black-and-white artwork by A. Wiedemann, Glenn Chadbourne, Ron Wilber and Bob Conway.

Published by The Haunted River, Weirdly Supernatural #1 was a journal dedicated to the weird and supernatural in literature, film and art. It was edited by Chris Barker, with fiction and articles by T.E.D. Klein, Peter Haining, Richard Dalby, Brian Stableford and others.

Paul Bradshaw’s The Dream Zone managed three new issues, with cleaner design and fiction from Allen Ashley, Rhys Hughes, Peter Tennant, Paul Pinn, Michael Pendragon and others. With issue #13 the magazine was combined with John Lawson’s online publication The Dream People.

The ninth issue of Jack Fisher’s Flesh & Blood contained an interview with Jack Ketchum.

Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine was billed as “Australia’s newest science fiction and fantasy magazine”. Launched in June and edited by Robbie Matthews, the first four bi-monthly digest issues featured fiction and poetry by Lyn McConchie, Stephen Dedman, Richard Womack, Cory Daniells and John B. Rosenman, amongst others, along with various reviews, convention reports and a letters column.

Published in trade paperback, Fantasy Commentator #53-54 edited by A. Langley Searles featured articles by Andrew Darlington, Everett Bleiler, Sam Moskowitz and Bruce Boston on David Keller, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Hugo Gernsbach and others, including Isaac Asimov who, it was revealed in a new book compiled by his wife, had actually died of AIDS in 1992 after contracting HIV from a tainted blood transfusion a decade earlier.

Britain’s monthly Book and Magazine Collector included profiles of authors Nelson S. Bond by Mike Ashley and Tod Robbins by David Ian Chapman, plus a report by Richard Dalby on the auction of a complete Aurthur Rackham library in London in May.

With editor-in-chief Charles N. Brown celebrating his sixty-fifth birthday in 2002, Locus marked its thirty-fourth year of publication and five hundredth issue. The definitive news and reviews periodical of the SF and fantasy genre also featured interviews with Tim Powers, China Miéville, Stephen Baxter, Barry N. Malzberg, Graham Joyce, Paul McAuley, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Elizabeth Hand, Kelly Link, Neil Gaiman and Gene Wolfe, Dan Simmons, Jeff VanderMeer, veteran publisher Betty Ballantine and Charles Brown himself. Brown also finally gave up his editorial title, with Jennifer A. Hall taking over as executive editor of the monthly magazine.

Despite the monthly cover date, DNA Publications’ new incarnation of Science Fiction Chronicle suffered from an erratic publishing schedule and unattractive design. Along with the often dated news and reviews columns by Paul Kincaid, Don D’Ammassa, Jeff Rovin, Steven Sawicki, Brian Keene and Mike Jones, the glossy “professional” trade journal also included guest articles by Spider Robinson, Eric Brown, Allen M. Steele, Cecilia Tan, Paul Barnett, Darrell Schweitzer, Alan Dean Foster, Marvin Kaye and John Gregory Betancourt, plus interviews with Spider and Jeanne Robinson, S.M. Stirling, Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta, Ellen Datlow, Jane Yolen, Chris Bunch, Allen Steele and the ubiquitous Neil Gaiman.

With the September issue, SFC’s title was shortened simply to Chronicle and founder and news editor Andrew I. Porter was fired by publisher Warren Lapine, who replaced him with John R. Douglas.

Published quarterly, The Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America featured columns and articles by Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg (including a hilariously misguided piece about editing anthologies), Michael Cassutt, Howard Waldrop, John Clute, Judith Blish, Paul Di Filippo and others, along with useful market reports and round-table discussions between Gordon Van Gelder, Ellen Datlow and Claude Lalumierè, and Stanley Schmidt, Datlow, Gardner Dozois and Van Gelder.

The May/June issue of Vector, edited by Andrew M. Butler for the British Science Fiction Association, included an interview with China Miéville and articles on the Gollancz Fantasy Masterworks series and H.P. Lovecraft.

The Dracula Society continued to produce its newsletter Voices from the Vaults, containing news and reviews for vampire fans. In 2002, the Society’s Hamilton Deane Award was presented to the writers of the BBC radio play There Are Such Things, while Roger Johnson won The Children of the Night Award.

The Ghost Story Society published three more excellent perfect-bound issues of All Hallows edited by Barbara Roden and Christopher Roden. Along with a lively letters column discussing spooky moments in film and television, the magazine featured the usual insightful and informative columns by Roger Dobson, Mark Valentine, David G. Rowlands, John Howard, James Doig and Richard Dalby; new fiction from Stephen Volk, Don Tumasonis, Simon Bestwick and many others, plus artwork by Douglas Walters, Allen Koszowski, Dallas Goffin, Jason C. Eckhardt, Paul Lowe and veteran Alan Hunter.

In February, The Horror Writers Association announced that, as a result of a poll in the HWA Newsletter, it had decided to alternate six print issues and six electronic PDF issues of the magazine under the editorship of Kathryn Ptacek.

Under the editorship of Melissa Murphy, The British Fantasy Society’s Prism newsletter lost its regular schedule, but still managed to publish a number of informative issues, including a double-sized volume. Along with the usual news, reviews and letters, these included columns and articles by Chaz Brenchley, Peter Coleborn, Allen Ashley and Matt Williams; interviews with James Herbert, Ramsey Campbell, China Miéville, David Gemmell, Simon Clark and Willie Meikle, plus a short-short story by Tim Lebbon and an extract from Campbell’s latest novel. The two issues of the Society’s Dark Horizons were edited by Debbie Bennett and featured stories by Tina Rath, Chris Naylor, Ian Hunter, Steve Lines and Allen Ashley, among others.

The most impressive volume yet from Peter Crowther’s PS Publishing imprint was probably Ramsey Campbell, Probably: On Horror and Sundry Fantasies. Edited by S.T. Joshi, and featuring an Introduction by Douglas E. Winter and tipped-in photo-illustrations by J.K. Potter, the 400-plus page volume collected nearly seventy essays and non-fiction pieces by one of the most insightful writers on horror. It was published in a special signed and numbered edition of 500 paperbacks and a hardcover printing of 200 slip cased copies.

Edited by the author and Stanley Wiater, The Brian Lumley Companion included essays, interviews, bibliographies and concordances by Barbara Ann Lumley, W. Paul Ganley, Stephen Jones, Robert M. Price, Robert Weinberg and others. The Tor Books hardcover featured eight pages of art and photographs and was available as a regular trade edition, and in a signed, slip cased printing of 400 numbered copies and fifty lettered copies which sold out before publication.

Originally published in 1998, Citadel Press reissued Stephen J. Spignesi’s The Lost Work of Stephen King: A Guide to Unpublished Manuscripts, Story Fragments, Alternative Versions and Oddities in a trade paperback edition. King was also the subject of a Pocket Essential written by Ashok Banker.

Mysteries of Time and Spirit: The Letters of H.P. Lovecraft and Donald Wandrei was the first volume in Night Shade Books’ “Lovecraft Letters” series, edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz. It was available in both hardcover and trade paperback editions.

The Science of Vampires by Katherine Ramsland, Ph.D looked at everything from “Vampire Personality Disorder” to “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Vampire Sex but Were Afraid to Ask”.

From Greenwood Press, The Fantastic Vampire: Studies in the Children of the Night edited by James Craig Holte contained academic essays on the work of such authors as Bram Stoker, Anne Rice and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.

Fighting the Forces: What’s at Stake in Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a collection of critical essays about the TV show edited by Rhonda V. Wilcox and David Lavery.

Published by The British Fantasy Society in a chapbook edition that quickly sold out, Jeff Gardiner’s study The Age of Chaos: The Multiverse of Michael Moorcock contained an Introduction by the author himself. Illustrated by Bob Covington, there was also a numbered hardcover edition signed by all the contributors, including Moorcock.

Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors was an illustrated study of mythical monsters by anthropology professor David D. Gilmore, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

An expansion of his father E.F. Bleiler’s 1982 reference work, editor Richard Bleiler’s Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror included entries on 116 authors who had been writing since 1985 and was published in two huge volumes by the Gale Group/Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Max Allan Collins not only novelized the movie The Scorpion King, but also wrote Before the Dawn, the first tie-in to the Dark Angel TV series.

Other blockbuster film tie-ins included MIIB: Men in Black II by Esther M. Friesner, Star Trek: Nemesis by J.M. Dillard, and Spider-Man by Peter David. Behind the Mask of Spider-Man by Mark Cotta Vaz looked at the making of the movie.

Sean Desmond’s International Horror Guild Award-winning novel Adam’s Fall was reissued in a movie tie-in edition as Abandon, while Star Trek author Keith R.A. DeCandido novelized Darkness Falls, which featured an evil Tooth Fairy seeking revenge.

John A. Keel’s 1975 book The Mothman Prophecies was reissued to tie in with the film starring Richard Gere.

Pocket Book’s incredibly popular series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer young-adult books continued with Oz: Into the Wild and The Wisdom of War by Christopher Golden, Crossings by Mel Odom, Little Things by Rebecca Moesta and These Our Actors by Ashley McConnell and Dori Koogler. Sweet Sixteen by Scott Ciencin and Tempted Champions by Yvonne Navarro both featured Dawn as a character, while The Cordelia Collection contained three stories by Nancy Krulik.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Journals of Rupert Giles, Vol.1 collected three stories by Nancy Holder and eight pages of colour photographs, while Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Tales of the Slayer, Vol.1 was an anthology of seven stories published in hardcover by the Science Fiction Book Club.

The show’s spin-off series Angel was equally popular among young adult readers, with Haunted and Stranger to the Sun by Jeff Mariotte, Image by Mel Odom and Vengeance by Scott Ciencin and Dan Jolley. Endangered Species by Nancy Holder and Jeff Mariotte was the first Angel hardcover, and Angel: The Longest Night Vol.1 was an anthology of twelve stories set over a single night.

Based on the TV adventures of three witchy sisters battling demons, the Charmed books also proved a hit with younger readers as the series reached its fifteenth volume with Charmed Again and Date With Death by Elizabeth Lenhard, Garden of Evil by Emma Harrison, and Spirit of the Wolf and Dark Vengeance by Diana G. Gallagher.

John DeChancie’s Witchblade: Talons and Witchblade: A Terrible Beauty were based on the TV series about a modern warrior and her ancient magical weapon.

Aimed at pre-teen readers, the Sabrina the Teenage Witch books made it to #46 with Tiger Tale by Mel Odom, Know-it-All by Lesa Fielder, Topsy-Turvey by Paul Ruditis, Hounded by the Baskervilles by Mercer Warriner, and The Witch That Launched a Thousand Ships and Off to See the Wizard both by Nancy Krulik.

The Steven Spielberg/SciFi Channel’s epic ten-part miniseries Taken was novelized by Thomas H. Cook.

In July, Games Workshop broke the £100 million sales barrier for the first time. Thanks to the group’s Warhammer and Lord of the Rings titles, turnover was up by 17 per cent to £108.6 million over the previous twelve months and profits rose by 20 per cent to £13.5 million. Pre-tax profits rose by 8 per cent to £6.5 million in the six months to 1 December.

Although billed as “a Warhammer novel”, Silver Nails from Games Workshop’s Black Library imprint was actually a collection of five novellas (two original) by Kim Newman writing as “Jack Yeovil”, featuring his vampire character Genevieve. The same publisher also issued welcome reprints of the author’s previous volumes in the series, Genevieve Undead and Beasts in Velvet.

From Wizards of the Coast, Keith Francis Strohm’s The Tomb of Horrors was set in the “Greyhawk” series and involved a pair of adventurers stealing a magical artefact from the tomb of a sorcerer, while Mel Odom’s The Jewel of Turmish was a “Forgotten Realms” novel and featured a zombie sorcerer attempting to raise an army of conquest.

During the summer, Wizards of the Coast fired a number of top executives after an internal investigation revealed an extensive fraud operation among its employees.

Edo van Belkom’s “lost” gaming novel Army of the Dead was published by Prime Books. Originally scheduled to appear in 1997, the book was cancelled by Wizards of the Coast upon the company’s purchase of TSR.

White Wolf’s World of Darkness series continued to produce a bewildering array of novelizations based on various role-playing games. Following on from the first two books in the “Clan Lasombra” series, Vampire: Shards and Vampire: Shadows, the vampire Lucita had to prevent a group of maddened mystics from plunging the world into eternal night in Vampire: Sacrifices, the final book in the trilogy by Bruce Baugh. Vampire: A Morbid Initiation by Philippe Boulle was the first volume of the “Victorian Age Vampire” trilogy, based on “Vampire: The Masquerade”.

Dark Ages: Nosferatu by Gherbod Fleming, Dark Ages: Assamite by Stefan Petrucha and Dark Ages: Cappadocian by Andrew Bates were the first three novels in the epic thirteen-part series of “Dark Ages Clan Novels”, chronicling a vast conflict amongst the vampires of the Middle Ages.

World of Darkness: Werewolf: Bone Gnawers & Stargazers was an omnibus of two novels in White Wolf’s “Werewolf Tribe Novel” series, the first by Bill Bridges and Justin Achilli and the second by Bridges alone. Other “Tribe” omnibus volumes included Werewolf: Children of Gaia & Uktena by Richard Lee Byers and Stefan Petrucha, and Werewolf: Silver Fangs & Glass Walkers by Carl Bowen and Tim Dedopulos. The savage Garou had one last chance to protect Gaia and defeat a terrible monstrosity in Black Spiral Dancers & Wendigo by Eric Griffin and Bill Bridges, the seventh and final volume in the series.

World of Darkness: Predator & Prey: Mage by Carl Bowen and Predator & Prey: Executioner by Gherbod Fleming were based around another role-playing game, while World of Darkness: Lucifer’s Shadow, edited by Philippe Boulle, contained ten original stories based on White Wolf’s new property “Demon: The Fallen”, about fallen angels in the modern world.

Richard E. Dansky’s Exalted: Beloved of the Dead was the first volume in the “Trilogy of the Second Age”, based on the role-playing game set before the World of Darkness.

Diablo #3: The Kingdom of Shadow by Richard Knaak was adapted from the computer game from Blizzard Entertainment.

Leading comics and graphic novels distributor LPC Group filed for bankruptcy protection in April and was liquidated in July after its bank unexpectedly recalled the company’s revolving line of credit and seized $1.4 million in cash receipts set aside to pay publishers.

In November, Stan Lee filed a $10 million lawsuit against Marvel Comics, claiming a 1998 deal with the company entitled him to a 10 per cent share of profits from film and TV projects that use his characters, along with a portion of the merchandising revenue. Marvel claimed that although such films as Spider-Man and X-Men had earned an estimated $404 million and $157 million respectively, they have not shown a “profit” under the terms of the agreement.

In a separate case, 87-year-old Joseph H. Simon sued Marvel to regain the rights to his character Captain America, whom he created in the late 1930s. Simon had already regained the rights in 1999 under a provision of the 1976 Copyright Act, but Marvel successfully sued to retain the character.

In October, writer Neil Gaiman won his nine-count lawsuit against comics tycoon Todd McFarlane, establishing his copyright interest in three characters in McFarlane’s Spawn universe, along with five comics he had written. Gaiman was awarded $45,000 (the full amount requested by his lawyers) for unauthorized use of his name and biography to imply that he’d endorsed a recent reprint of some of this material. With more in back royalties possibly due, it was speculated that as part of the settlement McFarlane would be asked to release whatever rights he may have to the MiracleMan comic. Any profits beyond lawyers’ fees were donated by Gaiman to such charities as the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund.

Dark Horse Books adapted two of Gaiman’s short stories as graphic novels: Harlequin Valentine (reprinted in Best New Horror Volume Eleven) was illustrated by John Bolton, and Murder Mysteries was illustrated by P. Craig Russell.

From the same publisher, in collaboration with Editions Carabas, Vampires collected artwork depicting the undead from a number of international artists, including Gary Gianni and David Lloyd.

Written by Peter M. Lenkov and illustrated by Frazer Irving, the Dark Horse series Fort: Prophet of the Unexplained pitted nineteenth-century librarian and seeker of truth Charles Fort against an alien menace.

Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde was a graphic-novel adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s story by Lorenzo Mattotti and Jerry Kramsky, translated from the Italian.

The second six-issue series of writer Alan Moore and artist Kevin O’Neill’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen pitched its team of nineteenth-century literary superheroes against H.G. Wells’s Martian war machines and also featured a guest appearance by the writer’s Dr Moreau.

From Moonstone, Kolchak: The Night Stalker: The Get of Belial was based on an unfilmed television script and adapted by Joe Gentile, Art Nichols and Felix Serrano.

Possibly one of the finest-looking illustrated books ever produced in the genre was Art of the Imagination: 20th Century Visions of Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy from Collectors Press. Containing more than 760 glossy full-colour pages, this gigantic volume collected three previously published books by Frank M. Robinson, Robert Weinberg and Randy Broecker, along with a new Introduction by Robinson. Although there were a few minor design glitches, this new compilation featured even better cover reproductions than in the original volumes.

Spectrum 9: The Best in Contemporary Fantasy Art was, as usual, edited by Cathy and Arnie Fenner and published by Underwood Books. This year’s volume, which had its release delayed by two months because of a dock workers’ strike, contained more than 300 full-colour works from 2001 by over 200 artists including John Jude Palencar, Brom, Dave McKean, Michael Whelan, Tom Kidd, Gary Gianni, Rick Berry and Leo and Diane Dillon.

From the same publisher, The Art of Jeffrey Jones was also edited by the Fenners and contained 175 illustrations reproducing book covers, comics and previously unpublished private work. It was also available in a $100 signed and slip cased edition.

Bradbury – An Illustrated Life: A Journey to Far Metaphor was an oversized “visual biography” of the author by Jerry Weist, containing magazine illustrations, movie stills, posters, book covers, comics, scripts, paintings and photos, along with a Foreword by Donn Albright and an Introduction by Bradbury himself.

Paper Tiger’s The Fantasy Art Gallery edited by “Paul Barnett” (John Grant) featured interviews from the online magazine The Paper Snarl with twenty-five top genre artists, including Brom, Jim Burns, Steve Crisp, Vincent Di Fate, Bob Eggleton, Frank Kelly Freas, Lisa Snellings and the late Ron Walotsky. Each chapter was accompanied by a full-colour selection of the artists’ work chosen by the illustrators themselves.

From the same imprint, The Art of Rowena was another stunning collection of full-colour art by Rowena Morrill, with text by Doris Vallejo and a Foreword by Greg and Tim Hildebrandt. Twin Visions featured more than 120 fantasy, SF and horror paintings by Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell.

Goad: The Many Moods of Phil Hale was available from Donald M. Grant in two different dust jackets, as a $100 de luxe edition or in a $360 limited leather-bound edition with an original drawing by the artist.

The Art of John Bolton contained images from 1988-2001 selected by the artist himself, while Gahan Wilson’s Gravediggers’ Party was another collection of ghoulish cartoons from the acclaimed illustrator.

From American Fantasy, The Broecker Sampler was an attractive chapbook of black-and-white illustrations (several previously unpublished) by Chicago artist Randy Broecker, compiled and introduced by Robert T. Garcia. From the same imprint came a two-colour broadsheet poem by Jo Fletcher: Midnight Monster was illustrated by Gahan Wilson and limited to just 400 numbered copies. Both publications coincided with the contributors’ Guest of Honour appearances at the Chicago World Horror Convention.

For small children, there were plenty of illustrated Halloween books, including Knock Knock It’s Halloween by Betty Schwartz, Halloween Has Boo! by Harriet Ziefert and Rebecca Doughty, Halloween Countdown by Jack Prelutsky, How Do You Know It’s Halloween? by Diana Curtis Regan, Halloween Colors by Carla Dijs, Corduroy’s Trick-or-Treat illustrated by Lisa McCue, In a Dark Dark Wood by David A. Carter, and In a Dark Dark House, Trick or Treat? and Vampire’s Halloween, all illustrated by John Bianchi. Toni Trent Parker’s Sweets and Treats explained Halloween for African-American children, while Diane Stortz’s Let’s Shine Jesus’ Light on Halloween was designed to reassure youngsters of their faith.

TV’s The Bear in the Big Blue House appeared in the glow-in-the-dark Eek! It’s Halloween! by Laura Driscoll, and a pair of piggy siblings returned in Martha Weston’s Tuck’s Haunted House. Gus and Grandpa and the Halloween Costume was the eighth title in the series by Claudia Mills, and Harriet returned for the twentieth anniversary edition of Harriet’s Halloween Candy.

For a more hands-on approach to the holiday, there was always Haunting on a Halloween: Frightful Activities for Kids by Linda White and The Halloween Activity Book: Creepy Crawly Hairy Scary Things to Do by Mymi Doinet.

“Discworld (Reformed)” readers could keep their appointments in the Vampyre’s Diary 2003 by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs, which was supposedly published by a group of vampires who had stopped drinking blood. It was illustrated by Paul Kidby. Bizarrely, Pratchett’s fictional “Discworld” city, Ankh-Morpork, was twinned with the English town of Wincanton, Somerset, in December. More than 1,000 fans turned up for the ceremonies along with the author and artist Kidby.

On 5 March, Christie’s auction house in London’s South Kensington held a sale of Vintage Film Posters, including the collection of Belgium-born Baron Alexandre de Groote (1906–91), whose 3,500 horror and science fiction posters were offered as 122 lots. Among the many rare American one-sheets never before offered at auction were posters for Doctor X (1932), The Crime of Dr Crespi (1935) and The Devil Doll (1936). The collection also boasted the largest group of Universal Studios titles to be offered at auction, including a rare one-sheet for The Wolf Man (1941), designs for Dracula’s Daughter (1936) and The Invisible Ray (1935), and a Belgian poster for The Mummy (1932), which sold for £15,275 ($21,600). An American one-sheet for the 1936 Universal serial Flash Gordon was only the second time this poster had appeared at auction, and it consequently sold for £18,800 ($26,600) to a London dealer. The record for a poster sold at auction is held for an American one-sheet of The Mummy, which sold in 1997 for $453,000.

Published by Cinematics Publishing, John B. Murray’s The Remarkable Michael Reeves: His Short and Tragic Life was a biography of the talented but troubled director of such British movies as The Sorcerers and Witchfinder General.

From McFarland, Donald F. Glut updated his previous studies in The Frankenstein Archive: Essays on the Monster, the Myth, the Movies and More (which included fifteen essays and fifty-five photographs), while Gary D. Rhodes edited Horror at the Drive-In: Essays in Popular Americana. Thomas M. Feramisco revealed The Mummy Unwrapped: Scenes Left on Universal’s Cutting-Room Floor, and Susan D. Cowie and Tom Johnson looked at The Mummy in Fact, Fiction and Film for the same imprint.

Charles P. Mitchell conjured up Satanic movies in The Devil on Screen: Feature Films Worldwide, 1913 Through 2000, Douglas G. Smith’s H.G. Wells on Film was subtitled The Utopian Nightmare, and McFarland also published Michael R. Pitts’s updated third edition of Horror Film Stars as a softcover.

Terence Fisher: Horror, Myth and Religion by Paul Leggett looked at the career of the Hammer Films director (1904–80) from the viewpoint of Christian mythology. Science Fiction Confidential: Interviews with 23 Stars and Film-makers from McFarland contained Tom Weaver’s interviews with more minor celebrities, including producer Alex Gordon and actors David Hedison, Denny Miller and Dan O’Herlihy.

Published by Midnight Marquee Press, Monsters, Mutants and Heavenly Creatures included another fourteen interviews by Weaver with, among others, producer William Alland, directors Irvin S. Yeaworth, Jr. and William Witney, actresses Marie Windsor, Stella Stevens and Patricia Owens, and actors Michael Ansara and Peter Mark Richman.

John Jewel’s Lips of Blood was subtitled An Illustrated Guide to Hammer’s Dracula Movies Starring Christopher Lee and included more than 100 rare photos. In Jack the Ripper: The Murders and the Movies, Denis Meikle looked at the historical background of the Ripper murders and the movies based on them.

From Plexus, Eaten Alive! Italian Cannibal and Zombie Movies featured lengthy reviews and interviews from editor Jay Slater and such contributors as Kim Newman, Christopher Frayling, Ramsey Campbell, David J. Schow and others. In the same publisher’s “Ultrascreen Series”, Tim Burton: A Child’s Garden of Nightmares was a guide to the director’s career with essays and interviews by, among others, Alan Jones, Steve Biodrowski, Chuck Wagner, Anthony C. Ferrante, Mark Salisbury and Kim Newman.

Edited by the ever-busy Newman, Science Fiction/Horror: A Sight and Sound Reader was published by the British Film Institute and collected essays and reviews that were originally published in Sight and Sound magazine.

The second edition of VideoHound’s Cult Flicks & Trash Pics edited by Carol Schwartz contained more than 1,300 reviews, many of them updated and expanded, with a Foreword by Bruce Campbell.

C.J. Henderson’s The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Movies: From 1897 to The Present also reviewed around 1,300 titles.

The Alfred Hitchcock Presents Companion was a look at the ten-year history of the TV show (1955–65) by Martin Grams Jr and Patrik Wikstrom. It included extended interviews with actor Norman Lloyd and producer Joan Harrison, plus a Foreword by Patricia Hitchcock.

In Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy Television, Joe Nazzaro interviewed seventeen creators of popular TV shows, including Chris Carter, Neil Gaiman, J. Michael Straczynski and Joss Whedon.

Following the collapse of FilmFour earlier in the year, Britain’s Granada announced in September that it was also closing its movie-making arm, Granada Film. That left the BBC as the only UK broadcaster still making movies.

In 2002, Peter Jackson’s fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers helped increase cinema takings in the United States by 14 per cent to a record $6.6 billion. Although income for the sequel was down slightly on the first film, it still managed to gross a respectable $200 million before the end of the year. Meanwhile, in Britain, it was the younger generation that was credited with pushing up cinema admissions 13 per cent to a twenty-one-year high.

In development for twenty years, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, based on the Marvel comic book, was the fastest movie ever to pass the US domestic $200 million barrier – in just two weeks. The film also led to a radical shake-up of British censorship laws in August, with a new “12A” rating being introduced to allow children accompanied by an adult to see films containing more mature material.

After taking $83 million in its first four days of release in the US, George Lucas’s Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones briefly sat at No.3 behind Spider-Man and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone for record openings. At least Lucas had learned from the mistakes of the previous entry and included nice-looking homages to Ray Harryhausen and Roger Corman’s The Raven, along with a great villainous role for Christopher Lee.

However, the film’s position was quickly usurped by the disappointing live-action version of Scooby-Doo which, despite scathing reviews, broke records for the biggest June opening ever (beating Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me) when it grossed a surprising $56.42 million in its first weekend. In Britain, the film took £1.5 million over its opening weekend, and London Underground produced its own Christmas tie-in. Meanwhile the full-colour “Official Collectors’ Magazine” contained everything you needed to know about Scooby-Doo, including a complete episode guide and a look at merchandising.

Chris Columbus’s much-anticipated Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets grossed an incredible $87.1 million in its first three days, knocking Scooby-Doo out of the No.3 slot. In Britain, the much darker sequel took £9.8 million over its opening weekend, breaking the £8.6 million record set by its predecessor.

Although easily breaking the $100 million mark in its second week, the Potter film initially lost its pole position to the fortieth-anniversary James Bond adventure Die Another Day. Despite subsequently bouncing back into the top slot, the movie’s year-end take of $240.3 million was somewhat behind the $317 million (more than $966 million worldwide) grossed by the first Potter film.

To tie in with the release of the film, the Isle of Man issued gold and silver crown coins featuring Harry Potter on one side and the Queen of England’s head on the other. The currency was legal tender.

WWF star “The Rock” (Dwayne Douglas Johnson) was the Conan-ish hero of Chuck Russell’s Ancient Egyptian sword & sorcery adventure The Scorpion King, a prequel to The Mummy Returns (2001) and originally set for a direct-to-video release.

Former model-turned-actress Milla Jovovich discovered that a secret subterranean research facility had been overrun by scary-looking cannibal zombies in Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil, based on the popular video game.

Wesley Snipes revived his moody half-vampire hero in Blade II, director Guillermo Del Toro’s belated but stylish sequel to the 1998 original.

Shot in twenty days for Canadian television, Guy Maddin’s Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary recreated silent-film techniques to record The Royal Winnipeg Ballet’s production of Bram Stoker’s novel.

Based on the books by Anne Rice and originally rumoured to go directly to video until star Aalyah’s tragic death, Michael Rymer’s rambling Queen of the Damned was dumped on the market in February.

Despite a sincere performance from Kevin Costner, Tom Shadyac’s saccharine supernatural drama Dragonfly was also dumped out in February, and quickly disappeared.

Anyone who watched a certain videotape died seven days later in Gore Verbinski’s box office hit The Ring, a disappointing remake of the 1998 Japanese cult success, which received its premiere at the “Scary Movies: Thirty Years of Horror” event, presented by New York’s The Film Society of Lincoln Center in October.

From Hideo Nakata, director of the original version of The Ring (Ringu), came Dark Water (Honoguri Mizu no Soko Kara), another supernatural thriller, this time about a mother and daughter who moved into a haunted tower block. Meanwhile, the Thai film The Eye involved a woman who could see ghosts after an operation to restore her sight.

Julianna Margulies and Gabriel Byrne were definitely slumming as members of a salvage crew who investigated an ocean liner lost at sea in 1962 in the Hallowe’en treat Ghost Ship.

Released either side of Hallowe’en, both FearDotCom and Wes Craven Presents They failed to scare up a decent audience.

Based on a supposedly true story, The Mothman Prophecies featured Richard Gere as a Washington Post reporter looking into the mythical creature that was said to be a harbinger of doom.

Rob Bowman’s enjoyable Reign of Fire was Day of the Triffids with dragons. Unfortunately, the film-makers apparently forgot to include the key scene (depicted on posters) where the CGI dragons laid waste to civilization.

Mining engineer David Arquette and unlikely sheriff Kari Wuhrer discovered that the local spider population had been transformed into Eight-Legged Freaks by a chemical spill.

Larry Fessenden’s low-budget Wendigo took the plot of The Shining and added a legendary monster deer.

David Hasselhoff starred in the dual roles for Jekyll & Hyde – The Musical, a high-definition recording of the Broadway musical given a selected digital cinema release.

Bill Paxton’s critically acclaimed directorial debut Frailty featured the actor as a Texas father who attempted to convince his two sons that they were surrounded by demons. It came with poster quotes from Stephen King and Roger Ebert.

Red Dragon was a redundant remake of Thomas Harris’s novel, previously filmed in 1986 as Manhunter with Brian Cox as Hannibal Lecter, a role now indelibly identified with Anthony Hopkins.

Filmed two years previously, French director Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day featured Vincent Gallo and Béatrice Dalle as a couple of cannibalistic lovers in Paris. The film was refused a rating in the US.

John Dahl’s Joyride was retitled Roadkill in the UK and owed more than a nod to Richard Matheson’s “Duel”, as a trio of teens were pursued by an unseen psycho truck driver (voiced by Ted Levine) seeking revenge for a prank.

Erika Christensen was the psycho Swimfan who stalked Jesse Bradford’s high-school swimming champ in John Poison’s teenage version of Fatal Attraction.

Halloween Resurrection saw the popular franchise reduced to the level of a reality TV show, thanks to the dull direction of Rick Rosenthal, who was also responsible for the second entry back in 1979. Meanwhile, Jason Voorhees, the hockey-masked murderer from the Friday the 13th series, was thawed out aboard a twenty-fifth-century spacecraft and lost no time in hacking up the scantily clad crew in Jason X.

Alcoholic FBI agent Sylvester Stallone found himself trapped with a serial cop-killer in D-Tox, another by-the-numbers slasher film.

Alaskan psycho Robin Williams played a cat-and-mouse game with L.A. detective Al Pacino in Christopher Nolan’s intelligent serial-killer thriller Insomnia, a remake of a 1997 Scandinavian film. Williams was equally as creepy in Mark Romanek’s One-Hour Photo, in which his disturbed loner developed a pathological obsession with the perfect families he saw in snapshots.

Al Pacino also turned up as a monomaniacal movie director whose digitally created star S1mOne became an overnight success in Andrew Niccol’s SF comedy.

Based on the short story by Philip K. Dick, Steven Spielberg’s overlong SF thriller Minority Report starred Tom Cruise as a policeman hunted for a murder he had not yet committed. It grossed more than $123 million domestically and certainly fared better than the year’s other Dick adaptation, Gary Fleder’s Impostor, featuring Gary Sinise as a scientist accused of being an alien replicant in a war-torn future.

Although most of the major cast members returned, Barry Sonnenfeld’s decidedly short sequel Men in Black II was a big disappointment, despite taking $182 million at the US box office. The climax was re-shot to remove New York’s World Trade Center towers from the film.

An unnecessary and pointless remake of H.G. Wells’s classic novel The Time Machine was, after the events of 9/11, pushed back from a December 2001 release to rework the ending and remove scenes of the Moon falling on New York City. Director Simon Wells (the author’s great-grandson) was reportedly replaced after eighteen days by an uncredited Gore Verbinski.

Mel Gibson, playing a widower, found his farm and family menaced by little green men in M. Night Shyamalan’s tricky Signs, which grossed an impressive $221 million in the US.

In Teknolust, Tilda Swinton created three colour-coordinated clones of herself who survived on a steady supply of male chromosomes.

Despite the star presences of George Clooney in Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Solaris and Eddie Murphy in The Adventures of Pluto Nash, both films flopped spectacularly at the box office. Meanwhile, Star Trek: Nemesis looked set to be the final nail in the coffin of the once-successful film franchise, as Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his ageing crew confronted a race of Nosferatu-like aliens.

Robert Rodriguez’s inventive sequel Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams gave more than a passing nod to Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad films. Although The Santa Clause 2 took more than $125 million in the US, other family films such as Clockstoppers and Stuart Little 2 didn’t fare so well at the box office, and a twentieth-anniversary reissue of Steven Spielberg’s E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial grossed just over $30 million domestically.

For cartoon fans, the Oscar-nominated prehistoric comedy Ice Age was the year’s top earner, followed by Disney’s Elvis-obsessed alien and friend, Lilo & Stitch. The studio’s other major release, Treasure Planet, took less that $30 million at the US box office, despite costing more than four times that amount. The super-powered Powderpuff Girls failed to make the leap from TV to the big screen.

There was something of a renaissance in British horror films in 2002, although the quality left much to be desired. Despite Alex Garland’s script showing the influence of a wide range of other sources, from Day of the Triffids, TV’s Survivors and Italian cannibal-zombie movies of the 1970s, Danny Boyle’s low-budget 28 Days Later, shot on high-definition video, still managed to generate some genuine scares. It was launched with an innovative comic-strip “teaser” campaign in British newspapers.

Six soldiers led by Sean Pertwee encountered seven-foot-tall werewolves while on exercises in the Scottish Highlands in Neil Marshall’s cleverly titled Dog Soldiers.

Veterans Udo Kier and Terence Stamp were on opposite sides of an attempt to clone Jesus Christ in Stuart Urban’s occult thriller Revelation, which also featured Derek Jacobi and Ron Moody.

A group of World War II German soldiers were stalked by psychological evil in Rob Green’s low-budget British film, The Bunker, while first-time director Michael J. Bassett’s Deathwatch covered much the same muddy ground from the Allied perspective.

Although actually filmed in 1998, Simon Hunter’s directorial debut Lighthouse received a belated release. It involved a prison ship running aground, and an escaped serial killer (Chris Adamson) slashing his way through the survivors. Marcus Adams was another first-time British director, whose Long Time Dead was based on the hoary old concept of a Ouija board setting loose a murderous djinn from the spirit world.

Andrew Green’s debut feature Nine Lives involved the release of a murderous Scottish spirit that possessed the bodies of its victims. The amateurish cast included hotel heiress Paris Hilton, who was thankfully dispatched early in the proceedings.

Marc Evans’s My Little Eye was yet another variation of The Blair Witch Project, as a group of would-be reality-TV contestants were filmed by CCTV cameras while being killed off in a reputedly haunted house. At least Ken Russell’s home-made The Fall of the Louse of Usher showed a spark of originality, as James Johnston’s Roderick Usher was committed to an insane asylum for the murder of his wife.

Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic Metropolis was reissued in theatres in an extended version that restored much, although not all, of the missing material. Modern-font dialogue cards were used to fill in the gaps.

Despite concerns over terrorism, the 2002 Academy Awards ceremony went ahead in Hollywood. DreamWorks’ Shrek beat out Disney’s Monsters, Inc. for Best Animated Film, although the latter picked up Best Original Song for Randy Newman’s “If I Didn’t Have You”. Out of a near-record thirteen nominations, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring collected Oscars for Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, Best Makeup and Best Visual Effects.

In a poll conducted in Total Film magazine in September, Sir Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter was voted by readers as the Top Serial Killer of All Time. Runners-up were John Doe (from Se7en) and Michael Myers (from the Halloween series). Some of the more surprising entries were Vincent Price’s Dr Anton Phibes (at #19), Peter Lorre’s Hans Beckert from M (at #22) and David Cronenberg’s Dr Decker from Nightbreed (at #25).

It was predicted that, in the next four years, spending on DVDs would triple in Western Europe, with volume sales already outstripping those for videotapes by 2003. With such retail outlets as Blockbuster and Tower Records emptying their warehouses of pre-recorded videos, it was estimated that the videotape was headed for extinction by 2006.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone made history when it was released in Britain on video and DVD and sold more than one million copies on the first day. Meanwhile, the two-disc DVD of Shrek included more than eleven hours of extras and became the best-selling DVD to date, shipping twenty-one million copies worldwide on VHS and DVD and generating more than $400 million in sales in just two months.

The “Special Extended Edition” of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring contained four discs and featured an extra half hour of previously unseen and extended material plus commentaries from Peter Jackson, co-writers Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens and various members of the cast, crew and design team, and more than six hours of “appendices”, including behind-the-scenes documentaries and interactive features. A “Special Gift Set” edition came with collectible Argonath Bookends sculpted by the film’s visual effects artists, a National Geographic bonus DVD and Lord of the Rings trading cards.

H.P. Lovecraft’s Re-animator Millennium Edition from Elite Entertainment, was a double DVD set containing a THX digitally transferred widescreen version of the 1985 movie with commentary by director Stuart Gordon, producer Brian Yuzna, and actors Jeffrey Combs, Barbara Crampton, Bruce Abbott and Robert Sampson, plus various extended and deleted scenes, theatrical trailers, TV spots, multi-angle storyboards, a behind-the-scenes photo gallery and much more.

The “Special Edition” DVD of Interview With the Vampire included a director’s commentary and an Introduction by Neil Jordan and Anne Rice.

From MGM Home Entertainment, the “Special Edition” of Mad Max contained a documentary and audio commentary, and featured Mel Gibson’s original audio track instead of the dubbed American version. On the same label, cult classic The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension included a rare prologue sequence starring Jamie Lee Curtis, never-before-seen deleted scenes restored with director W.D. Richter’s commentary, and a “making-of” documentary with stars Peter Weller, John Lithgow, Ellen Barkin, Jeff Goldblum and Christopher Lloyd. It was also the first MGM release to include NOUN-enhanced interactive technology, allowing access to behind-the-scene facts, and a Gamma Zoom Composer feature, which enabled viewers to pre-select close-up zooms of interesting scene elements.

Direct-to-video titles released in 2002 included director Morgan J. Freeman’s inventive and enjoyable American Psycho 2, which featured William Shatner as an FBI profiler seduced by victim-turned-killer Mila Kunis.

Wishmaster 4: The Prophecy Fulfilled was filmed back-to-back with the previous entry by director Chris Angel, while Hellraiser: Hellseeker took Clive Barker’s original concept down yet another notch.

Seduction Cinema’s Misty Mundae, Darian Caine, Debbie Rochon and Laurie Wallace were among the soft-core starlets groping each other in the DVD releases The Erotic Mirror, Witchbabe: The Erotic Witch Project III, My Vampire Lover, Vampire Obsession, Donald Farmer’s slightly more ambitious The Erotic Vampire in Paris, and the ludicrous Play-Mate of the Apes.

The Shock-O-Rama Cinema DVD label issued such independent horror productions as Demoness, Premutos: Lord of the Living Dead, Zombie Doom and Rock & Roll Frankenstein.

Steve Oedekerk’s spoof Frankenthumb was filmed in “Thumbation”.

Walt Disney Home Video’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame II replaced the dark edge of the 1996 original with syrupy songs and cheap-looking animation. Spookable Pooh and Frankenpooh appeared on the same disc from Disney in time for Hallowe’en, and the studio’s classic villains teamed up to menace the mouse in Mickey’s House of Villains.

In Elmo Says Boo!, the lovable Muppet encountered both The Count and Julia Roberts, while Casper and Wendy’s Ghostly Adventures contained fourteen classic cartoons from the 1950s.

Vincent Price: The Sinister Image Collector’s Edition contained an hour-long 1987 interview with the actor by David Del Valle, along with an audio interview with Price, a photo gallery, two half-hour TV shows and a radio drama.

From Allday Entertainment, All Monsters Attack featured fifty coming-attractions trailers plus a behind-the-scenes documentary on The Land That Time Forgot (1974), the 1954 atomic-bomb short Operation Plumbob, and the 1992 cartoon Mega-Morphosis.

Licensed by Lugosi Enterprises, The Devil Bat and Bowery at Midnight launched the “Bela Lugosi Presents” DVD series, which also included audio commentaries (by Bela Lugosi Jr and Ted Newsom), rare photos, home movies, radio and film trailers and collectible movie-poster inserts.

Kino on Video released a four-film set of German silent horror classics containing Nosferatu, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, The Golem and Waxworks.

Stephen King’s Rose Red was an original three-part, six-hour miniseries from ABC-TV that trotted out all the usual haunted-house clichés. The author had a silly cameo as a pizza-delivery man.

NBC-TV’s redundant remake of Carrie featured Angela Bettis as the telekinetic prom queen splattered in pig’s blood, while Firestarter Rekindled was a two-part miniseries sequel to King’s novel and the 1984 movie and was shown on the SciFi Channel. Michael McDowell took over the role of the psychotic John Rainbird.

Also on SciFi, Saint Sinner was loosely based on a failed comic book created by executive producer Clive Barker. Greg Serano played the monk who travelled through time to stop a pair of sexy succubi whom he had accidentally released.

David Keith hunted down a genetically created Sabretooth that was eating the members of a camping group, and Brad Johnson found himself transported to Riverworld in the impressive pilot movie based on Philip José Farmer’s series of books.

Harry Hamlin and Susan Dey found themselves trapped in a desert town that wasn’t on the map in the TBS movie Disappearance, while Lance Henriksen and Robin Givens found themselves trapped in a microscopic submarine inside the body of a wounded terrorist in Antibody.

Richard Roxburgh and Ian Hart made a bad-tempered Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson respectively in yet another unnecessary TV movie of The Hound of the Baskervilles from the BBC. At least Richard E. Grant turned in a fine performance as the scheming Stapleton. Matt Frewer wore the deerstalker and investigated The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire in the original Hallmark Entertainment production. Meanwhile, a wild young Sherlock Holmes (James D’Arcy) encountered his arch-nemesis Dr Moriarty (Vincent D’Onofrio) in the revisionist USA Networks movie Case of Evil.

Phil Davis and Anna Friel investigated a series of mysterious deaths in a small farming community in the BBC’s confusing two-part SF thriller Fields of Gold. Based on a story by Ian McEwan, advertising executive Ewan McGregor discovered a secret gateway to another dimension in Channel 4’s half-hour film Solid Geometry.

Millionaire industrialist Matthew Modine realised that he didn’t know the truth behind the fairy tale in Jim Henson’s Jack and The Beanstalk: The Real Story, an inventive Hallmark Entertainment production that also featured Vanessa Redgrave, Daryl Hannah, Richard Attenborough and Honor Blackman. Also from Hallmark, Bridget Fonda portrayed the frigid Snow Queen in David Wu’s adaptation of the classic fairy story.

Disney’s The Scream Team featured Kathy Najimy, Tommy Davidson and Eric Idle as a trio of friendly ghosts helping a pair of children to enable their dead grandfather to rest in peace.

Jeff Fine’s A Haunting in Georgia was a spot-on spoof documentary about the supernatural. Inspired by The Blair Witch Project, it was shown on the Discovery Channel. Sightings: Heartland Ghosts was a Showtime movie in which a team of paranormal investigators travelled to a small Kansas town to explore a house that may have been haunted.

Despite making the cover of the Hallowe’en edition of the Los Angeles Times TV supplement, one of the biggest disappointments of 2002 was the Turner Classic Movies reconstruction in stills of Tod Browning’s lost 1927 film London After Midnight, starring Lon Chaney, Sr.

Unavailable for more than thirty years, the 1962 film Hand of Death starring John Agar and Paula Raymond unexpectedly turned up on the Fox Movie Channel in July.

MTV’s Santo & Blue Demon vs The Monsters was an hour-long cut-down of the 1968 Mexican movie dubbed by an eclectic group of singers and minor celebrities, including Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, Snoop Dog, Paul Daniels, Shaggy and Uri Geller.

As part of its Hallowe’en celebrations, the increasingly controversial AMC film channel launched “Monsterfest 24/7”, a round-the-clock festival of movies ranging from the Halloween sequels and Predator 2 to all the Universal classics.

On Hallowe’en night, John Carpenter hosted AMC’s half-hour “Short Screamers”, which featured fifteen new short horror films by up-and-coming film-makers. The favourite of New York Post television critic Linda Stasi was Jay Holben’s Hunger: “To tell a story in less than a minute is tough enough,” explained the journalist, “but making it scary to boot is a real accomplishment. And Holben manages to do both.”

In The WB’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while her personal life collapsed around her Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) was also menaced by a trio of nerdy “supervillains” (Adam Busch, Tom Lenk and Danny Strong), which resulted in a fateful showdown. The seventh season saw the show jumping networks to UPN and, after the unrelenting misery of the previous year, Buffy had anxieties about accepting a counselling position at the reopened Sunnydale High School and vampire Spike (James Marsters) regained his soul. In a surprise cameo scene, Buffy was confronted by many of her most infamous enemies from previous episodes.

The University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, hosted an international academic conference in October entitled “Blood, Text and Fears” which was devoted to Buffy and at which more than sixty papers were presented from around the world.

In the increasingly grim Angel, the undead hero’s (David Boreanaz) desire for human blood prompted Wesley (Alexis Denisof) to betray his friends and kidnap Angel’s infant son Conner. This resulted in obsessed vampire-hunter Holtz (Keith Szarabajka) taking the child with him into a Hell dimension before the show’s six-week hiatus. The fifth season opened with Angel returning from the deep-sea tomb which his vengeful offspring (Vincent Kartheiser) had banished him to, and discovering the root of his recovery lay with the ostracized Wesley. Meanwhile, Cordelia (Charisma Carpenter) was forced to adjust to her new role as an angelic “higher being”. The new season also introduced paranormal thief Gwen (Alexa Davalos).

The latest project from Buffy and Angel creator Joss Whedon was the dull science fiction Western Firefly. Set aboard a ramshackle transport starship, the show was abruptly cancelled by the Fox Network with three unaired episodes to go.

Originally conceived as a heart-warming coming-home drama, Kevin Williams’s new show Glory Days did not fare much better on The WB. Eddie Cahill played the one-book novelist who returned to his native Pacific Northwest island where he investigated unusual mysteries until the series was cancelled.

The eponymous hero of the new Fox series John Doe (played by Dominic Purcell) became a suspect in a thirty-year-old murder case, which led to him wondering if he was a time traveller.

After The Lone Gunmen was abruptly cancelled, the show was finally wrapped up in The X Files episode “Jump the Shark”, in which the investigative trio sacrificed their lives. They returned as ghosts in the disappointing final episode of The X Files, “The Truth”, when missing FBI agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) was put on trial for the supposed murder of a “super-soldier”. Fans who had stuck with the show for nine seasons deserved better than this half-hearted attempt to tie up neatly all the loose ends and explain what had been going on for almost a decade.

Based on characters from the Stephen King novel, the USA Network’s The Dead Zone turned out to be a surprisingly intelligent series, with former teen actor Anthony Michael Hall making the role of psychic Johnny Smith his own. Another child star, Sean Patrick Flanery, guest-starred as apocalyptic politician Greg Stillman.

Former detective Frank Taylor (Matthew Fox) could see ghosts in Fox’s disappointing Haunted, while Richard Coyle played former priest turned occult investigator John Strange in the BBC pilot Strange, which also featured Samantha Janus and Ian Richardson.

Despite becoming involved with a vampire queen, a fairy-tale world and an old dark house murder mystery, in the US Charmed was moved to The WB’s Sunday-night graveyard slot.

At the end of the first season of Witchblade, most of the characters ended up dead. The second series kicked off in June with a two-hour premiere in which New York cop Sara Pezzini (Yancy Butler) turned back time and the story began again, but this time was set in a subtly different reality. Once again, megalomaniac millionaire Kenneth Irons (Anthony Cistaro) attempted to steal the titular magic weapon.

In a surprise announcement in October, TNT pulled the plug on Witchblade, its only original series, and the SciFi Channel cancelled Farscape, despite both shows receiving critical praise. Two months later, ABC-TV shelved its Dinotopia series.

Based on a series of books by Mark Sumner, the final season of The Chronicle: News from the Edge included an episode where World News reporters Tucker (Chad Willett), Wes (Reno Wilson) and Grace (Rena Sofer) went undercover at a convention full of vampire Elvis impersonators.

Creator James Cameron directed the feature-length second-season finale of Fox’s Dark Angel.

Judith Reeves-Stevens and Garfield Reeves-Stevens joined the third season of the increasingly goofy Australian series Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World as executive creative consultants. With the adventurers still stuck on the plateau, they were joined by a young woman (Lara Cox) from the year 2033. In the daft season-finale cliff-hanger, a time-shift phenomenon stranded the various characters among Spanish conquistadors, sacrificial Druids and the machine rulers of a far-future Earth, while the prehistoric world collapsed in upon itself.

CBS-TV’s flagging Touched by an Angel kicked off its ninth season with an asteroid on a collision course with Earth, and was reduced to using plot ideas sent in by viewers when Gloria (Valarie Bertinelli) was kidnapped by the Devil and Monica (Roma Downey) once again confronted her evil alter-ego.

The young Clark Kent (Tom Welling) had a character-changing encounter with Red Kryptonite in Smallville, which became The WB’s second-highest rated show during its first season. Following a stormy season cliffhanger, Clark gained a new superpower and one of his friends discovered his secret. He also fell in love with a Native American werewolf, encountered a man revived from the dead by the green meteorite stone, and discovered that a high-school cheerleader was actually a centuries-old crone who lived off the youth of her fellow students to remain eternally young.

From the same producers as Smallville, Dina Meyer, Ashley Scott and Rachel Skarsten starred in the stylized Birds of Prey. In a much darker superhero series, the crippled Oracle/Barbara Gordon (formerly Batgirl), moody Huntress/Helena Kyle (the offspring of Batman and Catwoman) and timid telepathic teen Dinah teamed up to battle devilish doctor Harley Quinn and other villains in New Gotham. Due to falling ratings, The WB decided to pull the plug on the show after just thirteen episodes.

When Vivendi Universal acquired full control of parent company USA Networks in March for $10.3 billion, the deal included The SciFi Channel. Premiering at the end of the year, Taken was a SciFi original miniseries about alien abduction, created by Leslie Bohem for Steven Spielberg’s DreamWorks LLC.

Forest Whitaker hosted yet another revival of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone for UPN, with guest stars including Jason Alexander, Greg Germann and Elizabeth Berkley.

The half-hour BBC anthology show Spine Chillers included episodes about a pair of would-be Goth vampires and a 2,000-year-old succubus who preyed upon her lovers.

In the 5 August episode of the daytime soap Passions, Timmy died from injuries sustained during a demon-created earthquake. In a strange case of synchronicity, Josh Ryan Evans, the actor who played the diminutive doll-turned-living-boy, died the same day of a congenital heart condition. The show also included a zombie named Charity.

“Naked Eyes” was the ninth “book” in the ever more bizarre soap set in Port Charles, where the inhabitants had to put up with angels, demons, magic candles and the coming Judgement Day.

Still desperately unfunny, The League of Gentlemen returned to the BBC with a variation on “The Hands of Orlac”. Just as dull, Ed Stone is Dead was a half-hour BBC sitcom in which the eponymous character (MTV’s Richard Blackwood) was revived from the dead as an ageless, unfeeling zombie.

The Thanksgiving episode of the Fox sitcom Bernie Mac included a Claymation nightmare and a parody of a classic Richard Matheson episode of Twilight Zone set at 20,000 feet.

In an attempt to appeal to more young-adult viewers, Sabrina The Teenage Witch saw its supporting cast disappearing faster than viewers, while the titular witch (Melissa Joan Hart) became a writer for a music magazine.

The two schoolboy heroes of Channel 5’s Harry & Cosh were regressed through hypnotism and took refuge in a manor where the mistress was reputed to be a vampire.

From Kids WB, Phantom Investigators mixed puppets and live action as a group of pre-teens investigated the kind of mysteries all young children experience and came up with supernatural explanations.

When a family inherited the house of an Ancient Egyptian-loving aunt, they discovered the living mummy of an ancient boy-prince (Elyes Gabel) in the Canadian/UK children’s series I ? Mummy. While searching the world for magical artefacts, Alex O’Connell and his family were once again pitted against Imhotep, Weasler and the revived Ancient Egyptian sorceress Anck-su-namun in the cartoon sequel series The Mummy: Secrets of the Medjai.

The ever-nervous Chuckie dressed up as a “werewuff” in the special Hallowe’en episode of Nickelodeon’s popular Rugrats, and A Scooby-Doo Christmas was a holiday special on The WB, in which the gang investigated the legend of a headless snowman.

Those darned kids were also investigating new cartoon mysteries in What’s New, Scooby-Doo?, and in the Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, the 1960s animated superhero defended Scooby-Doo and Shaggy on “possession” charges and also settled the Jonny Quest custody case.

Stargate Infinity was a Fox cartoon spin-off of the Stargate SG-1 franchise, while the cancelled Futurama aired a backlog of sixteen episodes.

When the Cartoon Network asked viewers to select a cartoon from a list of ten to become a regular series, Grim & Evil received the most votes. In the first part, two children tricked the Grim Reaper into being their best friend, while the brain of a former playboy was transplanted into a bear in the second half.

The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror 13 included “Send in the Clones”, where a magic hammock created multiple copies of Homer; zombie versions of Billy the Kid, Frank and Jesse James, the Sundance Kid and Kaiser Wilhelm rose from the grave to terrorize Springfield in “The Right to Keep and Bear Arms”; and “The Island of Dr Hibbert” was inspired by the H.G. Wells story.

Ann Rice: Interview With the Vampire was a tedious twenty-minute documentary in the BBC series Cover Stories. It featured interviews with the author and her family, including sister Alice Borchardt.

From Showtime, Masters of Horror was an entertaining and stylish feature-length documentary about horror films that included interviews with John Carpenter, Wes Craven, George A. Romero, Tobe Hooper, Dario Argento, John Landis, Rick Baker, Guillermo del Toro and Stuart Gordon. It was hosted by an irreverent Bruce Campbell.

From American Movie Classics, The Alien Saga was narrated by John Hurt, while Backstory: Halloween was an hour-long look behind the scenes at John Carpenter’s classic “slasher” film.

ABC-TV invited viewers to experience 13 Nights of Halloween and the Scariest Places on Earth, the latter hosted by Linda Blair.

The ennui that is Reality TV continued with Nickelodeon’s Scaredy Camp, a five-part series in which two teams of boy and girl campers had to solve the mysterious disappearance of a man named Dennis Williams ten years earlier.

Closing after just seven weeks and fifty-six performances, Jim Steinman’s $7.5 million musical Dance of the Vampires (loosely based on Roman Polanski’s 1967 movie) became one of the biggest flops on Broadway after being savaged by the critics, with The New York Times calling 61-year-old star Michael Crawford a “long-in-the-tooth neck-nibbler”.

Meanwhile, Dominic Symonds’s Dragula was a musical retelling of Bram Stoker’s novel set to 1980s pop hits.

F. Brook Warren’s classic 1897 chiller The Face at the Window was revived in its full version at The Gatehouse pub theatre in London’s Highgate by the Resurrectionist Drama Company.

Richard O’Brien was perfectly cast as the evil Child Catcher in the London stage musical of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, that came complete with flying car. The role was subsequently played by Paul O’Grady (better known as drag comedian Lily Savage).

*   *   *

The latest “Lara Croft” video game was not ready in time for the important Christmas market. When it was announced that Lara Croft – Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness would benefit from “refinement”, shares in the troubled software group Eidos fell by nearly 9 per cent. However, they quickly bounced back after it was realized that the game would not have to compete with Electronic Arts’ Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, the James Bond game Die Another Day, and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers game.

The new Harry Potter was available for the big three games consoles – GameCube, PS2 and Xbox – as players guided Harry through the Whomping Willow, the Duelling Club and an enhanced game of Quidditch before the climactic showdown.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was a first-person survival game based around H.P. Lovecraft’s Mythos, from Britain’s Headfirst Productions.

The classic zombie shoot-up Resident Evil was revamped for Nintendo’s GameCube, while Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem featured Alexandra Roivas investigating a family mystery spanning the centuries. Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen 2 was set in the same universe as Soul Reaver 2 and followed the adventures of a super-human evil vampire.

Based on the disappointing film, the game version of Reign of Fire allowed players to control either the well-armed hero or the marauding dragons, while The Terminator: Dawn of Fate was set before the first movie in the series.

An alien prison ship crashed on Earth in Men in Black 2: Alien Escape, and John Carpenter’s 1982 version of The Thing finally got the game treatment. GameCube’s Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters pitted its jolly green hero against some of his greatest foes.

The Buffy the Vampire Slayer game from EA for Xbox featured impressive graphics, and only the faithful Scooby could save his kidnapped friends in Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights.

In Luigi’s Mansion, launched on GameCube in May, Mario was kidnapped in a haunted mansion and it took a mad professor and some household implements to rescue him from the ghosts.

Boris Karloff’s Son of Frankenstein character was released as a twelve-inch high black-and-white “Silver Screen” figure, limited to 5,000 units. The surgically enhanced Gill Man from The Creature Walks Among Us, one of The Mole Men and Henry Hull’s lycanthropic WereWolf of London were issued as Universal Monster twelve-ince figures, complete with accessories.

The long-delayed Universal Studios Wolf Man twenty-four-inch poser also finally made its appearance, with twelve points of articulation.

A twelve-inch poseable figure of Vincent Price from The Raven had more than twenty points of articulation. Each figure was packaged with an individually numbered hologram and the edition was limited to 5,000.

An eight-inch-high Metaluna Mutant from This Island Earth was cast in a blue translucent plastic edition, limited to 1,500 figures, while Gort the robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still was recreated as a five-inch-tall metal cast figure. Gort was also available as a tin wind-up with a visor that opened.

Twelve-inch figures of Bruce Campbell as Ash and Evil Ash from the film Army of Darkness came equipped with weapons, while the Ash bobbing head stood with chainsaw at the ready.

Figures of Mathayus, Cassandra and Balthazar from The Scorpion King each featured detailed likenesses of the actors who played them, while a series of seven-inch characters and a twelve-inch likeness of Kurt Russell’s Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China were also available.

For fans of the 1960s Outer Limits TV show, twelve-inch figures of The Ebonite Guard from the episode “Nightmare” and Gwyllm from “The Sixth Finger” were available, along with a two-figure set from “Keeper of the Purple Twilight” and a set of poseable life-size Zanti Misfits from the episode of the same title. The latter was issued in a limited edition of 5,000.

Moore Creations produced a series of bust ornaments of the characters Darla, Host and Wesley from TV’s Angel.

The Munsters Coach, designed by George Harris, was released as a one-eighth-scale die-cast replica.

Stan Winston’s “She Creature, Queen of the Lair” resin statue was based on the scaly monster from the 2001 made-for-TV movie.

The series from Japan of eight-inch vinyl figures of creatures originally created as stop-motion models by Ray Harryhausen continued with recreations of the Cyclops, Centaur, Griffin and Minaton from the various Sinbad films. There were also twelve-inch poseable action figures of the Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth and Kali from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, along with a seven-piece set of bronzed skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts.

A set of seven four-inch Harryhausen statues contained characters from Earth vs. The Flying Saucers, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts and First Men in the Moon. Five skeleton warriors from Jason were also available in the same size, painted and ready for display.

From the Japanese creators of the Harryhausen figures also came the “Godzilla Collection” of four-inch hand-painted resin figurines featuring the 1954, 1968 and 1995 Godzillas, Rodan and Hedorah the Smog Monster.

Mezco’s “Cinema of Fear” featured Jason, Leatherface and Freddy figures from New Line Cinema’s Friday the 13th, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and A Nightmare on Elm Street respectively, and all three characters also turned up as Bobbing Head caricatures.

For Hallowe’en, there were string-light sets of Jason, Leatherface and Freddy heads, or four “head knockers” featuring a mummy, witch, skeleton and pumpkin-headed scarecrow.

Even more unusual were the Army of Darkness, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Hellraiser shooter-glass sets, and the latter four titles were also available as illustrated lunch-boxes.

The Dracula and Mummy Tin Lunch-Box sets included a drink container depicting colour artwork from the Universal classics, while The Bride of Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi as Dracula wall clocks sported reproductions of the films’ original poster designs.

The Nightmare Before Christmas continued to exploit its growing cult status with a tin lunch-box and thermos combo. For the more literary-minded, the same set was available in a Lord of the Rings design. Barrell and Lock from Nightmare were also available as bobbing heads.

Lego and Steven Spielberg MovieMaker Sets launched four “Scary Thriller” Movies Sets for budding film-makers of a younger age. These included Werewolf Ambush, Vampire’s Crypt, Scary Laboratory and Curse of the Pharaoh. The “Scary Monster Madness Kit” included all four sets, while the website for “All of the Dead” was billed as “The World’s First Lego Video Nasty!”

A nine-inch tall Cthulhu Mini-Bust was made of cold-cast resin with a bronze finish and was limited to 500 castings, each signed and numbered by sculptor Tommy Allison and packaged in a 1930s-style FBI Evidence Box.

A “Summer Fun Cthulhu” plush doll featured H.P. Lovecraft’s tentacled Elder God dressed in a Panama hat, Hawaiian shirt, shorts and sandals. The “Baby Cthulhu Stuffed Doll” from Toy Vault was a miniature of the larger plush toy. There was also a “Gothic Cthulhu Plush” designed in black and silver with red eyes.

The H.P. Lovecraft Pin featured two portraits of Lovecraft facing each other. A second revised edition of The H.P. Lovecraft Tarot, published by Mythos Books LLC, contained seventy-eight cards corresponding to the Major Arcana and Minor Arcana of the traditional tarot, all again illustrated by Daryl Hutchinson. The pack came with an eighty-page introductory booklet by Eric C. Friedman.

For Hallowe’en fans with deep pockets, Creative Visions offered a “Sleeping Giant” that was nearly twelve feet high and roared at trick-or-treaters for just $35,000. Or for a mere $5,000 you could get “Deep Fryer” – a full-size man in an electric chair who writhed and smoked when it was turned on.

London’s Madame Tussaud’s imported a wax model of Bela Lugosi as Dracula from its New York museum to appear opposite a new £50,000 model of Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy the Vampire Slayer for a Hallowe’en attraction in the Chamber of Horrors entitled “Trail of the Vampires”. Children were encouraged to track down twenty celebrity waxworks – including Margaret Thatcher and Pierce Brosnan – who had tell-tale bite marks on their necks.

The World Horror Convention 2002 was held in Chicago, Illinois, over 11–14 April. A nice-looking programme book featured appreciations of all the guests, along with various contributions, bibliographies and an art portfolio and colour cover by artist Guest of Honour Randy Broecker.

The impressive line-up of multiple GoHs also included authors Gene Wolfe and Neil Gaiman, editor Melissa Ann Singer, toast-master Gahan Wilson, poet Jo Fletcher, photographer Beth Gwinn, musician Liz Mandville Greeson, comics creator Jill Thompson, media guests Patricia Tallman and Robert Z’dar, and special guest authors Karen Taylor, Yvonne Navarro and Brian A. Hopkins, along with Grand Master Charles L. Grant and International Horror Guild Living Legend William F. Nolan.

The other IHG Awards were announced at the convention by Gaiman and Wilson. Recognizing outstanding achievements in the field of horror and dark fantasy, the 2002 awards were sponsored by The Design Image Group.

Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Threshold was voted Best Novel, and David Searcy’s Ordinary Horror won in the Best First Novel category. Best Long Fiction was Elizabeth Hand’s “Cleopatra Brimstone” (from Redshift) and Kiernan won again in the Best Short Fiction category for “Onion” (from Wrong Things). Through Shattered Glass by David B. Silva was voted Best Collection, and Richard Chizmar’s Night Visions 10 picked up Best Anthology. Best Illustrated Narrative was the five-issue miniseries Just a Pilgrim by Garth Ennis and Carlos Ezquerra, and David J. Schow’s book of essays Wild Hairs won Best Non-fiction. Anthony Sapienza’s online magazine The Spook collected Best Publication, John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps won for Best Film, and John Picacio was voted Best Artist.

For the first time in three years, the Bram Stoker Awards Weekend was not held in conjunction with the World Horror Convention. The 2001 Stokers were presented for Superior Achievement on 8 June at the Horror Writers Association annual meeting in New York. Neil Gaiman’s American Gods won the Novel award, while Michael Oliver’s Deadliest of the Species topped the vote for First Novel. In These Final Days of Sales by Steve Rasnic Tem picked up the Long Fiction award, and the Short Fiction prize went to “Reconstructing Amy” by Tim Lebbon (from As the Sun Goes Down). Norman Partridge’s The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists won the Collection award, and Extremes 2: Fantasy and Horror from the Ends of the Earth edited by Brian A. Hopkins, won in the Anthology category. The Non-fiction award went to Brian Keene’s Jobs in Hell, Christopher and Jonathan Nolan’s Memento won the Screenplay prize, and The Willow Files #2 by Yvonne Navarro collected the Work for Young Readers award. The award for Poetry Collection went to Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes by Linda Addison, Beth Gwinn and Stanley Wiater’s Dark Dreamers: Facing the Masters of Fear picked up the award for Alternative Forms, and John Farris was the recipient of the Life Achievement Award. No award was presented in the Illustrated Narrative category.

The British Fantasy Awards were announced on 21 September at the one-day FantasyCon 2002 in London. Graham Joyce was the sole Guest of Honour after artist Jim Burns cancelled at the last minute. Decided by members of the British Fantasy Society, Simon Clark’s disappointing The Night of the Triffids was voted Best Novel (The August Derleth Fantasy Award). Best Anthology was The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Twelve, while Paul Finch’s Aftershocks won in the Best Collection category. Simon Clark also picked up the award for Best Short Fiction for “Goblin City Lights” (from Urban Gothic: Lacuna and Other Trips). Jim Burns was announced as Best Artist in his absence, and Peter Crowther’s PS Publishing collected the Best Small Press award for the second year running. After reportedly failing to reach an agreement, the awards committee decided not to present the Special Karl Edward Wagner Award.

“Gods & Monsters” was the theme of the twenty-eighth World Fantasy Convention, chaired by Greg Ketter in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from 31 October to 3 November. Guests of Honour were Dennis Etchison, Jonathan Carroll, Kathe Koja, Dave McKean and Stephen Jones, with William F. Nolan as Special Guest. Unfortunately, the other special guest, veteran author Nelson Bond, was unable to attend due to his failing eyesight. The superb-looking programme book contained appreciations of and contributions by all the guests.

As usual, the World Fantasy Awards were presented at the Banquet on the Sunday afternoon. Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Other Wind won Best Novel, Best Novella was S.P. Somtow’s “The Bird Catcher” (from The Museum of Horrors), and Alfred E. Cowdrey’s “Queen for a Day” (from F&SF) was voted Best Short Story. Dennis Etchison’s The Museum of Horrors also won Best Anthology, and the Best Collection went to Nalo Hopkinson’s Skin Folk. Best Artist was Allen Koszowski, there was a tie in the Special Award: Professional category between Stephen Jones (for editing) and Jo Fletcher (for editing Gollancz’s “Fantasy Masterworks” series), and the Special Award: Non-Professional went to Raymond Russell and Rosalie Parker for Tartarus Press. Lifetime Achievement awards were presented to George Scithers and Forrest J. Ackerman.

California book dealer Barry R. Levin announced his fifteenth Annual Collectors Awards, with Neil Gaiman named Most Collectable Author of the Year, and Crossroads Press as Most Collectable Publisher of the Year for the lettered state of Dead Roses for a Blue Lady by Nancy A. Collins. Helen and Marc Younger and Daniel Hirsch received the special Lifetime Collectors Award for their outstanding bibliographic contributions to the study of the works of Theodore Geisel (Dr Seuss).

In early September, award-winning genre commentator and former editor of Horror Garage Paula Guran posted a controversial article about the current state of horror fiction on the Locus Online website.

According to the writer, her opinion piece provoked a deluge of hate mail on various message boards, particularly on the Horror Writers Association site, and having participated with Guran and others in a panel discussion about the article at the 2002 World Fantasy Convention, I can testify to the level of debate and resentment the essay elicited.

Provocatively entitled “Tribal Stand”, the article begins with the writer’s “distressing realization that so few in our field still seek professionalism, a high level of achievement, legitimate credits, and to gain a sense of history – attributes that combine to set what we might call the Standard.”

She then goes on to explain that such standards are set by a writer’s peers, and “wannabe” authors need to continue honing their skills if they expect to be taken seriously. This is all very sensible advice for any would-be writer, and so far the piece contains nothing too disputable.

But then Guran comes to the core of her thesis with the assertion that “in the horror tribe, the Standard is breaking down.”

She next launches into a very North American-biased review of the history of the horror genre and its practitioners over the past thirty years. Here she touches upon the end of the 1980s horror boom once the writing had become formulaic, when big fat horror novels were seen simply as a commodity and publishers dismissed the genre as a marketing tool. She also takes to task the proliferation of “How To” books on writing horror and the burgeoning number of organizations and conventions aimed at fans.

Guran quotes the late Karl Edward Wagner who, while taking the field to task almost a decade ago, was also astute enough to realize that “The good writers will hang in there and survive.”

She also quotes from a 1998 essay/speech by Douglas E. Winter (another of the genre’s premier analysts), who pointed out that: “Great horror fiction is being published today; sometimes it wears other names, other faces . . . Probably the most welcome result is the departure of the bottom-feeders and lemmings, who will move along to writing the flavor of the new decade and allow the conscientious writers of the horrific to flourish.”

And here is where the writer breaks with the views of her peers. In Guran’s opinion, “Without that system of standards of which we dare not speak, all too often it is not the conscientious writers of the horrific who are flourishing and being encouraged within the horror writing community itself.”

It is easy to see how a comment like this would be likely to get under the skin of any member of the Horror Writers Association. Especially someone who is desperately trying to make a name for themselves in that writing community. For most would-be authors, it’s hard enough just finding the time to write fiction, let alone also sourcing a suitable market for their work. They don’t need to be insulted as well.

According to Guran, “Yes, the hacks, bottom-feeders, and lemmings began bailing out of the shrinking pond of horror. But it was not the good who always survived in the remaining shallow puddle . . . They planted themselves in the mud and whined.”

And according to Guran they are still whining.

She blames the networking capacity of the Internet and publishing on the Web, CD-ROM or print-on-demand for turning these so-called “mud-whiners” into “real writers” to be admired and listened to by the “wannabes”.

However, what she fails to take into account is that it is getting more and more difficult for writers to be published – especially if those writers have decided to work in the horror field. Newsstand magazines and professional anthologies have all but disappeared, and it is only through the efforts of the “small press” (which, as the preceding annual round-up reveals, probably now publishes more horror than the so-called “mainstream”) and such new technologies as those cited in the article, that most horror fiction survives at all.

Guran, quite rightly, points out that writing any kind of short fiction these days is no way to earn a living. That could also go for editing anthologies and writing novels too. But if the horror genre is going to survive and, hopefully, expand, then these new writers need an outlet for their work. If they have nowhere else to publish, then they will eventually leave the field. And where, then, will the new generations of horror writers come from?

“And woe to anyone who nay-said these self-declared deities or their new-found acolytes or dared point out a lack of quality,” she continues. “E-damnation was swift for any who mentioned such outmoded concepts as standards of good writing or professionalism.”

There is no denying that Guran is right on the mark here, as she quickly discovered for herself once the article appeared online. It is depressing that the majority who reacted to her comments decided to do so by attacking her rather than by entering into a reasoned dialogue about the many important points raised in her piece.

It should also be noted that Guran herself made her name as an online writer (which she readily acknowledges in her article) and it is a little ironic perhaps that her criticism was published in such an electronic forum.

Despite this mild contradiction, she goes on to say that “Neither these new ‘writers’, nor their ‘editors’, had to meet any sort of Standard at all.” Quite simply, she claims that because of new technology, anybody can now be a writer or publisher. “No one needs to learn the craft of writing . . . Just grind it out, accumulate approbation from your similarly-ranked pals, and vigorously ignore the Standard.”

Of course, Guran is correct – to a certain extent. All branches of writing will include the terrible along with the terrific. Horror is no exception. There is no excuse for bad writing, but isn’t that for the reader to judge for themselves? After all, I’ve edited enough anthologies to know that no two people usually agree on the worth of a piece of fiction. And such things as “craft” can be learned with experience.

When choosing stories to include in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, I consider work that originally appeared in a wide variety of publications and formats. And I know that other anthology editors do so as well. Not all the good stuff makes it into a professional showcase first.

Guran continues: “And the tragedy is that the most self-aware among this new breed know they don’t measure up to Real Writers, and are happy to tread water in an eddy that is 90 per cent pointless, derivative crap, appearing in dreadfully conceived anthologies full of amateurs, or excreting another novel-length waste of time about vampire cockroaches.”

Although I am certain that the majority of writers would rather do the best work they can and have that work published in the most prestigious markets available, it should come as no surprise to anybody that this does not always happen. Sometimes a sale is a sale, and a writer (or even editor) is forced to compromise their talents to earn a crust or see their endeavours presented to as wide an audience as possible.

Guran blames the horror “community” itself for creating a new fiction ghetto (a charge that has often been made before) by becoming self-promoting and isolationist. Unfortunately, so far as horror is concerned you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. If you successfully move into the “mainstream” you are widely regarded as selling out; if you stay behind and try to promote the genre then, according to Guran, you are merely exacerbating the problem.

Perhaps even more damaging, she also accuses those people currently working in the genre of staying silent, of not calling attention to the problems. Well, I am sorry to contradict, but many of the criticisms in her article have already been addressed in this very series of books and by other well-established writers elsewhere. I have also been on enough convention panels with people such as Doug Winter, Ramsey Campbell, Ellen Datlow and David J. Schow, as well as with various others, to know that staying silent is not usually an option among horror professionals.

“Most of all, never, ever feel passionate about the literature you once loved”, denigrates Guran. “In fact, other than bitterness over the detail that someone else got rich – or at least richer than you – try not to feel anything at all.”

Unfortunately, this is not a view of the horror community that I recognize at all. If anything, we are sometimes too passionate about our feelings for the genre. If we weren’t, most of us would be earning a great deal more money elsewhere. For many writers and editors in this field, financial rewards are not always the primary concern.

Guran makes a case for horror to “be both profound and entertaining”, sentiments with which I readily agree. But what is this “system of standards of which we dare not speak”? She never actually tells us. And that is the problem. As readers, writers and editors we all have our own system of standards. We may not always agree with each other, but it is that very diversity of taste and erudition that binds our community.

I may not agree with everything Paula Guran says in her article, but I commend it to anyone who has more than a passing interest in horror fiction. It is an important piece of writing that raises many pertinent questions about the way we perceive ourselves as both individuals and as a community. Like the best horror fiction, it is certain to provoke a reaction but there is no reason to react to it with hostility. Read it carefully, and then discuss it with anyone who shares your interest in the genre.

Near the end of the piece, Guran states “Horror, of course, will survive as it always has.” And in that sentiment, at least, we are unanimous.

The Editor
May, 2003

NEIL GAIMAN

October in the Chair

NEIL GAIMAN’S 2002 NOVEL American Gods won science fiction’s Hugo Award and horror’s Bram Stoker Award. His latest novel, Coraline, a dark fantasy for children that he had been writing for a decade, was a huge success on both sides of the Atlantic and looks set to follow its predecessor in the awards stakes.

On the illustrated front, his first Sandman graphic novel in seven years, entitled Endless Nights, is published by DC Comics; 1602 is a new series from Marvel, and he has collaborated with artist Dave McKean on a children’s picture book called The Wolves in the Walls.

As well as all the above, he somehow also found the time to make a short film entitled A Short Film About John Bolton, which is due for release on DVD, and he has recently started writing a new novel, with the working title Anansi Boys.

About the Locus Award-winning “October in the Chair”, he explains: “I began this story several years ago, when Harlan Ellison and I were at a convention, and we were meant to be writing a story together in a roped-off area. But Harlan was late on a deadline for an introduction, so he was typing that. I wrote the first few hundred words of this story then, and showed it to Harlan. He read it through, suggested I clean up April’s language, and said no, he thought that really this was the beginning of one of my stories. So I began a different story, which Harlan called ‘Shoot Day for Night’ when he continued it. One day, at some other convention, behind some other ropes, I have no doubt that it will be finished.

“So the months sat around the fire on my hard disk for several years, haunting me but unwritten. Then, last year, Peter Straub asked me for a story for Conjunctions 39, and I got to find out what happened next.”

OCTOBER WAS IN THE CHAIR, so it was chilly that evening, and the leaves were red and orange and tumbled from the trees that circled the grove. The twelve of them sat around a campfire roasting huge sausages on sticks, which spat and crackled as the fat dripped onto the burning apple wood, and drinking fresh apple-cider, tangy and tart in their mouths.

April took a dainty bite from her sausage, which burst open as she bit into it, spilling hot juice down her chin. “Beshrew and suck-ordure on it,” she said.

Squat March, sitting next to her, laughed, low and dirty, and then pulled out a huge, filthy handkerchief. “Here you go,” he said.

April wiped her chin. “Thanks,” she said. “The cursed bag-of-innards burned me. I’ll have a blister there tomorrow.”

September yawned. “You are such a hypochondriac,” he said, across the fire. “And such language.” He had a pencil-thin moustache, and was balding in the front, which made his forehead seem high, and wise.

“Lay off her,” said May. Her dark hair was cropped short against her skull, and she wore sensible boots. She smoked a small, brown cigarillo that smelled heavily of cloves. “She’s sensitive.”

“Oh puhlease,” said September. “Spare me.”

October, conscious of his position in the chair, sipped his apple cider, cleared his throat, and said, “Okay. Who wants to begin?” The chair he sat in was carved from one large block of oak-wood, inlaid with ash, with cedar and with cherrywood. The other eleven sat on tree stumps equally spaced about the small bonfire. The tree-stumps had been worn smooth and comfortable by years of use.

“What about the minutes?” asked January. “We always do minutes when I’m in the chair.”

“But you aren’t in the chair now, are you, dear?” said September, an elegant creature of mock solicitude.

“What about the minutes?” repeated January. “You can’t ignore them.”

“Let the little buggers take care of themselves,” said April, one hand running through her long blonde hair. “And I think September should go first.”

September preened and nodded. “Delighted,” he said.

“Hey,” said February. “Hey-hey-hey-hey-hey-hey-hey. I didn’t hear the chairman ratify that. Nobody starts till October says who starts, and then nobody else talks. Can we have maybe the tiniest semblance of order here?” Small, pale, dressed entirely in blues and greys, he peered at them.

“It’s fine,” said October. His beard was all colours, a grove of trees in autumn, deep brown and fire-orange and wine-red, an untrimmed tangle across the lower half of his face. His cheeks were apple-red. He looked like a friend; like someone you had known all your life. “September can go first. Let’s just get it rolling.”

September placed the end of his sausage into his mouth, chewed daintily, and drained his cider mug. Then he stood up and bowed to the company and began to speak.

“Laurent DeLisle was the finest chef in all of Seattle – at least, Laurent DeLisle thought so, and the Michelin Stars on his door confirmed him in his opinion. He was a remarkable chef, it is true – his minced-lamb brioche had won several awards; his smoked-quail and white truffle ravioli had been described in The Gastronome as ‘the tenth wonder of the world’. But it was his wine-cellar . . . ah, his wine cellar . . . that was his source of pride and his passion.

“I understand that. The last of the white grapes are harvested in me, and the bulk of the reds: I appreciate fine wines, the aroma, the taste, the aftertaste as well.

“Laurent DeLisle bought his wines at auctions, from private wine-lovers, from reputable dealers: he would insist on a pedigree for each wine, for wine frauds are, alas, too common when the bottle is selling for perhaps five, ten, a hundred thousand dollars, or pounds, or Euros.

“The treasure – the jewel – the rarest of the rare and the ne plus ultra of his temperature-controlled wine cellar was a bottle of 1902 Chateau Lafitte. It was on the wine list at $120,000, although it was, in true terms, priceless, for it was the last bottle of its kind.”

“Excuse me,” said August, politely. He was the fattest of them all, his thin hair combed in golden wisps across his pink pate.

September glared down at his neighbour. “Yes?”

“Is this the one where some rich dude buys the wine to go with the dinner, and the chef decides that the dinner the rich dude ordered isn’t good enough for the wine, so he sends out a different dinner, and the guy takes one mouthful, and he’s got, like, some rare allergy and he dies just like that, and the wine never gets drunk after all?”

September said nothing. He looked a great deal.

“Because if it is, you told it before. Years ago. Dumb story then. Dumb story now.” August smiled. His pink cheeks shone in the firelight.

September said, “Obviously pathos and culture are not to everyone’s taste. Some people prefer their barbecues and beer, and some of us like—”

February said, “Well, I hate to say this, but he kind of does have a point. It has to be a new story.”

September raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips. “I’m done,” he said, abruptly. He sat down on his stump.

They looked at each other across the fire, the months of the year.

June, hesitant and clean, raised her hand and said, “I have one about a guard on the X-ray machines at La Guardia airport, who could read all about people from the outlines of their luggage on the screen, and one day she saw a luggage X-ray so beautiful that she fell in love with the person, and she had to figure out which person in the line it was, and she couldn’t, and she pined for months and months. And when the person came through again she knew it this time, and it was the man, and he was a wizened old Indian man and she was pretty and black and, like twenty-five, and she knew it would never work out and she let him go, because she could also see from the shapes of his bags on the screen that he was going to die soon.”

October said, “Fair enough, young June. Tell that one.”

June stared at him, like a spooked animal. “I just did,” she said.

October nodded. “So you did,” he said, before any of the others could say anything. And then he said, “Shall we proceed to my story, then?”

February sniffed. “Out of order there, big fella. The man in the chair only tells his story when the rest of us are through. Can’t go straight to the main event.”

May was placing a dozen chestnuts on the grate above the fire, deploying them into patterns with her tongs. “Let him tell his story if he wants to,” she said. “God knows it can’t be worse than the one about the wine. And I have things to be getting back to. Flowers don’t bloom by themselves. All in favour?”

“You’re taking this to a formal vote?” February said. “I cannot believe this. I cannot believe this is happening.” He mopped his brow with a handful of tissues, which he pulled from his sleeve.

Seven hands were raised. Four people kept their hands down – February, September, January and July. (“I don’t have anything personal on this,” said July, apologetically. “It’s purely procedural. We shouldn’t be setting precedents.”)

“It’s settled then,” said October. “Is there anything anyone would like to say before I begin?”

“Um. Yes. Sometimes,” said June, “sometimes I think somebody’s watching us from the woods and then I look and there isn’t anybody there. But I still think it.”

April said, “That’s because you’re crazy.”

“Mm,” said September, to everybody. “That’s our April. She’s sensitive but she’s still the cruellest.”

“Enough,” said October. He stretched in his chair. He cracked a cobnut with his teeth, pulled out the kernel, and threw the fragments of shell into the fire, where they hissed and spat and popped, and he began.

There was a boy, October said, who was miserable at home, although they did not beat him. He did not fit well, not his family, his town, nor even his life. He had two older brothers, who were twins, older than he was, and who hurt him or ignored him, and were popular. They played football: some games one twin would score more and be the hero, and some games the other would. Their little brother did not play football. They had a name for their brother. They called him the Runt.

They had called him the Runt since he was a baby, and at first their mother and father had chided them for it.

The twins said, “But he is the runt of the litter. Look at him. Look at us.” The boys were six when they said this. Their parents thought it was cute. A name like “the Runt” can be infectious, so pretty soon the only person who called him Donald was his grandmother, when she telephoned him on his birthday, and people who did not know him.

Now, perhaps because names have power, he was a runt: skinny and small and nervous. He had been born with a runny nose, and it had not stopped running in a decade. At mealtimes, if the twins liked the food they would steal his; if they did not, they would contrive to place their food on his plate and he would find himself in trouble for leaving good food uneaten.

Their father never missed a football game, and would buy an ice cream afterward for the twin who had scored the most, and a consolation ice cream for the other twin, who hadn’t. Their mother described herself as a newspaperwoman, although she mostly sold advertising space and subscriptions: she had gone back to work full-time once the twins were capable of taking care of themselves.

The other kids in the boy’s class admired the twins. They had called him Donald for several weeks in first grade, until the word trickled down that his brothers called him the Runt. His teachers rarely called him anything at all, although among themselves they could sometimes be heard to say that it was a pity that the youngest Covay boy didn’t have the pluck or the imagination or the life of his brothers.

The Runt could not have told you when he first decided to run away, nor when his daydreams crossed the border and became plans. By the time that he admitted to himself that he was leaving he had a large Tupperware container hidden beneath a plastic sheet behind the garage containing three Mars bars, two Milky Ways, a bag of nuts, a small bag of liquorice, a flashlight, several comics, an unopened packet of beef jerky, and thirty-seven dollars, most of it in quarters. He did not like the taste of beef jerky, but he had read that explorers had survived for weeks on nothing else; and it was when he put the packet of beef jerky into the Tupperware box and pressed the lid down with a pop that he knew he was going to have to run away.

He had read books, newspapers and magazines. He knew that if you ran away you sometimes met bad people who did bad things to you; but he had also read fairy tales, so he knew that there were kind people out there, side by side with the monsters.

The Runt was a thin ten-year-old, small, with a runny nose and a blank expression. If you were to try and pick him out of a group of boys, you’d be wrong. He’d be the other one. Over at the side. The one your gaze slipped over.

All through September he put off leaving. It took a really bad Friday, during the course of which both of his brothers sat on him (and the one who sat on his face broke wind, and laughed uproariously) to decide that whatever monsters were waiting out in the world would be bearable, perhaps even preferable.

Saturday, his brothers were meant to be looking after him, but soon they went into town to see a girl they liked. The Runt went around the back of the garage and took the Tupperware container out from beneath the plastic sheeting. He took it up to his bedroom. He emptied his schoolbag onto his bed, filled it with his candies and comics and quarters and the beef jerky. He filled an empty soda-bottle with water.

The Runt walked into the town and got on the bus. He rode west, ten dollars-in-quarters-worth of west, to a place he didn’t know, which he thought was a good start, then he got off the bus and walked. There was no sidewalk now, so when cars came past he would edge over into the ditch, to safety.

The sun was high. He was hungry, so he rummaged in his bag and pulled out a Mars bar. After he ate it he found he was thirsty, and he drank almost half of the water from his soda bottle before he realized that he was going to have to ration it. He had thought that once he got out of the town he would see springs of fresh water everywhere, but there were none to be found. There was a river, though, that ran beneath a wide bridge.

The Runt stopped halfway across the bridge to stare down at the brown water. He remembered something he had been told in school: that, in the end, all rivers flowed into the sea. He had never been to the seashore. He clambered down the bank and followed the river. There was a muddy path along the side of the river bank, and an occasional beer can or plastic snack packet to show that people had been that way before, but he saw no one as he walked.

He finished his water.

He wondered if they were looking for him yet. He imagined police cars and helicopters and dogs, all trying to find him. He would evade them. He would make it to the sea.

The river ran over some rocks, and it splashed. He saw a blue heron, its wings wide, glide past him, and he saw solitary end-of-season dragonflies, and sometimes small clusters of midges, enjoying the Indian Summer. The blue sky became dusk-grey, and a bat swung down to snatch insects from the air. The Runt wondered where he would sleep that night.

Soon the path divided, and he took the branch that led away from the river, hoping it would lead to a house, or to a farm with an empty barn. He walked for some time as the dusk deepened, until at the end of the path he found a farmhouse, half tumbled down and unpleasant-looking. The Runt walked around it, becoming increasingly certain as he walked that nothing could make him go inside, and then he climbed over a broken fence to an abandoned pasture and settled down to sleep in the long grass with his schoolbag for his pillow.

He lay on his back, fully dressed, staring up at the sky. He was not in the slightest bit sleepy.

“They’ll be missing me by now,” he told himself. “They’ll be worried.”

He imagined himself coming home in a few years’ time. The delight on his family’s faces as he walked up the path to home. Their welcome. Their love . . .

He woke some hours later, with the bright moonlight in his face. He could see the whole world – as bright as day, like in the nursery rhyme, but pale and without colours. Above him the moon was full, or almost, and he imagined a face looking down at him, not unkindly, in the shadows and shapes of the moon’s surface.

A voice said, “Where do you come from?”

He sat up, not scared, not yet, and looked around him. Trees. Long grass. “Where are you? I don’t see you?”

Something he had taken for a shadow moved, beside a tree on the edge of the pasture, and he saw a boy of his own age.

“I’m running away from home,” said the Runt.

“Whoa,” said the boy. “That must have taken a whole lot of guts.”

The Runt grinned with pride. He didn’t know what to say.

“You want to walk a bit?” said the boy.

“Sure,” said the Runt. He moved his schoolbag so that it was next to the fence post, so that he could always find it again.

They walked down the slope, giving a wide berth to the old farmhouse.

“Does anyone live there?” asked the Runt.

“Not really,” said the other boy. He had fair, fine hair that was almost white in the moonlight. “Some people tried a long time back, but they didn’t like it, and they left. Then other folk moved in. But nobody lives there now. What’s your name?”

“Donald,” said the Runt. And then, “But they call me the Runt. What do they call you?”

The boy hesitated. “Dearly,” he said.

“That’s a cool name.”

Dearly said, “I used to have another name, but I can’t read it any more.”

They squeezed through a huge iron gateway, rusted into position, part open, part closed, and they were in the little meadow at the bottom of the slope.

“This place is cool,” said the Runt.

There were dozens of stones of all sizes in the small meadow. Tall stones, bigger than either of the boys, and small ones, just the right size for sitting on. There were some broken stones. The Runt knew what sort of a place this was, but it did not scare him. It was a loved place.

“Who’s buried here?” he asked.

“Mostly okay people,” said Dearly. “There used to be a town over there. Past those trees. Then the railroad came and they built a stop in the next town over, and our town sort of dried up and fell in and blew away. There’s bushes and trees now, where the town was. You can hide in the trees and go into the old houses and jump out.”

The Runt said, “Are they like that farmhouse up there? The houses?” He didn’t want to go in them, if they were.

“No,” said Dearly. “Nobody goes in them, except for me. And some animals, sometimes. I’m the only kid around here.”

“I figured,” said The Runt.

“Maybe we can go down and play in them,” said Dearly.

“That would be pretty cool,” said the Runt.

It was a perfect early October night: almost as warm as summer, and the harvest moon dominated the sky. You could see everything.

“Which one of these is yours?” asked the Runt.

Dearly straightened up proudly, and took the Runt by the hand. He pulled him over to an overgrown corner of the field. The two boys pushed aside the long grass. The stone was set flat into the ground, and it had dates carved into it from a hundred years before. Much of it was worn away, but beneath the dates it was possible to make out the words

DEARLY DEPARTED
WILL NEVER BE FORG

“Forgotten, I’d wager,” said Dearly.

“Yeah, that’s what I’d say too,” said the Runt.

They went out of the gate, down a gully and into what remained of the old town. Trees grew through houses, and buildings had fallen in on themselves, but it wasn’t scary. They played hide-and-seek. They explored. Dearly showed the Runt some pretty cool places, including a one-room cottage that he said was the oldest building in that whole part of the county. It was in pretty good shape, too, considering how old it was.

“I can see pretty good by moonlight,” said the Runt. “Even inside. I didn’t know that it was so easy.”

“Yeah,” said Dearly. “And after a while you get good at seeing even when there ain’t any moonlight.”

The Runt was envious.

“I got to go to the bathroom,” said the Runt. “Is there somewhere around here?”

Dearly thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t do that stuff any more. There are a few outhouses still standing, but they may not be safe. Best just to do it in the woods.”

“Like a bear,” said the Runt.

He went out the back, into the woods that pushed up against the wall of the cottage, and went behind a tree. He’d never done that before, in the open air. He felt like a wild animal. When he was done he wiped himself off with fallen leaves. Then he went back out the front. Dearly was sitting in a pool of moonlight, waiting for him.

“How did you die?” asked the Runt.

“I got sick,” said Dearly. “My maw cried and carried on something fierce. Then I died.”

“If I stayed here with you,” said the Runt, “would I have to be dead too?”

“Maybe,” said Dearly. “Well, yeah. I guess.”

“What’s it like? Being dead?”

“I don’t mind it,” admitted Dearly. “Worst thing is not having anyone to play with.”

“But there must be lots of people up in that meadow,” said the Runt. “Don’t they ever play with you?”

“Nope,” said Dearly. “Mostly, they sleep. And even when they walk, they can’t be bothered to just go and see stuff and do things. They can’t be bothered with me. You see that tree?”

It was a beech tree, its smooth grey bark cracked with age. It sat in what must once have been the town square, ninety years before.

“Yeah,” said the Runt.

“You want to climb it?”

“It looks kind of high.”

“It is. Real high. But it’s easy to climb. I’ll show you.”

It was easy to climb. There were handholds in the bark, and the boys went up the big beech tree like a couple of monkeys, or pirates, or warriors. From the top of the tree one could see the whole world. The sky was starting to lighten, just a hair, in the east.

Everything waited. The night was ending. The world was holding its breath, preparing to begin again.

“This was the best day I ever had,” said the Runt.

“Me too,” said Dearly. “What you going to do now?”

“I don’t know,” said the Runt.

He imagined himself going on across the world, all the way to the sea. He imagined himself growing up and growing older, bringing himself up by his bootstraps. Somewhere in there he would become fabulously wealthy. And then he would go back to the house with the twins in it, and he would drive up to their door in his wonderful car, or perhaps he would turn up at a football game (in his imagination the twins had neither aged not grown) and look down at them, in a kindly way. He would buy them all – the twins, his parents – a meal at the finest restaurant in the city, and they would tell him how badly they had misunderstood him and mistreated him. They apologized and wept, and through it all he said nothing. He let their apologies wash over him. And then he would give each of them a gift, and afterwards he would leave their lives once more, this time for good.

It was a fine dream.

In reality, he knew, he would keep walking, and be found tomorrow, or the day after that, and go home and be yelled at and everything would be the same as it ever was, and day after day, hour after hour until the end of time he’d still be the Runt, only they’d be mad at him for having dared to walk away.

“I have to go to bed soon,” said Dearly. He started to climb down the big beech tree.

Climbing down the tree was harder, the Runt found. You couldn’t see where you were putting your feet, and had to feel around for somewhere to put them. Several times he slipped and slid, but Dearly went down ahead of him, and would say things like, “Just a little to the right, now,” and they both made it down just fine.

The sky continued to lighten, and the moon was fading, and it was harder to see. They clambered back through the gully. Sometimes the Runt wasn’t sure that Dearly was there at all, but when he got to the top, he saw the boy waiting for him.

They didn’t say much as they walked up to the meadow filled with stones. The Runt put his arm over Dearly’s shoulder, and they walked in step up the hill.

“Well,” said Dearly. “Thanks for coming over.”

“I had a good time,” said the Runt.

“Yeah,” said Dearly. “Me too.”

Down in the woods somewhere a bird began to sing.

“If I wanted to stay—?” said the Runt, all in a burst. Then he stopped. I might never get another chance to change it, thought the Runt. He’d never get to the sea. They’d never let him.

Dearly didn’t say anything, not for a long time. The world was grey. More birds joined the first.

“I can’t do it,” said Dearly, eventually. “But they might.”

“Who?”

“The ones in there.” The fair boy pointed up the slope to the tumbledown farmhouse with the jagged broken windows, silhouetted against the dawn. The grey light had not changed it.

The Runt shivered. “There’s people in there?” he said. “I thought you said it was empty.”

“It ain’t empty,” said Dearly. “I said nobody lives there. Different things.” He looked up at the sky. “I got to go now,” he added. He squeezed the Runt’s hand. And then he just wasn’t there any longer.

The Runt stood in the little graveyard all on his own, listening to the birdsong on the morning air. Then he made his way up the hill. It was harder by himself.

He picked up his schoolbag from the place where he had left it. He ate his last Milky Way and stared at the tumbledown building. The empty windows of the farmhouse were like eyes, watching him.

It was darker inside there. Darker than anything.

He pushed his way through the weed-choked yard. The door to the farmhouse was mostly crumbled away. He stopped at the doorway, hesitating, wondering if this was wise. He could smell damp, and rot, and something else underneath. He thought he heard something move, deep in the house, in the cellar, perhaps, or the attic. A shuffle, maybe. Or a hop. It was hard to tell.

Eventually, he went inside.

Nobody said anything. October filled his wooden mug with apple cider when he was done, and drained it, and filled it again.

“It was a story,” said December. “I’ll say that for it.” He rubbed his pale blue eyes with a fist. The fire was almost out.

“What happened next?” asked June, nervously. “After he went into the house?”

May, sitting next to her, put her hand on June’s arm. “Better not to think about it,” she said.

“Anyone else want a turn?” asked August. There was silence. “Then I think we’re done.”

“That needs to be an official motion,” pointed out February.

“All in favour?” said October. There was a chorus of “Ayes”. “All against?” Silence. “Then I declare this meeting adjourned.”

They got up from the fireside, stretching and yawning, and walked away into the wood, in ones and twos and threes, until only October and his neighbour remained.

“Your turn in the chair next time,” said October.

“I know,” said November. He was pale, and thin-lipped. He helped October out of the wooden chair. “I like your stories. Mine are always too dark.”

“I don’t think so,” said October. “It’s just that your nights are longer. And you aren’t as warm.”

“Put it like that,” said November, “and I feel better. I suppose we can’t help who we are.”

“That’s the spirit,” said his brother. And they touched hands as they walked away from the fire’s orange embers, taking their stories with them back into the dark.

For Ray Bradbury

CHINA MIÉVILLE

Details

CHINA MIÉVILLE WAS BORN IN 1972 and is one of Britain’s hottest young science fiction writers. He has degrees in Social Anthropology and International Relations, and a Ph.D in the philosophy of International Law. He has lived, worked and studied in Britain, Egypt, Zimbabwe and the United States.

Miéville’s published novels are King Rat, the Arthur C. Clarke and British Fantasy Award-winning Perdido Street Station, and The Scar. His novella The Tain recently appeared from PS Publishing with an Introduction by M. John Harrison.

“When I was a kid,” remembers the author, “I slept on a bunk bed right near the ceiling, and I could see all the swirls of paint. One of them had a shape something between a gorilla and Spider-Man’s enemy The Sandman. I wasn’t scared of this creature but I was fascinated by it, and by how it was both invisible – it was just random paint, there was nothing to see – and vividly there, whenever I looked for it. I suppose ‘Details’ is proof that the fascination never went away.”

WHEN THE BOY UPSTAIRS got hold of a pellet gun and fired snips of potato at passing cars, I took a turn. I was part of everything. I wasn’t an outsider. But I wouldn’t join in when my friends went to the yellow house to scribble on the bricks and listen at the windows.

One girl teased me about it, but everyone else told her to shut up. They defended me, even though they didn’t understand why I wouldn’t come.

I don’t remember a time before I visited the yellow house for my mother.

On Wednesday mornings at about nine o’clock I would open the front door of the decrepit building with a key from the bunch that my mother had given me. Inside there was a hall and two doors, one broken and leading to the splintering stairs. I would unlock the other and enter the dark flat. The corridor inside was unlit and smelt of old wet air. I never walked even two steps down that hallway. Rot and shadows merged, and it looked as if the passage disappeared a few yards from me. The door to Mrs Miller’s room was right in front of me. I would lean forward and knock.

Quite often there were signs that someone else had been there recently. Scuffed dust and bits of litter. Sometimes I was not alone. There were two other children I sometimes saw slipping in or out of the house. There were a handful of adults who visited Mrs Miller.

I might find one or other of them in the hallway outside the door to her flat, or even sometimes in the flat itself, slouching in the crumbling dark hallway. They would be slumped over or reading some cheap-looking book or swearing loudly as they waited.

There was a young Asian woman who wore a lot of make-up and smoked obsessively. She ignored me totally. There were two drunks who came sometimes. One would greet me boisterously and incomprehensibly, raising his arms as if he wanted to hug me into his stinking, stinking jumper. I would grin and wave nervously, walk past him. The other seemed alternately melancholic and angry. Occasionally I’d meet him by the door to Mrs Miller’s room, swearing in a strong cockney accent. I remember the first time I saw him, he was standing there, his red face contorted, slurring and moaning loudly.

“Come on, you old slag,” he wailed, “you sodding old slag. Come on, please, you cow.”

His words scared me but his tone was wheedling, and I realized I could hear her voice, Mrs Miller’s voice, from inside the room, answering him back. She did not sound frightened or angry.

I hung back, not sure what to do, and she kept speaking, and eventually the drunken man shambled miserably away. And then I could continue as usual.

I asked my mother once if I could have some of Mrs Miller’s food. She laughed very hard and shook her head. In all the Wednesdays of bringing the food over, I never even dipped my finger in to suck it.

My mum spent an hour every Tuesday night making the stuff up. She dissolved a bit of gelatine or cornflower with some milk, threw in a load of sugar or flavourings, and crushed a clutch of vitamin pills into the mess. She would stir it until it thickened and let it set in a plain white plastic bowl. In the morning it would be a kind of strong-smelling custard which my mother put a dishcloth over and gave me, along with a list of any questions or requests for Mrs Miller, and sometimes a plastic bucket full of white paint.

So I would stand in front of Mrs Miller’s door, knocking, with a bowl at my feet. I would hear a shifting and then her voice from close by the door.

“Hello,” she would call, and then she would say my name a couple of times. “Have you my breakfast? Are you ready?”

I would creep up close to the door and hold the food ready. I would tell her I was.

Mrs Miller would slowly count to three. On three, the door would suddenly swing open a snatch, just a foot or two, and I would thrust the bowl into the gap. She would grab it and slam the door quickly in my face.

I couldn’t see very much inside the room. The door was open for less than a second. My strongest impression was of the whiteness of the walls. Mrs Miller’s sleeves were white too, and made of plastic. I never got much of a glimpse at her face, but what I saw was unmemorable. A middle-aged woman’s eager face.

If I had a bucket full of paint, we would run through the routine again. Then I would sit cross-legged in front of her door and listen to her eat.

“How’s your mother?” she would shout. At that I would unfold my mother’s careful queries. She’s OK, I’d say, she’s fine. She says she has some questions for you.

I’d read my mother’s strange questions in my careful child monotone, and Mrs Miller would pause and make interested sounds, and clear her throat and think out loud. Sometimes she would take ages to come to an answer, and sometimes it would be almost immediate.

“Tell your mother she can’t tell if a man’s good or bad from that,” she’d say. “Tell her to remember the problems she had with your father.” Or: “Yes, she can take the heart of it out. Only she has to paint it with the special oil I told her about.” “Tell your mother seven. But only four of them concern her and three of them used to be dead.”

“I can’t help her with that,” she told me once, quietly. “Tell her to go to a doctor, quickly.” And my mother did, and she got well again.

“What do you not want to do when you grow up?” Mrs Miller asked me one day.

That morning when I had come to the house the sad cockney vagrant had been banging on the door of her room again, the keys to the flat flailing in his hand.

“He’s begging you, you old tart, please, you owe him, he’s so bloody angry,” he’d been shouting, “only it ain’t you gets the sharp end, is it? Please, you cow, you sodding cow, I’m on me knees . . .”

“My door knows you, man,” Mrs Miller had declared from within. “It knows you and so do I, you know it won’t open to you. I didn’t take out my eyes and I’m not giving in now. Go home.”

I had waited nervously as the man gathered himself and staggered away, and then, looking behind me, I had knocked on her door and announced myself. It was after I’d given her her food that she asked her question.

“What do you not want to do when you grow up?”

If I had been a few years older her inversion of the cliché would have annoyed me: it would have seemed mannered and contrived. But I was only a young child, and I was quite delighted.

I don’t want to be a lawyer, I told her carefully. I spoke out of loyalty to my mother, who periodically received crisp letters that made her cry or smoke fiercely, and swear at lawyers, bloody smart-arse lawyers.

Mrs Miller was delighted.

“Good boy!” she snorted. “We know all about lawyers. Bastards, right? With the small print! Never be tricked by the small print! It’s right there in front of you, right there in front of you, and you can’t even see it and then suddenly it makes you notice it! And I tell you, once you seen it it’s got you!” She laughed excitedly. “Don’t let the small print get you. I tell you a secret.” I waited quietly, and my head slipped nearer the door.

“The devil’s in the details!” She laughed again. “You ask your mother if that’s not true. The devil is in the details!”

I’d wait the twenty minutes or so until Mrs Miller had finished eating, and then we’d reverse our previous procedure and she’d quickly hand me out an empty bowl. I would return home with the empty container and tell my mother the various answers to her various questions. Usually she would nod and make notes. Occasionally she would cry.

After I told Mrs Miller that I did not want to be a lawyer she started asking me to read to her. She made me tell my mother, and told me to bring a newspaper or one of a number of books. My mother nodded at the message and packed me a sandwich the next Wednesday, along with The Mirror. She told me to be polite and do what Mrs Miller asked, and that she’d see me in the afternoon.

I wasn’t afraid. Mrs Miller had never treated me badly from behind her door. I was resigned, and only a little bit nervous.

Mrs Miller made me read stories to her from specific pages that she shouted out. She made me recite them again and again, very carefully. Afterwards she would talk to me. Usually she started with a joke about lawyers, and about small print.

“There’s three ways not to see what you don’t want to,” she told me. “One is the coward’s way and too damned painful. The other is to close your eyes for ever which is the same as the first, when it comes to it. The third is the hardest and the best: you have to make sure only the things you can afford to see come before you.”

*   *   *

One morning when I arrived the stylish Asian woman was whispering fiercely through the wood of the door, and I could hear Mrs Miller responding with shouts of amused disapproval. Eventually the young woman swept past me, leaving me cowed by her perfume.

Mrs Miller was laughing, and she was talkative when she had eaten.

“She’s heading for trouble, messing with the wrong family! You have to be careful with all of them,” she told me. “Every single one of them on that other side of things is a tricksy bastard who’ll kill you soon as look at you, given half a chance.

“There’s the gnarly throat-tipped one . . . and there’s old hasty, who I think had best remain nameless,” she said wryly. “All old bastards, all of them. You can’t trust them at all, that’s what I say. I should know, eh? Shouldn’t I?” She laughed. “Trust me, trust me on this: it’s too easy to get on the wrong side of them.”

“What’s it like out today?” she asked me. I told her that it was cloudy.

“You want to be careful with that,” she said. “All sorts of faces in the clouds, aren’t there? Can’t help noticing, can you?” She was whispering now. “Do me a favour when you go home to your mum: don’t look up, there’s a boy. Don’t look up at all.”

When I left her, however, the day had changed. The sky was hot, and quite blue.

The two drunk men were squabbling in the front hall and I edged past them to Mrs Miller’s door. They continued bickering in a depressing, garbled murmur throughout my visit.

“D’you know, I can’t even really remember what it was all about, now!” Mrs Miller said when I had finished reading to her. “I can’t remember! That’s a terrible thing. But you don’t forget the basics. The exact question escapes me, and to be honest I think maybe I was just being nosy or showing off . . . I can’t say I’m proud of it but it could have been that. It could. But whatever the question, it was all about a way of seeing an answer.

“There’s a way of looking that lets you read things. If you look at a pattern of tar on a wall, or a crumbling mound of brick or some such . . . there’s a way of unpicking it. And if you know how, you can trace it and read it out and see the things hidden right there in front of you, the things you’ve been seeing but not noticing, all along. But you have to learn how.” She laughed. It was a high-pitched, unpleasant sound. “Someone has to teach you. So you have to make certain friends.

“But you can’t make friends without making enemies.

“You have to open it all up for you to see inside. You make what you see into a window, and you see what you want through it. You make what you see a sort of a door.”

She was silent for a long time. Then: “Is it cloudy again?” she asked suddenly. She went on before I answered.

“If you look up, you look into the clouds for long enough and you’ll see a face. Or in a tree. Look in a tree, look in the branches and soon you’ll see them just so, and there’s a face or a running man, or a bat or whatever. You’ll see it all suddenly, a picture in the pattern of the branches, and you won’t have chosen to see it. And you can’t unsee it.

“That’s what you have to learn to do, to read the details like that and see what’s what and learn things. But you’ve to be damn careful. You’ve to be careful not to disturb anything.” Her voice was absolutely cold, and I was suddenly very frightened.

“Open up that window, you’d better be damn careful that what’s in the details doesn’t look back and see you.”

The next time I went, the maudlin drunk was there again wailing obscenities at Mrs Miller through her door. She shouted at me to come back later, that she didn’t need her food right now. She sounded resigned and irritated, and she went back to scolding her visitor before I had backed out of earshot.

He was screaming at her that she’d gone too far, that she’d pissed about too long, that things were coming to a head, that there was going to be hell to pay, that she couldn’t avoid it for ever, that it was her own fault.

When I came back he was asleep, snoring loudly, curled up a few feet into the mildewing passage. Mrs Miller took her food and ate it quickly, returned it without speaking.

When I returned the following week, she began to whisper to me as soon as I’d knocked on the door, hissing urgently as she opened it briefly and grabbed the bowl.

“It was an accident, you know,” she said, as if responding to something I’d said. “I mean of course you know in theory that anything might happen, you get warned, don’t you? But oh my . . . oh my God it took the breath out of me and made me cold to realise what had happened.”

I waited. I could not leave, because Mrs Miller had not returned the bowl. She had not said I could go. She spoke again, very slowly.

“It was a new day.” Her voice was distant and breathy. “Can you even imagine? Can you see what I was ready to do? I was poised . . . to change . . . to see everything that’s hidden. The best place to hide a book is in a library. The best place to hide secret things is there, in the visible angles, in our view, in plain sight.

“I had studied and sought, and learnt, finally, to see. It was time to learn truths.

“I opened my eyes fully, for the first time

“I had chosen an old wall. I was looking for the answer to some question that I told you I can’t even remember now, but the question wasn’t the main thing. That was the opening of my eyes.

“I stared at the whole mass of the bricks. I took another glance, relaxed my sight. At first I couldn’t stop seeing the bricks as bricks, the divisions as layers of cement, but after a time they became pure vision. And as the whole broke down into lines and shapes and shades, I held my breath as I began to see.

“Alternatives appeared to me. Messages written in the pockmarks. Insinuations in the forms. Secrets unravelling. It was bliss.

“And then without warning my heart went tight, as I saw something. I made sense of the pattern.

“It was a mess of cracks and lines and crumbling cement and as I looked at it, I saw a pattern in the wall.

“I saw a clutch of lines that looked just like something . . . terrible . . . something old and predatory and utterly terrible . . . staring right back at me.

“And then I saw it move.”

“You have to understand me,” she said. “Nothing changed. See? All the time I was looking I saw the wall. But that first moment, it was like when you see a face in the cloud. I just noticed in the pattern in the brick, I just noticed something, looking at me. Something angry.

“And then in the very next moment, I just . . . I just noticed another load of lines – cracks that had always been there, you understand? Patterns in broken brick that I’d seen only a second before – that looked exactly like that same thing, a little closer to me. And in the next moment a third picture in the brick, a picture of the thing closer still.

“Reaching for me.”

“I broke free then,” she whispered. “I ran away from there in terror, with my hands in front of my eyes and I was screaming. I ran and ran.

“And when I stopped and opened my eyes again, I had run to the edge of a park, and I took my hands slowly down and dared to look behind me, and saw that there was nothing coming from the alley where I’d been. So I turned to the little snatch of scrub and grass and trees.

“And I saw the thing again.”

Mrs Miller’s voice was stretched out as if she was dreaming. My mouth was open and I huddled closer to the door.

“I saw it in the leaves,” she said forlornly. “As I turned I saw the leaves in such a way . . . Just a chance conjuncture, you understand? I noticed a pattern. I couldn’t not. You don’t choose whether to see faces in the clouds. I saw the monstrous thing again and it still reached for me, and I shrieked and all the mothers and fathers and children in that park turned and gazed at me, and I turned my eyes from that tree and whirled on my feet to face a little family in my way.

“And the thing was there in the same pose,” she whispered in misery. “I saw it in the outlines of the fathers coat and the spokes of the baby’s pushchair, and the tangles of the mother’s hair. It was just another mess of lines, you see? But you don’t choose what you notice. And I couldn’t help but notice just the right lines out of the whole, just the lines out of all the lines there, just the ones to see the thing again, a little closer, looking at me.

“And I turned and saw it closer still in the clouds, and I turned again and it was clutching for me in the rippling weeds in the pond, and as I closed my eyes I swear I felt something touch my dress.

“You understand me? You understand?”

I didn’t know if I understood or not. Of course now I know that I did not.

*   *   *

“It lives in the details,” she said bleakly. “It travels in that . . . in that perception. It moves through those chance meetings of lines. Maybe you glimpse it sometimes when you stare at clouds, and then maybe it might catch a glimpse of you too.

“But it saw me full on. It’s jealous of . . . of its place, and there was I peering through without permission, like a nosy neighbour through a hole in the fence. I know what it is. I know what happened.

“It lurks before us, in the everyday. It’s the boss of all the things hidden in plain sight. Terrible things, they are. Appalling things. Just almost in reach. Brazen and invisible.

“It caught my glances. It can move through whatever I see.

“For most people it’s just chance, isn’t it? What shapes they see in a tangle of wire. There’s a thousand pictures there, and when you look some of them just appear. But now . . . the thing in the lines chooses the pictures for me. It can thrust itself forward. It makes me see it. It’s found its way through. To me. Through what I see. I opened a door into my perception.”

She sounded frozen with terror. I was not equipped for that kind of adult fear, and my mouth worked silently for something to say.

“That was a long, long journey home. Every time I peeked through the cracks in my fingers, I saw that thing crawling for me.

“It waited ready to pounce, and when I opened my eyes even a crack I opened the door again. I saw the back of a woman’s jumper and in the details of the fabric the thing leapt for me. I glimpsed a yard of broken paving and I noticed just the lines that showed me the thing . . . baying.

“I had to shut my eyes quick.

“I groped my way home.

“And then I taped my eyes shut and I tried to think about things.”

There was silence for a time.

“See, there was always the easy way – that scared me rotten, because I was never one for blood and pain,” she said suddenly, and her voice was harder. “I held the scissors in front of my eyes a couple of times, but even bandaged blind as I was I couldn’t bear it. I suppose I could’ve gone to a doctor. I can pull strings, I could pull in a few favours, have them do the job without pain.

“But you know I never . . . really . . . reckoned . . . that’s what I’d do,” she said thoughtfully. “What if you found a way to close the door? Eh? And you’d already put out your eyes? You’d feel such a fool, wouldn’t you?

“And you know it wouldn’t be good enough to wear pads and eyepatches and all. I tried. You catch glimpses. You see the glimmers of light and maybe a few of your own hairs, and that’s the doorway right there, when the hairs cross in the corner of your eye so that if you notice just a few of them in just the right way . . . they look like something coming for you. That’s a doorway.

“It’s . . . unbearable . . . having sight, but trapping it like that.

“I’m not giving up. See . . .” Her voice lowered, and she spoke conspiratorially. “I still think I can close the door. I learnt to see. I can unlearn. I’m looking for ways. I want to see a wall as . . . as bricks again. Nothing more. That’s why you read for me,” she said. “Research. Can’t look at it myself, of course, too many edges and lines and so on on a printed page, so you do it for me. And you’re a good boy to do it.”

I’ve thought about what she said many times, and still it makes no sense to me. The books I read to Mrs Miller were school textbooks, old and dull village histories, the occasional romantic novel. I think that she must have been talking of some of her other visitors, who perhaps read her more esoteric stuff than I did. Either that, or the information she sought was buried very cleverly in the banal prose I faltered through.

“In the meantime, there’s another way of surviving,” she said slyly. “Leave the eyes where they are, but don’t give them any details.

“That . . . thing can force me to notice its shape, but only in what’s there. That’s how it travels. You imagine if I saw a field of wheat. Doesn’t even bear thinking about! A million million little bloody edges, a million lines. You could make pictures of damn anything out of them, couldn’t you? It wouldn’t take any effort at all for the thing to make me notice it. The damn lurker. Or in a gravel drive or, or a building site, or a lawn . . .

“But I can outsmart it.” The note of cunning in her voice made her sound deranged. “Keep it away till I work out how to close it off.

“I had to prepare this blind, with the wrappings round my head. Took me a while, but here I am now. Safe. I’m safe in my little cold room. I keep the walls flat white. I covered the windows and painted them too. I made my cloak out of plastic, so’s I can’t catch a glimpse of cotton weave or anything when I wake up.

“I keep my place nice and . . . simple. When it was all done, I unwrapped the bandages from my head, and I blinked slowly . . . and I was all right. Clean walls, no cracks, no features. I don’t look at my hands often or for long. Too many creases. Your mother makes me a good healthy soup looks like cream, so if I accidentally look in the bowl, there’s no broccoli or rice or tangled-up spaghetti to make lines and edges.

“I open and shut the door so damned quick because I can only afford a moment. That thing is ready to pounce. It wouldn’t take a second for it to leap up at me out of the sight of your hair or your books or whatever.”

Her voice ebbed out. I waited a minute for her to resume, but she did not do so. Eventually I knocked nervously on the door and called her name. There was no answer. I put my ear to the door. I could hear her crying, quietly.

I went home without the bowl. My mother pursed her lips a little but said nothing. I didn’t tell her any of what Mrs Miller had said. I was troubled and totally confused.

The next time I delivered Mrs Miller’s food, in a new container, she whispered harshly to me: “It preys on my eyes, all the white. Nothing to see. Can’t look out the window, can’t read, can’t gaze at my nails. Preys on my mind.

“Not even my memories are left,” she said in misery. “It’s colonizing them. I remember things . . . happy times . . . and the thing’s waiting in the texture of my dress, or in the crumbs of my birthday cake. I didn’t notice it then. But I can see it now. My memories aren’t mine any more. Not even my imaginings. Last night I thought about going to the seaside, and then the thing was there in the foam on the waves.”

She spoke very little the next few times I visited her. I read the chapters she demanded and she grunted curtly in response. She ate quickly.

Her other visitors were there more often now, as the spring came in. I saw them in new combinations and situations: the glamorous young woman arguing with the friendly drunk; the old man sobbing at the far end of the hall. The aggressive man was often there, cajoling and moaning, and occasionally talking conversationally through the door, being answered like an equal. Other times he screamed at her as usual.

I arrived on a chilly day to find the drunken cockney man sleeping a few feet from the door, snoring gutturally. I gave Mrs Miller her food and then sat on my coat and read to her from a women’s magazine as she ate.

When she had finished her food I waited with my arms outstretched, ready to snatch the bowl from her. I remember that I was very uneasy, that I sensed something wrong. I was looking around me anxiously, but everything seemed normal. I looked down at my coat and the crumpled magazine, at the man who still sprawled comatose in the hall.

As I heard Mrs Miller’s hands on the door, I realized what had changed. The drunken man was not snoring. He was holding his breath.

For a tiny moment I thought he had died, but I could see his body trembling, and my eyes began to open wide and I stretched my mouth to scream a warning, but the door had already begun to swing in its tight, quick arc, and before I could even exhale the stinking man pushed himself up faster than I would have thought he could and bore down on me with bloodshot eyes.

I managed to keen as he reached me, and the door faltered for an instant, as Mrs Miller heard my voice. But the man grabbed hold of me in a terrifying, heavy fug of alcohol. He reached down and snatched my coat from the floor, tugged at the jumper I had tied around my waist with his other hand, and hurled me hard at the door.

It flew open, smacking Mrs Miller aside. I was screaming and crying. My eyes hurt at the sudden burst of cold white light from all the walls. I saw Mrs Miller rubbing her head in the corner, struggling to her senses. The staggering, drunken man hurled my checked coat and my patterned jumper in front of her, reached down and snatched my feet, tugged me out of the room in an agony of splinters. I wailed snottily with fear.

Behind me, Mrs Miller began to scream and curse, but I could not hear her well because the man had clutched me to him and pulled my head to his chest. I fought and cried and felt myself lurch as he leaned forward and slammed the door closed.

He held it shut.

When I fought myself free of him I heard him shouting.

“I told you, you slapper,” he wailed unhappily. “I bloody told you, you silly old whore. I warned you it was time . . .” Behind his voice I could hear shrieks of misery and terror from the room. Both of them kept shouting and crying and screaming, and the floorboards pounded, and the door shook, and I heard something else as well.

As if the notes of all the different noises in the house fell into a chance meeting, and sounded like more than dissonance. The shouts and bangs and cries of fear combined in a sudden audible illusion like another presence.

Like a snarling voice. A lingering, hungry exhalation.

I ran then, screaming and terrified, my skin freezing in my T-shirt. I was sobbing and retching with fear, little bleats bursting from me. I stumbled home and was sick in my mother’s room, and kept crying and crying as she grabbed hold of me and I tried to tell her what had happened, until I was drowsy and confused and I fell into silence.

My mother said nothing about Mrs Miller. The next Wednesday we got up early and went to the zoo, the two of us, and at the time when I would usually be knocking on Mrs Miller’s door I was laughing at camels. The Wednesday after that I was taken to see a film, and the one after that my mother stayed in bed and sent me to fetch cigarettes and bread from the local shop, and I made our breakfast and ate it in her room.

My friends could tell that something had changed in the yellow house, but they did not speak to me about it, and it quickly became uninteresting to them.

I saw the Asian woman once more, smoking with her friends in the park several weeks later, and to my amazement she nodded to me and came over, interrupting her companions’ conversation.

“Are you all right?” she asked me peremptorily. “How you doing?”

I nodded shyly back and told her that I was fine, thank you, and how was she?

She nodded and walked away.

*   *   *

I never saw the drunken, violent man again.

There were people I could probably have gone to to understand more about what had happened to Mrs Miller. There was a story that I could chase, if I wanted to. People I had never seen before came to my house and spoke quietly to my mother, and looked at me with what I suppose was pity or concern. I could have asked them. But I was thinking more and more about my own life. I didn’t want to know Mrs Miller’s details.

I went back to the yellow house once, nearly a year after that awful morning. It was winter. I remembered the last time I spoke to Mrs Miller and I felt so much older it was almost giddying. It seemed such a vastly long time ago.

I crept up to the house one evening, trying the keys I still had, which to my surprise worked. The hallway was freezing, dark and stinking more strongly than ever. I hesitated, then pushed open Mrs Miller’s door.

It opened easily, without a sound. The occasional muffled noise from the street seemed so distant it was like a memory. I entered.

She had covered the windows very carefully, and still no light made its way through from outside. It was extremely dark. I waited until I could see better in the ambient glow from the outside hallway.

I was alone.

My old coat and jumper lay spreadeagled in the corner of the room. I shivered to see them, went over and fingered them softly. They were damp and mildewing, covered in wet dust.

The white paint was crumbling off the wall in scabs. It looked as if it had been left untended for several years. I could not believe the extent of the decay.

I turned slowly around and gazed at each wall in turn. I took in the chaotic, intricate patterns of crumbling paint and damp plaster. They looked like maps, like a rocky landscape.

I looked for a long time at the wall furthest from my jacket. I was very cold. After a long time I saw a shape in the ruined paint. I moved closer with a dumb curiosity far stronger than any fear.

In the crumbling texture of the wall was a spreading anatomy of cracks that – seen from a certain angle, caught just right in the scraps of light – looked in outline something like a woman. As I stared at it it took shape, and I stopped noticing the extraneous lines, and focused without effort or decision on the relevant ones. I saw a woman looking out at me.

I could make out the suggestion of her face. The patch of rot that constituted it made it look as if she was screaming.

One of her arms was flung back away from her body, which seemed to strain against it, as if she was being pulled away by her hand and was fighting to escape, and was failing. At the end of her crack-arm, in the space where her captor would be, the paint had fallen away in a great slab, uncovering a huge patch of wet, stained, textured cement.

And in that dark infinity of markings, I could make out any shape I wanted.

DON TUMASONIS

The Wretched
Thicket of Thorn

DON TUMASONIS, IN THE SHORT SPACE of his tarnished, yet louche career as a writer of speculative fiction, has established a name – what sort, he will not say – through the publication of a number of short stories, reviews and articles in various magazines, including All Hallows, Supernatural Tales and Ghosts and Scholars, not to mention the anthologies Shadows and Silence and Dark Terrors 6. His translation of Christopher Hals Gylseth and Lars O. Toverud’s book Julia Pastrana: The Strange Life of the Victorian Ape Woman was recently published by Sutton UK, and more of the author’s stories are due to appear in All Hallows and John Pelan’s third Darkside anthology.

As Tumasonis recalls: “ ‘The Wretched Thicket of Thorn’ was written as part of a yet-unfinished cycle of speculative fictions with the working title Seven Modern Deadly Sins. Two previously published stories, ‘The Graveyard’ and ‘What Goes Down’, dealt with infidelity and acrimony, respectively.

“The title remotely derives from hearing Harlan Ellison once hold forth on his short story ‘The Whimper of Whipped Dogs’, which, not understanding West Coast, I took to be ‘The Whipper of Whipped Dogs’. The perceived malapropism had me bursting publicly into laughter, alone of an otherwise polite audience of a hundred or so. Which crime had Mr Ellison attempting my assassination by paper airplane. Being younger then, I artfully deflected the missile, foreshadowing the parrying skills of Bill the Butcher, but wisely left the room before the talk was finished. Long after, having found out my mistake, pace Ellison, I realized that alliteration might have its use in titles after all.

“The setting and events of the story are for the most part true; the island exists, as does the thicket. Having taken one look inside, I never entered, but always wondered what I would have found had I done so.”

THE LITTLE ISLAND harbour below, so enclosed from the winds by cliffs, was sickeningly hot and humid. Here above, where they had their small hotel, a breeze played constantly across the hilltop and made life bearable. Anticipating the plunge into the furnace, Charles, still acclimatizing to the bright Greek sun after a cold and rainy summer at home, stopped for a moment, wiped the accumulated sweat from his forehead, and looked about him.

His gaze wandered to a nearby building under construction. He had stopped here the day before, in an effort to find out whether a luminous rectangle on a wall in the roofless second floor was sky through a real window or light so intense that it had pierced the solidity of concrete, dissolving it, turning matter to light and light to substance. In the end he took out his binoculars and, focusing on the spot, saw it resolve into the granulated surface of thrown plaster.

Looking down, he caught sight of Elizabeth’s tanned bare legs: she was already well along on the way down to the dock and the restaurants lining the quay. He sighed, and then began to pick his way along the zigzag path, shaded by a plane tree and tamarisks, hoping his body would soon adjust to the heat.

But entering the basin where what life there was on this outlier to the bigger, more heavily trafficked tourist islands had concentrated was equivalent to entering a steam bath. A few beadlets had already re-formed on his brow in the short while since he had started down.

One supposed that the clammy humidity, unusual this far north in Greek waters, was a result of the place being so heavily wooded. It was green, even greener than Thassos. Most Ægean isles were sun-scorched rocks with rare, if any, natural shade; Charles and Elizabeth had chosen this place just because it promised change from the eternal sun-bleached landscapes that had begun to form the habit of their travel each year.

Before reaching the asphalted bit connecting the path to the main shore road, Charles saw that Elizabeth was, in her impatience to get out of the sticky pre-noon haze, entering post-haste the air-conditioned office of Poseidon Travel. Across the street from that agency, on the narrow town beach, its little flotilla of rental boats was neatly lined up, waiting for the next customer to make a choice for the day’s excursion.

Today was the first of September, Elizabeth’s birthday, and the climate was still molten in these parts, as Charles had found out to his extreme discomfort the day before. The two had separated: Charles determined to reach the island’s highest point, his variant on Munro-bashing developed over repeated visits to the Ægean, whilst his spouse had settled for relaxation on the strand, Sybaris ahead of the local Olympus.

His walk had started well, but the lack of shade had left him exposed to the sun and broiling before too long. Later, alone, with metalled road turned to track, local resin-collectors and any traffic far behind, he had left the cutting for the peak. The place was silent but for the wind.

Charles had never seen brush so dense as on those lower slopes, a thick, barely penetrable maquis. Treelike bushes, plants whose baking in the sun erupted forth with aromatic, pungent odours. And bushlike trees bent by the wind, with thick exposed roots, so rocklike themselves that the stones between their twistings appeared to have grown there, organic intrusions studding and enveloped by the worn mineral bark.

The only way was along animal trails, literal tunnels through the steamy thorny mass, that made passage a travail of clothing and hair caught in spiky and desiccated vegetation. When he saw his progress to be a few tens of metres that hour, he had given up, disgusted.

Resting on a block of stone in a rare clearing, he had sat facing the nearby island to the east. Gulping water from his plastic canteen, he had regarded the place between swallows. It was greener even than Tiflos.

With half the bottle finished, he had taken out his map, matching names to the prospect in front of him, a favourite private game. The island was Aghios Mikhailis, Saint Michael. The chart showed it to be about half the length of the main island and divided into two distinct sections, each with its own pronounced summit, separated by a narrow saddle-like neck of land at the middle.

The peak on the left was called Frangòberga – something to do with the Franks, a presence here in the Middle Ages? – and the one on the right was Stefáni, which he vaguely remembered from Greek classes to mean “bridal wreath” or “crown”. Through the binoculars, he had explored the visible parts of the opposite shore, four or five kilometres out. There was a white spot high up that hill, probably some herd of sheep eking it out in the sparse shade of afternoon.

On the long return to town, Charles had suffered near-heat stroke, and took an icy shower to recover. Stretched out nude on the sheet, he had a sip of their duty-free Scotch and read a few pages of Symonds’s Michelangelo. He had then put the book down and broached the idea of taking a boat out to Aghios Mikhailis, suggesting the outing as the perfect day-trip for a birthday.

By habit, Charles avoided the area of the harbour promenade that he knew was covered with what looked to be a permanent oil slick. As he came up on the spot, he saw a weathered old man, face gnarled and darker than tanned, forcefully throwing something like the head of a wet mop on to the pavement. A rusty three-pronged harpoon, shaft like a weathered broom handle, lay at his feet.

Charles stopped to see, and then realized that the object being thrown was an octopus. The man repeatedly dashed it against the concrete, the hard slaps resonating throughout the seaside neighbourhood. That was the explanation: no motor oil wilfully dumped here, but a slick that was the sudsy juice of cephalopods.

Why did the people do it? The claim was that the animal was only edible if made tender in this fashion. Charles thought, however, that there was more to it than that: some form of revenge, or beating out of a devil, or the liberation of a form, forced unwillingly to leave its mortal habitat for a new round on the wheel of all existence.

Unable to say why, he abhorred the practice. There was something nasty and unpleasant about it, connecting at some illogical level in his thoughts with fantasies of furtiveness, and impotence.

When he entered the agency, he saw his wife already seated, chatting and joking with the proprietor, who was related to the owners of their hotel.

“Panagiotis,” she said with a small smile on her face “has been telling me how his boats are the best in the Sporades.”

“It’s true,” the Greek interjected, standing up to move to the other side of his desk, where Elizabeth sat. He was bearded, bulky and dark, with a gold chain that swung from his neck, like some faux crack dealer.

Leaning over her shoulder, the man placed a thick, hairy hand on her bare arm, ostensibly for balance, as he reached with his other for a folder that lay in front of her. He opened it to a section showing coloured photographs of boats, calling Charles over to see. Charles thought that they could as easily have gone to the window, from which the boats could be seen perfectly well.

While Panagiotis pointed to the various models, extolling their individual virtues, Charles saw that he had not removed his hand from Elizabeth’s upper arm. Voluble and vociferous, the words rolled out of him in a friendly bass boom. However, there was a look of stealthy challenge in his eyes each time he glanced at Charles, a look like that of a pickpocket caught in the act, daring a bystander who has discovered him to blow the whistle; a sort of smirk, full of arrogance blended with contempt.

All the while, he kept his grip on Elizabeth, while Charles, too polite to react while still unsure about what after all might only have been effusive Greek friendliness, thought he saw the man’s thumb stroke his wife’s bronzed skin lightly, as she imperceptibly leaned in to the Greek.

“Now this boat, it’s the one you should have. Only ten thousand drachmas for the day, until sunset, with gas in the tank. A special price for you, my friends, on this, your wife’s name-day.” So she had told him of her birthday.

The boat indicated was a quasi-inflatable, a Zodiac-type raft, with rubber pontoon sides and a plywood floor, that took a heavy outboard motor.

“What about that one?” queried Charles, intruding his pointing arm between the two in such a way that Panagiotis was forced to relinquish his grip on Elizabeth. A pout formed on his face like that of a child denied extra sweets.

“Which one?”

“That one, there.” Charles had placed his finger on the picture of a small cabinless inboard with a sunshade, made of plastic or fibreglass. He had the vague notion of touring the sea rocks a few miles out in the water, visible beyond the office window, that the large-scale map showed strung out in a line, like beads on a chain from here to Syros. Perhaps, he thought, we could even get to Syros and back, and dive for fish at each of the uninhabited islands along the way.

“My friend, how much time have you spent in boats? Have you ever driven one before, huh?”

Charles was forced to admit to little knowledge of things nautical; his maritime experience was limited to a few pulls of the oar in rowboats, and a turn or two at the rudder of pleasure craft owned by friends.

“Well, then, don’t think about a big boat like that. It will only get you into trouble, my friend. Besides, it costs too much for you.”

It grated to realize how easily the islander had sized up their economic status, as did his contempt for their boat-handling abilities, and his constant use of the word friend when his relation to them was that of a shopkeeper. Charles nonetheless acquiesced on the choice of vessel, noticing at the same time that Panagiotis had again insinuated his hand on to Elizabeth’s upper arm, now massaging it openly between his thumb and fingers as if it were a piece of cloth he were testing before deciding on purchase. Was she luxuriating under the attention, or was it his imagination? If she were a cat, would she be purring now?

A contract in Greek and French was signed, something about insurance; money changed hands; and suddenly the man was all business, the cloying affection turned off like a tap. He yelled through the door to a colleague or employee, or, most likely, a family member, “Dimitri, take these nice people over to number four, and show them how the boat works.” He turned back to the couple. “Dimitri will take care of you. Where are you thinking of going today?”

Before Charles could frame his answer, Panagiotis continued. “Maybe you stay away from Aghios Mikhailis. There’s rocks along the shore you can’t see. They can tear the bottom off the boat. Especially around the middle of the island. And the police don’t want anyone around the south of the place – the archaeologists are working on a wreck there. Byzantine. Too many people going over to watch them, someone might get hurt. Much nicer beaches here, on Tiflos. Stay here.” That last almost coming out as a grunt, he turned on his heel and ambled back to his desk.

And the devil to you, sir, thought Charles. He had already had enough of the Greek’s thinly veiled sneering and half-disguised fondling of his wife. They would go where they pleased, now that payment had been made.

Dimitri, a somewhat sullen young man of twenty or so, got up from lubricating a motor he had taken apart, and led the couple down to the inflatable, which was drawn on to the brownish sand. In English more broken than that of his chief, he gave them running instructions for the operation of the motor and its refuelling. He drilled them through starting and stopping the motor a couple of times, until he was satisfied they could handle the job. He was more serious than Panagiotis, more concerned with doing his work, and more distant.

With Dimitri gone back to his motor, the two loaded their picnic and gear, and Elizabeth shoved off, nimbly jumping in just after the boat left shore. When the water was deep enough, Charles lowered the motor and started it according to the instructions he had received moments before. He was pleasantly surprised when it took life just as easily as it had during Dimitri’s demonstration, although there was no reason why it should have behaved otherwise.

He opened the throttle and, going slowly, they exited the harbour in a few minutes, entering the chop, before swinging to port to follow the coastline northwards. They had discussed their intended route over breakfast at the hotel, and had decided to visit the several bays strung out along the shore of Tiflos, where beaches were promised by the parasol symbols on their crude map. With confidence built by several landfalls, stops and starts, and the boat holding up, they would cross the channel between the two islands at its narrowest point, and visit what was perhaps a settlement that Charles had seen with his binoculars the day before, at the middle of Aghios Mikhailis.

Rounding the point, their cruise along the coast continued uneventfully; that was to say, it went well, and they each handled their own end of the routine of landfall and launch in a way that made them begin to feel that they were well suited to the sea. Putting in at the small yacht basin at Steni Vála, away from the bigger boats, they were not displeased with the lack of attention paid to them, since it meant that they had handled themselves in a passably honourable nautical fashion, which was what they had hoped. Beaching the craft, they went ashore and had an iced drink on the verandah of the small marina café before starting out again.

The next stretch was longer, past the middle of the island to Aghios Dimitros. Its umbrella on the map called forth undue optimism; the triangular cape was loose shingle of large rounded stones. A pair he recognized as French, from having exchanged a few words with them in town, occupied one end of the enormous strand. Elizabeth and Charles saw no reason to linger; at the narrowest point between Aghios Mikhailis and Tiflos, they were eager to get on with their odyssey of one day and cross the strait to terra incognita.

The sun was out as they crossed over but, with the breeze, the air was cool. Elizabeth removed her top and let her naked breasts catch the sun and spray. Charles, hand on the throttle, watched her with a mixture of admiration and exasperation. He did not share the typical sunseeker’s disdain for local custom, and was afraid that even on this deserted stretch of sea someone might see them and try his hand at pestering them afterwards, justifying the unwanted attention with the excuse that Elizabeth was a loose woman.

She, for her part, did not care a bit what the locals might think. They were only here for a week, and the chances they would be remembered when they came back – if they came back – were minimal. Charles was a prude in any case, and she would do as she pleased, Greek sensibility be damned. Besides, she thought the local men nice, and was not averse to the idea that more attention might be paid to her if she was, in her desert innocence, reported back to Panagiotis by some rumour-monger shepherd hidden in the hills, watching through binoculars.

The northern part of the island loomed before them; the water seemed deep enough to manoeuvre in close to the cliffs. Charles, without a hat, was feeling the effects of the sun and wanted the few yards of shade that the steep slope could provide. They entered the narrow shadow and Elizabeth, sighing, drew her top back on, and watched the depth as they sped on. Hugging the coast for a quarter of an hour, they burst into sunshine again when the cliffs turned to low hills. The middle of the island broadened to contain the sheltered bay of Vassiliko, where Charles had seen some traces of habitation from his perch the day before.

They eased around the northern point of the opening and he cut the boat’s speed, seeing numerous low-lying jagged rocks that broke the surface on the approach to shore. Carefully navigating past these, they saw an arm of the bay appear and grow to port; a small homestead or summer farm lay at its head. Because of the rocks, and also on account of his unwillingness to expose their craft and selves to the curious pokings and proddings of local adults and children bound to assemble if they landed nearby, Charles pointed the prow at a sandy flat a hundred yards or more away from the buildings.

There was only one main whitewashed house, meaning that no more than a single family lived here. Some olive-oil cans, tops removed, sported wilting geraniums; a few unpainted rails and drystone walls topped with dried-out thorns were corrals for sheep or goats. The area immediately around the structure, long grassless, was dusty and bare.

“It would be nice if there was a kafenion there,” Elizabeth commented forlornly, having already given up hope.

“Mmm. It looks deserted to me,” Charles answered. “But I agree – help me pull this thing up on the shore and let’s have a look.”

What they had taken from a distance to be sand was mostly rotting seaweed and dried-out mud, cracked tan plates curling at their edges. Its breakage as they walked on it, evidently the first to do so in months, made a crisp noise, like flatbread broken at the breakfast board.

“No chapel,” he commented, half to himself.

“It’s probably on the other side of the island; there’s likely ten of them about.”

They had visited Greece often enough to have developed an amateur passion for the place, even having studied the language at local evening courses; both were aware that the smallest of rocks in the sea would have its little ecclesia, or at least a ruin thereof, built by mariners in grateful devotion, as thanks for rescue from the sea’s travails or for some favour granted by a saint.

Here, obviously, there was no little church, the expected adjunct to any such lonely house, protection against the terrors of isolation and night, and the demon that walks at noon. It must be, as Elizabeth had said, invisible from where they were; there was certainly enough bush about to hide one in, or ten of them, for that matter.

“If there’s anyone around, we can inquire,” she said, watching the place for signs of life as they approached. A few ducks and geese waddled towards, and then around them, hoping to be fed. Charles thought he heard a dog bark, from not so far away, but was not sure and so said nothing to his wife. A faint smell of smoke, as from a fire burned out the day before, would now and then waft their way. Of people they saw no trace.

“Clearly there’s no one here, and I think we can forget the café, let alone human contact,” he ventured, stating the obvious.

“They’re all back on Tiflos, and probably come out here every other day to water the goats and feed the birds,” Elizabeth replied. They stopped, nearly on top of the house, realizing that to go any further would be a violation of the owner’s private space, even with the hospitality of the local countryside and the relaxed Greek attitude to invasion of the blurred division between public space and private property taken into account.

The geese and mallards, giving up on the couple, went back with honks and quacks of disappointment to the shade from whence they had come. Motionless for a while, the two regarded a dovecote behind the house, and then, without speaking, turned to their boat.

“I think if we continued around the bay, to the south, we might find a picnic spot.”

“Yes, I thought I saw something that way when we came in.”

The two of them shoved the boat off the shelf of decaying plants, Charles boarding first and Elizabeth hopping on board with the mooring line afterwards. When the water was deep enough, Charles dropped the motor to its upright position and started up. Cutting across the rough half-moon of the bight, they found, as they had hoped, a small beach at its further end. The map gave the place’s name as xilo – wood. It was backed by an open grove of olives that climbed the steep surrounding hillside.

Behind the silvery-bladed trees was a thicket that seemed to cover the hill up to the ridge line, and to the summit somewhere at their right. It stretched in both directions, seemingly impenetrable, swinging across the narrow neck of land back towards the distant house, now barely visible. No paths ran from or along the shore; the olive harvest would necessarily be taken to its pressing by boat, on account of the difficult and broken ground on both sides of the solitary cultivation.

With no one about, they landed and took the craft up on the shore. Spreading a large towel as a picnic blanket, they laid out the bread, tomatoes, and cheese that they had brought from town. Elizabeth washed the tomatoes in the salt water of the sea, and Charles got busy with the bottle and two metal cups from home. They were out in the open, away from any shade, and the sun beat down violently upon their little feast.

“I saw that bit, with Panagiotis, in the shop.”

“What bit?”

“Don’t be naive: the way he was pawing you under the pretence of showing us that brochure.”

“What? Oh, he was just trying to impress himself. You don’t think for a second . . . ?”

Charles, surly from his sense of unavenged wrong, the sun, and the wine, which was acting quickly, said nothing. Instead, he locked his hand around Elizabeth’s ankle, pulling her slowly across the rucking towel towards him.

“Come off it, now; you don’t think I’m about to do it out here in broad daylight, do you? Don’t you have a book to read?” she teased lazily, with a half-suppressed giggle, making no effort to defend herself.

They awoke, sated and indolent, in the shade of the enormous fig tree to which they had removed an hour before. The figs, overly ripe with no one to collect them, lay half-burst and rotting under its branches. Wavelets were coming in slightly higher, a sign of shifting breeze. The sun still rode high in the heavens, and a profound stillness infused the air about them.

“Come on, get a move on,” Charles yawned, throwing Elizabeth’s tank top at her ruddy head as she stretched, arching her back. She flicked off the corner of the towel that had covered her in her sleep. Something about sleeping under a fig tree, Elizabeth thought, but she could not remember the bit of folklore associated with it; only that for Greeks it portended something or other.

Nude, she lifted herself to her feet and stretched out a leg, bending it, to pull on her shorts. She left her shirt off, tucking it partly into a pocket, so it trailed her from behind. They packed up the remains of their picnic for loading on the boat.

Everything aboard, they went through the drill of setting off: Charles aft, shirtless himself now, ready to lower and set the motor, only the nose of the raft remaining on the strand, waiting for Elizabeth’s push. She shoved and jumped in, and they drifted out into the clear water, which deepened quickly. The particoloured stony bottom was exquisitely visible, like pebbles in the bottom of a fish tank, and the boat rocked slightly as Charles commenced his routine. A few pulls to clear the vapour, a short rest, and try again. Only this time, instead of faithfully catching, the outboard refused to start.

“It’s been out in the sun unprotected so long, it’ll need a few more turns before it starts up; it’s vapour lock,” he told Elizabeth unconcernedly. A few more turns, and the result was the same. Charles rested a moment, and motioned for her to move forward, in case he fell backward pulling the cord. He clenched his fist around the curved plastic handle, and yanked powerfully, almost viciously, at the line, but the only sound was the spin of the disengaged rotor in the quiet air. Sweat was beading on his face as the boat began to drift out slowly.

“If I open the tank cover, it’ll get some air,” he said, screwing off the top for a moment before replacing it. With the beach near one corner of the bay, they would soon drift out of it, into water that was becoming more disturbed by the rising puffs of wind. He pulled once more, and almost fell over backwards, as the cord spun freely in the direction of his pull.

“Christ, we’ve got to get it back to shore, and hold it steady while I work on it.”

Elizabeth did not reply. She was the superior rower of the two; without saying anything, she took up the plastic oars provided and began the task of pulling them back to the shallows. Beads of perspiration rolled down her freckled breasts, while Charles, in black anger, cursed Greek maintenance.

When they had re-entered their picnic cove, Elizabeth, taking off her shorts and donning her plastic sandals, entered the water to hold the raft steady while Charles repeatedly tried to start the engine. Once or twice, during the next half-hour, it gave a weak cough, in promise of something more substantial; but after that the machine’s cooperation stopped. He tried the various knobs and buttons, without any effect. Tugs on the cord became more infrequent; finally, nearing exhaustion, he sat down in disgust, Elizabeth regarding him curiously, her eyebrows raising in her question-mark expression.

“What next?”

“I don’t know. It’s impossible to go along the shore in either direction – perhaps go up and look about, try to get up on the ridge. There must be a trail or path through it, it can’t be as bad as it looks from here. Maybe I can get the attention of the archaeologists diving at the wreck: I’m sure that once they finish, they’d help out and tow us back. Might be a path along the top, where I could get back to the house we saw, and see if anyone is there now. They might have a way of signalling back to Tiflos. Then again, perhaps someone is anchored around here. The main thing is to go up, where I can see.”

“Well, one thing’s sure, I’ll never be able to row us across: it must be two kilometres back, and I’d never outdo the current. You go up, if you’re so keen on it, and I’ll stay here and swim and watch our things.”

“At worst, if we have to overnight here, I’m sure Panagiotis will come out looking in the morning,” Charles said; then, seeing the hint of contempt forming in Elizabeth’s eyes, hastily decided then and there to do as much as possible to get help from anyone who happened to be on or near the island. Anything but have his own incompetence put on display for the leering boat-concession owner.

So they pulled the boat in, and Charles started up the hill towards the encompassing bush. He had put on a shirt and long pants to protect against the snagging burrs and thorns. Elizabeth tied the inflatable firmly to a solid onshore stump with the boat’s long mooring line; still nude, she swam out to the craft and climbed into it, to use it as a diving platform-cum-floating sun deck.

In fifteen minutes, Charles had nearly reached the wave of greenery and its precursor, an almost tangible wall of humid heat. The route through the olive grove had steepened quickly, the pebbly orange-brown soil changing to gravel, except where, beneath each tree, the small stones had been cleared. Footing was difficult because of the slope; he would have to watch it on the way down, or he would be in for a nasty slide and tumble. He stopped for a couple of minutes in the shadow of a tree, catching his breath, and viewed his wife far below, a small brown figure diving yet again from the useless boat. Her plunge into the water carried no sound at this height. Wiping the sweat, which was quickly condensing on his face now that he was out of the sun, he struggled to his feet and dusting the seat of his pants, trudged up towards the thicket.

He saw then that he was following the faintest of narrow tracks, with fewer pebbles to roll on, the only route where he could be reasonably sure of his balance Had he not been forced on to it by the nature of the terrain, he doubted he would have spotted it.

Almost at the lower edge of the enormous thicket, which was twice his height and unbelievably dense, he saw with relief an opening in the thorny barrier. Even more than the maquis on Tiflos, this was almost solid – so grown together that the tangled bush would tear to shreds anyone daring the leafy mess. He was all the more thankful then that his path continued into some sort of tunnel pointing uphill into the heart of the jungly vegetation.

He turned once more, looking back at the raft, and could only vaguely make out the sprawled form of his resting wife basting in the sun, limbs spread out. Swinging round, he bent his head and entered the dark tube that ran through the plants.

Almost immediately, his nostrils were struck by a rank smell, confirming his suspicion that this was an animal track which, although it lacked the distinctive sweet smell of their excreta, might have been made by goats. The reek was stronger when he went a few yards further in. A few long hairs of different colours were twisted among the nearest branches; these he could not identify as belonging to this beast or that. The light was largely filtered out by the intermingled boughs that formed a solid roof above, although here and there a clear beam shone through, showing innumerable dust motes dancing in the pillars of light.

Only a little bit further on, Charles hesitated; once into this maze, he was on his own. If something happened, it would be impossible for rescuers to spot him from the air, assuming that the passage through the thicket was totally enclosed, as it seemed to be.

Beyond that thought, there was a deeper reluctance – he did not like the word “fear”, it was too unmanly – that held him back from immediately continuing. Something that was not quite right, probably only an impulse in the limbic stem, the reptilian brain, Aristotle’s dragon, warning against a place where he might suddenly come up against – what?

This is the physical world, he thought to himself, and there is no reason to be frightened. It was only natural to react to dark, enclosed spaces smelling of animal; it probably had something to do with deep-based instinct. The point of it was to suppress the irrational notion that something other than a goat was lurking in the tangle of greenery: worrying would do no good. The main thing was to attain the summit of Stefáni, perhaps three to four hundred feet above him now. He seemed to remember it as being clear of shrubbery from his distant survey of the day before. Once up, he could orient himself, spot any trails, and conceivably even get help. In spite of any nagging doubt, he would have to carry on.

Charles went up, suddenly feeling damp and clammy. Sometimes he had to duck low as the path twisted along, even to the point of moving on all fours now and then. The height of the passage allowed only an inconvenient crouch that left his back aching after a few minutes. He kept lower than was necessary, after having scraped his uncovered scalp on some thorns and losing a few hairs that way.

Not long after, that which he had hoped against happened: the game trail split. Charles reached down at the junction, plucked up three flattish stones, and piled them on each other, marking the path by which he had come. It was most unlikely they would be disturbed: from the look of the many spider webs hanging down, it had been days, or longer, since any beast had wandered through.

Not much further on, he saw the turds of some largish animal. No sheep, goat or dog had left the pile. From its size, it must have been something bigger, but Charles was baffled when he tried to match it to any animal he knew. Whatever it was, it ate meat: bits of white bone, undigested, poked through the fecal mess, which from its dryness must have been there weeks, if not months.

Beyond that, still plodding uphill, the going often like climbing up a narrow staircase, he came to another junction in the trail. He did not mark it, since the spoor he had seen would be sufficient for that purpose. Not far from there, no more than a few yards, was a place where the dusty tunnel divided into three; again, he did not blaze it – with only the one way down, he was sure that was unnecessary.

From there, things were a bit more straightforward, although the dust, thick on the ground between the exposed roots and long undisturbed, irritated his lungs. He stopped at least twice, his sides heaving from coughing fits. Once, while hawking, he heard a sharp crack deep in the brush, as if a large object or animal had moved through it; but that was impossible. Nothing bigger than a cat could manage, he was certain. Whatever it had been, it was impossible to judge its distance. He had frozen at the noise, and feeling foolish at that, went on.

With stones piled on one another, Charles marked three or four more turn-offs before the proverbial light at the end appeared and he popped out of the labyrinth of thorn and brush. He emerged on to a slightly rounded top, open and clear to all sides—Stefáni, without question. A trig-point marker, a concrete column about three feet high, set up by the mapping authorities, stood at the highest point, a few yards in front of him. He wobbled over to it, straining to straighten out his sore and stiffened spine.

Finally upright, he stretched a foot on to the bronze medallion implanted on the top, and with both hands flat on either side of it, he carefully lifted himself up. There was just enough room to balance on both feet. With the extra height, he could see in all directions, establishing by sight what was already known in the mind: that all land is surrounded by sea.

To the south, the Byzantine diving operation was clearly visible, and he could make out two black dots in the water, the divers, no doubt, now heaving themselves on to the floating dock that must have been excavation headquarters. He thought of taking off his shirt to wave at them to attract their attention, but knew that he was too far off to see, unless they were looking directly at him. Even then, it was unlikely they would interpret any such action from that distance as a plea for help.

Pivoting slowly, he looked back to the main axis of the island. The ridge spanning the waist of the island to the north was absolutely bare of paths. This half of Aghios Mikhailis showed no trace of trails or roads. Except for the tiny cove where they had landed, and the olive grove and one or two others like it, the entire southern part was covered by the same thicket in which he stood. Nor was there any sign of the predicted chapel. There was nothing to do but turn back, and wait it out until rescued.

It was at that instant that Charles, looking back the way he had come, realized that there was something decidedly wrong. Focusing for a moment after hopping down from his perch, it slowly came to him. There were three openings in front of him, each more or less identical in appearance to the others. He simply had not thought of this possibility when, tired and half-blinded by sweat, he had entered the clearing, and so had not bothered to note his exit. And now he had no way of telling which path would lead him back below, where Elizabeth waited.

One thing was certain: he had no desire at all, none whatsoever, to remain at the top until someone came to fetch him. The bareness of the place, the isolation, and the solitude, were beginning to weigh on him, even after the short while he had spent on the hilltop. It was evident that the trails were interconnected: as unpleasant as getting lost momentarily might be, the paths were sure to rejoin as long as he kept following the trend of the slope downward.

Hesitating in front of the three openings for only a second longer than a moment, and with the distinct feeling that something was watching him, Charles chose the middle way on impulse, and began his descent.

Elizabeth, by this time, was getting bored. She hauled herself on shore using the line, and with a bit of struggle, beached the boat. The light was getting longer now, and she wrapped a thin rectangle of cloth around herself, sarong-style, the way lightly packed young Antipodeans did on their rites-of-passage pilgrimages around the world’s seasides.

Squatting on her heels, and wondering what was taking Charles so long, she idly contemplated the flowers that grew from the edge of the eroded low cliff backing the shore. Something in form like a hummingbird was feeding from a bloom, and, interest aroused, she went over to look at it more closely. Its movements were so rapid, together with the motion of its wings, that she could not say at first whether it was insect or bird. Then, vaguely remembering that Trochilidae were restricted to the New World, she opted for the first, and moved up slowly to inspect it more closely.

It was then, only a foot or two away, that Elizabeth noticed the large thin sherd, its inner concavity projecting out of the red dry soil. Forgetting the creature in front of her, she tugged at the piece of pottery, freeing it with some difficulty. When she turned it over in her hand, she saw to her surprise that it was decorated.

The glazed fragment showed a black limb upon a red background, with its muscles, defined by white line, straining against something pulling at it. Part of whatever that was was just visible where the break ran across the figure’s ankle. She looked up to the place where she had found it, but there was no other sherd protruding. Glancing down the vertical face towards her feet, she discovered among the stones a few more bits of fired clay, which she picked up. One or two were worn smooth by the sea, and had obviously been washed up from there. But another, sharp and unworn, was decorated. Turning it in her hand, she matched it perfectly to the first piece. Sun-dazzled retinas slowly adjusting to the dull glaze of the pottery, Elizabeth tried to make sense of the story it depicted. Black skin, she knew, was a convention used by ancient Greek artisans to indicate the male. All the skill of the artist had gone to convince the viewer of a great struggle: a dark moulded leg, tendons straining through the flesh in a futile effort to escape that which was wrapped around the man’s ankle.

Whatever was holding him, was horrific, and matched no noble proportions that she had seen through all their Greek museum wanderings. Of course, she knew the old Greeks had their darker side: many a little hybrid monster or grotesque was hidden away in smaller local collections, unknown to any sanitized mythology smoothed out by a Bulfinch or a Hamilton.

The powerful hand, or paw, or appendage – it was hard to say, really, what it was, although it was depicted with clear sharp lines – was decidedly huge, grotesque, and malformed. The painter had, with a few hints of the brush, perfectly suggested a pale, mottled skin, covered with welts and half-burst blisters, bubbled as if diseased. It had its victim in an unbreakable hold, and was dragging him towards the unseen owner of the monstrous limb. She shuddered, glad that there were no more fragments to show what the ugly thing was attached to.

Studying her find a bit more, Elizabeth saw that the painter had even tried to give a hint of depth, by clearly indicating, with only a few economical strokes, a background of thorn-bush. Perhaps it had something to do with a mystery religion; the Greek world was so full of those in the olden times. She put her find into the boat.

Charles was thoroughly lost. That is to say, having taking the wrong way, he had no clear sense of where he was in the thicket, other than a vague impression that he was approaching its edge somewhere in the general direction of the beach where Elizabeth waited. It was hard to tell – the light was gradually weakening, and if he was not to spend the night amid the thorny jungle, he would have to leave it soon.

As he crouched, stumbling over rocks in the waxing dimness, he found growing within himself a faint perception of someone walking parallel with him. The illusion took the form of a faint echo of his own footsteps, and was so strong that he stopped at one point to see if it would continue on its own. But there was nothing save the humid stillness and the choking clouds of dust that he had kicked up in his progress down.

He came to an intersection of tunnels that he took to contain a subtle hint, triggering a weak memory of having been there before. Perhaps, unknowing, he had rejoined his original trail. One thing was certain, though: there was something tracking alongside him, in the seemingly impossible snarl to his left, the uphill side. From the time he had started again, the faint echo had grown louder; he was convinced that some curious beast was following him, although he could not imagine what it might be. But from the sound it made, it was large. How anything could manage in the impenetrable brush, so thickly grown together, was beyond his comprehension. The uncomfortable feeling that he was being herded glimmered through his mind, and lingered faintly. He found himself feeling faint, and on the edge of panic, wishing more than anything else that he was through the thicket jungle and out on the hillside on the way down to Elizabeth and the boat, which they could row out, if they had to.

Just then, Charles suddenly saw the tunnel widen ahead of him, and, seeing the light beyond, hoped that it was the end of his trials, the end of the impenetrable brush.

The narrow throat of greenery opened to a wide mouth, and he tumbled into the open, having to climb up a metre or more over a solid tangle of bleached small branches. Dazed by the heat, salt in his eyes, he dully registered that these were broken into bits, perhaps the result of coppicing or cutting, covering entirely what he now saw was only a large clearing, about as wide as a football pitch, with no other exit. His despair at not having broken out was mixed with relief on realising that whatever had been following him was now silent, perhaps having given up its stalking.

Out of the dark interior of the thorns, he could see that there was still a surprising amount of light, making for good visibility, even though twilight was not too far off. There was still a glare from the sun, which had not yet departed the ridge of Tiflos, now visible across the strait to his left. Although light and colour were here in sufficiency, his impression of the clearing was shades of black and grey.

Looking about, Charles saw in the middle of the open space a thin blackish stone, upright and flat, a little taller than the height of a full-grown man, standing in position on some kind of platform, loosely supported in its vertical position by a couple of small rude boulders at its base. He walked towards it, the cracking twigs and branches under his feet making an odd sound, something like the wind-chime noise that comes when walking on beaches made of broken coral branch.

Going around the object, he saw that it was roughly anthropomorphic. What could have been wide shoulders now came into view, along with a narrowing at the top that perhaps was meant to represent a head. The whole plan of it suggested the smoothly polished Cycladic figures he had seen with his wife two years before in Athens. But when he came to the base of the menhir-like object, he saw that where the museum figures had folded arms and breasts and genitals incised, this figure was more rough, and whatever was meant to be represented by the crude hacking of the basaltic rock departed from the canonical in a suggestive, frightening and ugly fashion. He was not sure what was being shown, but he did not like it at all.

Looking from the base of the platform, he could see that a long section of the hedge on the far side of the clearing was full of openings, through which the light showed. Perhaps only a bush thick, it was woven into a meshlike net: he had reached an edge of the tangle after all. The gaps between the twisted interlocking vines were too small to crawl through without enlargement. The glint of the sea below was beckoning; if need be, he could use the saw on his pocket tool to cut through the few tough branches and wiggle through. He would not, under any circumstance, consider trying further maze-wandering with the daylight diminishing so quickly.

Just then, starting towards the thin remaining barrier and freedom, Charles kicked something, and looked down. By the tip of his right toe, amidst the carpet of broken wood, rested a round object, looking somewhat like a blanched fragment of rubber beach ball that had sat too long out in the sun. Reaching down and picking it up, he was stunned to see that it was a piece of a human cranium.

This focused his thinking sharply for the first time since he had entered the clearing. Looking around him, seeing details he had ignored, he felt sickened to realize that what he had thought was stripped wood was, in fact, bone. The entire open area was covered with cracked splinters of it, and the pit of his stomach dropped when this simple fact sank in.

Nauseated, he stumbled, and his hand reached out for support towards the primitive statue behind him. He leaned on to it, only to have it move under the pressure. Charles jumped back, and saw it crash and crack across its middle on the rim of the platform.

At which moment, from the edge of the clearing by the single entrance, a clatter arose. Something big had somehow forced its way under the blanket of bones, and was moving smoothly and rapidly along, like a shark on land, throwing out a visible ripple along the axis of its movement, which was towards Charles. The clacking was more resonant than the chimelike sound he had made crossing to the sculpture. Something was rising through the loose whitened mass as it approached, with a small bow-wave of skeletal remains and pieces being tossed out to either side.

As the white bulk beneath the bony sea neared him, Charles broke, screaming, and ran for the far tangle.

*   *   *

Elizabeth shivered with the sudden coolness as the sun disappeared behind the ridge, at a loss for to what to do. Going up into the thicket in the darkness would be no good whatsoever. She was better off waiting below, in case Charles made it out soon. Nothing would be worse than his coming down, finding her gone, and then running up into the impossible bushes again in an effort to find her.

While rationalizing this choice, the sound of a motor behind her intruded into her thought. Full of unease, she wheeled around, and saw a boat similar to theirs approaching. Splashing into the shallows, she saw at the throttle a single figure that resolved into Panagiotis as the inflatable neared the strand. She stumbled backwards as he ran the craft up on to shore, cutting the motor and lifting and locking it into an angled position in one neat motion, to protect the propeller from the bottom rocks. A young goat, a kid, was trussed up in the bow, bleating poignantly.

With the man’s appearance, Elizabeth’s reserve broke down. She grabbed his thick hairy arm by the wrist even before he set foot on land. “Thank God you’re here! Charles has wandered up on to the hillside, and I’m afraid he’s lost. Is there anything you’ve got that we can use to signal him, to help him find his way down?”

The Greek, who had been smiling slightly, was suddenly grim. “Where on the hillside did he go? Up by the olives?”

“No, higher. He was trying to get up on top, to see if he could find a path or help. You see, our motor stopped and we couldn’t get it started again, so—” Her breathy explanation was interrupted by some loud but distant sound from above, at the edge of the green wall nearest them.

A tear ran down Elizabeth’s cheek. Panagiotis peered into the gloom, and then more noise came to them, something like a loud ripping of leaves mingled with a splintering sound. He turned his gaze to Elizabeth, and she saw that he had begun to sweat. A look was in his eyes that she had never seen in anybody’s before. It was extreme fear, with undertones of greed and awe commingled, and a hint of undisguised lust. She could not, in her building panic, interpret its import.

He turned as the intensity of the racket from the distant thicket increased, and dragged the kid roughly from the boat, tossing it on the pebbles where it rested, supine, tongue hanging from its mouth, slitted eyes bulging with fear. The sound from high up now changed, both like and unlike the roar of a lion.

“Get in the boat.”

“We— I can’t. Charles is up there, he’s in some kind of trouble. We can’t leave him!”

Panagiotis said nothing more while she protested, but took the line of the disabled vessel and knotted it to a cleat on his boat. About to shove the couple’s disabled transport out into the water, something caught his attention, and he reached down into the raft, taking something out. Stepping briskly up to her, he shoved the ancient pottery into her face, demanding loudly, “What is this? What is this?”

“It’s nothing, nothing, it’s only pottery I found here by the shore! What does it matter? Can’t you help Charles?” By now she was nearly screaming, while the sounds above them increased.

Between clenched teeth, anger having got the better of fear momentarily, the Greek muttered, “I told you not to come here! What fools!” and flung the two sherds from him.

Elizabeth started away, going up, inland, when something totally unexpected happened. Panagiotis took her by the shoulder, swung her around, and slapped her across the face so hard that she saw stars.

She was stunned, and stood motionless while he shoved the boats into the shallows. Without any prelude, he walked back, grabbed Elizabeth by the wrist, and dragged her out to the bobbing Zodiac. She tried to dig in her heels, but his bulk and strength made her effort futile, and he effortlessly threw her into the vessel before jumping aboard himself. He started the motor and the two craft began to draw away swiftly, their prows swinging around towards the darkening channel that separated them from Tiflos.

Limp, drained of all resistance, all thinking gone from her mind, Elizabeth slowly lifted her gaze to where the sounds still came from, and saw, for the first time, something very large, and white, tearing uselessly at the barrier of thorn from inside. It threw itself again and yet again at the shaking net of roots and branches, but could not penetrate it. The barrier yielded, sagging beneath the impact, but did not give. It was as if the massive thing was trapped, and was raging inside, casting itself against the wall of vines that held it in. Something wet was being slapped against the thicket, and then being picked up and dashed against it again. Now and then she thought she saw a splotch or two of red against the huge paleness, but she was not sure. Half in shock, she remained passive when she felt Panagiotis’s grip high up her thigh, kneading it in his oversized paw, stroking the inside of her leg.

She knew that whatever it was saw them in the boat, and that its rage was somehow connected with this. At that knowledge, she broke down and finally began to weep, collapsing onto the gunwale, as the pulsing motor unwaveringly pushed them across the channel, into the night.

DAVID J. SCHOW

The Absolute Last of the
Ultra-Spooky, Super-Scary
Hallowe’en Horror Nights

DAVID J. SCHOW, A CONTRIBUTOR TO several past volumes of The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, still lives in the Hollywood Hills, and still works in the “script mines”, and now wonders what the cinema equivalent of black lung might be.

His collection of essays from Fangoria magazine, Wild Hairs, won the 2001 International Horror Guild Award for Best Non-fiction. The author’s more recent books include the final volume of the Lost Bloch trilogy (subtitled Crimes and Punishments), and Elvisland, a landmark collection of John Farris’s short fiction (both of which he edited); a resurrected, polished and spiffed-up reissue of his first collection, Seeing Red; a trade paperback edition of his fourth collection, Crypt Orchids; a new collection of living-dead stories entitled Zombie Jam; a short novel, Rock Breaks Scissors Cut, and a new mainstream suspense novel, Bullets of Rain.

“ ‘The Absolute Last of the Ultra-Spooky, Super-Scary Hallowe’en Horror Nights’ was completed on Hallowe’en, 2001,” recalls Schow, “and immediately performed (read aloud) for a ready audience at the home of monster-memorabilia collector Bob Burns.

“It is yet another story in the ‘monsters old versus monsters new’ cycle which keeps growing when I’m not looking, and currently includes ‘Monster Movies’, ‘Last Call for the Sons of Shock’, ‘(Melodrama)’ and ‘Gills’ – I suppose a book collecting them all is inevitable.

“This one also permits me to blow off a little steam over the etymological removal of the apostrophe from ‘Hallowe’en’, which became a common usage sometime after the release of the eponymous film, and annoys me to this day. The reader may perceive a vague whiff of roman-à-clef in regard to certain Southern California amusement parks and movie studios; please be assured that any similarity to existing persons, places, or events is entirely coincidental, and that no werewolves were harmed in the making of this little fiction.”

“MUMMIES, TAKE THE TRAM to the prep trailer in Area Two. Ghouls and zombies, anybody who’s not a straight rubberhead – trailer four, right behind me. I want the Frankensteins to line up according to height in the parking space over by Ops, which is right next to Security on your map. Draculas, your dressing room is the big space near the cafeteria. Rubberheads, you’ve got a thing looks like a sorta circus tent not too far from the restrooms, ’cos you don’t need so much prep. Everybody else – if you’re a Wolf Man or a Pinhead or a Freddy or Leatherface; all the Aliens and Jasons and Beetlejuices – report directly to Ops to see the script grid and get an assignment from Tracy or Kimberly; pick up your chainsaws, whatever gear your character needs. Everybody tracking? Can you all hear me, monsters?”

That’s the problem with monsters, thought Oscar. They never pay attention.

He looked around at his fellow players. They were probably all like him, wondering how the performance life had brought them to this low ebb – playing monsters for some movie studio’s amusement-park exploitation of Hallowe’en. Oscar had six years of formal dance training and tutelage with top choreographers under his Spandex belt. He had been in Cats and The Lion King, for Christsake.

He was still waiting for the first review that actually named him.

Hallowe’en SpookyNight had come via the usual cattle-call, and making the cast cuts, for Oscar, was a breeze. The ads for the annual horror-themed in-park “adventures” promised a hair-raising, bone-chilling smorgasbord of monsters. Basically, it was your standard All Hallow’s haunted house gauntlet, but super-sized into a combination of live theatre, wax museum and modular walk-through chamber of horrors, diverse and just time-consuming enough to justify the pricey admission fee – just over thirty bucks per head. The adjacent multiplex was screening a Spook-a-Thon of cheap rentals (nothing not already available in better shape on DVD), and patrons could avail their bone-chilled psyches of genuine alcohol at several clearly labeled watering holes. Needless to say, the Spook-a-Thon cost extra, as did the cocktails. No specials or mark-downs, especially during a buying season where retailers were already caterwauling about making their nut.

The show runner with the megaphone was named Randy . . . something. He was slumming, too, having lost an assistant director slot on some sitcom. From beneath his studio-logoed baseball cap, which might as well have been embroidered with the word ASSHOLE, he deployed attitude as though he was Patton, whipping the Third Army into a killing frenzy.

“A-Number One priority, people,” announced Randy. He had one of those bullhorns that strapped to his shoulder and permitted him to speak through a mike. “We can’t stress this enough. You are reminded not to grab or physically interface with the guests.” Everyone nodded or murmured; they had all been told dozens of times, and this item came first on the hot sheet that had been distributed on the first day.

Following the Disneyland rule, visitors to the park were called “guests”, though that term was freighted with none of the obligatory courtesy. The unspoken understanding was that the “guests” were really the Enemy, and for the entire crew staffing the studio’s annual scare show the objective was to survive long enough to get paid the going flat rate for “ambient atmosphere”, that is, monsters.

The juice of genuine danger had amplified the touchy proposition of having live monsters on the lurk. Last year, one of the Draculas had gotten dragged to death when he got hung up in the tailgate of a tour tram. A teenager had gotten hit in the shoulder by a bullet fired into the air outside the park. And more and more non-preferred social element was showing up just to raise hell and start shit. Park security was lumbered beyond their capacity just breaking up gang fights, so a visible police presence had been attenuated. The show had to go on, basically, because the gate was irresistible to the studio suits, who thus deterred blame when their movies flopped.

Executives needed to promote the illusion of a “safe and sane” consumer entertainment experience, and in response had assigned pagers with panic buttons to park employees. This year they were tied into a satellite tracker that could pinpoint trouble spots instantly.

Oscar reconsidered the park property surrounding him. It was a mile and a quarter in circumference, this bubble of make-believe pretend Hollywood hoo-hah. The rock scarps were spurious, unreal. Much of the strategic vegetation was plastic. Theme areas were boldly delineated and convenient restrooms benchmarked. All visitors had to do while inside was spend money. The whole place was like a compound in a zoo – low maintenance, entirely fabricated, patently fake: an exemplar of the illusion of security.

The park was split up into mazes, theme tunnels or rooms, stage-bound presentations like the Vampire Magician or the Séance Tent, and tarted up backlot areas such as the Haunted Bayou, the Phantom’s Sewer, and the Stairway to Hell. Some of the rides had been converted to night-time operation; you could strap yourself into the Chunkblower and ride it backward, in the dark. For one week only, Western Street had turned into Satan’s Gulch. Rubberheads, or park extras wearing simple over-the-head masks, hung around mostly to provide guests with monsters to pose against, for snapshots. Ambient monsters in more complex make-ups and gear populated the scare zones. Oscar’s assignment was an area inside the Ghostly Graveyard known as Lycanthrope Trail.

“Your basic movement grids are on the maps handed out to you,” announced Randy. “Stick to your grid. Jump-and-scares are okay so long as you don’t scare little kids or catch guests too off-guard.”

It was okay to be scary, thought Oscar . . . as long as nobody actually got scared, experienced fear, or suffered genuine dread. When had horror become so hypocritical?

Oscar thought that Hallowe’en should really fall on Friday the 13th, but he bowed to tradition, since few were left amid the mercantile consumerism packaged to the buying public as “holidays”. Hallowe’en had never been an official holiday within his lifetime. No red numeral on the calendar; everybody worked. Seasonal employees were usually treated like the worst sort of chattel – temps, forever bludgeoned with reminders that they should be thankful for the gig and could be shitcanned for the slightest infraction.

His combo brow-and-snout piece was a featherweight appliance of breathable latex, affixed with non-allergenic spirit gum. He paid special attention to the hairlines and blends. Details mattered. He had suited up out of his own pocket in order to duplicate Lon Chaney, Jr’s venerable wolfing garb, not that anybody still paid attention to the classic chestnuts. Most civilians found remembering those old movies preferable to actually watching them, and indeed, most guests could not be expected to have done the basic coursework. They knew Frankenstein, Dracula, the Creature as words, not names; they existed into the new century only as forms of iconographic product placement. They were supposed to be scary, but only on Hallowe’en, then they were mothballed until the next SpookyNight. They no longer scared anybody, not really.

Gordito, Flaco, Chispa and Tiny came strictly to raise hell. Gordito’s homegirl was a spidery white chick named Ashleigh. The rest were partnered with buoyant hoodrats proudly displaying the speckled foundation make-up and sky-high, needle-thin eyebrows that trademarked them as expatriates from Ramparts, which most Los Angeles-area newswatchers routinely short-formed as Gang Central. Flaco’s girl was Chiqui, bratwurst-encased by skin-tight silk which amplified the size of her butt into a wonderland of possibilities. She still bore the Gothic O.C. tat on her neck from her dalliance with some cholo in Costa Mesa; much internal ragging and discourse was devoted to how the ink could be modified, embellished or obliterated. Her pasted-on acrylic nails were three inches long, and each fingertip bore the image of one of the Homies cartoon characters.

Only Chispa had kept his beautiful hair. “See, white guys are all jealous of Mexicano hair,” he’d say. “So they promote the image that bald is super-bad, so all the cholos shave their heads. You guys are humiliating your heritage, man.” Gordito and Flaco and Tiny, all shaved and goateed, teased Chispa about cultivating a pachuco pomp and therefore not being worth shit in a fight. Like snaps or the dozens, the ranks went round and round, everybody insulting everybody else to show their love.

Park security and the on-site feel-up was a joke. Gordito’s crowd entered SpookyNight strapped with pins, razors and short, stubby combat blades. Flaco, not wanting to dress down from his customary six-inch stiletto, had concealed it in the crack of his ass, and taken a lot of ragging for it. “What if you cough and it opens, dude?” said Tiny, sniggering. Flaco stoically endured the usual barrage of crap about stinky blades and “cutting” farts; what mattered was, he’d kept his weapon of choice.

Chispa’s girl, Connie – short for Conceptión – had stripped the micro-blades from safety razors and hot-glued them beneath her scarlet fingernails. Most of the guys had copied Tiny’s trick of dropping their lock-backs into a shoe or boot and walking it through the pat-down, standing on it and trying not to limp. If the scanners tripped, steel toes and soles were blamed and no one ever forced you to take off your shoes. Once in the park, the footwear came off in the bathroom, and the blades were nestled back where they belonged, in a pocket or waistband. Nobody ever searched you when you were exiting the park.

“Check it out,” Flaco said, cocking a thumb.

He directed their discreet attention to what Security and the cops could not see: A wall of shadows near the entryway where the dimmed floods of two intersecting theme zones of the park joined. There was an unsightly swath of concrete barricade visible from Flaco’s angle; normally, bogus foliage would have concealed it. A couple of trespassers clambered over the wall from the parking garage. They were visible for all of half a second, but Flaco had spotted the hidden activity with the surety of a concentration camp guard. “Go, dudes,” he muttered. “Gonna be some shit tonight.”

They had been attending SpookyNight for four years running. It was too much fun to fuck with the monsters that were supposed to frighten you. “Couldn’t scare nobody,” Gordito always said, triumphant over some disposable menace. “Couldn’t scare shit.”

*   *   *

“What’s the record?” said Archie, crouching in the bushes like a Green Beret, his face streaked with black and green camo paint.

“Guy supposedly snuck into Disneyland and spent the whole night on one of the Jungle Cruise islands,” said Mace. “But the one I heard about the guy who dressed up as a buccaneer and spent nearly forty hours inside Pirates of the Caribbean – that’s gotta be the gold.”

“What about the kid who lived on Tom Sawyer Island, for, like, days?”

“Doesn’t count. I think he drowned.”

“What, in four feet of water?” Archie gave him a curdled expression.

Nobody ever got the damned stories straight.

“That’s what I heard. It doesn’t count if you die.”

“The Pirates dude kept it up for nearly two days?”

“So they say. You know how many friggin’ security cameras are inside that ride? He foxed them by pretending to be a robot. That redefines cool. I am in awe.”

“Any proof?”

“Proof was on the news,” said Mace. “They arrested him when the cameras caught him taking a leak, but he never said how long he was actually inside.” He fiddled with his digital rig and flipped the viewscreen around so he could tape himself. “This is zero hour, 8.00 p.m., and we’ve just penetrated the park.”

Archie stuck his face into the shot too, for posterity. This was the ultimate in clandestine, behind-the-scenes spy-camming. “Let’s find the women’s prep tent,” he said. “Some of those chicks dressing out as the Bride of Frankenstein are ripped beyond belief. We might get to capture some flesh.”

“I read ya,” said Mace.

Their personal monster hunt had begun.

“Crowd Control expects three to five thousand guests through here tonight,” said Randy into his bullhorn. “Everybody stay alert and do your job. If it gets hairy, let Security do theirs. Do not intercede.”

All Oscar could smell was adhesive and latex, his head painted and glued into Wolf Man appliances, his hands already sweating in their fur gloves. All around him, ghouls, zombies and classic monsters were trying to dope out their assigned grids by penlight. Groups of otherworldly horrors grabbed their last chance for hydration at the snack bar.

Already, his inner voice was chanting: In six hours this will be over.

Oscar assumed his post and commenced to startle giggling nitwits and the dates of bigger nitwits, getting a photo-flash in the face too damned many times. Even in the land of the supernatural, they acted like the tourists they were. One guy had shoved him, all huffed up because Oscar had actually caught him unawares, but the guy turned his back and strolled away, laughing. No harm, no foul.

There was some vigorous activity going on in the bushes about twenty yards to the rear, off the beaten track of Lycanthrope Trail. Either humping minors, Oscar knew, or, occasionally, a pair of fornicating show monsters, which was a weird enough possibility to distract his notice from his job. Last year, he’d seen one of the rubberheads, a Frankenstein Monster, with his pants down and his Bride with her legs in the air; now that was a photo op. He decided to take five to check it out, but by the time he fixed a direction, the commotion ceased. All he’d find was a wet Kleenex, or maybe a spent condom hanging on a branch, glistening like a glow-worm.

It took him an extra heartbeat to identify what he found as a person – a man, lying on his back, his eyes wide and fixed, his throat completely excavated to visible bone. He glistened, all right, mostly due to the ebbing glurts of carotid blood. His hands were frozen into claws and he was the deadest thing Oscar had ever seen.

Oscar’s first thought was: Maybe this is a really good prop.

His second thought was: Okay, it’s just more urban violence, this is the 21st Century, don’t panic.

He fumbled out his pager and instantly dropped it. He groped around for it. Hopeless. When he rose again, he banged into something living and breathing, and rebounded onto one knee. Even in the bad light, he could make out that this was one of his fellow Wolf Men. He started to ask if this was for real when his voice died out in his throat, drying up to desert.

The creature regarding him had chatoyant eyes and smelled like a wet bloodhound fresh from a wallow in offal. It cocked its head, considering what it saw versus what it could scent – conflicting information. It ran an ebony talon along one side of Oscar’s face and flicked one of his rubber ears. Its breath stank of carrion. Its teeth looked too practical to be a sham. Then it blew out breath in a hot snort of dismissal, released Oscar, and bounded away into the underbrush on backward-jointed canine hind legs.

If it was a werewolf costume, it was the best Oscar had ever seen.

Several jello shots later, Gordito fingered the edge of his blade, grinning like a demon and never letting his now-bloodshot eyes stray too far from the park fountain. “If I cut him from behind, right along that fin on his back, dude’ll fall right out of his suit,” he said to Ashleigh, who snickered and popped her gum.

The attention of the green amphibian monster in the fountain was focused away from them, toward the park. Not a lot of traffic right now, with the Chunkblower at full capacity and showtime for the Vampire Magician just commencing. He splashed about desultorily, awaiting an audience, pondering aquatic scare tactics.

“I’m gonna go for it,” Gordito said, always anxious to be first. The deal with his homies was that each of them would target a different monster, and each had to score a trophy – a plastic appendage, a slice of monster suit, an artefact of the hunt. A simple bloodstain would suffice, too, but Gordito had his eye on that backfin. Ashleigh did not like the part about the blood.

“Gordo, don’t hurt the fuckin’ guy, okay? That’s not funny.”

“Callaté.” It was a command, a warning, and the end of the argument. Inwardly, Gordito was relieved that none of his boys were around to hear his bitch mouthing off. Sometimes, listening to Ashleigh whine was worth it, just so Gordo could be proud of his trophy blonde; other times, well, what was it about white chicks that made them so whiny?

He edged up behind the fountain like a commando. Nobody was strolling by. If he had to step into the two-foot depth of water, Ashleigh’s instructions were to yank him back so he did not fall.

When the Creature meandered back to Gordito’s side of the pool, Gordito arm-barred him from behind and made a clean cut straight down the length of the dorsal double-fin. “What-up, fishie!” he growled, making a monster voice. The fin did not peel back easily. Fat droplets of dark purple blood hit the clear water like ink. That was the last thing Gordito saw.

His victim turned with a bulrush roar, snapping both bones in Gordito’s forearm. The knife dropped into the water. The scaled thing revolved in his limp grasp, slick as motor oil, and razor-keen talons husked Gordito’s face off his skull. When Ashleigh screamed and pulled back on her boyfriend’s free hand, she fell on her rump because the arm was no longer attached.

Her screaming attracted no notice in the park as the water turned vaguely pink and Gordito’s corpse splashed face-down. She was borne into the air, light as a broomstick, and body-slammed into the bushes behind the fountain. All she could see was blurry movement and shifting light; the world turning upside down, and there was no time left to draw breath to make any more commotion.

The Gill-Man had always been attracted to the fair ones, the ones in angelic white. Like many of the others long-past, this one did not survive the mating.

“Did you see that?! Did you get it?!” Mace was beside himself with excitement.

“I got it,” said Archie, staring at his video camera as if it had suddenly sprung a secret hatch containing hidden treasure.

“Ho, man!” Mace was getting wiggly. They were guerilla’ed in at the treeline with a clear view of the park fountain, about thirty yards from where Gordito and Ashleigh had just died. Archie’s digital kit featured an excellent zoom, even using night-vision.

“Shut up, shut up!” There was more activity at the fountain, and both Archie and Mace hunkered down to see what came next.

They videotaped a fellow named Rory Caulder who had taken an unscheduled break to repair his Gill-Man suit, since the chemicals used to keep the fountain water clear had a tendency not only to waterlog the rubber, but to dissolve it at inopportune times. God only knew what it was doing to his skin. It was comic to watch, even on instant replay: The green monster shuffles flat-footedly to his post, puts one leg into the water, looks down, and does a monster double-take worthy of Wile E. Coyote. He springs out of the water and falls on his ass, ripping his reptilian suit as he claws for his emergency pager.

“Got it,” said Archie. “Classic.”

Oscar was doing his best to skin around the edges of the park, with the nearest exit as his objective. He still could not get his breathing to settle down. He would never be able to erase the image of the eviscerated cadaver from his mind, especially when his imagination impudently filled in gory details obscured by the bad light. His nose seemed clogged with the stench of freed organs cooling in the night, back there, somewhere behind him.

“What the hell is this – a Wolf Man?” said Connie.

Libia, Tiny’s girl, unlimbered her straight razor with a stainless-steel glint in her eyes. “Let’s take him.” They had been kicking it under a large eucalyptus tree – a real one – working their way through a spliff the size of a Dodger Dog and discussing how they could one-up their guys in the scavenger hunt for monster parts.

“Wait!” said Oscar, skidding to a stop. “Wait a minute!” His hairy paws were stretched out, open-palmed, in entreaty as the two girls angled toward him, jackals stalking a werewolf. “You’ve got to get out of the park, now! You’re in danger! There’s—”

Libia and Connie glanced at each other with scrunched-up expressions of impatience. “Fuck you,” they both said at the same time, like homicidal twins.

Connie slashed obliquely with her bladed fingernails while Libia thrust and danced and Oscar found his life full-up, trying to track both of them. He felt molten pain in his bicep as he was incised – first blood. Apropos of Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar’s brain reeled as he fell. He was still trying to warn people who were intent on harming him. He was bleeding now, yet the words coming from his mouth were still trying to save them.

Scrambling to rise, savaging his wounded arm, only Oscar saw the clot of ghouls and zombies that had congregated to watch.

One of the walking dead grabbed Libia by the hair and gnawed a big wet mouthful out of her naked shoulder. Libia went nuclear and windmilled with the razor. The zombie did not mind, and within seconds Libia was being eaten in all directions. Conceptión simply vanished into a huddle of lurching, famished walkers, folding inward like cardboard. Oscar saw her hand last of all, flashy fingernails tearing impotently at the night air.

“I could kick Frankenstein’s ass,” said Tiny. “Come on.”

“What about the girls?” Chispa was looking around for Connie.

“What a pussywhip,” said Flaco. “They’ll find us. Let’s do it.”

“Big son of a bitch,” said Chispa, meaning their prey.

The Frankenstein Monster was seated in a niche in the Rhine Village, which had been redecorated as the Stairway to Hell. Whoever was under the monster make-up had been cast for size, and with the big clunky Franken-boots he was still two feet taller than Tiny, who, typically, was north of six-two and past three hundred on the scale. The guy was laying down on the job, not stalking and scaring. He looked like he had a headache or something.

“Take the bolts on his neck,” suggested Flaco.

They came in like muggers dogging a lone Girl Scout on a train platform.

“Saaayyy,” Tiny said, swaggering. “I always wanted to kick Frankenstein in the balls to see what he’d do.”

The Monster looked up, infinite weariness in its face.

The blades came out. “Give us those bolts and we won’t have to Veg-O-Matic your ass,” said Chispa.

The Monster stood up, casting all three of them into its shadow. The sight of the knives caused it to wave its huge hands, to ward away the danger, and that was all Tiny needed to interpret as an attack. They swarmed the Monster, right, left and center.

The Monster grabbed Tiny’s throat as Tiny drove his lock-back knife hilt-deep into its sternum. It grunted but followed through, crushing all the bones in Tiny’s neck. Tiny’s eyes went snowy and he died instantly, hitting the ground like a side of buffalo steak falling off the back of a butcher’s truck. Flaco feinted while Chispa dug in. The Monster backhanded Chispa so hard that his eyes popped out. Worse, his pompadour was mussed for life.

In another part of the Stairway to Hell, guests witnessing the action had begun to applaud.

Flaco saw them, felt caught in the act, and his fight-or-flight knob cranked full over to flight. He ran away, grateful that his dead friends could not see him chicken out in real time.

The Monster growled, once, put-upon and angry. No one else dared to come near it. It pulled the knife from its chest and flung it. Then it resumed its seat in partial shadow, hands rising to obscure its view of the world. It just wanted to be left alone.

“Hey, mijo,” Chiqui said when she’d spotted Flaco, crouched low near the Haunted Bayou, eyes dulled. “You laying down on the job or you just trying to lure me back into the bushes?” She was game, and dropped a strap, trying to look sexy-cute.

“Chiquita,” Flaco said, gasping, his voice clogged. “Don’t—”

“What?”

Flaco could say no more because he was busy trying to hold his intestines together in his lap. He failed. Chiqui uttered a strangled little cry and nearly backed into the guy standing behind her, the guy in the long cloak and top hat.

“What the fuck are you?!” she said, whirling, startled out of seeing Flaco, just for a moment. “Fucking Dracula; get the fuck outta here.”

“I suppose not,” said the man in the cloak.

“Oh, well, you Mister Hyde or some sorta fucker, then? Fuck, you ain’t no monster.”

“I suppose not,” said Jack the Ripper, who had lived for a hundred years and would live for a hundred more, as a killer with no face.

He slid Flaco’s six-inch blade into Chiqui’s esophagus, cutting off further comment and popping a knuckle of vertebra through the back of her neck. He had cut Flaco quickly. With the women, he always tried to take more time.

“Oh, wow, he cut her, man – cut her like a surgeon!”

Archie’s insane giggle had grated Mace’s nerves for three kills now, and Mace was starting to think that maybe his partner was beginning to lose his mind.

“If you don’t shut up and keep down, I’m going to cut you,” Mace said gutturally. “Like a weed-eater. Hand me the other battery.”

Archie rummaged inside his rucksack of nightfighting-black canvas. “He stuck the knife in them and they died, faster than clicking off a light switch. That was so smooth. Please tell me you got that!”

“I got it, I got it. Jesus.” Typical, for Archie to think Mace might have missed the shot. Mace wanted to be a cameraman, and would never let a low battery pack louse up a choice composition. “I got it, okay?”

Then the Mummy got them.

Archie pitched forward onto Mace, his skull corrugated by inch-deep finger-tracks full of dust and trailing mold. Everything inside his head gushed out under pressure, and as Mace was trying to swing his lens around to capture the moment, he realized the last face he would see was more than three thousand years old, and completely devoid of expression.

Hymie and Gloria worked clean-up together, one of several details throughout the park. Appropriate to the season, they were in costume too, from their dark blue washable jumpsuits to the paper filters partially masking their faces. Like many of the ambient monsters in the park, they too wore latex gloves, though theirs were surgical. Their shoulder patches read SECURITY and were emblazoned with little handcuffs and lightning bolts.

“It just gets worse,” Gloria said, her gaze defocused. Her eyes, above the aluminum nose-guard for the mask, were metallic blue-grey in the vague light. “Nobody can just have a nice time anymore. Children don’t have any business with adult drugs, adult weapons, yet here they are, more every year.” She was staring toward the exit to the Haunted Bayou sector. Tourists in, tourists out. No action just now.

“It wouldn’t be so bad if these gang idiots just killed each other,” said Hymie, who was of the opinion that the world needed fewer stupid people anyway, but was conflicted by his need to sound sympathetic to Gloria’s views. Her jumpsuit revealed her figure as pert and trim and he really wanted to ask her out, after work, for coffee or something.

Gloria said, “Well, who are we to deny them a little help-along?” Her expression was caught halfway between rueful and bittersweet as her headset radio crackled. She had this habit of pressing the earpiece when she responded, as though she was auditioning in a recording booth. “Copy that, Front-Man, clean-up on Aisle Eight.” Aisle Eight would be the restricted area behind the Bizarre Bazaar.

Usually they just zipped the body into a bag and slung it into the back of their van. When they had twenty-five stacked up, they traded for a clean van. But the Aisle Eight job was a bonafide mess, and Hymie’s first thought was Wolf Man.

“What, again?” Gloria shook her head at the mess. “I’m thinking Jack the Ripper got himself into a party mood.” It was funny in a way: the Wolf Man did the real ripping; Jack used tools. The corpse was a casserole from chin to crotch. Together they managed to spatula-roll it into the sterile bag, and once zipped shut, it was just another load.

“Is this a guy or a girl?” Hymie said.

“Female. Look at the make-up. Unless it’s a guy in drag. Hell, Hymie, everybody’s wearing make-up tonight; nobody’s who they’re supposed to be. Isn’t that what Hallowe’en’s all about? Disguising yourself?”

“Damned monsters,” Hymie said, wiping down his suit with an aerosol bottle of disinfectant.

“The last time I ever trick-or-treated, I was twelve,” she said. “Before poison in the candy and pedophiles behind every door. This neighbor lady named Mrs Burke used to hand out full-sized candy bars. My sister Jeanie and I had to go home and empty our bags. We made two full rounds of the whole neighborhood, walked on streets we couldn’t even name, till almost midnight, and we were okay. We were safe. God, I feel old.”

“What did you go as?” said Hymie.

“I went as the sorority vampire chick from Blood of Dracula – scarf, vampire fangs, contrail eyebrows, the whole bit. I thought it was an empowering image. I never went as a princess, or Snow White. I was the Bride of Frankenstein one time, and the Leech Woman.”

“If more kids were watching those old movies and dressing up, we might not have to do this.”

“That was then, this is now,” she said. “Besides, we’d be out of a job, so I’m not complaining.” In a lax economy, their particular branch of SECURITY was booming. They had more clean-ups every year.

Hymie said, “I heard next year they might actually tell the fake monsters about the . . . you know – the ringers.”

Gloria snorted. “Why? The actors aren’t going to get hurt. We haven’t lost a single one.”

“What about Dracula, last year?”

“That was an accident, and it was probably his own fault, or some drunk moron shoved him. It wasn’t – you know, the other thing.”

Neither of them could summon the words to speak of real monsters.

“Not only that,” said Gloria, “but if we told the actors too, then nobody would show up for the auditions. Bad for biz.”

Together they slung the fresh bag into their van. Hymie’s heart did a little skip-and-jump. He knew about Blood of Dracula; he knew that the movie had been filmed as I Was A Teenage Vampire in the 1950s, and he and Gloria could talk about stuff like that later, after they punched their clock cards for the night.

He wondered what she was up to for Christmas.

Somehow, Oscar had made it clear of SpookyNight with no further damage. Somehow, he had put the monster fest behind him, huffing and puffing, on hands and knees, over the grassy hillock on the other side of the security fences. He did not even remember finding his car in the part-time employee lot, or not losing his keys, or two dozen other variables that might have hampered his escape.

Lot Security waved him through the gate with a grin. Look at that, a monster driving a car, pretty damned funny. I didn’t know lycanthropes could drive a stick.

Making it back to his apartment without killing himself in a collision was another minor miracle. His attempts to hide his face made him lope, and he was spotted by costumed kids on the sidewalk, being shepherded through treats, with few tricks, by their put-upon parents and handlers. Look, Daddy, it’s the Wolf Man! They all saw him, and not one of them was frightened.

When he caught sight of himself in his bureau mirror, he startled. His make-up base was smeared, kohling his eyes so they appeared huge and wet. He thought of prostitutes, beaten up and left with shredded hose in some alley. The blend edges of his Wolf Man appliances had peeled. He looked like he was rotting, dying. Sweat had popped in gravid, oily droplets. Hallowe’en had surprised him this year. His skull sloshed with sickly thoughts about classic monsters and make-believe; about the dangers of making the fantasmagoric creatures of the night too cuddly.

He tried to meter his breathing, and failed. He fought to stabilize his composure, and couldn’t. His emotions were redlining because this year, this season, he had felt something he had never felt before, when playing dress-up and going boo! for minimum wage . . . and in the flash of an instant, the world had changed around him.

Oscar was scared. To the thudding core of his heart, he was scared to death on Hallowe’en, for the very first time.

NICHOLAS ROYLE

Standard Gauge

NICHOLAS ROYLE WAS BORN IN MANCHESTER in 1963, and has lived in London for the past twenty years. He is the author of four novels: Counterparts, Saxophone Dreams, The Matter of the Heart and The Director’s Cut.

He has published more than one hundred short stories and has edited eleven anthologies, from Darklands (1991) to The Time Out Book of London Short Stories: Volume 2 (2000).

As Royle explains: “ ‘Standard Gauge’ was written for a book of photographs of female nudes by photographer Marc Atkins. The idea behind the book, Thirteen, was that thirteen writers would each be sent a randomly selected nude and asked to write a piece to ‘illustrate’ the photograph. Readers may like to try to imagine the nude in this case. Or, better still, track down a copy of Thirteen.”

THERE ARE TWO THINGS you can be sure of with West London estate agents. One is that the prices will always be higher than the last time you looked. The other is that among the properties for sale or rent there will always be at least one in Sinclair Road.

Sinclair Road runs from behind Olympia to the top of Addison Gardens in Shepherd’s Bush. It’s a long straight road lined with big Victorian terraced houses divided up into flats. Nothing unusual in that, you might think. But Sinclair Road is actually very unusual indeed.

Late one blowy afternoon towards the end of last year, I was looking in the window of an estate agent close to Shepherd’s Bush Green when I noticed a couple of places in Sinclair Road. I went into the office intending to score a flat list and get back out on the street as quickly as possible – I’ve nothing against estate agents, I just wish they didn’t always demand your soul in return for a flat list – but both the agents, a man and a woman, were busy and there was no other visible source of information. The man, a well-built dark-skinned guy in his early thirties, was on the phone, twirling a set of keys around his index finger as he exaggerated the charms of a studio flat in Hammersmith Grove to someone on the other end of the line.

The woman, pipe-cleaner thin, cigarette-lined, looking ten years older than her thirty-odd years, was fielding some bizarre questions from the only other person apart from me in the place. Having dismissed the woman’s invitation to sit down, the questioner used his hands to press against the edge of her desk. Essentially he wanted to know if the properties they sold were divided up vertically or horizontally. It didn’t matter how many different ways he phrased it, the woman seemed unable to give him an answer.

“We sell flats and houses,” she kept saying. “Some of the houses are divided up into flats.”

“Horizontally or vertically?” he wanted to know, chopping his hands through the air. “This way or that?”

Deep gridlines of stress had appeared on the woman’s forehead as if etched there by the man’s hand movements. “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I don’t think I can help you.”

Her colleague continued to spiel and twirl, appearing to drag out the conversation. I had no doubt, however, that the caller had hung up.

What interested me in particular was that as I had entered the office the first words I had heard the crazy guy say were “Sinclair Road”.

Abruptly, the madman scowled and spun away from the woman’s desk. I saw his face for the first time; his eyes blazed with an unsettling intensity. He pulled open the door and left. I noted the direction he took, then turned to raise my eyebrows at the woman, but she was still wound up, so I quickly requested a flat list. She pulled one out of a drawer and handed it to me without a word. I left the shop and headed down Goldhawk Road. The sky above the Hammersmith & City line bridge was turning a deep pink. Within half an hour it would be that uniform orangey-purple that passes for night in London. The crazy guy turned and went into Vesbar. I stopped outside and watched through the window as the young, the fashionable and the beautiful parted to allow the interloper to approach the bar, where I saw him growl at the staff until they relented, presenting him with what I assumed was a glass of tap water.

I went in and asked for two beers, pointing to a row of bottles in the chiller.

“Want a beer?” I asked him.

He glared at me.

“I was in the estate agent’s,” I explained. “I’m interested in this vertical/horizontal thing. Have a beer and tell me about it.”

He turned away.

“I think I know what you’re talking about,” I lied.

He turned back.

“What’s it to you?” he asked, taking the beer.

“I’m interested.”

And so he told me. The normal way in which a street is divided up – one house, consisting of a ground floor, first floor and perhaps second floor, next to another – did not reflect the actual reality of these spaces. There was more homogeneity between one first-floor space and the next than between any first-floor space and the ground floor beneath it or the second floor above.

“I see,” I said, wishing that I’d saved my beer money.

“Anyway,” he muttered, turning away again. “She wasn’t tall enough.”

“What?”

“The estate-agent woman. She wasn’t tall enough.”

“How could you tell? She was sitting down.”

“I can tell.”

He kept looking away, watching people around him, as if an attack could come from any quarter.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Marco.”

“Tall enough for what, Marco?” I asked.

“It ran just south of here, you know.”

“What did?”

“Two minutes’ walk.”

I thought about buying him another beer, out of pity, and making myself scarce. But I didn’t like to leave him there. He was in the wrong place. Very soon after it had opened, Vesbar had started to fill up from early evening onwards with the sort of people you didn’t normally see in Shepherd’s Bush. Young, trendy, furiously smoking; tote bags, tight jackets, Hoxton fins. Where did they come from? They didn’t live in the Bush; you never saw them carrying shopping or entering houses. From which branch of Central Casting did they get bused in? They weren’t of the same stripe as the good-time girls and boys who shivered in shirtsleeves outside the Walkabout on the west side of the Green, or even drawn from the same subset as the exhibition drinkers who had packed out the Slug & Lettuce on the north side the moment it opened. Nor would they be likely to wander down to the Bush Bar & Grill for expensive eats after a couple of swift ones. They were there for the duration. (Earlier in the day it was a different story. The place was almost empty at lunchtime. It was good for meetings with BBC producers who wanted to get out of the office. I’d take my iBook down there and show them my stuff over a mineral water, and they’d say “Mmm, yes. Very nice”, and then never call.)

“D’you wanna see it?” Marco asked, looking up at me through dirty wisps of hair.

“See what?” I asked, running a hand over my shaved skull.

“The old line, the disused line. What I’ve been talking about all this time, for fuck’s sake.”

I had to admit that I had almost no idea what he’d been talking about, even less now, but I left with him because I rather liked the unnecessary cursing and I didn’t have him pegged as dangerous. We turned off Goldhawk Road into Richford Street.

Richford Street is mixed. Dentists, psychologists, foreign editors and private finance types rub shoulders with hookers, crack-heads, murderers and various victims of violent crime. I knew a bunch of people down there, primarily drawn from the former group. I wondered where Marco was taking me. I wasn’t carrying my camera, my standard piece of armour in awkward situations.

At the bottom of Richford Street we kept going. At Trussley Road, Marco stopped.

“Over there,” he said. To our left was a viaduct carrying the Hammersmith & City line south to Hammersmith. The railway arches had been colonized by car workshops, separate businesses specializing in different makes of vehicle. Marco was pointing across the street to the remains of another railway viaduct. “There.”

“So what?” I said.

“That’s it, the disused line I was talking about.”

I looked at him.

Footsteps approached from Hammersmith Grove. We each turned and watched a young woman of medium height coming towards us. She crossed the road to avoid us and carried on down towards the railway arches.

“Too short, I suppose?” I said, when she had turned the corner.

“By a good six inches.”

If I had known then why he was interested in tall women, I would never have made the comment.

For the next few days I concentrated on my own project, my film about Sinclair Road, which I was hoping to flog to one of the new BBC digital channels that were soon to come online. Nobody would see it, but that wasn’t the point. I’d get paid, there’d be a bit of press and the next one might actually get commissioned. It was a plan, not an especially clever one, but a plan nevertheless, which I’d come up with after several years of trying to set stuff up with the BBC and countless small production companies. I’d been to enough meetings to last a lifetime, all of them fruitless.

The conceit of the film was that everybody in London has lived in Sinclair Road or will do so at some point in the future. It seemed a neat way in to make a little film about a road that actually is a bit special. It does have an unusually high turnover of residents. I am forever meeting people who live there, or who tell me they’ve lived there in the past. An academic I met at a party a year ago, and an architect she knew who lived there too; a musician I met via some writer friends; a lad to whom I gave a lift home after playing football under the Westway. It got to the point where I was expecting people to say “Sinclair Road” when I asked them where they lived.

At home I edited various bits of footage on the iBook while working my way through a bottle of vodka. I replayed a panning shot of top-floor flats along Sinclair Road and it struck me how similar it was to a clip I’d shot the day before of a train on the Hammersmith & City line near Latimer Road. Playing both clips forward and back and varying the speeds, I remembered what Marco had said about streets full of houses being divided up horizontally rather than vertically. His theory ended up influencing the way I edited the film, as I intercut shots of Sinclair Road with shots of the train.

Tired and half-pissed, I decided to log on to the net for half an hour before crashing out. I looked into Marco’s story about a disused line and discovered that it was true. There had been a line, going from Addison Road station (now Kensington Olympia) to Hammersmith and then on to Richmond. It had run north alongside the West London line, parallel with Sinclair Road, as far as Addison Gardens, then had peeled off to the left.

Normally, in the mornings, I waited for the post before going out anywhere, and especially around that time, as I had placed an ad for an actress or model in the Stage. “Possible nudity,” I had specified, and “no fee upfront”, so the CVs were not exactly flooding in. First thing the next day, however, before the post came, I wandered over to Sinclair Road with the camera.

The line’s former route was easy to identify. Because it had run in a cutting just below street level, there were noticeable humps where various roads had bridged the line. On the west side of Shepherd’s Bush Road there was even a parapet where you could look down on to a row of lock-up garages where once there had been a station serving Shepherd’s Bush. On the east side of the road, an imposing block of flats, the Grampians, had been built in the Art Deco style of the day only fifteen years or so after the line’s closure in 1916. It occurred to me that I had walked over that former bridge hundreds of times and wondered why it was there. When you looked west you somehow expected a slightly grander view than a line of lock-ups and a few old cars. It had always seemed an unsatisfactorily resolved landscape.

The old line had passed underneath the Hammersmith & City line just south of Goldhawk Road station and then straightened to mount its own viaduct, a fragment of which Marco had shown me at Trussley Road.

I headed back towards Sinclair Road via the Green, then cut behind the petrol station, but as I did so I noticed a figure disappearing up the ramp into the residents’ car park at the foot of one of the tower blocks. It’s funny how with some people you think you recognize them in the street, but you’re not quite sure, even though you can see them right there in front of you, and so you don’t know whether or not to acknowledge them, and if you do and it’s not them you look stupid, and you look no less stupid if you fail to acknowledge someone you do know; and yet with other people, you recognize them in a split second, a hundred per cent, even from the back as they’re disappearing into a car park.

Instead of hailing Marco, I followed him. I had never had reason to enter this or any other nearby car park. I lived in a two-bedroom flat that cost more than I could afford above a twenty-four-hour supermarket on the north side of the Green and parked my Mazda in the street.

At the top of the ramp there was a covered section. I waited until Marco had reached the other end and turned left into daylight again. I passed a couple of 4 × 4s and a newish Jaguar. Smart cars for a block of council flats. Beyond the covered area was an open-air extension to the car park. At the far side, a low wall and a wire-mesh fence separated the parked cars, among them two new Minis, from a twenty-foot drop to the rear of the Deco apartment block, the Grampians. I realized this represented part of the track-bed of the disused line. Marco was standing close to the fence further along. From what I could make out, he was trying to see into the flats. Every few seconds he lowered his gaze to the cutting where, a hundred years before, trains would have run. It was at that point that I started to suspect that his interest in the old line went beyond that of a local historian. Before I knew what I was doing I had the camera to my eye and was filming him. Local nutter or neighbourhood visionary, he’d look good in the film, whether his taking part was agreed to or not. If he fancied it, we could shoot some more stuff in Sinclair Road; if not, he’d just be a long-haired bystander in a dirty coat, a tatty figure in a scruffy landscape. There’d be a stark contrast with the female nude, if ever I found one.

Marco registered my presence. I lowered the camera, but he didn’t seem that bothered. I walked over to him.

“I’m making a film,” I said, “about Sinclair Road. Since you told me about the old line, I realize that’s got to be in it. It ran just down here, didn’t it?”

“Can you hear them, too?”

I raised my eyebrows at him.

“The trains.”

“Did one just go by? Did I miss it?”

He laughed to himself, somewhat hollowly.

“There’s a good view from my place,” he said.

“Where’s that?”

“Where do you think?”

We walked together to Sinclair Road. His place was on the east side close to Addison Gardens and the bridge over the railway. We climbed to the top floor, where he had a studio flat that smelled of incense and damp.

“Nice place,” I said.

“It’s a shit-hole,” he muttered.

My brain went into overdrive. My visits to estate agents had served two purposes. I wanted to gather evidence that Sinclair Road had an unusually high turnover, as I’ve said, but I was also on the lookout for a cheap flat to rent, to use in the film. Maybe I’d found it, rent free. The studio room was relatively uncluttered: a vinyl settee, a portable TV and a free-standing bookcase full of books on magic and biographies of Aleister Crowley. I looked out of the front window. It was only really when you saw the road from this angle that you appreciated how big these houses were and how many people must live in the street at any one time. What looked like three-storey houses to the casual passer-by in fact comprised five storeys if you counted the lower-ground floor and the attics that most of them seemed to have.

Hearing the sound of tearing paper, I turned to look at Marco. He was opening his post by ripping the tops and bottoms of envelopes right across.

“Do you always open your mail like that?” I asked him.

“Of course,” he said.

“Why ‘of course’?”

Again he laughed to himself and held up a brown A5-size envelope.

“Open one of these in a darkened room,” he said, “and you’ll see why.”

When I continued to look baffled, he went and pulled the curtains, front and back, plunging the room into semi-darkness. He tossed the envelope to me.

“You open it,” he said. “Pull it apart where the glue’s stuck together.”

I realized what he was going on about, but opened the envelope, all the same, according to his instructions. As I expected, where the glue parted, in long stringy filaments, a faint phosphorescent glow appeared. I’d seen this before, but had no idea what caused it.

“You don’t like that, then?” I asked him. “The phosphorescent thing?”

“What’s there to like? That they’re trying ever more bizarre ways to get at me? I’m not stupid, you know.”

“No. I can see that,” I said, opening the curtains at the rear and looking down at the railway line. “So that’s the West London line?” I said.

“Yes.”

“And the disused line ran alongside?”

“On this side, yes. And can I sleep at night? No. The noise of it is constant. Constant. The trains never stop. They never stop.”

Marco was pressing the heel of his hand to his forehead like a method actor with a headache.

“Right,” I said. “And what’s this, if you don’t mind my asking?” I pointed to a small pile of soil on the carpet near the window, and an indecipherable series of chalk marks on the wall.

“That’s my business,” he said darkly.

“Whatever.”

Walking home, I thought about the soil. I vaguely recalled reading up on magic and divination for an unsuccessful pitch to Channel Four. Geomancy had something to do with seeing the future in patterns of scattered soil. The contents of Marco’s bookshelves attested to more than a passing interest in the dark arts. I wondered how far he took it.

I pictured the flat and imagined ripping up the ratty carpet to expose the bare boards that must lie beneath. All I needed was the right face, and more, to situate in that space and have it looking out at Sinclair Road from the inside.

And when I got home I found that face.

There was a small pile of mail on the doormat. I took the mail into the front room. Then I did something I’d never done before. I don’t know why I did it – whether in homage to Marco or as a way of rather pointlessly taking the piss out of the poor fucker – but I selected the biggest item and opened it in the way I’d seen him do it, by ripping off the top and the bottom. Too late I realized that the envelope had contained a response to my ad in the Stage: a letter, a CV and a black and white ten-by-eight.

I gingerly withdrew what remained of the photo. The respondent had taken heed of my warning about nudity and had gamely got herself snapped in the buff. Her arms and legs looked dark, making me think she might be Asian or Arab. Her torso and abdomen were awash with light from the adjacent open window. It could have been the window in Marco’s flat. Between her breasts and her navel was a series of broken-up horizontal lines that I assumed to be some sort of henna pattern. Her left hand was placed across her breastbone, just below her throat, which seemed a strangely vulnerable gesture for a woman willingly posing nude.

I picked the remaining contents of the envelope up off the floor. The woman’s head, which I had so cavalierly ripped from her body, was turned towards the window, a distant, melancholy look on her face. On the other strip that I’d unwittingly torn from the photograph were the model’s feet. Around her ankles were more henna designs like dotted lines. Only when I reassembled the three pieces did I appreciate fully her tall, statuesque figure.

I looked at the letter and CV. Her name was Vita Ray, which I took to be a stage name. She wanted the work, she said, because she wanted to get into films. Modelling for the picture had demonstrated that she was at ease in front of a camera. She gave a mobile number and what looked like a temporary address in Paddington.

I knew that I should really give it a few more days for some more CVs to come in, but I felt bad about mistreating Vita Ray’s portrait, and she looked right for Sinclair Road, so I picked up the phone.

Our first meeting took place in Sinclair Road itself. Vita Ray arrived by cab. As she stepped out and paid the driver, I saw for the first time how tall she was. At least two inches taller than my five foot seven. We walked the length of Sinclair Road while I explained to her what the film was about. As we approached the far end I glanced up at the attic window of number 148. Did I see the curtain move? It was impossible to be sure, especially with the sun reflecting off the glass.

I found her a little nervous, but keen to get started. I got her to walk towards me while looking into the windows she was passing.

“I want you to appear curious about who lives here and what they do,” I explained.

She was a natural. Unaware of the camera and a graceful mover. I began, prematurely, to congratulate myself on having chosen her. I asked her to unbutton her coat. As soon as she did so I saw that she had another intricate henna pattern, one that postdated the photograph, around her throat like a necklace. I then wondered if it could have been there, after all, and I had torn along the line of it when opening the envelope.

As we reached the bottom of the street, we ran into Marco, who was walking up from the Olympia end, so either I’d been mistaken about the curtain in his flat or he’d seen us and come straight out, going the long way round and doubling back. I introduced them to each other. The way Marco stole glances at Vita, while she was looking elsewhere, appeared sly and calculating. It was only later that I realized precisely how calculating.

“So you’re working on his film?” he asked her, somehow managing to offend both of us at the same time. “Me too.”

Vita looked less than thrilled at the prospect.

“We’ve got to go,” I said, taking her arm. “I’ll be in touch.”

I walked Vita down to Olympia and put her in a black cab. She turned round to watch me through the rear window as the cab pulled away. I gave a self-conscious wave. It was the last time I would see her alive.

I fixed a meeting for a couple of days later at Marco’s place. If I could actually get Marco out of the flat for half an hour, get him to run some invented errand, then Vita and I would be able to shoot some stuff. I didn’t need long and my instinct told me she’d be a fast worker, too.

My plan was to get there first, so she didn’t have to hang around on her own with Marco. Typically, however, a BBC producer rang me on the morning of the day when we were to do the filming. Some woman I’d had a couple of inconclusive meetings with in the past. Something had just come up, she said, an opportunity that was too good to miss. A BBC2 thing. Could I come in and knock a few ideas around? She suggested a time. I asked if we could make it any earlier or even the following day.

“It’s just come up,” she repeated, from which I inferred that it could just as quickly go away again.

“Okay, I’ll be there,” I said. “But I’ve got to be away by three.”

I should have said no, but I didn’t know that then. Obviously I know it now, but I didn’t know it then, although you could argue, and I often do, that I should have done.

I was still pacing up and down in the White City lobby at ten to three when Amanda finally showed up, trotting down to the security barriers. I considered telling her I had to go, but these meetings have a way of sucking you in, draining you of the power to resist. I went through and we went upstairs and we knocked a few ideas around and she said she’d get back to me and I knew she wouldn’t. Or she would, but it would be six weeks down the line and she’d remind me I knew what it was like.

It was four p.m. when I got to Sinclair Road. There was no response to my repeated leaning on Marco’s bell, nor to my hammering on the door.

“You gave her to me,” Marco would later whisper, when I visited him.

Vita’s body was found by the lock-up garages on the west side of Shepherd’s Bush Road. She lay across the track-bed of the disused line, albeit on asphalt laid down over its long-dead remains. Her feet were found closest to the garages, severed just above the ankle. Her head had rolled a few inches in the direction of the block of flats served by the garages. It was quickly established, from the amount of blood spilled at the site, not only that the beheading and double amputation had taken place right there in broad daylight and in full view of residents and passers-by, but that Vita had still been alive at the time.

Marco was picked up soaked in blood outside Vesbar. He never denied taking Vita to the lock-up garages and being present at the moment of her death, which he attributed not to his own efforts and the hacksaw bearing his bloody fingerprints found on the roof of one of the garages but to a train that had emerged from the tunnel under Shepherd’s Bush Road and failed to stop. It should have stopped at the station, he maintained.

In the opinion of the court, Marco was not insane, merely trying his hardest to give that impression. I asserted otherwise, having cooperated fully with the authorities. Not only did I believe there was a danger that I might face charges myself, I would have welcomed them. As it was, I was cleared of any impropriety and left free to judge myself. It wasn’t long before the offers started coming in. Meetings would be an informality this time, it seemed. I could choose my own projects. Set my own budgets. Publicity guaranteed.

I turned down the offers, despite the fact that I had even less work now than before. My landlord gave me notice to quit the flat.

Whenever I began to feel that I had sacrificed enough and might try to return to a normal life, I arranged to visit Marco.

“You gave her to me,” he whispered.

“She was tall,” I said. “Why did she have to be tall?”

“Standard gauge is four foot, eight and a half inches.”

I looked at him. His gaze had lost its intensity.

“I’ve got nowhere to live,” I told him.

“Move into my place,” he said. “You’ve always wanted to live in Sinclair Road.”

It wasn’t so much that I’d always wanted to, more that I’d always believed I would at some point. It wasn’t long after I’d moved in that I, too, started hearing the trains. They came in the middle of the night when there was no traffic on the West London line.

I measured my head in the mirror in Marco’s bespattered bathroom. Roughly nine inches from crown to Adam’s apple. From the sole of my foot to above my ankle bone was four inches. Nine and four made thirteen. Subtract thirteen inches from five foot, nine and a half – Vita’s height, as stated in court – and you’re left with four foot, eight and a half inches. Standard gauge.

I’m just that little bit shorter, so I’d have to stretch a bit.

STEPHEN GALLAGHER

Little Dead Girl Singing

STEPHEN GALLAGHER LIVES IN THE RIBBLE VALLEY, Lancashire, with his wife and daughter. His short stories have appeared in various magazines and anthologies, including Fantasy Tales, Shadows, Darklands and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and a collection is due from PS Publishing around the end of 2003.

His novels include Oktober, Down River, Nightmare with Angel and White Bizango, while among his film and television credits are Chimera, Oktober (which he also directed), two episodes of Chillers (Peter James’s “Prophecy”, and “Here Comes the Mirror Man”) and Murder Rooms: The Kingdom of Bones.

As Gallagher explains: “There’s a moment in this tale where the narrator recalls a glimpse of a dead child seen in old black-and-white newsreel footage from World War II. There are many bits and pieces of truth assembled into this story, but none truer than that one image. It’s there in my head. The stillest of still lives. Seen for maybe half a second, remembered for decades. But ask me where I walked the dog this morning, and I’ll have to think it out before I can tell you.

“Memory’s strange. Sometimes I think our brains are more efficiently designed to forget than they are to remember. Only when something strikes us on an emotional level does it get tagged for later recall. The problem there is that we don’t get much choice in the matter. I want to remember this for ever, we say, but we don’t. And then we tell someone Forget it, when we know they can’t.

“This tale was written partly to exorcise something I’d prefer to forget. But of course, the act of writing reinforced it to such an extent that I never will . . .”

HERE’S ONE YOU WON’T have heard before.

If you’re a parent with a musical child then you’ll know the festival circuit. I don’t mean anything that’s big business or in any way high-profile. I’m talking about those little local festivals run on dedication and postage stamps, where the venue’s a school theatre or a draughty church hall and the top prize is nothing more than pennies in an envelope. I’m talking about cold Saturday mornings, small audiences made up of singing teachers and edgy parents, judges whose quality varies depending on how their judgements accord with your own, and shaky little juvenile voices cracking with nerves.

As you might have guessed, I have been there.

Never as an entrant, of course. Even the dog leaves the house when I sing. But every young singer needs an adult support team rather like a racing driver needs a pit crew, to provide transport and encouragement and to steer them through the day’s schedule. That’s where the parents come in. Some children turn out with their entire extended families in tow, decamping with them from class to class like a mobile claque.

But not us. By the time Victoria was twelve we’d reached the point where she wanted as little fuss or pressure as possible. The thought of one of those three-generation cheer squads would have filled her with horror.

“One of you can come,” she’d say. “And you’re not to sit right at the front. I don’t want to be able to see you.”

This was last year. She liked to sing and she sang well, but she didn’t like to make a big deal of it. So on the Saturday of the festival just she and I made the hour’s drive to this tiny little town you’ve never heard of, way out in the middle of the flat country between home and the coast, with her entry slips and her piano copies and a bottle of mineral water.

They’d been running an annual festival here since nineteen forty-eight, and we’d done it twice before. This year Vicky’s singing teacher had entered her for four different competition classes, spread throughout the day. The room where the earliest would take place was the one we liked least, the village hall with its high ceiling and tiny stage and no acoustic to speak of. Well, you could speak of it, but you’d have to shout to be heard at the back. And it was always so cold in there that at this time of year you could see your breath.

We sat outside in the car for a few minutes.

“All right?” I said. “Anything else you need?”

She shook her head. She didn’t seem keen. I knew she’d had a bad throat for a few days and wasn’t feeling entirely at her best, but in we went.

They’d already started and so we waited for an interval between competitors to find a seat. When the opportunity came, we dodged around empty chairs and a photographer’s tripod and made our way down the hall.

The judge had her table out in the middle, while the spot for the singers was by an upright piano before the stage. The stage had a home-made backcloth for The Wizard of Oz. The judge was a woman in her late fifties, straight-backed, powdered, a little severe. None of which meant anything. I’d found you could never really get the measure of them until you heard what they had to say.

Vicky’s name came halfway down the programme, so we settled in. The class was Songs from the Shows and the age group was the youngest. There was low winter sun coming in through the windows at the back of the hall and it was making the singers squint.

Early-morning voices, little kids singing. Some in tune, most not, every one of them the apple of someone’s eye.

Andrew Lloyd Webber was getting a real hammering. In the space of half an hour we had three Whistle Down the Winds relieved only by a couple of I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say Nos. I recognized a few of the entrants from previous years. Only two young boys got up to sing and, bless ’em, you could tell that this was not their chosen element.

Vicky got up and did her piece. As she sat down beside me again she said, “That was rubbish.”

It wasn’t, but I knew that it wasn’t a patch on what she could do at her best. But I also had that sneaking feeling that I’m sure I shared with every parent in the room, that out of this bunch I had the only real singer and the rest of them might just as well give up and go home.

We had a song from Annie and a song from Les Miserables and then another Whistle Down the Wind, and then the judge did some scribbling and called the next name.

She mispronounced it the first time and I looked at my programme to check . . . Cantle? But the name was Chantal, exotic enough amongst the Emmas and the Jennies. There was movement over on the other side of the room and I craned to see what a Lancashire Chantal might look like.

Up stood this little girl in a cardigan, with a bow in her topknot and a dress that looked like funeral parlour curtains. She was tiny, and I reckoned she couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old.

She stood by the piano and waited for the judge’s nod and then the accompanist started up, and then little Chantal sang a perfect piping rendition of Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.

Let me qualify that. It was perfect, but it was also horrible in a way that I still can’t quite put my finger on. Her diction was clear and her intonation was bright. She hit all the notes dead-on, and she even acted the whole thing out.

But to see this eight-year-old doing such a precise imitation of mature emotion was like watching a wind-up doll simulating sex. She’d been drilled to a frightening degree. On one line her hand moved to her heart, on the next she gestured to the crowd. When the lines were repeated later in the song, she did exactly the same movements again in exactly the same way. There was a slightly American intonation there, as if she’d learned the words by listening to the movie soundtrack so many times that it rang in her head like tinnitus.

I looked for her mother. Sure enough, there she was. She had a little boy of about five or six beside her. The little boy was ordinary, fidgeting, eyes wandering, all his little-boy energies struggling against the imposed stillness like cats in a heavy sack.

The mother, though . . . she was as much of a study, in her way, as the little girl.

She wasn’t old, or even middle-aged. But her youth was only there in traces, as if it had been harried out of her too soon. Her hair was a dirty-blonde froth of curls, cut short and pushed up high on her head above her ears. She was staring at her daughter as she sang, her lips twitching along. She wasn’t mouthing the words as some of the mothers do, vicariously living the performance or, even worse, trying to conduct it from the sidelines. To me it seemed that she was just rapt, quite literally lost in the song, as the tenderest of souls might be overwhelmed by the greatest of artists.

I reckon you could have wheeled out Madonna herself and the London Symphony Orchestra, but you couldn’t have given her a performance that could affect her half so much. And my cynical heart softened then, because whatever form it comes in, however it’s expressed, it’s hard to be critical of such uncompromising love.

The song ended. There was the standard scattering of applause, and the little girl’s smile switched on like a bulb. Two seconds later it switched off again and she walked back to her seat as the next singer went up to take her place. Her mother bent over to whisper something but I was distracted then by a metallic bang from the back of the room, and I looked around to see a nondescript man noisily folding up his camera tripod.

The father, I assumed. My heart promptly hardened up again. I don’t like it when people make it so obvious that they’ve no interest in the efforts of any child other than their own. It may be a universal truth, but I think we’ve all got a responsibility at least to pretend otherwise. Yet still you see them at school shows and concerts, not looking at the stage, flicking through the programme book, sometimes not even bothering to join in the applause. They’re here to see the Third Wise Man triumph, and to them all the rest is just noise.

We’ve got a camera of our own, but I’d stopped taking it along. I’d started to find that if you make a big thing out of recording the moment what you lose is the moment itself.

They stuck it out for one more song, which was about as long as it took for him to pack the video gear away, and then in the gap between entrants the four of them got up and left. The girl went out in front and her brother got dragged along behind, bobbing around in his family’s wake like a rag doll caught up on a motor boat.

We slipped out ourselves about ten minutes after that. Done quietly, it was no breach of etiquette. The class was running late and we had another one to get to, so for this one we’d check the results and pick up the judgement slip later in the day. That was how it worked: young singers and their minders in constant motion from one hired room to another, getting nervous, doing their best, hoping for praise, fearing the worst.

We planned to get some lunch after the English Folk Song. They always set up a tearoom in the church but, being no lover of grated-cheese-and-pickle sandwiches, I had other ideas. On our way to the car, we stopped to pick up the slip from that earlier class and to check on the list of prizewinners.

Strange little Chantal had taken the first prize. Second and third places went to performances that I couldn’t remember.

Well, what can you do? You note it and move on.

We got into the car and drove out toward the coast, which was only another three or four miles. I thought a change of scene would be a good idea. I could sense that Vicky was unhappy; not peevishly so, just unhappy with her own performance, unhappy with the way she felt, unhappy with the day ahead and the sense of a course to be run that had no great promise of satisfaction in it.

After being quiet for a few minutes she said, “I don’t think I want to go back.”

“No?”

“I just want to go home. There’s no point.”

I said, “If that’s what you want, then fine. I’m not going to force you to stay. But be sure in your own mind that you’re not throwing it in for the wrong reasons. All right?”

“Mmm.” She was looking out of the window.

We found a cafeteria over an Edwardian parade and, wouldn’t you know it, they’d run out of ham for the sandwiches but had no shortage of grated cheese and pickle to offer.

Over lunch, we talked about the morning. Specifically, about Chantal’s win.

“I can’t say she didn’t deserve it,” I said. “Technically she’s very impressive and in two or three years’ time there’s a chance that she’ll be really good. Right now I’d say she’s been drilled too much. She’s very mechanical and over-controlled. But I’d also have to say she’s got an obvious natural gift. From here it’ll depend upon how naturally it’s allowed to develop, as opposed to being forced.”

Vicky sat there sucking her Coke through a straw, not over-happy but not disagreeing, either. She needed a straw to keep the ice from bobbing against the metal of her brace.

I said, “And of course, we know for a fact that the room’s got a curse on it and the judges are always peculiar.”

I said it as a joke but felt that there was a grain of truth in it. This was the third time we’d had the same experience. It was a catch-all class that started the day, with the age range heavily weighted towards the very young. The prizes had always gone to shrill little girls who maybe didn’t get the notes but did a lot of eye-rolling and arm-waving. The judges marked high on smiling and gestures, and some of the teachers played to that. A real singer probably flew right above the radar.

Well, it got her laughing when I said that it was no insult to miss out on a prize in a freak show. And as we were walking to the car she said, “I think I will go back.”

So instead of going home, we went back.

I was glad, because later in the day was when the big girls came in and the musicianship got more serious. Vicky was caught somewhere in between the moppets and the teenagers but when she sang among the best, she sounded as if she belonged there. Even if she didn’t get a prize, it would be good for her to see it through. Prizes are nice. But what really matters is who your peers are. The quality of the people among whom you clearly belong.

We were laughing about something else in the car when it came to me. The little girl had stuck in my mind and had been troubling me for some reason, and I suddenly realized why.

I found myself recalling an image from a TV documentary that I’d once seen. It was about the Second World War, the London Blitz. I don’t know how old I’d been when I saw it, but it was an early and shocking memory. Outside a bombed-out house, this family had been laid on the pavement. One was a baby, clearly dead, but not in repose. Its mouth was open, as if caught in mid-chortle.

The image was in my mind now because it shared something with the face of the girl I’d seen that morning. I’d hate to say what. But if I close my eyes I can still see her now, eyes hooded with dark rings under them, her downturned mouth hanging slightly open, her tiny teeth like points.

I saw her again, about half an hour later.

We’d moved over into the church, which was a big improvement. Inside the church there were several large informal rooms as well as the wood-panelled nave, and they were decently heated. In the nave was the best acoustic of them all, and the best piano to go with it.

I slipped out while we were waiting for Vicky’s turn in the British Composer set piece. She was complaining that her throat was dry and the water bottle was empty. She stayed behind in the hall.

The tearoom was in the middle of the building and had no windows. Metal-legged tables and plastic chairs had been set up among the pillars, and service was through a hatchway from a kitchen staffed by volunteers. There were some uncleared plates and crumbs on the tables but otherwise the seating area was empty apart from me and Chantal.

I recognized her easily, even from the back. That topknot, that cardigan. Just like a dressed-up doll. She was drawing something aimless in spilled sugar on one of the tables, and she was making a sing-song whispering sound as she did.

“Hello there,” I said.

She jumped. Not literally, but you could see her start. She turned around.

I said, “I heard you this morning. Congratulations. You sang really well.”

I was sorry I’d started this. She seemed panicked. I’d spoken to her and she didn’t know what to do or how to respond. Her eyes were looking at me but her eyes were empty.

I didn’t know what I could say now.

“Chantal,” I heard from behind me.

It was her mother. I glanced back and saw her. She didn’t meet my look but her gaze kind of slid around me to her daughter, as if she knew I was there and she ought to acknowledge me . . . and she was acknowledging me in her own way, but her own way was not direct.

She muttered something about being late and the two of them went off together, with me stepping aside to let them by. I don’t know if she’d been speaking to me or to her daughter. I felt like an idiot, to be honest, and I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.

More than feeling stupid, I felt a little bit spooked. That was one creepy family. Chantal’s eyes had been empty until her mother spoke. But I can’t say for sure what I’d seen in them then.

The rest of the afternoon passed by. Other classes came and went and the voices got better and better. We heard some thrilling sopranos and one beanpole of a teenaged boy who ran in late and sang Handel like a spotty angel.

Our final session was in the nave of the church. Vicky was more or less resigned to the fact that this wasn’t her best day, and she was taking something of a gonzo attitude to it all now . . . by which I mean that she wasn’t worrying about placing or prizes, but was just getting in there and doing it. Which I’ve always liked better. Do a thing for its own sake, and let anything else that comes along be a surprising bonus. That’s how to be an original. That way you can’t lose.

So there we were. The first thing that I noticed on entering the church, up on the empty balcony above our heads, was the nondescript man with his tripod and camera. Once we were in our seats, I looked around for the other three.

And there they were. The boy was in the middle. Slumped, glowering. He was the one I felt sorry for. He looked like the normal one in the family and I could imagine his patience being tested to near-destruction by a day like this. It must have been Boy Hell, having to get scrubbed-up and endure hours of boredom and sitting still in the company of grown-ups, and all for your sister in the spotlight.

Vicky was up third. She sang her piece, and sang it well. The throat problem hadn’t gone and she was up against her limit by the ends of some of the lines, but in contrast to the morning she was warmed-up and relaxed, and it was a great room to sing in. The atmosphere was completely different. The piping-little-kid factor was almost completely absent, but then I had to remind myself that all these mature and impressive young singers had probably been piping little kids once.

While Vicky was singing, there was a sharp noise from one of the rows. It didn’t throw her – in fact, she told me afterwards that she hadn’t even noticed it – but it made me look back.

Chantal’s brother had dropped something, I guessed. Probably a hymn book from the rail in front of him. His mother was giving him a kind of gritted-teeth, staring-eyes silent scolding. I looked past him to Chantal. She was completely slack, as if she’d been switched off.

That was when I started thinking of her as a little dead girl, in her funeral home curtain dress. In fact I fantasized about the whole family of them living above the funeral parlour and climbing into the boxes to sleep at night.

But not for long. My kid was still singing.

Even the applause sounded better in here. She sat down flushed, and I could see that she was pleased with herself.

Chantal was the youngest entrant in this class. She went up about twenty minutes later.

If anything, her performance was more extreme than the one I’d seen that morning. Her diction was so sharp that it was unpleasant to the ear. Every r was rolled, every t was a gunshot. Whatever had served her well before, she was doing more of it now. The light-bulb smile was a bizarre face-pull.

I nudged Vicky and she followed my glance over at the mother. The mother was doing it again, her mouth unconsciously making the shapes of the words, living the song with her daughter. I couldn’t see the balcony from my seat but I knew for sure that Cecil B would be up there, capturing it all on tape for endless home replay.

It was only the youngest member of the family who seemed to have used up all his reserves of team spirit. He wasn’t paying his sister any attention at all. To be fair to him, he’d probably sat through this a hundred times at home. He squirmed in his seat and stuck an arm up in the air, stretching. His mother quickly pulled it down so he stuck it up again, instantly computing that he’d found a way to annoy her. She pulled it down almost violently now and he tried it a third time, but by then the damage was done. The movement must have caught the little girl’s eye and distracted her for a second. She’d stumbled on her words. I’d only been half-listening but when she went wrong, I knew it at once.

So did her mother. God, now there was a look. Medusa would have asked for lessons.

When it came time for the judge to give his results, Chantal got a kind mention along with everybody else but Vicky got a very respectable second prize. It was all the more welcome for being unexpected, and she was only one point behind the sixteen-year-old who took the first. I’d have been happy at the fact that she’d held her own so well among such a high class of singers. But what the hell, it was nice to get an envelope as well.

“I bet you’re not sorry you stayed,” I said to her as everybody was gathering up their papers and their coats, and she made a face that could have meant anything.

Outside the church, the sky was mostly dark and streaked with red but there was just enough light to see by. Some of the sessions would go on into the evening, but quite a few of us were dispersing to our cars.

This was never my favourite kind of countryside. Far too flat and featureless. I imagine it had all been under the sea at one time, and the best thing you could say about it was that the views were uninterrupted. Looking out now, across the road and the fields beyond, I realized that I could see all the way to the far horizon. On the horizon sat the disappearing rim of the sun, on a strip of ocean that was like a ribbon of fire.

In a minute or less, the sun would have dropped and the effect would be gone. I wasn’t the only one to have my attention caught by it.

I could see Chantal about halfway across the parking area. She was out where there were few cars and she was alone. She was little more than a shadow-silhouette in the fading light but, as before, she was immediately recognizable.

I saw this little ghost take a faltering step, and then another. And then I saw her break into a run.

I don’t know why. But it was as if she’d seen a doorway open up between the sun and the sea, and she’d set her mind on reaching it before it closed.

Whatever was in her mind, she was running straight for the road.

I wasn’t near enough to reach her. I looked around for her parents and saw them, loading their stuff into a brown Allegro. I’ll swear to what happened then, because I saw it. I don’t think anyone else did.

Her mother looked back over her shoulder. That was all she did. She didn’t call out and she didn’t even change her expression. Just looked at the running child, and the running child stopped about a dozen yards short of the road.

A couple of cars zipped by. Then the child turned and started back.

She climbed into the brown car without a word and they all drove off together.

As I said, that was last year.

This year, we went again.

Vicky had picked up a first prize in one of the classes in the city festival a few months later, and it had raised her enthusiasm enough for her to want another crack at this one. When the time came around, we sent in the forms. We skipped that perverse morning session, finally giving in to the lesson of experience, and went straight for the afternoon.

I remembered little Chantal, and when we got there I looked for her name in the programme. I felt a slight disappointment when I didn’t see it. I was curious to see how she might have developed – at that age, a year can make a lot of difference in one way or another – but it seemed that I wasn’t to find out.

Well, it was only curiosity.

But here’s the odd thing. Chantal wasn’t there, but her family was.

I knew it as soon as I saw Cecil B up in the gallery with his camera. Of course I immediately looked around the pews, and saw the mother with the boy. But no little dead girl.

The boy was in short pants and a clean shirt with a little bow tie. He was behaving himself. Or was he? By the look of him, you’d think he’d been drugged. He certainly wasn’t the squirming live wire I remembered from the year before. In fact he had the same kind of slack, dead-eyed expression that I’d seen on his sister.

So if they were here, where was she? Could she have changed so much that I’d passed her outside and hadn’t recognized her? I looked towards the doorway, expecting her to walk in and join them, but the stewards were closing up the room ready to begin.

The competition started, and the boy just sat there.

Until a name was called, and with a nudge from his mother he got to his feet.

Surprised, I watched him move to the piano. He took short steps. If body language could show a stammer, I reckon that walk is what you’d see. When he reached the piano, he turned to face the audience. And when the accompanist hit the first note, he switched on his smile.

The woman leaned forward in the crowd, her gaze intent, her lips already beginning to shape the first of the words. Upstairs, the man rolled the tape.

I looked at Vicky, and Vicky looked at me.

And down by the piano, when the moment came, the boy placed his hand over his heart, opened his mouth, and sang like a clockwork nightingale.

BRIAN HODGE

Nesting Instincts

BRIAN HODGE IS THE AUTHOR OF EIGHT NOVELS ranging from horror to crime noir – most recently Wild Horses and its forthcoming successor, Mad Dogs, with a new one in the works.

He has also written around eighty-five short stories and novellas, many of which have been pummelled into three acclaimed collections. The most recent of these is Lies & Ugliness, which marked the first appearance of “Nesting Instincts”. He also pens book and music reviews, and has even made sufficient peace with factuality to contribute regularly to a leading computer magazine.

When not writing, Hodge wanders the hills around Boulder, Colorado, and is working on a CD’s worth of dark electronic music for an alter-ego recording project dubbed Axis Mundi.

About “Nesting Instincts”, he says: “This one was a textbook case of working backwards. I no longer remember what prompted it, but the surreal imagery near the end came to mind one day. Live with a sight like that long enough, and you’ll eventually turn obsessive about discovering how it came to be.”

CALL IT ANOTHER DAY HE WON’T REMEMBER by the time the next one gets here, nothing much to commend it even if there’s nothing much to condemn it, either. The whole idea of average is really starting to weigh on him, a kind of giant beige trash bin that the majority of everything gets swept into sooner or later. Average is the standard that special is judged against, which means that most of what anyone does in a day ends up being pretty pointless. It’s like the acres of wallpaper surrounding the framed photo or painting that’s actually all you’re really interested in looking at.

Micah points this out to Charisse four blocks from his house – maybe not the best time to get into heavy conversation, especially not at the speeds she likes to drive, but it sort of slips out anyway.

“You’re probably right,” she says, sounding neither pleased nor displeased about it. “But that’s just the way it is and it’s not like anybody gets any say in the matter, do they?”

Really, he’s not trying to put a damper on the afternoon, only figure a few things out. It’s not like he has actual parents who can be relied upon to pitch in on that endeavor, even though if he did he would be probably be expected to pretend he wouldn’t really welcome their input. There’s Lydia, of course, but even if she were to agree that this was part of her domestic job description, and most likely she would, by all indications she’s still working on figuring things out for herself. And right now he would prefer to think that’s just a fluke instead of the norm.

“You know what we need?” Micah says. “We need a good terminal illness. Or a near-death experience. That always seems to straighten people out. They come out of it and everything’s so clear from then on.”

“Except when they don’t come out of it at all.” She’s laughing now, and when Charisse laughs, he can’t help but join in. Yeah, as if riding with her isn’t enough of a near-death experience in itself at least once a day. “You’re sick,” she tells him then.

“I guess. But not in a good way.”

Another intersection and half a block later, she cuts over to the curb in front of his house. Ranch-style, with two and a half trees in front. Could they have possibly made it any more average? Some days he’ll rotate through a series of imaginary dwellings as long as he’s somewhere else and not being confronted with the real thing. One day it’s a palace to look forward to coming home to, the next day a grass shack on a Tahitian beach, the day after that a New York subway station where he’ll go deep underground to rejoin the rest of the mole people. And then, on other days, as much as he hates to admit it, average isn’t really all that bad, because at least it’s predictable, it’s there, it’ll always be there.

“I could come in. Want me to come in?” Charisse says. “I’ve got a little time before I have to go to work.”

It hurts to shake his head no. Physically hurts. “Evan’s home.” Not that he can see past the closed garage doors but the main door is standing open on the other side of the screen door, and it’s sure not Lydia, not this early.

“I’ll have to meet him someday, won’t I, if he and Lydia stay together?”

What she really means to say, even if she doesn’t realize it, is if you and I stay together. That’s the scary thing she actually means.

“Just not today, though, okay? It really should be when Lydia’s around too. It’d be too weird with Evan on his own.”

“Want to hear my theory? The only reason you keep stalling is because there’s no way he can live up to what you keep saying he’s like.”

She’s fearless in her way, Charisse is. As if somebody or something stepped down from the sky and with a voice so deep it left no room for doubt told her that nothing could ever go wrong for her. That everyone she would ever meet would like her, that her hair would forever twine effortlessly down around her face in perky loose curls, that she would always score ninety or above on every test, that traffic lights would stay yellow a little longer just for her. Imagine being able to go through life with that kind of assurance.

Although it’s not that Evan is like anything, exactly. More that Micah would rather have him figured out first before Charisse gets to take a crack at him, probably diagnose his every neurosis from a psych class she’s taken that same afternoon.

They kiss, then he grabs his bookbag by the straps and hoists it into his lap and levers the door handle.

“You’re beautiful,” she tells him. It’s what she usually says instead of I love you. At first it used to bother him, figuring that it was her easy way out, her escape clause, her subtle declaration of non-commitment – that in her view, he could still go on being beautiful whether she was around to love him or not: I’m off to go live with another guy in a grass shack on the beach in Tahiti . . . and don’t forget, you’re beautiful. Lately, though, it seems like there’s more wrapped up in it than he first gave it credit for, since he’s never once heard her say this to anyone else. Maybe what she’s telling him is that she could never love anything she found ugly, or leave anything she found ugly’s opposite.

Then he’s out of the car and she’s off, roaring down the street as he stares after her a moment, her arm out the window as she waves while veering around the corner. Charisse. For some of the guys at school, it’s already obvious what they are, the first thing they wrap their drooling senses around. Leg-men, some of them. Ass-men, others. Breast-men. Charisse – Micah tastes the word for the millionth time and has to wonder if he isn’t some sort of freak, a name-man. Sight unseen, he would’ve walked a thousand miles to meet someone named Charisse.

Up by the house, he notices a few spiny dark shapes buzzing lazily under the eaves. He stops a moment at the door to watch them, a few more crawling over an alien grey wad stuck into the angle between the wall and the roof: wasps, and their nest. Why did they always have to build someplace like this, just a few feet from the door, where you couldn’t ignore them? Never in a spot where nobody went, like the side of the house facing the neighbors, so everyone could go about their lives peacefully, whether they walked or buzzed. No, it had to be someplace that was sure to doom them.

Now he’ll have to go buy one of those spray cans that fires a solid chemical stream at them, soaking them with poison. The whole tiny civilization of them, nuked because they’ve got no sense of compromise. It’s the kind of task you’d think that Evan could handle, might even feel was his duty to handle, but no. Evan doesn’t do bugs. Just like Evan doesn’t do rugs. As long as the sun’s up, Evan doesn’t appear to do a whole lot of anything that’s useful.

Micah is conscientious about banging the screen door good and loud when he walks in, make sure that Evan hears him. The worst thing he can think of is coming home some day and finding Evan playing with himself. He’d rather be a wasp in the nest on the day of its annihilation than endure such a trauma. Really, you’d have to leave home after an ordeal like that, and if there’s one thing Micah’s sure about, it’s that he’s fresh out of other homes.

He’s not sure if guys Evan’s age still do that, but it’s safer to assume that the possibility exists. The guy’s forty or forty-one, around there, so on the one hand, ha ha, why should they as long as they have their own women, like Evan has Lydia. But then, on the other, it’s not like Micah can imagine just waking up one day and tossing out the magazines after realizing that, what do you know, he’s had enough of it, guess he won’t be going back to pump that particular well ever again.

After ditching his bookbag in the kitchen and grabbing a bottle of guava juice from the fridge, he wanders back into the family room, although it’s always seemed that it should have a reserve name for houses where “family room” doesn’t quite fit. All he’s had to do is follow the music back here, Evan listening to the stereo like he does during so much of his down-time. Jazz, always jazz. If the man wanted to kill him, all he’d have to do would be kick back with some rap or metal when Micah comes home, and that would do it. Boom – instant coronary.

No chance, though, because it’s like Evan has to steep himself in jazz, the way a teabag steeps in hot water, before he can head to the uptown club where he plays most nights. Where the paper-tearing fits into this routine, Micah can’t begin to guess, Evan just sitting on the edge of the easy chair and tearing paper – junk mail, catalogs, older newspapers, pretty much whatever he gets his hands on.

“How was school?” he asks.

“Ample,” Micah says, just to say something different for a change. Every day he says okay, he has got to start being less predictable.

Except Evan doesn’t appear to have even noticed this break in routine, intent only on tearing paper. He’s not making confetti, either. There’s a deliberate method to it, and quality control – nothing but straight strips, torn slowly to maximize each ripping noise. Only then are they released, to flutter to the floor and join the pile. It’s a new twist in the entity that is Evan, something he took up two or three weeks ago, like he woke up one afternoon and decided from then on that he was going to be a human paper shredder.

Micah doesn’t know how he can stand it, listening to that steady tearing sound, it’s enough to drive you bugshit – but then, wouldn’t you have to be a little whacked in the head to make such a habit of this to begin with? As far as Micah knows, Lydia has no idea her boyfriend does it.

Maybe it’s some kind of mystical exercise for finger dexterity known only to jazz musicians. Until Evan, Micah had never met anyone whose entire bodily focal point seemed to be his hands. The rest of Evan, from his lanky legs to his narrow shoulders to his severely clipped hair and small round glasses, is only there to provide a context for his hands. Even if you don’t shake, have your attention called to them that way, you’re still going to end up staring at his hands – larger than you would think, judging by the rest of him, but not in a thick, clumsy way. What swans are to ducks, Evan’s hands are to everyone else’s.

If there are leg-man and ass-men, surely there must be hand-women, and maybe Lydia’s one of them.

“There’s something I’ve wondered about, but never got around to asking,” Evan looks up and says. “Do you mind?” He seems to pause, waiting for Micah to say no, leave the room, puncture his own eardrums, something. “Before I moved in, did Lydia give you a chance to vote on it?”

“Not that I remember, exactly.” How much time were they talking about here? Five or six months, it would be. It’s hot and sticky out now, and when Evan had moved in the day was cold and damp. “More like all she did was tell me it was gonna happen, and that’s all there was to say about it.” After a few moments, he feels compelled to add, “Not that she was mean about it or anything.”

That brings a sort-of grin out of Evan, even though he directs it at the latest careful strip he’s tearing. “No . . . mean is the one thing that’s impossible to picture her being. You have to have a good heart if you take in strays the way she has.”

Can’t argue with that, then he knows the question is on its way even before it hits the air, Evan wanting to know, okay, if Lydia had given him the chance to say no, just leave that guy at the jazz club where she found him, what would’ve been the verdict? As if there can be an honest answer to a question like this – Sure, I told Lydia, in fact bring home two or three why don’t you, maybe they can all tear paper together in a disassembly line – when Micah knows he’s under this roof by her good graces every bit as much as Evan is.

In truth, the relationship they’ve had here has been one of benign tolerance. Having Evan move in was like the arrival of a charmless dog. You don’t want to pet him, and he doesn’t show any tendency to bite, so the two of you wind up leaving each other alone most of the time.

He’s blissing on the music now, and with most normal people that’s a good thing, but there’s something about the way Evan does it that gives you reason to worry – three parts appreciation to one part smoldering resentment that comes to the surface at all the wrong times. A flurry of trumpet notes terminates in a single tone held for an inhumanly long time, and the way Evan seems to ride it, it’s so obvious he wishes he’d been around to play in some earlier, smokier, more intoxicated and dangerous era instead of now, when all he’s doing is going to the club every night and furnishing wallpaper that you can barely hear above the clink of martini glasses. Micah’s overheard him complain about it to Lydia.

Evan nods toward the stereo. “Sometimes you hear Miles play and you know he realizes that even though he and the audience may have been in the same room, they weren’t anywhere near being in the same place. You can really understand why sometimes he used to turn his back on the audience and play like that.” Evan scowls and tears another strip. “You don’t have that luxury with a piano.”

“Maybe you should take up the accordion instead.”

To look at him, you’d think Evan didn’t realize it was a joke; worse, that he actually thought about it for a moment, then decided no only because it sounded like too much effort.

“And what you should do is quit school,” Evan tells him. “Quit school and have some real adventure in your life before it’s too late.”

“And pay for it how?”

“That’s where the adventure part comes in, I suppose.”

Sure. Easy for Evan to say, as easy as it is for Micah to dream about roaming free, just him and Charisse, except dreaming is all he can manage to do about it. And if he’s too dumb to know the difference, well then, how convenient for Evan, who gets Lydia and her place all to himself.

He’s smooth when he wants to be, you have to give him that.

“Anyway,” Micah says, more to spite him than anything, make Evan look at the prospect of sharing the same shower soap for years to come, “who says it’s not too late already?”

He leaves the room to Evan and Miles and the abuse of processed wood pulp, taking his bookbag into his room to let it acclimate awhile before he can even begin to consider learning anything else for one day. Once there he realizes he’s left his guava juice behind, where he set it down on a tabletop for a few moments.

Micah backtracks, but decides to leave the bottle of sweet nectar right where it is as soon as he sets foot in the doorway to the family room, without Evan noticing him, Evan thinking he’s by himself as he feeds a strip of paper into his mouth and chews. Then another. And another.

It’s always strange to him to consider how he’s lived with Lydia for more years than he ever got to spend with his own mother, and not once during that time has he called her anything other than her name. Probably she’s earned something more by now, but it’s just like that deal with “family room,” nobody’s come up with a better alternative.

“Do you miss her?” she used to ask him long ago, about his mother, and it wasn’t that Lydia didn’t already know the answer, it was just her way of getting the conversation going when she sensed it was something that had to be gone through. Stroking the hair back from his forehead and listening for as long as it took, or waiting with him through the silence when he had no voice for it.

Do you miss her?

A fierce nod against Lydia’s newly damp shoulder.

Do you miss her?

Uh huh . . . but it doesn’t hurt as bad as it used to.

Until the day:

Do you miss her?

Sure . . . I just don’t remember her much anymore.

What a surprise, hearing that come from his own lips. Like he’d gone into a room looking for a big bag of agony that he was certain he’d left in its usual place, only it wasn’t there anymore. Hunt around, but it wasn’t in the corner, either, or under the bed, or in the closet; it was like the most he could turn up were a few photos, already starting to look faded and washed-out. Put together the captions from the photos and maybe you could whip up a little biography: She married Dad and they had a son who for some unfathomable reason they named Micah and she made great spaghetti and meatballs and used to yell a lot around once a month and one day she tripped over a bucket of soapy water and fell down a flight of stairs and she lived in the hospital for a couple of days after but never regained consciousness, just gave in to the skull fracture. A terrible story, really, but it was hers.

Do you miss her?

I suppose . . . but why’d she have to be so clumsy in the first place?

After Lydia had drawn it all out of him, over time, it was as though she knew precisely when to quit asking. She’d never once asked him to call her Mom, even seemed to discourage it when after a year or two, when he was just eight or nine, he was showing signs that maybe he could transfer the title over and no harm would be done. But not a good idea, apparently.

The best explanation he could ever come up with was that being needed was title enough for her.

“I need you to do me a favor,” she asks that weekend. “If you’re out today I want you to pick up something to spray at those wasps by the front door and take care of them.”

“Oh – okay,” he tells her, like it’s the first he’s ever heard of them instead of having expected this for days. Dreading it: becoming a mass murderer. Anthills demolished when he was a kid don’t count. Now he’s old enough to be tried as an adult. “Do you want them to suffer?”

Lydia pretends to consider it, then shakes her head. “As quickly and humanely as possible, please.”

Hey, let’s go drown whole families in neurotoxins. It’ll be very humane.

“And please don’t think you’ll take a shortcut and get after them with charcoal starter instead.” She starts to laugh. “I remember, your dad had a client once, a new listing, and that’s how the man thought he’d get rid of a nest before we started showing the place. He burned out the whole side of it two days before the open house. And then . . . ! Then he had the nerve to suggest we could just knock forty thousand off the asking price and everything would be fine.”

He laughs with her. Lydia tells a story well, very animated. But it’s the only way she ever brings up his dad anymore: as a stepping stone to something else.

It’s never hard for him to recognize what his father must have seen in her a decade ago. Since she’s not really his mother, it’s not like the territory is that creepy. She’s blonde like a fading sun, her face softly square, and even though she’s put on a few extra pounds over the last few years it doesn’t detract. She worked in the same real estate agency as Dad, and right after his wife died, sure, everywhere he turned there was a gush of sympathy, but like a watering hole in a drought, that’s got to dry up eventually. Except for Lydia. The way Micah has always imagined it, Lydia’s was the last shoulder left for him to lean on. It took him more than four years to decide he didn’t want to lean there after all, although he could leave his kid behind as a consolation prize.

“Evan tells me you two had a pretty good conversation the other day,” she says then.

He tries to remember one remarkable or even above-average detail about it and can’t come up with a single thing. Maybe that’s what passes for good conversation with guys who sit around tearing paper and eating it like potato chips, but Micah supposes he’s got higher standards. Lying back on a blanket spread on thick grass, sharing a contraband bottle of wine with Charisse as they stare up at the stars and talk about what their lives are going to be like, and life on other planets – now that’s a conversation.

“I guess we did,” he lies. Because at least it makes Lydia happy.

“I’m so glad. I hope you’re starting to warm up to him.” She says it with such earnest hope that it breaks his heart. “It’s important that my two guys get along.”

“Do you love him?” Jesus. Did he really say that out loud? “Or, I’m sorry, is that too personal a question?”

It isn’t, by the look of her, but she sidesteps it anyway, like she’s gotten good at dodging questions from years of showing people empty houses and hearing them ask if the basement leaks.

“He needs somebody in his life,” she says. “Evan’s had a hard life.”

Lydia has to know what he’s thinking, hearing her say that.

“And you’ve had a hard life, I know that. Same as I’ve had a hard life. One way or another, we’ve all had hard lives, okay?”

He nods. As long as they’re at it, the lives of those stupid wasps out there are about to get a whole lot harder, too.

“Hard, horrible lives and it’s a miracle we all haven’t hanged ourselves by now.” She starts to grin, to let him know she’s only kidding, even though he caught on to her years ago, the way she gets a kick out of exaggerating in weird moments. Then she turns serious. “It’s what life is. Life’s hard, Micah. I hate to be so blunt about it, but that’s the plain truth of it. And the only way we can keep it from turning us hard along with it is to give of ourselves.”

He’s already given back both parents – that wasn’t enough? Maybe not, since he never even got a receipt.

“Give ’til it hurts. Especially ’til it hurts,” she says, sounding like she has plenty of experience at this. “That’s when it does the most good.”

He has no doubt that she knows what she’s talking about. But is this system of hers even relevant when life hasn’t made you hard, hasn’t even come close – you only wish it had?

And even though she hasn’t answered his question in so many words, she’s answered it in other ways: No, she doesn’t love Evan. Just the empty spaces inside him, and all his needs that take up residence to fill the empty spaces of her own.

The next afternoon Micah decides he’s put it off long enough, and borrows Lydia’s car and a few dollars from the grocery money to buy the lethal aerosol can from the nearest hardware store. The label looks like the stuff really means business – extra-strength formulated for hornets, wasps, and yellowjackets. But the art doesn’t take it far enough to show them dead, flat on their backs with Xs for eyes. Instead, they’re drawn to appear as foul-tempered and vicious as alien invaders, like all it’s supposed to take is one look to make you lunge for the can, realizing that these things deserve to die.

As he stands beside the foundation of the house, shaking the can and looking up at the target zone, he wonders what they would say if they could talk. If all their deranged waspy fury would prove to be an act and they would plead, or if they were too proud for that, just say bring it on. Or do the unexpected and send their finest diplomats, ones who could be counted on not to sting first and ask questions later, to see if they couldn’t work something out.

Instead, they just buzz around in the heat. Oblivious, you’d have to imagine. From inside the nest comes a lower hum, and he wonders if this might be their way of singing lullabies to the next generation.

“I know,” he says. “What’d you ever do to me, right?”

He uncaps the can and raises it and, after a couple of false starts, lets them have it. Nothing personal, just following orders. It comes out in a thin liquid jet, splashing and spattering wasps, nest, and wall alike. He catches some of the airborne troops in mid-flight and they go into death spirals, trying to keep it together but now they’ve got no control, banging into the house on their way to the ground. Others come scrambling out of the nest and tumble straight down, joining the earliest casualties in a litter of twitching legs and spastic wings and throbbing abdomens, while the overall buzzing builds with a heightened new intensity. He doesn’t speak their language but is that even necessary to translate? Probably just choking and coughing, maybe even crying out to him, too – what’s wrong with you, you monster, don’t you realize there are larvae here?

Which ones are the fathers, he wonders, and would they have left early if they’d known?

“Do you miss him?” Lydia used to ask long ago, and it wasn’t that she didn’t already know the answer, it was just her way of getting the conversation going when she sensed it was something that had to be gone through. She would try stroking the hair back from his forehead the way she had when he was younger and she’d listened to him talk about his mother, but he was older this time, twelve, and didn’t want her messing with what he’d worked so hard to achieve with the comb.

Do you miss him?

Shaking his head no as he glared at the floor.

Do you miss him?

Probably more than he misses me.

Until the day:

Do you hate him?

Hell yes, and if he was here, I’d tell him so to his face.

What a surprise hearing that come from his own lips. Nearly as big a surprise as Lydia’s expression, since he’d assumed the question was some kind of contrived lead-in for her to sermonize about forgiveness, but instead she looked as though she not only understood but approved. For the first time he wondered if this sort of thing might’ve happened to her before, if inside her heart she carried around a gallery of photos, kept bright and vibrant by frequent polishing.

As for their captions and the story they told, he could only be sure about the ones from the last few years: She worked alongside his father and felt sorry for his loss, then for some unfathomable reason maybe even decided that she loved him, and opened up her home not just to him but his son Micah and took care of them, did it for years, until the day there came more yelling than Micah had ever heard at once and the same woman’s name was repeated several times, and within a few days Dad was out the door without a word to anyone, although he’d left a cashier’s check on the kitchen counter for child care, or as Lydia called it, “conscience money,” and eventually she started to date again, always guys who seemed sad-looking no matter how hard they tried to smile. A pathetic story, really, but it was hers.

Do you wish he was dead?

He couldn’t recall ever answering that one.

Micah stoops down to the miniature killing field he’s created, where the struggles are growing more feeble – a leg here, a wing there, one especially tough victim dragging itself in a slow circle. He’s still got plenty left in the spray can and, feeling hugely guilty of genocide already, wonders if using more would be merciful or merely adding insult to fatal injury. Funny, how they never sell an antidote spray in case you should change your mind. Although it’s hard to imagine the wasps coming out of it just laughing it off: Good one, Micah, you really had us going for a few minutes.

“There’s probably a lesson there to be learned,” he hears from behind him; hasn’t even known that Evan is outside, much less standing a few feet away. He’s always thought of musicians as noisy people, that you should be able to hear them coming from a mile away.

“Oh yeah?” It’s the weekend. He shouldn’t have to be learning anything. He stands up. Maybe from a higher perspective the wasps will look like they’re only sleeping. “What kind of lesson?”

For a moment, Evan stands with his oversized hands in his pockets as he regards the toxified nest. “They thought they knew their place in the scheme of things. They had it all figured out, didn’t they . . . knew right where they belonged. Now look where they are.”

Micah doesn’t say anything, just wishes he had the courage to tell Evan to go eat a magazine or something. That talk of place and belonging and being wrong . . . it sounds like a threat, a very subtle threat.

“I don’t know if you ever thought about anything like this before,” Evan says next, kind of bumbling about it, a completely new and unexpected direction, “but if you were ever interested in piano lessons, maybe I could get you started. I had to sell my baby grand last year, during the divorce, but I’m thinking about buying a good digital piano. Kawai makes them pretty close to the real thing. You’d be welcome to practice on it whenever you wanted.”

“I don’t suppose you’d know anything about guitar instead, would you?”

“Afraid not.”

“That’s okay,” Micah tells him, and doesn’t know why he says things like what’s about to pop out, things he doesn’t mean, it just happens: “Anyway, nobody makes real music anymore. They just sample what somebody else has already done. Kinda makes you a chump if you take up something you have to practice, instead of just pushing some buttons.”

Evan blinks at him from the other side of his little round glasses. This is the cleanest man he’s ever seen, Micah realizes. Never a smudge or a fiber out of place. Maybe it’s the hair, not even long enough to blow.

“A chump,” Evan says, almost whispering.

And now, the guilt. “I just . . . meant for me, you know? I didn’t mean you. They didn’t have the kind of technology they do now when you were my age.”

But Evan tells him it’s okay, he hasn’t said anything wrong, that this would hardly be the first time he’s thought the word applied to himself. He starts to look as though he wishes he were someplace else, or maybe it’s a hungry look, like he could really go for a nice candy wrapper about now.

Piano lessons. Of all the lamebrain ideas.

“You never had kids, did you?”

“That lived?” Evan says. “No.”

Abruptly, Micah is overcome with a powerful awareness of the can he’s holding, and it’s a good thing that his normal-sized hands seem to be under greater control than his vocal cords, because he can’t help wondering what would happen if he turned the spray on Evan, and again, if it would be an act of cruelty, or just another name for mercy.

A few days later he takes the snow shovel from the garage and uses the front of the blade to scrape the barren nest from the side of the house. It hits the ground with a rattly, papery sound, pieces of it flaking away, but most remains intact, still looking like something from another world, or at least something that doesn’t belong in this one. Micah steps on it, feels its dry crunch through his sneaker, and when he takes his foot away can see the shiny broken husks of the unborn glittering in the wreckage.

He’s a moron, of course. Feeling sorry for a bunch of bugs that, if the spray can’s label was accurate, existed only to sting you full of welts. And so much for Lydia’s system of personal development, too. If giving is supposed to prevent you from getting hardened by life, it makes sense that taking would promote it. Well, he took, all right, took on an epic scale as far as those wasps were concerned, and the act hasn’t accomplished a thing. He’s got plenty of pity left inside, more than ever it seems, although maybe it is misdirected, because probably he should be slopping some of it Evan’s way.

But the guy sure doesn’t make it easy.

And could be Evan doesn’t really need it, either. Overall, things must be going pretty much the way Evan wants in the Lydia department. They must think he isn’t hearing them in their bedroom lately, and maybe he wouldn’t if not for his new habit of sneaking out his own window late nights to link up with Charisse for an hour or two, whatever they can steal away. After sneaking back in and lying in bed awake, like sleep is something for other people, most nights Micah can’t help but have his nose rubbed in the fact that Evan’s getting a whole lot more action than he is. Although Micah figures that potential is working in his favor, at least.

The weird part is, this whole time, he’s never figured Evan for a dynamo of passion. And ever since catching him noshing strips of paper, Micah’s wondered if Evan might not actually prefer paper women, if maybe to him the act of eating a centerfold would be better than the idea of having sex with the actual model.

Turns out Evan must know his business behind a closed bedroom door after all. Either that, or Lydia’s just uncommonly good at faking it, but does it make sense that she’d fake it so enthusiastically every night? Not to Micah it doesn’t. Because if she’s not into it to the degree that she sounds like, surely not even Lydia would want to give a man that much encouragement. The kind of encouragement that, if they were in an apartment building instead, with thin walls, concerned neighbors would be calling the police.

Most nights it sounds like she’s dying in there for a minute or two before dissolving into her strange, satisfied little whimpers.

More now than ever before, he’s glad he has at least a few recollections of his real mother, enough to realize that her memory and Lydia are nothing alike. He’s got that little bit of distance left intact, and maybe this, finally, is the reason Lydia has always insisted upon things staying that way, that even though she’s been just like a mom for the last decade, she still wanted to hang onto the privilege of turning into a wildwoman without him totally freaking over it.

Which is only validated by Charisse when he tells her about it one night, to get her perspective on the situation.

“Good for Lydia,” is all she says, like she doesn’t see anything one bit weird about it.

“So you don’t think it’s perverted?” He has to know.

“That they’re not afraid of having a good time? What’s perverted about that?”

“Well,” Micah says, only tossing this out for consideration, not that he’s made any determinations on it yet, “their age, for one thing.”

“Let me tell you a secret,” she says, under the stars and with the taste of berry wine on her lips. “I wish my mother still remembered how to cut loose and enjoy herself that much. She’d be a lot more fun to live with, I think. Mostly she just seems to look at my sisters and me like we stole it away from her.”

And it’s comments like this that make him realize one thing above all: He will never come close to understanding the way women think. Even at the best of times, they seem to him as alien as anything that came out of that nest he nuked.

“Where does she think you stashed it?” he asks.

Charisse stares at the sky with her arms around her knees, like she really has to think about this one. “I guess we’re supposed to have kept it for ourselves. Just sucked it out of her and held onto it. Like it was our birthright or something.”

More bug imagery – he can’t help it. Maybe it’s the sticky almost-summer air and the expectation of what it’ll soon be bringing. He pictures Charisse and her four sisters, most known only through photographs, as mosquitoes surrounding their mother and bleeding her of any ability to get it on with abandon. No matter which way she turns, she can’t escape the sharp hollow probes they jam into her for another extraction of joi de vivre. Her exhausted cry of heartbreak and defeat: How am I supposed to live like this, love like this, you ungrateful little whores? A word he can’t even imagine the woman saying . . . which may be part of the problem.

“So, all that pent-up energy, it’s, like, inside you now,” Micah says, clarifying, with so much hope it could power a city.

“Don’t let it give you ideas. That’s not what I was driving at.”

Again. Shot down in flames so many times he could qualify for frequent flyer miles. His craving, his absolute need, to be inside her churns away like a turbine.

“You’re beautiful,” she tells him then, cheerfully, as if that’s supposed to be enough to quench every urgent yearning.

Maybe it’s even good for Lydia, he decides eventually – that much attention, that much desire, that much satisfaction.

These noisy nocturnal bouts between her and Evan have been going on for three or so weeks by the time Micah concludes that it’s not just his imagination: She really is losing weight. And not just those extra pounds she put on starting the year after his dad left them. At first that’s all it was, as if she were flipping through the pages of the last few calendars in reverse, restoring herself into the person that he remembers first taking him in. But soon it goes beyond this, and he’s never known her to be so thin, Lydia throwing an ever-narrower shadow, until she’s as gangly as any of Charisse’s friends that he’s hardly ever seen eat more than two bites. Except Lydia still has that soft little pad of jowl beneath her chin.

“Are you feeling okay?” he asks her one day. Has to. It’s what sons do, even if he’s no one’s son anymore. What, he’s supposed to ignore it when she seems to have a bit of trouble walking?

“Never better!” she says, very chirpy about it.

She tries to reassure him with that same confident smile she must use whenever house-hunters say we’ll take it, where do we sign. Except he finds it impossible to believe her. Secrets between them, at last. Secrets and lies. It’s what mothers do, even if they didn’t give birth: lie so the kids won’t worry. Where did they ever get the idea this worked, anyway?

Until now, he and Lydia have always been so open, because they can afford it, not one single chromosome in common. What could finally be so awful that she won’t tell him? It’s Evan-related, obviously. He’s brought home some appalling disease, the way musicians are prone to do. Or maybe she’s gone into the club one night to listen to him play and seen some other woman drape herself over him, a stick figure with nipples, and has decided she’s got to compete.

No fair, Micah thinks. Lydia’s turning him into a detective right here in his own home, and her timing sucks. What kind of thing is that to force on him now, with the school year winding to a close and final exams to worry about?

In this role as detective, it’s not like he can get anyone to answer questions; he’s forced to rely on observation. Which only creates more questions, and he sort of wishes that he never noticed the way Lydia wears nothing but long sleeves now, no matter how hot the days are getting. It’s been weeks since he’s seen her elbows.

Likewise her knees. She wears only slacks now. She was never that prone to wearing shorts, being sensitive about a couple patches of spidery blue veins on her thighs, but used to be, it wasn’t like she’d never wear them. Some days, comfort got the better of pride. Except it’s not only shorts he knows she won’t be wearing again anytime soon. Even her skirts and dresses seem to have become obsolete.

One evening his watchful vigilance pays off when Lydia gets careless. He sees her reach for the day’s mail, or what’s left of it after Evan gets through with the junk, except her sleeve isn’t buttoned. It rides up past her wrist and he sees the lower inches of a gauze bandage wrapped around her forearm, and the edge of a yellowish stain that’s seeped up from below. Sees it for two seconds maybe, hardly enough time to know for sure that his eyes aren’t playing tricks, then her arm is close to her dwindling body again. He pretends not to have noticed anything as Lydia’s other hand scurries to secure her sleeve and she pretends she’s not eyeing him to see if she got away with it.

They’ve become junkies, he imagines. Suburban junkies. Evan’s found a connection and is trying in his own demented way to bring back the great dangerous age of jazz that he was cheated out of by being born too late. Except they don’t know how to do it right yet, and already they’ve made an infected mess out of her limbs by wrecking vein after vein.

So maybe that’s the cause of the Lydia-sounds he hears at night. She hates the needles but loves what they bring.

No fair, Micah thinks. Lydia’s turning him into a pervert right here in his own home, because now he actively listens for her – the moans, the cries, the whimpers, the sighs. He’s becoming something that his friends used to razz him about, back when all these guys started showing a freedom to admire Lydia that they wouldn’t have if she’d really been his mother. Telling him how they wished they were in his position, because since she’d only raised him for the last few years, she would probably be the one to fuck him the first time, too.

So Micah listens for her sounds and excuses it by reimagining them as the soundtrack to his own life. Same sounds, different source, and he’s the one who inspires them. It’s a unique form of ventriloquism, throwing these anguished and delicious cries across town so they’re emerging from Charisse instead.

Except . . .

If all that about them being junkies is really true, how come Evan hasn’t started to diminish?

Micah’s been turning that one over and over in his mind awhile, watching the creeping dawn brighten his window after a night without sleep. It’s Saturday, though, so maybe he can do some catching up. Saturday morning – garbage day for their part of town, he remembers after hearing the grind of the truck and the clang and thud of emptying cans coming from the end of the block.

A whole week’s worth of their trash is sitting out beside the alley behind the house, waiting to be hauled away and made anonymous. If he’s going to get to the bottom of any mysteries, there may not be a better time.

Micah grabs a pair of jeans, wrestles them up to his self-tenderized groin and fastens them on the run while, behind their closed and inviolable door, Lydia and Evan soundlessly guard their secrets. He doesn’t waste time with shoes and barely makes a sound himself as he rushes through the house and out the back door. He crosses the dew-slick back lawn with wet whisking footslaps.

The truck and crew are four houses away, which doesn’t leave much time if he has to do any real digging to find anything. In the sticky-cool dawn, with a scab of pebbles and dirt forming on the soles of his feet, he stands over the pair of big round green plastic cans and waves away the flies that find them so appealing. Not both cans so much as just one.

At first it seems reasonable that it’s only kitchen scraps they’re after, but two seconds’ thought and this theory doesn’t hold up. They eat a lot of carry-in in this household. How are you going to have kitchen scraps when hardly anyone ever cooks?

He clutches the handle of the lid and yanks it from the can.

More flies – they flurry upward into a dense cloud. Their buzzing is so thick that it has legs of its own, so loud that it nearly drowns out the rumble and hydraulic crush of the approaching truck. He swats at them with the lid like it’s a shield, feels the hailstone pop of their hard little bodies against the plastic and his stomach does slow rolls at the thought of something so many, so mindless, so greedy.

When he’s cleared away the worst of them, Micah thrusts his free hand down into the can, not knowing the first thing about what he’s looking for. If it’s used-up needles, then he figures he’s doing a really stupid thing because he’ll be sure to get one through the palm.

The stink hits him only after he remembers he should be breathing. He’s smelled worse – it’s not quite like something spoiled, or fast-food dumpsters on a hot day. It’s a stink with some mystery to it, a pliable odor that hasn’t yet tipped into full rot, but still has a richness of suppuration and decay. It’s like no smell he’s ever encountered rising out of a garbage can.

He finds the source in a big white plastic bag forced into the can and subjected to a half-ass job of trying to conceal it, with a few other bits of trash scattered on top. It’s filled as tight as a sausage with soiled bandages, just like the one he saw bound around Lydia’s arm, except here there are wads and wads of them – so many that he might as well have ripped open a trash bag behind a hospital.

He scatters the more benign rubbish back over them, like more than anything it’s still important to maintain household secrets, and slams the lid back into place.

He needn’t have bothered. By now the truck has pulled up to carry it all away. The ground trembles underfoot and until this moment he never thought he could be so glad to smell diesel exhaust.

“That ready to go?” asks one of the garbage men. Barely six in the morning and already he looks like he’s made of grime. He points at the can and its halo of flies. “Or are you looking for something you lost?”

Micah doesn’t know how to even begin to answer that.

In hindsight, it seems inevitable that she would stop going to work. That one morning he would get up and the bedroom door at the end of the hall would still be closed. That there would be no coffee smell wafting from the kitchen, no Lydia rushing around with her day planner and trying to remember where she last laid her cell phone. That Charisse would drop him off after school and Lydia’s car would appear not to have moved an inch.

Maybe she took a sick day, is all. If anybody’s entitled, Lydia is, judging by what he found in the garbage. And then a second sick day after that? Well, okay fine, but he can’t keep from wondering if she shouldn’t actually be in the hospital, instead of just replicating the trash from one.

And shouldn’t he see her?

“Maybe she’s depressed,” Charisse tries. “It happened to my mom once, a few years ago. She shut herself up in her room and drew the blinds and we hardly saw her for three weeks.”

They’re on lunch break, except it turns out that the last thing he’s interested in is that greasy burger in his hand. Just like there are two days of school left and the last thing he wants is more time to spend at home.

“But you did see her some, right?” he asks.

“Sure. But we had to force our way into the room.”

That’s the difference between them. He could never do that. Another side effect of not being related to the woman. Since he’s not bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, he doesn’t have the full Bill of Rights. He can stand out in the hallway and look at the door like any pet thwarted by the knob.

“The only thing is,” he says, “she doesn’t sound depressed.”

“Then she’s probably pretending it’s not even happening. My mom, if you mention that time to her now, she just looks at you like ‘What are you talking about?’ ” Charisse makes a big flourish with her hands, introducing something that isn’t there. “Ladies and gentlemen . . . our role models!” She laughs, and it’s the first time Micah can remember her laughter sounding like he’s not supposed to join in. Like maybe this time she’s worried she might not be able to overcome every bad example set for her. “What does Evan say?”

“Evan doesn’t say anything.” Micah stares at the liquefying shake in his hand. He’s been downing them since before time began but this one suddenly seems unnatural and nauseating. They can’t call these things milkshakes because no milk ever gets anywhere near them. He’s heard they’re made of aerated chemical foam. “When he’s not in there with her, Evan just smiles and plays his new piano.”

Like now he’s got everything he wanted, Micah thinks but doesn’t say out loud, because it too would be an admission of failure, since to get it Evan at least had to know what that was.

It’s the third day and he’s decided that enough’s enough. He’s going to get some answers. Which is only fitting, since he can’t shake the nagging suspicion that he’s given a lot of wrong ones during this past week of test questions.

Today’s the right day for it, too, since this is one of those rare afternoons when Evan’s car is gone. He’s run down to the jazz club, maybe, to pick up his paycheck while it’s still banking hours.

Weird, how long a hallway can feel when you’re not that eager to get to the other end. If Charisse had known he was going to do this, she could’ve wished him good luck, told him he could handle it, that he was beautiful.

He knocks on the closed bedroom door. Lightly, in case she’s sleeping.

“Lydia?” he calls. “Can I come in for a minute and talk to you?”

“Micah?” she calls back. Like who else would it be? “No . . . no, I’d really rather you didn’t. Not right now.”

He listens carefully, trying to hear if there’s a rustle of sheets, or any other movement of a depressed, sluggish body, and decides there isn’t. Just this strange distant quality to her voice, as if it were coming through an extra door or two.

“Well . . . when, then?”

“I don’t know, Micah. Whenever I’m feeling better, I guess.”

She’s starting to sound irritated and defensive, then softens when he tells her all he wants to do is talk the way they used to when it was just the two of them, when they used to need each other to make it through some of those earliest days. That gets her; he’s speaking Lydia’s native language now. She knows exactly the days he means: both of them hating the same man and for a long time too chicken to come right out and admit it.

“We can talk this way,” she says. “Nothing has to change.”

“But I can’t even see you.”

She makes a noise that sounds a little like her most carefree laugh. “You don’t know what I look like by now?”

Taking great care to do it silently, Micah grips the knob and gives it a slow twist. It turns only millimeters before it stops. Locked. He leans against the door frame, stalling for time while he schemes. Telling her that today was the last day of school for the year – did she know that?

“You’re kidding.” She sounds legitimately surprised. “It seems like only a week or two ago it was spring break.”

Yeah, he thinks, losing all track of time is always what happens when you start to lose yourself in the wrong guy. He has to wonder if for Lydia there even exists such a thing as the right one.

“So you’re on summer vacation now?” she says. “What are you going to do?”

“I figured I’d just get a crappy job somewhere.”

“No . . . no, that’s a bad idea. Maybe you should take off and travel . . . did you ever think of that?” she says from faraway, from what sounds like a small cave. “You should have some adventure in your life . . .”

There’s something about hearing her echo Evan now, in very nearly his exact words, that makes Micah want to be sick. She tells him how wonderful traveling would be for him, how it would broaden his horizons, except all he can hear is what she’s really saying: that he no longer belongs here and maybe never has.

A thing like that and she can’t even say it to his face?

He looks at the doorknob. How good a lock can it be, anyway? Locks inside the house are only meant for the people you live with, so you can’t accidentally walk in on them while they’re in the process of deciding to hate you. It’s not like they’re meant to keep out thieves. Once the thieves are inside the house – and some even come in by invitation – it’s too late.

He slides the wallet from his pocket and slips out his student I.D. It’s as stout as a credit card, and with another year survived, useless. Except maybe as a break-in tool. He wiggles it between the door and the frame, working it into the latch until it gives with a soft pop, and so much for home security. He can’t think of one thing he learned in school this year that was half this useful.

Even though it’s not nearly as strong here, the same smell is in the bedroom that he remembers all too well from the garbage can. Except that there’s something about it now that’s cleaner, purer, less diseased and more a fact of biology.

The last thing he was expecting to find was no Lydia. Not only is she not on the bed, the bed doesn’t even look slept in, doesn’t look like anyone’s so much as reclined on it. It’s made up as neat as a barracks bunk.

The curtains and blinds are pulled halfway shut, making a pleasant light actually, enough for him to walk in and see how worthless his and Charisse’s theories have been. There’s no junkie paraphernalia. None of the stuff that would accumulate where someone depressed was holing up, whatever that would be – food and magazines and sleeping pills and liquor bottles, he imagines. And for sure there’s no swirling vortex into which someone could just disappear.

He checks beneath the bed – nothing but luggage and boxes of old pictures.

The only other alternative is the closet, although that seems way peculiar, since it’s not big enough, deep enough, to be a walk-in. It’s just two sliding doors on rollers in a track, like in a motel, only not as cheap-looking. He pushes one door aside, right to left, and lets in the light.

When he looks downward, Micah backs away with a start and probably a loud cry, then has to stare for a few moments simply to process the presence of what he’s seeing. How about those eyes – they can really play tricks on you sometimes, can’t they? At first he can’t believe it has the remotest connection with Lydia. It’s a science project. It’s an industrial accident. It’s something one of them has brought home from an anatomy lab, then form-fitted into the corner of the closet.

He remembers from school that the skin is the body’s largest organ, and yeah, he supposes it would take something like that to have created what he’s seeing – this fleshy hollow, its opening nearly as big around as a barrel. Its inner walls are surprisingly thick, pink as muscles. The edges of the structure cling to the floor and the closet wall like they’ve been fastened with some sort of natural adhesive.

The worst part about this? Those two wide, familiar eyes staring out at him from the shadows at the very back of the inside of . . . it? Her? They seem to reflect their own unique brand of shame and guilt, like the time a few years ago when she loaned money to a boyfriend who then split town in his new car, no forwarding address.

He can’t fathom how such a thing can begin to be possible, no more than he can figure out what sustains her. It looks so painful and raw, what she’s been made into; if her cries at night were any indication, it had been. But Lydia had to have wanted this, because it couldn’t have happened all at once. Micah imagines that Evan must’ve used his teeth. And lots of patience, along with architectural skills learned from . . . where? Strange grey things clinging to the outside of the house?

Every impulse is telling him to run, that what he’s seeing is overload and if he stares at it any longer something terrible will happen, over and above his insides feeling as chewed up and reprocessed as Lydia’s body.

Because what else is this but the ultimate proof of how much it must actually take to keep someone loving you?

But when he does run, he doesn’t get far, running smack into Evan out in the hallway. Immediately Evan knows what’s up – can’t put anything past Evan – and for a guy who’s always seemed so passive, he can look awfully enraged. Before Micah has even recovered from the collision, Evan’s grabbed him by the shoulders with those oversized hands and hurled him into the wall. He’s bounced all the way to the floor before he hears Lydia’s oddly reverberant voice crying out, “Don’t hurt him, don’t hurt him,” except Micah doesn’t know which of them she’s calling to.

He lies face-down while feeling Evan’s legs swing over him, hearing the footsteps proceed into the bedroom. There’s a murmur of voices, maybe the sound of someone crying, and the sound of someone getting undressed.

Micah debates it for a few moments, but it’s no debate of intellect, more like warring instincts, and finally one side wins and he squirms forward along the floor and gets as far as his shoulders through the bedroom doorway. Just enough to see what’s going on over at the closet, where Evan is pulling the last of himself into the cell that they’ve made of her.

And could it really only have been minutes ago that he was thinking about Lydia after so many wrong men, doubting if for her there could be such a thing as the right one?

Listening to them, to the sounds they make together, he knows he shouldn’t have been so quick to judge.

Now, at least, this time, the fit is perfect.

GLEN HIRSHBERG

The Two Sams

GLEN HIRSHBERG LIVES IN LOS ANGELES with his wife, son and daughter. The following tale is the title story from the author’s new collection, The Two Sams, recently published in the US by Carroll & Graf. His first novel, The Snowman’s Children, appeared from the same publisher to critical acclaim in 2002 and earned Hirshberg his second International Horror Guild Award nomination.

His ghost stories and novelettes have appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Trampoline and Dark Terrors 6, and two have been nominated for the World Fantasy Award.

He is currently completing his second novel and working on a new set of ghost stories.

“This remains the story I’m least happy to have been inspired to create,” reveals the author about the “The Two Sams”. “And it may be the only thing I ever produce that I do not dedicate to my two weird and wonderful children . . .”

WHAT WAKES ME ISN’T A SOUND. At first, I have no idea what it is, an earthquake, maybe, a vibration in the ground, a 2:00 a.m. truck shuddering along the switchback road that snakes up from the beach, past the ruins of the Baths, past the Cliff House and the automatons and coin-machines chattering in the Musee Mechanique and our apartment building until it reaches the flatter stretch of the Great Highway, which will return it to the saner neighbourhoods of San Francisco. I lie still, holding my breath without knowing why. With the moon gone, the watery light rippling over the chipping bas-relief curlicues on our wall and the scuffed, tilted hardwood floor makes the room seem insubstantial, a projected reflection from the camera obscura perched on the cliffs a quarter-mile away.

Then I feel it again, and I realize it’s in the bed, not the ground. Right beside me. Instantly, I’m smiling. I can’t help it. You’re playing on your own, aren’t you? That’s what I’m thinking. Our first game. He sticks up a tiny fist, a twitching foot, a butt cheek, pressing against the soft roof and walls of his world, and I lay my palm against him, and he shoots off across the womb, curls in a far corner, waits. Sticks out a foot again.

The game terrified me at first. I kept thinking about signs in aquariums warning against tapping on glass, giving fish heart attacks. But he kept playing. And tonight, the thrum of his life is like magic fingers in the mattress, shooting straight up my spine into my shoulders, settling me, squeezing the terror out. Shifting the sheets softly, wanting Lizzie to sleep, I lean closer, and know, all at once, that this isn’t what woke me.

For a split second, I’m frozen. I want to whip my arms around my head, ward them off like mosquitoes or bees, but I can’t hear anything, not this time. There’s just that creeping damp, the heaviness in the air, like a fog bank forming. Abruptly, I dive forward, drop my head against the hot, round dome of Lizzie’s stomach. Maybe I’m wrong, I think. I could be wrong. I press my ear against her skin, hold my breath, and for one horrible moment, I hear nothing at all, a sea of silent, amniotic fluid. I’m thinking about that couple, the Super Jews from our Bradley class who started coming when they were already seven months along. They came five straight weeks, and the woman would reach out, sometimes, tug her husband’s prayer-curls, and we all smiled, imagining their daughter doing that, and then they weren’t there anymore. The woman woke up one day and felt strange, empty, she walked around for hours that way and finally just got in her car and drove to the hospital and had her child, knowing it was dead.

But under my ear, something is moving now. I can hear it inside my wife. Faint, unconcerned, unmistakable. Beat. Beat.

“ ‘Get out Tom’s old records . . .’ ” I sing, so softly, into Lizzie’s skin. It isn’t the song I used to use. Before, I mean. It’s a new song. We do everything new, now. “ ‘And he’ll come dance around.’ ” It occurs to me that this song might not be the best choice, either. There are lines in it that could come back to haunt me, just the way the others have, the ones I never want to hear again, never even used to notice when I sang that song. They come creeping into my ears now, as though they’re playing very quietly in a neighbour’s room. “ ‘I dreamed I held you. In my arms. When I awoke, dear. I was mistaken. And so I hung my head and I cried.’ ” But then, I’ve found, that’s the first great lesson of pregnancy: it all comes back to haunt you.

I haven’t thought of this song, though, since the last time, I realize. Maybe they bring it with them.

Amidst the riot of thoughts in my head, a new one spins to the surface. Was it there the very first time? Did I feel the damp then? Hear the song? Because if I did, and I’m wrong . . .

I can’t remember. I remember Lizzie screaming. The bathtub, and Lizzie screaming.

Sliding slowly back, I ease away toward my edge of the bed, then sit up, holding my breath. Lizzie doesn’t stir, just lies there like the gutshot creature that she is, arms wrapped tight and low around her stomach, as though she could hold this one in, hold herself in, just a few days more. Her chin is tucked tight to her chest, dark hair wild on the pillow, bloated legs clamped around the giant blue pillow between them. Tip her upright, I think, and she’d look like a little girl on a hoppity horse. Then her kindergarten students would laugh at her again, clap and laugh when they saw her, the way they used to. Before.

For the thousandth time in the past few weeks, I have to squash an urge to lift her black-framed, square glasses from around her ears. She has insisted on sleeping with them since March, since the day the life inside her became – in the words of Dr Seger, the woman Lizzie believes will save us – “viable”, and the ridge in her nose is red and deep, now, and her eyes, always strangely small, seem to have slipped back in their sockets, as though cringing away from the unaccustomed closeness of the world, its un-blurred edges. “The second I’m awake,” Lizzie tells me, savagely, the way she says everything these days, “I want to see.”

“Sleep,” I mouth, and it comes out a prayer.

Gingerly, I put my bare feet on the cold ground and stand. Always, it takes just a moment to adjust to the room. Because of the tilt of the floor – caused by the earthquake in ’89 – and the play of light over the walls and the sound of the surf and, sometimes, the seals out on Seal Rock and the litter of wood scraps and sawdust and half-built toys and menorahs and disemboweled clocks on every tabletop, walking through our apartment at night is like floating through a shipwreck.

Where are you? I think to the room, the shadows, turning in multiple directions as though my thoughts were a lighthouse beam. If they are, I need to switch them off. The last thing I want to provide, at this moment, for them, is a lure. Sweat breaks out on my back, my legs, as though I’ve been wrung. I don’t want to breathe, don’t want this infected air in my lungs, but I force myself. I’m ready. I have prepared, this time. I’ll do what I must, if it’s not too late, and I get the chance.

“Where are you?” I whisper aloud, and something happens in the hall, in the doorway. Not movement. Not anything I can explain. But I start over there, fast. It’s much better if they’re out there. “I’m coming,” I say, and I’m out of the bedroom, pulling the door closed behind me as if that will help, and when I reach the living room, I consider snapping on the light, but don’t.

On the wall over the square, dark couch – we bought it dark, we were anticipating stains – the Pinocchio clock, first one I ever built, at age fourteen, makes its steady, hollow tock. It’s all nose, that clock, which seems like such a bad idea, in retrospect. What was I saying, and to whom? The hour is a lie. The room is a lie. Time is a lie. “Gepetto”, Lizzie used to call me before we were married, then after we were married, for a while, back when I used to show up outside her classroom door to watch her weaving between desks, balancing hamsters and construction paper and graham crackers and half-pint milk cartons in her arms while kindergartners nipped between and around her legs like ducklings.

Gepetto. Who tried so hard to make a living boy.

Tock.

“Stop,” I snap to myself, to the leaning walls. There is less damp here. They’re somewhere else.

The first tremble comes as I return to the hall. I clench my knees, my shoulders, willing myself still. As always, the worst thing about the trembling and the sweating is the confusion that causes them. I can never decide if I’m terrified or elated. Even before I realized what was happening, there was a kind of elation.

Five steps down the hall, I stop at the door to what was once our workshop, housing my building area and Lizzie’s cut-and-paste table for classroom decorations. It has not been a workshop for almost four years now. For four years, it has been nothing at all. The knob is just a little wet when I slide my hand around it, the hinges silent as I push open the door.

“Okay,” I half-think, half-say, trembling, sliding into the room and shutting the door behind me. “It’s okay.” Tears leap out of my lashes as though they’ve been hiding there. It doesn’t feel like I actually cried them. I sit down on the bare floor, breathe, stare around the walls, also bare. One week more. Two weeks, tops. Then, just maybe, the crib, fully assembled, will burst from the closet, the dog-cat carpet will unroll itself like a torah scroll over the hardwood, the mobiles Lizzie and I made together will spring from the ceiling like streamers. Surprise!

The tears feel cold on my face, uncomfortable, but I don’t wipe them. What would be the point? I try to smile. There’s a part of me, a small, sad part, that feels like smiling. “Should I tell you a bedtime story?”

I could tell about the possum. We’d lost just the one, then, and more than a year had gone by, and Lizzie still had moments – seizures, almost – where she ripped her glasses off her face in the middle of dinner and hurled them across the apartment and jammed herself into the kitchen corner behind the stacked washer-dryer unit. I’d stand over her and say, “Lizzie, no,” and try to fight what I was feeling, because I didn’t like that I was feeling it. But the more often this happened, and it happened a lot, the angrier I got. Which made me feel like such a shit.

“Come on,” I’d say, extra gentle, to compensate, but of course I didn’t fool her. That’s the thing about Lizzie. I knew it when I married her, even loved it in her: she recognizes the worst in people. She can’t help it. And she’s never wrong about it.

“You don’t even care,” she’d hiss, her hands snarled in her twisting brown hair as though she was going to rip it out like weeds.

“Fuck you, of course I care.”

“It doesn’t mean anything to you.”

“It means what it means. It means we tried, and it didn’t work, and it’s awful, and the doctors say it happens all the time, and we need to try again. It’s awful but we have to deal with it, we have no choice if we want—”

“It means we lost a child. It means our child died. You asshole.”

Once – one time – I handled that moment right. I looked down at my wife, my playmate since junior high, the perpetually sad person I made happy, sometimes, and who made everyone around her happy even though she was sad, and I saw her hands twist harder in her hair, and I saw her shoulders cave in toward her knees, and I just blurted it out.

“You look like a lint ball,” I told her.

Her face flew off her chest, and she glared at me. Then she threw her arms out, not smiling, not free of anything, but wanting me with her. Down I came. We were lint balls together.

Every single other time, I blew it. I stalked away. Or I started to cry. Or I fought back.

“Let’s say that’s true,” I’d say. “We lost a child. I’ll admit it, I can see how one could choose to see it that way. But I don’t feel that. By the grace of God, it doesn’t quite feel like that to me.”

“That’s because it wasn’t inside you.”

“That’s such . . .” I’d start, then stop, because I didn’t really think it was. And it wasn’t what I was trying to say, anyway. “Lizzie. God. I’m just . . . I’m trying to do this well. I’m trying to get us to the place where we can try again. Where we can have a child. One that lives. Because that’s the point, isn’t it? That’s the ultimate goal?”

“Honey, this one just wasn’t meant to he,” Lizzie would sneer, imitating her mom, or maybe my mom, or any one of a dozen people we knew. “Is that what you want to say next?”

“You know it isn’t.”

“How about, ‘The body knows. Something just wasn’t right. These things do happen for a reason.’ ”

“Lizzie, stop.”

“Or, Years from now, you’ll look at your child, your living, breathing, beautiful child, and you’ll realize that you wouldn’t have had him or her if the first one had survived. There’d be a completely different creature there. How about that one?”

“Lizzie, Goddamnit. Just shut up. I’m saying none of those things, and you know it. I’m saying I wish this had never happened. And now that it has happened, I want it to be something that happened in the past. Because I still want to have a baby with you.”

Usually, most nights, she’d sit up then. I’d hand her her glasses, and she’d fix them on her face, and her small, green-grey eyes would blink as the world rushed forward. She’d look at me, not unkindly. More than once, I’d thought that she was going to touch my face, my hand.

Instead, what she said was, “Jake. You have to understand.” Looking through her lenses at those moments was like peering through a storm window, something I would never again get open, and through it I could see the shadows of everything Lizzie carried with her and could not bury, didn’t seem to want to. “Of all the things that have happened to me. All of them. You’re probably the best. And this is the worst.”

Then she’d get up, step around me, and go to bed. And I’d go out to walk, past the Cliff House, past the Musée, sometimes all the way down to the ruins of the Baths, where I’d stroll along the crumbling concrete walls which once had framed the largest public bathing pool in the United States, and now framed nothing, marsh-grass and drain-water and echo. Sometimes, the fog would roll over me, a long, grey ghost-tide, and I’d float off on it, in it, just another trail of living vapour combing the earth in search of a world we’d all gotten the idea was here somewhere. Where, I wonder, had that idea come from, and how did so many of us get it?

“But that isn’t what you want to hear,” I say suddenly to the not-quite-empty workroom, the cribless floor. “Is it?” For a second, I panic, fight down the urge to leap to my feet and race for Lizzie. If they’ve gone back in there, then I’m too late anyway. And if they haven’t, my leaping about just might scare them in that direction.

“I was going to tell you about the possum, right? One night, maybe eight months or so after you were . . .” The word curls on my tongue like a dead caterpillar. I say it anyway. “Born.” Nothing screams in my face or flies at me, and my voice doesn’t break. And I think something might have fluttered across the room from me, something other than the curtains. I have to believe it did. And the damp is still in here.

“It was pretty amazing,” I say, fast, staring at where the flutter was as though I could pin it there. “Lizzie kicked me and woke me up. ‘You hear that?’ she asked. And of course, I did. Fast, hard scrabbling, click-click-click. From right in here. We came running and saw a tail disappear behind the dresser. There was a dresser then, I made it myself, the drawers came out sideways and the handles formed kind of a pumpkin face, just for fun, you know? Anyway, I got down on my hands and knees and found this huge white possum staring right at me. I didn’t even know there were possums here. This one took a single look at me and keeled over with its feet in the air. Playing dead.”

I throw myself on the ground with my feet in the air. It’s like a memory, a dream, a memory of a dream, but I half-believe I feel a weight on the soles of my feet, as though something has climbed onto them. For a ride, maybe. Tears, again.

“I got a broom. Your . . . Lizzie got a trashcan. And for the next, I don’t know, three hours, probably, we chased this thing around and around the room. We had the windows wide open, all it had to do was hop up and out. Instead, it just hid behind the dresser, playing dead, until I poked it with the broom, and then it would race along the baseboard or into the middle of the room and flip on its back again, as if to say, okay, now I’m really dead, and we couldn’t get it to go up and out. We couldn’t get it to do anything but die. Over and over and over. And . . .”

I stop, lower my legs abruptly, sit up. I don’t say the rest. How, at 3:45 in the morning, Lizzie dropped the trashcan to the floor, looked at me, and burst out crying. Threw her glasses at the wall and broke one of the lenses and wept while I just stood there, so tired, with this possum belly-up at my feet and the sea air flooding the room. I’d loved the laughing. I could hardly stand up for exhaustion, and I’d loved laughing with Lizzie so goddamn much.

“Lizzie,” I’d said. “I mean, fuck. Not everything has to relate to that. Does it? Does everything we ever think or do, for the rest of our lives . . .” But of course, it does. I think I even knew that then. And that was after only one.

“Would you like to go for a walk?” I say carefully. Clearly. Because this is it. The only thing I can think of, and therefore the only chance we have. How does one get a child to listen, really? I wouldn’t know. “We’ll go for a stroll, okay? Get nice and sleepy?” I still can’t see anything. Most of the other times, I’ve caught half a glimpse, at some point, a trail of shadow. Turning, leaving the door cracked open behind me, I head for the living room. I slide my trench coat over my boxers and Green Apple T-shirt, slip my tennis shoes onto my bare feet. My ankles will be freezing. In the pocket of my coat, I feel the matchbook I left there, the single, tiny, silver key. It has been two months, at least, since the last time they came, or at least since they let me know it. But I have stayed ready.

As I step onto our stoop, wait a few seconds, pull the door closed, I am flooded with sensory memory – it’s like being dunked – of the day I first became aware. Over two years ago now. Over a year after the first one. Halfway to dreaming, all but asleep, I was overcome by an overwhelming urge to put my ear to Lizzie’s womb, to sing to the new tenant in there. Almost six weeks old, at that point. I imagined seeing through my wife’s skin, watching toe and finger shapes forming in the red, waving wet like lines on an Etch-a-sketch.

“You are my sun—” I started, and knew, just like that, that something else was with me. There was the damp, for one thing. And an extra soundlessness in the room, right beside me. I can’t explain it. The sound of someone else listening.

I reacted on instinct, shot upright and accidentally yanked all the blankets off Lizzie and shoved out my arms at where the presence seemed to be, and Lizzie blinked awake and narrowed her spectacle-less eyes at the shape of me, the covers twisted on the bed.

“There’s something here,” I babbled, pushing with both hands at the empty air.

Lizzie just squinted, coolly. Finally, after a few seconds, she snatched one of my waving hands out of the air and dropped it against her belly. Her skin felt smooth, warm. My forefinger slipped into her belly button, felt the familiar knot of it, and I found myself aroused. Terrified, confused, ridiculous, and aroused.

“It’s just Sam,” she said, stunning me. It seemed impossible that she was going to let me win that fight. Then she smiled, pressed my hand to the second creature we had created together. “You and me and Sam.” She pushed harder on my hand, slid it down her belly toward the center of her.

We made love, held each other, sang to her stomach. Not until long after Lizzie had fallen asleep, just as I was dropping off at last, did it occur to me that she could have been more right than she knew. Maybe it was just us, and Sam. The first Sam, the one we lost, returning to greet his successor with us.

Of course, he hadn’t come just to listen, or to watch. But how could I have known that, then? And how did I know that that was what the presence was, anyway? I didn’t. And when it came back late the next night, with Lizzie this time sound asleep and me less startled, I slid aside to make room for it, so we could both hear. Both whisper.

Are both of you with me now, I wonder? I’m standing on my stoop and listening, feeling, as hard as I can. Please, God, let them be with me. Not with Lizzie. Not with the new one. That’s the only name we have allowed ourselves this time. The new one.

“Come on,” I say to my own front door, the filigrees of fog that float forever on the air of Sutro Heights, as though the atmosphere itself has gone Art Deco. “Please. I’ll tell you a story about the day you were born.”

I start down the warped wooden steps toward our garage. Inside my pocket, the little silver key darts between my fingers, slippery and cool as a minnow. In my mouth, I taste the fog, and the perpetual garlic smell from the latest building to perch at the jut of the cliffs and call itself the Cliff House – the preceding three all collapsed, or burned to the ground – and something else, too. I realize, finally, what it is, and the tears come flooding back.

What I’m remembering, this time, is Washington DC, the grass brown and dying in the blazing August sun as we raced down the Mall, from museum to museum, in a desperate, headlong hunt for cheese. We were in the ninth day of the ten-day tetracyclene program Dr Seger had prescribed, and Lizzie just seemed tired, but I swear I could feel the walls of my intestines, raw and sharp and scraped clean, the way teeth feel after a particularly vicious visit to the dentist. I craved milk, and got nauseous just thinking about it. Drained of its germs, its soft, comforting skin of use, my body felt skeletal, a shell without me in it.

That was the point, as Dr Seger explained it to us. We’d done our tay-sachs, tested for lead, endured endless blood screenings to check on things like prolactin, lupus anticoagulant, TSH. We would have done more tests, but the doctors didn’t recommend them, and our insurance wouldn’t pay. “A couple of miscarriages, it’s really not worth intensive investigation.” Three different doctors told us that. “If it happens a couple more times, we’ll know something’s really wrong.”

Dr Seger had a theory, at least, involving old bacteria lingering in the body for years, decades, tucked up in the fallopian tubes or hidden in the testicles or just adrift in the blood, riding the heart-current in an endless, mindless circle. “The mechanism of creation is so delicate,” she told us. “So efficiently, masterfully created. If anything gets in there that shouldn’t be, well, it’s like a bird in a jet engine. Everything just explodes.”

How comforting, I thought but didn’t say at that first consultation, because when I glanced at Lizzie, she looked more than comforted. She looked hungry, perched on the edge of her chair with her head half over Dr Seger’s desk, so pale, thin, and hard, like a starved pigeon being teased with crumbs. I wanted to grab her hand. I wanted to weep.

As it turns out, Dr Seger may have been right. Or maybe we got lucky this time. Because that’s the thing about miscarriage: three thousand years of human medical science, and no one knows any fucking thing at all. It just happens, people say, like a bruise, or a cold. And it does, I suppose. Just happen, I mean. But not like a cold. Like dying. Because that’s what it is.

So for ten days, Dr Seger had us drop tetracyclene tablets down our throats like depth charges, blasting everything living inside us out. And on that day in DC – we were visiting my cousin, the first time I’d managed to coax Lizzie anywhere near extended family since all this started – we’d gone to the Holocaust Museum, searching for anything strong enough to take our minds off our hunger, our desperate hope that we were scoured, healthy, clean. But it didn’t work. So we went to the Smithsonian. And three people from the front of the ticket line, Lizzie suddenly grabbed my hand, and I looked at her, and it was the old Lizzie, or the ghost of her, eyes flashing under their black rims, smile instantaneous, shockingly bright.

“Dairy,” she said. “Right this second.”

It took me a breath to adjust. I hadn’t seen my wife this way in a long, long while, and as I stared, the smile slipped on her face. With a visible effort, she pinned it back in place. “Jake. Come on.”

We paid admission, went racing past sculptures and animal dioramas and parchment documents to the cafes, where we stared at yogurt in plastic containers – but we didn’t dare eat yogurt – and cups of tapioca that winked, in our fevered state, like the iced-over surfaces of Canadian lakes. But none of that was what we wanted. We needed a cheddar wheel, a lasagna we could scrape free of pasta and tomatoes so we could drape our tongues in strings of crusted mozzarella. What we settled for, finally, were four giant bags of generic cheese puffs from a 7-11. We sat together on the edge of a fountain and stuffed each other’s mouths like babies, like lovers.

It wasn’t enough. The hunger didn’t abate in either of us. Sometimes I think it hasn’t since.

God, it was glorious, though. Lizzie’s lips around my orange-stained fingers, that soft, gorgeous crunch as each individual puff popped apart in our mouths, dusting our teeth and throats while spray from the fountain brushed our faces and we dreamed separate, still-hopeful dreams of children.

And that, in the end, is why I have to, you see. My two Sams. My lost, loved ones. Because maybe it’s true. It doesn’t seem like it could be, but maybe it is. Maybe, mostly, it just happens. And then, for most couples, it just stops happening one day. And afterwards – if only because there isn’t time – you start to forget. Not what happened. Not what was lost. But what the loss meant, or at least what it felt like. I’ve come to believe that time alone will not swallow grief or heal a marriage. But perhaps filled time . . .

In my pocket, my fingers close over the silver key, and I take a deep breath of the damp in the air, which is mostly just Sutro Heights- damp now that we’re outside. We have always loved it here, Lizzie and I. In spite of everything, we can’t bring ourselves to flee. “Let me show you,” I say, trying not to plead. I’ve taken too long, I think. They’ve gotten bored. They’ll go back in the house. I lift the ancient, rusted padlock on our garage door, tilt it so that I can see the slot in the moonlight, and slide the key home.

It has been months since I’ve been out here – we use the garage for storage, not for our old Nova – and I’ve forgotten how heavy the salt-saturated wooden door is. It comes up with a creak, slides over my head and rocks unsteadily in its runners. How, I’m thinking, did I first realize that the presence in my room was my first, unborn child? The smell, I guess, like an unripe lemon, fresh and sour all at once. Lizzie’s smell. Or maybe it was the song springing unbidden, over and over, to my lips. “When I awoke dear, I was mistaken.” Those things, and the fact that now, these last times, there seem to be two of them.

The first thing I see, once my eyes adjust, is my grandfather glaring out of his portrait at me, his hair thread-thin and wild on his head like a spiderweb swinging free, his lips flat, crushed together, his ridiculous lumpy potato of a body under his perpetually half-zipped judges’ robes. And there are his eyes, one blue, one green, which he once told me allowed him to see 3-D, before I knew that everyone could. A children’s rights activist before there was a name for such things, a three-time candidate for a state bench seat and three-time loser, he’d made an enemy of his daughter, my mother, by wanting a son so badly. And he’d made a disciple out of me by saving Lizzie’s life. Turning her father in to the cops, then making sure that he got thrown in jail, then forcing him and his whole family into counseling, getting him work when he got out, checking in on him every single night, no matter what, for six years, until Lizzie was away and free. Until eight months ago, on the day Dr Seger confirmed that we were pregnant for the third time, his portrait hung beside the Pinochio clock on the living room wall. Now it lives here. One more casualty.

“Your namesake,” I say to the air, my two ghosts. But I can’t take my eyes off my grandfather. Tonight is the end for him, too, I realize. The real end, where the ripples his life created in the world glide silently to stillness. Could you have seen them, I want to ask, with those 3-D eyes that saw so much? Could you have saved them? Could you have thought of another, better way? Because mine is going to hurt. “His name was Nathan, really. But he called us ‘Sam’. Your mother and me, we were both ‘Sam’. That’s why . . .”

That’s why Lizzie let me win that argument, I realize. Not because she’d let go of the idea that the first one had to have a name, was a specific, living creature, a child of ours. But because she’d rationalized. Sam was to be the name, male or female. So whatever the first child had been, the second would be the other. Would have been. You see, Lizzie, I think to the air, wanting to punch the walls of the garage, scream to the cliffs, break down in tears. You think I don’t know. But I do.

If we survive this night, and our baby is still with us in the morning, and we get to meet him someday soon, he will not be named Sam. He will not be Nathan, either. My grandfather would have wanted Sam.

“Goodbye, Grandpa,” I whisper, and force myself toward the back of the garage. There’s no point in drawing this out, surely. Nothing to be gained. But at the door to the meat-freezer, the one the game-hunter who rented our place before us used to store wax-paper packets of venison and elk, I suddenly stop.

I can feel them. They’re still here. They have not gone back to Lizzie. They are not hunched near her navel, whispering their terrible, soundless whispers. That’s how I imagine it happening, only it doesn’t feel like imagining. And it isn’t all terrible. I swear I heard it happen to the second Sam. The first Sam would wait, watching me, hovering near the new life in Lizzie like a hummingbird near nectar, then darting forward when I was through singing, or in between breaths, and singing a different sort of song, of a whole other world, parallel to ours, free of terrors or at least free of this terror, the one that just plain living breeds in everything alive. Maybe the world that we’re all born dreaming really does exist, but the only way to it is through a trapdoor in the womb. Maybe it’s better where my children are. God, I want it to be better.

“You’re by the notebooks,” I say, and I almost smile, and my hand slides volitionlessly from the handle of the freezer door, and I stagger toward the boxes stacked up, haphazard, along the back wall. The top one on the nearest stack is open slightly, its cardboard damp and reeking when I peel the flaps all the way back.

There they are. The plain, perfect-bound school composition notebooks Lizzie bought, as diaries, to chronicle the lives of her first two children in the 270 or so days before we were to know them. “I can’t look in those,” I say aloud, but I can’t help myself. I lift the top one from the box, place it on my lap, sit down. It’s my imagination, surely, that weight on my knees, as though something else has just slid down against me. Like a child, to look at a photo album. Tell me, Daddy, about the world without me in it. Suddenly, I’m embarrassed. I want to explain. That first notebook, the other one, is almost half my writing, not just Lizzie’s. But this one . . . I was away, Sam, on a selling trip, for almost a month. And when I came back . . . I couldn’t. Not right away. I couldn’t even watch your mom doing it. And two weeks later . . .

“The day you were born,” I murmur, as though it was a lullabye. Goodnight moon. “We went to the redwoods, with the Giraffes.” Whatever it is, that weight on me, shifts a little. Settles. “That isn’t really their name, Sam. Their name is Girard. Giraffe is what you would have called them, though. They would have made you. They’re so tall. So funny. They would have put you on their shoulders to touch EXIT signs and ceiling tiles. They would have dropped you upside down from way up high and made you scream.” Goodnight nobody. That terrifying, stupid, blank page near the end of that book. What’s it doing there, anyway?

“This was December, freezing cold, but the sun was out. We stopped at a gas station on our way to the woods, and I went to get Bugles, because that’s what Giraffes eat, the ones we know, anyway. Your mom went to the restroom. She was in there a long time. And when she came out, she just looked at me. And I knew.”

My fingers have pushed the notebook open, pulled the pages apart. They’re damp, too. Half of them are ruined, the words, in multi-colored inks, like pressed flowers on the pages, smeared out of shape, though their meaning remains clear.

“I waited. I stared at your mother. She stared at me. Joseph – Mr Giraffe – came in to see what was taking so long. Your mom just kept on staring. So I said, ‘Couldn’t find the Bugles.’ Then I grabbed two bags of them, turned away, and paid. And your mom got in the van beside me, and the Giraffes put on their bouncy, happy, Giraffe music, and we kept going.

“When we got to the woods, we found them practically empty, and there was this smell, even though the trees were dead. It wasn’t like spring. You couldn’t smell pollen, or see buds, just sunlight and bare branches and this mist floating up, catching on the branches and forming shapes like the ghosts of leaves. I tried to hold your mother’s hand, and she let me at first, and then she didn’t. She disappeared into the mist. The Giraffes had to go find her in the end, when it was time to go home. It was almost dark as we got in the van, and none of us were speaking. I was the last one in. And all I could think, as I took my last breath of that air, was, Can you see this? Did you see the trees, my sweet son, daughter or son, on your way out of the world?”

Helpless now, I drop my head, bury it in the wet air as though there were a child’s hair there, and my mouth is moving, chanting the words in the notebook on my lap. I only read them once, on the night Lizzie wrote them, when she finally rolled over, with no tantrum, no more tears, nothing left, closed the book against her chest, and went to sleep. But I remember them, still. There’s a sketch, first, what looks like an acorn with a dent in the top. Next to it Lizzie has scrawled “You. Little rice-bean.” On the day before it died. Then there’s the list, like a rosary: “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry I don’t get to know you. I’m so sorry for wishing this was over, now, for wanting the bleeding to stop. I’m so sorry that I will never have the chance to be your mother. I’m so sorry you will never have the chance to be in our family. I’m so sorry that you are gone.”

I recite the next page, too, without even turning to it. The I-don’t-wants: “a D & C; a phone call from someone who doesn’t know, to ask how I’m feeling; a phone call from someone who does, to ask how I am; to forget this, ever; to forget you.”

And then, at the bottom of the page: “I love fog. I love seals. I love the ghosts of Sutro Heights. I love my mother, even though. I love Jake. I love having known you. I love having known you. I love having known you.”

With one long, shuddering breath, as though I’m trying to slip out from under a sleeping cat, I straighten my legs, lay the notebook to sleep in its box, tuck the flaps around it, and stand. It’s time. Not past time, just time. I return to the freezer, flip the heavy white lid.

The thing is, even after I looked in here, the same day I brought my grandfather out and wound up poking around the garage, lifting boxtops, touching old, unused bicycles and cross-country skis, I would never have realized. If she’d done the wrapping in wax paper, laid it in the bottom of the freezer, I would have assumed it was meat, and I would have left it there. But Lizzie is Lizzie, and instead of wax paper, she’d used red and blue construction paper from her classroom, folded the paper into perfect squares with perfect corners, and put a single star on each of them. So I lifted them out, just as I’m doing now.

They’re so cold, cradled against me. The red package. The blue one. So light. The most astounding thing about the wrapping, really, is that she managed it all. How do you get paper and tape around nothing and get it to hold its shape? From another nearby box, I lift a gold and green blanket. I had it on my bottom bunk when I was a kid. The first time Lizzie lay on my bed – without me in it, she was just lying there – she wrapped herself in this. I spread it on the cold cement floor, and gently lay the packages down.

In Hebrew, the word for miscarriage translates, literally, as “something dropped”. It’s no more accurate a term than any of the others humans have generated for the whole apparently incomprehensible process of reproduction, right down to “conception”. Is that what we do? Conceive? Do we literally dream our children? Is it possible that miscarriage, finally, is just waking up to the reality of the world a few months too soon?

Gently, with the tip of my thumbnail, I slit the top of the red package, fold it open. It comes apart like origami, so perfect, arching back against the blanket. I slit the blue package, pull back its flaps. Widening the opening. One last parody of birth.

How did she do it, I wonder? The first time, we were home, she was in the bathroom. She had me bring Ziplock baggies, ice. For testing, she said. They’ll need it for testing. But they’d taken it for testing. How had she gotten it back? And the second one had happened – finished happening – in a gas-station bathroom somewhere between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Muir Woods. And she’d said nothing, asked for nothing. “Where did she keep you?” I murmur, staring down at the formless, red-grey spatters, the bunched-up tissue that might have been tendon one day, skin one day. Sam, one day. In the red package, there is more, a hump of frozen something with strings of red spiraling out from it, sticking to the paper, like the rays of an imploding sun. In the blue package, there are some red dots, a few strands of filament. Virtually nothing at all.

The song comes, and the tears with them. You’ll never know. Dear. How much I love you. Please don’t take. Please don’t take. I think of my wife upstairs in our life, sleeping with her arms around her child. The one that won’t be Sam, but just might live.

The matches slide from my pocket. Pulling one out of the little book is like ripping a blade of grass from the ground. I scrape it to life, and its tiny light warms my hand, floods the room, flickering as it sucks the oxygen out of the damp. Will this work? How do I know? For all I know, I am imagining it all. The miscarriages were bad luck, hormone deficiencies, a virus in the blood, and the grief that got in me was at least as awful as what got in Lizzie, it just lay dormant longer. And now it has made me crazy.

But if it is better where you are, my Sams. And if you’re here to tell the new one about it, to call him out . . .

“The other night, dear,” I find myself saying, and then I’m singing it, like a Shabbat blessing, a Hanukkah song, something you offer to the emptiness of a darkened house to keep the dark and the emptiness back one more week, one more day. “As I lay sleeping. I dreamed I held you. In my arms.”

I lower the match to the red paper, to the blue, and as my children melt, become dream, once more, I swear I hear them sing to me.

for both of you

JAY RUSSELL

Hides

JAY RUSSELL IS THE AUTHOR of Blood, and three novels in the “Marty Burns” detective series: Celestial Dogs, Burning Bright and Greed & Stuff. His most recent book, Brown Harvest, was a World Fantasy Award nominee for Best Novel and is published in the US and UK by Four Walls Eight Windows. A new Marty Burns chapbook is due in 2004 from Earthling Publications.

As the author recalls: “When the wonderful Michele Slung asked me to contribute a story to a new anthology, with the vague title of Stranger, she casually mentioned that she wouldn’t mind seeing more period pieces for the book. As I didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to be a part of a Slung project – and not just because she pays so well – it occurred to me that it was a great chance to take on a Western setting, which I’d long wanted to try.

“In all honesty, I can’t recall how I came to choose the real-world protagonist around whom the story revolves. Despite his centrality to horror fiction I’m not particularly devoted to his work, though the chronology of the tale does accord with the facts of his biography. Michele’s only requirement for the anthology was that a chance meeting with a stranger should somehow figure into the story.

“I suppose that set me to thinking about all the possible meanings of ‘stranger’ and who and what a stranger is. That train of thought is very much reflected in the title, which refers to at least three different things in the context of the story and the real-life lead character.”

“YOU AIN’T FROM HERE.”

Stevenson did his best to smile. The smell wafting off the man was atrocious, like something that should have been buried weeks before. Stevenson hadn’t noticed it so much while the man slept through the first several hours of the journey, but now that he was up and moving, waving his arms about, the smell was impossible to avoid. The others in the stage didn’t seem to mind, but Stevenson couldn’t stop coughing; had to will himself not to retch with every fresh rack of his aching lungs. He spat a wad of phlegm out into his dirty handkerchief. The blond man who smelled like a dead thing hawked up a brown lugie of his own and spat it out the window, largely missing.

“Lunger?” the man asked.

Stevenson nodded, started coughing again and lost all control. He turned, leaned over the sleeping, red-haired woman to his right and vomited out the window. Bloody wads of mucus came up along with the too-big breakfast of hotcakes, bacon and coffee he’d forced down in the dining car of the train. The train that was supposed to take him all the way to Sacramento, but which had been forced to discharge its passengers at Carson City where the track had flooded out. Stevenson had been reluctant to board the uncomfortable stagecoach, but hadn’t seen any choice. Not if he wanted to get to Fanny.

And seeing her again was the only thing in the world that truly mattered. His desire had driven him across an ocean and this massive, mad continent.

Stevenson held his head outside as the stage rattled along the choppy dirt trail. The dry air did his lungs some good – just not enough. And nothing could change the smell of the man sitting across from him. Stevenson would never have gotten on board if he’d known, but the blond man had jumped on just as the stage pulled out of Carson City. So there was nothing to do but ride it out. Reluctantly, gulping a last tubercular lungful of fresh air, Stevenson withdrew back into the coach. He started to apologize to the young woman he’d leaned across, but saw that she hadn’t so much as stirred. The acid taste of bile coated his tongue and palate, but Stevenson found that it cut into his sense of smell, and he accepted the small mercy. The blond man watched him with an unpleasant smile plastered across his unshaved face. The other passengers – a stiff-backed, elderly man in a black suit and stovepipe hat, and his horse-faced, pursed-lipped wife, also in black – simply looked bored.

“Nasty,” the blond man said.

“Aye,” Stevenson agreed.

“You what?”

“Sorry?” Stevenson was confused.

“You said ‘I,’ but you didn’t say what. Then you said “sorry,” but you didn’t say what you’s apologizing for.”

“Aye,” Stevenson repeated, catching on. “I meant to say yes. Aye means yes, ye see. Ken?”

“Not in these parts it don’t. And my name ain’t Ken. It’s Jackworth.” He looked at the elderly man. “You Ken?”

The old man offered the slightest, unfriendliest possible shake of his head. His wife screwed her face up into an even uglier expression.

“No Kens here,” the blond man said.

“My mistake,” Stevenson said. He sighed.

“You talk funny, mister.” Jackworth hawked another wad of phlegm toward the window. Given his own condition it didn’t bother Stevenson – not like the smell – though Stevenson had now seen enough of the American west to realize that there was nothing likely wrong with the man’s lungs; it was the egg-sized wad of tobacco stuffed in his cheek that was to blame.

“So where’s you from, then?”

The smell was starting to get to Stevenson again. He put his hand up to his mouth and nose to stem the effects. It didn’t help much.

“Edinburgh,” he said, and coughed.

“Enburr?” the man puzzled.

Stevenson lowered his hand, tried not to roll his r’s so much. “Ed-in-burgh.”

Jackworth scratched his head, pulling out a louse which he briefly inspected before squashing between thumb and forefinger. “Ed-and-burg,” he repeated. “That up Nebraska way?”

Stevenson coughed again, but this time to disguise a laugh. The blond man might be stupid – might be? – but he looked like the type who wouldn’t take kindly to being mocked. And he was watching Stevenson very closely.

“Edinburgh’s a city in Scotland.”

Jackworth just frowned.

“Scotland. It’s a country.”

Nothing. A blank stare.

“It’s a part of Great Britain. England?”

The man shook his head.

“Across the Atlantic Ocean.”

Jackworth’s eyes lit up. “I heard of that,” he yelled, slapping his hat against his thigh. “Never seed it though. Seed Wichita once. Big old town.” He leaned forward – bringing his smell with him – and held a hand up to his cheek to confer on Stevenson a conspiratorial whisper. “Got me some fine cunny there, tight as a baby sheep. Ain’t never forgot it.”

Appalled, Stevenson nonetheless smiled and nodded, then turned toward the window for a taste of clean air and the hope of an end to the conversation.

“Where’s abouts—”

The question was interrupted by a monstrous lurch of the stagecoach. The sleeping woman rolled on top of Stevenson and both fell to the far side of the compartment. Jackworth was quick – very quick – and grabbed hold of the door handle, but the old man and his wife tumbled to the floor, like a pair of coupling crows in flight. The man’s stovepipe hat zipped right out the window. The wheels on the right side of the coach lifted off the ground, and for a very long second Stevenson felt certain that the vehicle was going to flip over. But with a gut– (and lung–) shuddering thud, followed by a loud crunch from the undercarriage, the coach righted itself. The driver shouted a stream of curses as he tried to bring the horses to rein. Stevenson couldn’t see much with the no-longer-sleeping woman sprawled on top of him, but he could hear the horses shriek and whinny as they went down and the rear axle of the coach was ripped out from underneath. The carriage hit the dirt trail hard, and Stevenson smacked his jaw against the wooden bench, biting into his upper lip as he did so. His mouth filled with the too-familiar taste of blood.

There was another jerk, and then everything came to a blessed stop.

Jackworth was out of the coach before Stevenson could even right himself. The woman had rolled back off of him with the coach’s final lurch and spilled into the old man and woman. Stevenson pressed the back of his hand to his mouth and, examining the volume of blood, decided that the cut wasn’t too bad. He got to his feet as best he could – at better than six feet tall, he couldn’t stand up straight – and offered a hand to help untangle his fellow passengers. The young woman appeared dazed, but had no visible injuries. Stevenson lifted her up and sat her down on the bench, where she rubbed her stomach. The old man had gotten to his knees and now fussed over his wife who sat whimpering on the floor. The man had a long gash across his forehead, and had torn his undertaker’s suit, but the woman was hurt much worse. Her black skirt had ridden up and Stevenson saw that her leg was badly broken. An ivory cane of bone poked out through a bloody tear in her left thigh. The woman touched the bone with her finger, unable, it seemed, to recognize it for what it was. She’d gone very pale indeed, and started to cry out with the pain, but her husband, studying Stevenson’s gaze, seemed more concerned with drawing the hem of her skirt back over the exposed expanse of her ghost-white thigh. The man’s lips drew back in a snarl, but before Stevenson could say anything, two shots sounded from outside. Another pair swiftly followed.

Stevenson leaped out the open door, misjudged the distance and took a face-first fall into the dirt. More embarrassed than hurt, he scrambled to his feet. He came around to the front of the coach just in time to see the driver put a final bullet into the head of a dying horse. A second dead animal lay beside it.

“There’s my job,” the driver said, and spat onto the corpse. The pair of horses that had survived the accident danced and whinnied nervously a dozen yards up the road.

“The old woman is hurt quite badly,” Stevenson announced. “She’s broken her leg clear through the skin.”

The driver turned to Jackworth who was dancing excitedly between the dead animals. “What in hell’d he say?”

“He ain’t from here,” Jackworth reported. “Come from ’cross the ocean. Atlantic, you know it?”

“The old woman inside the carriage is badly injured,” Stevenson repeated, slowly. “Her leg is broken.”

“Shee-it,” the driver said and spat again. “Ain’t that just the fly on the turd.”

“You a doc there, Ed-and-burg?” Jackworth asked. He practically leaped from leg to leg, like a man desperate to urinate. What was he so bloody excited about, Stevenson wondered.

“Nae . . . no. But ye can see bone through the flesh. There’s not a lot of doubt as to what’s wrong.”

“Hot damn! Got to get me a looky-loo at that.” And Jackworth jumped back into the coach.

A moment later the younger woman leaned out, still rubbing at her belly, but looking less dazed. Stevenson went to help her out, and together they studied the wreck of the stagecoach. The rear axle had snapped in two and lay a dozen yards up the road, near the two-foot-deep gully in the trail that had caused the crash. The front axle was still attached, but it, too, was as broken as the old woman’s leg. It was clear that they wouldn’t be going any farther in this coach, though looking at the damage, Stevenson felt lucky to be alive and essentially uninjured.

“What do we do now?” Stevenson asked the driver.

The man picked his nose and spat. He looked aggrieved to have to answer the question. Or perhaps just scared about the consequences of the crash, Stevenson considered.

“We’s caught what you’d call ’twixt and ’tween and halfway to neither. Too far to the company post, especially with the womenfolk and such. There is a old way station not too far from here. Five, maybe seven miles, best I reckon. Don’t generally like to stop there, though.”

“Why not?”

“Company don’t like it. Had some trouble there a while back. ’Sall I know.”

“Will there be a doctor there?” Stevenson asked.

The driver chuckled. “Barely a there there, friend. But I reckon she’ll have to do us. Feller runs things there knows some doctoring. Claims to, anyway, what I hear. Queer feller, I thought; makes your blood run like the wrong way.”

Stevenson didn’t much care for the sound of that. “Is there nae a better destination for us?”

“Not to make before nightfall. We put the old lady on the one horse, and the ma’am here on t’other, should make it right enough. Not too bad a hike, these things go. Bit uphill. Not that I sees much choice in the matter.”

And thus did Robert Louis Stevenson, late of Edinburgh, Scotland (across the Atlantic Ocean, of which many people have heard), set out on the road to Hides.

*   *   *

The old woman screamed something fierce as they dragged her out of the remains of the coach, but mercifully she passed out as they settled her onto the horse, making the task that much easier. Jackworth continued to marvel at the length of bone protruding through her thigh, though to his credit he did the lion’s share of carrying her without complaint. Her husband, who’d reluctantly introduced himself as Mr Anderson Balfour – he stressed the Mister – looked on disapprovingly, constantly tugging her dress down over her exposed leg, and proving himself to be of little help. The driver – Grey, he called himself, though if that was his first name or last, or merely an encapsulation of his life, Stevenson never learned – was only slightly more helpful, utterly preoccupied, it seemed, by the wreckage of his stagecoach and his livelihood. Little Jackworth was a ball of energy, though, and while Stevenson felt that there was something odd about the fellow (not just his smell), he decided Jackworth’s primary offense was that of being somewhat juvenile. Indeed, as he studied the blond man, Stevenson guessed that Jackworth couldn’t be much more than nineteen or twenty years old. Though he did wear a pair of guns on his belt.

The other woman, who eventually introduced herself as Mrs Timothy Reilly, continued to clutch at her belly, while denying any specific discomfort or injury. She showed some initial reluctance at mounting the remaining horse, and in the end would only ride side-saddle. Stevenson might have assumed that she was fearful of the steed, but she seemed confident enough once in place.

Grey led the way, taking the reins of the horse bearing the unconscious old woman, along with the lockbox from the stagecoach; the other bags would have to be left behind with the wreckage, though the driver secreted the passengers’ belongings in the woods off the trail to be safe, then covered his tracks. Balfour followed directly behind Grey, eyes glued to his wife’s leg, then came Mrs Reilly on her horse. Stevenson, already feeling the effects of the strain on his lungs, brought up the rear. Much to his chagrin, Jackworth fell into place beside him, swinging his arms back and forth as he walked, like a kid in a holiday parade. A light breeze from the north brought with it just a hint of storm; Stevenson took advantage of it to position himself upwind of the man.

“So, Ed, what’s yer business?” Jackworth asked.

Stevenson didn’t much want to talk – he was finding it difficult enough just walking and breathing – but neither did he like to be rude.

“I’ve trained and toiled as both a lawyer and an engineer, though neither vocation proved much to my liking. I do a wee bit of writing now, and am told I’ve a flair for it. And most people call me Louis.” Except for one who calls me Robbie, he thought.

“No fooling. Sorry ’bout that, Lou. Well, gee. I always did want to learn to read, you know. Got a cousin who knows his ABCs right through, mostly. Smart as a whip and hung like a bear. Beat that if you can! What ya write?”

“Stories about my travels, mostly. People and things I’ve seen, and places I’ve visited. France and Germany most recently. And about my home in Scotland, of course.”

“Hooo-weee! You been all them places? I heard of France, you know. That ’cross the Atlantic, too?”

Stevenson merely nodded. “My health compels me to travel. The climate back home is particularly unsuitable to my condition. More’s the pity, because I do love it so.”

“So what brings yer hell and gone out here? You fixing to write another story?”

Stevenson hesitated. He didn’t much care to discuss his life and plans with this stranger. And he couldn’t talk about Fanny to anyone. She was . . . hard to explain.

“In fact, I’m just now thinking about something entirely different: a work of pure fiction. A pirate story, I ken. I find that my imagination grows keener than my powers of observation with each passing year.” Stevenson offered himself a slight chuckle.

“Don’t know no pirates, so I can’t help you there, Lou. Plenty good tales ’round these parts though.”

“Is that right?”

“You must know ’bout the Donners,” Jackworth whispered.

“Not to my recollection.”

Jackworth took off his hat and slapped it against his thigh. He grinned so wide, Stevenson could see all his missing back teeth. “You ain’t heard of the Donner party?” he practically yelled.

The others all turned around and the driver, Grey, offered a particularly disgusted look. Jackworth slapped his hand over his mouth.

“What was the Donner party?” Stevenson asked.

When it was clear that the others were again facing front, Jackworth continued, determinedly sotto voce: “Cannibals.”

Stevenson assumed that he misunderstood. “I beg your pardon?”

Jackworth nodded his head feverishly. “They was cannibals. I mean, not to start, but that’s how it come out in the end.”

“I don’t think I follow ye.”

“Thirty years or so back. Donners and Reeds was travelling west. Two big families. Got trapped up in the Sierra, just a piece aways from here, by the winter snows. Damn fools, but ain’t no shortage of them. Supplies run out, animals run out, luck run out, mostly. Nothing left for it but to chomp each other. Told folks after that they only et the ones what was already dead, but there’s them what say elsewise. Some claim they drew lots and slaughtered the losers like sows. Others that the families set up camps and went at each other like in a war and et their enemies what they captured. Eighty odd went into that pass in winter, forty odd come out the other end in spring. Others all got et.”

“Good Lord!”

“Yessir. There’s folks ’round who still remember, can tell you the gruesome details if you can stand to hear ’em. It’s a wonder, ain’t it? Imagine how’d it be like to end your days getting et.”

“And you’re certain that this is true?”

A darkness crossed Jackworth’s face. “You calling me a liar?”

“Nae, certainly not.” Stevenson had learned that, in this part of the world, short of stealing a man’s horse there was no offense worse than questioning his word. “I just wondered if this is not, perhaps, some wee tall tale that is told in the region. I have heard a few others. Some nonsense about a giant lumberjack for one. And it reminds me of the stories told of old Sawney Bean in and around Ballantrae.”

Jackworth nodded, seemingly appeased. “Well, this ain’t no tall tale, that’s for sure. It’s a damn historical fact. They even started to call the old canyon trail where it happened Donner Pass.”

“Remarkable,” Stevenson mused. “How could anyone do that?”

“How’s you mean?”

Stevenson found himself intrigued and repelled by the story in equal measure. “Imagine eating human flesh. Not just eating it, but slaughtering it yourself. A friend, a cousin, a brother. Even if they were already dead the things ye’d have to do. Draining the blood. Cutting the muscle from the bone. Carving the organs from their cavities. Cooking the meat, putting the morsels in your mouth. Chewing. Swallowing.” He shuddered. “Doesn’t seem possible.”

“I could do it.”

Stevenson studied the young man. Jackworth stared ahead with an intense, very serious expression, nodding to himself. “Ye couldn’t.”

Jackworth looked up at the writer. “Oh, yeah. I been hungry. I done things. I seen things.”

“Not like that, surely.”

“Naw, not exactly. But then I ain’t never been stuck in no mountain pass in no blizzard with nothing to eat but a third cousin twice removed. I seen men kilt, though, and it were for less than not starving to death. People is funny animals, Lou. My daddy used to say never turn your back on a animal ’cause you never can tell what it’s likely to do. Well, I turned my back on lots of critters and I ain’t never suffered no harm. Okay, mebbe a bite on the ankle. But turn your back on a man, and you’re likely as not to take a bullet in the ass. Or worser. People is just animals when day turns to night, you gotta know that. And you can’t never be surprised by the things they’s prone to do. Aw, hell, I got to take a piss something fierce. Burns like hell when I do it, too. Don’t know what that’s about.”

As Jackworth dashed off into the trees, unbuttoning his fly, Stevenson increased his stride. He thought he could do with some different company for a while.

They stopped after an hour of mostly uphill walking. It was Mrs Reilly who asked if they could rest, and though Grey glanced up at the darkening skies with a frown, he nodded his assent. Stevenson went over to help the woman down from the horse, but a fresh coughing fit overcame him, and ultimately she had to help him to sit on an outcropping of rock above a gurgling stream. He waved her away, nodding his thanks, and hawked up a bloody wad of phlegm against the white stone. He lay flat on the rocks and reached down to scoop up handfuls of clear water. It was so cold that it sent a spike of pain up through his head, but after a few swallows, the coughing once again subsided. He rolled over, breathing slowly, enjoying the dim rays of late-afternoon sun that penetrated the growing overcast.

Balfour stood guard beside his wife, still out cold. With Grey’s help, they’d lowered her off the horse, to give the animal a chance to rest and drink from the stream. Jackworth kept an excited eye on the enterprise, eager it seemed, to catch another glance at the woman’s protruding leg bone. Mrs Reilly had wandered off behind the trees, to answer nature’s call, no doubt. She returned a few minutes later, still rubbing her stomach, a dyspeptic expression distorting her otherwise pleasant features. She went over to see if she could be of help with Mrs Balfour. The four of them stood in a circle around the old woman, none of them quite knowing what to do. Jackworth saw Stevenson studying the tableau and grinned at the writer. Stevenson groaned to himself as the blond man came over to his spot on the rock. Jackworth leaned over and whispered into Stevenson’s ear: “You’re trying to figure which of us you’d eat, ain’t ya?”

Stevenson had been thinking no such thing. Before he could say so, Jackworth added: “Well, I got dibs on the Irish cunny, hear?” and he licked his lips lasciviously. To Stevenson’s relief, Jackworth stood up and wandered back toward the trail.

Mrs Reilly was gesticulating forcefully at the old woman. Mr Balfour crossed his arms over his chest and firmly shook his head from side to side. She then pointed at the driver, but he raised his hands in a “No, sir, not me” gesture and walked away, back to the horses. Mrs Reilly again made a pleading gesture at the old man, but he just turned his back on her. Exasperated, she walked away and sat down beside Stevenson.

“She’s going to lose that leg,” Mrs Reilly informed him. “He’s tied a sash around the top to stem the bleeding, but it’s fastened too tight and the leg’s gone all blue. The blasted man won’t listen to a word I say.”

“He looks a stubborn old mule.”

“Impossible. I told him she’ll lose the leg and he just insists that ‘The Lord will provide.’ And beggars will ride, I say.”

Stevenson raised an eyebrow. “Not one for providence, then?”

“I didn’t mean to shock you. I understood you to be a writer of tales. I always heard writers were open-minded, liberal types.”

Jackworth liked to talk, Stevenson realized. “Aye, but I’m also a lay preacher’s son.”

“No offense meant, I’m sure.”

“None taken, missus. I’m just surprised to hear a good Irish lass like yourself express such a sentiment.”

“Who said I was Irish?”

Stevenson felt slightly flustered. “Well, it’s just . . . your look and your hair and . . . Mrs Reilly and all that.”

Mrs Reilly dragged her rear end across the rock, closer to Stevenson. “May I confess something to you?” Stevenson nodded. “My name isn’t really Mrs Reilly.”

“Nae?”

She shook her head. “There is no Mr Reilly.”

“Is there not?”

She shook her head. Suddenly, a picture took shape in Stevenson’s head. He didn’t know how he knew, but he knew. He said it out loud. “Then who’s the father of the bairn?”

The woman’s eyes went wide, and the hand that had been rubbing her stomach froze.

“I didn’t mean to shock ye,” Stevenson said, touching a hand lightly to the woman’s arm.

“How did you know?” she whispered.

“I didn’t for certain. Until this second. But the way ye touch your belly, and the way ye ride the horse and, well, ye’ve probably heard it said before, but as I look at ye there’s a kind of a glow about ye. I just put a series of observations together and invented the story that tied them up in a neat package. That’s what I do, after all. It’s true, then.”

She nodded. “You won’t say . . .”

“It’s none of their concern,” he said, patting her hand. “Nor mine. As an open-minded writer.”

The woman looked relieved. “I’m traveling to find the father. Let him know the situation. I hope to become Mrs Reilly. Well, a missus at least, whatever the name.” She studied Stevenson carefully. “I bet you’re a good writer.”

Before he could reply, or recover from his blush, their attention was distracted by a piercing scream from the old woman. She’d come to, and didn’t much like the feeling. As she continued to shriek, Grey had to rush over and try to settle the horses. Jackworth came running back from wherever he’d been, and made straight toward the Balfours. He stood directly over the old woman, breathing hard from his exertions, but seemingly excited by her agony. Mr Balfour was struggling with his wife, holding her from behind, trying to calm her down. Stevenson and Mrs Reilly both stood up, but before they could make a move to help, Jackworth hauled off and punched the old woman in the jaw with all his might. Her head rocked back and she tipped over, smacking the ground hard.

She was out cold again.

Mr Balfour studied his wife, then glanced up at the still-grinning Jackworth. The old man nodded his thanks and Jackworth winked at him.

They loaded the women back on the horses and set off up the road.

The trail leveled out, but the early-evening air took on a chill. Stevenson had left his coat in his traveling bag and had to make do with cinching tight his waistcoat. Jackworth was up in front with Grey – every so often the two men broke out in fits of ugly laughter – and Mrs Reilly seemed to be half-dozing in the saddle as they made slow progress. Stevenson had been lagging behind and increased his pace, as much to keep warm as anything else, and without really meaning to, found himself beside Mr Balfour. He thought about walking on past, but another burst of vile hilarity from Grey and Jackworth restrained him. He matched strides with Balfour, offering a glance back at the old man’s wife, still enjoying Jackworth’s ministrations on the back of the horse. They walked like that for some ways.

“Has she stirred?” Stevenson asked, unable to endure any more of the uncomfortable silence.

“No.”

“With fortune, this gentleman at the way station will be able to help.”

“Can’t say.”

“Do you know anything about this place? The driver doesn’t seem to care for it.”

“Nnnn.”

Stevenson tried a different tack: “So where are ye and your wife headed?”

“West.”

Stevenson coughed. “Getting a tad cold now,” he said.

“You say so.”

Balfour walked a little quicker. Stevenson slowed his pace again, allowing Balfour and the horse bearing his wife to advance past him once more.

Coughing, shaking his head, crossing his arms over his chilled body, Stevenson walked on alone.

There was just enough light to make out the sign. It had been crudely burned into a strip of old wood that might once have been part of a door. It dangled on frayed hemp rope from the dead branches of a lightning-struck willow tree. Just the one word:

HIDES

“There she is,” Grey announced.

The building was roughly oblong, but none of the angles were quite straight. Several crude windows had been carved out of the mismatched wooden walls, but there was no glass in the frames, only flimsy shutters to keep out the wet and the cold. One whole side of the structure was black and charred, though some makeshift effort to patch up the worst of the fire damage was in evidence. Bright light glinted out through holes in the door and gaps in the frame, suggesting that someone waited inside. Though who could regard such a wreck as home, Stevenson couldn’t imagine. His heart sank over the prospect of finding proper attention for the injured old woman from anyone residing here.

“Hides,” Stevenson whispered. He shuddered.

“They say it used to be a big trading post,” Grey explained. “Been here since Hector was a pup. The Yana and the Atsugewi’d come swap their pelts and beads and such for heap big firewater. Heh-heh. Don’t think I even seen a Atsugewi for going on ten years now. Kilt ’em all, I reckon. Or drank ’emselves to death, filthy red buggers.” And he spat. “Don’t know what keeps the place going these days. Not much, from the look of her.”

Mrs Balfour began to stir again on the back of the horse. She wasn’t quite awake, but she was moaning slightly and her teeth chattered like cicadas at sunrise. Stevenson saw Jackworth ball his fingers into a preparatory fist, but Mrs Reilly slid down from her mount and stood between the blond man and the old woman.

“We’d best get her inside,” she said to Mr Balfour. The old man glanced at Jackworth, as if considering the fist option, then nodded at Mrs Reilly. Jackworth looked briefly disappointed, but he was all smiles as he helped Grey carry the woman into the old trading post.

Mrs Reilly opened the door for them as Grey and Jackworth hauled Mrs Balfour across the threshold. Mr Balfour scurried right behind. Mrs Reilly held the door for Stevenson, who entered last.

The trading post consisted of a single large room, broken up only by a counter that ran the length of the far wall. The room was lit every which way by oil lamps and fat tallow candles that stank to high hell but provided an unexpectedly warm glow. All manner of furry hides had been draped across the walls and over the rough wooden floor. Stevenson didn’t know his American fauna too well, but he recognized bits of beaver, racoon, deer and an immense bearskin that covered the whole center of the room. A grizzly, possibly. The hides smelt musky and mildewed, but their softness and heat sucked the worst of the chill right out of his lungs.

Sitting in a rocking chair by a roaring fire in the corner was a rotund ball of a man with a misshapen, bald head. He wore wire-rim spectacles and was reading from a tattered yellowed copy of one of Beadle’s Dime Novels. His dark brown eyes opened wide at the sight of the group who had intruded on his quiet evening.

“Howdy,” Grey said. He hawked into a spittoon by the door. “Paul, ain’t it?”

“Poole,” the round man said. He had a soft, almost girlish voice. He pulled a pocket watch from his vest, frowned. “You should have passed hours ago. Why are you here?”

“Accident. Busted both axles, believe that? Been hoofing it for miles. Coach is a wreck and I had to put down two of the horses. I’m through, that’s for certain.”

“My,” Poole replied.

Everyone stood and stared at each other then, Jackworth and Grey still supporting Mrs Balfour between them. Her groaning had gotten louder.

“This woman needs some attention,” Stevenson finally said. “She’s broken her leg in the accident.”

“He’s from Ed-and-burg,” Jackworth pointed out helpfully.

Poole continued to sit there.

“Can ye help her?” Stevenson urged. “Or is there someone else?”

“No one else. Just me now.” The fat man blinked. He put down his book, pointed at the opposite corner of the room. “Bring her this way.”

Jackworth and Grey carried Mrs Balfour over to a bench and put her down – a bit roughly, Stevenson thought – then stepped away. Mr Balfour walked around behind the bench, hovering protectively over his wife. The old woman’s eyes fluttered open and she immediately began to shriek in pain. Poole waddled over and lifted the hem of her black dress without so much as a by-your-leave from her husband. Mr Balfour gasped, but offered no more demonstrative objection. Poole knelt down and ran his fingers up the woman’s leg, gently prodding at the exposed shank of bone. Mrs Balfour screamed.

“Well,” Poole said.

“Won’t you do something?” Mrs Reilly asked.

“This tourniquet has been fastened much too tightly,” Poole announced. Mrs Reilly issued a harrumph. Poole loosened the sash and kneaded the flesh of the woman’s upper thigh. Mr Balfour took a white-knuckle grip on the back of the bench, but held his tongue. His wife wailed in such agony that, had there been any glass in the windows, Stevenson felt sure that the sound would have shattered it. Blood oozed out of the open wound, but in lesser volume than before.

“First things first,” Poole said. He got up and slowly walked behind the counter, not at all bothered by the old woman’s cries. A series of ill-balanced shelves and cubbyholes along the back wall held a plethora of mismatched jars and beakers, filled to varying levels with multicolored liquids. As the old woman continued to shriek – Stevenson wanted to cover his ears – Poole calmly went about pouring drops and drams out of different bottles into a chipped whiskey glass. He glanced up and down the counter for something, shrugged to himself, then stuck his finger in the glass to stir the potion. He sniffed his finger as he withdrew it and nodded in approval. He handed the glass to Mr Balfour.

“Make her drink that,” he said.

The old man tried to put the glass in his wife’s hand, but she was beyond reasoning. She flailed at him, nearly emptying the glass of its contents. Balfour didn’t seem to know what to do. Poole shook his head and sighed.

“A bit of help, if you would.”

Grey and Jackworth had retreated near the fire with a bottle of rye. The two men exchanged a glance and got up. Grey took the old woman’s arms, Jackworth, grinning, her feet. When she opened her mouth to let out a wail, Poole snatched the glass back from her husband and poured the contents down her gullet.

Mrs Balfour choked on the stuff at first and spat some of it out, but enough of it must have gone down, because in less than a minute she was asleep again.

“What was in that?” Stevenson asked.

“Oh, just a little elixir I know,” Poole said. “She’ll be out till morning if we’re lucky. We could saw that leg right off, and she wouldn’t feel a thing.” He looked up then at Mr Balfour. “I’m not planning on sawing it off. At least not yet. But you shouldn’t have tied that knot so tight. I’ll try and fix her up, but I don’t know that it will take. Time, as is its wont, will be the final arbiter. And circumstance.”

Mr Balfour nodded.

Stevenson was impressed as he and Mrs Reilly assisted Poole with setting the leg. Poole decided that Grey and Jackworth were too indelicate for the task, and though the process had its difficult moments – Stevenson had to look away as Poole forced the exposed length of bone back inside Mrs Balfour’s torn flesh, then twisted and pulled at the leg until he felt the broken ends grind together and mesh – Poole worked quickly and with a minimum of spilled blood. They used two lengths of worm-eaten board for a splint, and secured it with strips of muskrat hide. Poole couldn’t decide what to do about the open wound, then opted for stitching it closed with some catgut and a needle made from bone that must have been meant for sewing hides. Stevenson again found it difficult to watch as Poole darned together the torn flaps of skin, but suspected that, all in all, Mrs Balfour could have had worse luck than to have alighted at Hides. Poole finished up by dousing the wound with rot-gut whiskey. As the amber liquid washed over the stitched opening, Mrs Balfour shuddered in her induced slumber. Poole laid a blanket on top of her, and gave another to her husband who settled in for the night on the floor beside her.

By the time they were done with the old woman and had cleaned themselves up, Jackworth and Grey had finished off their bottle of hooch and had both passed out on the floor in front of the dying fire. “Leave them be,” Poole said, and hauled out a couple of louse-ridden horse blankets which he gently laid over the sleeping men. He searched around in a trunk until he found a length of calico. He hung it up across a corner of the room, making a private sleeping space for Mrs Reilly. He found a somewhat softer and cleaner blanket for her and piled some furs on the floor into a little mattress.

“I’m not really equipped for ladies,” he said, “but you should be able to make do with that. I receive so few guests.”

Mrs Reilly retreated gratefully behind the curtain, still rubbing her belly and saying her goodnights. Poole gathered another set of furs together and flung them on the floor beside his own bed. “That should do you,” he said.

“That’ll be dandy,” Stevenson replied.

Poole went around damping out the candles and lamps until the only light came from the embers of the fire in the corner. Stevenson removed his boots and waistcoat, unfastened the top buttons of his trousers and chemise and lay down.

The sound of snoring soon filled Hides.

The rain woke Stevenson up. The rain and the coughing.

The storm that had threatened to break all during their long hike had finally arrived, and with a fury. Water sloshed into the corners of the room, from the spots where the walls and roof were poorly joined, and through gaps in the wall and windows and door. The sudden concentration of humidity and moisture in the air sat heavily in Stevenson’s lungs and provoked a diabolical coughing fit.

At first, Stevenson could barely stop hacking long enough to take a breath. He crawled off his pallet of furs toward the door, made it to the spittoon to hawk up a wad of dark mucus. He was able to take several deep breaths after that, until a fresh spell of coughing possessed him. Not wanting to wake the others, he dragged himself out the door and into the wet night. His stockinged feet plunged ankle-deep into the mud, but a slight overhang in the roof kept the worst of the rain off of his head.

The coughing, however, simply wouldn’t stop.

Stevenson sank back to his knees as the pain exploded through his chest. This was as bad as it had ever felt. His lungs were on fire and something wet and thick got caught in his throat; he couldn’t draw sufficient breath to expel it. He opened his mouth as wide as it would go, began clawing at the air with his muddy hands as if he could physically wrench some of it into his lungs.

He was choking to death.

As veins of darkness seeped in at the edges of his vision, Stevenson saw, in his mind’s eye, Fanny’s sweet face. As he made one last effort to draw a saving breath, his only regret was that he’d never kiss that face again, feel her lips on his.

Something struck him hard across the back, knocking him face first into the mud. A hand grabbed at the hair on the back of his neck, yanked him up sharply, then another blow to the back. And another.

With the fourth hammer strike, a fist-sized chunk of phlegm exploded from his throat and past his lips, disappearing into the black swamp around him. With a gasp like rattling bones, he drew in a wet lungful of air, and nothing had ever tasted so sweet. He exhaled, coughed – took another slap on the back – but didn’t need it. Just like that he was breathing normally, though tears continued to stream from his eyes.

“Better?”

Stevenson turned around in the slick mud and saw Poole, mud-spattered as well, staring down at him. Poole put out a hand, helped Stevenson back to his feet.

“I thank ye, sir.”

“I heard the ruckus. You was looking a little peaked there, friend.”

“I believe, Mr Poole,” Stevenson said, through another small cough, “that ye just saved my life.”

Poole shrugged, but smiled. He looked embarrassed. “Just a little pat on the back’s all it was. Could have gone either way. How long you suffered the consumption?”

“Always. It’s afflicted me in one way or the other since I was a boy.”

The rain had slowed, but Stevenson stepped out into it, allowing the cool drops to wash the sweat and blood from his face. He breathed deep, found he wasn’t coughing at all.

“That’s rough,” Poole said. “But you beat the odds still being alive this long. I’m impressed by that. We live with long odds and brief lives. Tried anything for the consumption?”

“Medicines are largely useless. I travel. I find some climes more amenable than others, at least for a time. I hadn’t expected this one to be so . . . ungracious.”

“This can be rough country.”

Stevenson stepped back under the protection of the overhang, stared out into the night with Poole who’d lit up a cheroot. “So I’ve been told. Though I thought only in winter.”

“Heard about that, huh? Well, I guess everyone knows about the Donners by now.”

“I hadn’t until Mr Jackworth in there told me the tale during our journey here. Quite gruesome.”

“You have no idea, friend.”

Stevenson raised an eyebrow. “Ye weren’t . . .”

“Seen and done a lot,” Poole said, not meeting Stevenson’s gaze. “It’s rough country and it’s a rougher life. You can’t really understand if you ain’t a part of it. Some see things out here and call them cruelties, but everything is relative. Ever seen how a cat plays with a rat? What a fox’ll do to a chicken or a bear to a sheep? Eaten alive is nature’s rule and it’s just our civilized – so-called – selves who’ve got nancy-prance ideas about such things. Ideas that we deserve better than eaten alive. Better than nature.”

“And don’t we?”

Poole shrugged. “Maybe some. Not most.”

“But surely the whole purpose of civilization, its primary virtue, is to escape those very cruelties of nature. To celebrate our unique ability to rise above such cruelty, to transcend nature. Even if it’s our own nature.”

“Think so? Think anyone rises above their nature? That that’s possible to do?” Poole turned his gaze back on Stevenson, who wanted to respond in the affirmative but who didn’t fancy arguing with a man who’d just saved his life, who suddenly looked very intense. Poole answered his own questions anyway: “Just ask the Donners,” he said.

As the storm swelled again Stevenson felt a fresh cough coming on, so Poole led him back inside and out of the rain. Mr Balfour raised his head, scowled, and went back to sleep beside his still-slumbering wife. Jackworth and Grey continued to snore on the floor. Mrs Reilly hadn’t so much as stirred from behind her curtain.

“I got something here that might help you out a bit,” Poole whispered, and led Stevenson back to his collection of jars and beakers. He had to stand on a chair to get a bottle of clear liquid down from a high shelf. “Try this.”

“What is it?”

“Laudanum. Mostly. Ever try it?”

Stevenson nodded. “The effects are salubrious, but short-lived. The aftermath is like drinking a barrel of cheap gin.”

“Get you through the night,” Poole suggested.

Stevenson considered, then nodded. Poole poured him a measured glassful, which Stevenson raised to his host in a toast. “You don’t regard this as too intrusive of civilization on nature?” Stevenson asked. He meant it as a joke.

“Some interventions are necessary. And it’ll get you through the night,” Poole repeated, mirthlessly.

Stevenson downed the drink, which was extremely potent. Poole had to help him back to his makeshift bed.

Breathing comfortably, Stevenson was asleep within seconds.

And awoke to the familiar smell of blood.

Stevenson was so used to spitting up blood in the night that he didn’t think much of it. He had trouble, thanks to the laudanum, thinking straight at all. The storm had passed and the morning sunlight pierced his eyes like knitting needles. Stevenson tried to lift his head, but couldn’t do it. He lay there for a while, breathing deeply but without difficulty. Bits of dried mud spotted the furs and floor beneath him, flaked off his hands and arms as he raised them to rub at his bleary eyes.

The smell of blood was very strong.

Stevenson forced himself to a half-sitting position and glanced down at the front of his shirt. He saw more mud there, but no sign of having bled from his mouth in the night. He touched his fingers to his lips, came away with no trace of red there, either. The scent, however, was overpowering.

Stevenson looked behind him, saw the arc of Poole’s sleeping back, the slight rise and fall of his round shoulders. Glancing across the room, he could make out Grey and Jackworth’s legs poking out from the far end of the counter. They didn’t appear to have moved at all in the night. The Balfours were silent, as well. As he groggily got to his feet he stole a guilty glance at Mrs Reilly’s curtained corner.

The calico lay on the floor, revealing the exposed flesh of the young woman sprawled across the bed of furs. Embarrassed, Stevenson looked away, but even as he did so, he knew that something was very wrong.

That bloody smell had to be coming from somewhere.

Stevenson turned back toward Mrs Reilly. He took a tentative step, saw that the pile of hides on which she slept was dark and wet. She was entirely naked, and though his gaze fell at first on the swell of her exposed breast, he saw that something dark sat upon her abdomen. As he drew nearer, his head began to swim with the sanguinary odor that wafted off of and out of her. There was nothing atop her stomach, he saw as he neared her bed, but rather her abdomen had been cut open; peeled apart and turned inside out. She’d been slit from between the legs up to her navel. Most of what had been contained within was untidily piled without.

“Jackworth,” Stevenson whispered.

He spun around, but there was no movement from the pairs of legs on the floor. Stevenson grabbed at an empty whiskey bottle, holding it by the neck like a club. He advanced along the counter, raising the bottle high above his head as he turned the corner.

The legs were unattached to any bodies. The bloody stumps had been neatly arranged on the floor, but the bulk of neither Grey nor Jackworth was anywhere to be seen. Stevenson dropped the bottle, opened and closed his eyes several times, convinced that he must be trapped in some laudanum-inspired nightmare.

The sight – and smell – of the Balfours’ bodies, husband’s head on wife’s shoulders and vice versa, eventually convinced him otherwise. The old woman’s carefully splinted leg was untouched.

Stevenson stared at the carnage around him, his head still fuzzy from the drug and the shock.

What had happened? Who could have done this? What kind of animal—

Poole.

Stevenson grabbed the bottle again and smashed it against the counter. Holding the jagged edge in front of him he advanced on his host – his savior of only hours previous – who still lay in his bed.

Stevenson could hear the fat man’s heavy breathing, saw now that his blanket and straw mattress were drenched in drying blood.

Poole rolled over slowly as Stevenson approached. His eyes were glazed, his features dotted with splotches of red.

Stevenson moved closer, saw that the man’s hands were cupped over his chest, something wet and dark clutched within.

Stevenson raised up the broken bottle.

Poole stared dully at him; made no move to attack or get up. He just lay there in his blood-soaked bedclothes.

“Why?” Stevenson asked.

Poole didn’t respond, didn’t so much as blink.

“Why?” Stevenson demanded, voice breaking. “Why did you do this?”

“Eaten alive,” Poole whispered. “Eaten alive.”

Stevenson waited for more. He had to blink away the fuzziness that continued to dance at the edge of his consciousness.

“. . . alive,” Poole croaked.

Stevenson lowered his weapon. He looked into Poole’s eyes and saw only a reflection of the morning sunlight.

“Why not me?” Stevenson begged.

Poole swallowed hard, and his eyes flicked down to his chest. Stevenson followed his gaze.

Poole opened his hands to show Stevenson what he held. So tiny but so unmistakable in form.

He shovelled it into his fat mouth.

Stevenson screamed.

He lifted the sharp-edged glass high above his head.

Fanny’s skin glowed in the lamplight with the sweat of their exertions. A snail’s trail of semen dried on her thigh, matted the softness between her legs. Her head rested on his shoulder and he stroked her long hair. She held his spent organ delicately in her hand; his arm beneath her, his hand cupping the outer curve of her breast.

“He must have been alone out there for a very long time,” she said.

“The stagecoaches passed by, stopped in when they had to. The driver, Grey, knew the place, knew the man’s name. He wasn’t a hermit.”

“I’m trying to think how he could have . . .”

“Do ye think I’m not? Don’t ye know I can’t think of anything else now?”

She didn’t reply.

“Other than ye,” he added. And kissed her hair.

“He could have taken you, too,” she said and shuddered. “So easily. Why didn’t he, Robbie? Why did he spare you?”

“I haven’t a clue. Perhaps because he saved my life in the night.”

“He saved the old woman, too. It didn’t help her.”

“Aye. I don’t know. That’s why I say. There was nothing but madness in his act, so where do ye look for the logic, for the reason in such a thing?”

“And there was no clue? No sense of, I don’t know, danger or menace from him?”

“Not a bit. Like I say, the conversation we had in the night, about human nature and the quality of civilization, was a bit peculiar, but it was just words in the night. Or so I thought. And if ye’d seen him treating that old woman – he seemed so clearheaded, so knowledgeable. But it’s like there was some other man hiding inside the one I could see, ye ken? Imprisoned within the first, waiting to come out. But damned if I know what the key was that opened the door and set the monster free. Was it something I said to him in the night? Is that why he spared me? Damned if I know anything at all about people.”

“Eaten alive,” Fanny whispered.

“What’s that?”

“Isn’t that what he kept repeating to you? Eaten alive?”

“Aye. That’s all I could understand. Not that I do understand.”

“Perhaps he was describing himself. Perhaps he was talking about something that . . . happened to him?”

“Or something that he’d done. I don’t know, love. I feel like I don’t know anything anymore. I just feel lost. Like a stranger even within myself.”

“Eaten alive,” Fanny repeated.

Stevenson turned his head, but in spite of the topic of conversation he had grown hard again in her hand. She slipped out of his grasp and climbed astride him, slipping him back inside herself. She rocked slowly back and forth on top of him.

“Robbie?”

“Aye,” he groaned.

“You didn’t tell me what you did.”

“Eh?” he said, understandably distracted.

“You didn’t finish the story. After you saw . . . unnh . . . what he held in his hands, what he . . . ate. You said you had the broken bottle, and that you raised it up. But you didn’t tell me what you did. What happened to Poole.”

“Oh, Fanny. Oh, my, Fanny.”

She grasped his head and looked hard into his eyes.

“Tell me what you did, Robbie. You know that you can tell me anything. You can tell your Fanny.”

“Eaten alive,” Stevenson gasped, and exploded inside her.

“Robbie?”

RAMSEY CAMPBELL

The Unbeheld

RAMSEY CAMPBELL HAS RECEIVED more awards for horror fiction than any other writer. He has been named Grand Master by the World Horror Convention and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association.

Latest projects include a film of his novel Pact of the Fathers, which was filmed in Spain last year as El Segundo Nombre (Second Name); Told by the Dead is his new collection of short stories; The Darkest Part of the Woods is his latest supernatural novel, and he is currently working on another, The Overnight.

The author’s M.R. Jamesian anthology Meddling With Ghosts is published by The British Library, and he has co-edited Gathering the Bones with Jack Dann and Dennis Etchison. S.T. Joshi’s study Ramsey Campbell and Modern Horror Fiction is available from Liverpool University Press, while Ramsey Campbell, Probably is a large non-fiction collection from PS Publishing which recently won the International Horror Guild Award.

About the following story, Campbell admits that: “The idea came from nowhere and I found a character to fit it, as tends to be the case. The tale wasn’t even written anywhere exotic, but in my office facing the dawn over the Mersey.”

ON THE FIRST DAY OF THE AUTUMN TERM the traffic seemed more reluctant than ever to acknowledge Leonard. Many drivers didn’t slow even when he stepped into the road, raising his sign. As his hands on the metal pole grew slippery with anger, a silver Volvo with a rusty indentation in the driver’s door added itself to the rank of cars parked opposite the school. He was stalking towards it when the driver dashed around the car to let a child out, leaving a furious terrier to yap. The woman led her daughter by the hand to Leonard. “Are you here all the time?” she asked him.

“As long as there are children. Would you mind—”

“May I have your name?”

“All the children call me Leonard.”

“I see, and it’s Mr . . .”

“Bailey. I was just going to say—”

“Polly, this is Mr Bailey. You can always go to him if for any reason I’m not here.”

“Hello, Mr Bailey,” the little girl said, taking his hand. She was about eight, with a plump face that looked uncertain whether to be pert and large blue eyes adorned with the longest lashes he’d ever seen on a child. “Hello, Polly,” he said. “Some people would pay for those eyelashes.”

Apparently that failed to appeal to her or her mother. “I thought there was one like them on my pillow this morning,” Leonard said, still hoping for a laugh.

“Shall we see if that’s one of your teachers in the playground, Polly? She looks nice.”

“A false one, I mean,” Leonard insisted, since he was telling the truth, “but it was only an old dead spider.”

Polly giggled and her fingers squirmed. “It was dead, Polly,” her mother said – unnecessarily, Leonard thought. “Come along now. You don’t want to be late on your first day or any other either.”

Soon the long building the colour of the scabs on half a dozen of that morning’s knees reduced the shrill uproar in the playground to a murmur before sucking it into a hush. While Leonard ushered latecomers across the road, the Volvo shook and yapped as the dog leapt within, all the more vigorously when Polly’s mother returned. “Thank you for guarding my car,” she said.

She might have been speaking to rather than over the dog. Once she’d eased the car forward into a vacated space, however, she lowered her window. “I’m sorry I stopped where I shouldn’t. I wanted to be sure she had time to settle in.”

“So long as it was just this once. Have you moved far?”

“From London.”

“That’s a good way, isn’t it? What brought you?”

“My job and my husband’s. Social work.”

“There’s a lot of that about these days. I hope you won’t find us Northerners too different. I’ve not long moved myself.”

“Aren’t you local?”

“Some wouldn’t say so. They think if you were born the other side of town you’re a foreigner.”

“You’re telling me about yourself.”

“Born and lived there till the kids next door started keeping me awake half the night. Any road, I didn’t need all that space without my mam and dad, and now I’m just up the street from the school.”

“Is that the appeal? Quiet now, Sheba,” Polly’s mother said, twisting round to pat or slap the dog.

“She had her way with Solly, didn’t she, Sheba?”

The woman pushed the dog down on the seat and frowned at Leonard. “Have you a pet, Mr Bailey?”

“The landlord won’t allow them. When I was Polly’s age—”

“How old is that?”

“Eight, isn’t it?”

“Seven.” Having stared at him, Polly’s mother said “I should introduce myself. I’m Mrs Marsh.”

“Pleased to meet you, I’m sure.”

When the Volvo sped away as though powered by yapping he used his pole to make himself a gap in the relentless rush-hour traffic. He felt like a knight issuing a challenge to anyone who tried to cross his path. He stored his pole and his fluorescent orange coat in the office, where Miss Devine, the school secretary, leaned her lanky upper half over her strewn desk at him. “Off somewhere good now?” she enquired, and seemingly in case he hadn’t understood her “Off somewhere good?”

“Home to see who’s written to me.”

Only computers had. At the end of his walk through three increasingly narrow streets to the midmost of a clump of houses squeezed together, all the envelopes on the muddy cork doormat were brown. His name peeked out of two cellophane windows; another bill was for his deceased predecessor, and the last for Mr Flanagan upstairs, whose cigarettes Leonard always smelled on entering the house. He thought he heard Mr Flanagan panting on the stairs, but there was no sign of him, and the noise ceased as Leonard unlocked his apartment door.

He sipped tea at the table in the kitchen that was also the dining room and wrote letters contesting the utility bills. Even if he had to agree the amounts eventually, his bank balance would have put on an extra few pence. At the post office the morose postmaster pretended to think Leonard was there for his pension, though he must know by now that Leonard was a Monday man. Outside the post office Leonard caught a bus that delivered him as close to the nearest cinema as public transport was allowed.

Five minutes’ walk past elephantine branches of a very few stores brought him to the cinema, only to find that little on the ten screens attracted him. “A fairy tale in another galaxy” sounded too childish, and he wasn’t to be tricked by “A movie for anyone who’s ever felt gay”. Even less tempting were “The most grossest comedy ever”, “A crime film to terrify us all”, “A ninety-minute roller-coaster ride” . . . He had his suspicions about “A sensitive study of modern relationships”, but at least nobody was heading for it armed with enormous tubs of popcorn. He displayed his bus pass to a regally indifferent ticket clerk who bestowed a ticket on him.

Perhaps the sensitivity of the film was meant to lie in how all the lovers were hugely overweight, but it only made him feel dwindled. It contained lashings of language that he heard too many children use these days and masses of rampant flesh. The sly movement of the exit doors beside the screen was a welcome distraction until an usher appeared through the doors and clanked the bar into place. The man plodded up the aisle, and Leonard was reluctantly attending to a renewed surge of blubber on the screen when he glimpsed a shape making its four-legged way along the row of seats to him.

It wasn’t his dog, he told himself – just a dog. He wished he could remember his dog’s name and a good deal else. He leaned down to pat the animal’s head. It flinched back, and his hand encountered its wet nose. He cried out with disgust as it did too. “What are you doing with that child?” a grandam demanded behind him.

“What’s a child doing in a film like this?” Leonard countered.

“I’m sure I don’t know. I didn’t bring them.”

“I hope you aren’t saying I did.”

The lobby doors slammed behind the intruder. “Disgraceful. Shouldn’t be allowed,” the woman muttered to her companion, and Leonard was uncertain if she meant the film. She should. When the combination of her commentary and the film grew intolerable, he left the auditorium.

At least he had time to walk home, and not much else to do. As he admitted himself to his flat he heard panting, no doubt his own. He held his breath, then gripped his mouth with a hand that smelled of the brass doorknob. There was a sound – a scuttling, a stirring of claws – at the end of the hall.

He found the maker of the spasmodic noise on the kitchen table: half an earthworm. He scooped it into the dustpan with the orange plastic brush and shook it out of the couple of inches of kitchen window he always left open at the top, since the sash would budge no further. Could a bird have struggled in through the gap? Perhaps it was still in his rooms. Searching hadn’t rid him of a sense that something was by the time he had to leave.

The day had grown hotter, or he had. He arrived at the school flapping the armpits of his shirt, and once he’d donned his orange coat, its too. He desisted when children began to run or skip or amble to the gates. “You’ll want to be off and get changed,” he said to some, and told others “I’ll bet you’d like to go to the baths.” When Polly’s mother led her to the kerb, having parked so far away that the source of the incessant yapping was invisible, he said “How did you like Miss Jennings, Polly?”

“She was nice. She gave me a sweet for getting all my sums right,” Polly said as her eyelashes rendered a blink more dramatic. “How did you know who my teacher is?”

“We know all about little girls, don’t we, Mrs Marsh?” When that earned him the faintest of smiles he said “I know who teaches your year, that’s all. I was saying to your mam, when I was your age I had a dog.”

“About her age.”

“Fair enough, about.” Leonard was starting to find conversation with the woman rather a task. “They last longer than a year, most dogs.”

“What was his name,” Polly had already begun to ask, “or was he a she?”

Leonard found he didn’t know. “How about yours?”

“His name’s Tiger.”

“Because he’s like a prawn, is that?”

Polly dealt him a pitying look. “Because he’s striped.”

Leonard supposed the dog was. “I should go to him before he does a mischief,” he said, and had an impression too momentary to grasp that he was talking, or ought to be talking, about himself.

In the morning he was wakened by sunlight on his face. He should have been up by the time the sun reached his pillow. He twisted under the blankets to grope for the bedside clock, and dislodged an object from the foot of the bed. It struck the floor with a soft thud. As he clutched at the edge of the mattress and leaned out, he found he was expecting to see an old lost toy from his childhood. Lying on the shabby carpet, stiff legs outstretched and tiny claws splayed wide, was a dead sparrow.

At least that explained the worm, he thought. The bird must have dropped it and then become trapped in the apartment. He loaded the small corpse onto the dustpan and shovelled it onto the back doorstep for later burial, then hurried to do as little as he absolutely had to in the bathroom.

“Overslept,” he panted at Miss Devine, not that she seemed eager to know. “Too fond of my bed,” he told the first of the parents and children he escorted across the road. “Maybe I’m starting my second childhood. You can rely on me in future,” he assured them, and was interrupted by a yapping that claimed all their attention. “Why, it’s pretty Polly and her stripy friend,” he cried. “Is he going to school as well?”

“I just want him to see where I go.”

“He’ll have plenty of chances, Polly,” her mother said. “I’m sure he’ll be with us longer than you’re at this school.”

Leonard wondered why that should be accompanied by a frown at him, then understood. “That’s right, Polly. I didn’t mean yesterday they live only a couple of years. They grow up with you, do dogs.”

“Have you thought what yours was called yet?”

“Flea,” he said, and with further inspiration “Because he was made of them.”

“Not really.”

“No, just seemed to be,” Leonard said, increasingly unsure of the truth.

Polly’s mother talked to Miss Jennings until the bell signalled the end of fun – that was how Leonard remembered it, at any rate – and then she and sloppily striped Tiger made for him. “No tears, then,” he said.

“Should there be?”

“I’d never want any, if that’s what you mean. I just thought, you know, new school and all that, having to make new friends . . .”

“She’s good at telling who her friends are.”

“I’m sorry if I made her worried for her best one. I didn’t think.”

“It takes more than that to upset her. When she is there’s usually a very good reason.”

“I’m glad. I was wrong about my dog, by the way. I called him Flea because he used to run away.”

“Why would he do that, Mr Bailey?”

He’d only said it hoping for a laugh. “Things do when you’re my age,” he said.

On returning home he found the doormat scattered with letters for Mr Flanagan and a purple envelope addressed to himself. It contained a birthday card premature by a week. The card depicted an unbalanced man with crosses in his eyes and bubbles spiralling around his head, and was from Pat, Leonard’s next-door neighbour from his life on the other side of town, whom he’d taken at first sight for a man. He propped it on the mantel-piece above the dusty gas fire and took the envelope to the kitchen bin – or rather, as far as the kitchen door, which stuck. A soft object was blocking it from the far side. He threw his weight against the door, which dragged the obstruction out of the way, all except one sodden feather. It was the dead sparrow.

How thin would anything have had to be in order to climb with the bird over the top of the sash? The corpse must have been flung into the room, and the only culprit who came to mind was Mr Flanagan. Leonard grabbed the letters from the mat and bore them into the atmosphere of stale cheap smoke, but no amount of pounding on the unpainted door brought an answer. He tramped downstairs and shovelled the bird and its feather into a binliner, and scrubbed the linoleum before laying the package to rest in the weedy flowerbed alongside the concrete of the back yard. Having failed to close the sash, he stalked out of the house.

His anger fetched him up at the library where he used to work, a windowless white bunker guarded by the remains of young trees. A uniformed man stood reading a small newspaper outside the electronic arches that raised the alarm if anything was pilfered. While Leonard didn’t recognise the guard, Mr Bloore was behind the counter. Leonard had grown to dislike the librarian as much as Mr Bloore had disliked him for chatting so much to the children rather than simply warning them to take care of books. There were considerably fewer of those than there had been in Leonard’s time, not to mention bookcases, and no sign of Mr Flanagan. Nevertheless the experience of being a member of Mr Bloore’s public amused Leonard, and he sat down to wait for a newspaper.

Eventually someone even older than himself finished with the Telegraph. The government proposed a curfew not only for children convicted of wrongdoing, Leonard read, but also for their parents or guardians, who would have to stay home with them. If only all children were like Polly and his other favourites, he thought – not like the pair of boys no more than twelve years old who were giggling at the display on an Internet terminal. He raised his head to tut at them, but the sound he unleashed was louder and less restrained. “You shouldn’t be watching that,” he protested, hot-cheeked. “Nobody should.”

Mr Bloore limped over, every step sending quivers through his face, a fat pink egg hairless except for eyebrows. “What’s all the noise about?” he demanded, and with very little less hostility “It’s Leonard Bailey, isn’t it? What brings you here?”

“The same thing I’m paid to do, seems like,” Leonard was provoked into retorting. “Seeing after kids. Those two ought to be at school, and don’t you have to keep an eye on what they’re looking at?”

“Please don’t presume to tell me my job, Leonard.” Mr Bloore raised his voice for the last word as though reminding a child of its age. “These two young gentlemen have a perfect right to be here, though I would ask them to be a trifle quieter. They’re researching a wildlife project for their schoolwork.”

“That’s what they call it, is it?” Leonard said wildly, and saw that the screen was indeed now exhibiting only a dog. “There was a woman there before,” he insisted, and whispered “I’ll tell you what they were up to if you like.”

“You’ve said quite enough already, a good deal more than enough. If you continue in front of these children I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

“They’re trying to trick you, can’t you see that? Dogs aren’t wildlife, they’re pets. You wouldn’t put books on dogs under wildlife.”

“That’s all. More than all,” Mr Bloore said and turned to the uniformed guard, who had mooched to him. “Will you remind Mr Bailey where the door is, Harold? He’s disturbing other people.”

“They ought to be disturbed. You ought. Can’t you see what they’re up to?” Leonard was shouting by now, having shrugged away from the guard’s descending grasp. When the boys began to giggle harder he lurched at them, then veered doorwards. He had to restrain himself from striking out at the electronic arch to trigger the alarm.

Some of his fury had its roots in the notion that Mr Flanagan might be back at the house and up to more of his senile mischief. Leonard panted home and shouted his neighbour’s name. It roused only an echo of the end of itself, or did he hear a surreptitious movement? He followed his voice up the stairs, but even bruising his knuckles on the man’s door brought no response. Wheezing with the threat of having to inhale smoke of which the air was giving him a taste, Leonard slammed his own door as if that could communicate his anger. As he found himself wondering if the little grave he’d dug had been tampered with, he strode along the hall. He was unlocking the back door when a kitten darted out from under the sink and across the yard to leap over the wall with a screech.

He hadn’t time to see how much of its grey it owed to cobwebs, tatters of which had trailed from its hiding place almost to the door – he knew only that it had been terrified by whatever had been done to it. If it had squeezed through the gap above the sash it would have been able to clamber out again. It must have been shoved through by Mr Flanagan in an attempt to make trouble for Leonard, just because Leonard had asked him not to smoke in the hall for the sake of other people’s health. Leonard locked the back door and leaned in the doorway opposite the stairs to be sure of catching Mr Flanagan when he came home.

All that earned him was an aching shoulder, and another, and an accumulation of rage. He waited until it was nearly time to set off for his patrol, then longer still, and had to fling himself out of the house in more of a fury than ever. He did his best to calm down before reaching the school, but the children’s voices seemed painfully shrill even when they greeted him. How would Tiger’s yapping sound? Leonard was close to wishing that Polly’s mother had already taken her away. But here they came across the schoolyard, and the dog was silenced by a chewed ball almost bigger than its mouth. “That’s more like it,” Leonard said as the seven-year-old smiled at him. “That’s the Polly I want to see.”

“How many have you got?”

“She’s quick, isn’t she?” Since her mother went no farther towards agreement than to raise her frown by a fraction of an inch, he said “Just you. Just room for one.”

“And your dog.”

“Yes, I started to tell you about him, didn’t I, only he wasn’t called Flea.” It took Leonard a moment to realise he’d somehow convinced himself he could leave it at that. “He was called,” he said as it came to him, “Frog.”

“Why?”

“Because he’d always give me a jump. Because he was always jumping up, I mean.” Since that appeared not to have made an impression, he added “And he used to bring me things like yours does. Slept with me as well.”

“Can Tiger, mummy?”

“Certainly not.” Mrs Marsh’s frown spread to the skin around her eyes and wrinkled her lips as well. “That’s a nasty idea. Dirty,” she said so forcefully that Tiger almost neglected to retrieve the ball she’d made him drop.

Leonard told himself her vehemence hadn’t been aimed at him, but now he was confused as well as furious. Having abandoned his regalia in the office, he marched home. The front door wasn’t fully open when he released the shout that had been welling up in him. “Mr Flanagan.”

“I’m here in front of you,” his burly red-faced neighbour complained, emitting a noseful of smoke that turned his extensive moustache even greyer. “What’s more, I’ve a headache.”

“Why would you have one of those?”

“The state of the world, for a start. They’ll be telling us next we can’t smoke in the street,” Mr Flanagan said, and scowled more fiercely at him. “What are you trying to get at?”

“I thought it might be yowling that made your head hurt.”

“Not yowling, yelling. That was you. Why, what have you been hearing that I’ve not?”

“Someone’s been putting creatures in my rooms, as maybe you might know.”

“Have you been having a bit of a tipple?”

“I don’t drink or smoke either.”

“Maybe you should,” Mr Flanagan said and gave him a sly yellow-toothed grin. “Putting them in your rooms, eh? Even Mr Taggart who lived there before you didn’t think up that excuse.”

“For what?”

“For keeping a dog when he knew none of us was let. Silly bugger used to hide it when the landlord came, in his bed or in a cupboard under the sink or in his dirty washing and God alone knows where else. Only it got to keeping me awake, worse than a woman for yapping, so I had to tell on him. The landlord paid him a visit unexpected like, and he still tried to hide the thing under some towels in the bath. Know what old Taggart did when he was told he’d have to go if the dog didn’t? Kicked it to death and then had a heart attack that finished him off. That’s what comes of losing your temper.”

“Sounds more like it came of you telling tales out of school.”

“You want to grow up, old boy. You aren’t going to get me livid. There’s a nag owes me some money,” Mr Flanagan said, and paused to light a cigarette from the one he threw out of the house and suck on it before pushing past him.

His nonchalance didn’t fool Leonard. What might he have interrupted that Mr Flanagan had been up to so close to Leonard’s flat? Once the fading of his rage gave Leonard his sight back he fumbled the door open and searched the rooms. The absence of evidence that anyone or anything had sneaked or been sneaked in didn’t satisfy him. Not least because Mr Flanagan had denied all knowledge, Leonard was certain that more was to come. He hurried to the nearest fish and chip shop to bring home a greasy dinner, and searched the rooms again before he ate it, one eye alert for the kitchen window, one for the hall.

Nothing had happened by the time the apartment set about growing dim. The thought of sitting all night in the kitchen enraged him further. He left the kitchen door wide open and sat opposite his birthday card, watching the television with the sound turned down. Mr Flanagan’s was louder, causing a slapstick comedian to utter a political speech, after which a newsreader broke into an Irish comic song. At least the noise overhead meant Mr Flanagan was there – or could he have left the set on to cover up some surreptitious activity? Leonard kept lurching into the kitchen to surprise him, but vainly. Eventually he tired of that – tired enough for bed. He manhandled his mattress into the hall and, having wedged the kitchen door with it, dumped blankets and pillow on it, then himself.

The switch for the kitchen light was out of reach. He reared up and clawed at the switch as a preamble to stumbling over the pillow and twisting around like a dog before dropping to all fours and then none to drag the bedclothes over himself. He tried not to be aware of the floor through the mattress and the dim walls towering too high above him, but more than these kept him sleepless. Hours seemed to ooze by while he listened for hints that he was about to be visited. Whenever sleep began to settle on him he jerked awake, seized by an impression that something had crawled to him so as to nuzzle or otherwise touch his face. In the depths of the night he was only half aware of floundering through the apartment to peer in the bath and the washing bin and the cupboard under the sink and his improvised bed, into which he then subsided. It was even darker when he struggled free of the start of a nightmare that had required no more than an instant of sleep. “No more spiders. Don’t bring me anything,” he mouthed and to some extent said. “It’s not my birthday till next week.”

The words roused his nerves, and realising what he’d had in mind didn’t help. He’d been about Polly’s age when he’d wakened in the early hours to find his mother on her hands and knees beyond the bed, doing her best not to disturb him by leaving presents there, though it had been not his birthday but Christmas. If his mother were to creep now to the foot of the bed or to the pillow, what would the darkness be concealing? He wished he hadn’t thought that – wished he hadn’t let her see how upset the knowledge that there was no Santa Claus had left him. He tugged the sheet over his face to fend off a sensation that felt like the imminence of cobwebs or of a sprinkling of earth. His head was crawling with unwanted thoughts, and he found he was unable to close his eyes until the walls set about collecting the dawn.

A cold touch on his forehead wakened him. A tongue, he thought – a tongue too cold to be alive. He’d thrown off the bedclothes before he realised he’d felt merely a draught from the kitchen window. He bruised an elbow on the hardened mattress as he raised himself to blink. The sash was several inches wider open than he’d left it, and a pale ungainly object was advancing across the kitchen floor towards him. When he found his eyes with the knuckles of his prop of an arm and rubbed his vision clear he saw that the intruder was a naked boy about a year old, trailing wisps of cobweb.

Leonard filled his lungs to yell at the floor overhead, but let the breath whisper out of him. Surely even Mr Flanagan wasn’t capable of this latest trick – couldn’t have dropped the baby into the kitchen without making it scream. It looked healthy enough. Leonard staggered to his feet and backed away from it to search the rooms. Except for the baby he appeared to be on his own. He had to get rid of it before anyone realised it had been there, but he was about to be late for work. He wrapped the baby in a towel and buttoned a raincoat around it and himself on the way to venturing unwashed and unshaven out of the house.

Every step bumped the baby against his chest. When he tried to put on speed his burden squirmed and wailed, and he had to rub it through the coat until it subsided. Though the parents and children in the streets weren’t close enough to notice, they gave him no chance to leave the baby anywhere. He had to pass an empty pushchair outside an open door, because mothers were in conversation not a hundred yards away. There would be plenty of prams outside the school, he almost reassured himself aloud.

There were, but all the parents seemed unusually aware of him. Why couldn’t they be lost in chat as usual? “I’ll be out as soon I’m dressed,” he told them, waving at the school to prove he had a free arm as well as the one that was clutching his chest. He was making his dainty way across the schoolyard when the front of his trousers grew warm and wet. He thought age and panic had ambushed him until he realised that the moisture was trickling from higher up. He waddled splay-legged into the school, desperate to be unobserved for just the few minutes that leaving the baby somewhere would take, but Miss Devine caught sight of him through her doorway at once. “Feeling the cold, Mr Bailey?”

“Got a bit of one. A bit of a temperature,” he babbled, unable to remember how hot the day was, incapable of glancing down at his coat for fear a stain was visible on him. He stared hot-eyed around the office and was suddenly inspired. “Someone’s looking for you in the yard,” he said.

“Didn’t you tell them to come in?”

“They can’t,” he assured her, and rubbed his bulging chest as he tried to think why. The only reason he could manufacture was “They said they can’t.”

After a pause that turned Leonard’s chest and trousers wetter, the secretary sighed and stood up not too straight with a groan and trudged stooping out of the room. Leonard darted to the filing cabinet behind the desk and began to pull the drawers forth, only to slam them back in. He was close to despairing when the bottom drawer proved to be empty except for several erotic magazines, presumably confiscated. He snatched his coat open, snapping off a button, and laid the baby on top of a glossy woman with gigantic breasts, then tucked the sodden towel around the wriggling limbs and slid the drawer shut. He dragged his orange uniform over the raincoat to hide his stained chest and crotch, and almost buttoned himself up wrong in his haste to be clear of the office before Miss Devine returned.

He’d barely stepped out of the building when she came at him, head low. “Who’s supposed to be wanting me?”

“They must have gone.” He surveyed the playground in an attempt to seem convincing, but she recoiled from him, wagging a hand in front of her face. “I know. Smelly old man,” he said. “It’s because I’m ill.”

He raised his pole and strode across the playground, not sure whether to ignore or joke with the children who held their noses and giggled at him. He hadn’t time to play with them, he was needed on the road. He dipped his pole almost as low as the oncoming windscreens until a car halted with a grudging screech. “Come along,” he called to the mothers and children at the opposite kerb, “you’re all safe while I’m here,” and heard Tiger yapping close by and, further off, a baby’s wail. Surely it wasn’t the child he had stored in the office; how could it be so audible? He lingered in the middle of the road even though nobody was waiting to cross. Before long he was rewarded not just by the impatient blare of a car’s horn but, better, by the arrival at the kerb of Mrs Marsh and Polly, who was leading the dog. “That’s it, hurry along,” he called. “Bring him too. Show a leg, Polly Wolly Doodle.”

“I’m not a wally.”

“Of course you aren’t,” Leonard shouted in the hope that would drown the wailing somewhere behind him. “You’re more of a delight every time I see you. Give me a closer look.”

She and her mother stayed where they were, staring past him at the schoolyard. He mustn’t let himself be distracted from his job. He had to strike the road with his staff before Mrs Marsh said “Cross over quickly, Polly.” Was it Tiger’s tugging that made Polly dash past him to the school gates? He tried not to see Miss Devine advancing, stooped over a loud bundle, but she raised her voice above the clamour. “Did you leave this in my office, Mr Bailey?”

He almost succeeded in laughing. “What would I be doing with a baby?”

A car honked and lurched forward an inch, urging him off the road. He didn’t want to be seen to retreat from Miss Devine. He almost tripped as he stumbled onto the pavement alongside the schoolyard. “Go in, Polly. Leave Tiger here,” Mrs Marsh said far more briskly than usual, and bent to give the little girl a swift kiss before joining other parents and the secretary in staring hard at Leonard. “He took some children in to see a dirty film the other day,” a mother said.

“And he got thrown out of the library for letting kids see porn on the Internet.”

“I’ve had my doubts about the way he talks to Polly. He says he moved because of some children. I’m starting to wonder how he found them disturbing, if you know what I mean.”

Their fights and their thumping stereo had kept him awake; they’d shoved rubbish through his letterbox and then denied that they had. Before he could explain any of this the secretary turned towards the school, shooing away children and declaring over the wail of her burden “I’m phoning the police.”

Leonard knew at once that he had no chance. If the mothers couldn’t see him as he was, nobody would. He leaned his pole against the railings and removed his orange coat to hang it on a spike. He saw the mothers back away from him, and wasn’t sure if he was smelling only the stain the baby had bestowed on him. “Nasty old man,” he said, and called through the railings “I never had a dog really. I wished I had. I just used to pretend.” He didn’t know if Polly heard him – didn’t know if the further muttered accusations he thought he heard were issuing from the mothers or from the pal he’d nearly had, lurking somewhere close to see him off, behind a wall or a car. It was too late to matter. He pushed himself away from his abandoned uniform. “You can’t see me,” he said, and stepped into the traffic.

BASIL COPPER

Ill Met by Daylight

FOR THIRTY YEARS BASIL COPPER worked as a journalist and editor of a local newspaper before becoming a full-time fiction writer in 1970.

His first story in the horror field, “The Spider”, was published in 1964 in The Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories, since when his short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, been extensively adapted for radio, and collected in Not After Nightfall, Here Be Daemons, From Evil’s Pillow, And Afterward the Dark, Voices of Doom, When Footsteps Echo, Whispers in the Night and, most recently, Cold Hand on My Shoulder.

One of the author’s most reprinted stories, “Camera Obscura”, was adapted for a 1971 episode of the anthology television series Rod Serling’s Night Gallery.

Besides publishing two non-fiction studies of the vampire and werewolf legends, his other books include the novels The Great White Space, The Curse of the Fleers, Necropolis and The Black Death. He has also written more than fifty hard-boiled thrillers about Los Angeles private detective Mike Faraday, and has continued the adventures of August Derleth’s Holmes-like consulting detective in several volumes, including the collections The Exploits of Solar Pons and The Recollections of Solar Pons. Copper’s 1983 Arkham House novel The House of the Wolf was recently reprinted in a special Twentieth Anniversary edition by Sarob Press.

“I must admit that my work in certain genres has been greatly influenced by the wonderful tales of M.R. James,” explains the author. “His own subtle and oblique way of constructing narrative has been my dictum: less is more. I also admire the work of the distinguished film director Lawrence Gordon Clark, who has translated some of James’s finest stories to the television screen in a restrained and wonderfully evocative fashion. Clark has been trying to get my film treatment of James’s ‘Count Magnus’ made for TV, for which I shall always be grateful.

“I hope that those who come to this tale for the first time will find some measure of enjoyment and, dare one say it, a frisson of the terror that takes hold of the protagonist. For, as Edward van Sloan so memorably observed in an epilogue to one of the classic Universal horror films, ‘There are such things!’ ”

I

IT WAS LATE MORNING when Grant left St Ulric’s Church. He had come down there on an architectural project two months earlier and now, on this bright spring day he had dropped into a bar almost opposite for a pre-lunch drink. As he sipped his goblet of chilled house white he had a clear view through one of the front windows across the road and to the church beyond. That was when he first saw the old man. He wore dark clothes and the architect thought for a moment that it was the sexton, a somewhat lugubrious character he had spoken to earlier in the morning, but then he realized he was mistaken.

The man’s dark clothes had nothing about them appertaining to the church. In fact, now that Grant saw him more clearly, he looked like a tramp, for the watcher could have sworn the old man’s overcoat was tied together with string. He was acting in a most peculiar manner, which had first attracted Grant’s attention.

He swayed slightly, as if drunk, and though Grant, oblivious of the animated chatter of the occupants of the bar, shifted slightly to catch a glimpse of the man’s face, he kept it averted. Then he suddenly darted into the church entrance, so perhaps he was connected with St Ulric’s after all, Grant thought.

“Something else, sir?” The white-coated barman was at his elbow.

“Yes, same again, please. By the way, do you know that old chap hovering about opposite?”

The barman looked puzzled. “I don’t see anyone, sir.”

Grant turned his attention back to the church entrance but the man had gone, no doubt around the main body of the building. There was a public footpath there.

He gave a short laugh. “It’s nothing important. An old chap was there just now.”

The barman nodded, glancing at the former’s leather case, which he had propped against the table leg. “Ah, you’ll be Mr Grant, sir. Doing the survey of the church for Mr Brough. Staying at The Bull, I believe.”

Grant nodded. Brough was the Rector. “You seem to know a lot about me.”

The barman smiled. “It’s a small place. And Mr Brough enjoys a drink here from time to time. He spoke about you when you first came.”

After Grant had returned to The Bull, where he had taken a room for the duration of his work on the church – it would be a long commission, for the building was in a very poor state, particularly so far as the foundations went – he had lunch and then found a corner of the coffee lounge and checked his latest notes and drawings. This occupied him for over an hour and afterward he decided to take a walk round the village in order to stretch his legs. He passed the old timbered post office on his way round and on impulse, seeing a phone booth outside, went in and dialled his fiancée, Sally, in London, to let her know how things were going. Then he returned to The Bull and continued working on his notes in the now deserted lounge.

Presently there was a pleasant interruption to his labours when a shadow fell across his drawings and the bulky form of the Rector, the Rev. Charles Brough, materialized. A good-looking man in his early fifties, his black hair flecked with grey, he had established a good rapport with Grant and the latter had enjoyed the hospitality of Brough and his much younger wife at the Rectory, a mellow eighteenth-century building the other side of the churchyard.

Grant, using his privilege as a guest at the hotel, quickly ordered the visitor a glass of sherry and the two men were soon engrossed in facts and figures regarding the renovation work on the church.

“Of course, you do realize it will be a very expensive job,” the architect pointed out. “A good deal of underpinning of the buttresses on the north side of the building, where water has been penetrating for years and some of the panelling and other interior fitments are showing signs of dry rot, to say nothing of woodworm.”

The Rector smiled briefly, raising his glass in salute. “I don’t think that will be too big a problem, Mr Grant. The Diocese has promised us half a million pounds and we have a large-scale restoration fund underway.”

Grant nodded. “Oh, but you haven’t taken my fees into account.”

The Rector gave a dry chuckle before continuing. “Now that you have been on the spot and gone into all the details, how long do you think the work will take? We have an excellent firm of church restorers, and though they have only undertaken what you might call running repairs in the past, they will be glad of this major commission in these difficult times.”

Grant pursed his lips, putting down his sherry glass and tidying up his papers. “According to the requirements you’ve laid down and the preliminary figures I’ve arrived at, around two years for the complete restoration. Perhaps a little longer. My associates will, of course, check the work thoroughly as it proceeds. And naturally I shall still have overall control.”

Brough gave him an approving glance. “That’s about what the church council thought. I’ll let them know your provisional findings at the council meeting next Monday evening. You’ll be present, of course, and perhaps you’d like to have dinner at the Rectory afterwards.”

Grant thanked Brough for his invitation and the two men rose.

“I must get back to the church,” the Rector said.

“I’ll come with you,” Grant replied. “I have to take some more measurements and make further inspection before writing my notes this evening.”

The two men fell into step as they crossed the road toward St Ulric’s, engaging in small talk, when Grant caught sight from the corner of his eye a black-clad figure walking among the gravestones in the churchyard. He was too late to see clearly and the man – for he was certain of the gender – had disappeared along the footpath by the time they reached the worn lych-gate.

“Did you see who that was?” Grant asked.

The Rector glanced around. “I didn’t notice anybody. This is a public footpath, as you know. Something to do with the Lord of the Manor in medieval times, who gave the land for the building of the church while retaining a public right of way. A great eccentric, according to old records.”

“That reminds me,” Grant continued. “I saw an old chap in shabby black clothes acting rather queerly near the church this morning. I wondered if you knew anything about him.”

The Rector shook his head. “Doesn’t ring a bell.” He gave a short laugh. “We have all sorts of funny people around here. Eccentrics, harmless village-idiot types. There are gypsies in the woods too, though they have no right to be there. Many of them use the footpath that runs down to a sort of small suburb to the north of the church. Several streets bisected by a stream. Most picturesque. You ought to take a look some time.”

“I will,” Grant promised him.

The two men were at the church porch now and Brough extended his hand. “You’re going into the church and I’m going to do some work in my study at the Rectory. Shall I see you over the weekend?”

Grant gave the other an expression of mock regret. “I’m going up to London to see my fiancée in the morning and shan’t be back until Sunday evening.”

The Rector broke into a smile, revealing strong, square teeth. “Ah, journeys end in lovers’ meetings,” he said jocularly.

Grant smiled too. “Something like that.”

He watched the powerful figure striding away down the brick path, but as he turned to go into the church something arrested his attention. Instead, he went across the sloping turf between the gravestones to where he had previously seen the dark form. He walked aimlessly, desultorily reading the worn inscriptions. They were mostly old tombstones here, with an occasional vault for some more prestigious local, he supposed. One in particular caught his eye. Principally because there was a fresh posy of spring flowers tied with string, lying on the damp grass. He glanced from it to the black-letter inscription on the worn stone, half obscured by the inroads of ivy.

He read: JEDEDIAH BRIGGS. CALLED TO GLORY APRIL 30TH 1770. Underneath was a rather puzzling inscription in much smaller letters: GREAT THOUGH IT IS TO LIE IN DARKNESS, EVEN MORE GLORIOUS IS IT TO WALK ABROAD AT THE NOONTIDE HOUR.

A curious sentiment, the architect thought, and during various church commissions carried out in his career Grant had never seen one more strange. Even more bizarre, to his mind, was that the inscription carried no date of birth. He would ask the Rector about it when they met on Monday. He supposed now that the figure he had seen might have left the rustic bouquet at the graveside; possibly some descendant of the deceased person, though over two hundred years was a long time to continue leaving such tokens. However, as he turned back to the church and his immediate concerns, the matter was swiftly erased from his mind.

II

Grant took an early train to London the next morning and passed a pleasant weekend with his fiancée. But there was some indefinable cloud that was hovering at the edge of his consciousness that he could not wholly shake off all the time that he was away from the village and his commission at St Ulric’s. Even Sally had noticed it and though she was too tactful to question him directly, he passed it off by speaking of the problems with the church foundations, which were causing some difficulties. It was nothing the Rector had said nor had it to do directly with the church, but the somewhat moving image of the simple bunch of wild flowers lying on the grave that recurred from time to time.

But when he caught the 9:30 train at Charing Cross on Sunday night all these relatively trivial matters were forgotten, and he and Sally parted amid laughter and suppressed tears on the girl’s part. Meanwhile, he had promised to have her down to stay at The Bull soon and it was with a lighter heart that he sat down in a corner of the crowded carriage to read one of the quality Sunday papers, which passed the first stage of the journey agreeably. Unfortunately he had to change trains once and the second train stopped at every station so that when he finally arrived at his destination it had turned eleven o’clock.

It was a somewhat misty evening, with the smell of damp earth in his nostrils and the faint fret of the distant stream in his ears, as he hurried to the telephone booth to ring Sally to let her know of his safe arrival. There were few street lamps and dark patches of shadow obscured the road at intervals while a watery moon gave little light, but Grant could have sworn that someone was keeping pace with him at the other side of the road. No one else had got out at the station and he had passed no one on his way down the street, though it was possible that some railway employee had just finished his duties and was making his own way home.

There was a gritting sound in the roadside gravel that fretted at his nerves and he stopped twice to see if the unknown pedestrian would reveal himself. But each time all was still apart from the faint rustle of the wind in the roadside trees and the far-off murmur of the stream, now partly blotted out by the encroaching houses. The cheerful lights of The Bull were now showing ahead and once he had made his call and Sally’s reassuring voice was in his ears, things fell into perspective so that when the dark form of a villager passed by the phone booth a minute or two later, the explanation was simple. Darkness, wind and imagination had combined to present a very different picture. He rang off with a light heart and entered the welcoming vestibule of the hotel with a clear mind for the tasks of the following morning.

Grant slept well and after an excellent breakfast in the crowded dining room he collected his equipment and then set out for the church. The day was overcast and dark clouds were rolling in from the west, but fortunately it was dry, as he intended to make further examinations of the exterior buttresses which had caused him some previous concern. The soil was sandy there and might create some problems with the underpinning. Grant was a very meticulous man, noted for the high quality of his work, and he did not want the builders to run into unexpected difficulties when they were on site.

But first, out of idle curiosity, he turned aside and retraced his steps of Friday through the older part of the graveyard to where the tomb of Jedediah Briggs stood. The first thing he noticed was that the bunch of flowers had gone. It was no great matter really; presumably some passer-by had made off with them. The second thing, however, was rather more puzzling, for Grant now saw that what he had originally taken for a gravestone appeared to be a sort of portico. A shallow flight of steps descended, presumably to a vault beneath, but they were now completely obscured by a tangle of weeds and ivy, with only the worn top tread showing.

Then he saw the friendly figure of the Rector advancing toward him along the path.

“Had a good weekend?”

Grant nodded.

“Great.” Brough looked at him shrewdly. “Worried about something? Nothing to do with your fiancée, I hope?”

Grant laughed. “Nothing like that, thank goodness. I was thinking how curious this tomb was.”

The Rector bent toward the inscription on the worn stone. “Old Jedediah Briggs? He was something of a local legend. A sort of eighteenth-century tearaway.” He chuckled. “Only without the motorcycle, of course. But apparently he was quite well off at one time and during those years he used to gallop about the parish in a phaeton, lashing out with his whip at anyone who crossed his path.”

“Nice fellow,” Grant said.

“You may well say so. Then he fell on hard times and became bitter and even more vindictive. He hanged himself from a branch of one of the churchyard trees in the end.”

“That’s strange,” Grant observed.

“Why so?”

“I thought suicides weren’t allowed to be buried in consecrated ground in the old days. Yet here we have this elaborate tomb.”

The Rector shrugged. “I believe this thing was put up in the late nineteenth-century at the request of his descendants, who had him reinterred. Yes, you’re right, it’s a strange story. We have something about it in the old church records if you’d care to follow it up.”

“Perhaps,” Grant said. “But I wonder why it’s become so overgrown when the rest of the churchyard is so immaculately kept.”

The Rector gave him a strange smile. “You’d better ask the sexton about that. Old Martin’s a bit superstitious and says there’s something odd about it. He’s a silly old fool in some ways but a good church servant, so I don’t press the point. Once or twice a year our team of local volunteers clear the graveyard.”

The two men had turned away toward the church entrance by this time.

“Anyway, somebody must think well of him because someone left a posy of wild flowers there on Friday,” Grant said.

The Rector had his face averted and said nothing so Grant did not pursue the matter.

III

When Grant ascended to the little muniments room above the church porch, where St Ulric’s records were kept, the sun was low in the sky, throwing long shadows across the well-kept turf surrounding the church, and the graveyard beyond. Through the tiny lancet windows the dark silhouettes of birds were flying back to the woods beyond – presumably to seek their nests, he thought as he turned away. The records were kept in a large oak aumbry secured to the stone wall with massive bolts, and Grant opened the door with a keen sense of anticipation, though he could not have said why.

He went through the shelves with quickening interest and took several of the huge volumes down. But to his disappointment the records for the latter part of the eighteenth-century seemed to be missing, though the church history’s relevant documentation was extraordinarily complete otherwise. Just then he was somewhat startled by an odd creaking noise, and the door to the little chamber opened rather furtively, Grant thought; if a door could be furtive, he mused, with an inward smile as the white hair of old Martin, the sexton, was thrust into the gap.

“Ah, there you are, Mr Grant, sir. Was there anything further you’ll be wanting as I’ll be away home in a few minutes? The Rector said I should keep myself available in case you require my help.”

Grant was smiling now, half due to the old man’s grave and formal way of speaking, though nothing of this showed on his face.

“I don’t think so, thank you. Oh, just a moment, though. There is something. Could you let me know what happened to the church records for the last half of the eighteenth-century? Or were they perhaps destroyed in a fire or lost?”

A darkness seemed to descend on Martin’s features, though his face, illuminated by the rays of the dying sun, was clearly delineated against the blackness of the passage behind him. He bit his lip before replying.

“As far as I recollect, Mr Grant, they were taken to the County Record Office some years ago.”

Grant wrinkled his brow. “Why so? That seems rather odd, doesn’t it, as it leaves a gap in these valuable records here.”

The sexton looked discomfited. “I don’t rightly know, sir. I believe it had something to do with certain valuable information contained there. Mr Brough would be able to help you.”

For some reason Grant felt he had to persist in the questioning, despite the sexton’s somewhat evasive manner. “Forgive me for asking but are you sure you don’t know the reason why this material was removed? As I have said, it leaves a gap in the archives. And the County Records Office is a long way off.”

Martin shook his head. There was a stubborn set to his features now. “I know nothing, sir. But I’m sure Mr Brough would be able to explain. And you can, of course, consult the records yourself. The offices are only an hour’s drive away.”

Grant nodded. “Well, thank you, anyway. And don’t let me detain you further.”

With obvious relief Martin backed out the door with a mumbled goodnight and a few moments later the architect heard his heavy boots clattering down the wooden stairs. On a sudden impulse Grant crossed to the narrow windows set in the opposite wall, fully expecting to see the sexton hurrying down the path. But there was no sign of him. What he saw instead was a thin figure, dressed in shabby black clothes tied with cord, who seemed to glide between the gravestones.

As Grant stood transfixed at the casement, the man turned his face toward the lancet windows, as though he knew there was a watcher there. Grant was left with the impression of red-rimmed eyes that were shrouded in cavernous sockets surmounted by eyebrows that looked like whitened seaweed. The man gave him a twisted smile as though in recognition. Before he had passed the end of the building out of Grant’s sight, the latter took the stairs two at a time to gain the church porch. But quick as he was, there was no one to be seen in all the long expanse of paving that stretched to the lych gate. Grant gave up his researches for that day and after tidying the muniments room and locking both it and the main church door, he made his way thoughtfully back to The Bull to prepare his notes for the parish council meeting.

IV

It was a long evening and discussion, as always at parish level, went on interminably. Strictly speaking the church renovation was a Diocesan matter and had nothing to do with the parish council’s jurisdiction, but there was an added complication because the Rector and the church council wished to install toilets and other modern facilities within the church proper.

This would entail extensive drainage works involving the closure of the public right of way through the churchyard, inconveniencing people who lived in the small suburb beyond: it would mean them having to walk more than a mile round in order to reach their homes. However, Grant had come up with a plan to erect a raised plank walkway across the graveyard while the drainage work was in progress, which met with the meeting’s approval.

It was half-past ten before the gathering closed and finally Grant and Brough walked across to the Rectory where the former had been invited to a late supper. Grant spent a pleasant time with the Rector and his wife and it was past midnight when he got back to the inn. He slept badly and had a frightful dream, no doubt arising from the previous night’s debate when some members of the parish council had raised objections to the drainage work, which would involve, as they put it, desecrating the graves of the dead, in particular the vault in which the remains of Jedediah Briggs were interred. They had not said that in as many words, but their remarks had obviously planted a seed in the architect’s mind.

The dream began, as so many do, in a very inconsequential way, with Grant saying goodbye to his fiancée at Charing Cross Station. Then, as always, he was immediately transposed to the village and the graveyard in particular. But instead of it being night, as one might have supposed, it was broad daylight, though the village was silent and deserted; absolutely devoid of human beings. Then there appeared a dark figure, gliding effortlessly between the gravestones. Grant turned to run but was able to take only a few steps, as though in slow motion, like some macabre sequence in a film. But a hand was on his shoulder and the owner of the tattered black overcoat, whom he had previously seen in reality, gave him a crooked smile and beckoned him to follow.

The pair went down dank steps toward the Briggs vault and there was a charnel stench in the dreamer’s nostrils. He tried to run but fell headlong toward the vault door, which gave with a crash. Grant woke drenched with perspiration, thankful to see early daylight leaching through the curtains of his room. He remembered the words of one parish council member, in reference to the digging up of the graveyard – “If it goes ahead, I warn this meeting, no good can come of it” – but eventually fell into a refreshing sleep.

For the next few days Grant was involved in a heavy workload, finishing his drawings and specifications. Nightly he was posting his rough drawings and specifications to his London office, where his staff of draughtsmen would prepare the final plans. During his tours of the church building and its surroundings, Grant was surprised to find that the area round the vault of Jedediah Briggs had been cleared of ivy and foliage, just as it had been in his vivid dream. But the explanation was simple: the Rector remarked that the church working party had been along on their half-yearly task of clearing up the churchyard.

Brough was abruptly called back to the Rectory, following a message relayed by his wife, to the effect that the Bishop had rung regarding the work on the church and would be ringing back in half an hour. Left to himself, Grant circled the massive vault building, which was in remarkably good condition, considering its age. It was a bright, cloudless day, with the pleasant aroma carried from a distant bonfire. The sound of passing cars was more often than not drowned by the reassuring chorus of bird-song.

The time passed very quickly and Grant was kneeling on the grass, making notations in the jotting pad he always carried, when he became aware that a deep silence had fallen and even the traffic noises had faded. At almost the same moment a dark shadow fell across the nearest tombstone. Grant looked up with a welcoming smile, thinking that the Rector had returned, but it was not Brough. A black-coated figure that was becoming all too familiar passed swiftly by, face averted, toward the mausoleum. As Grant got to his feet, energy flooding back into his frame, he started forward with a hoarse cry. He ran quickly across the turf but when he arrived at the back of the tomb there was no one to be seen. Nothing in the wide expanse of the churchyard either.

He leaned against the lichen-encrusted wall, perspiration pouring down into his eyes. Considerably shaken, it was some time before he again became aware of familiar sounds: passing cars, no longer muted; the cries of birds; and the distant shouts of children from a nearby school. His nerves at last calmed, Grant made a careful examination of the exterior of the tomb. Was he suffering from hallucinations, he wondered. It was true that he had been working extremely hard and Sally had often urged him to ease up. But it was nothing like that. The person he had seen was tangible enough, though it was true that no one else, apparently, had seen him.

Nothing unusual about that either, because Grant had been alone, as he was on this occasion. He went down the ancient stone steps with beating heart and tried the great oak door, which had weathered extremely well considering it had been in situ for over two hundred and twenty years. There was something carved into the woodwork, which time and weather had blurred, so that he could not make it out. It was probably in Latin anyway, and his memory in that department was rather rusty. There was an enormous circular iron handle. He tried it gingerly but to his relief it was securely locked. His relief was mingled with embarrassment because he was not normally of a superstitious or nervous nature. He wiped his face with his handkerchief, put the notebook in his pocket and went back up toward the churchyard entrance. It was time for lunch and the reality of everyday things.

V

Grant had much to do in the next few days and as time passed the events of recent weeks began to seem fanciful. But one night there was a sudden and quite unexpected thunderstorm of enormous power and ferocity, with torrential rain that continued all night. The storm had eased by early morning and when Grant left his breakfast table at The Bull the rain had ceased and a cheerful sun was drying off the earth, though there were visible traces of the night’s havoc with torn branches strewn across the roads and a few ancient trees down in the countryside beyond.

When he hurried downstairs with his briefcase and equipment he was met by the hotel manager who said there was an urgent telephone call for him. He was worried that it might be bad news about Sally as he crossed to the reception desk, but it was Brough who informed him that the churchyard had sustained considerable storm damage. A few minutes later Grant was able to see for himself. Two oaks had been uprooted, smashing some of the tombs and standing monuments, while lightning had apparently struck the Briggs mausoleum. The top of the heavy stonework had been cracked and there was a gaping hole in the side wall near the bottom of the steps.

Brough had a worried face. “The workmen are due to start on some of the church underpinning in a week or two. Do you think this will make any difference?”

Grant shook his head. “Not unless there is similar damage to the church foundations. But I’ll make a thorough inspection and let you have a verbal report before lunch.”

Brough now had relief on his face. “That’s good.”

As Grant went back up the path to the church porch the small knot of curious spectators, which included the sexton and one of the churchwardens, was slowly dispersing. In the afternoon Grant spent more than two hours in the little muniments room, working on his notes and rough sketches. He felt that there might be some difficulty in moving a number of the monuments in the south aisle of St Ulric’s, and he was concerned in case their considerable weight might cause a collapse when the builders started excavating the church foundations on that side in order to commence the underpinning.

He wrestled with ideas for more than another hour, but eventually felt there was nothing for it but to arrange the removal of the massive tombs before work on the underpinning began. Things would not be entirely satisfactory – they never were in his experience of church renovation – but the itinerary he had planned was the best he could think of for the moment. When he finally left the church the afternoon was waning and an early dusk was setting in, due to the low cloud mass that hovered over the village. There was no one around in the churchyard or in the street beyond, and the sexton, Martin, had left an hour before. As Grant neared the section where the tomb of Jedediah Briggs lay, some impulse again made him turn aside to survey the damage tha the storm had caused.

As he came closer, he could see that the great oak door, which had seemed so secure, now hung awry on its hinges, no doubt due to the damage evidenced by the gaping hole in the wall beyond. There were dark shadows on the stone treads and he was horrified to see that the jostling shapes were those of dozens of rats, which were emerging from the broken doorway. Grant shrank back but the seething mass darted aside and at the same moment someone came up behind him. Grant turned, expecting to see the Rector, but it was the black-clad figure of the old man he had several times glimpsed hovering about the churchyard.

The architect was nauseated by the appalling charnel stench that emanated from the creature’s clothing. The old man thrust a withered face into Grant’s own, and at the same time a clawlike hand seized his arm in a crushing grip, incredible in one so ancient. He had a welcoming smile on his face as he said in a high, sweet voice, “Come with me, my son. Welcome to Paradise!”

As though in a dream Grant was led inexorably toward the steps leading to the shattered doorway of the tomb. They were halfway down, and Grant could not shake off the paralysis that had overcome him, when a huge brass altar cross was suddenly thrust into the old man’s face. He gave a hideous cry of fear and fell downward through the door, which Grant had remembered as being solid but nevertheless disintegrated in a cloud of dust as the architect fell fainting into the Rector’s arms.

VI

Brandy was being forced down Grant’s throat. He coughed and the swimming vision finally settled into the reassuring faces of Brough and one of his churchwardens. The architect was back in the church, lying on one of the pew benches with a cushion beneath his head.

“What was it?” he gasped, when the fit of shuddering had passed. “What was it?”

The Rector shook his head. “We will leave that for the moment,” he said gently. “You have been unconscious for nearly an hour but the police doctor told us there was nothing to worry about. All is being taken care of.”

Grant struggled up. “I owe you so much, Rector.”

The other gave him a wry smile. “Let us say we were fortunate. I had occasion to come back to the church to collect some notes for a lecture. I saw you being dragged across the churchyard by a strange old man in black clothes and I assumed it was the person of whom you had previously spoken. Then I also noticed that you were walking like a drunken man, with a desperate expression on your face. There was something so sinister in the sight that I was momentarily paralysed and you were almost at the vault steps before I recovered myself.”

Grant took another sip of the brandy, feeling strength returning.

“That thing . . .”

The Rector bit his lip. “There was something inexpressibly unholy in that horrifying tableau. So I rushed into the church and seized the altar crucifix and struck it blindly into the creature’s face. I say ‘creature’ advisedly because there was something loathsome and evil about it. The thing let go your arm and fell downward into the vault.”

“I cannot thank you enough, sir.”

Brough inclined his head. He was about to speak when they were interrupted by the wailing of police sirens outside. Grant started to his feet, but the Rector laid a hand on his arm.

“I should not go out if I were you. The police, the press, doctors and the ambulance men are there.” There was a tremor in his voice now. “They have discovered terrible things in that vault. Opened coffins. Many bodies, some of them in advanced stages of putrefaction. Police computer systems have already identified a number as being those of persons reported missing in the county over the past few years.” He shuddered. “Utterly evil. Unspeakable things.”

“And the old man?” Grant said in a trembling voice.

The Rector turned away. “Nothing but bones and dust. It is beyond belief.”

VII

Grant left the village a week afterward, his work completed. In the interim the vault contents had been removed, the tomb dismantled and the area turfed over. The Bishop then reconsecrated it as sacred ground. The architect took a month’s convalescence and he and Sally were married in the late summer. Understandably he was reluctant to undertake church restoration work after his experiences and now sends one of his junior colleagues instead.

A strange aftermath of the affair at St Ulric’s is the appearance of a small streak of white in his otherwise black hair. His wife has often asked him to snip it off but he prefers it to remain as a salutary warning and reminder of the evils that walk abroad at noonday. The quotation was garbled, owing to his faint recollection of the piece, but his wife got the message.

KELLY LINK

Catskin

KELLY LINK RECENTLY MOVED to Northampton, Massachusetts, with her husband Gavin J. Grant. Together they produce the small-press magazine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, and publish books as Small Beer Press. The duo are also now reading for the fantasy half of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, taking over from editor Terri Windling.

Individually, Link is the editor of the anthology Trampoline, and her short stories have won a Nebula, the World Fantasy Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr Award.

“I wrote ‘Catskin’ very quickly,” she recalls. “I was getting ready to drive cross-country on a tour with writer Shelley Jackson, and I wanted something to give away at readings. Shelley had written several songs, and brought along an electric guitar to all the readings. I don’t sing, so I printed up about a hundred and fifty copies of ‘Catskin’ as a mini-zine and gave it away. Shelley produced art for the cover.

“The real inspiration – besides not being able to sing – for ‘Catskin’ was a conversation that I had with writer Christopher Rowe, after he e-mailed me a jpeg of his cat, about whether or not said cat was a real feline, or a spooky cat-impersonator. Christopher produced a zine Say . . . is this a cat? on the subject.

“ ‘Catskin’ was subsequently republished in McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales, guest-edited by Michael Chabon. It got a second illustration, this time from Howard Chaykin. Oh yeah, and the book tour was a blast.”

CATS WENT IN AND OUT of the witch’s house all day long. The windows stayed open, and the doors, and there were other doors, cat-sized and private, in the walls and up in the attic. The cats were large and sleek and silent. No one knew their names, or even if they had names, except for the witch.

Some of the cats were cream-colored and some were brindled. Some were black as beetles. They were about the witch’s business. Some came into the witch’s bedroom with live things in their mouths. When they came out again, their mouths were empty.

The cats trotted and slunk and leapt and crouched. They were busy. Their movements were catlike, or perhaps clockwork. Their tails twitched like hairy pendulums. They paid no attention to the witch’s children.

The witch had three living children at this time, although at one time she had had dozens, maybe more. No one, certainly not the witch, had ever bothered to tally them up. But at one time the house had bulged with cats and babies.

Now, since witches cannot have children in the usual way – their wombs are full of straw or bricks or stones, and when they give birth, they give birth to rabbits, kittens, tadpoles, houses, silk dresses, and yet even witches must have heirs, even witches wish to be mothers – the witch had acquired her children by other means: she had stolen or bought them.

She’d had a passion for children with a certain color of red hair. Twins she had never been able to abide (they were the wrong kind of magic) although she’d sometimes attempted to match up sets of children, as though she had been putting together a chess set, and not a family. If you were to say a witch’s chess set, instead of a witch’s family, there would be some truth in that. Perhaps this is true of other families as well.

One girl she had grown like a cyst, upon her thigh. Other children she had made out of things in her garden, or bits of trash that the cats brought her: aluminum foil with strings of chicken fat still crusted to it, broken television sets, cardboard boxes that the neighbors had thrown out. She had always been a thrifty witch.

Some of these children had run away and others had died. Some of them she had simply misplaced, or accidentally left behind on buses. It is to be hoped that these children were later adopted into good homes, or reunited with their natural parents. If you are looking for a happy ending in this story, then perhaps you should stop reading here and picture these children, these parents, their reunions.

Are you still reading? The witch, up in her bedroom, was dying. She had been poisoned by an enemy, a witch, a man named Lack. The child Finn, who had been her food taster, was dead already and so were three cats who’d licked her dish clean. The witch knew who had killed her and she snatched pieces of time, here and there, from the business of dying, to make her revenge. Once the question of this revenge had been settled to her satisfaction, the shape of it like a black ball of twine in her head, she began to divide up her estate between her three remaining children.

Flecks of vomit stuck to the corners of her mouth, and there was a basin beside the foot of the bed which was full of black liquid. The room smelled like cats’ piss and wet matches. The witch panted as if she were giving birth to her own death.

“Flora shall have my automobile,” she said, “and also my purse, which will never be empty, so long as you always leave a coin at the bottom, my darling, my spendthrift, my profligate, my drop of poison, my pretty, pretty Flora. And when I am dead, take the road outside the house and go west. There’s one last piece of advice.”

Flora, who was the oldest of the witch’s living children, was redheaded and stylish. She had been waiting for the witch’s death for a long time now, although she had been patient. She kissed the witch’s cheek and said, “Thank you, mother.”

The witch looked up at her, panting. She could see Flora’s life, already laid out, flat as a map. Perhaps all mothers can see as far.

“Jack, my love, my birdsnest, my bite, my scrap of porridge,” the witch said, “you shall have my books. I won’t have any need of books where I am going. And when you leave my house, strike out in an easterly direction and you won’t be any sorrier than you are now.”

Jack, who had once been a little bundle of feathers and twigs and eggshell all tied up with a tatty piece of string, was a sturdy lad, almost full grown. If he knew how to read, only the cats knew it. But he nodded and kissed his mother’s grey lips.

“And what shall I leave to my boy Small?” the witch said, convulsing. She threw up again in the basin. Cats came running, leaning on the lip of the basin to inspect her vomitus. The witch’s hand dug into Small’s leg.

“Oh it is hard, hard, so very hard, for a mother to leave her children (though I have done harder things). Children need a mother, even such a mother as I have been.” She wiped at her eyes, and yet it is a fact that witches cannot cry.

Small, who still slept in the witch’s bed, was the youngest of the witch’s children. (Perhaps not as young as you think.) He sat upon the bed, and although he didn’t cry, it was only because witchs’ children have no one to teach them the use of crying. His heart was breaking.

Small was ten years old and he could juggle and sing and every morning he brushed and plaited the witch’s long, silky hair. Surely every mother must wish for a boy like Small, a curly-headed, sweet-breathed, tender-hearted boy like Small, who can cook a fine omelet, and who has a good strong singing voice as well as a gentle hand with a hairbrush.

“Mother,” he said, “if you must die, then you must die. And if I can’t come along with you, then I’ll do my best to live and make you proud. Give me your hairbrush to remember you by, and I’ll go make my own way in the world.”

“You shall have my hairbrush, then,” said the witch to Small, looking, and panting, panting. “And I love you best of all. You shall have my tinderbox and my matches, and also my revenge, and you will make me proud, or I don’t know my own children.”

“What shall we do with the house, mother?” said Jack. He said it as if he didn’t care.

“When I am dead,” the witch said, “this house will be of no use to anyone. I gave birth to it – that was a very long time ago – and raised it from just a dollhouse. Oh, it was the most dear, most darling dollhouse ever. It had eight rooms and a tin roof, and a staircase that went nowhere at all. But I nursed it and rocked it to sleep in a cradle, and it grew up to be a real house, and see how it has taken care of me, its parent, how it knows a child’s duty to its mother. And perhaps you can see how it is now, how it pines, how it grows sick to see me dying like this. Leave it to the cats. They’ll know what to do with it.”

*   *   *

All this time the cats have been running in and out of the room, bringing things and taking things away. It seems as if they will never slow down, never come to rest, never nap, never have the time to sleep, or to die, or even to mourn. They have a certain proprietary look about them, as if the house is already theirs.

The witch vomits up mud, fur, glass buttons, tin soldiers, trowels, hat pins, thumbtacks, love letters (mislabeled or sent without the appropriate amount of postage and never read), and a dozen regiments of red ants, each ant as long and wide as a kidney bean. The ants swim across the perilous stinking basin, clamber up the sides of the basin, and go marching across the floor in a shiny ribbon. They are carrying pieces of Time in their mandibles. Time is heavy, even in such small pieces, but the ants have strong jaws, strong legs. Across the floor they go, and up the wall, and out the window. The cats watch, but don’t interfere. The witch gasps and coughs and then lies still. Her hands beat against the bed once and then are still. Still the children wait, to make sure that she is dead, and that she has nothing else to say.

In the witch’s house, the dead are sometimes quite talkative.

But the witch has nothing else to say at this time.

The house groans and all the cats begin to mew piteously, trotting in and out of the room as if they have dropped something and must go and hunt for it – they will never find it – and the children, at last, find that they know how to cry, but the witch is perfectly still and quiet. There is a tiny smile on her face, as if everything has happened exactly to her satisfaction. Or maybe she is looking forward to the next part of the story.

The children buried the witch in one of her half-grown doll-houses. They crammed her into the downstairs parlor, and knocked out the inner walls so that her head rested on the kitchen table in the breakfast nook, and her ankles threaded through a bedroom door. Small brushed out her hair, and, because he wasn’t sure what she should wear now that she was dead, he put all her dresses on her, one over the other over the other, until he could hardly see her white limbs at all beneath the stack of petticoats and coats and dresses. It didn’t matter: once they’d nailed the dollhouse shut again, all they could see was the red crown of her head in the kitchen window, and the worn-down heels of her dancing shoes knocking against the shutters of the bedroom window.

Jack, who was handy, rigged a set of wheels for the dollhouse, and a harness so that it could be pulled. They put the harness on Small, and Small pulled and Flora pushed, and Jack talked and coaxed the house along, over the hill, down to the cemetery, and the cats ran along beside them.

The cats are beginning to look a bit shabby, as if they are molting. Their mouths look very empty. The ants have marched away, through the woods, and down into town, and they have built a nest on your yard, out of the bits of Time. And if you hold a magnifying glass over their nest, to see the ants dance and burn, Time will catch fire and you will be sorry.

Outside the cemetery gates, the cats had been digging a grave for the witch. The children tipped the dollhouse into the grave, kitchen window first. But then they saw that the grave wasn’t deep enough, and the house sat there on its end, looking uncomfortable. Small began to cry, (now that he’d learned how, it seemed he would spend all his time practicing) thinking how horrible it would be to spend one’s death, all of eternity, upside down and not even properly buried, not even able to feel the rain when it beat down on the exposed shingles of the house, and seeped down into the house and filled your mouth and drowned you, so that you had to die all over again, every time it rained.

The dollhouse chimney had broken off and fallen on the ground. One of the cats picked it up and carried it away, like a souvenir. That cat carried the chimney into the woods and ate it, a mouthful at a time, and passed out of this story and into another one. It’s no concern of ours.

The other cats began to carry up mouthfuls of dirt, dropping it and mounding it around the house with their paws. The children helped, and when they’d finished, they’d managed to bury the witch properly, so that only the bedroom window was visible, a little pane of glass like an eye at the top of a small dirt hill.

On the way home, Flora began to flirt with Jack. Perhaps she liked the way he looked in his funeral black. They talked about what they planned to be, now that they were grown up. Flora wanted to find her parents. She was a pretty girl: someone would want to look after her. Jack said he would like to marry someone rich. They began to make plans.

Small walked a little behind, slippery cats twining around his ankles. He had the witch’s hairbrush in his pocket, and his fingers slipped around the figured horn handle for comfort.

The house, when they reached it, had a dangerous, grief-stricken look to it, as if it was beginning to pull away from itself. Flora and Jack wouldn’t go back inside. They squeezed Small lovingly, and asked if he wouldn’t want to come along with them. He would have liked to, but who would have looked after the witch’s cats, the witch’s revenge? So he watched as they drove off together. They went north. What child has ever heeded a mother’s advice?

Jack hasn’t even bothered to bring along the witch’s library: he says there isn’t space in the trunk for everything. He’ll rely on Flora and her magic purse.

Small sat in the garden, and ate stalks of grass when he was hungry, and pretended that the grass was bread and milk and chocolate cake. He drank out of the garden hose. When it began to grow dark, he was lonelier than he had ever been in his life. The witch’s cats were not good company. He said nothing to them and they had nothing to tell him, about the house, or the future, or the witch’s revenge, or about where he was supposed to sleep. He had never slept anywhere except in the witch’s bed, so at last he went back over the hill and down to the cemetery.

Some of the cats were still going up and down the grave, covering the base of the mound with leaves and grass and feathers, their own loose fur. It was a soft sort of nest to lie down on. The cats were still busy when Small fell asleep – cats are always busy – cheek pressed against the cool glass of the bedroom window, hand curled in his pocket around the hairbrush, but in the middle of the night, when he woke up, he was swaddled, head to foot, in warm, grass-scented cat bodies.

*   *   *

A tail is curled around his chin like a rope, and all the bodies are soughing breath in and out, whiskers and paws twitching, silky bellies rising and falling. All the cats are sleeping a frantic, exhausted, busy sleep, except for one, a white cat who sits near his head, looking down at him. Small has never seen this cat before, and yet he knows her, the way that you know the people who visit you in dreams: she’s white everywhere, except for reddish tufts and frills at her ears and tail and paws, as if someone has embroidered her with fire around the edges.

“What’s your name?” Small says. He’s never talked to the witch’s cats before.

The cat lifts a leg and licks herself in a private place. Then she looks at him. “You may call me Mother,” she says.

But Small shakes his head. He can’t call the cat that. Down under the blanket of cats, under the window pane, the witch’s Spanish heel is drinking in moonlight.

“Very well then, you may call me The Witch’s Revenge,” the cat says. Her mouth doesn’t move, but he hears her speak inside his head. Her voice is furry and sharp, like a blanket made of needles. “And you may comb my fur.”

Small sits up, displacing sleeping cats, and lifts the brush out of his pocket. The bristles have left rows of little holes indented in the pink palm of his hand, like some sort of code. If he could read the code, it would say: Comb my fur.

Small combs the fur of The Witch’s Revenge. There’s grave dirt in the cat’s fur, and one or two red ants, who drop and scurry away. The Witch’s Revenge bends her head down to the ground, snaps them up in her jaws. The heap of cats around them is yawning and stretching. There are things to do.

“You must burn her house down,” The Witch’s Revenge says. “That’s the first thing.”

Small’s comb catches a knot, and The Witch’s Revenge turns and nips him on the wrist. Then she licks him in the tender place between his thumb and his first finger. “That’s enough,” she says. “There’s work to do.”

So they all go back to the house, Small stumbling in the dark, moving farther and farther away from the witch’s grave, the cats trotting along, their eyes lit like torches, twigs and branches in their mouths, as if they plan to build a nest, a canoe, a fence to keep the world out. The house, when they reach it, is full of lights, and more cats, and piles of tinder. The house is making a noise, like an instrument that someone is breathing into. Small realizes that all the cats are mewing, endlessly, as they run in and out the doors, looking for more kindling. The Witch’s Revenge says, “First we must latch all the doors.”

So Small shuts all the doors and windows on the first floor, leaving open only the kitchen door, and The Witch’s Revenge shuts the catches on the secret doors, the cat doors, the doors in the attic, and up on the roof, and the cellar doors. Not a single secret door is left open. Now all the noise is on the inside, and Small and The Witch’s Revenge are on the outside.

All the cats have slipped into the house through the kitchen door. There isn’t a single cat in the garden. Small can see the witch’s cats through the windows, arranging their piles of twigs. The Witch’s Revenge sits beside him, watching. “Now light a match and throw it in,” says The Witch’s Revenge.

Small lights a match. He throws it in. What boy doesn’t love to start a fire?

“Now shut the kitchen door,” says The Witch’s Revenge, but Small can’t do that. All the cats are inside. The Witch’s Revenge stands on her hind paws and pushes the kitchen door shut. Inside, the lit match catches something on fire. Fire runs along the floor and up the kitchen walls. Cats catch fire, and run into the other rooms of the house. Small can see all this through the windows. He stands with his face against the glass, which is cold, and then warm, and then hot. Burning cats with burning twigs in their mouths press up against the kitchen door, and the other doors of the house, but all the doors are locked. Small and The Witch’s Revenge stand in the garden and watch the witch’s house and the witch’s books and the witch’s sofas and the witch’s cooking pots and the witch’s cats, her cats, too, all her cats burn.

You should never burn down a house. You should never set a cat on fire. You should never watch and do nothing while a house is burning. You should never listen to a cat who says to do any of these things. You should listen to your mother when she tells you to come away from watching, to go to bed, to go to sleep. You should listen to your mother’s revenge.

*   *   *

You should never poison a witch.

In the morning, Small woke up in the garden. Soot covered him in a greasy blanket. The Witch’s Revenge was curled up asleep on his chest. The witch’s house was still standing, but the windows had melted and run down the walls.

The Witch’s Revenge woke and stretched and licked Small clean with her small sharkskin tongue. She demanded to be combed. Then she went into the house and came out, carrying a little bundle. It dangled, boneless, from her mouth, like a kitten.

It is a catskin, Small sees, only there is no longer a cat inside it. The Witch’s Revenge drops it in his lap.

He picked it up and something shiny fell out of the loose light skin. It was a piece of gold, sloppy, slippery with fat. The Witch’s Revenge brought out dozens and dozens of catskins, and there was a gold piece in every skin. While Small counted his fortune, The Witch’s Revenge bit off one of her own claws, and pulled one long witch hair out of the witch’s comb. She sat up, like a tailor, cross-legged in the grass, and began to stitch up a bag, out of the many catskins.

Small shivered. There was nothing to eat for breakfast but grass, and the grass was black and cooked.

“Are you cold?” said The Witch’s Revenge. She put the bag aside, and picked up another catskin, a fine black one. She slit a sharp claw down the middle. “We’ll make you a warm suit.”

She used the coat of a black cat, and the coat of a calico cat, and she put a trim around the paws, of grey and white striped fur.

While she did this, she said to Small, “Did you know that there was once a battle, fought on this very patch of ground?”

Small shook his head no.

“Wherever there’s a garden,” the Witch’s Revenge said, scratching with one paw at the ground, “I promise you there are people buried somewhere beneath it. Look here.” She plucked up a little brown clot, put it in her mouth, and cleaned it with her tongue.

When she spat the little circle out again, Small saw that it was an ivory regimental button. The Witch’s Revenge dug more buttons out of the ground – as if buttons of ivory grew in the ground – and sewed them onto the catskin. She fashioned a hood with two eye holes and a set of fine whiskers, and sewed four fine cat tails to the back of the suit, as if the single tail that grew there wasn’t good enough for Small. She threaded a bell on each one. “Put this on,” she said to Small.

Small put on the suit and the bells chime. The Witch’s Revenge laughs. “You make a fine-looking cat,” she says. “Any mother would be proud.”

The inside of the cat suit is soft and a little sticky against Small’s skin. When he puts the hood over his head, the world disappears. He can only see the vivid corners of it through the eyeholes – grass, gold, the cat who sits cross-legged, stitching up her sack of skins – and air seeps in, down at the loosely sewn seam, where the skin droops and sags over his chest and around the gaping buttons. Small holds his tails in his clumsy fingerless paw, like a handful of eels, and swings them back and forth to hear them ring. The sound of the bells and the sooty, cooked smell of the air, the warm stickiness of the suit, the feel of his new fur against the ground: he falls asleep and dreams that hundreds of ants come and lift him and gently carry him off to bed.

When Small tipped his hood back again, he saw that The Witch’s Revenge had finished with her needle and thread. Small helped her fill the bag with gold. The Witch’s Revenge stood up on her hind legs, took the bag, and swung it over her shoulders. The gold coins went sliding against each other, mewling and hissing. The bag dragged along the grass, picking up ash, leaving a green trail behind it. The Witch’s Revenge strutted along as if she were carrying a sack of air.

Small put the hood on again, and he got down on his hands and knees. And then he trotted after The Witch’s Revenge. They left the garden gate wide open, and went into the forest, towards the house where the witch Lack lived.

The forest is smaller than it used to be. Small is growing, but the forest is shrinking. Trees have been cut down. Houses have been built. Lawns rolled, roads laid. The Witch’s Revenge and Small walked alongside one of the roads. A school bus rolled by: The children inside looked out their windows and laughed when they saw The Witch’s Revenge walking on her hind legs, and at her heels, Small, in his cat suit. Small lifted his head and peered out of his eyeholes after the schoolbus.

“Who lives in these houses?” he asked The Witch’s Revenge.

“That’s the wrong question, Small,” said The Witch’s Revenge, looking down at him and striding along.

Miaow, the catskin bag says. Clink.

“What’s the right question, then?” Small said.

“Ask me who lives under the houses,” The Witch’s Revenge said.

Obediently, Small said, “Who lives under the houses?”

“What a good question!” said The Witch’s Revenge. “You see, not everyone can give birth to their own house. Most people give birth to children instead. And when you have children, you need houses to put them in. So children and houses: most people give birth to the first and have to build the second. The houses, that is. A long time ago, when men and women were going to build a house, they would dig a hole first. And they’d make a little room – a little, wooden, one-room house – in the hole. And they’d steal or buy a child to put in the house in the hole, to live there. And then they built their house over that first little house.”

“Did they make a door in the lid of the little house?” Small said.

“They did not make a door,” said the Witch’s Revenge.

“But then how did the girl or the boy climb out?” Small said.

“The boy or the girl stayed in that little house,” said The Witch’s Revenge. “They lived there all their life, and they are living in those houses still, under the other houses where the people live, and the people who live in the houses above may come and go as they please, and they don’t ever think about how there are little houses with little children, sitting in little rooms, under their feet.”

“But what about the mothers and fathers?” Small asked. “Didn’t they ever go looking for their boys and girls?”

“Ah,” said The Witch’s Revenge. “Sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t. And after all, who was living under their houses? But that was a long time ago. Now people mostly bury a cat when they build their house, instead of a child. That’s why we call cats house-cats. Which is why we must walk along smartly. As you can see, there are houses under construction here.”

*   *   *

And so there are. They walk by clearings where men are digging little holes. First Small puts his hood back and walks on two legs, and then he puts on his hood again, and goes on all fours: He makes himself as small and slinky as possible, just like a cat. But the bells on his tails jounce and the coins in the bag that The Witch’s Revenge carries go clink, miaow, and the men stop their work and watch them go by.

How many witches are there in the world? Have you ever seen one? Would you know a witch if you saw one? And what would you do if you saw one? For that matter, do you know a cat when you see one? Are you sure?

Small followed The Witch’s Revenge. Small grew calluses on his knees and the pads of his fingers. He would have liked to carry the bag sometimes, but it was too heavy. How heavy? You would not have been able to carry it, either.

They drank out of streams. At night they opened the catskin bag and climbed inside to sleep, and when they were hungry they licked the coins, which seemed to sweat golden fat, and always more fat. As they went, The Witch’s Revenge sang a song:

I had no mother
and my mother had no mother
and her mother had no mother
and her mother had no mother
and her mother had no mother
and you have no mother
to sing you
this song

The coins in the bag sang too, miaow, miaow, and the bells on Small’s tails kept the rhythm.

Every night Small combs The Witch’s Revenge’s fur. And every morning The Witch’s Revenge licks him all over, not neglecting the places behind his ears, and at the backs of his knees. And then he puts the catsuit back on, and she grooms him all over again.

*   *   *

Sometimes they were in the forest, and sometimes the forest became a town, and then The Witch’s Revenge would tell Small stories about the people who lived in the houses, and the children who lived in the houses under the houses. Once, in the forest, The Witch’s Revenge showed Small where there had once been a house. Now there were only the stones of the foundation, upholstered in moss, and the chimney stack, propped up with fat ropes and coils of ivy.

The Witch’s Revenge rapped on the grassy ground, moving clockwise around the foundation, until both she and Small could hear a hollow sound; The Witch’s Revenge dropped to all fours and clawed at the ground, tearing it up with her paws and biting at it, until they could see a little wooden roof. The Witch’s Revenge knocked on the roof, and Small lashed his tails.

“Well, Small,” said The Witch’s Revenge, “shall we take off the roof and let the poor child go?”

Small crept up close to the hole she had made. He put his ear to it and listened, but he heard nothing at all. “There’s no one in there,” he said.

“Maybe they’re shy,” said The Witch’s Revenge. “Shall we let them out, or shall we leave them be?”

“Let them out!” said Small, but what he meant to say was, “Leave them alone!” Or maybe he said Leave them be! although he meant the opposite. The Witch’s Revenge looked at him, and Small thought he heard something then – beneath him where he crouched, frozen – very faint: a scrabbling at the dirty, sunken roof.

Small sprang away. The Witch’s Revenge picked up a stone and brought it down hard, caving the roof in. When they peered inside, there was nothing except blackness and a faint smell. They waited, sitting on the ground, to see what might come out, but nothing came out. After a while, The Witch’s Revenge picked up her catskin bag, and they set off again.

For several nights after that, Small dreamed that someone, something, was following them. It was small and thin and bleached and cold and dirty and afraid. One night it crept away again, and Small never knew where it went. But if you come to that part of the forest, where they sat and waited by the stone foundation, perhaps you will meet the thing that they set free.

*   *   *

No one knew the reason for the quarrel between the witch, Small’s mother and the witch Lack, although the witch, Small’s mother had died for it. The witch Lack was a handsome man and he loved his children dearly. He had stolen them out of the cribs and beds of palaces and manors and harems. He dressed his children in silks, as befitted their station, and they wore gold crowns and ate off gold plates. They drank from cups of gold. Lack’s children, it was said, lacked nothing.

Perhaps the witch Lack had made some remark about the way the witch, Small’s mother was raising her children, or perhaps the witch, Small’s mother had boasted of her children’s red hair. But it might have been something else. Witches are proud and they like to quarrel.

When Small and The Witch’s Revenge came at last to the house of the witch Lack, The Witch’s Revenge said to Small, “Look at this monstrosity! I’ve produced finer turds and buried them under leaves. And the smell, like an open sewer! How can his neighbors stand the stink?”

Male witches have no wombs, and must come by their houses in other ways, or else buy them from female witches. But Small thought it was a very fine house. There was a prince or a princess at each window staring down at him, as he sat on his haunches in the driveway, beside The Witch’s Revenge. He said nothing, but he missed his brothers and sisters.

“Come along,” said The Witch’s Revenge. “We’ll go a little ways off and wait for the witch Lack to come home.”

Small followed The Witch’s Revenge back into the forest, and in a while, two of the witch Lack’s children came out of the house, carrying baskets made of gold. They went into the forest as well and began to pick blackberries.

The Witch’s Revenge and Small sat in the briar and watched.

There was a wind in the briar. Small was thinking of his brothers and sisters. He thought of the taste of blackberries, the feel of them in his mouth, which was not at all like the taste of fat.

The Witch’s Revenge nestled against the small of Small’s back. She was licking down a lump of knotted fur at the base of his spine. The princesses were singing.

Small decided that he would live in the briar with The Witch’s Revenge. They would live on berries and spy on the children who came to pick them, and The Witch’s Revenge would change her name. The word Mother was in his mouth, along with the sweet taste of the blackberries.

“Now you must go out,” said The Witch’s Revenge, “and be kittenish. Be playful. Chase your tail. Be shy, but don’t be too shy. Don’t talk to them. Let them pet you. Don’t bite.”

She pushed at Small’s rump, and Small tumbled out of the briar, and sprawled at the feet of the witch Lack’s children.

The Princess Georgia said, “Look! It’s a dear little cat!”

Her sister Margaret said doubtfully, “But it has five tails. I’ve never seen a cat that needed so many tails. And its skin is done up with buttons and it’s almost as large as you are.”

Small, however, began to caper and prance. He swung his tails back and forth so that the bells rang out and then he pretended to be alarmed by this. First he ran away from his tails and then he chased his tails. The two princesses put down their baskets, half-full of blackberries, and spoke to him, calling him a silly puss.

At first he wouldn’t go near them. But, slowly, he pretended to be won over. He allowed himself to be petted and fed blackberries. He chased a hair ribbon and he stretched out to let them admire the buttons up and down his belly. Princess Margaret’s fingers tugged at his skin, then she slid one hand in between the loose catskin and Small’s boy skin. He batted her hand away with a paw, and Margaret’s sister Georgia said knowingly that cats didn’t like to be petted on their bellies.

They were all good friends by the time The Witch’s Revenge came out of the briar, standing on her hind legs and singing:

I have no children
and my children have no children
and their children
have no children
and their children
have no whiskers
and no tails

At this sight, the Princesses Margaret and Georgia began to laugh and point. They had never heard a cat sing, or seen a cat walk on its hind legs. Small lashed his five tails furiously, and all the fur of the catskin stood up on his arched back, and they laughed at that too.

When they came back from the forest, with their baskets piled with berries, Small was stalking close at their heels, and The Witch’s Revenge came walking just behind. But she left the bag of gold hidden in the briar.

That night, when the witch Lack came home, his hands were full of gifts for his children. One of his sons ran to meet him at the door and said, “Come and see what followed Margaret and Georgia home from the forest! Can we keep them?”

And the table had not been set for dinner, and the children of the witch Lack had not sat down to do their homework, and in the witch Lack’s throne room, there was a cat with five tails, spinning in circles, while a second cat sat impudently upon his throne, and sang:

Yes!
your father’s house
is the shiniest
brownest largest
the most expensive
the sweetest-smelling
house
that has ever
come out of
anyone’s
ass!

The witch Lack’s children began to laugh at this, until they saw the witch, their father standing there. Then they fell silent. Small stopped spinning.

“You!” said the witch Lack.

“Me!” said The Witch’s Revenge and sprang from the throne. Before anyone knew what she was about, her jaws were fastened about the witch Lack’s neck, and then she ripped out his throat. Lack opened his mouth to speak and his blood fell out, making The Witch’s Revenge’s fur more red now than white. The witch Lack fell down dead, and red ants went marching out of the hole in his neck and the hole of his mouth, and they held pieces of Time in their jaws as tightly as The Witch’s Revenge had held Lack’s throat in hers. But she let Lack go and left him lying in his blood on the floor, and she snatched up the ants and ate them, quickly, as if she had been hungry for a very long time.

While this was happening, the witch Lack’s children stood and watched and did nothing. Small sat on the floor, his tails curled around his paws. Children, all of them, they did nothing. They were too surprised. The Witch’s Revenge, her belly full of ants, her mouth stained with blood, stood up and surveyed them.

“Go and fetch me my catskin bag,” she said to Small.

Small found that he could move. Around him, the princes and princesses stayed absolutely still. The Witch’s Revenge was holding them in her gaze.

“I’ll need help,” Small said. “The bag is too heavy for me to carry.”

The Witch’s Revenge yawned. She licked a paw and began to pat at her mouth. Small stood still.

“Very well,” she said. “Take those big strong girls the Princesses Margaret and Georgia with you. They know the way.”

The Princesses Margaret and Georgia, finding that they could move again, began to tremble. They gathered their courage and they went with Small, the two girls holding each other’s hands, out of the throne room, not looking down at the body of their father, the witch Lack, and back into the forest.

Georgia began to weep, but the Princess Margaret said to Small: “Let us go!”

“Where will you go?” said Small. “The world is a dangerous place. There are people in it who mean you no good.” He threw back his hood, and the Princess Georgia began to weep harder.

“Let us go,” said the Princess Margaret. “My parents are the King and Queen of a country not three days’ walk from here. They will be glad to see us again.”

Small said nothing. They came to the briar and he sent the Princess Georgia in to hunt for the catskin bag. She came out scratched and bleeding, the bag in her hand. It had caught on the briars and torn open. Gold coins rolled out, like glossy drops of fat, falling on the ground.

“Your father killed my mother,” said Small.

“And that cat, your mother’s devil, will kill us, or worse,” said Princess Margaret. “Let us go!”

Small lifted the catskin bag. There were no coins in it now. The Princess Georgia was on her hands and knees, scooping up coins and putting them into her pockets.

“Was he a good father?” Small asked.

“He thought he was,” Princess Margaret said. “But I’m not sorry he’s dead. When I grow up, I will be Queen. I’ll make a law to put all the witches in the kingdom to death, and all their cats, as well.”

Small became afraid. He took up the catskin bag and ran back to the house of the witch Lack, leaving the two princesses in the forest. And whether they made their way home to the Princess Margaret’s parents, or whether they fell into the hands of thieves, or whether they lived in the briar, or whether the Princess Margaret grew up and kept her promise and rid her kingdom of witches and cats, Small never knew, and neither do I, and neither shall you.

When he came back into the witch Lack’s house, The Witch’s Revenge saw at once what had happened. “Never mind,” she said.

There were no children, no princes and princesses, in the throne room. The witch Lack’s body still lay on the floor, but The Witch’s Revenge had skinned it like a cony, and sewn up the skin into a bag. The bag wriggled and jerked, the sides heaving as if the witch Lack were still alive somewhere inside. The Witch’s Revenge held the witchskin bag in one hand, and with the other she was stuffing a cat into the neck of the skin. The cat wailed as it went into the bag. The bag was full of wailing. But the discarded flesh of the witch Lack lolled, slack.

There was a little pile of gold crowns on the floor beside the flayed corpse, and transparent, papery things that blew around the room on a current of air, surprised looks on the thin, shed faces.

Cats were hiding in the corners of the room, and under the throne. “Go catch them,” said The Witch’s Revenge. “But leave the three prettiest alone.”

“Where are the witch Lack’s children?” Small said.

The Witch’s Revenge nodded around the room. “As you see,” she said. “I’ve slipped off their skins, and they were all cats underneath. They’re cats now, but if we were to wait a year or two, they would shed these skins as well and become something new. Children are always growing.”

Small chased the cats around the room. They were fast, but he was faster. They were nimble, but he was nimbler. He had worn his catsuit longer. He drove the cats down the length of the room, and The Witch’s Revenge caught them and dropped them into her bag. At the end there were only three cats left in the throne room and they were as pretty a trio of cats as anyone could ask for. All the other cats were inside the bag.

“Well done and quickly done, too,” said The Witch’s Revenge, and she took her needle and stitched shut the neck of the bag. The skin of the witch Lack smiled up at Small, and a cat put its head through Lack’s stained mouth, wailing. But the Witch’s Revenge sewed Lack’s mouth shut too, and the hole on the other end, where a house had come out. She left only his earholes and his eyeholes and his nostrils, which were full of fur, rolled open so that the cats could breathe.

The Witch’s Revenge slung the skin full of cats over her shoulder and stood up.

“Where are you going?” Small said.

“These cats have mothers and fathers,” The Witch’s Revenge said. “They have mothers and fathers who miss them very much.”

She gazed at Small. He decided not to ask again. So he waited in the house with the two princesses and the prince in their new cat suits, while The Witch’s Revenge went down to the river. Or perhaps she took them down to the market and sold them. Or maybe she took each cat home, to its own mother and father, back to the kingdom where it had been born. Maybe she wasn’t so careful to make sure that each child was returned to the right mother and father. After all, she was in a hurry, and cats look very much alike at night.

No one saw where she went – but the market is closer than the palaces of the Kings and Queens whose children had been stolen by the witch Lack, and the river is closer still.

When The Witch’s Revenge came back to Lack’s house, she looked around her. The house was beginning to stink very badly. Even Small could smell it now.

“I suppose the Princess Margaret let you fuck her,” said The Witch’s Revenge, as if she had been thinking about this while she ran her errands. “And that is why you let them go. I don’t mind. She was a pretty puss. I might have let her go myself.”

She looked at Small’s face and saw that he was confused. “Never mind,” she said.

She had a length of string in her paw, and a cork, which she greased with a piece of fat that she had cut from the witch Lack. She threaded the cork on the string, calling it a good, quick, little mouse, and greased the string as well, and she fed the wriggling cork to the tabby who had been curled up in Small’s lap. And when she had the cork back again, she greased it again and fed it to the little black cat, and then she fed it to the cat with two white forepaws, so that she had all three cats upon her string.

She sewed up the rip in the catskin bag, and Small put the gold crowns in the bag, and it was nearly as heavy as it had been before. The Witch’s Revenge carried the bag, and Small took the greased string, holding it in his teeth, so the three cats were forced to run along behind him as they left the house of the witch Lack.

Small strikes a match, and he sets the house of the dead witch, Lack, on fire, as they leave. But shit burns slowly, if at all, and that house might be burning still, if someone hasn’t gone and put it out. And maybe, some day, someone will go fishing in the river near that house, and hook their line on a bag full of princes and princesses, wet and sorry and wriggling in their catsuit skins – that’s one way to catch a husband or a wife.

Small and The Witch’s Revenge walked without stopping and the three cats came behind them. They walked until they reached a little village very near where the witch, Small’s mother had lived and there they settled down in a room that The Witch’s Revenge rented from a butcher. They cut the greased string, and bought a cage and hung it from a hook in the kitchen. They kept the three cats in it, but Small bought collars and leashes, and sometimes he put one of the cats on a leash and took it for a walk around the town.

Sometimes he wore his own catsuit and went out prowling, but The Witch’s Revenge used to scold him if she caught him dressed like that. There are country manners and there are town manners and Small was a boy about town now.

The Witch’s Revenge kept house. She cleaned and she cooked and she made Small’s bed in the morning. Like all of the witch’s cats, she was always busy. She melted down the gold crowns in a stewpot, and minted them into coins.

The Witch’s Revenge wore a silk dress and gloves and a heavy veil, and ran her errands in a fine carriage, Small at her side. She opened an account in a bank, and she enrolled Small in a private academy. She bought a piece of land to build a house on, and she sent Small off to school every morning, no matter how he cried. But at night she took off her clothes and slept on his pillow and he combed her red and white fur.

Sometimes at night she twitched and moaned, and when he asked her what she was dreaming, she said, “There are ants! Can’t you comb them out? Be quick and catch them, if you love me.”

But there were never any ants.

One day when Small came home, the little cat with the white front paws was gone. When he asked The Witch’s Revenge, she said that the little cat had fallen out of the cage and through the open window and into the garden and before The Witch’s Revenge could think what to do, a crow had swooped down and carried the little cat off.

They moved into their new house a few months later, and Small was always very careful when he went in and out the doorway, imagining the little cat, down there in the dark, under the doorstep, under his foot.

Small got bigger. He didn’t make any friends in the village, or at his school, but when you’re big enough, you don’t need friends.

One day while he and The Witch’s Revenge were eating their dinner, there was a knock at the door. When Small opened the door, there stood Flora and Jack. Flora was wearing a drab, thrift-store coat, and Jack looked more than ever like a bundle of sticks.

“Small!” said Flora. “How tall you’ve become!” She burst into tears, and wrung her beautiful hands. Jack said, looking at The Witch’s Revenge, “And who are you?”

The Witch’s Revenge said to Jack, “Who am I? I’m your mother’s cat, and you’re a handful of dry sticks in a suit two sizes too large. But I won’t tell anyone if you won’t tell, either.”

Jack snorted at this, and Flora stopped crying. She began to look around the house, which was sunny and large and well appointed.

“There’s room enough for both of you,” said The Witch’s Revenge, “if Small doesn’t mind.”

Small thought his heart would burst with happiness to have his family back again. He showed Flora to one bedroom and Jack to another. Then they went downstairs and had a second dinner, and Small and The Witch’s Revenge listened, and the cats in their hanging cage listened, while Flora and Jack recounted their adventures.

A pickpocket had taken Flora’s purse, and they’d sold the witch’s automobile, and lost the money in a game of cards. Flora found her parents, but they were a pair of old scoundrels who had no use for her. (She was too old to sell again. She would have realized what they were up to.) She’d gone to work in a department store, and Jack had sold tickets in a movie theater. They’d quarreled and made up, and then fallen in love with other people, and had many disappointments. At last they had decided to go home to the witch’s house and see if it would do for a squat, or if there was anything left, to carry away and sell.

But the house, of course, had burned down. As they argued about what to do next, Jack had smelled Small, his brother, down in the village. So here they were.

“You’ll live here, with us,” Small said.

Jack and Flora said they could not do that. They had ambitions, they said. They had plans. They would stay for a week, or two weeks, and then they would be off again. The Witch’s Revenge nodded and said that this was sensible.

Every day Small came home from school and went out again, with Flora, on a bicycle built for two. Or he stayed home and Jack taught him how to hold a coin between two fingers, and how to follow the egg, as it moved from cup to cup. The Witch’s Revenge taught them to play bridge, although Flora and Jack couldn’t be partners. They quarreled with each other as if they were husband and wife.

“What do you want?” Small asked Flora one day. He was leaning against her, wishing he were still a cat and could sit in her lap. She smelled of secrets. “Why do you have to go away again?”

Flora patted Small on the head. She said, “What do I want? That’s easy enough! To never have to worry about money. I want to marry a man and know that he’ll never cheat on me, or leave me.” She looked at Jack as she said this.

Jack said, “I want a rich wife who won’t talk back, who doesn’t lie in bed all day with the covers pulled up over her head, weeping and calling me a bundle of twigs.” And he looked at Flora when he said this.

The Witch’s Revenge put down the sweater that she was knitting for Small. She looked at Flora and she looked at Jack and then she looked at Small.

Small went into the kitchen and opened the door of the hanging cage. He lifted out the two cats and brought them to Flora and Jack. “Here,” he said. “A husband for you, Flora, and a wife for Jack. A prince and a princess, and both of them beautiful, and well brought up, and wealthy, no doubt.”

Flora picked up the little tom-cat and said, “Don’t tease at me, Small! Whoever heard of marrying a cat!”

The Witch’s Revenge said, “The trick is to keep their catskins in a safe hiding place. And if they sulk, or treat you badly, sew them back into their catskin and put them into a bag and throw them in the river.”

Then she took her claw and slit the skin of the tabby-colored catsuit, and Flora was holding a naked man. Flora shrieked and dropped him on the ground. He was a handsome man, well made, and he had a princely manner. He was not a man that anyone would ever mistake for a cat. He stood up and made a bow, very elegant, for all that he was naked. Flora blushed, but she looked pleased.

“Go fetch some clothes for the Prince and the Princess,” The Witch’s Revenge said to Small. When he got back, there was a naked princess hiding behind the sofa, and Jack was leering at her.

A few weeks after that, there were two weddings, and then Flora left with her new husband, and Jack went off with his new princess. Perhaps they lived happily ever after.

The Witch’s Revenge said to Small, “We have no wife for you.”

Small shrugged. “I’m still too young,” he said.

But try as hard as he can, Small is getting older now. The catskin barely fits across his shoulders. The buttons strain when he fastens them. His grown-up fur – his people fur – is coming in. At night he dreams.

The witch his mother’s Spanish heel beats against the pane of glass. The princess hangs in the briar. She’s holding up her dress, so he can see the catfur down there. Now she’s under the house. She wants to marry him, but the house will fall down if he kisses her. He and Flora are children again, in the witch’s house. Flora lifts up her skirt and says, see my pussy? There’s a cat down there, peeking out at him, but it doesn’t look like any cat he’s ever seen. He says to Flora, I have a pussy too. But his isn’t the same.

At last he knows what happened to the little, starving, naked thing in the forest, where it went. It crawled into his catskin, while he was asleep, and then it climbed right inside him, his Small skin, and now it is huddled in his chest, still cold and sad and hungry. It is eating him from the inside, and getting bigger, and one day there will be no Small left at all, only that nameless, hungry child, wearing a Small skin.

Small moans in his sleep.

There are ants in The Witch’s Revenge’s skin, leaking out of her seams, and they march down into the sheets and pinch at him, down under his arms, and between his legs where his fur is growing in, and it hurts, it aches and aches. He dreams that the Witch’s Revenge wakes now, and comes and licks him all over, until the pain melts. The pane of glass melts. The ants march away again on their long, greased thread.

“What do you want?” says The Witch’s Revenge.

Small is no longer dreaming. He says, “I want my mother!”

Light from the moon comes down through the window over their bed. The Witch’s Revenge is very beautiful – she looks like a Queen, like a knife, like a burning house, a cat – in the moonlight. Her fur shines. Her whiskers stand out like pulled stitches, wax and thread. The Witch’s Revenge says, “Your mother is dead.”

“Take off your skin,” Small says. He’s crying and The Witch’s Revenge licks his tears away. Small’s skin pricks all over, and down under the house, something small wails and wails. “Give me back my mother,” he says.

“Oh, my darling,” says his mother, the witch, The Witch’s Revenge, “I can’t do that. I’m full of ants. Take off my skin, and all the ants will spill out, and there will be nothing left of me.”

Small says, “Why have you left me all alone?”

His mother the witch says, “I’ve never left you alone, not even for a minute. I sewed up my death in a catskin so I could stay with you.”

“Take it off! Let me see you!” Small says. He pulls at the sheet on the bed, as if it were his mother’s catskin.

The Witch’s Revenge shakes her head. She trembles and beats her tail back and forth. She says, “How can you ask me for such a thing, and how can I say no to you? Do you know what you’re asking me for? Tomorrow night. Ask me again, tomorrow night.”

And Small has to be satisfied with that. All night long, Small combs his mother’s fur. His fingers are looking for the seams in her catskin. When The Witch’s Revenge yawns, he peers inside her mouth, hoping to catch a glimpse of his mother’s face. He can feel himself becoming smaller and smaller. In the morning he will be so small that when he tries to put his catskin on, he can barely do up the buttons. He’ll be so small, so sharp, you might mistake him for an ant, and when The Witch’s Revenge yawns, he’ll creep inside her mouth, he’ll go down into her belly, he’ll go find his mother. If he can, he’ll help his mother cut her catskin open so that she can get out again and come and live in the world with him, and if she won’t come out, then he won’t, either. He’ll live there, the way that sailors learn to live, inside the belly of fish who have eaten them, and keep house for his mother inside the house of her skin.

This is the end of the story. The Princess Margaret grows up to kill witches and cats. If she doesn’t, then someone else will have to do it. There is no such thing as witches, and there is no such thing as cats, either, only people dressed up in catskin suits. They have their reasons, and who is to say that they might not live that way, happily ever after, until the ants have carried away all of the time that there is, to build something new and better out of it?

JOE HILL

20th Century Ghost

JOE HILL LIVES IN NEW HAMPSHIRE with his wife, three boys and a worthless dog. His stories have been accepted by such journals as The High Plains Literary Review, The Clackamas Review and Implosion magazine. His story “Pop Art”, which concerns the life and tragic death of an inflatable boy, appeared in an anthology of Jewish Magic Realism entitled With Signs and Wonders.

“20th Century Ghost” was the winner of the 2002 New Century Writer Short Fiction Contest. His prize was the Ray Bradbury Fellowship. Hill is also a past recipient of the A.E. Coppard Long Fiction Prize.

“I was hoping to write a story as terrifying and memorable as Kelly Link’s ‘The Specialist’s Hat’,” reveals the author. “Anyone who’s a fan of the genre owes it to themselves to pick up her collection, Stranger Things Happen, and read it immediately.

“I didn’t succeed, by the way . . . but I’m awfully proud of the story all the same.”

THE BEST TIME TO SEE HER is when the place is almost full. there is the well-known story of the man who wanders in for a late show, and finds the vast six-hundred-seat theater almost deserted, halfway through the movie, he glances around and discovers her sitting next to him, in a chair that only moments before had been empty, her witness stares at her. she turns her head and stares back, she has a nosebleed, her eyes are wide, stricken. My head hurts, she whispers. I have to step out for a moment. Will you tell me what I miss? It is in this instant that the person looking at her realizes she is as insubstantial as the shifting blue ray of light cast by the projector. It is possible to see the next seat over through her body. As she rises from her chair she fades away.

Then there is the story about the group of friends who go into the Rosebud together on a Thursday night. One of the bunch sits down next to a woman by herself, a woman in blue. When the movie doesn’t start right away, the person who sat down beside her decides to make conversation. What’s playing tomorrow? he asks her. The theater is dark tomorrow, she whispers. This is the last show. Shortly after the movie begins she vanishes. On the drive home, the man who spoke to her is killed in a car accident.

These, and many of the other best-known legends of the Rosebud, are false . . . the ghost stories of people who have seen too many horror movies and who think they know exactly how a ghost story should be.

Alec Sheldon, who was one of the first to see Imogene Gilchrist, owns the Rosebud, and at seventy-three still operates the projector most nights. He can always tell, after talking to someone for just a few moments, whether or not they really saw her, but what he knows he keeps to himself, and he never publicly discredits anyone’s story . . . that would be bad for business.

He knows, though, that anyone who says they could see right through her didn’t see her at all. Some of the put-on artists talk about blood pouring from her nose, her ears, her eyes; they say she gave them a pleading look, and asked for them to find somebody, to bring help. But she doesn’t bleed that way, and when she wants to talk it isn’t to tell someone to bring a doctor. A lot of the pretenders begin their stories by saying, You’ll never believe what I just saw. They’re right. He won’t, although he will listen to all that they have to say, with a patient, even encouraging smile.

The ones who have seen her don’t come looking for Alec to tell him about it. More often than not he finds them, comes across them wandering the lobby on unsteady legs; they’ve had a bad shock, they don’t feel well. They need to sit down a while. They don’t ever say, You won’t believe what I just saw. The experience is still too immediate. The idea that they might not be believed doesn’t occur to them until later. Often they are in a state that might be described as subdued, even submissive. When he thinks about the effect she has on those who encounter her, he thinks of Steven Greenberg coming out of The Birds one cool Sunday afternoon in 1963. Steven was just twelve then, and it would be another twelve years before he went and got so famous; he was at that time not a golden boy, but just a boy.

Alec was in the alley behind the Rosebud, having a smoke, when he heard the fire door into the theater clang open behind him. He turned to see a lanky kid leaning in the doorway – just leaning there, not going in or out. The boy squinted into the harsh white sunshine, with the confused, wondering look of a small child who has just been shaken out of a deep sleep. Alec could see past him into a darkness filled with the shrill sounds of thousands of squeaking sparrows. Beneath that, he could hear a few in the audience stirring restlessly, beginning to complain.

Hey kid, in or out? Alec said. You’re lettin’ the light in.

The kid – Alec didn’t know his name then – turned his head and stared back into the theater for a long, searching moment. Then he stepped out and the door settled shut behind him, closing gently on its pneumatic hinge. And still he didn’t go anywhere, didn’t say anything. The Rosebud had been showing The Birds for two weeks, and although Alec had seen others walk out before it was over, none of the early exits had been twelve-year-old boys. It was the sort of film most boys of that age waited all year to see, but who knew? Maybe the kid had a weak stomach.

I left my Coke in the theater, the kid said, his voice distant, almost toneless. I still had a lot of it left.

You want to go back in and look for it?

And the kid lifted his eyes and gave Alec a bright look of alarm, and then Alec knew. No.

Alec finished his cigarette, pitched it.

I sat with the dead lady, the kid blurted.

Alec nodded.

She talked to me.

What did she say?

He looked at the kid again, and found him staring back with eyes that were now wide and round with disbelief.

I need someone to talk to she said. When I get excited about a movie I need to talk.

Alec knows when she talks to someone she always wants to talk about the movies. She usually addresses herself to men, although sometimes she will sit and talk with a woman – Lois Weisel most notably. Alec has been working on a theory of what it is that causes her to show herself. He has been keeping notes in a yellow legal pad. He has a list of who she appeared to and in what movie and when (Leland King, Harold and Maude, ’72; Joel Harlowe, Eraserhead, ’76; Hal Lash, Blood Simple, ’84; and all the others). He has, over the years, developed clear ideas about what conditions are most likely to produce her, although the specifics of his theory are constantly being revised.

As a young man, thoughts of her were always on his mind, or simmering just beneath the surface; she was his first and most strongly felt obsession. Then for a while he was better – when the theater was a success, and he was an important businessman in the community, chamber of commerce, town planning board. In those days he could go weeks without thinking about her; and then someone would see her, or pretend to have seen her, and stir the whole thing up again.

But following his divorce – she kept the house, he moved into the one-bedroom under the theater – and not long after the eight-screen cineplex opened just outside of town, he began to obsess again, less about her than about the theater itself. (Is there any difference, though? Not really, he supposes, thoughts of one always circling around to thoughts of the other.) He never imagined he would be so old and owe so much money. He has a hard time sleeping, his head is so full of ideas – wild, desperate ideas – about how to keep the theater from failing. He keeps himself awake thinking about income, staff, saleable assets. And when he can’t think about money anymore, he tries to picture where he will go if the theater closes. He envisions an old folk’s home, mattresses that reek of Ben Gay, hunched geezers with their dentures out, sitting in a musty common room watching daytime sitcoms; he sees a place where he will passively fade away, like wallpaper that gets too much sunlight and slowly loses its color.

This is bad. What is more terrible is when he tries to imagine what will happen to her if the Rosebud closes. He sees the theater stripped of its seats, an echoing empty space, drifts of dust in the corners, petrified wads of gum stuck fast to the cement. Local teens have broken in to drink and screw; he sees scattered liquor bottles, ignorant graffiti on the walls, a single, grotesque, used condom on the floor in front of the stage. He sees the lonely and violated place where she will fade away.

Or won’t fade . . . the worst thought of all.

Alec saw her – spoke to her – for the first time when he was fifteen, six days after he learned that his older brother had been killed in the South Pacific. President Truman had sent a letter expressing his condolences. It was a form letter, but the signature on the bottom – that was really his. Alec hadn’t cried yet. He knew, years later, that he spent that week in a state of shock, that he had lost the person he loved most in the world and it had badly traumatized him. But in 1945 no one used the word trauma to talk about emotions, and the only kind of shock anyone discussed was “shell”.

He told his mother that he was going to school in the mornings. He wasn’t going to school. He was shuffling around downtown looking for trouble. He shoplifted candy bars from the American Luncheonette and ate them out at the empty shoe factory – the place closed down, all the men off in France, or the Pacific. With sugar zipping in his blood, he launched rocks through the windows, trying out his fastball.

He wandered through the alley behind the Rosebud and looked at the door into the theater and saw that it wasn’t firmly shut. The side facing the alley was a smooth metal surface, no door handle, but he was able to pry it open with his fingernails. He came in on the 3:30 p.m. show, the place crowded, mostly kids under the age of ten and their mothers. The fire door was halfway up the theater, recessed into the wall, set in shadow. No one saw him come in. He slouched up the aisle and found a seat in the back.

“Jimmy Stewart went to the Pacific,” his brother had told him while he was home on leave, before he shipped out. They were throwing the ball around out back. “Mr Smith is probably carpet bombing the red fuck out of Tokyo right this instant. How’s that for a crazy thought?” Alec’s brother Ray was a self-described film freak. He and Alec went to every single movie that opened during his month-long leave: Bataan, The Fighting Seabees, Going My Way.

Alec waited through an episode of a serial concerning the latest adventures of a singing cowboy with long eyelashes and a mouth so dark his lips were black. It failed to interest him. He picked his nose and wondered how to get a Coke with no money. The feature started.

At first Alec couldn’t figure out what the hell kind of movie it was, although right off he had the sinking feeling it was going to be a musical. First the members of an orchestra filed onto a stage against a bland blue backdrop. Then a starched shirt came out and started telling the audience all about the brand-new kind of entertainment they were about to see. When he started blithering about Walt Disney and his artists, Alec began to slide downwards in his seat, his head sinking between his shoulders. The orchestra surged into big dramatic blasts of strings and horns. In another moment his worst fears were realized. It wasn’t just a musical; it was also a cartoon. Of course it was a cartoon, he should have known – the place crammed with little kids and their mothers – a 3:30 show in the middle of the week that led off with an episode of The Lipstick Kid, singing sissy of the high plains.

After a while he lifted his head and peeked at the screen through his fingers, watched some abstract animation for a while: silver raindrops falling against a background of roiling smoke, rays of molten light shimmering across an ashen sky. Eventually he straightened up to watch in a more comfortable position. He was not quite sure what he was feeling. He was bored, but interested too, almost a little mesmerized. It would have been hard not to watch. The visuals came at him in a steady hypnotic assault: ribs of red light, whirling stars, kingdoms of cloud glowing in the crimson light of a setting sun.

The little kids were shifting around in their seats. Alec heard a little girl whisper loudly, “Mom, when is there going to be Mickey?” For the kids it was like being in school. But by the time the movie hit the next segment, the orchestra shifting from Bach to Tchaikovsky, he was sitting all the way up, even leaning forward slightly, his forearms resting on his knees. He watched fairies flitting through a dark forest, touching flowers and spiderwebs with enchanted wands and spreading sheets of glittering, incandescent dew. He felt a kind of baffled wonder watching them fly around, a curious feeling of yearning. He had the sudden idea he could sit there and watch forever.

“I could sit in this theater forever,” whispered someone beside him. It was a girl’s voice. “Just sit here and watch and never leave.”

Alec didn’t know there was someone sitting beside him, and jumped to hear a voice so close. He thought – no, he knew – that when he’d sat down the seats on either side of him were empty. He turned his head.

She was only a few years older than him, couldn’t have been more than twenty, and his first thought was that she was very close to being a fox; his heart beat a little faster to have such a girl speaking to him. He was already thinking don’t blow it. She wasn’t looking at him. She was staring up at the movie, and smiling in a way that seemed to express both admiration and a child’s dazed wonder. Alec wanted desperately to say something smooth, but his voice was trapped in his throat.

She leaned towards him without glancing away from the screen, her left hand just touching the side of his arm on the armrest.

“I’m sorry to bother you,” she whispered. “When I get excited about a movie I want to talk. I can’t help it.”

In the next moment Alec became aware of two things, more or less simultaneously. The first was that the girl’s hand against his arm was cold. He could feel the deadly chill of it through his sweater, a cold so palpable it startled him a little. The second thing he noticed was a single teardrop of blood on her upper lip, under her left nostril.

“You have a nosebleed,” he said, in a voice that was too loud. He immediately wished he hadn’t said it. You only had one opportunity to impress a fox like this. He should have found something for her to wipe her nose with, and handed it to her, murmured something real Sinatra: You’re bleeding, here. He pushed his hands into his pockets, feeling for something she could wipe her nose with. He didn’t have anything.

But she didn’t seem to have heard him, didn’t seem the slightest bit aware he had spoken. She absent-mindedly brushed the back of one hand under her nose, leaving a dark smear of blood over her upper lip . . . and Alec froze with his hands in his pockets, staring at her. It was the first he knew there was something wrong about the girl sitting next to him, something slightly off about the scene playing out between them. He drew himself up instinctively and slightly away from her without even knowing he was doing it.

She laughed at something in the movie, her voice soft, breathless. Then she leaned towards him and whispered, “This is all wrong for kids. Harry Parcells loves this theater but he plays all the wrong movies, Harry Parcells who runs the place?”

There was a fresh runner of blood leaking from her left nostril and blood on her lips, but by then Alec’s attention had turned to something else. They were sitting directly under the projector beam, and there were moths and other insects whirring through the blue column of light above. A white moth had landed on her face. It was crawling up her cheek. She didn’t notice, and Alec didn’t mention it to her. There wasn’t enough air in his chest to speak.

She whispered, “He thinks just because it’s a cartoon they’ll like it. It’s funny he could be so crazy for movies and know so little about them. He won’t run the place much longer.”

She glanced at him and smiled. She had blood staining her teeth. Alec couldn’t get up. A second moth, ivory white, landed just inside the delicate cup of her ear.

“Your brother Ray would have loved this,” she said.

“Get away,” Alec whispered hoarsely.

“You belong here, Alec,” she said. “You belong here with me.”

He moved at last, shoved himself up out of his seat. The first moth was crawling into her hair. He thought he heard himself moan, just faintly. He started to move away from her. She was staring at him. He backed a few feet down the aisle and bumped into some kid’s legs, and the kid yelped. He glanced away from her for an instant, down at a fattish boy in a striped T-shirt who was glaring back at him: Watch where you’re going, meathead.

Alec looked at her again and now she was slumped very low in her seat. Her head rested on her left shoulder. Her legs hung lewdly open. There were thick strings of blood, dried and crusted, running from her nostrils, bracketing her thin-lipped mouth. Her eyes were rolled back in her head. In her lap was an overturned carton of popcorn.

Alec thought he was going to scream. He didn’t scream. She was perfectly motionless. He looked from her to the kid he had almost tripped over. The fat kid glanced casually in the direction of the dead girl, showed no reaction. He turned his gaze back to Alec, his eyes questioning, one corner of his mouth turned up in a derisive sneer.

“Sir,” said a woman, the fat kid’s mother. “Can you move, please? We’re trying to watch the movie.”

Alec threw another look towards the dead girl, only the chair where she had been was empty, the seat folded up. He started to retreat, bumping into knees, almost falling over once, grabbing someone for support. Then suddenly the room erupted into cheers, applause. His heart throbbed. He cried out, looked wildly around. It was Mickey, up there on the screen in droopy red robes – Mickey had arrived at last.

He backed up the aisle, swatted through the padded leather doors into the lobby. He flinched at the late-afternoon brightness, narrowed his eyes to squints. He felt dangerously sick. Then someone was holding his shoulder, turning him, walking him across the room, over to the staircase up to balcony level. Alec sat down on the bottom step, sat down hard.

“Take a minute,” someone said. “Don’t get up. Catch your breath. Do you think you’re going to throw up?”

Alec shook his head.

“Because if you think you’re going to throw up, hold on till I can get you a bag. It isn’t so easy to get stains out of this carpet. Also when people smell vomit they don’t want popcorn.”

Whoever it was lingered beside him for another moment, then without a word turned and shuffled away. He returned maybe a minute later.

“Here. On the house. Drink it slow. The fizz will help with your stomach.”

Alec took a wax cup sweating beads of cold water, found the straw with his mouth, sipped icy cola bubbly with carbonation. He looked up. The man standing over him was tall and slope-shouldered, with a sagging roll around the middle. His hair was cropped to a dark bristle and his eyes, behind his absurdly thick glasses, were small and pale and uneasy. He wore his slacks too high, the waistband up around his navel.

Alec said, “There’s a dead girl in there.” He didn’t recognize his own voice.

The color drained out of the big man’s face and he cast an unhappy glance back at the doors into the theater. “She’s never been in a matinee before. I thought only night shows, I thought – for God’s sake, it’s a kid’s movie. What’s she trying to do to me?”

Alec opened his mouth, didn’t even know what he was going to say, something about the dead girl, but what came out instead was: “It’s not really a kid’s film.”

The big man shot him a look of mild annoyance. “Sure it is. It’s Walt Disney.”

Alec stared at him for a long moment, then said, “You must be Harry Parcells.”

“Yeah. How’d you know?”

“Lucky guesser,” Alec said. “Thanks for the Coke.”

Alec followed Harry Parcells behind the concessions counter, through a door and out onto a landing at the bottom of some stairs. Harry opened a door to the right and let them into a small, cluttered office. The floor was crowded with steel film cans. Fading film posters covered the walls, overlapping in places: Boys Town, David Copperfield, Gone With the Wind.

“Sorry she scared you,” Harry said, collapsing into the office chair behind his desk. “You sure you’re all right? You look kind of peaked.”

“Who is she?”

“Something blew out in her brain,” he said, and pointed a finger at his left temple, as if pretending to hold a gun to his head. “Four years ago. During The Wizard of Oz. The very first show. It was the most terrible thing. She used to come in all the time. She was my steadiest customer. We used to talk, kid around with each other—” His voice wandered off, confused and distraught. He squeezed his plump hands together on the desktop in front of him, said finally, “Now she’s trying to bankrupt me.”

“You’ve seen her.” It wasn’t a question.

Harry nodded. “A few months after she passed away. She told me I don’t belong here. I don’t know why she wants to scare me away when we used to get along so great. Did she tell you to go away?”

“Why is she here?” Alec said. His voice was still hoarse, and it was a strange kind of question to ask. For a while, Harry just peered at him through his thick glasses with what seemed to be total incomprehension.

Then he shook his head and said, “She’s unhappy. She died before the end of The Wizard and she’s still miserable about it. I understand. That was a good movie. I’d feel robbed too.”

“Hello?” someone shouted from the lobby. “Anyone there?”

“Just a minute,” Harry called out. He gave Alec a pained look. “My concession-stand girl told me she was quitting yesterday. No notice or anything.”

“Was it the ghost?”

“Heck, no. One of her paste-on nails fell into someone’s food so I told her not to wear them anymore. No one wants to get a fingernail in a mouthful of popcorn. She told me a lot of boys she knows come in here and if she can’t wear her nails she wasn’t going to work for me no more so now I got to do everything myself.” He said this as he was coming around the desk. He had something in one hand, a newspaper clipping. “This will tell you about her.” And then he gave Alec a look – it wasn’t a glare exactly, but there was at least a measure of dull warning in it – and he added: “Don’t run off on me. We still have to talk.”

He went out, Alec staring after him, wondering what that last funny look was about. He glanced down at the clipping. It was an obituary – her obituary. The paper was creased, the edges worn, the ink faded; it looked as if it had been handled often. Her name was Imogene Gilchrist, she had died at nineteen, she worked at Water Street Stationery. She was survived by her parents, Colm and Mary. Friends and family spoke of her pretty laugh, her infectious sense of humor. They talked about how she loved the movies. She saw all the movies, saw them on opening day, first show. She could recite the entire cast from almost any picture you cared to name, it was like a party trick – she even knew the names of actors who had had just one line. She was president of the drama club in high school, acted in all the plays, built sets, arranged lighting. “I always thought she’d be a movie star,” said her drama professor. “She had those looks and that laugh. All she needed was someone to point a camera at her and she would have been famous.”

When Alec finished reading he looked around. The office was still empty. He looked back down at the obituary, rubbing the corner of the clipping between thumb and forefinger. He felt sick at the unfairness of it, and for a moment there was a pressure at the back of his eyeballs, a tingling, and he had the ridiculous idea that he might start crying. He felt ill to live in a world where a nineteen-year-old girl full of laughter and life could be struck down like that, for no reason. The intensity of what he was feeling didn’t really make sense, considering he had never known her when she was alive; didn’t make sense until he thought about Ray, thought about Harry Truman’s letter to his mom, the words died with bravery, defending freedom, America is proud of him. He thought about how Ray had taken him to The Fighting Seabees, right here in this theater, and they sat together with their feet up on the seats in front of them, their shoulders touching. “Look at John Wayne,” Ray said. “They oughta have one bomber to carry him, and another one to carry his balls.” The stinging in his eyes was so intense that he couldn’t stand it, and it hurt to breathe. He rubbed at his wet nose, and focused intently on crying as soundlessly as possible.

He wiped his face with the tail of his shirt, put the obituary on Harry Parcells’s desk, looked around. He glanced at the posters, and the stacks of steel cans. There was a curl of film in the corner of the room, just eight or so frames – he wondered where it had come from – and he picked it up for a closer look. He saw a girl closing her eyes and lifting her face, in a series of little increments, to kiss the man holding her in a tight embrace; giving herself to him. Alec wanted to be kissed that way sometime. It gave him a curious thrill to be holding an actual piece of a movie. On impulse he stuck it into his pocket.

He wandered out of the office and back onto the landing at the bottom of the stairwell. He peered into the lobby. He expected to see Harry behind the concession stand, serving a customer, but there was no one there. Alec hesitated, wondering where he might have gone. While he was thinking it over, he became aware of a gentle whirring sound coming from the top of the stairs. He looked up them, and it clicked – the projector. Harry was changing reels.

Alec climbed the steps and entered the projection room, a dark compartment with a low ceiling. A pair of square windows looked into the theater below. The projector itself was pointed through one of them, a big machine made of brushed stainless steel, with the word VITAPHONE stamped on the case. Harry stood on the far side of it, leaning forward, peering out the same window through which the projector was casting its beam. He heard Alec at the door, shot him a brief look. Alec expected to be ordered away, but Harry said nothing, only nodded and returned to his silent watch over the theater.

Alec made his way to the VITAPHONE, picking his way carefully through the dark. There was a window to the left of the projector that looked down into the theater. Alec stared at it for a long moment, not sure if he dared, and then put his face close to the glass and peered into the darkened room beneath.

The theater was lit a deep midnight blue by the image on the screen: the conductor again, the orchestra in silhouette. The announcer was introducing the next piece. Alec lowered his gaze and scanned the rows of seats. It wasn’t much trouble to find where he had been sitting, an empty cluster of seats close to the back, on the right. He half-expected to see her there, slid down in her chair, face tilted up towards the ceiling and blood all down it – her eyes turned perhaps to stare up at him. The thought of seeing her filled him with both dread and a strange nervous exhilaration, and when he realized she wasn’t there, he was a little surprised by his own disappointment.

Music began: at first the wavering skirl of violins, rising and falling in swoops, and then a series of menacing bursts from the brass section, sounds of an almost military nature. Alec’s gaze rose once more to the screen – rose and held there. He felt a chill race through him. His forearms prickled with gooseflesh. On the screen the dead were rising from their graves, an army of white and watery specters pouring out of the ground and into the night above. A square-shouldered demon, squatting on a mountain top, beckoned them. They came to him, their ripped white shrouds fluttering around their gaunt bodies, their faces anguished, sorrowing. Alec caught his breath and held it, watched with a feeling of mingled shock and wonder rising in him.

The demon split a crack in the mountain, opened Hell. Fires leaped, the Damned jumped and danced, and Alec knew what he was seeing was about the war. It was about his brother dead for no reason in the South Pacific, America is proud of him, it was about bodies damaged beyond repair, bodies sloshing this way and that while they rolled in the surf at the edge of a beach somewhere in the Far East, getting soggy, bloating. It was about Imogene Gilchrist, who loved the movies and died with her legs spread open and her brain swelled full of blood and she was nineteen, her parents were Colm and Mary. It was about young people, young healthy bodies, punched full of holes and the life pouring out in arterial gouts, not a single dream realized, not a single ambition achieved. It was about young people who loved and were loved in return, going away and not coming back, and the pathetic little remembrances that marked their departure, my prayers are with you today, Harry Truman, and I always thought she’d be a movie star.

A church bell rang somewhere, a long way off. Alec looked up. It was part of the film. The dead were fading away. The churlish and square-shouldered demon covered himself with his vast black wings, hiding his face from the coming of dawn. A line of robed men moved across the land below, carrying softly glowing torches. The music moved in gentle pulses. The sky was a cold, shimmering blue, light rising in it, the glow of sunrise spreading through the branches of birch trees and northern pine. Alec watched with a feeling like religious awe in him until the film was over.

“I liked Dumbo better,” Harry said.

He flipped a switch on the wall, and a bare light bulb came on, filling the projection room with harsh white light. The last of the film squiggled through the VITAPHONE and came out at the other end, where it was being collected on one of the reels. The trailing end whirled around and around and went slap, slap, slap. Harry turned the projector off, looked at Alec over the top of the machine.

“You look better. You got your color back.”

“What did you want to talk about?” Alec remembered the vague look of warning Harry had given him when he told him not to go anywhere, and the thought occurred to him now that maybe Harry knew he had slipped in without buying a ticket, that maybe they were about to have a problem.

But Harry said, “I’m prepared to offer you a refund or two free passes to the show of your choice. Best I can do.”

Alec stared. It was a long time before he could reply.

“For what?”

“For what? To shut up about it. You know what it would do to this place if it got out about her? I got reasons to think people don’t want to pay money to sit in the dark with a chatty dead girl.”

Alec shook his head. It surprised him that Harry thought it would keep people away, if it got out that the Rosebud was haunted. Alec had an idea it would have the opposite effect. People were happy to pay for the opportunity to experience a little terror in the dark – if they weren’t there wouldn’t be any business in horror pictures. And then he remembered what Imogene Gilchrist had said to him about Harry Parcells: He won’t run the place much longer.

“So what do you want?” Harry asked. “You want passes?”

Alec shook his head.

“Refund, then.”

“No.”

Harry froze with his hand on his wallet, flashed Alec a surprised, hostile look. “What do you want then?”

“How about a job? You need someone to sell popcorn. I promise not to wear my paste-on nails to work.”

Harry stared at him for a long moment without any reply, then slowly removed his hand from his back pocket.

“Can you work weekends?” he asked.

In October, Alec hears that Steven Greenberg is back in New Hampshire, shooting exteriors for his new movie on the grounds of Phillips Exeter Academy – something with Tom Hanks and Haley Joel Osment, a misunderstood teacher inspiring troubled kid-geniuses. Alec doesn’t need to know any more than that to know it smells like Steven might be on his way to winning another Oscar. Alec, though, preferred the earlier work, Steven’s fantasies and suspense thrillers.

He considers driving down to have a look, wonders if he could talk his way onto the set – Oh yes, I knew Steven when he was a boy – wonders if he might even be allowed to speak with Steven himself. But he soon dismisses the idea. There must be hundreds of people in this part of New England who could claim to have known Steven back in those days, and it isn’t as if they were ever close. They only really had that one conversation, the day Steven saw her. Nothing before; nothing much after.

So it is a surprise when one Friday afternoon close to the end of the month Alec takes a call from Steven’s personal assistant, a cheerful, efficient-sounding woman named Marcia. She wants Alec to know that Steven was hoping to see him, and if he can drop in – is Sunday morning all right? – there will be a set pass waiting for him at Main Building, on the grounds of the Academy. They’ll expect to see him around 10:00 a.m., she says in her bright chirp of a voice, before ringing off. It is not until well after the conversation has ended that Alec realizes he has received not an invitation but a summons.

A goateed PA meets Alec at Main and walks him out to where they’re filming. Alec stands with thirty or so others and watches from a distance while Hanks and Osment stroll together across a green quad littered with fallen leaves, Hanks nodding pensively while Osment talks and gestures. In front of them is a dolly, with two men and their camera equipment sitting on it and two men pulling it. Steven and a small group of others stand off to the side, Steven observing the shot on a video monitor. Alec has never been on a movie set before, and he watches the work of professional make-believe with great pleasure.

After Steven has what he wants, and has talked with Hanks for a few minutes about the shot, he starts over towards the crowd where Alec is standing. There is a shy, searching look on his face. Then he sees Alec and opens his mouth in a gap-toothed grin, lifts one hand in a wave, looks for a moment very much the lanky boy again. He asks Alec if he wants to walk to craft services with him, for a chili dog and a soda.

On the walk Steven seems anxious, jiggling the change in his pockets and shooting sideways looks at Alec. Alec knows he wants to talk about Imogene, but can’t figure how to broach the subject. When at last he begins to talk, it’s about his memories of The Rosebud. He talks about how he loved the place, talks about all the great pictures he saw for the first time there. Alec smiles and nods, but is secretly a little astounded at the depths of Steven’s self-deception. Steven never went back after The Birds. He didn’t see any of the movies he says he saw there.

At last, Steven stammers, What’s going to happen to the place after you retire? Not that you should retire! I just mean – do you think you’ll run the place much longer?

Not much longer, Alec replies – it’s the truth – but says no more. He is concerned not to degrade himself asking for a handout – although the thought is in him that this is in fact why he came. That ever since receiving Steven’s invitation to visit the set he had been fantasizing that they would talk about the Rosebud, and that Steven, who is so wealthy, and who loves movies so much, might be persuaded to throw Alec a life preserver.

The old movie houses are national treasures, Steven says. I own a couple, believe it or not. I run them as revival joints. I’d love to do something like that with the Rosebud someday. That’s a dream of mine you know.

Here is his chance, the opportunity, that Alec was not willing to admit he was hoping for. But instead of telling him that the Rosebud is in desperate straits, sure to close, Alec changes the subject . . . ultimately lacks the stomach to do what must be done.

What’s your next project? Alec asks.

After this? I was considering a remake, Steven says, and gives him another of those shifty sideways looks from the corners of his eyes. You’d never guess what. Then, suddenly, he reaches out, touches Alec’s arm. Being back in New Hampshire has really stirred some things up for me. I had a dream about our old friend, would you believe it?

Our old— Alec starts, then realizes who he means.

I had a dream the place was closed. There was a chain on the front doors, and boards in the windows. I dreamed I heard a girl crying inside, Steven says, and grins nervously. Isn’t that the funniest thing?

Alec drives home with a cool sweat on his face, ill at ease. He doesn’t know why he didn’t say anything, why he couldn’t say anything; Greenberg was practically begging to give him some money. Alec thinks bitterly that he has become a very foolish and useless old man.

At the theater there are nine messages on Alec’s machine. The first is from Lois Weisel, who Alec has not heard from in years. Her voice is brittle. She says, Hi Alec, Lois Weisel at B.U. As if he could have forgotten her. Lois saw Imogene in Midnight Cowboy. Now she teaches documentary film-making to graduate students. Alec knows these two things are not unconnected, just as it is no accident that Steven Greenberg became what he became. Will you give me a call? I wanted to talk to you about – I just – will you call me? Then she laughs, a strange, frightened kind of laugh, and says, This is crazy. She exhales heavily. I just wanted to find out if something was happening to the Rosebud. Something bad. So – call me.

The next message is from Dana Lewellyn who saw her in The Wild Bunch. The message after that is from Shane Leonard, who saw Imogene in American Graffiti. Darren Campbell, who saw her in Reservoir Dogs. Some of them talk about the dream, a dream identical to the one that Steven Greenberg described, boarded over windows, chain on the door, girl crying. Some only say they want to talk. By the time the answering-machine tape has played its way to the end, Alec is sitting on the floor of his office, his hands balled into fists – an old man weeping helplessly.

Perhaps twenty people have seen Imogene in the last twenty-five years, and nearly half of them have left messages for Alec to call. The other half will get in touch with him over the next few days, to ask about the Rosebud, to talk about their dream. Alec will speak with almost everyone living who has ever seen her, all of those whom Imogene felt compelled to speak to: a drama professor, the manager of a video rental store, a retired financier who in his youth wrote angry, comical film reviews for The Lansdowne Record, and others. A whole congregation of people who flocked to the Rosebud instead of to church on Sundays, those whose prayers were written by Paddy Chayefsky and whose hymnals were composed by John Williams and whose intensity of faith is a call that Imogene is helpless to resist. Alec himself.

Steven’s accountant handles the fine details of the fund-raiser to save the Rosebud. The place is closed for three weeks to refurbish. New seats, state-of-the-art sound. A dozen artisans put up scaffolding and work with little paintbrushes to restore the crumbling plaster molding on the ceiling. Steven adds personnel to run the day-to-day operations. He has bought a controlling interest, and the place is really his now, although Alec has agreed to stay on to manage things for a little while.

Lois Weisel drives up three times a week to film a documentary about the renovation, using her grad students in various capacities, as electricians, sound people, grunts. Steven wants a gala reopening to celebrate the Rosebud’s past. When Alec hears what he wants to show first – a double feature of The Wizard of Oz and The Birds – his forearms prickle with goose-flesh; but he makes no argument.

On reopening night, the place is crowded like it hasn’t been since Titanic. The local news is there to film people walking inside in their best suits. Of course, Steven is there, which is why all the excitement . . . although Alec thinks he would have a sell-out even without Steven, that people would have come just to see the results of the renovation. Alec and Steven pose for photographs, the two of them standing under the marquee in their tuxedoes, shaking hands. Steven’s tuxedo is Armani, bought for the occasion. Alec got married in his.

Steven leans into him, pressing a shoulder against his chest. What are you going to do with yourself?

Before Steven’s money, Alec would have sat behind the counter handing out tickets, and then gone up himself to start the projector. But Steven hired someone to sell tickets and run the projector. Alec says, Guess I’m going to sit and watch the movie.

Save me a seat, Steven says. I might not get in until The Birds, though. I have some more press to do out here.

Lois Weisel has a camera set up at the front of the theater, turned to point at the audience, and loaded with high speed film for shooting in the dark. She films the crowd at different times, recording their reactions to The Wizard of Oz. This was to be the conclusion of her documentary – a packed house enjoying a twentieth-century classic in this lovingly restored old movie palace – but her movie wasn’t going to end like she thought it would.

In the first shots on Lois’s reel it is possible to see Alec sitting in the back left of the theater, his face turned up towards the screen, his glasses flashing blue in the darkness. The seat to the left of him, on the aisle, is empty, the only empty seat in the house. Sometimes he can be seen eating popcorn. Other times he is just sitting there watching, his mouth open slightly, an almost worshipful look on his face.

Then in one shot he has turned sideways to face the seat to his left. He has been joined by a woman in blue. He is leaning over her. They are unmistakably kissing. No one around them pays them any mind. The Wizard of Oz is ending. We know this because we can hear Judy Garland, reciting the same five words over and over in a soft, yearning voice, saying – well, you know what she is saying. They are only the loveliest five words ever said in all of film.

In the shot immediately following this one, the house lights are up, and there is a crowd of people gathered around Alec’s body, slumped heavily in his seat. Steven Greenberg is in the aisle, yelping hysterically for someone to bring a doctor. A child is crying. The rest of the crowd generates a low rustling buzz of excited conversation. But never mind this shot. The footage that came just before it is much more interesting.

It is only a few seconds long, this shot of Alec and his unidentified companion – a few hundred frames of film – but it is the shot that will make Lois Weisel’s reputation, not to mention a large sum of money. It will appear on television shows about unexplained phenomena, it will be watched and rewatched at gatherings of those fascinated with the supernatural. It will be studied, written about, debunked, confirmed, and celebrated. Let’s see it again.

He leans over her. She turns her face up to his, and closes her eyes and she is very young and she is giving herself to him completely. Alec has removed his glasses. He is touching her lightly at the waist. This is the way people dream of being kissed, a movie-star kiss. Watching them, one almost wishes the moment would never end. And over all this, Dorothy’s small, brave voice fills the darkened theater. She is saying something about home. She is saying something everyone knows.

KIM NEWMAN

Egyptian Avenue

KIM NEWMAN HAS WON the Bram Stoker Award, the British Fantasy Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the Children of the Night Award, the Fiction Award of the Lord Ruthven Assembly and the International Horror Critics Guild Award.

His novels include The Night Mayor, Bad Dreams, Jago, The Quorum, Back in the USSA (with Eugene Byrne), Life’s Lottery and the acclaimed Anno Dracula sequence – comprising the title novel, plus The Bloody Red Baron, Judgment of Tears (aka Dracula Cha Cha Cha) and Johnny Alucard. An English Ghost Story is currently being developed as a movie from a script by the author, while The Matter of Britain is another collaboration with Byrne.

Newman’s short fiction has been collected in The Original Dr Shade and Other Stories, Famous Monsters, Seven Stars, Unforgivable Stories and Where the Bodies Are Buried, while his story “Week Woman” was adapted for the Canadian TV series The Hunger. In 2001, the author directed a 100-second short film, Missing Girl, for cable TV channel The Studio.

“This is an entry in a series of 1970s-set occult/SF/mystery stories I’ve been working at on and off since ‘The End of the Pier Show’,” explains Newman. “Richard Jeperson has also appeared in ‘You Don’t Have to Be Mad . . .’, ‘Seven Stars: The Biafran Bank Manager’ and ‘Tomorrow Town’. For my entry in the revived Night Visions series, I’ve written ‘Swellhead’, a novella that brings Jeperson’s story up to the present day, though I’ve still not solved all the ongoing mysteries.

“ ‘Egyptian Avenue’ was written for Embracing the Mutation, a collection in which writers were given their pick of pre-existing J.K. Potter illustrations and asked to write something inspired by one of them. I assume from the picture I chose that J.K. once took the tour of Highgate Cemetery – the old one, not the one where Karl Marx is buried – that I did.

“Incidentally, William Schafer and Bill Sheehan had a system whereby they sent the first author on the list a big batch of illustrations; he or she took his out and sent on a diminished batch to the next author, who did the same. I’ve no idea where I came in the list, but I got the pictures from Graham Joyce and had to send them on to Michael Marshall Smith. Knowing that Mike is rarely at his sharpest first thing in the morning when he’d be opening the post, I took William and Bill’s covering letter and sent it to him with some illustrations of my own done in the style of my then eight-year-old nephew, signed ‘JKP’ in crayon – a haunted house with a kat sat in front of it and smoke curling from the chimney, a white-sheet ghost going ‘boo!’, a ‘scary monster’ with fangs. I sent the real Potters a day or so later, honest.”

“THIS TOMB’S LEAKING SAND,” said Fred Regent. “And beetles.”

Fine white stuff – hourglass quality, not bucket-and-spade material – seeped from a vertical crack, fanning out around and between clumps of lush, long green grass. Black bugs glittered in morning sunlight, hornlike protrusions rooting through the overgrowth, sand-specks stuck to their carapaces. Fred looked up at the face of the tomb, which was framed by faux-Egyptian columns. The name BUNNING was cut deep into the stone, hemmed around by weather-beaten hieroglyphs.

It was the summer of 197–. Fred Regent, late of the Metropolitan Constabulary, was again adventuring with the supernatural. As before, his guide off life’s beaten track was Richard Jeperson, the most resourceful agent of the Diogenes Club, which remained the least-known branch of Britain’s intelligence and police services. All the anomalies came down to Jeperson. Last month, it had been glam-rock ghouls gutting groupies at the Glastonbury Festival and an obeah curse on Prime Minister Edward Heath hatched somewhere inside his own cabinet; this morning, it was ghosts in Kingstead Cemetery.

Jeperson, something of an anomaly himself, scooped up a handful of sand and looked down his hawk nose at a couple of fat bugs.

“Were we on the banks of the great river Nile rather than on a pleasant hill overlooking the greater city of London,” said Jeperson, “I shouldn’t be surprised to come across these little fellows. As it is, I’m flummoxed. These, Fred, are scarabus beetles.”

“I saw Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb at the Rialto, Richard. I know what a scarab is.”

Jeperson laughed, deepening creases in his tanned forehead and cheeks. His smile lifted black moustaches and showed sharp teeth-points. The Man From the Diogenes Club sounded as English as James Mason, but when suntanned he looked more like an Arab, or a Romany disguised as Charles II. His mass of black ringlets was not a wig, though. And no gypsy would dress as gaudily as Richard Jeperson.

“Of course you do, Fred. I elucidate for the benefit of exposition. Thinking out loud. That is Sahara sand and these are North African beasties.”

“Absolutely, Guv’nor. And that bloody big dead one there is a scorpion.”

Jeperson looked down with amused distaste. The scorpion twitched, scuttled and was squashed under Jeperson’s foot.

“Not so dead, Fred.”

“Is now.”

“Let us hope so.”

Jeperson considered his sole, then scraped the evil crushed thing off on a chunk of old headstone.

For this expedition to darkest N6, he wore a generously bloused leopard-pattern safari jacket and tight white high-waisted britches tucked into sturdy fell-walker’s boots. His ensemble included a turquoise Sam Browne belt (with pouches full of useful implements and substances), a tiger’s-fang amulet that was supposed to protect against evil, and an Australian bush hat with three corks dangling from the rim. Champagne corks, each marked with a date in felt-tip pen.

“The term for a thing so out of place is, as we all know, an ‘apport’,” said Jeperson. “Unless some peculiar person has for reasons unknown placed sand, scarabs and scorps in our path for the purpose of puzzlement, we must conclude that they have materialized for some supernatural reason. Mr Lillywhite, this is your belief, is it not? This is yet another manifestation of the spookery you have reported?”

Lillywhite nodded. He was a milk-skinned, fair-haired middle-aged man with burning red cheeks and a peacock’s-tail-pattern smock. His complaint had been passed from the police to the Diogenes Club, and then fielded to Jeperson.

“What is all this doing here?” asked Vanessa, Jeperson’s other assistant – the one everyone noticed before realizing that Fred was in the room. The tall, model-beautiful redhead wore huge sunglasses with swirly mint-and-yellow patterns on the lenses and frames, a sari-like arrangement of silk scarves that exposed a ruby winking in her navel, and stack-heeled cream leather go-go boots. Beside the other two, Fred felt a bit underdressed in his Fred Perry and Doc Martens.

“Appearing supernaturally, I should say, Vanessa,” said Jeperson. “That’s generally what apports do.”

“Not just the apports,” she went on. “All the obelisks and sphinxes. Oughtn’t this to be in the Valley of the Kings, not buried under greenery in London North Six?”

Jeperson dropped the sand and let the scarabs scuttle where they might. He brushed his palms together.

Vanessa was right. Everything in this section of Kingstead Cemetery was tricked out with Ancient Egyptian statuary and design features. The Bunning tomb was guarded by two human-headed stone lions in Pharaonic headdresses. Their faces had weathered as badly in a century as the original sphinx had in millennia. All around were miniature sandstone pyramids and temples, animal-headed deities, faded blue and gold hieroglyphs and ankh-shaped gravestones.

“I can explain that, Miss . . . ah?” said Lillywhite.

“Vanessa. Just Vanessa.”

“Vanessa, fine,” said the scholarly caretaker, segueing into a tour guide speech. “The motif dates back to the establishment of the cemetery in 1839. Stephen Geary, the original architect, had a passion for Egyptiana which was shared by the general public of his day. From the first, the Cemetery was planned not just as a place for burying the dead but as a species of morbid tourist attraction. Victorians were rather more given to visiting dead relatives than we are. It was expected that whole families would come to picnic by grandmama’s grave.”

“If my gran were dead, we’d certainly have a picnic,” said Fred. Lillywhite looked a little shocked. “Well, you don’t know my gran,” Fred explained.

“They held black-crêpe birthday parties for the many children who died in infancy,” the caretaker continued, “with solemn games and floral presents. Siblings gathered annually around marble babies well into their own old age. It’s not easy to start a graveyard from scratch, especially at what you might call the top end of the market. Cemeteries are supposed to be old. For a Victorian to be laid to rest in a new one would be like you or me being bundled into a plastic bag and ploughed under a motorway extension.”

“That’s more or less what Fred has planned,” said Jeperson.

“I can’t say I’m surprised. To circumvent the prejudice, Geary decided to trade on associations with ancient civilizations. If his cemetery couldn’t be instantly old, then at least it would look old. This area is Egyptian Avenue. Geary himself is buried here. Originally, there were three such sections, with a Roman Avenue and a Grecian Avenue completing the set. But the fashionable had a craze for Egypt. The Roman and Grecian Avenues were abandoned and overtaken. It was no real scholarly interest in Egyptology, by the way, just an enthusiasm for the styles. Some of the gods you see represented aren’t even real, just made up to fit in with the pantheon. A historian might draw a parallel between Ancient Egyptian obsession with funerary rites and the Victorian fascination with the aesthetics of death.”

Fred thought anyone who chose to spend his life looking after a disused cemetery must have nurtured some of that obsession himself. Lillywhite was an unsalaried amateur, a local resident who was a booster for this forgotten corner of the capital.

“It’s certainly ancient now,” said Fred. “Falling to pieces.”

“Regrettably so. Victorian craftsmen were good on surface, but skimped everything else. Artisans knew the customers would all be too dead to complain and cut a lot of corners. Impressive stone fronts, but crumbling at the back. Statues that dissolve to lumps after fifty years in the rain. Tombs with strong corners but weak roofs. By the 1920s, when the original site was full and children and grandchildren of the first tenants were in their own grave-plots, everything had fallen into disrepair. When the United Cemetery Company went bust in the early 1960s, Kingstead was more or less abandoned. Our historical society has been trying to raise money for restoration and repair work. With not much luck, as yet.”

“Put me down for fifty quid,” said Jeperson.

Fred wasn’t sure if restoration and repair would improve the place. The tombs had been laid out to a classical plan like miniature pyramids or cathedrals, and serpentine pathways wound between them. Uncontrolled shrubbery and ivy swarmed everywhere, clogging the paths, practically burying the stonework. A broken-winged angel soared from a nearby rhododendron, face scraped eyeless. It was the dead city of a lost civilization, like something from Rider Haggard. Nature had crept back, green tendrils undermining thrones and palaces, and was slowly taking the impertinent erections of a passing humanity back into her leafy bosom.

“This is the source of your haunting?” asked Jeperson, nodding at the Bunning tomb.

Fred had forgotten for a moment why they were here.

“It seems to be.”

There had been a great deal of ghostly activity. Yesterday, Fred had gone to the newspaper library in Colindale and looked over a hundred and twenty years of wails in the night and alarmed courting couples. As burial grounds went, Kingstead Cemetery was rather sporadically haunted. Until the last three months, when spooks had been running riot with bells and whistles on. A newsagent’s across the road had been pelted with a rain of lightning-charged pebbles. A physical-culture enthusiast had been knocked off his bicycle by ectoplasmic tentacles. And there had been a lot of sightings.

Jeperson considered the Bunning tomb. Fred saw he was letting down his guard, trying to sense what was disturbed in the vicinity. Jeperson was a sensitive.

“According to your report, Lillywhite, our spectral visitors have run the whole gamut. Disembodied sounds . . .”

“Like jackals,” said Lillywhite. “I was in Suez in ’56. I know what a jackal sounds like.”

“. . . Phantom figures . . .”

“Mummies, with bandages. Hawk-headed humans. Ghostly barges. Crawling severed hands.”

“. . . And now, physical presences. To wit: the scarabs and other nasties. Even the sand. It’s still warm, by the way. Does anyone else detect a theme here?”

“Spirits of Ancient Egypt,” suggested Vanessa.

Jeperson shot her a finger-gun. “You have it.”

Fred would have shivered, only . . .

“Richard, isn’t there something funny here?” he said. “A themed haunting? It’s a bit Hammer Horror, isn’t it? I mean, this place may be done up with Egyptian tat but it’s still North London. You can see the Post Office Tower from here. Whoever is buried in this tomb . . .”

“Members of the Bunning family,” put in Lillywhite. “The publishing house. Bunning and Company, Pyramid Press. You can see their offices from here. That black building, the one that looks like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s called the Horus Tower.”

Fred knew the skyscraper, but had never realized who owned it.

“Yes, them. The Bunnings. They were just Victorians who liked the idea of a few hierogylphs and cat-headed birds in the way they might have liked striped wallpaper or a particular cut of waistcoat. You said it was a fashion, a craze. So why have we got authentic Egyptian ghosts, just as if there were some evil high priest or mad Pharaoh in there?”

“George Oldrid Bunning was supposedly buried in a proper Egyptian sarcophagus,” said Lillywhite. “It was even said that he went through the mummification process.”

“Brains through the nose, liver and lights in canopic jars?”

“Yes, Mr Jeperson. Indeed.”

“That would have been irregular?”

“In 1897? Yes.”

“I withdraw my objection,” said Fred. “Old Bunning was clearly a loon. You might expect loon ghosts.”

Jeperson was on his knees, looking at the sand. The scarabs were gone now, scuttling across London in advance of a nasty surprise come the first frost.

“I’ve been trying to get in touch with the descendants for a while,” said Lillywhite. “Even before all this fuss. I was hoping they might sponsor restoration of the Bunning tomb. The current head of the family is George Rameses Banning. He must maintain the family interest in Egypt, or at least his parents did. It appears George Rameses has his own troubles.”

“So I’d heard,” said Jeperson. “All dynasties must fail, I suppose.”

Fred had vaguely heard of the Bunnings but couldn’t remember where.

“Pyramid Press are magazine publishers,” said Jeperson, answering the unspoken query. “You’ve heard of Stunna.”

Vanessa made a face.

Stunna was supposedly a blokes’ answer to Cosmopolitan, with features about fast cars and sport and (especially) sex. It ran glossy pictures of girls not naked enough to get into Playboy but nevertheless unclad enough for you not to want your mum knowing you looked at them. The magazine had launched last year with a lot of publicity, then been attacked with a couple of libel suits from a rival publisher that they had made nasty jokes about, Derek Leech of the Daily Comet. Stunna had just ceased publication, probably taking the company down with it. Fred realized that he had heard of George Rameses Bunning after all. He was doomed to be dragged into bankruptcy and ruin, throwing a lot of people out of work. The scraps of his company would probably be gobbled up by the litigious Leech, which may well have been the point.

“Bunning and Company once put out British Pluck and The Halfpenny Marvel,” said Jeperson. “Boy’s papers. At their height of popularity between the wars. And dozens of other titles over the years. Mostly sensation stuff. Generations of lads were raised on the adventures of Jack Dauntless RN, and the scientific vigilante Dr Shade. I think the masthead of Stunna bears the sad legend ‘incorporating British Pluck’.”

“You think there’s a tie-in,” said Fred. “With all the pluck business. It’s a penny-dreadful curse.”

Jeperson’s brow furrowed. He was having one of his ‘feelings’, which usually meant bad news for anyone within hailing distance.

“More than that, Fred. I sense something very nasty here. An old cruelty that lingers. Also, this is one of those ‘hey, look at me’ hauntings. It’s as if our phantoms were trying to tell us something, to issue a warning.”

“Then why start making a fuss in the last month? Any ghosts around here must have been planted . . .”

“Discorporated, Fred.”

“Yes, that . . . they must have been dead for eighty years. Why sit quietly all that time but kick up a row this summer?”

“Maybe they object to something topical,” suggested Vanessa. “Like what’s Top of the Pops?”

“It’s not dreadful enough to be after the Bay City Rollers, luv,” said Fred.

“Good point.”

Jeperson considered the Bunning tomb, and stroked his tash.

Fred looked around. The cemetery afforded a pleasant green dappling of shadow and swathes of sunstruck grass. But Jeperson was right. Something very nasty was here.

“Vanessa,” said Jeperson. “Pass the crowbar. I think we should unseal this tomb.”

“But . . .” put in the startled Lillywhite.

Jeperson tapped his tiger-fang. “Have no fear of curses, man. This will shield us all.”

“It’s not that. This is private property.”

“I won’t tell if you don’t. Besides, you’ve already established that George Rameses Bunning has less than no interest in the last resting place of his ancestors. Who else could possibly object?”

“I’m supposed to be a guardian of this place.”

“Come on. Haven’t you ever wanted to open one of these tombs up and poke around inside?”

“The original Mr Bunning is supposed to have had an authentic Egyptian funeral. He might be surrounded by his treasures.”

“A bicycle to pedal into the afterlife? Golden cigar cuspidors? Ornamental funerary gaslamps?”

“Very likely.”

“Then we shall be Howard Carter and Lord Caernarvon.”

Fred thought that wasn’t a happy parallel. Hadn’t there been an effective curse on the tomb of King Tutankamun?

Vanessa produced a crowbar from her BOAC holdall. She was always prepared for any eventualities.

Fred thought he should volunteer, but Jeperson took the tool and slipped it into a crack. He strained and the stone didn’t shift.

“Superior workmanship, Lillywhite. No skimping here.”

Jeperson heaved again. The stone advanced an inch, and more sand cascaded. Something chittered inside.

Vanessa had a trowel. She cleared some of the sand and picked out dried-up mortar.

“Good girl,” said Jeperson.

He heaved again. The bottom half of the stone cracked through completely, then fell out of the doorway. The top half slid down in grooves and broke in two pieces. A lot more sand avalanched.

Fred tugged Lillywhite out of the way. Jeperson and Vanessa had already stepped aside.

A scarecrow-thin human figure stood in the shifting sands, hands raised as if to thump, teeth bared in a gruesome grin. It pitched forward on its face and broke apart like a poorly made dummy. If it were a Guy, it would not earn a penny from the most intimidated or kindly passer-by.

“That’s not George Oldrid Bunning,” gasped Lillywhite.

“No,” said Jeperson. “I rather fear that it’s his butler.”

There were five of them, strewn around the stone sarcophagus, bundles of bones in browned wrappings.

“A butler, a footman, a cook, a housekeeper and a maid,” said Jeperson. Under his tan, he was pale. He held himself rigidly, so that he wouldn’t shake with rage and despair. He understood this sort of horror all too well – having lost the memory of a boyhood torn away in a Nazi camp – but never got used to it.

The servant bodies wore the remains of uniforms.

Lillywhite was upset. He was sitting on the grass, with his head between his knees.

Vanessa, less sensitive than Jeperson, was looking around the tomb with a torch.

“It’s a good size,” she called out. “Extensive foundations.”

“They were alive,” bleated Lillywhite.

“For a while,” said Jeperson.

“What a bastard,” said Fred. “Old George Oldrid Bunning. He got his Pharaoh’s funeral all right, with all his servants buried alive to shine his boots and tug their forelocks through all eternity. How did he do it?”

“Careful planning,” said Jeperson. “And a total lack of scruple.”

Lillywhite looked up. He concentrated, falling back on expertise to damp down the shock.

“It was a special design. When he was dying, George Oldrid contracted a master mason to create his tomb. It’s the only one here that’s survived substantially intact. The mason died before Bunning. Suspiciously.”

“Pharaohs had their architects killed, to preserve the secrets of their tombs from grave-robbers. There were all kind of traps in the pyramids, to discourage looters.”

A loud noise came from inside the tomb. Something snapping shut with a clang.

Jeperson’s cool vanished.

“Vanessa?” he shouted.

Vanessa came out of the tomb, hair awry and pinned back by her raised sunglasses. She had a nasty graze on her knee.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Nothing a tot won’t cure.”

She found a silver flask in her holdall and took a swallow, then passed it round. Fred took a jolting shot of brandy.

“Who’d leave a mantrap in a tomb? Coiled steel, with enough tensile strength after a century to bisect a poor girl, or at least take her leg off, if she didn’t have a dancer’s reflexes.”

“George Oldrid Bunning,” said Jeperson.

“Bastard General,” clarified Fred.

“Just so. He must have been the bastardo di tutti bastardi. It would have been in the will that he be laid personally to rest by his servants, with no other witnesses, at dead of night. They were probably expecting healthy bequests. The sad, greedy lot. When closed, the sarcophagus lid triggered a mechanism and the stone door slammed down. For ever, or at least until Vanessa and her crowbar. The tomb is soundproof. Weatherproof. Escape-proof.”

“There’s treasure,” said Vanessa. “Gold and silver. Some Egyptian things. Genuine, I think. Ushabti figures, a death mask. A lot of it is broken. The downstairs mob must have tried to improvise tools. Not that it did them any good.”

The now-shattered stone door showed signs of ancient scratching. But the breaks were new, and clean.

“How long did they . . . ?”

“Best not to think of it, Lillywhite,” said Jeperson.

“In death, they got strong,” said Vanessa. “They finally cracked the door, or we’d never have been able to shift it.”

The little maid, tiny skull in a mob cap, was especially disturbing. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen.

“No wonder the ghosts have been making a racket,” said Fred. “If someone did that to me, I’d give nobody any rest until it was made right.”

Jeperson tapped his front tooth, thinking.

“But why wait until now? As you said, they’ve had a hundred years in which to manifest their understandable ire. And why the Egyptian thing? Shouldn’t they be Victorian servant ghosts? I should think an experience like being buried alive by a crackpot with a King Tut complex would sour one on ancient cultures in general and Egypt in particular.”

“They’re trying to tell us something,” said Vanessa.

“Sharp girl. Indeed they are.”

Fred looked away from the tomb. Across the city.

The Horus Tower caught the light. It was a black glass block, surmounted by a gold pyramid.

“George Rameses Bunning is dying,” said Lillywhite. “A recurrence of some tropical disease. News got out just after Derek Leech Incorporated started suing Pyramid Press. It’s had a disastrous effect on the company stock. He’s liable to die broke.”

“If he’s anything like his great-great, then he deserves it,” said Vanessa.

Jeperson snapped his fingers.

“I think he’s a lot like his great-great. And I know what the ghosts have been trying to tell us. Quick, Fred, get the Rolls. Vanessa, ring Inspector Price at New Scotland Yard, and have him meet us at the Horus Tower immediately. He might want to bring a lot of hearty fellows with him. Some with guns. This is going to make a big noise.”

Fred didn’t care to set foot inside the Horus Tower. Just thinking about what had been done in the building made him sick to his stomach. He was on the forecourt as the coughing, shrunken, handcuffed George Rameses Bunning was led out by Inspector Euan Price. Jeperson had accompanied the police up to the pyramid on top of the tower, to be there at the arrest.

Employees gathered at their windows, looking down as the boss was hauled off to pokey. Rumours of what he had intended for them – for two hundred and thirty-eight men and women, from senior editors to junior copy-boys – would already be circulating, though Fred guessed many wouldn’t believe them. Derek Leech’s paper would carry the story, but few people put any credence in those loony crime stories in the Comet.

“He’ll be dead before he comes to trial,” said Jeperson. “Unless they find a cure.”

“I hope they do, Richard,” said Fred. “And he spends a good few years buried alive himself, in a concrete cell.”

“His Board of Directors were wondering why, with the company on the verge of liquidation, Bunning had authorized such extensive remodelling of his corporate HQ. It was done, you know. He could have thrown the switch tomorrow, or next week. Whenever all was lost.”

Now Fred shivered. Cemeteries didn’t bother him, but places like this – concrete, glass and steel traps for the enslavement and destruction of living human beings – did.

“What did he tell what’s-his-name, the architect? Drache?”

“It was supposed to be about security, locking down the Tower against armed insurrection. Rioting investors wanting their dividends, perhaps. The spray nozzles that were to flood the building with nerve gas were a new kind of fire-prevention system.”

“And Drache believed him?”

“He believed the money.”

“Another bastard, then.”

“Culpable, but not indictable.”

The Horus Tower was equipped with shutters that would seal every window, door and ventilation duct. When the master switch was thrown, they would all come down and lock tight. Then deadly gas would fill every office space, instantly preserving in death the entire workforce. Had George Rameses Bunning intended to keep publishing magazines in the afterlife? Did he really think his personal tomb would be left inviolate in perpetuity with all the corpses at their desks, a monument to himself for all eternity? Of course, George Oldrid Bunning had got away with it for a century.

“George Rameses knew?”

“About George Oldrid’s funerary arrangements? Yes.”

“Bastard bastard.”

“Quite.”

People began to file out of the skyscraper. The workday was over early.

There was a commotion.

A policeman was on the concrete, writhing around his kneed groin. Still handcuffed, George Rameses sprinted back towards his tower, shouldering through his employees.

Jeperson shouted to Price. “Get everyone out, now!”

Fred’s old boss understood at once. He got a bullhorn and ordered everyone away from the building.

“He’ll take the stairs,” said Jeperson. “He won’t chance us stopping the lifts. That’ll give everyone time to make it out.”

Alarm bells sounded. The flood of people leaving the Horus Tower grew to exodus proportions.

“Should I send someone in to catch him?” asked Price. “It should be easy to snag him on the stairs. He’ll be out of puff by the fifth floor, let alone the thirtieth.”

Jeperson shook his head.

“Too much of a risk, Inspector. Just make sure everyone else is out. This should be interesting.”

“Interesting?” spat Fred.

“Come on. Don’t you want to see if it works? The big clockwork trap. The plans I saw were ingenious. A real economy of construction. No electricals. Just levers, sand and water. Drache kept to Egyptian technology. Modern materials, though.”

“And nerve gas?” said Fred.

“Yes, there is that.”

“You’d better hope Drache’s shutters are damn good, or half London is going to drop dead.”

“It won’t come to that.”

Vanessa crossed the forecourt. She was with the still-bewildered Lillywhite.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“George Rameses is back inside, racing towards his master-switch.”

“Good grief.”

“Never fear, Vanessa. Inspector, it might be an idea to find some managerial bods in the crowd. Read the class register, as it were. Just make sure everyone’s out of the tower.”

“Good idea, Jeperson.”

The policeman hurried off.

Jeperson looked up at the building. The afternoon sun was reflected in black.

Then the reflection was gone.

Matt shutters closed like eyelids over every window. Black grilles came down behind the glass walls of the lobby, jaws meshing around floor-holes. The pyramid atop the tower twisted on a stem and lowered, locking into place. It was all done before the noise registered, a great mechanical wheezing and clanking. Torrents of water gushed from drains around the building, squirting up fifty feet in the air from the ornamental fountain.

“He’s escaped,” said Fred. “A quick, easy death from the gas and it’ll take twenty years to break through all that engineering.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Jeperson. “Fifteen at the most. Modern methods, you know.”

“The ghosts won’t rest,” said Lillywhite. “Not without revenge or restitution.”

“I think they might,” said Jeperson. “You see, George Rameses is still alive in his tomb. Alone, ill and, after his struggle up all those stairs, severely out of breath. Though I left the bulk of his self-burial mechanism alone, I took the precaution of disabling the nerve gas.”

“Is that a scream I hear?” said Vanessa.

“I doubt it,” said Jeperson. “If nothing else, George Rameses has just soundproofed his tomb.”

JAMES VAN PELT

The Boy Behind the Gate

JAMES VAN PELT LIVES IN Western Colorado with his wife and three sons. One of the finalists for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, he teaches high school and college English.

His fiction has appeared in, among other anthologies and magazines, Dark Terrors 5 and 6, the SFWA anthology New Faces in Science Fiction, Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction, David Hartwell’s The Year’s Best Fantasy, Asimov’s, Analog, Realms of Fantasy, Talebones, The Third Alternative, Weird Tales and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. His first collection of stories, Strangers and Beggars, was published in 2002.

“The genesis of ‘The Boy Behind the Gate’ occurred long before I became a father,” recalls the author. “During the summers, I often explored the old mills and ghost towns in the mountains west of Denver. Every once in a while there would come a report of a body found at the bottom of a deep shaft, and, of course, kids always turned up missing. It didn’t take much imagination to picture a child locked in the mines. But Mark Twain and Injun Joe went there first.

“For the longest time the story was entitled ‘Two Dads’, and I still think of the story with that emphasis. Those two poor, tortured dads. Is the one’s love strong enough to overcome evil? Will the other pause just long enough before he strikes to change his mind? As a dad, I hope so.”

AS YOU ARE NOW,
So once was I.
As I am now,
So you shall be.
Prepare for death and follow me.

—from a tombstone in the
Central City Cemetery

CENTRAL CITY: TODAY
Pine-tree tops creaked overhead, but the air didn’t move in the granite-strewn gully as Ron hiked up the steep gulch. He consulted his compass, then rechecked the map. Another hundred yards above him should be The Golden Ingot #9, and if the rusted mining equipment he’d been climbing over and around for the last ten minutes were any indication, the map was right. He scanned the ground, his eyes aching from sun and dust. The backpack, heavy with a powerful flashlight, rope and bolt cutters thumped against his kidneys. Was anything out of the ordinary? Was there any sign? A patch of cloth? A child’s shoe? Could Levi have walked this far? Ron imagined the eight-year-old being towed up the mountain, hand in hand with the stranger who’d taken him. Would Levi have been crying, aware in his little-boy way of the danger he was in?

Ron closed his eyes. He wanted to imagine Levi scared. He hoped he was scared to death because the alternative . . . Maybe he’d been wrapped in a blanket or a plastic sheet slung over the man’s shoulder. They knew who the man was, Jared Sims, but Levi wouldn’t have known. Ron shivered and continued climbing.

A jumble of cable, thick as his wrist and so rusted that wherever the metal crossed itself it had corroded into one piece, blocked his path. Ron scrambled partly up the gully’s slope around it. Piles of yellow and white mine tailings humped up above him, and soon he topped out to the relative flatness of the claim. The old map he’d photocopied in Central City had shown him where the mine was; it wasn’t marked on the USGS maps. Most of the abandoned mines and shafts had been filled in. Too much chance of some tourist wandering around old mining property, snapping pictures of busted-down mills and what was left of miners’ cabins, and then stepping on some rotten boards covering a shaft a hundred feet deep. So over the last twenty years, the state and park service had been closing the properties. Still, the Gilpin County mining district had been huge and thousands of claims had been made. There were hundreds of openings even now for someone to find if he knew where to look. Perfect, mysterious holes blasted into the mountain, timeless monuments to long-dead miners’ hopes. Perfect places to hide a little boy you didn’t want found. Here, at the Golden Ingot #9, except for the rust, it could be 1880 again. He half expected to surprise a dozen miners waiting for their turn in the bucket and the long ride down the shaft.

Ron kept his gaze down. Little chance that there’d be a footprint in the yellow gravel, but it didn’t hurt. Maybe Levi would have dropped something for him to find. It seemed years ago, but it was only last winter that Ron had read him The Lord of the Rings. The hobbit, Pippin, had broken from the orcs and dropped a sign that he was still alive, a beautiful beech-tree leaf brooch. Levi had said, in his little man’s voice, “That was very clever of him, Daddy, wasn’t it?” Ron remembered Levi’s head resting on his arm while he read. He could almost feel the weight of his little boy leaning against him until they got to the end of the chapter. “Read some more, Daddy. Read some more,” he’d said sleepily.

A pile of boards lying almost flat looked hopeful. Ron lifted the end of one. It creaked as it rose slowly, pulling a dozen nails from the rotted plank beside it. Dust slapped into the air after Ron moved it aside and dropped it. The next one showed a shaft’s edge. A minute later, he’d cleared most of the boards. The pile looked like it hadn’t stirred since Grover Cleveland held office, but since he was here, he was going to check.

The afternoon sun showed only six feet of shaft wall, while the rest was black. Was the bottom only a dozen feet away, or was this one of those deep, deep holes reaching hundreds of yards down?

As always, as he had scores of times since the police had given up looking ten days before, he crouched at the shaft’s edge, cupped his hands around his mouth and called into the darkness, “Levi! Levi! Are you there, son?”

Wind stirred sand behind him, blowing a little over the edge where it glittered in the sunlight, then disappeared. Only the breeze’s sibilant hiss answered him.

CENTRAL CITY: 1879
Images flitted in Charles’s mind as he stayed motionless in his bed, listening to the boy’s even breathing on the floor beside him. It was the small hours of the morning, when time came unanchored, and memories piled willy-nilly atop one another. Charles could see them all: his wife dying, the Laughlins, the McGaritys, the bloody hands in the mine. The fireplace coals had long since died, and the moon’s thin line outside the window cast almost no light through the muslin drape. He’d light a candle if he dared, but if he did, the boy’s eyes might be open; he might look at him through the flickering light and know that he knew.

He couldn’t sleep. No, not that. Charles would dream, and in his dreams he’d see the Laughlin children burning up, their red skin baking from within. “Scarlet fever,” the nurse from Idaho Springs had said. “Poor things.”

Charles had stood at the Laughlins’ door that morning, a basket of bread and clean sheets hanging from one hand, blinking at the darkness in the room. Only the sun behind him provided light. They’d covered the one window, and the cabin smelled close and moist and sweaty-sick. The nurse sat by three-year-old Lisa to his left. Against the back wall lay Evelyn with her mother sitting beside her. The baby’s crib rested in the opposite corner. William Laughlin sat at the rough-hewn table in the room’s middle, resting his forehead in his hand.

The boy crept around Charles, even though he’d told him to stay with the mule. His arm wrapped around the back of Charles’s leg, and he leaned into the room. Charles put his hand down to push him back, but he didn’t. He didn’t like touching his son, the stranger who lived with him every day. Lisa panted under the blankets, blonde hair plastered to the side of her face. Four-year-old Evelyn turned to the wall, her chest still for a moment before she drew her next wheezing breath. Her mom, a hint of the scarlet flush across her own cheeks visible in the sunlight, pressed a wet cloth to Evelyn’s forehead.

“The little one?” Charles said.

William Laughlin shook his head without moving his hand. “She went during the night.” He coughed. It sounded wet and pathetic.

“I brung some things,” Charles said. He stepped deeper into the room, and the atmosphere pushed back. Outside the sun shone bright and men filled the valley, moving surely from mine to mill, loading ore wagons or carrying supplies. Blasting echoed off cliff walls above and Clear Creek murmured like watery wind. But here, the air felt dead with fever.

William draped a hand over the basket’s edge. “You’re a right Christian, Charles.”

“You going to your shift?” Charles moved back. The heat in the room oppressed, and he didn’t want to breathe so close to the sick girls.

“I’ll be along.”

Charles retreated to the porch. The boy leaned over Lisa, his legs bright in the sun pouring through the door, while his upper torso faded in the room’s shadows. He drew a finger across the little girl’s forehead, through her fevered sweat. He stood, facing his father, his finger up as if he’d erased chalk off a blackboard. For a moment he looked at Charles as if surprised to see him still waiting for him, then he put his finger in his mouth.

When they crossed the footbridge over the creek, Charles said, “Why’d you do that, boy? I told you to stay out.”

The boy held on to the mule’s bridle, his head not even coming up to the mule’s chin. “They’ll burn, Papa.”

Charles nearly stumbled, then glanced at the boy. He wore an old flannel shirt too big for him with the sleeves rolled up. Pale, skinny arms. Dark hair cut above his eyebrows. Dark eyes. He was given to long, unblinking looks. A serious mouth, like his mother who’d died bringing him into the world eight years before.

“I’m glad he’s out of me,” she’d said in the moment before she died screaming.

“What do you mean, boy?”

“I put the death in them.” He held up his finger that had touched the girl as if in proof. “Just like the other lambs.”

“Don’t talk like that.” Charles pulled the bridle from the boy’s hand, his own hand shaking. “You go on home, and I don’t want to see a mess in the cabin when I get back. Sweep the floor.”

“I can smell the fire,” the boy said before turning toward their cabin.

Charles thought about his son all day, deep in the mine, as he worked the single jack, bent low in the tunnel only three-quarters of his height, placing the steel bit against the stone, pounding it a bit deeper with each blow, rotating it each time to clear the bit. Pausing just before he drove the hammer home. The angle had to be perfect. The placement, perfect. He had to judge before he struck. Striking without looking could shatter the drill. There was always the pause before the hammer came down to be sure he was doing the right thing. So there could be no mistake. It was a feeling of good or bad in the way the drill stood. Charles considered his judgment with the hammer to be his only genius. He never struck wrongly. Clang! The hammer would fall against the rod. Rock dust crumbled from the hole. Clang! He’d hit it again, his strong right arm driving the blow home. Numbing work to create a hole for the charge. He could raise the hammer all day with that arm; the work had made it larger than the other one, a giant’s arm, but he couldn’t shape the boy with it. He couldn’t even hold him.

The boy had been bad from the beginning. His wet-nurse took sick and died. After that, no one would help Charles, so he fed the child himself with goat’s milk, certain that the first winter would kill him, having no mother to care for him. But as winter filled the mountains with snow and cutting wind, even as influenza swept through the camp taking many babies, the boy thrived. He was walking by the next summer, and Charles would leave him locked in the cabin when he worked his shift, half expecting to find the toddler dead on his return. But every day the boy met him, a little taller, a little stronger, and never smiling.

Setting the powder took a half-hour. Each hole had to be filled with the proper amount. Then the fuse cord had to be measured. Charles worked methodically. This deep in the mine, the stale air hurt his lungs and rock-grit coated his eyes and tongue. He checked the candle burning brightly in its shadowgee stuck in the wall. When he set the last charge, he retreated to the bucket lift, covering his nose and mouth with a soaked bandanna to protect against the dust. After the blast, he stood with head bowed, breathing through the wet cloth.

Charles wanted to love him. He tried. The weather in the boy’s heart was cold, though, and hugs meant nothing to him. He never played. He never cried. And always, around him, children died. Diphtheria. The grippe. Typhoid. The croup. Pneumonia. Whooping cough. Smallpox. Lingering diseases. Wasting illnesses. The cemetery filled with tiny corpses.

The ore cart rattled on the rails as Charles pushed it toward the broken ore. For the rest of his shift he’d fill the cart, take it back to the lift, empty it and return for another load. No candles lit the path, but that didn’t matter. Charles didn’t mind the dark most days, but today he couldn’t stop thinking about the boy. What does the boy do while I’m at work? What does he daydream about? Charles imagined him wandering through the camp, looking for children.

In the spring he’d taken the boy to a funeral. Seamus McGarity had lost both his boys and his wife to dysentery three days apart. McGarity, his kin and friends circled the coffins, two tiny wood boxes and a long one. During the prayer, Charles looked down at his boy dressed in mourning black. The corners of the boy’s mouth turned up and his eyes were shining. At the ceremony’s end, the boy dropped dirt in each grave. Surreptitiously, he also put a handful of grave soil in his pocket.

“Lucky your kid’s doing good,” McGarity said to him the next day as they waited for the bucket to take them down the shaft. His lunch pail dangled from his hand, and the miner looked exhausted, as if he hadn’t slept for a month. “He came by a week ago. Found him sitting by the door.”

“What did he want?” Charles wished he could pat McGarity on the shoulder. How would it be to lose your whole family? There’d been other men whose children died who drank themselves to death. The other miners stood away from them. People died in the camps all the time, but it wasn’t easy to be next to the bereft, not at first.

McGarity didn’t answer for a while. He stared out over the valley, but he didn’t appear to be looking at anything. Finally he said, “Caleb used to sing his little brother to sleep. I don’t think he knew I was listening. ‘Amazing Grace’ it was. Learned it from his mom. He had a nice voice for a ten-year-old.”

They found McGarity at the bottom of a shaft a week later. Was he drunk and fell in, or did he jump?

At the blasting site the dust still hung in the air, surrounding the candle in a pale globe. Charles hefted ore into the cart. My boy’s not human, he thought as each rock crashed against the metal. Methodically he bent and lifted, bent and lifted. Not human. Not human. Charles pictured the boy with his finger in his mouth, salty-bitter from the Laughlin girl’s scarlet-fever sweat.

After a while Charles stopped loading. His hands stung. He stepped next to the candle’s feeble light and held them up. Blood ran down his wrists from his ragged fingertips. Dully he realized he’d not worn his gloves. And a certainty came to him, a grave-stone-solid conviction: My boy’s a monster!

Charles lay in his bed, motionless. The boy breathed evenly on the floor below him. Only the silver-moonlit window floated in the dark. Charles kept his eyes wide open. If he shut them, even for a second, the boy might stand. He might lean his unsmiling face close. The boy might run his finger across Charles’s forehead.

“I see you burning, Papa,” the boy would say. He always called him Papa, like it was a curse.

And dawn was hours away.

Ron sat in his van on the abandoned mining road near the boulders that the park service had used to block the path, his map spread out on the seat beside him marked with Xs for mining claims. From Central City there were so many. The historical marker at the town limits proclaimed THE RICHEST SQUARE MILE ON EARTH. He shook his head. If only it were that small.

Starting at Black Hawk at one end of the valley to the other end of Central City was a couple of miles. Mine tailings spotted the slopes on both sides. Then there were the gulches: Chase, Eureka, Russell, Lake, Pecks, Fourmile and others the map didn’t name with mines of their own, and the road went on to the ghost towns of Yankee Hill, Ninety-Four, Alice and Kingston. Nevadaville was only a stone’s throw to the west. He could almost see the honeycomb of tunnels.

Ron smoothed the map, but his attention shifted. On the floor, barely visible in the blue dusk of sunset, a red plastic building brick lay canted on its side. He stretched around the steering wheel, crinkling the map with his elbow, and picked it up. The brick had almost no weight sitting on his palm. He straightened, put the brick on the dashboard.

They didn’t have building bricks when he was a boy. His dad had given him Lincoln logs, and over the years, Ron’s dad had added to the set until they filled a box almost too big to fit under his bed. Ron made forts and villages and fences and barns. Two short logs crossed over each other served as cannon. His dad came into his room one night and they built a tower together, half as tall as Ron.

Years later, when Levi was six, Ron had said to his dad, “You never told me how much fun being a father would be.”

“I didn’t think of it at the time,” his dad said.

Ron fingered the building brick. He’d never made a tower with Levi.

The sky grew dark, and Ron didn’t move. He thought about putting Levi to bed. “Have good dreams,” he’d say. For forty nights now, Levi had not had Ron to wish him a bedtime without nightmares. He thought about throwing a baseball back and forth. He remembered reading to him, book after book, Levi’s head resting against Ron’s arm as they sat on the couch.

Ten days ago the Denver detective in charge of the investigation said, “We’re giving up the search, Ron. You’re going to have to face the possibility that your son is dead. Sims killed his victims. We know that.” They sat in the detective’s temporary office in the Gilpin County Court house. Ron struggled to remain calm. The detective didn’t look over twenty, and it was clear that Ron made him uncomfortable.

“He didn’t kill them right away,” Ron insisted. “The Perez girl he kept in his basement for a week. In Colorado Springs he kept that baby in a storage garage for four days. His house was in Central City. My boy is in a mine somewhere. It’s logical.” Ron held a crumpled flyer. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD? Levi smiled from the page, a strand of his black hair across his forehead, his dark eyes turned toward his cake before he blew out the candles.

With the detective, Ron had walked through Sims’s house, a restored turn-of-the-century Victorian gingerbread with no closets. Posters covered the living-room walls, all children. Except for the kitchen, blocked with yellow crime-scene tape and the outline of Sims’ body on the floor, the rooms were meticulously tidy. Magazines on the coffee table were fanned out perfectly, the same half-inch overlap on each. On Sims’s dresser in the bedroom, a line of brass padlocks stood like sentinels in a military row. They were the only decoration. Ron wondered what could make a man like Sims. Couldn’t love have saved him? Love, pure love, might have kept Sims from hating, just as pure love would find his son. The police didn’t love Levi enough to find him.

The detective shook his head. “If he hadn’t shot himself, we could ask him. But he did. We’ve had crews up and down the area. If your son were there, we would have found him. He might have lasted a week without food. Only a couple days without water. It’s been a month. Sims buried his victims. I’m sorry to have to say it this way, but I’d guess your boy is in a shallow grave.”

Ron gripped the arms of the chair to keep from leaping at the man. “There’s bonds between a father and his son. I’d know if he had died.”

“The department can arrange counseling, if you request it,” the detective said.

“You’re not a father, are you?” Ron looked past the detective. Black and white photographs hung on the wall behind him: men standing in front of a wagon, holding shovels and lunch boxes; a long shot of Central City down main street when it was still dirt; the front of a school, forty or fifty children sitting on the steps, their severe-looking teacher standing behind them with her arms crossed.

Ron touched the hard edge of the plastic building brick sitting on the dashboard and thought about the kids in the school a hundred years ago no different than his own boy, all dead by now for sure, and Levi who might not be. Razor-edged stars filled the sky through his windshield. The air had cooled, caressing his face through the open windows. This far up the rutted road he couldn’t hear traffic from the highway or crowd noise from the casinos that filled Central City. He canted his head to hear better. Something clicked repetitively in the distance, maybe a night bird or a locust. He wondered if locusts lived this high. For a long time he rested his finger on the brick and listened. The night vibrated with its own muttering. Unidentifiable sounds that he guessed might be the breeze sliding over rocks and through the scrubby grasses. A high squeak that might be a bat. He couldn’t tell. The mountain was perfectly black and the cloudless sky danced with stars that provided no illumination.

He turned on the ceiling light to read the map. If someone saw him from a distance, he thought, he’d look like a time traveler in his craft, light glowing through the windows, unattached to the Earth.

Eventually he turned the light out and fell asleep sitting up, his head pillowed on a jacket against the door, windows still open so that he could hear if Levi should call.

Charles slipped out of the cabin before dawn, the eastern sky just barely lighter than the west. The wind came up the valley, and in it he could hear the stamp mills thrumming as they crushed ore.

He trudged up the switchback trail toward the mine, his hands heavy; his head, heavy. Had any child the boy met lived? There weren’t that many children in the camps. The school in Nevadaville had 150 students last year, he’d heard, but there were 10,000 miners in the district. Central City had a small school and so did Blackhawk. Charles had never sent the boy, but he was supposed to go in the fall. The town was growing. More families came in every day. They were building churches.

At the top of the hill, he paused. From here in the pre-sunrise grimness, most of the town was visible in purples and blues. He couldn’t find his own cabin, though. Then he gasped. A black aura like a cloud hid it from him, and for a moment it seemed as if it grew tentacles that flowed down the dirt roads, over the wooden sidewalks, sniffing at each door. The wind rippled the cloud’s top, then blew in his face, carrying the smell of a crypt and the fevered dampness from the Laughlin cabin.

Charles shook his head. There was his cabin! There was no black cloud. He held his hands over his pounding heart. Am I going mad? A hallucination! But the question echoed hollowly. This was not madness. He’d seen the cloud as a vision, a sign. He backed up the trail, afraid to take his gaze away from the cabin.

When a man’s dog goes wild, he shoots him. It’s his responsibility. What was his responsibility as a father of a monster?

When Charles worked the mine that day, he stuffed his pockets with candles, and he kept one lit no matter where he was. The shadows beyond the weak candlelight were like the shadow creeping from his own house.

If Sims had locked Levi in a mine, it would have to have several qualities, Ron thought as he shouldered his pack. Pines lining the mountain top glowed in the morning light, but the sun wouldn’t touch the valley’s floor for another hour. Ron checked his map and began the long hike up the old road. It had to be both close enough for him to get to, but far enough off the beaten track that it was unlikely anyone would find it. It had to be far enough back that even if Levi screamed for help, no one would hear him. There would be food and water. The question was, how much food and water? Sims wouldn’t have planned on leaving Levi with over a month’s supply.

Each step up the road felt like the ticking of an immense clock counting down. How much time was left? Was Levi even now crouched against a locked gate, light leaking around the edges, on the brink of death by thirst or starvation? If he ran out of water, might there be water in the mine itself that he had been drinking to keep himself alive? Ron thought about Tom Sawyer, not the high jinks of the little boy, but the awful image of Injun Joe trapped in McDougal’s cave. After Ron’s dad had read him that part, Ron had nightmares for months about eating bats while trying to carve through a thick wooden door with a broken knife.

Ron quickened his pace, his calves burning, keeping his eyes open for evidence of tunnels not on his map. He’d followed dozens of faint trails to dead-end mines in the last ten days, peered down scores of open shafts, rattled the locks on handfuls of metal gates, always looking for a sign, always listening for Levi’s voice. He crossed from the valley’s shadow into the sunlight, and even this early in the morning the rays heated his shirt. It would be a hot one today.

The road ended at the tumbled remains of a small mill. Busted beams pointed skyward, a skirt of rotten wood at their feet. Ron rested for a moment, his hand against a grey post. Splinters flaked onto his skin. Behind the ruin a narrow path vanished over a ridge. Weeds grew into the twin grooves that were too narrow for an automobile. He imagined steel-rimmed wagon wheels and a cart of ore making its way down the road behind a team of horses. Time seemed irrelevant here. It could be 1880 again, or 2080; the mountains wouldn’t know the difference. But he wasn’t timeless, and the clock counted; every minute that passed was another minute that Levi suffered alone. Could an eight-year-old die of fright? What if he believed that his daddy had forgotten him? Ron whimpered at the thought.

His photocopied map called this the Sunderson Mill. Above it were several mines: West Yellow Dog, New Baltimore and Crossroad. Ron spread the map over his knee. Small Xs indicating digs crowded the gulch. There could be ventilation shafts, drainage tunnels, powder-storage crypts, false starts, dead ends and full-bore excavations that needed checking.

It would take all day.

“Come with me, boy,” said Charles, his hands shaking. It had taken him several minutes to push open the cabin door. He couldn’t shake the impression of the cloud he’d seen around his house in the morning. It seemed to hover still, insubstantial, but present just the same. The sun shone mutedly through it, and the air felt cooler than it did ten feet away.

“It won’t work,” said the boy. He sat on the edge of his bed, his dark hair disheveled, his gaze steady and challenging.

Charles swallowed hard. “What won’t work?”

“What you are planning.” The boy came toward him, across the cabin’s single room.

Charles backed away into the sunlight, gripping the hammer hanging from his belt. The weight of his satchel tugged at his shoulder. For a second he envisioned beating the boy down where he stood, before he could get away. He forced his fingers from the hammer.

“We are taking a walk.”

“I know.” The boy strode past him and up the road out of town.

Charles watched him, his breath caught in his throat. Suddenly the air seemed to clear, and the sun pressed against him. Had it always been this way around the boy? Had he been in a daze from the moment the child was born?

It was as if the boy followed a trail traced for him in the dirt. He walked in the road’s middle, barely giving way when a wagon came toward him. The horse’s nostrils flared at his smell.

Charles caught up to him when they turned onto the Sunderson Mill Road. The mines above it had gone bad the year before, and the mill was closed.

“The mountains hold things, Papa.” The boy’s hands hung straight at his side, as if he were standing at attention, not hiking a steep road.

He had no words to say to him. Am I the monster? thought Charles. The boy’s mother wouldn’t want this. Have I done something to deserve a curse? Every step hurt. Part of him wanted to run away. He could do it: leave the boy on the road, catch the new train out of town and be in Denver before anyone knew. His family lived back east.

Another part denied that anything was wrong. Charles thought, What if I’m insane? My boy is strange, for sure, but he’s not evil. What child growing in the mountains with a dead mother and a father who worked the mines wouldn’t mature differently?

And a third part wanted to fall on the boy like a bear and rend him, bloody bone from bloody bone.

“Keep going,” Charles said when the boy slowed at the mill. The windows were already broken and its door hung askew.

“Don’t you love me, Papa?” he said. The boy looked at him sardonically. “A Papa should love his son.”

The trail climbed as quickly as stairs for a hundred yards, while the afternoon sun touched the mountain top ahead of them. Charles choked on the words: “Of course I love you.” And he knew that he did. He loved him even as he wanted to kill him, even as he was afraid. Was this right? He thought of sick children sweating in their fevers, dead children. “They’ll burn, Papa,” the boy had said.

At the ridge’s top, the trail flattened and split. Winding to the right, it led to West Yellow Dog, a fifty-foot drift that started with a yard-wide vein of quartz and wire gold but petered out into low-grade ore that wasn’t worth the cost of the powder to extract it. The middle trail ended at the New Baltimore, a failed attempt to find West Yellow Dog’s wire gold by coming at it laterally. Charles had worked the New Baltimore for six months before the owners shut it down.

He’d never been in the Crossroad on the left trail, but, as the hard-rock Cornishman who told him about it said, “The claim was snakebit from the beginning.” The rumour was that the first prospector had been drilling into the rock to set a charge, and when he hit the drill for the last time, it disappeared into the rock. There was a tunnel already there. A silly story, but the claim didn’t pay out, and there had been accidents.

They took the turn to the left, around a granite wall, out of the sun and into the stone bowl that held the mine. Rock surrounded them on three sides, like a small arena. The sound of Charles’s hard-soled boots echoed. At the far side, a metal gate held closed by a clasp lock marked the mine’s entrance.

“You’re going to be staying here, boy,” Charles removed a chisel from his satchel, set its edge against the lock, raised the hammer, then paused. Always he judged before he struck. Was the chisel set correctly? Would the hammer do its job? There could never be a strike without the pause for judgment, where a mistake could be saved. The metal’s sharp report reverberated off the rocks. Another blow broke the lock, then Charles pulled the door open; it screeched against the stiffness in its hinges. He’d never seen a mine entrance like the Crossroad’s. The floor looked worn smooth, as if thousands of feet had marched on it through the years. How had the miners done that?

“Don’t you love me, Papa?” the boy said again.

Charles didn’t look at him. From his satchel he removed a blanket, candles, a small bundle of food and a water bottle. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“You must not be my Papa.” He didn’t sound insincere this time. “My Papa loves me. He’ll find me, my Papa.”

“Just get in!”

Through his tears, Charles could barely see the new lock that he put on the door.

Behind the iron gate, he heard the boy move, a large sound, as if what stirred in the tunnel had suddenly grown huge. He fell back. Impossibly, the door stirred in its iron frame, and for a second Charles thought the inch-thick bolts might pull from the rock. He scuttled away. Even at the edge of the granite arena, when Charles looked at the mine entrance, he could hear the boy behind the gate, breathing loud, his heart throbbing. The sky grew dark and the air thick. A noxious cloud seeped around the door’s edges, filled the stone chamber, its tendrils crawling on the floor toward Charles. The boy said, his voice full of old mining timbers and cold, wet stone a thousand feet deep, “Papa?”

Charles fled.

West Yellow Dog had been dynamited. All that remained of its entrance was twisted ore cart track. Ron searched the cliff base to both sides. A niche three hundred yards to the right might have been where they stored powder, but it was only ten feet deep and didn’t have a door. Below the mine, partially hidden behind scrubby pine growing between the rocks, he found a small tunnel barely tall enough for him to enter on his hands and knees, but twigs and dirt blocked the way a few feet in and it smelled of marmot. Ron sat on his haunches outside the hole and closed his eyes against the sun.

He’d know if Levi had died, wouldn’t he? A father and son had a bond, he’d told the detective.

Within his view, visible only because the sun cast long shadows, several foundations rose from the grass in the clearing below the slope. There must have been a small community here, or they might have been part of the mining operation. At the Gilpin County Courthouse, Ron had looked at pictures of the town from the 1880s, and beside them were modern shots taken from the same spot. The buildings changed. Trees changed. But the rocks and mountains stayed the same. He trembled. To the mountain, time didn’t exist; all times were interchangeable. He glanced at his watch. To a little boy dying in a mine, every second stretched like skin on fire.

He pushed himself upright.

The New Baltimore had a park-service gate on it. Ron slowed as he approached. Covered in dust, the remains of a broken lock lay on the ground. He rubbed the scratches in the metal. No rust. Someone had been here this summer.

“Levi!” His voice sounded hollow and out of place.

The gate gave reluctantly, its base dragging over the rock as he pulled it open. Moisture seeped from the walls a few feet in. Resting one hand on the black-slime ceiling just above his head, he shone his flashlight on indistinct footprints on the muddy floor. Back in the depths, a watery plink-plink-plink broke the silence. The tunnel split. To the right, a pile of rock and broken timbers blocked the way. To the left, the passage sloped downward for another twenty feet before ending at a pool of water. The footprints led here. Ron played the quivering light across the surface, penetrating to the bottom. Rocks. More timber. Metal so heavily rusted that he couldn’t tell what its original shape had been. No wrapped bundle. No horror-story patch of white that resolved itself into a face.

He released a pent-up breath. Why had someone broken into the mine? Turning, he studied the walls and ceiling. A slippery, unhealthy-looking fungus covered the surfaces, and the stagnant air smelled rotted and mildewed. Near the ceiling to the left of the pool, a patch of rock peered through the growth, as if it had been brushed clean, and above it, a crack wider than his fist swallowed the light. Ron reached in, touched plastic. He found four bags in the crack, about a pound each. A whiff of the first one showed that he’d uncovered someone’s stash.

Ron left the bags on the floor. Ten minutes wasted.

According to his map, all that remained was the Crossroad. It took a half-hour of backtracking across the gulch’s east side before he found a faint trail that led to a gap around a rock wall.

He spotted the lock on the door on the other side of the stone arena as soon as he rounded the corner – a brand new, brass padlock, like one of those in the row on top of Sims’s dresser. He ran without thinking about it. Old metal door, not park service. Ron ripped off his backpack, fumbled for the bolt cutter, gripped the handles and squeezed. The lock snapped.

Was now the moment when he would know? Ron had dreamed of finding Levi in a thousand ways. Bad dreams, in some, where Levi was dead. Either dead over a month or, even worse, dead a few days. He’d be starved or dead from thirst or exposure. In some dreams he was alive but sick, damaged from exposure or the time spent alone. In one dream Levi didn’t know him, his mind gone. What could be worse than an eight-year-old driven insane by abuse and fear? In that dream, Ron loved his son back to sanity. No evil could be so bad that love could not change it to something good.

Ron tore the lock from the hasp, jammed his fingertips into the gap between the door and the frame. Pulled.

In the good dreams, Levi waited. “Daddy!” he would cry. He always called Ron “Daddy”, like it was a blessing.

The door swung open.

Charles didn’t even try to get to sleep. Sitting at the table in his cabin, the tiny slice of moon providing the only light again, he thought about the locked gate and the boy behind it. His intention was to never return.

He thought, What’s the greater evil? Every time he closed his eyes, he saw dead children, a fingerprint on their foreheads; he also saw the boy at the Crossroad, staring at a candle, maybe, or sleeping. What kind of dreams would a bringer of death like him have? But Charles was evil too. The boy, no matter what else he was, was his son. A father should take care of his own. One time when Charles was young he locked a storage shed on his father’s farm. A week later his father sent him to fetch some tools. The storage shed stank, a solid wall of putridness rolling out when Charles opened the door. A cat had been locked in, its mouth gaping open, dry as dust; its stomach had burst. If he had known, wouldn’t it have been merciful to have killed the cat a week earlier?

Charles looked through the darkness to his own bed. He couldn’t imagine sleeping again. The boy behind the gate moved in his mind. The room was so black, Charles could almost see the boy without closing his eyes. Like the cat, the boy was locked in. But the cat wasn’t the devil. No, not by a long shot. Maybe a creature like the boy thrived on the black air behind the gate. Could such a thing be killed by an act as simple as being shut into a mine? What if it could do some magic to save itself?

In a sudden vision, Charles saw himself as an older man walking down a street. A beautiful carriage clattered by, the horses’ hooves loud on the bricks. In the vision, Charles glanced up. Sitting in the carriage was his son, grown now, and the look he gave from the carriage was full of hate.

Charles made a fist on the table, alone in his cabin in the midst of the night and moaned. The boy was behind the gate. “I’m cursed,” Charles said to the four walls. Already he felt the guilt like a blood-soaked blanket settling over his head, suffocating him.

He’s a boy dying slowly, my son, Charles thought. He’s a monster who can save himself in some evil way.

Like the New Baltimore, the Crossroad was wet. Footprints showed clearly in the mud. Little prints. A child’s shoes.

“Levi!” Ron’s eyes strained to see into the mine, pulse throbbing huge in his chest. “Are you there, son?”

He took a few steps down the tunnel. Where was Levi? Ron turned on his flashlight. The powerful beam cut into the air, showing the path curving away ahead of him. His feet slipped on the muddy floor as slick as polished marble, and suddenly he felt scared, as scared as he’d ever been in his life. His breath puffed out in a plume in front of him. Every instinct told him to run. The mine didn’t feel right. The air clung to his arms like icy cockle-burs, and he had to brace himself with a hand against the wall. Then the floor shook, but it wasn’t just the floor: everything jolted or quivered. Every cell in his body flinched. He wasn’t sure if he had turned around and was heading out. He thought, The world has shifted.

He stepped forward again. Where am I? Where am I going? A voice came from the tunnel before him, a little boy’s voice.

“Papa?” it called.

Ron rushed forward, his fear forgotten. He would greet him with love like he’d never known.

“Papa?”

His son was coming home.

Charles stood at the Crossroad gate. He’d pulled it open, but he wouldn’t step inside. No, he was too frightened for that. He couldn’t see the boy, or all would be lost. He had one chance to make it right, and only one.

“Boy?” he yelled into the mine.

For a long time there was no sound. Then Charles felt a peculiar twitch, like the mountain had shrugged. The air itself contracted, and his ears popped.

He shook his head. Whatever else was going on, he could not be swayed.

“Boy?” he shouted again.

A voice came from far back in the mine. “Daddy?” it cried. “Is that you, Daddy?”

Small feet splashed through the mud, growing louder.

“I knew you’d come, Daddy,” the voice exclaimed, very close now.

Charles stood by the door out of sight, his hammer raised high, paused above him. When the boy stepped out, he would bring it down. Oh yes, he would. He would end it here.

And all would be right.

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

Nor the Demons
Down Under the Sea

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN LIVES in Atlanta, Georgia. Her short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder, From Weird and Distant Shores, and Wrong Things (with Poppy Z. Brite). Her fourth collection, To Charles Fort, With Love, will be released late in 2003 by Subterranean Press. The author’s story “Onion” received the 2002 International Horror Guild Award, and her fiction has appeared regularly in The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror.

Kiernan’s novels include the award-winning Silk and Threshold. Her third novel, Low Red Moon, will be published by Roc in November 2003. Other forthcoming publications include the chapbooks Waycross and Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold, and her “lost” novel The Five of Cups, all from Subterranean Press. She also scripted The Dreaming for DC Comics/Vertigo, as well as the miniseries The Girl Who Would Be Death and Bast: Eternity Game.

As she reveals: “ ‘Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea’ was written in July and August of 2000, for John Pelan’s The Children of Cthulhu. It’s the middle story of a trilogy, following ‘Andromeda Among the Stones’ and preceding ‘A Redress for Andromeda’. I did it during a period when I was experimenting with stories set in the 1950s. ‘Spindleshanks (New Orleans, 1956)’ is another story I did around the same time.

“I think I originally intended for this piece to be an actual Mythos tale, as per the anthology’s guidelines, but it came out merely ‘Lovecraftian’, at best. In hindsight, that was probably not a bad thing. I wanted to speak softly in this story, keeping it relatively quiet and impressionistic, essentially a ghost story revolving around a difficult relationship between two women. ‘Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea’ takes very seriously my belief that dark fiction dealing with the inexplicable should, itself, present to the reader a certain inexplicability. It’s not about resolution nor understanding, but that brief, disturbing contact that usually characterizes actual paranormal encounters.”

(1957)

THE LATE SUMMER MORNING like a shattering bluewhite gem, crashing, liquid seams of fluorite and topaz thrown against the jaggedrough shale and sandstone breakers, roiling calcite foam beneath the cloudless sky specked with gulls and ravens. And Julia behind the wheel of the big, green Bel Air, chasing the coast road north, the top down so that the Pacific wind roars wild through her hair. Salt smell to fill her head, intoxicating and delicious scent to drown her citydulled senses and Anna’s alone in the back seat, ignoring her again, silent, reading one of her textbooks or monographs on malacology. Hardly a word from her since they left the motel in Anchor Bay more than an hour ago, hardly a word at breakfast for that matter, and her silence is starting to annoy Julia.

“It was a bad dream, that’s all,” Anna said, the two of them alone in the diner next door to the motel, sitting across from one another in a naugahyde booth with a view of the bay, Haven’s Anchorage dotted with the bobbing hulls of fishing boats.

“You know that I don’t like to talk about my dreams.” And then Anna pushed her uneaten grapefruit aside and lit a cigarette. “God knows I’ve told you enough times.”

“We don’t have to go on to the house,” Julia said hopefully. “We could always see it another time and we could go back to the city today, instead.”

Anna only shrugged her shoulders and stared through the glass at the water, took another drag off her cigarette and exhaled smoke the color of the horizon.

“If you’re afraid to go to the house, just say so.”

Julia steals a glance at her in the rear-view mirror, wind-rumpled girl with shiny, sunburned cheeks, cheeks like ripening plums and her short, blonde hair twisted into a bun and tied up in a scarf. And Julia’s own reflection stares back at her from the glass, reproachful, desperate, almost fifteen years older than Anna, so close to thirty-five now that it frightens her; her drab hazel eyes hidden safely behind dark sunglasses that also conceal nascent crow’s feet, and the wind whips unhindered through her own hair, hair that would be mouse brown if she didn’t use peroxide. The first, tentative wrinkles beginning to show at the corners of her mouth, and she notices that her lipstick is smudged, then, licks the tip of one index finger and wipes the candypink stain off her skin.

“You really should come up for air,” Julia shouts, shouting just to be heard above the wind, and Anna looks slowly up from her book. She squints and blinks at the back of Julia’s head, an irritated, uncomprehending sort of expression and a frown that draws creases across her forehead.

“You’re missing all the scenery, dear.”

Anna sits up, sighs loud and stares out at a narrow, deserted stretch of beach rushing past, the ocean beyond, and “Scenery’s for the tourists,” she says. “I’m not a tourist.” And she slumps down into the seat again, turns a page and goes back to reading.

“You could at least tell me what I’ve done,” Julia says, trying hard not to sound angry or impatient, sounding only a little bit confused, instead, but this time Anna doesn’t reply, pretending not to hear or maybe just choosing to ignore her altogether.

“Well, then, whenever you’re ready to talk about it,” Julia says, but that isn’t what she wants to say; wants to tell Anna she’s getting sick of her pouting about like a high-school girl, sick of these long, brooding silences and more than sick of always feeling guilty because she doesn’t ever know what to say to make things better. Always feeling like it’s her fault, somehow, and if she weren’t a coward, she would never have become involved with a girl like Anna Foley in the first place.

But you are a coward, Julia reminds herself, the father-cruel voice crouched somewhere behind her sunglasses, behind her eyes. Don’t ever forget that, not even for a second, and she almost misses her exit, the turn-off that would carry them east to Boonville if she stayed on the main road. Julia takes the exit, following the crude map Anna drew for her on a paper napkin; the road dips and curves sharply away from the shoreline, and the ocean is suddenly lost behind a dense wall of redwoods and blooming rhododendrons, the morning sun traded for the rapid flicker of forest shadows. Only a few hundred yards from the highway there’s another, unpaved road, unnamed road leading deeper into the trees, and she slows down and the Chevrolet bounces off the blacktop onto the rutted, pockmarked logging trail.

The drive up the coast from San Francisco to Anchor Bay was Anna’s idea, even though they both knew it was a poor choice for summertime shelling. But a chance to get out of the laboratory, she said, to get away from the city, from the heat and all the people, and Julia knew what she really meant. A chance to be alone, away from suspicious, disapproving eyes, and besides, there had been an interesting limpet collected very near there a decade or so ago, a single, unusually large shell cataloged and tucked away in the vast Berkeley collections and then all but forgotten. The new species, Diodora thespesius, was described by one of Julia Winter’s male predecessors in the department and a second specimen would surely be a small feather in her cap.

So, the last two days spent picking their way meticulously over the boulders, kelp- and algae-slick rocks and shallow tide pools constantly buried and unburied by the shifting sand flats; hardly an ideal place for limpets, or much of anything else, to take hold. Thick-soled rubber boots and aluminum pails, sun hats and gloves, knives to pry mollusks from the rocks, and nothing much for their troubles but scallops and mussels. A few nice sea urchins and sand dollars, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus and Dendraster excentricus, and the second afternoon Anna had spotted a baby octopus but it had gotten away from them.

“If we only had more time,” Anna said, “I’m sure we would have found it if we had more time.” She was sitting on a boulder, smoking, and her dungarees soaked through to the thighs, staring north and west towards the headland and the dark silhouette of Fish Rocks jutting up from the sea like the scabby backs of twin leviathans.

“Well, it hasn’t been a total loss, has it?” Julia asked and smiled, remembering the long night before, Anna in her arms, Anna whispering things that had kept Julia awake until almost dawn. “It wasn’t a complete waste.”

And Anna Foley turned and watched her from her seat on the boulder, sloe-eyed girl, slate-grey irises to hide more than they would ever give away; She’s taunting me, Julia thought, feeling ashamed of herself for thinking such a thing, but thinking it anyway. It’s all some kind of a game to her, playing naughty games with Dr Winter and she’s sitting there watching me squirm.

“You want to see a haunted house?” Anna said, finally, and whatever Julia had expected her to say, it certainly wasn’t that.

“Excuse me?”

“A haunted house. A real haunted house,” and Anna raised an arm and pointed north-east, inland, past the shoreline. “It isn’t very far from here. We could drive up tomorrow morning.”

This is a challenge, Julia thought. She’s trying to challenge me, some new convolution in the game meant to throw me off balance.

“I’m sorry, Anna. That doesn’t really sound like my cup of tea,” she said, tired and just wanting to climb back up the bluff to the motel for a hot shower and an early dinner.

“No, really. I’m serious. I read about this place last month in Argosy. It was built in 1890 by a man named Machen Dandridge who supposedly worshipped Poseidon—”

“Since when do you read Argosy?”

“I read everything, Julia,” Anna said. “It’s what I do,” and she turned her head to watch a ragged flock of seagulls flying by, ash and charcoal wings skimming just above the surface of the water.

“And an article in Argosy magazine said this house was really haunted?” Julia asked skeptically, watching Anna watch the gulls as they rose and wheeled high over the Anchorage.

“Yes, it did. It was written by Dr Johnathan Montague, an anthropologist, I think. He studies haunted houses.”

“Anthropologists aren’t generally in the business of ghost-hunting, dear,” Julia said, smiling, and Anna glared at her from her rock, her stormcloud eyes narrowing the slightest bit.

“Well, this one seems to be, dear.”

And then neither of them said anything for a few minutes, no sound but the wind and the surf and the raucous gulls, all the soothing, lonely ocean noises. Finally the incongruent, mechanical rumble of a truck up on the highway to break the spell, the taut, wordless space between them, and “I think we should be heading back now,” Julia said. “The tide will be coming in soon.”

“You go on ahead,” Anna whispered and chewed at her lower lip. “I’ll catch up.”

Julia hesitated, glanced down at the cold salt water lapping against the boulders, each breaking and withdrawing wave tumbling the pebbles imperceptibly smoother. Waves to wash the greenbrown mats of seaweed one inch forward and one inch back; Like the hair of drowned women, she thought and then pushed the thought away.

“I’ll wait for you at the top, then,” she said. “In case you need help.”

“Sure, Dr Winter. You do that.” And Anna turned away again and flicked the butt of her cigarette at the sea.

Almost an hour of hairpin curves and this road getting narrower and narrower still, strangling dirt road with no place to turn around, before Julia finally comes to the edge of the forest and the fern thickets and giant redwoods release her to rolling, open fields. Tall, yellowbrown pampas grass that sways gentle in the breeze, air that smells like sun and salt again, and she takes a deep breath. A relief to breathe air like this after the stifling closeness of the forest, all those old trees with their shaggy, shrouding limbs, and this clear blue sky is better, she thinks.

“There,” Anna says and Julia gazes past the dazzling green hood of the Chevy, across the restless grass and there’s something, dark and far away, silhouetted against the western sky.

“That’s it,” Anna says, “Yeah, that must be it,” and she’s sounding like a kid on Christmas morning, little-girl-at-an amusement-park excitement; she climbs over the seat and sits down close to Julia.

I could always turn back now, Julia thinks, her hands so tight around the steering wheel that her knuckles have gone a waxy white. I could turn this car right around and go back to the highway. We could be home in a few hours. We could be home before dark.

“What are you waiting for?” Anna asks anxiously and she points at the squat, rectangular smudge in the distance. “That’s it. We’ve found it.”

“I’m beginning to think this is what you wanted all along,” Julia says, speaking low: she can hardly hear herself over the Bel Air’s idling engine. “Anchor Bay, spending time together – that was all just a trick to get me to bring you out here, wasn’t it?”

And Anna looks reluctantly away from the house, and “No,” she says, “That’s not true. I only remembered the house later, when we were on the beach.”

Julia looks towards the distant house again, if it is a house. It might be almost anything, sitting out there in the tall grass, waiting. It might be almost anything at all.

“You’re the one who’s always telling me to get my nose out of books,” and Anna’s starting to sound angry, cultivated indignation gathering itself protectively around her like a caul and she slides away from Julia, slides across the vinyl car seat until she’s pressed against the passenger door.

“I don’t think this was what I had in mind.”

Anna begins kicking lightly at the floorboard then, the toe of a sneaker tapping out the rhythm of her impatience like a Morse code signal, and “Jesus,” she says, “It’s only an old house. What the hell are you so afraid of, anyway?”

“I never said I was afraid, Anna. I never said anything of the sort.”

“You’re acting like it, though. You’re acting like you’re scared to death.”

“Well, I’m not going to sit here and argue with you,” Julia says and tells herself that just this once it doesn’t matter if she sounds more like Anna’s mother than her lover. “It’s my car and we never should have driven all the way out here alone. I would have turned around half an hour ago, if there’d been enough room.” And she puts the Bel Air into reverse and backs off the dirt road, raising an alarmed and fluttering cloud of grasshoppers, frantic insect wings beating all about them as she shifts into drive and cuts the wheel sharply in the direction of the trees.

“I thought you’d understand,” Anna says, “I thought you were different,” and she’s out of the car before Julia can try to stop her, slams her door shut and walks quickly away, following the path that leads between the high and whispering grass towards the house.

Julia sits in the Chevy and watches her go, watches helplessly as Anna seems to grows smaller with every step, the grass and the brilliant day swallowing her alive, wrapping her up tight in golden stalks and sunbeam teeth. And she imagines driving away alone, simply taking her foot off the brake pedal and retracing that twisting, treeshadowed path to the safety of paved roads. How easy that would be, how perfectly satisfying, and then Julia watches Anna for a few more minutes before she turns the car to face the house and tries to pretend that she never had any choice at all.

The house like a grim and untimely joke, like something better off in a Charles Addams cartoon than perched on the high, sheer cliffs at the end of the road. This ramshackle grotesquerie of boards gone the silvergrey of old oyster shells, the splinterskin walls with their broken windows and crooked shutters, steep gables and turrets missing half their slate shingles and there are places where the roof beams and struts show straight through the house’s weathered hide. One black lightning rod still standing guard against the sky, a rusting garland of wrought-iron filigree along the eaves, and the uppermost part of the chimney has collapsed in a redgreen scatter of bricks gnawed back to soft clay by moss and the corrosive sea air. Thick weeds where there might once have been a yard and flower beds, and the way the entire structure has begun to list perceptibly leaves Julia with the disconcerting impression that the house is cringing, or that it has actually begun to pull itself free of the earth and crawl, inch by crumbling inch, away from the ocean.

“Anna, wait.” But she’s already halfway up the steps to the wide front porch and Julia’s still sitting behind the wheel of the Chevy. She closes her eyes for a moment, better to sit listening to the wind and the waves crashing against the cliffs, the smaller, hollow sound of Anna’s feet on the porch, than to let the house think that she can’t look away. Some dim instinct to tell her that’s how this works, the sight of it to leave you dumbstruck, vulnerable, and My God, it’s only an ugly old house, she thinks, An ugly old house that no one wants anymore, and then she laughs out loud, like it can hear.

After she caught up with Anna and made her get back into the car, and after Julia agreed to drive her the rest of the way out to the house, Anna Foley started talking about Dr Montague’s article in Argosy again, talked as though there’d never been an argument. The tension between them forgotten or discarded in a flood of words, words that came faster and faster as they neared the house, almost piling atop each other towards the end.

“There were stories that Dandridge murdered his daughter as a sacrifice, sometime after his wife died in 1914. But no one ever actually found her body. No, she just vanished one day and no one ever saw her again. The daughter, I mean. The daughter vanished, not the wife. His wife is buried behind the house.”

Only an ugly old house sitting forgotten beside the sea.

“. . . To Poseidon, or maybe even Dagon, a sort of Mesopotamian corn king, half man and half fish. Dandridge traveled all over Iraq and Persia before he came back and settled in California. He had a fascination with Persian and Hindu antiquities.”

Then open your eyes and get this over with. And she does open her eyes then, stares back at the house and relaxes her grip on the steering wheel. Anna’s standing on the porch now, standing on tiptoes and peering in through a small, shattered window near the door.

“Anna, wait for me. I’m coming.” And Anna turns and smiles, waves to her, then goes back to staring into the house through the broken window.

Julia leaves the keys dangling in the ignition and picks her way towards the house, past lupine and wild white roses and a patch of poppies the colour of tangerines, three or four orange-and-black monarch butterflies flitting from blossom to blossom, and there’s a line of stepping stones almost lost in the weeds. The stones lead straight to the house, though the weedy patch seems much wider than it did from the car. I should be there by now, she thinks, looking over her shoulder at the convertible and then ahead, at Anna standing on the porch, standing at the door of the Dandridge house, wrestling with the knob. I’m so anxious, it only seems that way, but five, seven, ten more steps and the porch seems almost as far away as it did when she got out of the car.

“Wait for me,” she shouts at Anna, who doesn’t seem to have heard. Julia stops and wipes the sweat from her forehead before it runs down into her eyes. She glances up at the sun, directly overhead and hot against her face and bare arms, and she realizes that the wind has died. The blustery day grown suddenly so still and she can’t hear the breakers anymore, either. Only the faint and oddly muted cries of the gulls and grasshoppers.

She turns towards the sea, and there’s a brittle noise from the sky that makes her think of eggshells cracking against the edge of a china mixing bowl, and on the porch Anna’s opening the door. And the shimmering, stickywet darkness that flows out and over and through Anna Foley makes another sound, and Julia shuts her eyes so she won’t have to watch whatever comes next.

The angle of the light falling velvetsoft across the dusty floor, the angle and the honey colour of the sun, so she knows that it’s late afternoon and somehow she’s lost everything in between. That last moment in the yard before this place without even unconsciousness to bridge the gap, then and now, and she understands it’s as simple as that. Her head aches and her stomach rolls when she tries to sit up to get a better look at the room and Julia decides that maybe it’s best to lie still a little while longer. Just lie here and stare out that window at the blue sky framed in glass-jagged mouths, and there might have been someone there a moment ago, a scarecrow face looking in at her, watching, and there might have been nothing but the partitioned swatches of the fading day.

She can hear the breakers again, now only slightly muffled by the walls, and the wind around the corners of the house; these sounds through air filled with the oily stench of rotting fish and the neglected smell of any very old and empty house. A barren, fishstinking room and a wall with one tall, arched window just a few feet away from her, sunbleached and peeling wallpaper strips, and she knows that it must be a western wall, the sunlight through the broken window panes proof enough of that.

Unless it’s morning light, she thinks. Unless this is another day entirely and the sun is rising now instead of setting. Julia wonders why she ever assumed it was afternoon, how she can ever again assume anything. And there’s a sound, then, from somewhere behind her, inside the room with her or very close: the crisp sound of a ripe melon splitting open, scarlet flesh and black teardrop seeds, sweet red juice, and now the air smells even worse. Fish putrefying under a baking summer sun, beaches strewn with bloated fishsilver bodies as far as the eye can see, beaches littered with everything in the sea heaved up onto the shore, an inexplicable, abyssal vomit, and she closes her eyes again.

“Are you here, Anna?” she says. “Can you hear me?”

And something quivers at the edge of her vision, a fluttering darkness deeper than the long shadows in the room, and she ignores the pain and the nausea and rolls over onto her back to see it more clearly. But the thing on the ceiling sees her too and moves quickly towards the sanctuary of a corner; all feathered, trembling gills and swimmerets, and its jointed lobster carapace almost as pale as toadstools, chitin soft and pale and it scuttles backwards on raw and bleeding human hands. It drips and leaves a spattered trail of itself on the floor as it goes.

She can see the door now, the absolute blackness waiting in the hall through the doorway, and there’s laughter from that direction, a woman’s high, hysterical laugh, but so faint that it can’t possibly be coming from anywhere inside the house.

“Anna,” she says again and the laughter stops and the thing on the ceiling clicks its needle teeth together.

“She’s gone down, that one,” it whispers. “She’s gone all the way down to Mother Hydra and won’t hear you in a hundred hundred million years.”

And the laughing begins again, seeping slyly up through the floorboards, through every crack on these moldering plaster walls.

“I saw a something in the Sky,” the ceiling crawler whispers from its corner. “No bigger than my fist.’ ”

And the room writhes and spins around her like a kaleidoscope, that tumbling gyre of colored shards, remaking the world and it wouldn’t matter if there were anything for her to hold on to. She would still fall; no way not to fall with this void devouring even the morning, or the afternoon, whichever, even the colors of the day sliding down that slick gullet.

“I can’t see you,” Anna says, Anna’s voice but Julia’s never heard her sound this way before. So afraid, so insignificant. “I can’t see you anywhere,” and Julia reaches out (or down or up) into the furious storm that was the house, the maelstrom edges of a collapsing universe, and her arm sinks in up to the elbow. Sinks through into dead-star cold, the cold ooze of the deepest sea-floor trench, and “Open your eyes,” Anna says, Anna crying now, sobbing, and “Please, God, open your eyes, Julia.”

But her eyes are open and she’s standing somewhere far below the house, standing in front of the woman on the rock, the thing that was a woman once, and part of it can still recall that lost humanity. The part that watches Julia with one eye, the desperate, hate-filled, pale green eye that hasn’t been lost to the seething ivory crust of barnacles and sea lice that covers half its face. The woman on the great rock in the center of the phosphorescent pool, and then the sea rushes madly into the cavern, surges up and foams around the rusted chains and scales and all the squirming, pinkwhite anemones sprouting from her thighs.

Alone, alone, all, all alone,

And the woman on the rock raises an arm, her ruined and shellstudded arm, and reaches across the pool towards Julia.

Alone on the wide wide Sea.

Her long fingers and the webbing grown between them, and Julia leans out across the frothing pool, ice water wrapping itself around her ankles, filling her shoes, and she strains to take the woman’s hand. Straining to reach as the jealous sea rises and falls, rises and falls, threatening her with the bottomless voices of sperm whales and typhoons. But the distance between their fingertips doubles, triples, origami space unfolding itself, and the woman’s lips move silently, yellow teeth and pleading, gillslit lips as mute as the cavern walls.

—Murdered his daughter, sacrificed her—

Nothing from those lips but the small and startled creatures nesting in her mouth, not words but a sudden flow of surprised and scuttling legs, the claws and twitching antennae, and a scream that rises from somewhere deeper than the chained woman’s throat, deeper than simple flesh, soulscream spilling out and swelling to fill the cave from wall to wall. This howl that is every moment that she’s spent here, every damned and salt-raw hour made aural and Julia feels it in her bones, in the silver amalgam fillings of her teeth.

Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?

And the little girl sits by the fire in a rocking chair, alone in the front parlor of her father’s big house by the sea and she reads fairy tales to herself while her father rages somewhere overhead, in the sky or only upstairs but it makes no difference, in the end. Father of black rags and sour, scowling faces, and she tries not to hear the chanting or the sounds her mother is making again, tries to think of nothing but the Mock Turtle and Alice, the Lobster Quadrille by unsteady lantern light, and Don’t look at the windows, she thinks, or Julia tries to warn her. Don’t look at the windows ever again.

Well, there was mystery. Mystery, ancient and modern, with Seaography: then Drawling – the Drawling-Master was an old conger eel . . .

An old conjure eel—

Don’t ever look at the windows even when the scarecrow fingers, the dry-grass bundled fingers, are tap-tap-tapping their song upon the glass. And she has seen the women dancing naked by the autumn moon, dancing in the tall, moonwashed sheaves, bare feet where her father’s scythe has fallen again and again, every reaping stroke to kill and call the ones that live at the bottom of the pool deep below the house. Calling them up and taunting them and then sending them hungrily back to down to Hell again. Hell or the deep, fire or icedark water, and it makes no difference whatsoever in the end.

Would not, could not, would not, could not, would not join the dance.

Julia’s still standing at the wavesmoothed edge of the absinthe pool, or she’s only a whispering, insubstantial ghost afraid of parlor windows, smokegrey ghost muttering from nowhen, from hasn’t-been or never-will-be, and the child turns slowly towards her voice as the hurting thing chained to the rock begins to tear and stretches itself across the widening gulf.

“Julia, please.”

“You will be their queen, in the cities beneath the sea,” the old man says. “When I am not even a memory, child, you will hold them to the depths.”

. . . And they all dead did lie, And a million million slimy things Liv’d on – and so did I . . .

“Open your eyes.” And Julia does, these sights like the last frame of a movie or a dream that might never have ended, and she’s lying in Anna’s arms, lying on her back in the weedy patch between the car and the brooding, spiteful house.

“I thought you were dead,” Anna says, holding on to her so tight that she can hardly breathe and Anna sounds relieved and frightened and angry all at once, the tears rolling down her sunburned face and dripping off her chin onto Julia’s cheeks.

“You were so goddamn cold. I thought you were dead. I thought I was alone.”

Alone, alone, all, all alone . . .

“I smell flowers,” Julia says. “I smell roses.” Because she does and she can think of nothing else to say, no mere words ever to make her forget, and she stares up past Anna, past the endless, sea-hued sky, at the summerwarm sun staring back down at her like the blind and blazing eye of Heaven.

GRAHAM JOYCE

The Coventry Boy

ALTHOUGH IT WORKS AS a stand-alone story, “The Coventry Boy” is an extract from Graham Joyce’s most recent novel, The Facts of Life, published by Victor Gollancz in 2002. His other most recent book is Smoking Poppy, and he has also scripted an adaptation of his book The Tooth Fairy for a Hollywood movie.

“This story tells of the fearful night of the Coventry Blitz,” reveals Joyce, who grew up in modern Coventry, “when the medieval and Georgian historical town was reduced to rubble by the Luftwaffe.”

EVERYONE SUSPECTED THAT THE BIG STORM was coming, but Cassie seemed to know exactly when. There had already been numerous raids between June and October 1940, when bombs had rained down on Coventry. Factories, shops and cinemas left twisted and smoking. There were even incidents of German planes machine-gun strafing civilians in the street. The civilian injury list was high, and almost two hundred people were killed outright in these early raids.

After all, Coventry was located exactly at the heart of the country and Adolf Hitler wanted to show what a surgeon he was; show how the heart could be cut out. A beautiful medieval and Georgian rosette town boasting resplendent cathedrals and antiquarian buildings, Coventry was a heritage showpiece of the English Midlands. And after all again, Coventry manufactured the Armstrong-Whitworth Whitley bomber, the first plane to penetrate German airspace, and the main instrument of the torment of Munich. No, not surgery: the Führer wanted to show he could bring his fist down and turn it to dust. The storm would come, but if only the city might know when then the fatalities might be minimized.

But Cassie knew. Sixteen years old, going on seventeen, exactly how she knew was unspeakable, but she knew it in her water, in her bowels. Her blood coursed differently. Perhaps the moon fattening in the night sky spoke to her; whatever it was, she knew better than to tell. She’d already learned that if she did try to tell, no one would believe her; and that after they’d failed to listen they would call her a jitterbug. So she knew with certainty, but did not speak.

Like the dead.

“The dead can hear you,” her mother Martha had said. Martha, who smoked a pipe and who never moved from her place by the fireside. “But they can’t speak. They can’t get their words out.”

It started for Cassie when she woke early one morning with music playing in her head. Her sleep patterns, already disrupted by the nights spent in the Anderson shelter at the bottom of the back garden and by the sirens, had broken like an egg yolk, spilling something of her. She felt a mild flow inside her and put her hands between her legs. The wetness she found there made her think of the residue of sleep, a slippery vernix left behind by her dreams. While elder sister Beatie and Martha still slept she pulled on her dressing gown and went downstairs.

The haunting music was still playing in her head. It was a piece she’d heard several times, familiar, comforting. Cassie switched on the radio. It was tuned to the BBC Home Service, and the same piece was playing, perfectly segued with the version sounding in her head. She switched the radio off and although it became fainter, she continued to hear the music, without it missing a beat or dropping a note. After switching the radio back again she sat on a chair and stared hard at the set until the piece had finished playing. When the music stopped on the radio, it stopped inside her head, too.

Cassie went upstairs to her room, dressed hurriedly and reached under her bed for a tin tea-caddy, Japanese lacquer-style. In it were her savings. After emptying the caddy into her purse she went downstairs again, put on her coat and allowed the door to click quietly behind her as she let herself out. The morning was cold and sharp and there was a rime of frost on the ground. She walked into the city.

Up Trinity Street to the top of the town and directly to Paynes’ music shop. Too early: it was closed. She stood in the doorway and waited. It was an hour and a half before the manager of the store arrived to open up. “You’re keen,” he said, producing his glittering bunch of keys. He had to wave his hand at Cassie to get her to stand aside for him.

“I want a record player,” Cassie said as soon as they’d got inside the shop. “A new one.”

The store manager switched on the lights. “Let me get my coat off,” he said. “Where’s the fire?”

Coming, said the voice in Cassie’s head.

He took her over to the latest box-players. Cassie was mesmerized by the little explosions of hair in his nostrils and earholes. “This is an HMV gramophone. It has a Bakelite playing arm and it comes in this beech cabinet—”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. I’ll have it.”

“You haven’t asked me how much it is.” The manager eyed this slip of a girl suspiciously. “How much can you afford?”

Cassie emptied her savings out of her purse. The manager sighed. “I’ve got some second-hand cabinets over here. Let’s see what we can do.”

Cassie could just afford one of the machines on offer. It took her last penny. Then she said, “I want a record. I don’t know what it’s called. But you’ll know it. It goes like this.” She hummed the music that had been playing both on the radio and in her head that morning.

“ ‘Moonlight Serenade’. I’ve got it in stock but how are you going to pay for it? I’ve just let you off a few shillings on that cabinet and that’s cleaned you out, hasn’t it?”

Cassie merely fixed her eyes on the man and crossed her legs at the ankles. She swayed, very slightly.

The manager seemed cross, but he stepped behind his counter and sorted through the discs until he found the Glenn Miller recording. “I’ll let you have it but you’re going to have to bring the money in when you’ve got it. Understand? I don’t know why I’m doing this.”

It’s because I’ve got power over you.

Cassie lugged the record-playing cabinet home by its carrying-handle. It was heavy and she had to keep stopping to switch hands, but she was unwavering. On the way home an ARP officer in a tin hat, hands on hips, positioned himself on the pavement in front of her. “Oi, girlie, where’s your gas mask?” he shouted in a bullying tone.

She stepped round the ARP man, leaving him to gaze after her.

Martha and Beatie were up and about when she got home. Cassie bustled into the sitting room and squeezed by them without a word. “Where’ve you been?” Martha called. “Do you want some breakfast?”

“Whatever have you got there?” Beatie said, eyeing the record player. But Cassie only bumped upstairs without a word. “She’s getting to be a proper moody girl.” Beatie complained.

“Not like someone I could name,” Martha said.

Beatie was about to fire back an answer, but there came to stop her lips the strains of Glenn Miller’s “Moonlight Serenade”, drifting from Cassie’s room. The sound filled the house like a dew-backed mist.

In the next few days, Cassie played the piece over and over and over. She would lie on her bed, sometimes naked, listening. At first, Beatie and Martha were merely irritated. Martha quizzed her daughter, without getting an answer, about why she’d blown her savings on the record player. Beatie actually went out and bought Cassie two more Glenn Miller hits, and an armload of stuff a friend at the bomber factory – where Beatie punched rivets for the war effort – had found too sad to keep because it had all belonged to a brother in the navy killed at sea. But Cassie didn’t play any of it. She sat upstairs in her room, spinning “Moonlight Serenade”. And if Martha or Beatie complained too aggressively, then she merely went out, and stayed out, for long periods of time.

At night, wide awake with whatever it was that had broken her sleep and when her mother and sister absolutely would not tolerate any sound coming from her room, she huddled in a blanket on the edge of her bed, watching the moon fattening slowly, maturing, feeding her with more energy as if through a silver umbilical cord. If the sirens came she was ready, and would help the others pull a few things together for the shuffle to the Anderson shelter; have the kettle boiled for a flask of tea while they were still blinking and complaining; especially helpful to Beatie who was doing ten-hour shifts riveting bombers and who needed the sleep, unlike Cassie. Most of the sirens at that time were false alarms, and Cassie knew it; knew they might as well sleep on, that it would be Birmingham or maybe Liverpool catching a tanning that night. But even in the shelter she couldn’t nap. One night sometime before dawn Beatie got up to relieve herself in the tin pail. Martha, blinking, dozy, said, “Hark! Is that the all-clear?”

“No, Mum, it’s Beatie pissing in the bucket. Go back to sleep.”

Beatie was having a hard time for sleep. Like many of the women of Coventry she was under pressure to work ten- and sometimes twelve-hour shifts for the war effort. Buck up, girls! Let’s bomb the Hun! This she did readily, and since the pay was good she’d never had so much money in her pocket; but the sirens going off on so many nights like this left her exhausted and irritable.

One evening Cassie heard her sister calling up the stairs, “Cassie, if you play that bloody thing one more time – just one more time – I’m coming up these stairs to sort you out! You hear me, Cassie?”

Cassie didn’t answer. She lay on her bed in bra and pants. “Moonlight Serenade” played on. When it stopped, Cassie reached over languidly to put it on again. After a moment, the thundering of shoes on the stairs. Beatie threw open the door, made straight for the record player, lifted the needle arm, plucked up the record from the turntable and broke it over her knee. Then she turned to look Cassie in the eye.

Cassie didn’t flinch. Beatie screamed and went thundering back down the stairs. Cassie didn’t mind. She’d got the music lodged in her head, and perfectly, note for note, beat for beat. She could switch it on or off any time she wanted to.

What’s more, she could repeat that trick with the radio over and over. Many times she heard music playing in her head, would go to switch on the Home Service and find the same tune broadcasting loud and clear. Without saying anything she tested this ability scientifically. It was clear to her that she could somehow “hear” radio broadcasts in the thin air. She didn’t need radio-receiving equipment. She somehow was the equipment.

Though she was not so stupid as to try to tell anyone about this.

Other things were going on in her body. Her breasts had plumped slightly, and her nipples were tender and sensitive. The lips of her vagina, too, were swollen, and she felt an itch or a trickle deep inside her. She needed to masturbate often, and before Beatie snapped the shellac disc she would lie under a sheet on her bed stroking her clitoris and squeezing her nipples while “Moonlight Serenade” teased her on. And in the street, too, it was obvious that all this wasn’t just one-way. Even as a virgin she knew the effect she was having on men. Off-duty soldiers and sailors and airmen were burning for her, it was plain from the way they sized her up. Plus she could make men’s heads turn – not in the usual figure of speech but literally: all she had to do was focus her gaze on the back of the neck of a man somewhere in her vicinity, perhaps on the bus or while waiting in a queue with her ration card, and after a moment the subject would have to turn and look at her. It worked without fail. She was accreting powers to herself, she knew that. What powers they were she had no idea, but they were extraordinary. She’d used them on that man in the record shop, but he didn’t know it. They never did know. They were easy. Men were easy.

And that was just part of it. It was knowing that the storm was coming that most excited her. Terrified and excited her.

On the night of 12 November Cassie went to a dance with Beatie. Martha had stopped worrying about what the girls got up to a long time ago. Though Cassie was only sixteen she could easily pass for a twenty-year-old, and Martha had given up trying to keep her in. Though she’d been stricter with her other daughters, something about the incidence of death all around had relaxed her with Cassie; and she’d learned early that Cassie would go her own way whatever obstacles were placed before her. But she did extract a promise from both her daughters that they would seek proper shelter, and not to try to find their way home should they get caught in a raid.

Cassie was in a highly excitable state as the two stepped into town together. The moon was moving into its fullness, like an autumn gourd, and though it was a clear and rather frosty night, the searchlights sweeping the starry sky passed across the three spires of the city, prickling the night. Beatie was trying to get Cassie to calm down.

She might as well not have bothered. As soon as they barrelled into the dance hall, Cassie heard the band and broke away from Beatie’s side. When Beatie caught up with her she was already jiving with an airman, his hair slicked back and his eyes dripping with ardour. “Don’t give it all away too quick,” was all Beatie could whisper, but Cassie was spinning and waving her hands in the air.

That jitterbug.

Within the hour Cassie was in the shadows of the great Gothic cathedral in Bayley Lane, her back against the cold, damp medieval wall and her skirt up around her waist. There were no street lights because of the blackout. “Wow, you’re in a hurry,” said her airman as she fumbled with his belt.

“We might never see each other again,” Cassie said, clinging to the fleecy collar of his leather flying jacket. “Imagine that. And then we’d have missed the chance to fuck.” And I’d never lose my cherry, she thought.

“Hey, and you think like a bloke,” he said.

“Does it put you off?”

“No, no . . . it’s just . . . and, oh you smell good.”

“Stop talking. Let’s do it.”

A siren began moaning, very close. “Fuckanddamn.”

“Ignore it,” Cassie said. “It’s not tonight.”

“What?”

“Maybe tomorrow night. Or the next night. But it’s not coming tonight.”

“Hey, they should have you down at Bletchley, if you know all that. You know, Telligence service. I’m sorry – I can’t do much with that siren going off in my ears. How old are you, anyway?”

Cassie dug her hand into the airman’s trousers, stroking the bell-end of his cock with her thumbnail. He flinched, and settled back into her arms again. “Can’t do what?” Cassie shouted. She was having to bellow to make herself heard above the siren. Someone ran past them on their way to a shelter. Then she put her tongue in his ear.

“Christ! God, you’re lovely!”

Cassie glanced up at the cathedral spire and at the searchlights raking the sky overhead. She knew the airman wanted get himself off to the nearest air-raid shelter, but with his cock fattening in her hand he couldn’t tear himself away. “Do it,” she said.

He tugged his trousers down and he hooked the back of Cassie’s leg over his arm. He had to push her knickers out of the way and come at her from the side, almost lifting her from the ground as he made to enter her, their gaze locked together in that ancient place, under the sky-pricking spire, under the intersecting beams of the searchlights, inside the demonic and melancholy howl of the siren. He fell back. “It’s no good. I can’t – not with that thing going off right in my ear.”

“What’s the matter?”

The airman fumbled. He looked up at the sky, at the searchlights raking the clouds. Then he looked down again. “It’s just not happening for me. Can we please go to the shelter? My arse is getting cold.”

Cassie pulled up his trousers for him. Hand in hand, they strolled towards the shelter on Much Park Street. An ARP man standing outside the shelter said, “Don’t ’urry yourselves, will you?”

“It’s all right,” said the airman glumly. “It’s not coming tonight.”

“Another bleedin’ know-it-all,” the ARP man said sourly.

The airman whispered as they went down into the basement of Draper’s Hall, “Don’t mind him. He just needs to get laid.”

Not the only one, Cassie’s voice said.

They spent an hour in the shelter together before the all-clear came. His name was Peter and he was a navigator. He was twenty, and seemed worldly and mature to Cassie. She was cold so he pulled his leather flying helmet out of his pocket and put it on her head. He walked her all the way home and they kissed again in the alley running between the houses. He put his hand on her forehead. “You’ve got a fever.”

“I’m all right,” Cassie said. “Really I am.”

But the moment had passed. Cassie sighed when she knew it wasn’t going to happen. She made to give him back his flying helmet. “You keep it,” he said.

“Won’t you get in trouble for losing it?”

“Yeh. Goodnight, Cassie. You’re too lovely, you are. Too lovely.”

And he went back to his war.

The next day Cassie lay in bed late, touching herself, thinking of her airman and other handsome men, sleeping fitfully. Now as well as the music her head was full of other sounds: high-frequency whistles and intermittent Morse signals and snatches of foreign language. When she rose the house was empty. Beatie had gone to work and Martha had left a note on the kitchen table to say that she had popped out to do some shopping.

Cassie parked a stray curl behind her ear with a delicate finger and switched on the radio, fiddling with the tuning dial. The frequency whistle rose and fell, throbbed and hummed. There was Morse code. There was guttural language. She didn’t need an interpreter. It was going be the following night for sure. Last night the moon had been almost full. Tomorrow night it would be complete. Cassie shook with excitement. It was plain. Adolf Hitler would send his men, his bombers, his demons to Coventry tomorrow night. That was what he would do.

“There you are,” Martha said, letting herself in, pulling off her hat. “Sleeping the sleep of the dead. It’ll do you no good, all this lying in.”

“Tomorrow night. They’re going to bomb us tomorrow night.”

“Eh? What’s that?”

“More than before. More than last month. The big raid. It’s tomorrow night. I know.”

“Know? How can you know?”

“It’s a full moon tomorrow night. It’s coming. It’s going to rain fire here in Coventry, Mum.”

Martha walked over and put her hand on Cassie’s forehead. “You’re shivering. You’re burning up. Do you want to go back to bed?”

Cassie hadn’t even known what the airman had meant in his reference to the intelligence mansion at Bletchley, the government code and cypher school. Its very existence was supposed to be top secret. But the day before Cassie met her airman at a dance the Bletchley school had decoded a recent German transmission. The transmission laid down the signal procedures for an operation code-named not Moonlight Serenade but Moonlight Sonata, implying that a three-pronged attack would be launched against a British city on the night of the full moon. On the same day a captured German pilot was overheard telling his cell-mate that a three-phase raid would be made on either Coventry or Birmingham on or around 15 November.

The Germans had invented a radio navigational system known as the X-Gerat, guiding a plane to its target and automatically triggering the bomb-release on arrival. The X-Gerat used four radio transmitters sending radio beams from different locations. It comprised one main beam aligned on the target and three intersecting beams. The German pathfinder pilots flew parallel to the main beam until they hit the first intersecting beam. That was their instruction to change course and fly directly along the main beam. Twenty miles from the target they passed through the second intersecting beam: a signal to press a button, starting a clock. Five miles from target they crossed the third beam: an instruction to press another button that stopped the first hand of the clock and started a second hand ticking. The bombing run had begun. When the two hands came together, the bomb load was automatically released on the people below. It was an efficient system for obliteration bombing.

Bletchley had uncovered signals to special bombing units, all starting with the code-word Korn. They also decrypted information revealing that special Luftwaffe calibration signals would commence at one p.m. on 14 November.

At 13:00 hours on the afternoon of 14 November the German calibration signal was detected. Two hours later British Fighter Command were satisfied that the X-Gerat beams were aligned on Coventry. The Air Ministry warned the RAF home commands that Coventry had become a special target.

They might also have warned Coventry. The city’s anti-aircraft batteries and barrage-balloon units might have appreciated the tip-off; not to mention the Coventry Fire Brigade, the Chief of Police, and the local ARP. They might have tipped the wink to the mayor of the city, or rumoured it at the Coventry and Warwick-shire hospital.

They chose not to. Cassie was the only person in Coventry who had been informed.

*   *   *

At one o’clock that afternoon, Martha and Cassie were about to sit down to lunch. Martha switched on the radio for the news. Just as it came on Cassie felt something click in her head, like a switch being thrown. “It’s started,” she said.

“Yes, yes,” Martha said, bringing the teapot to the table, thinking Cassie referred to the news broadcast.

“I don’t mean the news. Do you think you should all go out to the farm? That would be best. You should go out to Wolvey where Tom and Una are. Safer, Mum.”

“I can’t be bothered with that game,” Martha said. “If Adolf wants me he’ll have to come and get me.” When the early raids had started in June they had, like many other Coventry citizens, all gone out together to stay in the country. But what with the small aerodrome at Bramcote so close to the farm, they had found the concentration of bombs denser and somehow more immediate than when they stayed shivering under the stairs in the days before the Anderson shelter was erected.

“Well I’m glad. I don’t want to go to the farm. I want to stay. Stay and be here. Stay and help. That’s it. I want to help.” Cassie spoke rapidly. Martha had seen it before in her. A repetitive but cheerful chatter. “But you and Beatie, Mum, I want you and Beatie to stay in the shelter. While I’m out. Helping.”

“Is it your time of the month?” Martha said.

Some time after six o’clock that evening Cassie changed from her dress into a pair of slacks, pulled on a pair of Beatie’s work boots, donned her coat and scarf and went out without telling her mother. She stopped by the park to light a cigarette and to look up at the night sky. A Harvest Moon, they had called it before the war. The moon was indeed loaded, and one great thing about the blackout, Cassie thought, was the restoration of the stars in the sky. The evening was crisp and cold and the cigarette smoke reared up like white horses’ heads briefly painted on the air. And if she swung her head the black night ran with tiny beads of colour, and she knew that these were radio signals that she could not just hear but could see tracking across the sky, and it was no point trying to fix your gaze on these tiny iridescent parabolas because they would be gone in a twinkling anyway and the only way to apprehend them with the human eye was to acknowledge the brevity of the leap they made into and out of the visible spectrum, and it was an extraordinary thing how few people understood that.

Cassie was chipped out of her reverie by a burn on her hand. The cigarette wedged between first and second fingers had burned down to a stick of ash, unsmoked. The stub sparked as it fell to the flagstones, and she stamped it out under her shoe. She took her compact out of her bag and reapplied her lipstick by the light of the moon. She checked her hair in her pocket mirror, clipped it shut and returned her compact to her bag. “And the night,” she said; though she didn’t know why, because her mind was racing. Turning her collar against the chill of the evening, she proceeded to walk slowly towards Coventry city centre.

At around seven p.m. she developed a strange feeling in her stomach, or perhaps in her bowels. A vibration. Then it spread across her body to her ears, until she understood that the vibration was not inside her but was the familiar air-raid warning sirens. She’d somehow anticipated it by several seconds. That sour, almost forlorn howl dragged up from the lowest place on earth, fattening and rising into a despairing moan, climbing at last until it wails, fighting to live at its uppermost note until it falls back, uselessly, defeated, and then climbs again, wanting to infect with its own panic. Cassie heard the whistles of nearby ARP men as they went through their drill. Soon, she knew, there would be more urgency. Within ten minutes she was right. The throbbing of incoming aircraft could be heard like a great rumour in the distance, behind the moan of the air-raid siren. The ARP men began to whistle more spiritedly and shout along the streets, some of them jocular – “Run, rabbits, run, my little rabbits!” The searchlights were thrown on, criss-crossing the night sky from points in the centre of town.

Cassie pressed on. Then something beautiful illuminated the sky. It was a parachute flare, strontium-white and blazing brilliantly, hanging in the air. Then more, several parachute flares hanging in formation, dropped on the east side of the city and floating west in the light breeze. Ack-ack guns replied from ground placements in nearby villages, uselessly thumping shells into the sky; then Bofors guns from nearby, louder.

In Swan Lane a voice from the dark said, “Come on, girlie, let’s have you off the streets.”

“Hello, Derek,” Cassie said. “Where’ve you been these past weeks?”

Derek was an old friend of Beatie’s. He’d been turned down for active service because his right leg was three inches longer than his left. “Cassie! What are you doing? Why don’t you get home? This one’s for real.”

“I can see that. I’m out to help. Official, like.”

Derek squinted at her. “Official?”

“Go and do your rounds. Get some rest. It’s going to be a long night.”

Derek snorted at this sixteen-year-old advising him. But she was already gone. Derek put his whistle to his lips but merely stared after her.

Cassie took Thackall Street alongside the football stadium. There was a cut-through alley behind the football ground, and she hoped that route into town would help her dodge most of the ARP men. As she slipped through the alley towards Hillfields, Cassie could see families getting into their Andersons, and she thought she heard a snigger. Then another, and another, and she realized the sniggers were coming from the air. The sky was sniggering. They were incendiary bombs, producing an eerie sound as they twisted in the air. They thumped against the ground without exploding but spread fire where they fell, and they began to rain down in great numbers. Someone saw her from a garden by the light of one such flame and shouted, beckoning. But even when a different type of incendiary dropped with a flaring, phosphorescent flash, Cassie wasn’t going to be deflected.

Why am I unafraid? she said to herself. This isn’t natural. It’s because, she told herself, it’s because I am meant to be here.

Isolated minor fires broke out around her as she moved towards the heart of the town, and away from the sniggering rain of incendiaries. There was another sound in the air, like a beating of leathery wings as something fluttered around her head. It raised the goose-flesh on her arms, but she hadn’t time to think what had caused it because the incendiaries were followed by the crump-blasts of high-explosive bombs falling all over the city.

A fire engine with its bell ringing sped past her on Primrose Hill. Most of the incendiaries around her were burning without effect in the middle of the road; others spread their fire. One licked at a gatepost in Cox Street and she tried to kick the flames away with her toe before a man rushed out of the house, smothering the small fire with a blanket. The man grabbed her arm and tried to drag her inside but she pulled free of him.

The drone of planes overhead got louder, and it occurred to Cassie that there must be many, many bombers in the air above her head, otherwise the throbbing noise would have passed. She looked up and she could see them. Hundreds of them, in beautiful geometric formation. Some of them near enough to reflect the light of their own flares, others tiny specks caught in the beams of the searchlights. She could see tracers, and the brief orange puffball explosions of anti-aircraft fire, and still around her she heard both the sniggering and the unexplained, loathsome bat-wing flutter. In the sky she could also detect – briefly visible, now gone – the iridescence of radio waves, sparkling but following an undeviating route across the sky and she knew that the bombers were somehow following this rainbow route. Another parachute was falling behind her. It had something dangling on the end. She thought it was a paratrooper, that the Germans were actually going to land. The parachute swung hither and thither in perfect time to the beat of “Moonlight Serenade”. But then she saw that the parachute carried a cylindrical box, and after it disappeared behind the houses it rocked the earth with a fantastic blast that left Cassie’s ears ringing. She reached in her pocket and found the leather aviation helmet her airman had given her two nights ago, and she put it on, tying the strap under her chin.

It was plain to her by now that each new cascade of incendiaries and explosives was coming down at approximately thirty-second intervals. That must have been the distance between each bank of planes, half-a-minute. She began to punctuate her movements accordingly.

By the time she got to the cathedral there were small fires burning everywhere and crews of firemen putting them out. No sooner would they extinguish one small fire than another packet of incendiaries fell within yards. Cassie saw four men on the roof of the cathedral trying to put out the flames. She stood behind a policeman who stared up at the roof.

The policeman glanced at her and, seeing her in her aviation helmet, took her to be a messenger. “Son, get down the Command Centre and tell ’em we need firemen here if we’re going to save it.”

She was gone. She knew that Command Centre for Civil Defence was in the basement of the Council House. A Home Guard soldier stopped her at the door and said he’d pass the message along. “Don’t hold out much hope. The phone lines are gone already. Try to get a crew along yourself.”

Cassie ran up Jordan Well. Another fire engine was active in Little Park Street, where a small factory was alight. A fireman was screwing his hose to a hydrant. Then another wave of bombs landed and three buildings went up like matchwood. An empty double-decker bus was turned on its nose to come crashing down, belly up, in a great groaning and splintering of metal. The fireman stopped what he was doing and stared at the destruction. Cassie had to tug his arm. “Cathedral,” she said. “They need you.”

The fireman’s face was streaked with soot. “I can’t leave this,” he shouted above the thudding of anti-aircraft fire. “The entire block’ll go. Tell ’em I’ll come if I can.”

Cassie ran back up Jordan Well. A crater had appeared in the road and an ambulance had driven into it. The driver was climbing out of his cab. Back at the cathedral the policeman was gone. There were still men on the roof, but acrid, yellow smoke writhed off it like fat worms making an escape from the conflagration. The men tore up the lead to get to the incendiaries that had fallen through to the timbers beneath. Cassie knew that they were wasting their time. She looked up in the air again and saw the sky was still filled with planes. They are riding on a secret beam, she thought. They can’t go anywhere else.

More incendiaries came sniggering, metal clanging or thumping depending where they hit, all landing on the roof above the north door. From nearby came a massive, vibrating explosion. The men on the roof turned from their work to see where the newest parachuted land mine had hit. Then they went back to the scrabbling job of tearing up the lead. But the new basket of incendiaries had gone through and had taken hold. “Where’s the fucking firemen?” someone screamed.

“Putting out the other fucking fires,” Cassie screamed back.

The men on the roof looked down at her. Then one said. “We’re coming down. Help us save what’s inside.”

The interior was choked with twisting yellow fumes. They all went in and saved what they could. Everything on the altar, some paintings, a couple of tapestries. But the cathedral was a museum of priceless medieval artworks. No one knew where to begin. Cassie rescued a gilt-framed painting of Lady Godiva. Within half an hour the smoke was overwhelming. One of the men put an arm out to stop Cassie going back in again. “It’s all over,” he said. “We don’t want to lose you as well.” One of the others, a young man, broke down in tears. They all stood together at the south porch and they watched the flames grow higher. Outside more explosions rocked the city. Inside, history burned and the jewel of the city melted.

At about nine-thirty a group of firemen from Solihull battered their way through the rubble-strewn streets and set up hoses. When they trained water on the interior of the burning roof, violent billowing geysers of steam howled back at them in a reverse draught. There was a moment of hope before, without warning, the hoses stopped running, dribbled. The water mains had been hit. An exploding incendiary injured a policeman still involved in salvage. “It’s gone,” a voice said quietly.

Another policeman put a hand on her shoulder. “Look sharp,” he said firmly. “The phones are down and they need more messengers over at Central.” Then he squinted at her. The giant red flames from the cathedral roof illuminated Cassie’s face. “Are you a lass?”

“I’m a messenger,” Cassie said.

“You’re a bloody angel.”

She skipped away.

The entire city was aflame. The fire crew on Little Park Street had given up and moved on, leaving the street burning, a row of three-storey scooped-out front walls. Cassie could see that Broadgate, the heart of the city, was spectacularly aflame. At the Council House Command Centre the soldier on duty recognized her this time and waved her through. She went down the stone steps to the basement. Three men and half a dozen women were chalking on blackboards or conferring. The telephone lines were still dead. They worked away under insipid yellow emergency lighting.

“Who the hell are you?” said one bespectacled, sweating man, shirtsleeves rolled. He had a cigarette squashed between his fingers but it had gone out.

“Messenger Vine,” Cassie said.

“Right then messenger Vine, get down the fire station – speed of light – and take this list of water hydrants. Off you go.”

“First I’ve got a message for you.”

“Let’s have it, then.”

“The message is: we will win through this.”

Everyone looked up from his or her task. The man took off his spectacles. He grimaced. His lips twitched and his mouth shaped to speak but no words came out. Then he said, “Who is the message from?”

“From me. Messenger Vine.”

The man put his cigarette to his lips, took a drag on it, then remembered that it had gone out. Then he started laughing, and within a moment everyone in the basement was laughing. The man stepped forward and crushed her in a bear hug, and he kissed her cheek. “You beauty!” he shouted at her. “You little beauty!” Then everyone in the basement was applauding her. “Somebody please give her a tin ’at!” the man shouted. One of the women found her an oversized ARP helmet and squashed it over Cassie’s flying cap. Cassie ran back up the stairs, clutching her note, flushed and embarrassed by the applause. People are strange, she thought.

But when she got into Broadgate she was shocked into paralysis by what she saw. The heart of the town was in flames. Fire crews were fighting uselessly. The fires and the bombs had stripped department stores. Steam rose from the water directed by the hoses; Bible-black smoke belching where it wasn’t. It was too hot to pass through Broadgate. She stood back and watched the flames and the vile beat of leathery wings at her ears returned. She swatted wildly at the small tormenting demons in the air around her. Then she saw her first corpse.

It was propped against a shop doorway. The glass from the shopfront had blown out and crystalled the street before her, and every winking shard of glass reflected the red flames. The sparkling rubies crunched under her boots as she approached the figure, its face and clothes white with plaster dust, eyes wide open, worms of blood glistening at ears, nostrils and mouth. It was a man, middle-aged, in uniform, though she couldn’t tell which uniform because it was caked in dust. He looked like one who, exhausted, had squatted down in the doorway for a moment’s rest. Cassie thought she should try to close the staring eyes, not out of respect or religious practice but because she thought that was what you should do. But the eyelids wouldn’t stay closed. She tried again and said, “You can go now.” The eyelids sprung open again. Cassie shivered and walked backwards from the staring corpse, and turned to run, prepared to take her chances amidst the flames of Broadgate.

The flames were climbing. Not one building in Broadgate seemed untouched, and still the bombs and incendiaries were raining down, and for a moment Cassie lost the centre of herself and the unassailable confidence that had so far been guiding her. She retreated to the white stone steps under the portico of the National Provincial Bank and looked down at Broadgate aflame. The drone of the bombers, the snigger and the howl of bombs, the leather wings, the roar and crackle of the flames were not going to go away. The planes in the night sky became demons, exulting, stretching their wings in effortless displays of aerial prowess, gloating, exulting, making merry. They fanned winds with their wings to make the flames dance higher. Was this hell, then? Cassie thought. Is this what they meant? If it was, she knew she must walk through it. Wasn’t that the only way to move about in hell, to be defiant?

Snigger. Another stick of incendiaries falling.

Cassie turned to see the beautiful globe of a parachute, its silk reflecting pearl and pink, moon and fire, waltzing low in the air currents, tugged down by its land-mine basket. It dropped in Broadgate and the blast punched Cassie’s ears and the black wind that followed flung her on her back. Then came a shuffling sound, almost like water, like the sound of someone taking a loose shit in a backyard outhouse, and Cassie lifted her head to see a four-storey building shredding itself into the street.

She got to her feet and moved away from the swirling hot dust. She clapped her ears. She hadn’t been deafened, but all sound had become muted. The roar of fire had become a low surf sound. The blast of further bombs had become the crackle of sticks on a fire. The air was warm and bitter. It scorched her lungs. She retreated to the white stone steps, the pillared portico of the National Provincial Bank.

Hunkered in the corner of the portico was another corpse. It was a young boy of her own age, about sixteen. He was also a messenger: she saw the insignia on his epaulettes. This time the eyes were closed in death and his face was pancaked with white masonry dust. Red worms of blood soaked into the dust from his ears and his nostrils. Cassie reached out, very, very slowly, her forefinger and second finger extended in a probing V, and touched the boy’s closed eyes. His eyelids shot open, and his blank, bloodshot eyes stared back at her.

Snigger in the air. Another stick falling. Flutter of leather wings.

She leaned forward and put her lips very close to his. “You can’t go,” she said. She exhaled a kiss into him. Still a virgin, like me. She took dust and ash onto the moistness of her own lips. The boy shivered.

His eyes were now wide with terror and he cowered from her touch. She peered hard at him. His teeth chattered. Cassie moved very slowly, squatting next to him, and put her hand on his head.

He moved his mouth, saying something, but with the recent blast muffling her ears Cassie couldn’t make out what he said. She remembered the fire-hydrant list, still clutched in her hand. “Come with me,” she said. “We’ll help each other.”

He twitched slightly, grimacing, making an effort to stir. He spoke again but Cassie couldn’t hear it. She guessed from his lip movement that he said, “I can’t move.”

“Are you injured?”

Perhaps he said something like, “No. I just can’t move.”

There was a sound in her head when he tried to speak. But it was out of sync with his lip movement.

“If you stay there you will die of shame. You must get over your fear and come with me now. What’s your name?”

Something. Again he moved his lips, but no clear sound came.

“I can’t hear. My ears are damaged.”

“Michael.” Maybe he said his name was Michael.

Cassie placed her hands either side of his face, and she leaned into him, kissing him full on the mouth once more, sucking more dust and ash from his lips. He trembled and his teeth continued to chatter, so she kissed him harder. “Coventry boy,” she said at last. “Coventry boy. Are you coming with me?”

The boy wept and tried to hide his eyes from her. She stood up, as if to go, and he scrambled to his feet.

“Which way to the fire station?” Cassie asked.

He pointed that they would have to go along Broadgate.

“Cut through Pepper Lane?” Cassie said, putting the tin hat back on the boy’s head. “No, we won’t get. Hold my hand and we’ll find a way through.”

Together they moved into the inferno of Broadgate. Though St Michael’s Cathedral was lost, Holy Trinity church was untouched. They ran down Broadgate between the blazing shops and into Trinity Street. When they got to the fire station it had been abandoned. The roof had completely collapsed.

They passed the twisted skeletons of double-decker buses and clambered over the brick and broken plaster and melted girders. The bodies of two female ARP workers spilled from an ambulance. They stepped over the corpses. The tyres of the ambulances had liquefied in black puddles. The women had blast-blood leaking from eyes, noses and ears.

They managed to find the relocated Fire Service headquarters and deliver the message. An air of numb resolution gripped the emergency services now. They worked fiercely but blindly. The need for messages was giving way. No one stopped working but there was a sense that planning, strategy, coordination in the face of these odds was useless. There was just the need to fight the fires and ferry the wounded. So they went back to the Command Centre to see if they could be useful.

On the way Cassie heard the fluttering of leather wings again, and one of her aerial tormentors clanged on her tin helmet. “They give me the creeps,” she said.

“What does?” At first she thought her hearing was coming back, but it just seemed that she was better able to intuit Michael. He spoke and she heard his words in her brain, and the words came before his lips moved.

“These bat-things. These creatures fluttering around. Listen.” Michael strained his ears. The thirty-foot flames lit up the perspiration on his face. “There! Did you hear it?”

Michael pointed at a piece of smoking metal on the ground. “Shrapnel. Spinning to the ground. From our own ack-ack guns. What do you think happens to the shells after they burst?”

Cassie felt stupid.

A man ran past them, very fast, with his hair on fire and the soles of his boots smoking. They watched him run into a side street.

Together they spent the night running messages for the Command Centre. They were given tea and cigarettes, and told to rest for ten minutes. One of the workers there pulled Cassie aside. “Are you all right?” he said. Cassie could hear him more clearly than she could hear Michael.

“Yes. We’re all right.”

“We?”

“We’re okay.”

“I think you’re in shock.”

“Well, we’re all in shock.”

“Blown if that’s not true. But get someone to look at you if you get a chance.”

The news of the city’s losses couldn’t be kept from them. Hundreds dead. Wounded incalculable. The library destroyed, churches burned out, shops obliterated, monuments smashed. History had been pulled from the town like a set of back molars. Seven hours after the raid had started it was still going on. The German planes, it was calculated, had had time to go back to their bases, reload and return.

When they went outside again, it was obvious that there was nothing to be done. Roads were blocked and ambulances couldn’t get through. Fire engines had no water. Buses and cars lay tossed around in the streets like toys. There were the bodies of policemen in Cross Cheaping and a dead messenger boy in Pepper Lane. They had to leave them. Fires on either side of the streets were joining up in the middle, like theatre curtains closing on some hideous show. The heat sucked oxygen from the air and made the mouth taste of ashes and plaster dust and charcoal. And there was the smell of sewage and corruption. Rats ran squeaking amongst the rubble. Still the buildings burned. Coventry was going to be punched into powder. Even the ack-ack guns were giving up.

“Why aren’t the guns firing?” Cassie asked Michael.

“Out of ammunition,” she thought he said.

“Shall we bring one down, Michael? A Nazi plane, I mean? You and me? We could do it.”

“You’re mad, Cassie.”

“Do you trust me?”

“Somehow.”

“Then hold my hand and follow me.” She led him down Cuckoo Lane and into Priory Row, perilously close to the burning cathedral. All attempts to put it out had ended and the roof had collapsed entirely. Only the smoking Gothic shell remained, a pulsating ruby of vile heat. Every prayer to hope in half a millennium spitting and roasting and smoking. But the tower and the spire were untouched. The door to the tower had burned off. She beckoned him in.

Michael laughed bitterly. “Not up there.”

“It’s the safest place in the city,” she said. “That’s why it’s still standing. Trust me, Michael. More than anything I need you to trust me.” She took his hand and pulled him towards the base of the spire. Though it stood apart from the dense smouldering and smoking at the other end of the cathedral it was like walking into an oven. The spire acted like a chimney, sucking up heat, but after the first few twists of spiral steps the updraught blew out of the open mullioned lightwells and it became cooler. Together they climbed the one hundred and eighty spiralling, echoing stone steps.

When they stepped out onto the parapet of the tower the wind whipped at Cassie’s hair, and she realized what a cold evening it was and how the fires raging below had made an oven of the city. The sky overhead glowed cherry red. She poked her head between the crenellations of the Gothic spire and looked down.

From below she could hear nothing, and up here only the wind, and that muted, like a sad murmuring at her ears, like the whispering of an inconsolable, defeated angel. The city was a broken bowl, spilling fire. It was like looking into the heart of Satan. Rivers of flame, grinding sparks, belching black puffs of smoke. Miles of red glowing earth at all compass points. She ran to the other side. A filthy strand of smoke, twisting up like a giant worm. Silvery tongues of flame. Crimson jaws working away. Sudden flares. Puddles of combustion. A writhing, as if the flames were a maggoty infestation on the underbelly of the city. For a moment it seemed to Cassie that the tower too dropped away beneath her; she felt her stomach flip, but she was borne up by hot currents of air and she went flying over the inferno, over a city of three hundred thousand burning souls. Then she was back again, her feet planted firmly on the stone parapet of the medieval tower, with the wind in her ears. She heard a new drone.

More German aircraft coming in from the south-east – ten, no, twenty, no, twenty-five or so, flying in perfect formation. She put her hand out behind her and found Michael’s hand, drawing her to him. He was shivering uncontrollably.

“My God, you’re freezing,” Cassie said.

Michael’s teeth chattered wildly. Cassie unbuttoned her coat and wrapped him inside. “Come here,” Cassie said. “Take some of my warmth.”

Michael tried to say something, shaped his lips, but he was unable to speak. He was unbearably cold, his fingers like frost. She took his hand and put it inside her blouse, onto her breast. He stared at her in anguish.

“Look at them, Michael.” Cassie said, indicating the incoming bombers. “They think they are beautiful. They think their engines are keeping them in the sky. We know different, don’t we? Don’t we? Smell that? It’s aviation fuel. Close enough to smell, aren’t they? Look! It’s almost possible to see the pilots in the cockpits, isn’t it? If you imagined him a little closer you could talk with him, Michael. Which one? Pick one for yourself. Which one will you choose? Which one must pay? Which one shall we say will not be going home?”

Michael didn’t answer. Cassie drew his other hand under her skirt and placed it between her thighs, rubbing his icy fingers against herself. “No one should die a virgin, should they Michael?”

Michael shivered as she unbuttoned his trousers and massaged his erection, stroking her thumb over the head of his cock, whispering to him, encouraging him, as if she were expert. “We’ll have to fly to him, Michael. Scare him. Fly at him like a demon from out of the night.” She hoisted her leg over the crook of his elbow, just as the airman had taught her. Michael was wide-eyed, shocked but yielding. As she guided him inside her they both gasped, grabbing each other to steady themselves against the surpassing pleasure of the penetration. All words had gone. They were paralysed and the sky was ripping open in a fire-breathing ejaculation. Cassie tipped back her head and tried to look up into the moon-flooded fuel-drenched sky. And they fell, upwards, soaring, locked together, the wind streaming in their hair, Cassie’s jet-black curls lashing behind her, making a banshee of her, swooping on the incoming aircraft

Oh Michael. Let’s choose one. Let’s choose one for you. For you and for the city. Don’t be afraid and you mustn’t feel guilty. After all, they have chosen us. This one? This one coming in a little lower than the others? Shall we punish his beautiful daring? Shall we? He won’t know how it’s done. He’ll have no idea.

And they swooped on one of the German aeroplanes, arcing through the night, burning silver moonglow in their wake, coming upon the cockpit canopy, and they fastened upon the glass of the canopy with their sucking fingers and mouths, seeing the pilot look up from his controls, seeing his hideous smile of bowel-loosening, uncomprehending fear.

That’s it. That’s it, Michael. Fly to him. See his face. Look at his eye. Fix your eye on his. It will be like glue. Our eyes. Will be glued. Iris to his iris. We’ll be angels. In his cockpit. Or demons. Look at his terror. Look at the terror in his eye. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. It’s done, Michael, oh it’s done. He won’t get home. That one. No way home for him. It’s done. You can let go.

Back on the parapet of the spire Cassie watched the targeted plane, saw it bank and turn and climb, and head north-east of the city. A single puff of ack-ack fire burst in the air nearby, but not close enough to damage the plane. The defensive Bofors and ack-ack guns were depleted and exhausted now, offering only token fire. The plane disappeared safely into the darkness.

But she knew that it made no difference. The plane was doomed. She knew in the same way that she knew what song was playing on the radio even before she switched it on. The plane was locked into its course. It would come down seven miles from the city. Only Cassie knew that it wouldn’t return home safely. Only Cassie and Michael.

“Michael,” Cassie whispered. “Michael? Where are you?” She walked around the parapet, twice, calling softly to him.

He was gone. Cassie felt the wind at her ears. She buttoned her coat around her and descended the tower, feeling the heat return to her as she spiralled down the steps of the tower. Back on the ground the hot air was like a reeking and bitter pepper.

She knew where to find Michael. She retraced her steps, through the dripping fire and the acrid fog of smoke, dodging the fluttering airborne cinders and the maggoty cascading sparks, to the white stone steps under the portico of the National Provincial Bank. She found him hunkered in the corner of the portico, his face white with dust, dried blood in his nose and ears and eyesockets. She put a hand to his neck. His body was cold. This time she didn’t touch his eyelids, and they stayed shut. “You can go now,” she whispered.

More fire crews and emergency teams were finding their way into the city, but it was all over. Desperate salvage jobs were failing. Men were weeping or consoling the weeping. Cassie passed a pile of archaic manuscripts someone had pulled from the smoking ruins of the library but had then abandoned on the pavement. Gothic script and illuminated letters, handwritten by an ancient monk, left to char and blow along the street.

Cassie drifted through the streets with the surety of a sleepwalker, passing fire crews hosing mechanically and without hope. One fireman nodded to her, with a blackened face and with an insane grin twisting his mouth, as if he wanted her to share in some joke. It was all over. It was burning, and everything was gone. A fine, cold drizzle started to descend, mixed in with the swirling ash and soot and dust, forming a warm smog that brushed the face like hot cobwebs. The reek was one of cooked filth, of cracked drains and broken sewers, the spices of hell’s kitchen.

No more raids came in, but it was not until six-fifteen that the all-clear sounded, mournful and hollow in the grey light. The drizzle made for steam, and where black smoke wasn’t belching from the rubble, white vapour added to the dense, evil pall draped over the city. Cassie wandered without purpose, feeling herself like smoke, thinning, vague, unable to remember her purpose. Almost a ghost.

The city itself was a spectre. The steam and the mist and the smoke rendered the remaining walls and angles of broken buildings like vague pencil sketches, or photographic negatives, or perhaps they were only after-images of toppled buildings. Unrecognizable shells stood on weird stilts. Landmarks had vanished into rubble. Millions of bricks, splinters of wood, twisted girders, clumps of plaster and shards of glass spread in huge barrow-mounds across the streets. Cassie wandered down Cross Cheaping alongside the remains of a department store and saw a tailor’s dummy hanging from a window. Amid a pile of rubble an ironwork lamp stand boasted an untouched sign reading BUSES FOR KERESLEY STOP HERE. Beneath it was the twisted, melted skeletal frame of a double-decker.

And the people began to emerge. They picked their way over the bricks and the rubble, and they didn’t speak. Cassie watched them, saw them making internal inventory, trying to orientate themselves. They moved about in huddles. They touched their faces a great deal as they moved, silently, through the desolation.

Some business proprietors and shopkeepers arrived, bent on getting into the remains of their stores. Brief arguments broke out with police and ARP men. One tobacconist, finding only a single wall remaining, had salvaged a few bales of tobacco. He found a piece of card and wrote on it: Tobacco sale, slightly smoked. Half price. Then he sat down on a timber joist and waited for trade.

“I’d like a smoke,” Cassie told him.

The tobacconist looked up at her. “Been at it all night, have you?” he said brightly. “You look all in. Here, help yourself. On the bleedin’ house.”

“Would you roll one for me? My fingers are numb.”

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll roll one for you, and one for me. And we’ll sit down here together and we’ll smoke ’em, and we’ll say we’re glad to be alive. How about that?”

“Sounds good.”

“Right, then.” The tobacconist made a big show of finding Cassie a spot on the timber beside him, dusting it off for her before she sat down. “Shouldn’t have a problem finding a light,” he said. Cassie smiled. He rolled two neat cigarettes, lighting them both before handing one to her. They sat and smoked, each in honour of the other, and each not taking their gaze from the other until the cigarettes were done. And during that time Cassie hummed a tune, very softly.

“ ‘Moonlight Serenade’,” said the tobacconist. “Funny. I had that tune going round in my head afore you sat down.”

Cassie grinned, as if she knew something. People stopped to look at them, and everyone cracked a thin smile at his sign. “You need to go home, darlin’,” said the tobacconist. “If you’ve a home to go to.”

“Hadn’t thought of that,” Cassie said.

She trudged through streets now thronged with people. Incredibly, most of them seemed to be up and dressed and on their way to their places of employment, as if they thought the morning ritual in preparation for work might change the events of the raid. They wheeled their bicycles through the rubble, they carried their knapsacks or their briefcases. A large number of houses outside the city centre had been demolished or damaged, and as she approached home Cassie’s footsteps quickened.

The house was untouched. The front door was slightly ajar. Martha stood inside with Beatie. When they saw her come in – Cassie, with blackened face and filthy clothes and with her tin helmet – they peered hard at her. Then Martha screamed and ran to her and hugged her and howled and beat her child’s back and head with her fists, hard, so hard that Beatie had to pull her away, before letting their mother hug Cassie to her.

“Cassie,” Martha wailed. “What are you, Cassie? What must we do with you? Wherever have you been?”

“I’ve been helping the dead,” said Cassie. “Beatie, you can have my record player.”

And she sat down and slept.

DON TUMASONIS

The Prospect Cards

DON TUMASONIS DESCRIBES HIMSELF AS: “A washed-out academic aspirant once given to obscure scribbling for barely existent journals and books from here to Kathmandu.” He claims to now prefer the fame and adulation resulting from such pieces as those printed in this book.

The author also takes care to warn potential admirers desiring to camp out on his doorstep that he releases his large three-headed cat Heliogabalus outside each morning, to empty the compound, as it were. The resultant mess must be cleared away due to restrictions imposed by his suburban Scandinavian housing council – sticklers for neatness – so he really would prefer visitors to use armoured cars.

The following story won the International Horror Guild Award, and as Tumasonis explains about his second contribution to this volume of Best New Horror: “Like many authors, I keep notes of themes and odd ideas for future use. Seeing one day that the drawer for such scraps was overflowing one room, I sat down to write ‘The Prospect Cards’ with the view of freeing needed space, but soon discovered the tale would exceed the length of War and Peace, were all motifs developed in a straight linear fashion. It was then that I hit upon the idea of the broken narrative, thinking ‘Why should I, as writer, have to do all the work?’ ”

Dear Mr Cathcart,

We are happy to provide, enclosed with this letter, our complete description of item no. 839 from our recent catalogue ’Twixt Hamman and Minaret: 19th and Some Early 20th Century Travel in the Middle East, Anatolia, Nubia, etc. , as requested by yourself.

You are lucky in that our former cataloguer, Mr Mokley, had, in what he thought were his spare moments, worked to achieve an extremely full description of this interesting group of what are probably unique items. Certainly no others to whom we have shown these have seen any similar, nor have been able to provide any clew as to their ultimate provenance.

They were purchased by one of our buyers on a trip to Paris, where, unusually – since everyone thinks the bouquinistes were mined out long ago – they were found in a stall on the Left Bank. Once having examined his buy later that evening, he determined to return the following day to the vendor in search of any related items. Alas, there were no others, and the grizzled old veteran running the boxes had no memory of when or where he had purchased these, saying only that he had had them for years, perhaps since the days of Marmier, actually having forgotten their existence until they were unearthed through the diligence of our employee. Given the circumstance of their discovery (covered with dust, stuffed in a sealed envelope tucked away in a far corner of a green tin box clamped onto a quay of the Seine, with volumes of grimy tomes in front concealing their being), we are lucky to have even these.

Bear in mind that, as an old and valued customer, you may have this lot at 10% off the catalogue price, post free, with insurance additional, if desired.

Remaining, with very best wishes indeed,

Yours most faithfully,

Basil Barnet

Barnet and Kort,

Antiquarian Travel Books and Ephemera

No. 839

Postal view cards, commercially produced, various manufacturers, together with a few photographs mounted on card, comprising a group of 74. Mostly sepia and black-and-white, with a few contemporary tinted, showing scenes from either Balkans, or Near or Middle East, ca. 1920–30. The untranslated captions, when they occur, are bilingual, with one script resembling Kyrillic, but not in Russian or Bulgarian; the other using the Arabic alphabet, in some language perhaps related to Turco-Uighuric.

Unusual views of as yet unidentified places and situations, with public and private buildings, baths, squares, harbours, minarets, markets, etc. Many of the prospects show crowds and individuals in the performance of divers actions and work, sometimes exotic. Several of the cards contain scenes of an erotic or disturbing nature. A number are typical touristic souvenir cards, generic products picturing exhibits from some obscure museum or collection. In spite of much expended effort, we have been unable to identify the locales shown.

Entirely unfranked, and without address, about a third of these have on their verso an holographic ink text, in a fine hand by an unidentified individual, evidently a travel diary or journal (non-contiguous, with many evident lacunæ). Expert analysis would seem to indicate 1930 or slightly later as the date of writing.

Those cards with handwriting have been arranged in rough order by us, based on internal evidence, although the chronology is often unclear and the order therefore arbitrary. Only these cards – with a single exception – are described, each with a following transcription of the verso holograph text; the others, about 50 cards blank on verso, show similar scenes and objects. Our hypothetical reconstruction of the original sequence is indicated through lightly pencilled numbers at the upper right verso corner of each card.

Condition: Waterstain across top edges, obscuring all of the few details of date and place of composition. Wear along edges and particularly at corners. A couple of cards rubbed; the others, aside from the faults already noted, mostly quite fresh and untouched.

Very Rare. In our considered opinion, the cards in themselves are likely to be unique, no others having been recorded to now; together with the unusual document they contain, they are certainly so.

Price: £ 1,650

Card No. 1

Description: A dock, in some Levantine port. A number of men and animals, mostly mules, are congregated around a moored boat with sails, from which large tonnes, evidently containing wine, labelled as such in Greek, are being either loaded or unshipped.

Text: not sculling, but rather rowing, the Regatta of ’12, for which his brother coxswained. Those credentials were good enough for Harrison and myself, our credulity seen in retrospect as being somewhat naïve, and ourselves as rather gullible; such, however, is all hindsight. For the time being, we were very happy at having met fellow countrymen – of the right sort, mind you – in this god-forsaken backwater at a time when our fortunes, bluntly put, had taken a turn much for the worse. When Forsythe, looking to his partner Calquon, asked “George, we need the extra hands – what say I tell Jack and Charles about our plans?” To that Calquon only raised an eyebrow, as if to say it’s your show, go and do as you think fit. Forsythe, taking that as approval, ordered another round, and launched into a little speech, which, when I think back on the events of the past weeks, had perhaps less of an unstudied quality than his seemingly impromptu delivery would have implied. Leaning forward, he drew from his breast pocket a postal view card, and placed it on the table, saying in a lowered voice, as if we were fellow conspirators being drawn in, “What would you think if I told you that from here, in less than one day’s sail and a following week’s march, there is to be found something of such value, which if the knowledge of it became common, would

Card No. 2

Description: A view of a mountain massif, clearly quite high and rugged, seen from below at an angle, with consequent foreshortening. A fair amount of snow is sprinkled over the upper heights. A thick broken line in white, retouch work, coming from behind and around one of several summits, continues downward along and below the ridge-line, before disappearing. This evidently indicates a route.

Text: – ania and Zog. Perfidious folk! Perfidious people. Luckily, our packet steamer had arrived and was ready to take us off. A night’s sailing, and the better part of the next day took us to our destination, or rather, to the start of our journey. After some difficulty in finding animals and muleteers, we loaded our supplies, hired guides and, after two difficult days, arrived at the foothills of the mountains depicted on the obverse of this card. Our lengthy and laborious route took us ultimately up these, where we followed the voie normale, the same as shown by the white hatched line. Although extremely steep and exposed, the slope was not quite sheer and we lost only one mule and no men during the 1500-metre descent. Customs – if such a name can be properly applied to such outright thieves – were rapacious, and confiscated much of what we had, including my diary and notes. Thus the continuation on these cards, which represent the only form of paper allowed for sale to the

Card No. 3

Description: A panorama view of a Levantine or perhaps Balkan town of moderate to large size, ringed about by snow-covered mountains in the distance. Minarets and domes are visible, as is a very large public building with columns, possibly Greco-Roman, modified to accommodate some function other than its original religious one, so that the earlier elements appear draped about with other stylistic intrusions.

Text: vista. With the sun setting, and accommodation for the men and food for the animals arranged, we were able to finally relax momentarily and give justice, if only for a short while, to the magnificence of the setting in which the old city was embedded, like a pearl in a filigreed ring. I’ve seen a lot of landscapes, ’round the world, and believe me, this was second to none. The intoxicating beauty of it all made it almost easy to believe the preposterous tales that inspired Calquon, and particularly Forsythe, to persuade us to join them on this tossed-together expedition. I frankly doubt that anything will come of it except our forcing another chink in the isolation which has kept this fascinating place inviolate to such a degree that few Westerners have penetrated its secrets over the many centuries since the rumoured group of Crusaders forced their

Card No. 4

Description: A costume photograph, half-length, of a young woman in ethnic or tribal costume, veiled. The decolletage is such that her breasts are completely exposed. Some of the embroidery and jewellery would indicate Cypriote or Anatolian influence; it is clear that she is wearing her dowry in the form of coins, filigreed earrings, necklaces, medallions, and rings. Although she is handsome, her expression is very stiff. [Not reproduced in the catalogue]

Text: Evans, who should have stuck to Bosnia and Illyria. I never thought his snake goddesses to be anything other than some Bronze Age fantast’s wild dream, if indeed the reconstructions are at all accurate. Harrison, however, has told me that this shocking – i.e. for a white woman (the locals are distinctively Caucasian: red hair, blue eyes and fair skin appearing frequently, together with traces of slight Mediterranean admixture) – déshabille was common throughout the Eastern Ægean and Middle East until a very short while ago, when European mores got the better of the local folk, except, it seems, those here. I first encountered such dress (or undress) a week ago, the day after our late-evening arrival, when, out early to see the market and get my bearings, and totally engaged in examining some trays of spices in front of me, I suddenly felt bare flesh against my exposed arm, stretched out to test the quality of some turmeric. It was a woman at my side who, having come up unnoticed, had bent in front of me to obtain some root or herb. When she straightened, I realized at once that the contact had been with her bare bosom, which, I might add, was quite shapely, with nipples rouged. She was unconcerned; I must have blushed at least as much

Card No. 5

Description: A naos or church, on a large stepped platform, in an almost impossible mélange of styles, with elements of a Greek temple of the Corinthian order mixed in with Byzantine features and other heterogeneous effects to combine in an unusual, if not harmonious, whole. The picture, a frontal view, has been taken most probably at early morning light, since the temple steps and surrounding square are devoid of people.

Text: light and darkness, darkness and light” Forsythe said. “With this form of dualism, and its rejection of the body, paradoxically, until the sacrament is administered, the believers are in fact encouraged to excess of the flesh, which is viewed as essentially evil and, ultimately, an illusion. The thought is that by indulging mightily, disdain is expressed for the ephemeral, thus granting the candidate power over the material, which is seen as standing in his or her way to salvation.” “What does that have to do with your little trip of this morning?” I remonstrated. We had agreed to meet at ten o’clock to see if we could buy manuscripts in the street of the scribes, for the collection. Paul reddened and replied “D’you know the large structure on the square between us and the market? I was on my way to meet you, when I happened to pass through there. It seems” – and here he went florid again – “that in an effort to gain sanctity more quickly, parents, as required by the priests, are by law for two years to give over those of their daughters on the verge of womanhood to the temple each day between 10 and noon, in a ploy to quicken the transition to holiness. Any passer-by, during that time, who sees on the steps under the large parasols (set up like tents, there to protect exposed flesh) any maiden suiting his fancy, is urged to drop a coin in the bowls nearest and

Card No. 6

Description: A quite imperfect and puzzling picture, with mist and fog, or perhaps steam, obscuring almost all detail. What is visible are the dim outlines of two rows of faces, some veiled, others bearded.

Text: poured more water on the coals. By now it was quite hot, and I could no longer see Forsythe, but only hear his voice. The lack of visibility made it easier to concentrate on his words, with my eyes no longer focused on details I had found so distracting. “The incongruity of it all makes my head reel – how could they have maintained all this in the face of the changes around them? After all, a major invasion route of the past three millennia lies two valleys to the west . . .” Nodding in unseen agreement, my attention was momentarily diverted by the sound of a new arrival entering the room, and seconds later a smooth leg brushed briefly against mine; I assumed it was a woman, and durst not stir. “Not that they’ve rejected the modern at all costs – they’ve got electric generators and some lighting, a fair amount of modern goods and weaponry find their way in, there’s the museum, that Turkish photography shop, the printing press, and – oh, all the rest. But they pick and choose. And that religion of theirs! All the Jews and Muslims and Christians here are cowed completely! Why hasn’t a holy war been declared by their neighbours?” With Paul ranting on in the obscuring darkness, I grunted in agreement, and then, shockingly, felt a small foot rub against

Card No. 7

Description: Costumed official, perhaps a religious leader or judge, sitting on the floor facing the camera. He is bearded, greying, with a grim set to his mouth. One hand points gracefully towards a smallish, thick codex held by the other hand. From the man’s breast depends a long rectangular enamelled pendant of simple design, divided vertically into equal fields of black and white.

Text: Sorbonne, three years of which, I suppose, could explain a lot, as for example, his overpowering use of garlic. “Pseudo-Manicheeism” he continued, “is solely a weak term used by the uncomprehending for what can only be described as perfection, the last word itself being a watered-out expression merely, for that which cannot be comprehended through the feeble tool of rational and sceptical thinking, which closes all doors it does not understand. Oh, I know that some of you” – and here he eyed me suspiciously, as if I was running muckin’ Cambridge! – “have tried to classify our belief, using the Monophysites as opposed to the Miaphysites of your religion in an analogy that neither comprehends nor grasps the subtlety of our divinely inspired thought! As if It could be explained in Eutychian terms! Our truth is self-evident and is so clear that we allow, with certain inconsequential restrictions and provisos, those of your tribe who wish, to expound their falsehoods in the marketplace, assuming they have survived the rigours of the journey here. You were better to perceive indirectly, thinking of flashing light; the colours green, and gold; the hundred instead of the one; segmentation, instead of smoothness, as metaphors that enable one

Card No. 8

Description: Another museum card, with several large tokens or coins depicted, which in style and shape resemble some of the dekadrachm issues of 5th century Syracuse. The motifs of the largest one shown, are, however, previously unrecorded, with a temple (see card 5) on the obverse. The reverse, with a young girl and three men, is quite frankly obscene. [Not reproduced in the catalogue]

Text: tea. I was quite struck with the wholesome appearance and modest demeanour of Mrs Fortesque, who was plainly, if neatly dressed in the style of ten years ago – evidently, they had been out of contact with the London Society for Conversions of the Unfortunate Heathen, and the rest of Blighty since arrival! The Rev. Fortesque was holding forth on how they were, as a family, compelled by local circumstance, and frankly, the threat of force, to adhere strictly to the native code of behaviour and mores when out in public, the children not being exempt from the rituals of their fellows of like age. Calquon frowned at this, and asked “In every way, Reverend?” to which the missionary sighed, “Unfortunately, yes – otherwise, we would not be allowed to preach at all.” There was a small silence while we pondered the metaphysical implications of this. When a young and angelically beautiful girl of about twelve entered the room. “Gentlemen, this is my daughter, Alicia . . .” Mrs Fortesque smiled proudly, only to be interrupted in the most embarrassing fashion by the sudden sputtering and spraying of Forsythe, whom we thought had choked on his crumpet. Thwacking him on the back, until his redness of face receded and normal breathing resumed, I thought I saw an untoward smirk pass lightly over the face of the young girl. “What is it, old man?” I enquired solicitously. Paul, after having swallowed several times, with the attention of the others diverted, whispered sotto voce, breathlessly, so that only I could hear “Yesterday – the temple

Card No. 9

Description: An odd view, taken at mid-distance, of a low-angled pyramidal or cone-shaped pile of stones, most fist-sized or slightly smaller, standing about one to two feet high. A number of grimacing urchins and women, the last in their distinctive public costume, stand gesticulating and grinning to either side, many of them holding stones in their hands. Given the reflection of light on the pool of dark liquid that has seeped from the pile’s front, it must be – midday.

Text: brave intervention, with dire consequence. “For God’s sake, Fortesque, don’t . . .” shouted Forsythe, as I well remember, before his arms were pinned behind him, and with a callused paw like a bear’s clamped over his mouth, in much the same situation as myself, was forced helplessly to watch the inexorable and horrific grind of events. Eager hands, unaided by any tool – such is the depth of fanaticism that prevails in these parts – quickly scooped out a deep enough hole from the loose soil of the market square. The man of the cloth, who had persevered in the face of so much pagan indifference and outright hostility for over a decade, was for his troubles and valiant intervention unceremoniously divested of his clothing and dumped in the hole, which was quickly filled – there was no lack of volunteers – immobilizing him in the same manner as Harrison, who was buried with his arms and upper breast free. They were just far enough apart so that their fingers could not touch, depriving them in fiendish fashion of that small consolation. I remember the odd detail that Fortesque was half-shaven – he had dropped everything when informed of Harrison’s situation. Knowing full well what was in store, he began singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers” in a manly, booming voice that brought tears to my eyes, whilst Harrison, I am ashamed to say, did

Card No. 10

Description: Group portrait, of nine men. Six stand, wearing bandoliers, pistols with chased and engraved handles protruding from the sashes round their waists, decorative daggers, etc. The edges of their vests are heavily embroidered with metallic thread in arabesque patterns. All are heavily mustachioed. A seventh companion stands, almost ceremoniously, to their right, holding like a circus tent-peg driver a wooden mallet with a large head a foot or so off the ground; a position somewhat like that of a croquet player. The eighth man, wearing a long shift or kaftan, is on all fours in the centre foreground, head to the left, but facing the camera like the others. A wooden saddle of primitive type is on his back. A ninth man, dressed like the first seven, is in the saddle, as if riding the victim, who, we see, has protruding from his fundament, although discreetly draped in part by the long shift, a pole the thickness of a muscular man’s forearm.

Text: no idea, being sure that all this was misunderstanding, and could easily be cleared up with a liberal application of baksheesh. This was our mistake, as Calquon was led from the judge’s compartments, arms bound, to a small square outside, where there was a carved fountain missed by the iconoclasts of long ago (of whom there had been several waves), with crudely sculptured and rather battered lions from whose mouths water streamed into the large circular limestone basin. We followed, of course, vehemently protesting his innocence all the while, and were studiously ignored. Poor Calquon was untied, and forced onto his knees and hands in a most undignified and ludicrous position. A crowd of people had already gathered under the hot midday sun, including many women and children. Hawkers walked through the throng that gathered, offering cold water from tin tanks on their backs, each with a single glass fitted into a decorated silver holder with a handle, tied onto the vessel by a cord. I saw, lying off to the side, on the steps of the fountain, a wooden stake, bark removed from its narrow end, smoothed and sharpened to a nasty point. A fat greasy balding man wearing the red cummerbund of officialdom came out of the crowd, with a bright knife in

Card No. 11

Description: A market with various stalls and their owners. A wandering musician is off to the left, and a perambulating vendor of kebabs, with long brass skewers, is on the right.

Text: painful for everyone concerned, particularly George. A guard in crimson livery, decorated with gold thread, was sitting smoking his hubble-bubble a short distance away from our gloomy group, every now and then looking up from his reverie to make sure that things were as they should be. Perhaps it was the smoke from the pipe, or sheer bravado – I have never known, to this day – but Calquon, poor George, asked for a cigarette, which Forsythe immediately rolled and put on his lips, lighting it, since this was impossible for our fellow, whose arms were bound. He took a puff, as cool as if he were walking down Regent Street to Piccadilly, and then, for the first time noticing the women and children seated at his feet, asked us in a parched voice what they might possibly be doing there. I shuffled my feet and looked away, while Paul told him in so many words that they were waiting for his imminent departure, for the same purpose that women in the Middle Ages would gather around criminals about to be executed, in hope of obtaining a good-luck charm that was powerful magic, after the fact of summary punishment was accomplished. This, as we were afraid, enraged our unfortunate en brochette companion, who became livid as we tried to calm him. Writhing, in his stationary upright position, would after all do him no good, given that out of his shoulder (from whence I noticed a tiny tendril of smoke ascending) there was already protruding

Card No. 12

Description: A public square, photo taken from above at a slant angle, from a considerable distance. Some sort of framework or door, detached from any structure, has been set up in one corner. A couple of dark objects, one larger than the other, appear in the middle of that door or frame which faces the viewer, obscuring what is going on behind. A large agitated crowd of men of all ages – from quite young boys to bent, aged patriarchs, all wearing the truncated local version of the fez, are milling around the rear of the upright construction. A number of local police, uniformed, are in the thick of it, evidently to maintain order.

Text: wondering what the commotion was about. I was therefore shocked to see in one tight opening the immobilized head of a young woman of about twenty-five, and in the other her right hand. Instead of the ubiquitous veil, she had some sort of black silk bandage that performed the same function, closely wrapped around her mouth and nose. She was plainly emitting a sullen glare – easily understood, given the circumstance. There was no join or seam; for the life of me, I still do not understand the construction. Every now and then the frame and the woman contained by it would violently shake and judder. The expression under her shock of unruly red hair remained stoic and unperturbed. Walking to the other side (make sure that Mildred doesn’t read this!!) I saw the crowd of men – there were about 80 to 100, including about twenty or so of the few negro slaves found in these parts – with more pouring into the square – jostling in the attempt to be next: those nearest had partially disrobed, and had taken “matters” in hand, fondling themselves to arousal, for taking her in the fashion preferred here, which is of that between men and boys, from behind. Desponded as I was, I had no intention other than to continue, when I was suddenly shoved forward into the midst

Card No. 13

Description: A view down a narrow street, with the high tenements and their overhanging wooden balconies blocking out much of the light. The photographer has done well to obtain as much detail as is shown here. A cupola or dome, and what is perhaps a minaret behind it, are just visible at the end of the lane. Three young (from the look of their figures as revealed by the traditional dress, cf card 2) women in black, each with a necklace from which hangs a single bright large pendant, stand in the middle of the way, at mid-distance. They appear to be approaching the camera. Surprisingly, for all that they are bare-headed, etc., they are wearing veils that conceal their features utterly. There are no others in the street.

Text: said to Forsythe that there was no point to it, that we would have to, at some moment, accept our losses and the futility of going any further. With the others gone, I argued, it was extremely unlikely that we could continue on our own; we should swallow our pride, and admit that we had come greatly unprepared for what we had in mind. It was best, in other words, that we make our run as soon as backs were turned. Forsythe disagreed vehemently, and urged that on the contrary, we were obliged by the sacred memory of our companions to carry on, an odd turn of phrase, considering what we had hoped to accomplish and obtain, by any means. And then he said cryptically, “It doesn’t matter in any case – the deed is done.” I immediately took this as admission that the object of our expedition had been somehow achieved without my knowledge; that was the likely cause of the troubles we had experienced, and the growing agitation of the populace I had uneasily witnessed the past few days. As we discussed our dilemma outside the carpet shop, one of many lining the street, I became aware of a silence, a hush that had descended. People turned to face the wall, in fear, I thought, as I saw three females approaching. These

Card No. 14

Description: A poor reproduction of the second state of plate VII of Piranesi’s Carceri. In fact, the ascription is given on the verso of the card, the artist’s name (G.B. PIRANESI) appearing in Latin capitals inserted amongst the Arabic and Kyrillic letters.

Text: less than the Carceri! What everyone had once thought the malarial fever dreams of a stunted, perverse genius, I saw now only to be honest reporting. I was absolutely astounded, once the dragoman, smelling of garlic and anisette, had removed the blindfold from my eyes. A lump came to my throat, and tears threatened to engulf me, when I thought of the others done away with through treachery, foul ignorance and intolerance. I suppose rumours regarding the disappearance of the sacred entity of the valley had much to do with the situation, too. Controlling my emotions – here, for a man to weep is a sign of weakness, with all the consequences such a perception entails – I looked around me. A number of individuals, male and female, nude or partly so, were being ushered along the spiral staircase wrapped around an enormous stone column down which I myself must have descended only a few minutes before. Natural light played through a number of cleverly placed oculi in the invisible ceiling, concealed by the complex bends and angles of the place. Turning,

Card No. 15

Description: Another crude reproduction of a Piranesi “Prisons” plate, this time number VIII, ascribed as above.

Text: I saw yet another vista of the Italian artist before me, and began to understand, for the first time, that the plan of all his mad, insane engravings was a coherent whole, either taken from the actuality before me, or perhaps plotted out from his prints, and converted to reality, by some unsung architectonic genius. The Venetians had been here, I knew, during the mid-1700s, when things had settled down. Perhaps one of their workmen was given the book, and told to produce, or . . . With my glance following the staircase from its beginning, flanked by gigantic military trophies, with plumed helmets much larger than any human head, I traced the turn upwards to the left, and saw, between two enormous wooden doors opening on an arch, a large rack. A series of ropes hung down from the supporting wall, and I could see the faint glow of a brazier and hear the distant screams of the poor women and men, white bodies glistening with the sweat of fear, who hung

Card No. 16

Description: Tinted, clearly a display of gemstones, perhaps from a museum of natural history or local geology. One of the larger groups, arranged separately from the others, with green colouring obviously meant to indicate emeralds, appears to be the fragments, longitudinally shattered, of what must have been a single enormous stone.

Text: subincision being the technical expression. As you can imagine, I was straining wildly against my bonds, in fact, you could say I was struggling to the point of extreme violence, to, as it turned out, no avail. In spite of all my agitated effort, I was clamped to some sort of heavy metal framework or stand that immobilized me more or less completely. Naked, helpless, dreading whatever was in store, I saw the same three young women approach into the torchlight from the encircling darkness. Without a word, my gaolers and the others left, and I was alone with the unholy trio. As if at a signal, they simultaneously removed their veils, and I was momentarily stunned, almost drugged, by the sight of their incredible beauty. Remember, this was the first time I had ever seen one of the local women unmasqued – if these were representative of the rest, it would easily explain any number of puzzling local rituals and customs. In spite of my extreme situation, I could not help myself – the ravishing faces, the fulsome breasts with their shapely crimsoned nipples, the long black glistening hair

Card No. 17

Description: A market place, with many and various stands and displays. An ironmonger, a merchant of brass teapots, a seller of cured leather are all easily discerned. In the centre, arms like a Saint Andrew’s cross before his chest, holding a large knife in the one hand, a two-pronged fork in the other, is a seller of grilled and roasted meats. On the small portable gridiron in front of him, a number of sizeable sausages are warming, split neatly lengthwise.

Text: darted out with the tip of her tongue, and then slowly extended it again. To my horror, I saw it was no tongue: it was a long razor-sharp dagger or splinter of green glass or stone; a smaragd dirk that was somehow attached or glued to the root of what remained of her tongue. The other two, kneeling close on either side of her, reverentially held each, both with two hands, the one heavy breast nearest them of their chief colleague, as if ritually weighing and supporting these at the same time. This observation was made on the abstract, detachedly, as if I were outside my own body. More mundanely, I was screaming and thrashing – or attempting uselessly to thrash. Praise to the gods that be, I passed out completely, and awoke with the foul deed done, blood running down me and pooling on the cold flagging, and the three dark sisters gone. Looking down, as my original captors re-entered the chamber, I saw that the operation had been carried out, just as had been described to me by the temple priest, and I fainted once more. When

Card No. 18

Description: Not a postal card, but rather a half-length portrait photograph mounted on thick pasteboard, of a family group from about the 1920s. The two parents are quite young, and formally dressed: the father in a dark suit, to which is pinned an unidentified order or medal. He holds a small Bible clasped to his breast. The woman is handsome, in a white lacy blouse buttoned to the top of her graceful neck, with masses of hair piled high on her head. The young daughter is quite simply beautiful, an angel.

Text: would not have recognized, but for the signal distinctive wedding ring on her finger. “Mrs Fortesque”, I blurted out, as we stood amongst the milling crowd in the shade of the souk, “I had no idea—” but stopped when I saw the blush originating from beneath the missionary wife’s veil spread to her ample and attractive sun-browned bosom (a pendant black enamelled cross its sole decoration), with the attendant rush of blood turning the areolae – modestly without cinnabar – to the precise same shade of red so favoured by the local women. I saw, at the same time, the fleshy peaks slowly stiffen and stand, that motion drawing forth a corresponding response on my part, something I hardly had conceived feasible, after the trauma of the operation of four days ago, with the insertion of the papyrus strips to prevent rejoining of the separated parts while the healing occurred. “I should perhaps explain myself”, she said, regaining her composure. “The local rules are very strict; were I not, when attending to my public tasks and duties outside the house, to attire myself with what we consider wanton and promiscuous display, it would be here viewed as flagrant immodesty, and punishable, before the crowd, by the

Card No. 19

Description: An ossuary chapel, where the style of the classic Romanesque interior is partly obscured by the encrustation of thousands of skulls and skeletal parts, that form, or cover, the interior architecture. This photograph taken at the crossing, facing the nearby altar, where, instead of a crucifix or a monstrance, an enamelled or painted rectangular metal plaque stands upright, its left side white, its right black.

Text: that the crucifix was now exchanged for a small pendant medallion, half black, half white, the symbol of the local cult. The thought of Mrs Fortesque having gone, so to speak, over to the other side was shocking, and at the same time extremely piquant and arousing, with my recently acquired knowledge of what that fully entailed for the woman involved. Having just come to the rendezvous from my daily session with the local doctor, who was treating me with that disgusting metallic green and gold powder, the source of which I was loath to ponder on, I scarcely thought myself physically capable of what was to follow, given my general and peculiar state. Nonetheless, when the missionary’s widow, after furtively glancing about only to find the chapel empty – no surprise, since it was midday and most families were at home, doors shuttered for the day’s largest repast – reached for and embraced me, the last thing I had awaited, I found myself responding in a most unexpected fashion. “But the children – your late husband –” I stammered, as she pushed me back against a column, so the decorative knobs of tibiæ and the like bruised my spine, with her bare breasts crushed against my chest and her hot searching lips

Card No. 20

Description: A statue, whose dimensions are given as 13 by 15 by 5 [in, it is assumed], these last representing the base. A female goddess, in flowing robes, very much gravid, standing in a bronze boat formed like the body of a duck, whose head is the prow. Within its open beak it holds a cube.

Text: certain? It’s only been a month . . .” I lingered at these, my own words, astonished at the assertion. “Of course, I am” she snapped back, then, containing herself with difficulty, lowered her tone, and continued. “I’ve not been with anyone, before or since” she said, bitterly smiling. She was very much enceinte, astoundingly so, in a way that would have been impossible had I been responsible for her state. I kept on looking at her in bewilderment. My first thought was “propulsive force – perhaps; generative principal – never!!” Still holding my hand lightly, she followed up, saying “It does seem impossible, doesn’t it? Not just the time – I mean, given what had happened to you, in addition. Think, though, was anything odd done to you then, or about that time? I mean . . .” At that, the thought of the daily calls to the doctor snapped into mind. Once I had found out the disgusting source of the gold and green powders, I had ceased from visiting him again. Had our meeting in the ossuary been before or after the “treatment’s” short course? I could not remember, for the life of

Card No. 21

Description: Another souvenir card assumed to be from the local natural history collection, exhibiting a quite large centipede of unknown type, with several interesting and anomalous features. The scale beside it a millimetre stick, since centimetres would make the creature ridiculously large.

Text: smooth and horrendously distended vulva with a disgusting plop. The three witches – I cannot think of them as being other than that – hurried to the trestle immediately, clicking the emerald daggers they had for tongues excitedly against their teeth. The multitudinous onlookers and priests held their distance. Mrs F seemed to be in a state of shock, but was still breathing with eyes closed. Horrified, I cast a look at Alicia, who stood imperturbed in her youthful nakedness, motionless, still holding the thick black candle cool as you like, as if she were in Westminster Abbey. The bloody caul and afterbirth were snipped at and cut with glassy tongues, and I saw, when the three stepped back, a foul, thick, twitching, segmented thing, snaky, glinting green and gold, thick as a moray eel, writhing between the poor woman’s bloody legs. The chief witch nodded to Alicia, who slowly moved forward, setting her candle carefully at her mother’s feet. At another signal, she picked up the glistening demonic shape, which unwound itself into a heavy, broad, segmented centipede-like beast of dimensions that left me gasping. Alicia uncoiled the slimy monster, gleaming with ichor, and draped the hellspawn ’round her shoulders, just as if it was a feather boa. Pausing only for a moment, she turned to me with a thin leer, and asked “Want to hold it? It’s yours too!” Revulsed, I turned, while she shrugged and set off on the ceremonial way, the crowd bowing to her and her half-brother, sister, or whatever, the belt of hollow birds’ eggs – her only adornment – clicking around her slim hips, brown from hours on the temple steps – as she swayed, during

Card No. 22

Description: A shining centipede probably of gold, coiled upon a dais of ebony, or some other dark wood, this last encrusted with bejewelled precious metal of arabesque form. The central object’s size may be inferred from the various items imbedded in it: Roman cameos, Egyptian scarabs, coins from crushed empires and forgotten kingdoms, some thousands of years old, the votive offerings of worshippers over the millennia we infer the sculpture to have existed. The object is fabulous; an utter masterwork of the goldsmith’s art rivalled only by the Cellini salt-cellar and one or two other pieces. It seems almost alive.

Text: almost worth it. Calquon and Harrison are dead, what has become of Paul, who thought up all this, I have no idea. I have been subjected to the most hideous torture, and seen the most awful sights, that few can have experienced without losing their sanity. It is deeply ironic after all I have been through, that I by chance only yesterday discovered the object, hidden away in my belongings. What remains to be seen is whether I can bring it back to civilization with myself intact. I cannot trust Alicia, who has clearly let her elevation to high priestess and chief insect-keeper go to her head. During my last interview with her, whilst she dangled her shapely foot provocatively over the arm of her golden throne, I, in a vain effort to play upon her familial bonds and old self, reminded her of her younger brother, who had not been seen for days. At that she casually let drop that he had been sold on to Zanzibar (where there is, I believe, an active slave market), ultimately to disappear into one of the harems of the Arabian peninsula (Philby may be able to inform more fully). “I never could stand the little pest” was her remark, so it would be foolish to hope for any sympathy from her quarter. I am being watched quite closely, with great suspicion. Can it be they know? If I ever leave here alive, it will be an absolute sensation. Biding my time, I cannot do anything now, but I can at least try to smuggle these surreptitiously scribbled notes out to the French vice-consul in the city where we bought the mules. He is a good fellow, though he drinks to excess at

An additional 52 cards remain (see photo-copies), which although of great interest, bear no hand-written notes, and therefore are not described here, with the following single exception:

Card: not in sequence, i.e. unnumbered by us

Description: A photographic postal card of a large exterior wall of a stone building of enormous size. The impressive dimensions become apparent once one realizes that the small specks and dots on the stereobate of the vaguely classical structure are in fact people – some alone, others in groups, these last for the most part sheltered under awnings set up on the steps. What most catches the eye, however, is the magnificent low relief work covering most of the wall, depicting, it would seem, some mythological scene whose iconographic meaning is not apparent. It is in character a harmonious mixture of several ancient traditions: one sees hints of the Hellenistic, Indo-Grecian, and traces even of South-East Asian styles. The contrasts of tone make clear that the bare stone has been brightly painted.

The relief itself: It appears that a judgement is being carried out. In the background, solemn ringlet-bearded men draped in graceful robes, all in the same pose, all copies of the other. All hold a square object, somewhat in form like a hand-mirror divided into one field black and one field white, and watch with blank eyes the man before them who is strapped to a plank, while a large fabulous beast, part man, part insect, with elements of the order Scolopendrida predominating, tears at him in the fashion of the Promethean eagles, and worse. To the right, a young priestess or goddess, nude but for a chain of beads or eggs around her waist, stands contrapposto, with one arm embraced about an obscene creature, a centipedal monstrousity of roughly her own height, leaning tightly upright against her. She is pointing with her free hand towards the tortured man. The expression on her empty face has affinities with several known Khmer royal portrait sculptures. She smiles faintly, as if in ecstasy.

JEFF VANDERMEER

The Cage

JEFF VANDERMEER IS A WINNER of the World Fantasy Award, the Rhysling Award and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship. He has also been a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Award, and the British Fantasy Award.

Recent books include City of Saints and Madmen, which made more than a dozen year’s-best lists, and Veniss Underground. Forthcoming titles include the collection Secret Life from Golden Gryphon, the non-fiction Why Should I Cut Your Throat? from Monkey Brain Books, and the anthologies Album Zutique from Ministry of Whimsy and The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases from Night Shade Books.

In 2002, Locus Online named VanderMeer one of the top ten writers of short fantasy fiction.

About the following story, the author recalls: “I was at a bar mitzvah party and, suddenly turning, I looked up and saw on this distant ledge/shelf, high up toward the ceiling of the building, this empty cage with iron bars. It was incongruous – nothing around it fit. It didn’t look like it belonged at all. The question that immediately came to me, and which raised the little hairs on my neck was: ‘What’s inside it?’ I don’t know why I thought that. But although the cage was empty, it didn’t seem empty.

“Immediately, I was one of the first Ambergris Hoegbottons, looking up at the cage. I was in a mansion. Something terrible had happened or was going to happen . . . The idea was there, but I couldn’t write my way to it – all the drafts of first scenes were horrible. So I shelved it. Then, on a vacation to Tampa, my wife Ann and I stopped at the University of Tampa, which used to be a lush, lavish 1920s hotel. Inside, in one of the rooms, was a collection of old tables, chairs, grandfather clocks . . . and a cage. In that atmosphere, after hours, the place like a more opulent hotel from The Shining, again the cage seemed to contain something even though empty.

“This time, the idea stuck. Just the image of it. Another year passed. I couldn’t write it but wanted to write it. I got the idea of starting with an inventory from Melville. That allowed me to both set the scene and define the main character. After I wrote the first scene, I asked myself what the story was about and discovered the story was about an obsessed character who encounters something so horrible that he cannot move past it. Then it was simply a matter of letting the events play out to their inevitable conclusion.

“It was a tough story to write – the words fought me every sentence of the way. My favourite part of it is the main character’s relationship with his wife. I wanted to make a statement about the nature of love as part of any subplot. I wanted to make the reader finally realise that a somewhat proper character is actually deeply strange – and that, in a sense, we are all deeply strange creatures.”

I

THE HALL CONTAINED THE FOLLOWING ITEMS, some of which were later cataloged on faded yellow sheets constrained by blue lines and anointed with a hint of mildew:

24 moving boxes, stacked three high. Atop one box stood

1 stuffed black swan with banded blood-red legs, its marble eyes plucked, the empty sockets a shock of outrushing cotton (or was it fungus?), the bird merely a scout for the

5,325 specimens from far-off lands placed on shelves that ran along the four walls and into the adjoining corridors – lit with what he could only describe as a black light: it illuminated but did not lift the gloom. Iridescent thrush corpses, the exhausted remains of tattered jellyfish floating in amber bottles, tiny mammals with bright eyes that hinted at the memory of catastrophe, their bodies frozen in brittle poses. The stink of chemicals, a whiff of blood, and

1 Manzikert-brand phonograph, in perfect condition, wedged beside the jagged black teeth of 11 broken records and

8 framed daguerreotypes of the family that had lived in the mansion. On vacation in the Southern Isles. Posed in front of a hedge. Blissful on the front porch. His favorite picture showed a boy of seven or eight sticking his tongue out, face animated by some wild delight. The frame was cracked, a smudge of blood in the lower left corner. Phonograph, records, and daguerreotypes stood atop

1 long oak table covered by a dark green cloth that could not conceal the upward thrust that had splintered the surface of the wood. Around the table stood

8 oak chairs, silver lion paws sheathing their legs. The chairs dated to before the reign of Trillian the Great Banker. He could not help but wince noting the abuse to which the chairs had been subjected, or fail to notice

1 grandfather clock, its blood-spattered glass face cracked, the hands frozen at a point just before midnight, a faint repressed ticking coming from somewhere within its gears, as if the hands sought to move once again – and beneath the clock

1 embroidered rug, clearly woven in the north, near Morrow, perhaps even by one of his own ancestors. It depicted the arrival of Morrow cavalry in Ambergris at the time of the Silence, the horses and riders bathed in a halo of blood that might, in another light, be seen as part of the tapestry. Although no light could conceal

1 bookcase, lacquered, stacks with books wounded, ravaged, as if something had torn through the spines, leaving blood in wide furrows. Next to the bookcase

1 solicitor, dressed all in black. The solicitor wore a cloth mask over his nose and mouth. It was a popular fashion, for those who believed in the “Invisible World” newly mapped by the Kalif’s scientists. Nervous and fatigued, the solicitor, eyes blinking rapidly over the top of the mask, stood next to

1 pale, slender woman in a white dress. Her hooded eyes never blinked, the ethereal quality of her gaze weaving cobwebs into the distance. Her hands had recently been hacked off, the end of the bloody bandage that hid her left nub held by

1 pale gaunt boy with eyes as wide and twitchy as twinned pocket watches. At the end of his other arm dangled a small blue-green suitcase, his grasp as fragile as his mother’s gaze. His legs trembled in his ash-grey trousers. He stared at

1 metal cage, three feet tall and in shape similar to the squat mortar shells that the Kalif’s troops had lately rained down upon the city during the ill-fated Occupation. An emerald green cover hid its bars from view. The boy’s gaze, which required him to twist neck and shoulder to the right while also raising his head to look up and behind, drew the attention of

1 exporter-importer, Robert Hoegbotton, 35 years old: neither thin nor fat, neither handsome nor ugly. He wore a drab grey suit that he hoped displayed neither imagination nor lack of it. He too wore a cloth mask over his (small) nose and (wide, sardonic) mouth, although not for the same reasons as the solicitor. Hoegbotton considered the mask a weakness, an inconvenience, a superstition. His gaze followed that of the boy up to the high perch, an alcove set half-way up the wall where the cage sat on a window ledge. The dark, narrow window reflected needlings of rain through its tubular green glass. It was the season of downpours in Ambergris. The rain would not let up for days on end, the skies blue-green-grey with moisture. Fruiting bodies would rise, fat and fecund, in all the hidden corners of the city. Nothing in the bruised sky would reveal whether it was morning, noon, or dusk.

The solicitor was talking and had been for what seemed to Hoegbotton like a rather long time.

“That black swan, for example, is in bad condition,” Hoegbotton said, to slow the solicitor’s relentless chatter.

The solicitor wiped his beaded forehead with a handkerchief tinged a pale green.

“The bird itself. The bird,” the solicitor said, “is in superb condition. Missing eyes, yes. Yes, this is true. But,” he gestured at the walls, “surely you see the richness of Daffed’s collection.”

Thomas Daffed. The last in a long line of famous zoologists. Daffed’s wife and son stood beside the solicitor, last remnants of a family of six.

Hoegbotton frowned. “But I don’t really need the collection. It’s a fine collection, very fine” – and he meant it; he admired a man who could so single-mindedly, perhaps obsessively, acquire such a diverse yet unified assortment of things – “but my average customer needs a pot or an umbrella or a stove. I stock the odd curio from time to time, but a collection of this size?” Hoegbotton shrugged his famous shrug, perfected over several years of haggling.

The solicitor stared at Hoegbotton as if he did not believe him. “Well, then, what is your offer? What will you take?”

“I’m still calculating that figure.”

The solicitor loosened his collar with one sharp tug. “It’s been more than an hour. My clients are not well!” He was sweating profusely. A greenish pallor had begun to infiltrate his skin. Despite the sweat, the solicitor seemed parched. His mask puffed in and out from the violence of his speech.

“I’m sorry for your loss – all of your losses,” Hoegbotton said, turning to the mother and child who stood in mute acceptance of their fate. “I won’t keep you much longer.” The speech never sounded sincere, no matter how sincerely he meant it.

The solicitor made a noise between a groan and a choke that Hoegbotton did not bother to catalog. His thoughts had returned to the merchandise – rug, clock, bookcase, phonograph, table, chairs. What price might they accept?

Hoegbotton would not have included the cage in his calculations if the boy’s stare had not kept flickering wildly toward it and back down again, gliding like Hoegbotton’s own over the remnants of a success that had become utter failure. For all the outlandish things in the room – the boy’s own mother to be counted among them – the boy most feared the cage, an object that could no more hurt him than the green suitcase that hung from his arm.

A reflexive sadness for the boy ran through Hoegbotton, even as he noted the delicacy of the silver engravings on the chair legs; definitely pre-Trillian.

He stared at the boy until the boy stared back. “Don’t you know that you’re safe now?” Hoegbotton said a little too loudly, the words muffled by the cloth over his mouth. An echo traveled up to the high ceiling, encountered the skylight, and descended at a higher pitch.

The boy said nothing. As was his right. Outside, the bodies of his father, brother, and two sisters were being burned as a precaution, the bodies too mutilated to have withstood a Viewing anyway. The boy’s fate, too, was uncertain. Sometimes survivors did not survive.

Nothing could make one safe. There had been a great spasm of buying houses without basements, or with stone floors, but no one had yet proven that such a measure, or any measure, helped. The random nature of the events, combined with their infrequency, had instilled a certain fatalism in Ambergris’s inhabitants.

The solicitor had run out of patience. He stood uncomfortably close to Hoegbotton, his breath sour and thick. “Are you ready yet? You’ve had more than enough time. Should I call Slattery or Ungdom instead?” His voice seemed more distorted than the mask could explain, as if he were in the grip of a new, perhaps deadly, emotion.

Hoegbotton took a step back from the ferocity of the solicitor’s gaze. The names of his chief rivals made a little vein in Hoegbotton’s left eyelid pulse in and out. Especially Ungdom – towering John Ungdom, he of the wide belly, steeped in alcohol and pork lard.

“Call for them, then,” he said, looking away.

The solicitor’s gaze bored into his cheek and then the foul presence was gone. The solicitor had slumped into one of the chairs, a great smudge of a man.

“Anyway, I’m almost ready,” Hoegbotton said. The vein in his eyelid would not stop pulsing. It was true: neither Slattery nor Ungdom would come. Because they were afraid. Because their devotion to their job was incomplete, insufficient, inadequate. Hoegbotton imagined them both taken up into the rain and torn to pieces by the wind.

“Tell me about the cage,” Hoegbotton said suddenly, surprising himself. “The cage up there’ – he pointed – “is it for sale, too?”

The boy stiffened, stared at the floor.

To Hoegbotton’s surprise, the woman turned to look at him. Her eyes were black as an abyss; they did not blink and reflected nothing. He felt for a moment as if he stood balanced precariously between the son’s alarm and the mother’s regard.

“The cage was always open,” the woman said, her voice gravelly, something stuck in her throat. “We had a bird. We always let it fly around. It was a pretty bird. It flew high through the rooms. It— No one could find the bird. After.” The terrible pressure of the word after appeared to be too much for her and she fell back into her silence.

“We’ve never had a cage,” the boy said, the dark green suitcase swaying. “We’ve never had a bird. They left it here. They left it.”

A chill ran through Hoegbotton that was not caused by a draft. The sleepy gaze of a pig embryo floating in a jar caught his eye. Opportunity or disaster? The value of an artifact they had left behind might be considerable. The risks, however, might also be considerable. This was the third time in the last nine months that he had been called to a house visited by the grey caps, subterranean inhabitants of Ambergris. Each of the previous times, he had escaped unharmed. In fact, he had come to believe that late arrivals like himself were impervious to any side effects. Yet even he had experienced moments of discomfort, as when, at the last house, he had walked down a white hallway to the room where the merchandise awaited him and found a series of dark smudges and trails and tracks of blood. Halfway down the hallway, he had spied a dark object, shaped like a piece of dried fruit, glistening from the floor. Curious, he had leaned down to examine it, only to recoil and stand up when he realized that it was a human ear.

This time, the solicitor had experienced the most unease. According to the talkative messenger who had summoned Hoegbotton, the solicitor had arrived in the early afternoon to find the bodies and survivors. Arms and legs had been stuck into the walls between specimen jars, arranged in intricate poses that displayed a perverse sense of humor.

The light glinted softly off the windows. The silence became more absolute. All around, dead things watched one another, from wall to wall – a cacophony of gazes that saw everything but remembered nothing. Outside, the rain fell relentlessly.

A tingling sensation crept into Hoegbotton’s fingertips. A price had materialized in his mind, manifested itself in glittering detail.

“Two thousand sels – for everything.”

The solicitor sighed, almost crumpled in on himself. The woman blinked rapidly, as if puzzled, and then stared at Hoegbotton with a hatred more real for being so distant. All the former protests of the solicitor, even the boy’s fear, were nothing next to that look. The red at the end of her arms had become paler, as if the white bandages had begun to heal her.

He heard himself say, “Three thousand sels. If you include the cage.” And it was true, he realized – he wanted the cage.

The solicitor, trying to mask some small personal distress now, giggled and said, “Done. But you must retrieve it yourself. I’m not feeling well.” The cloth of the man’s mask moved in and out almost imperceptibly as he breathed. A sour smell had entered the room.

On the ladder, Hoegbotton had a moment of vertigo. The world spun, then righted itself as he continued to the top. When he peered onto the windowsill, two eyes stared up at him from beside the cage.

“Manzikert!” he hissed. He recoiled, almost lost his balance as he flailed at empty air, managed to fall back against the ladder . . . and realized that they were just the missing marble eyes of the swan, placed there by some prankster, although it did not pay to think of who such a prankster might be. He caught his breath, tried to swallow the unease that pressed down on his shoulders, his tongue, his eyelids.

The cage stood to the right of the ladder and he was acutely conscious of having to lock his legs onto the ladder’s sides as he leaned slowly toward the cage.

Below, the solicitor and the boy were speaking, but their voices seemed dulled and distant. He hesitated. What might be in the cage? What horrible thing far worse than a severed human ear? The odd idea struck him that he would pull the cord to reveal Thomas Daffed’s severed head. He could see the bars beneath the cloth, though, he told himself. Whatever lived inside the cage would remain inside the cage. Now that it was his property, his acquisition, he refused to suffer the same failure of nerve as Slattery and Ungdom.

The cover of the cage, which in the dim light appeared to be sprinkled with a luminous green dust, had a drawstring and opened like a curtain. With a sharp yank on the drawstring, Hoegbotton drew aside the cover – and flinched, again nearly fell, a sensation of displaced air flowing across his face, as of something moving. He cried out. Then realized the cage was empty. He stood there for an instant, breathing heavily, staring into the cage. Nothing. It contained nothing. Relief came burrowing out of his bones, followed by disappointment. Empty. Except for some straw lining the bottom of the cage and, dangling near the back, almost as an afterthought, a perch, swaying back and forth, the movement no doubt caused by the speed with which he had drawn back the cover. A latched door extended the full three feet from the base to the top of the cage and could be slid back on special grooves. Stained green, the metal bars featured detail work as fine as he had ever seen – intricate flowers and vines with little figures peering out of a background rich with mushrooms. He could sell it for 4,000 sels, with the right sales pitch.

Hoegbotton looked down through a murk diluted only by a few lamps.

“It’s empty,” he shouted down. “The cage is empty. But I’ll take it.”

An unintelligible answer floated up. As his sight adjusted to the scene below, the distant solicitor in his chair, the other two still standing, he thought for a horrible second that they were melting. The boy seemed melded to his suitcase, the green of it inseparable from the white of the attached arm. The woman’s nubs were impossibly white, as if she had grown new bones. The solicitor was just a splash of green.

When he stood on solid ground again, he could not control his shaking.

“I’ll have the papers to you tomorrow, after I’ve cataloged all the items,” he said.

All around, on the arms of the chairs, on the table, atop the bookcase, white mushrooms had risen on slender stalks, their gills tinged red.

The solicitor sat in his chair and giggled uncontrollably.

“It was nice to meet you,” Hoegbotton said as he walked to the door that led to the room that led to the next room and the room after that and then, hopefully, the outside, by which time he would be running. The woman’s stubs had sprouted white tendrils of fungus that lazily wound their way around the dried blood and obscured it. Her eyes were slowly filling with white.

Hoegbotton backed into the damaged table and almost fell. “As I say, a pleasure doing business with you.”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” the solicitor said, and giggled again, his skin as green and wrinkly as a lizard’s.

“Then I will see you again, soon,” Hoegbotton said, edging toward the door, groping behind him for the knob, “and under . . . under better . . .” But he could not finish his sentence.

The boy’s arms were dark green, fuzzy and indistinct, as if he were a still life made of points of paint on a canvas. His suitcase, once blue, had turned a blackish green, for the fungi had engulfed it much as ivy had engulfed the eastern wall of the mansion. All the terrible knowledge of his condition shone through the boy’s eyes and yet still he held his mother’s arm as the white tendrils wound round both their limbs in an ever more permanent embrace.

Hoegbotton later believed that he would have stood at the door forever, hand on the knob, the solicitor’s giggle a low whine in the background, if not for what happened next.

The broken clock groaned and struck midnight. The shuddering stroke reverberated through the room, through the thousands of jars of preserved animals. The solicitor looked up in sudden terror and, with a soft popping sound, exploded into a lightly falling rain of emerald spores that drifted to the floor with as slow and tranquil a grace as the seeds of a dandelion. As if the sound had torn him apart.

Outside, Hoegbotton tore off his mask, knelt, and threw up beside the fountain that guarded the path to Albumuth Boulevard. Behind him, across a square of dark green grass, the bodies of Daffed, his daughters, his other son, smoldered grey and black. The charred smell mixed with mildew and the rain that stippled his back. His arms and legs trembled with an enervating weakness. His mouth felt hot and dry. For a long time, he sat in the same position, watching pinpricks break his reflection in the fountain. He shivered as the water shivered.

He had never come this close before. Either they had died long before he arrived or long after he left. The solicitor’s liquid giggle trickled through his ears, along with the soft pop of the spores. He shuddered, relaxed, shuddered again.

When his assistant Alan Bristlewing questioned, as he often did, the wisdom of taking on such hazardous work, Hoegbotton would smile and change the subject. He could not choose between two conflicting impulses: the upswelling of excitement and the desire to flee Ambergris and return to Morrow, the city of his birth. As each new episode receded into memory, his nerve returned, somehow stronger.

The boy’s arm, fused to his suitcase.

Holding onto the lichen-flecked stone lip of the pool, Hoegbotton plunged his head into the smooth water. The chill shocked him. It prickled his skin, cut through the numbness to burn the inside of his nose. A sob escaped him, and another, and then a third that bent him over the water again. The back of his neck was suddenly cool. When he pulled away, he looked down at his reflection – and the mask he had made to hide his emotions was gone. He was himself again.

Hoegbotton stood up. Across the courtyard, the Cappan’s men had abandoned the bodies to begin the task of nailing boards across the doors and windows of the mansion. No one pulled the shades open to protest being trapped inside. No one banged on the door, begging to be let out. They had already begun their journey.

One look at his face as he staggered to safety had told the Cappan’s men everything. No doubt they would have boarded him in too, if not for the bribes and his previous record of survival.

Hoegbotton wiped his mouth with his handkerchief. The merchandise he had bought would molder in the mansion, unused and unrecorded except in his ledger of “Potential Acquisitions: Lost”. Depending on which hysteria-induced procedure the Cappan had adopted this fortnight, the mansion grounds might be cordoned off or the mansion itself might be put to the torch.

The clock struck midnight.

The cage stood beside him, slick with rain. Hoegbotton had gripped its handle so hard during his escape – from every corner, Daffed’s infernal collection of dead things staring innocently at him – that he had been branded where the skin had not been rubbed off his palm. He bore the mark of the handle: a delicate filigree of unfamiliar symbols from behind which strange eyes peered out. In the fading light, with the rain falling harder, the fungi appeared to have been washed off the cover of the cage. Perversely, this fact disappointed him. With each new encounter, he had come to expect further revelations.

Blinking away the rain, Hoegbotton let out a deep breath, stuffed his mask in a pocket, wrapped the cloth around his injured hand, and picked up the cage. It was heavier than he remembered it, and oddly balanced. It made him list to the side as he started walking up the path to the main road. He would have to hurry if he was to make the curfew imposed by the Cappan.

Ambergris at dusk, occluded and darkened by the rain that splattered on sidewalks, rattled against rooftops, struck windows, hinted at a level of debauchery almost as unnerving to Hoegbotton as the way, whenever he stopped to switch the cage from his left to his right hand and back again, the weight never seemed the same.

The city that flourished from wholesome activity by day became its opposite by night. Orgies had been reported in abandoned churches. Grotesque and lewd water-puppet shows were staged down by the docks. Weekly, the merchant quarter held midnight auctions of paintings that could only be termed obscene. The fey illustrated books of Collart and Slothian enjoyed a popularity that placed the authors but a single step below the Cappan in status. In the Religious Quarter, the hard-pressed Truffidian priests tried to wrest back authority from the conflicting prophets Peterson and Stratton, whose dueling theologies infected ever-more violent followers.

At the root of this immorality: the renewed presence of the grey caps, who in recent years came and went like the ebb and flow of a tide – now underground, now above ground, as if in a perpetual migration between light and dark, night and day. Always, the city reacted to their presence in unpredictable ways. What choice did the city’s inhabitants have but to go about their business, hoping that they would not be next, blind to all but their own misfortunes? It was now one hundred years since the Silence, when thousands had vanished without a trace, and people could be forgiven their loss of memory. Most people just no longer thought of the Silence on a daily basis. It did not figure into the ordinary sorrows of Ambergris’s inhabitants so much as into the weekly sermons of the Truffidians, or into the worries of the Cappan and his men.

As Hoegbotton walked home, street lamps appeared out of the murk, illuminating fleeting figures: a priest holding his robe up as he ran so he wouldn’t trip on the hem; two Dogghe tribesmen hunched against the closed doors of a bank, their distinctive green spiraled hats pulled down low over their weathered faces. Of the Kalif’s recent Occupation, no sign remained except for painted graffiti urging the invaders to go home. But Hoegbotton still came upon the faintly glowing, six-foot-wide purplish circles that showed where, before the Silence, huge mushrooms had been chopped down by worried authorities.

Hoegbotton’s wife was already asleep when he walked up the seven flights of stairs and entered their apartment. She had turned off the lamps because it gave her the advantage in case of an intruder. The faint scent of lilacs and honeysuckle told him that the flower vendor from the floor above them had been by to see Rebecca.

A dim half-light shone from the living room to his left as he set down the cage, took off his shoes and socks, and hung his raincoat on the coat rack. Directly ahead lay the dining room, with its mold-encrusted window, the purple sheen burning darkly as the rain fed it. He had checked the fungi guard just a week ago and found no leakage, but he made a mental note to check it again in the morning.

Hoegbotton found a towel in the hall closet and used it to dry his face, his hair, and then the outside of the cage. Again picking up the uncomfortable weight of the cage, he tiptoed into the living room, the rug beneath his feet thick but cold. A series of dark shapes greeted him, most of them items from his store: Lamps and side tables, a couch, a long low coffee table, a bookcase, a grandfather clock. Beyond them lay the balcony, long lost to fungi and locked up as a result.

The fey light almost transformed the living-room’s contents into the priceless artifacts he had told her they were. He had chosen them not for their value but for their texture, their smell, and for the sounds they made when moved or sat upon or opened. Little of it appealed visually, but she delighted in what he had chosen and it meant he could store the most important merchandise at the shop, where it was more secure.

Hoegbotton set the cage down on the living-room table. The palms of his hands were hot and raw from carrying it. He took off the rest of his clothes and laid them on the arm of the couch.

The light came from the bedroom, which lay to the right of the living room. He walked into the bedroom and turned to the left, the closed window above the bed reflecting back the iridescent light that came from her and her alone. Rebecca lay on her back, the sheets draped across her body, exposing the long, black, vaguely tear-shaped scar on her left thigh. He ran his gaze over it lustfully. It glistened like obsidian.

Hoegbotton walked around to the right side and eased himself into the bed. He moved up beside her and pressed himself against the darkness of the scar. An image of the woman from the mansion flashed through his mind.

Rebecca turned in her sleep and put an arm across his chest as he moved onto his back. Her hand, warm and soft, was as delicate as the starfish that glided through the shallows down by the docks. It looked so small against his chest.

The light came from her open eyes, although he could tell she was asleep. It was a silvery glow awash with faint phosphorescent sparks of blue, green, and red: shivers and hiccups of splintered light, as if a half-dozen tiny lightning storms had welled up in her gaze. What rich worlds did she dream of? And, for the thousandth time: What did the light mean? He had met her on a business trip to Stockton, after the fungal infection that had resulted in the blindness, the odd light, the scar. He had never known her whole.

Who was this stranger, so pale and silent and beautiful? A joyful sorrow rose within him as he watched the light emanating from her. They had argued about having children just the day before. Every word he had thrown at her in anger had hurt him so deeply that finally he had been wordless, and all he could do was stare at her. Looking at her now, her face unguarded, her body next to his, he could not help loving her for the scar, the eyes, even if it meant he wished her to be this way.

II

The next morning, Hoegbotton woke to the fading image of the woman’s bloody bandages and the sounds of Rebecca making breakfast. She knew the apartment better than he did – knew its surfaces, its edges, the exact number of steps from table to chair to doorway – and she liked to make meals in a kitchen that had become more familiar to her than it could ever be to him. Yet she also asked him to bring back more furniture for the living room and bedroom or rearrange existing furniture. She became bored otherwise. “I want an unexplored country. I want a hint of the unknown,” she said once, and Hoegbotton agreed with her.

To an extent. There were things Hoegbotton wished would stay unknown. On the mantel opposite the bed, for example, lay those of his grandmother’s possessions that his relatives in Morrow had sent to him: a pin, a series of portraits of family members, a set of spoons, a poorly copied family history. A letter had accompanied the heirlooms, describing his grandmother’s last days. The package had been waiting for him on the doorstep of the apartment one evening a month ago. His grandmother had died six weeks before that. He had not gone to the funeral. He had not even brought himself to tell Rebecca about the death. All she knew of it was the crinkling of the envelope as he had smoothed out the letter to read it. She might even have picked up the pin or the spoons and wondered why he had brought them home. Telling her would mean explaining why he hadn’t gone to the funeral and then he would have to talk about the bad blood between him and his brother Richard.

The smell of bacon and eggs spurred him to throw back the covers, get up, put on a bathrobe, and stumble bleary-eyed through the living room to the kitchen. A dead sort of almost-sunlight – pale and green and lukewarm – suffused the kitchen window through the purple mold and thin veins of green. A watermark of the city appeared through the glass: grey spires, forlorn flags, the indistinct shapes of other anonymous apartment buildings.

Rebecca stood in the kitchen, spatula in hand, framed by the dour light. Her black hair was brightly dark. Her dress, a green-and-blue sweep of fabric, fitted her loosely. She was intent on the skillet in front of her, gaze unblinking, mouth pursed.

As Hoegbotton came up behind Rebecca and wrapped his arms around her, a sense of guilt made him frown. He had come so close last night, almost as close as the boy, the woman. Was that as close as he could get without . . . ? The question had haunted him throughout his quest. A sudden deep swell of emotion overcame him and he found that his eyes were wet. What if, what if?

Rebecca snuggled into his embrace and turned toward him. Her eyes looked almost normal during the day. Flecks of phosphorescence shot lazily across the pupils.

“Did you sleep well?” she asked. “You came home so late.”

“I slept. I’m sorry I was late. It was a difficult job this time.”

“Profitable?” Her elbow nudged him as she turned the eggs over with the spatula.

“Not very.”

“Really? Why not?”

He stiffened. Would Rebecca have realized the mansion had become a death trap? Would she have smelled the blood, tasted the fear? He served as her eyes, her contact with the world of images, but would he truly deprive her by not describing its horrors to her in every detail?

“Well . . .” he began. Hoegbotton shut his eyes. The sick gaze of the solicitor flickering over the scene of his own death washed over him. Even as he held Rebecca, he could feel a distance opening up between them.

“You don’t need to shut your eyes to see,” she said, pulling out of his embrace.

“How did you know?” he said, although he knew.

“I heard you close them.” She smiled with grim satisfaction.

“It was just sad,” he said, sitting down at the kitchen table. “Nothing horrible. Just sad. The wife had lost her husband and had to sell the estate. She had a boy with her who kept holding on to a little suitcase.”

The remnants of the solicitor floating to the ground, curling up like confetti. The boy’s gaze fluttering between him and the cage.

“I felt sorry for them. They had some nice heirlooms, but most of it was already promised to Slattery. I didn’t get much. They had a nice rug from Morrow, from before the Silence. Nice detail of Morrow cavalry coming to our rescue. I would have liked to have bought it.”

She carefully slid the eggs and bacon onto a plate and brought it to the table.

“Thank you,” he said. She had burned the bacon. The eggs were too dry. He never complained. She needed these little sleights of hand, these illusions of illumination. It was edible.

“Mrs Bloodgood took me down to the Morhaim Museum yesterday,” she said. “Many of their artifacts are on open display. The textures were amazing. And the flower vendor visited, as you may have guessed.”

Rebecca’s father, Paul, was the curator for a small museum in Stockton. Paul liked to joke that Hoegbotton was just the temporary caretaker for items that would eventually find their way to him. Hoegbotton had always thought museums just hoarded that which should be available on the open market. Rebecca had been her father’s assistant until the disease stole her sight. Now Hoegbotton sometimes took her down to the store to help him sort and catalog new acquisitions.

“I noticed the flowers,” he said. “I’m glad the museum was nice.”

For some reason, his hand shook as he ate his eggs. He put his fork down.

“Isn’t it good?” she asked.

“It’s very good,” he said. “I just need water.”

He got up and walked to the sink. The faucet had been put in five weeks ago, after a two-year wait. Before, they had gotten jugs of water from a well down in the valley. He watched with satisfaction as the faucet spluttered and his glass gradually filled up.

“It’s a nice bird or whatever,” she said from behind him.

“Bird.” A vague fear shot through him. “Bird?” The glass clinked against the edge of the sink as he momentarily lost his grip on it.

“Or lizard. Or whatever it is. What is it?”

Hoegbotton turned, leaned against the sink. “What are you talking about?”

“That cage you brought home with you.”

The vague fear crept up his spine. “There’s nothing in the cage. It’s empty.” Was she joking?

Rebecca laughed: a pleasant, liquid sound. “That’s funny, because your empty cage was rattling earlier. At first, it scared me. Something was rustling around in there. I couldn’t tell if it was a bird or a lizard or I would have reached through the bars and touched it.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“There’s nothing in the cage.”

Her face underwent a subtle change and he knew she thought he doubted her on something at which she was expert: the interpretation of sound. On a calm day, she had told him, she could hear a boy skipping stones down by the docks.

For a moment, he said nothing. He couldn’t stay quiet for long. She couldn’t read his face without touching it, but he suspected that she knew the difference between types of silence.

He laughed. “I’m joking. It’s a lizard – but it bites. So you were wise not to touch it.”

Suspicion tightened her features. Then she relaxed and smiled at him. She reached out, felt for his plate with her left hand, and stole a piece of his bacon. “I knew it was a lizard!”

He longed to go into the living room where the cage stood atop the table. But he couldn’t, not just yet.

“It’s quiet in here,” he said softly, already expecting the reply.

“No, it’s not. It’s not quiet at all. It’s loud.”

The left corner of his mouth curled up as he replied by rote: “What do you hear, my love?”

Rebecca’s smile widened. “Well, first, there’s your voice, my love – a nice, deep baritone. Then there’s Hobson downstairs, playing a phonograph as low as he can to avoid disturbing the Potaks, who are at this moment in an argument about something so petty I will not give you the details, while to the side, just below them” – her eyes narrowed – “I believe the Smythes are also making bacon. Above us, old man Clox is pacing and pacing with his cane, muttering about money. On his balcony, there’s a sparrow chirping, which makes me realize now that the animal in your cage must be a lizard, because it sounds like something clicking and clucking, not chirping – unless you’ve got a chicken in there?”

“No, no – it’s a lizard.”

“What kind of lizard?”

“It’s a Saphant Click-Spitting Fire Lizard from the Southern Isles,” Hpegbotton said. “It only ever grows in cages, which it makes itself by chewing up dirt, changing it into metal, and regurgitating it. It can only eat animals that can’t see it.”

Rebecca laughed in appreciation and got up and hugged him. Her scent made him forget his fear. “It’s a good story, but I don’t believe you. I do know this, though – you are going to be late to work.”

Once on the ground floor, where he did not think it would make a difference if Rebecca heard, Hoegbotton set down the cage. The awkwardness of carrying it, uneven and swaying, down the spiral staircase had unnerved him. He was sweating under his raincoat. His breath came hard and fast. The musty quality of the lobby, the traces of tiny rust mushrooms that had spread along the floor like mouse tracks, the mottled green-orange mold on the windows in the front door, did not put him at ease.

Someone had left a worn umbrella leaning against the front door. He grabbed it and turned back to stare at the cage. Was this the moment that Ungdom and Slattery’s ill wishes caught up with him? He drove the umbrella tip between the bars. The cover gave a little, creasing, and then regained its former shape as he withdrew the umbrella. Nothing came leaping out at him. He tried again. No response.

“Is something in there?” he asked the cage. The cage did not reply.

Umbrella held like a sword in front of him, Hoegbotton pulled the cover aside – and leapt back.

The cage was still empty. The perch swung back and forth madly from the violence with which he had pulled aside the cover. The woman had said, “The cage was always open.” The boy had said, “We never had a cage.” The solicitor had never offered an opinion. The swinging perch, the emptiness of the cage, depressed him. He could not say why. He drew the cover back across the cage.

Footsteps sounded on the stairs behind him and he whirled around, then relaxed. It was just Sarah Willis, their landlady, walking down from her second-floor apartment.

“Good morning, Mrs Willis,” he said, leaning on the umbrella.

Mrs Willis did not bother to respond until she was standing in front of him, staring up at him through her thick glasses. A flower-pattern hat covered her balding head. A matching flower dress, faded, covered her ancient body, even her presumably shoed feet.

“No pets allowed,” she said.

“Pets?” Hoegbotton was momentarily bewildered. “What pets?”

Mrs Willis nodded at the cage. “What’s in there?”

“Oh, that. It’s not a pet.”

“No animals allowed, pets or meat.” Mrs Willis cackled and coughed at her own joke.

“It’s not . . .” He realized it was useless. “I’m taking it out now. It was just there for the morning.”

Mrs Willis grunted and pushed past him.

At the door, just as she walked out into the renewed patter of rain, apparently counting on her hat to protect her, she offered Hoegbotton the following advice: “Miss Constance? On the third floor? She’ll have your head if you don’t put back her umbrella.”

Located on Albumuth Boulevard, half way between the docks and the residential sections that descended into a valley ever in danger of flooding, Hoegbotton’s store – ROBERT HOEGBOTTON & SONS: QUALITY IMPORTERS OF FINE NEW & USED ITEMS FROM HOME & ABROAD – took up the first floor of a solid two-storey wooden building owned by a monk in the Religious Quarter. The sign exhibited optimism; there were no sons. Not yet. The time was not right, the situation too uncertain, no matter what Rebecca might say. Someday his shop might serve as the headquarters for a merchant empire, but that wouldn’t happen for several years. Always in the back of his mind, spurring him on: his brother Richard’s threat to swoop down with the rest of the Hoegbotton clan to save the family name should he fail.

The display window, protected from the rain by an awning, held a battered mauve couch, an opulent, gold-leaf-covered chair (nicked by Hoegbotton, along with several other treasures, during the panicked withdrawal of the Kalif’s troops), a phonograph, a large red vase, an undistinguished-looking saddle, and Alan Bristlewing, his assistant.

Bristlewing knelt inside the display, carefully placing records in the stand beside the phonograph. He had already wiped the window clean of fungi that had accumulated the night before. The detritus of the cleaning lay on the sidewalk in curled-up piles of red, green, and blue. A sour smell emanated from these remnants, but the rain would wash it all away in an hour or two.

When Bristlewing saw Hoegbotton, he waved and inched his wiry frame out of the window. A moment later, shielding his head from the rain with a newspaper, he was opening the huge lock in the iron grille of the door, his mouth set in the familiar laconic grin that itself displayed some antiques, courtesy of a sidewalk dentist. A few button-shaped mushrooms, a fiery red, tumbled out of the lock as the key withdrew, rolling to a stop on the wet sidewalk.

Bristlewing was a scruffy, short, animated man who smelled of cigar smoke and often disappeared for days on end. Stories of debaucheries with prostitutes and week-long fishing trips down the River Moth buzzed around Bristlewing without settling on him. Hoegbotton could not afford to hire more dependable help.

“Morning,” Bristlewing said.

“Good morning,” Hoegbotton replied. “Any customers last night?”

“None with any money . . .” Bristlewing’s grin vanished as he saw the cage. “Oh. I see you went to another one.”

Hoegbotton set the cage down in front of Bristlewing and took the ring of keys from him at the same time. “Just put it in the office. Are the inventory books up to date?” Hoegbotton’s hand still stung from where the imprint of the handle had branded itself on his skin.

“Course they’re current,” Bristlewing said, turning stiffly away as he picked up his new burden.

By design, the way to Hoegbotton’s office at the back of the store was blocked by a maze of items, from which rose a collective must-metal-rotted-dusty smell that to him formed the most delicate of perfumes. This smell of antiquity validated his selections as surely as any papers of authenticity. That customers tripped and frequently lost their bearings as they navigated the arbitrary footpaths mattered little to Hoegbotton. The received family wisdom said that thus hemmed in the customer had no choice but to buy something from the stacks of chairs, umbrellas, watches, pens, fishing rods, clothes, enameled boxes, deer racks, plaster casts of lizards, elegant mirrors of glass and copper, reading glasses, Truffidian religious icons, boards for playing dice made of oliphaunt ivory, porcelain water jugs, globes of the world, model ships, old medals, sword canes, musical clocks, and other ephemera from past lives or distant places. Hoegbotton loved knowing that a customer might, in seeking out a perfectly ordinary set of dinner plates, come face to face with the flared nostrils and questing tongue of a Skamoo erotic mask. An overwhelming sense of the secret history of these objects could sometimes send him into a trance-like state. Thankfully, Rebecca understood this feeling, having been exposed to it from an early age.

Emerging from this morass of riches, Hoegbotton’s office lay open to the rest of the store like an oasis of sparseness. Five steps led down to its sunken carpeting – crimson with gold threads, bought from the old Threnody Larkspur Theater before it burned to the ground – and a simple rosewood desk whose only flourishes were legs carved into the shape of writhing squid. A matching chair, two work tables against the far wall, and a couch for visitors rounded out the furniture. To the left of the office space stood two doors. The first led to a private bathroom, recently installed, much to Bristlewing’s delight.

The desk lay beneath an organized clutter of inventory books, a blotter, a selection of fountain pens, stationery with the H&S logo emblazoned upon it, folders full of invoices, a metal message capsule with a curled-up piece of paper inside, a slice of orange mushroom in a small paper bag, a shell he had found while on vacation in the Southern Isles when he was six, and the new Frankwrithe & Lewden edition of The Mystery of Cinsorium by Blake Clockmore. Daguerreotypes of Rebecca, his brother Stephen (lost to the family now, having signed up for the Kalif’s cavalry on a monstrous but historically common whim) and his mother Gertrude standing on the lawn of someone else’s mansion in Morrow added a personal touch.

Bristlewing had already made himself scarce – Hoegbotton could hear him pulling some artifact out from behind a row of old bookcases stacked high with cracked flowerpots – and the cage stood on the sideboard of his desk as if it had always been there.

Hoegbotton hung his raincoat on one of the six coat racks lined up like soldiers in the farthest corner of the office. Then he took the past day’s book of inventory and purchases and walked to the door that led to the room next to the bathroom. The door was very old, wormholed, and studded with odd metal symbols that Hoegbotton had taken from an abandoned Manziist shrine.

Hoegbotton unlocked the door and went inside. The door shut silently behind him and he was alone. The light that cast its yellowing glare upon the room came from an old-fashioned squid-oil lamp nailed into the room’s far wall.

Nothing, at first glance, distinguished the room from any other room. It contained a tired-looking dining table around which stood four worn chairs. To one side, plates, cups, bowls, and utensils sat atop a cabinet with a mirror that served as a backboard. The mirror was veined with a purplish fungus that had managed to infiltrate minute fractures in the glass. He had worried that the Cappan’s men might confiscate the mirror on one of their weekly inspections of his store, but they had ignored it, perhaps recognizing the age of the mirror and the way mold had itself begun to grow on the fungus.

The table held three place settings, the faded napkins unfolded and haphazard. Across the middle of the table lay a parchment of faded words, so old that it looked as if it might disintegrate into dust at the slightest touch. A bottle of port, half full, stood on the table next to a bare space in front of the fourth chair.

By tradition, recently established, Hoegbotton sat there for his daily readings from the books of inventory. Bound in red leather, the books were imported from Morrow. The off-white pages were thin as tissue paper to accommodate as many sheets as possible. The two books that Hoegbotton had taken with him represented the inventory for the past three months. Sixteen others, as massive and unwieldy, had been wrapped in a blanket and carefully hidden beneath the floorboards in his office. (Two separate notebooks to record unfortunate but necessary dealings with Ungdom and Slattery, suitably yellow and brown, had been tossed into an unlocked drawer of his desk.)

Yesterday had been slow – only five items sold, two of them phonograph records. He frowned when he read Bristlewing’s description of the buyers as “Short lady with walking stick. Did not give a name,” and “Man looked sick. Took forever to make up his mind. Bought one record after all that time.” Bristlewing did not respect the system. By contrast, a typical Hoegbottonpenned buyer entry read like an investigative report: “Miss Glissandra Beckle, 4232 East Munrale Mews, late 40s. Grey-silver hair. Startling blue eyes. Wore an expensive green dress but cheap black shoes, scuffed. She insisted on calling me ‘Mr Hoegbotton.’ She examined a very expensive Occidental vase and commented favorably on a bone hairpin, a pearl snuffbox, and a watch once worn by a prominent Truffidian priest. However, she only bought the hairpin.”

If Bristlewing disliked the detail required by Hoegbotton for the ledgers, he disliked the room itself even more. After carefully cataloging its contents upon their arrival three years before, Hoegbotton had asked Bristlewing a question.

“Do you know what this is?”

“Old musty room. No air.”

“No. It’s not an old musty room with no air.”

“Fooled me,” Bristlewing had said and, scowling, left him there.

III

But Bristlewing was wrong. Bristlewing did not understand the first thing about the room. How could he? And how could Hoegbotton explain that the room was perhaps the most important room in the world, that he often found himself inside it even while walking around the city, at home reading to his wife, or buying fruit and eggs from the farmers’ market?

The history of the room went back to the Silence itself. His great-great-grandfather, Samuel Hoegbotton, had been the first Hoegbotton to move to Ambergris, much against the wishes of the rest of his extended family, including his twenty-year-old son, John, who stayed in Morrow.

For a man who had uprooted his wife and daughter from all that was familiar to take up residence in an unknown, sometimes cruel, city, Samuel Hoegbotton became remarkably successful, establishing three stores down by the docks. It seemed that it would be only a matter of time before more of the Hoegbotton clan moved down to Ambergris.

However, this was not to be. One day, Samuel Hoegbotton, his wife and his daughter disappeared, just three of the thousands of souls who vanished from Ambergris during the episode known as the Silence – leaving behind empty buildings, empty courtyards, empty houses, and the assumption among those who grieved that the grey caps had caused the tragedy. Hoegbotton remembered one line in particular from John’s diary: “I cannot believe my father has really disappeared. It is possible he could have come to harm, but to simply disappear? Along with my mother and sister? I keep thinking that they will return one day and explain to me what happened. It is too difficult to live with, otherwise.”

Sitting in his mother’s bedroom with the diary open in front of him, the young Robert Hoegbotton had felt a chill across the back of his neck. What had happened to Samuel Hoegbotton? He spent many summer afternoons in the attic, surrounded by antiquities, speculating on the subject. He combed through old letters that Samuel had sent home before his disappearance. He visited the family archive. He wrote to relatives in other cities. His mother disapproved of such inquiries; his grandmother just smiled and said sadly, “I’ve often wondered myself.” He could not talk to his father about it; that cold and distant figure was rarely home.

His sister also found the mystery intriguing. They would act out scenarios with the house as the backdrop. They would ask the maids questions to fill gaps in their knowledge and thus uncover the meaning of words like “grey cap” and “Cappan”. His grandmother had even given them an old sketch that showed the apartment’s living room – Samuel Hoegbotton surrounded by smiling relatives on a visit. But for his sister it was just relief of a temporary boredom, and he was soon so busy learning the family business that the mystery faded from his thoughts.

When he reached the age of majority, he decided to leave Morrow and travel to Ambergris. No Hoegbotton had set foot in Ambergris for ninety years and it was precisely for this reason that he chose the city, or so he told himself. In Morrow, under the predatory eye of Richard, he had felt as if none of his plans would ever be successful. In Ambergris, he started out poor but independent, operating a sidewalk stall that sold fruit and broadsheets. At odd times – at an auction, looking at jewelry that reminded him of something his mother might wear; sneaking around Ungdom’s store examining all that merchandise, so much richer than what he could acquire at the time – thoughts of the Silence wormed their way into his head.

The day after he signed the lease on his own store, Hoegbotton visited Samuel’s apartment. He had the address from some of the man’s letters. The building lay in a warren of derelict structures that rose from the side of the valley to the east of the Merchant Quarter. It took Hoegbotton an hour to find it, the carriage ride followed by progress on foot. He knew he was close when he had to climb over a wooden fence with a sign on it that read OFF LIMITS BY ORDER OF THE CAPPAN. The sky was overcast, the sunlight weak yet bright, and he walked through the tenements feeling ethereal, dislocated. Here and there, he found walls where bones had been mixed with the mortar and he knew by these signs that such places had been turned into graveyards.

When he finally stood in front of the apartment – on the ground level of a three-storey building – he wondered if he should turn around and go home. The exterior was boarded up, fire-scorched and splotched with brown-yellow fungi. Weeds had drowned the grass and other signs of a lawn. A smell like dull vinegar permeated the air. The facing rows of buildings formed a corridor of light, at the end of which a stray dog sniffed at the ground, picking up a scent. He could see its ribs even from so far away. Somewhere, a child began to cry, the sound thin, attenuated, automatic. The noise was so unexpected, almost horrifying, that he thought it must not be a baby at all, but something mimicking a baby, hoping to lure him closer.

After a few more moments, he reached a decision and took a crowbar from his pack. Half an hour later, he had unpried the boards and the door stood revealed, a pale “X” running across the dark wood. He realized that he was breathing in shallow gasps, anticipation laced with fear. No one could help him if he opened the door and needed help, but he still wanted whatever was inside the apartment. It could be anything, even the end of his life, and yet the adrenalin rushed through him.

Hoegbotton pulled the door open and stepped inside, crowbar held like a weapon. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. The air was stale. Windows to the right and left of the hallway, although boarded up, let in enough light to make patches of dust on the floor shine like colonies of tiny, subdued fireflies. The hallway was oddly ordinary, nothing out of place. In the even more dimly lit living room, Hoegbotton could make out that some vagrant had long ago set up digs and abandoned them. A sofa had been overturned and a blanket used as a roof for a makeshift tent, broadsheets strewn across the floor for a bed. Dog droppings were more recent, as were the bones of small animals piled in a corner. A rabbit carcass, withered but caked with dried blood, might have been as fresh as the week before. The wallpaper had collapsed into a mumbling senility of fragments and strips. Paintings that had hung on the wall lay in tumbled flight against the floor, their hooks having long since given out. A faint, bitter smell rose from the room – a sourness that revealed hidden negotiations between wood and fungi, the natural results of decay. Hoegbotton relaxed. The grey caps had not been in the apartment for a long time. He let the crowbar dangle in his hand.

Hoegbotton entered the dining room. Brittle fragments of newsprint lay scattered across the dining-room table, held in place by a bottle of port with a glass beside it. Colonized by cobwebs, by dust, by mottled fragments of wood that had drifted down from the ceiling, the table also held three plates and place settings. The stale air had preserved the contents of the plates in a mummified state. Three plates. Three pieces of ossified chicken, accompanied by a green smear of some vegetable long since dried out. Samuel Hoegbotton. His wife Sarah. His daughter Jane. All three chairs, worm-eaten and rickety, were pulled out slightly from the table. A fourth chair lay off to the side, smashed into fragments by time or violence.

Hoegbotton stared at the chairs for a long time. Had they been moved at all in the last hundred years? Had freak winds blowing through the gaps in the boarded-up windows caused them to move? How could anyone know? And yet, their current positioning teased his imagination. It did not look as if Samuel Hoegbotton’s family had gotten up in alarm – unfolded napkins lay on the seats of two of the chairs. The third – that of the person who would have been reading the newspaper – had not been used, nor had the silverware for that setting. The silverware of the other two was positioned peculiarly. On the right side, the fork lay at an angle near the plate, as if thrown there. Something dark and withered had been skewered by the fork’s tines. Did it match an irregularity in the dry flesh of the chicken upon the matching plate? The knife was missing entirely. On the left side of the table, the fork was still stuck into its piece of chicken, the knife sawing into the flesh beside it.

It appeared to Hoegbotton as if the family had been eating and had simply . . . disappeared . . . in mid-meal. A prickly, cold sensation spread across Hoegbotton’s skin. The fork. The knife. The chairs. The broadsheet. The meals uneaten, half-eaten. The bottle of port. The mystery gnawed at him even as it became ever more impenetrable. Nothing in the scenarios his sister and he had drawn up in their youth could account for it.

Hoegbotton took out his pocket knife and leaned over the table. He carefully pulled aside one leaf of the broadsheet to reveal the date: the very day of the Silence. The date transfixed him. He pulled out the chair where surely Samuel Hoegbotton must have sat, reading his papers, and slowly slid into it. Looked down the table to where Samuel’s daughter and wife would have been sitting. Continued to read the paper with its articles on the turmoil at the docks, preparing for the windfall of squid meat due with the return of the fishing fleet; a brief message on blasphemy from the Truffidian Antechamber; the crossword puzzle. A sudden shift, a dislocation, a puzzled look from his wife, and he had stared up from his paper in that last moment to see . . . what? To see the grey caps or a vision much worse? Had Samuel Hoegbotton known surprise? Terror? Wonder? Or was he taken away so swiftly that he, his daughter, and his wife, had no time for any reaction at all?

Hoegbotton stared across the table again, focused on the bottle of port. The glass was half full. He leaned forward, examined the glass. The liquid inside had dried into sludge over time. A faint imprint of tiny lips could be seen on the edge of the glass. The cork was tightly wedged into the mouth of the bottle. A further mystery. Had the port been poured long after the Silence?

Beyond the bottle, the fork with the skewered meat came into focus. It did not, from this angle, look as if it came from the piece of chicken on the plate.

He pulled back, as much from a thought that had suddenly occurred to him as from the fork itself. A dim glint from the floor beside the chair caught his eye. Samuel Hoegbotton’s glasses. Twisted into a shape that resembled a circle attached to a line and two “u” shapes on either end. As he stared at the glasses, Hoegbotton felt the questions multiply, until he was not just sitting in Samuel Hoegbotton’s chair, but in the chairs of thousands of souls, looking out into darkness, trying to see what they had seen, to know what they came to know.

The baby was still screaming as Hoegbotton stumbled outside, gasping. He ran over bits of brick and rubble. He ran through the long weeds. He ran past the buildings with mortar made from bones. He scrambled over the fence that said he should not have been there. He did not stop running until he had reached the familiar cobblestones of Albumuth Boulevard’s farthest extreme. When he did stop, gasping for breath, the pressure in his temples remained, the stray thought lodged in his head like a disease. What had Samuel Hoegbotton seen? And was it necessary to disappear to have seen it?

*   *   *

That was how it had started – following a cold, one-hundred-year-old trail. At first, Hoegbotton convinced himself that he was just pursuing a good business opportunity: buying up the contents of boarded-up homes, fixing what was in disrepair, and reselling it from his store. He had begun with Samuel Hoegbotton’s apartment, hiring workmen to take the contents of the dining room and transplant it to the room next to his office. They had arranged it exactly as it had been when he first entered it. He would sit in the room for hours, scrutinizing each element – the bottle of port, the plates, the silverware, the napkins haphazard on the chairs – but no further insight came to him. After a few months, he dusted it all and repaired the table, the chairs, restoring everything but the broadsheet to the way it must have been the day of the Silence. In his darker moments, he felt as if he might be ushering in a new Silence with his actions, but still he came no closer to an answer.

Soon even the abandoned rooms of the Silence lost their hold on Hoegbotton. He would go in with the workmen and find old, dimly lit spaces from which whatever had briefly imbued them with a ghastly intensity had long since departed. He stopped acquiring such properties, although, in a sense, it was too late. Ungdom, Slattery, and their ilk had already begun to slander him, spreading rumors about his intent and his sanity. They made life difficult for him, but by ignoring their barbs, he had survived it.

Hoegbotton did not give up. Whenever he could, he bought items that had some connection to the grey caps, hoping to find the answers necessary to quell his curiosity. He read books. He spoke to those who remembered, vaguely, the tales their elders had told them about the Silence. And then, finally, the breakthrough: a series of atrocities at one mansion after the other, bringing him closer than ever before.

Hoegbotton finished reading the ledger, took a last sip of the port he had poured for himself, and walked out of the room in time to hear the bell that announced the arrival of a customer. He put the books back in their place and was about to lock the door to Samuel Hoegbotton’s dining room when it occurred to him that the cage might be more secure inside the room. He picked it up – the handle seemed hot to the touch – walked back into the room, and placed the cage on the far end of the table. Then he locked the door, put the key in his desk, and went to attend to the needs of his customer.

IV

That night, he made love to Rebecca. Her scar gleamed by the light from her eyes, which, at the height of her rapture, blazed so brightly that the bedroom seemed transported from night to day. As Hoegbotton came inside her, he felt a part of her scar enter him. It registered as an ecstatic shudder that penetrated his muscles, his bones, his heart. She called out his name and ran her hands down his back, across his face, her eyes sparking with pleasure. At such moments, when the strangeness of her seeped through into him, he would suffer a sudden panic, as if he was losing himself, as if he no longer knew his own name. He would sit up, as now, all the muscles in his back rigid.

She knew him well enough not to ask what was wrong, but, sleep-besotted, the light from her eyes dimming to a satisfied glow, said, simply, “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” he said. “Your eyes are full of fireflies.”

She laughed, but he meant it: entire cities, entire worlds, pulsed inside those eyes, hinting at an existence beyond the mundane.

Something in her gaze reminded him suddenly of the woman with the missing hands and he looked away, toward the window that, though closed, let in the persistent sound of rain. Beside the window, his grandmother’s possessions still lay in shadows on the mantel.

The next day, as he sat in Samuel Hoegbotton’s room writing out invoices for the past week’s exports – Saphant carnival masks, rare eelwood furniture from Nicea, necklaces made by yet another indigenous tribe discovered at the heart of the great southern rainforests, all destined for Morrow – he noticed something odd. He drew in his breath sharply. He pushed his chair back and stood up.

There, growing at a right angle from the green cloth that covered the cage, was a fragile, milk-white fruiting body on a long stem, the gills tinged red. It was identical to the mushrooms that had appeared in Daffed’s mansion. He cast about for a weapon, his gaze fixed on the cage. There was nothing but the bottle of port. Beyond the cage, the fungus that had infiltrated the cracks of the mirror appeared to have darkened and thickened. Irrationally, he decided that he had to remove the cage from the room. The room had caused the fruiting body. Picking up a napkin, he wound it around the handle of the cage and carried it out of the room, to his desk.

He stared across the store, trying to locate Bristlewing. His assistant stood in a far corner, helping an elderly gentleman decide on a chair. Hoegbotton could just see the back of Bristlewing’s head, nodding at something the potential customer had said, both of them obscured by a column of school desks.

Slowly, as if the mushroom was watching him, Hoegbotton slid his hand over to the top drawer of his desk, pulled it open and took out a silver letter-opener. Holding it in front of him, he approached the cage. Images of the woman and her son flickered in his mind. He couldn’t keep his hand still. He hesitated, wavered. A vision of the mushroom multiplying into two, three, four came to him. Hoegbotton leaned over his desk, chopped the mushroom off the side of the cage. It fell onto his desk, leaving behind only a small, circular white spot on the green cover, as innocent as a bird dropping.

Hoegbotton pulled his handkerchief out of his breast pocket and squashed the mushroom in its folds, careful not to touch any part of it with his bare skin. Then he stuffed the handkerchief into the wastebasket at his side. A moment’s hesitation. He fished it out. Decided against it and placed the handkerchief back into the wastebasket. Fished it out again.

Hoegbotton realized that both Bristlewing and his customer were now standing a few feet away, staring at him. He froze, then smiled.

“My dear Bristlewing,” he said. “What can I help you with?”

Bristlewing gave him a disgusted look. “Mr Sporlender here was interested in a writing desk, for his son. We’ve a good, solid chair but nothing appropriate in a desk. Anything in storage?”

Hoegbotton smiled, extremely aware of the dead mushroom in his hand. The irritation caused by the handle of the cage flared up, pulsing across his palm. “Yes, actually, Mr Sporlender, if you would come back tomorrow, I believe we might have something to show you . . .” Or not. Just so long as he left the shop – now.

Hoegbotton nudged Bristlewing out of the way and guided the man toward the door, through the crowded stacks of artifacts – babbling about the rain, about the importance of a writing desk, about anything at all, while Bristlewing’s disgusted stare burned into the back of his skull. Hoegbotton had never been more impatient to reach the rain-scoured street. When it came, it was like a wave – of light, of fresh air. It hit him with such force that he gasped, drawing a sharp look from Mr Sporlender.

As they stood there, on the cusp of the street, the iron door at Hoegbotton’s back, the man stared at him through narrowed eyes. “Really, Mr Hoegbotton – should I come back tomorrow? Would you truly advise that?”

Hoegbotton stared down at his hand, which was about to rebel and throw the handkerchief and mushroom as far away as possible. Some of the early-afternoon passers-by already stared curiously at the two of them.

“I suppose you shouldn’t, actually. We don’t have a desk in storage or anywhere else . . . I have a condition of sudden claustrophobia. It comes and goes. I cannot control it.”

The man sneered. “I saw what you put in the handkerchief. I know what it is. Will I tell? Why bother – you’ll be dead soon enough.” The man stalked off.

Hoegbotton immediately began to fast-walk in the opposite direction, past sidewalk vendors, a thin stream of pedestrians, and an even thinner stream of carts and carriages, which the rain rendered in smudges and humid smells. Only after three or four blocks, soaked to the skin, did he feel comfortable tossing the handkerchief and its contents into a public trashcan. He already had an image in his head of the Cappan’s men searching his store for traces of fungi.

A man was throwing up into the gutter. A woman was yelling at her husband. The sky was a uniform grey. The rain was unending, as common as the very air. He couldn’t even feel it anymore. Everywhere, in the cracks of the sidewalk, in the minute spaces between bricks in shop fronts, new fungi was growing. He wondered if anything he did mattered.

Back at the store, Bristlewing was grumpily moving some boxes around. He spared Hoegbotton only a quick glance – watchful, wary. Hoegbotton brushed past him and headed for the bathroom, where he scrubbed his hands red before coming out again to examine the cage. It looked just as he had left it. The green cover was unblemished but for the white spot. There had been no proliferation of mushrooms in his absence. This was good. This meant he had done the right thing. (Why, then, was it so hard to draw breath? Why so difficult to stop shaking?)

He sat down behind the desk, staring at the cage. The inside of his mouth felt dry and thick. Nothing happened without a reason. The mushroom had not appeared by coincidence. This he could not believe. How could he?

Almost against his will, he reached over to the cage and pulled the cover aside, the green giving way to the finely etched metal bars, the shadows of the bars letting the light slide around them so that he saw the perch, gently swinging, and, below it, a pale white hand. Slender and delicate. The end a mass of dried blood. A vision overtook him: that he was Samuel Hoegbotton, staring across the dining-room table at the cage, which was the last thing he would ever see . . . The hand, he had no doubt, was from Daffed’s wife. What would it take to make it go away?

But then his mind registered a much more important detail, one that made him bite down hard on his lower lip to stop from screaming. The cage door was open, slid to the side as neatly as the cover. He sat there, motionless, staring, for several seconds. Throughout the store, he could hear the hands of myriad clocks clicking forward. No mask could help him now. The hand. The open cage. The fey brightness of the bars. A rippling at the edges of his vision.

Somewhere, Hoegbotton found the nerve. He reached out and slid the door back into position with both hands, worked the latch shut – just as he felt a sudden weight on the other side, rushing up to meet him. It brushed against his fingers and chilled them. He drew back with a gasp. The door rattled once, twice, fell still. The perch began to swing violently back and forth as if something had pushed up against it. Then it too fell still. Suddenly.

He could not breathe. He could not call out for help. His heart was beating so fast, he thought it might burst. This was not how he had imagined it. This was not how he had imagined it.

Something invisible picked up the hand and forced it through the bars. The hand fell onto his blotter, rocked once, twice, and was still.

It took five or six tries, his fingers nimble as blocks of wood, but he managed to find the cord to the cover and slide it back into position.

Then he sat there for a long time, staring at the green cover of the cage. Nothing happened. Nothing bad. The sense of weight on the other side of the bars had vanished with the drawing of the veil. The hand that lay on his blotter did not seem real. It looked like alabaster. It looked like wax. It was a candle without a wick. It was a piece of a statue.

An hour could have passed, or a minute, before he found a paper bag, nudged the hand into it using the letter opener, and folded the bag shut.

Bristlewing appeared in his field of vision some time later.

“Bristlewing,” Hoegbotton said. “I’m glad. You’re here.”

“Eh?”

“You see this cage?”

“Yes.”

“I need you to take it to Ungdom.”

“Ungdom?” Bristlewing’s face brightened. He clearly thought this was a joke.

“Yes. To Ungdom. Tell him that I send it with my compliments. That I offer it as a token of renewed friendship.” Somewhere inside, he was laughing at Ungdom’s future discomfort. Somewhere inside, he was screaming for help.

Bristlewing snorted. “Is it wise?”

Hoegbotton stared up at him, as if through a haze of smoke. “No. It isn’t wise. But I would like you to do it anyway.”

Bristlewing waited for a moment, as if there might be something more, but there was nothing more. He walked forward, picked up the cage. As Bristlewing bent over the cage, Hoegbotton thought he saw a patch of green at the base of his assistant’s neck, under his left ear. Was Bristlewing already infected? Was Bristlewing the threat?

“Another thing. Take the rest of the week off. Once you’ve delivered the cage to Ungdom.” If his assistant was going to dissolve into spores, let him do it elsewhere. Hoegbotton suppressed a giggle of hysteria.

Suspicious, Bristlewing frowned. “And if I want to work?”

“It’s a vacation. A vacation. I’ve never given you one. I’ll pay you for the time.”

“All right,” Bristlewing said. Now the look he gave Hoegbotton was, to Hoegbotton’s eye, very close to a look of pity. “I’ll give the cage to Ungdom and take the week off.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Right. Bye, then.”

“Goodbye.”

As Bristlewing negotiated the tiny flotsam-lined pathway, Hoegbotton could not help but notice that his assistant seemed to list to one side, as if the cage had grown unaccountably heavy.

Five minutes after Bristlewing had left, Hoegbotton closed up the shop for the day. It only took seven tries for him to lock the door behind him.

V

When he arrived at the apartment, Hoegbotton told Rebecca that he was home early because he had learned of his grandmother’s death. She seemed to interpret his shakes and shudders, the trembling of his voice, the way he needed to touch her, as consistent with his grief. They ate dinner in silence, her hand in his hand.

“Tell me about it,” she said after dinner and he cataloged all the symptoms of fear as if they were the symptoms of loss, of grief. Everywhere he turned, the woman from the mansion confronted him, her gaze now angry, now mournful. Her wounds bled copiously down her dress but she did nothing to staunch the flow.

They went to bed early and Rebecca held him until he found a path toward sleep. But sleep held a kaleidoscope of images to torment him. In his dreams, he walked through Samuel Hoegbotton’s apartment until he reached a long, white hallway that he had never seen before. At the opposite end of the hallway, he could see the woman and the boy from the mansion, surrounded by great wealth, antiques fit for a god winking at him in their burnished multitudes. He was walking across a carpet of small, severed hands to reach them. This fact revolted him, but he could not stop walking: the promise of what lay ahead was too great. Even when he began to see his head, his arms, his own legs, crudely soldered to the walls using his own blood, he could not stop his progress toward the end of the hallway. The hands were cold and soft and pleading.

Despite the dreams, Hoegbotton woke the next morning feeling energetic and calm. The cage was gone. He had another chance. He did not feel the need to follow in Samuel Hoegbotton’s footsteps. Even the imprint on his hand throbbed less painfully. The rain clattering down made him happy for obscure, childhood reasons – memories of sneaking out into thunderstorms to play under the dark clouds, of taking to the water on a rare fishing trip with his father while drops sprinkled the dark, languid surface of the River Moth.

At breakfast, he even told Rebecca that perhaps he had been wrong and they should start a family. Rebecca laughed, hugged him, and told him they should wait to talk about it until after he had recovered from his grandmother’s death. When she did not ask him about the funeral arrangements, he wondered if she knew that he had lied to her. On his way out the door, he held her close and kissed her. Her lips tasted of honeysuckle and rose. Her eyes were, as ever, a mystery, but he did not mind.

Once at work, Bristlewing blissfully absent, Hoegbotton searched the store for any sign of mushrooms. Donning long gloves and a fresh mask, he spent most of his time in the old dining room, scuffing his knees to examine the underside of the table, cleaning every surface. The fungus embedded in the mirror had lost its appearance of renewed vigor. Nevertheless, he took an old toothbrush and knife and spent half an hour gleefully scraping it away.

Then, divesting himself of mask and gloves, he went through the same routines with his ledgers as in the past, this time reading the entries aloud since Bristlewing was not there to frown at him for doing so. Fragments of disturbing images fluttered in his mind like caged birds, but he ignored them, bending himself to his routine that he might allow himself no other thoughts.

By noon, the rain had turned to light hail, discouraging many erstwhile customers. Those who did enter the store alighted like crows escaping bad weather, shaking their raincoat wings and unlikely to buy anything.

By one o’clock, he had only made 100 sels. It didn’t matter. It was almost liberating. He was beginning to think that he had escaped great danger, even caught himself wondering if another rich family might experience a grey-cap visitation.

At two o’clock, his spirits still high, Hoegbotton received a shock when a grim-faced member of the Cappan’s security forces entered the store. The man was in full protective gear, clothed from head to foot, a grey mask covering his entire face except for his eyes. What could they know? It wasn’t time for an inspection. Had the man looking for a desk talked to them? Hoegbotton scratched at his wounded palm.

“How can I help you?” he asked.

The man stared at him for a moment, then said, “I’m looking for a purse for my mother’s birthday.”

Hoegbotton burst out laughing and had to convince the man that it was not directed at him before selling him a purse.

No customers entered the store for half an hour after the Cappan’s man left. Hoegbotton had worked himself into a fever pitch of calm by the time the messenger arrived around three o’clock: a boy on a bicycle, pinched and drawn, wearing dirty clothes, who knocked at the door and waited for Hoegbotton to arrive before letting an envelope flutter to the welcome mat outside the door. The boy pulled his bicycle back to the sidewalk and pedaled away, ringing his bell.

Hoegbotton, softly singing to himself, leaned down to pick up the envelope. He opened it. The letter inside read, in a spidery scrawl:

Thank you, Robert, for your very fine gift, but your bird has flown away home. I couldn’t keep such a treasure. My regards to your wife. – John Ungdom.

Hoegbotton stared at the note, chuckling at the sarcasm. Read it again, a frown closing his lips. Flown away home. Read it a third time, his stomach filling with stones. My regards to your wife.

He dropped the note, flung on his raincoat, and, not bothering to lock the store behind him, ran out onto the street – into the blinding rain. He headed up Albumuth Boulevard, through the Bureaucratic Quarter, toward home. He felt as if he were running in place. Every pedestrian hindered him. Every horse and cart blocked his path. As the rain came down harder, it beat a rhythmic message into Hoegbotton’s shoulders. The raindrops sounded like tapping fingers. Through the haze, the dull shapes of buildings became landmarks to anchor his staggering progress. Passers-by stared at him as if he were crazy.

By the time he reached the apartment-building lobby, his sides ached and he was drenched in sweat. He had fallen repeatedly on the slick pavement and bloodied his hands. He took the stairs three at a time, ran down the hallway to the apartment, shouting “Rebecca!”

The apartment door was ajar. He tried to catch his breath, bending over as he slowly pushed the door open. A line of white mushrooms ran through the hallway, low to the ground, their gills stained red. Where his hand held the door, fungus touched his fingers. He recoiled, straightened up.

“Rebecca?” he said, staring into the kitchen. No one. The inside of the kitchen window was covered in purple fungi. A cane lay next to the coat rack, a gift from his father. He took it and walked into the apartment, picking his way between the white mushrooms as he pulled the edge of his raincoat up over his mouth. The doorway to the living room was directly to his left. He could hear nothing, as if his head were stuffed with cloth. Slowly, he peered around the doorway.

The living room was aglow with fungi, white and purple, green and yellow. Shelves of fungi jutted from the walls. Bottle-shaped mushrooms, a deep burgundy, wavering like balloons, were anchored to the floor. Hoegbotton’s palm burned fiercely. Now he was in the dream, not before.

Looking like the exoskeleton shed by some tropical beetle, the cage stood on the coffee table, the cover drawn aside, the door open. Beside the cage lay another alabaster hand. This did not surprise him. It did not even register. For, beyond the table, the doors to the balcony had been thrown wide open. Rebecca stood on the balcony, in the rain, her hair slick and bright, her eyes dim. Strewn around her, as if in tribute, the strange growths that had long ago claimed the balcony: orange strands whipping in the winds, transparent bulbs that stood rigid, mosaic patterns of gold-green mold imprinted on the balcony’s corroded railing. Beyond: the dark grey shadows of the city, dotted with smudges of light.

Rebecca was looking down at . . . nothing . . . her hands held out before her as if in supplication.

“Rebecca!” he shouted. Or thought he shouted. His mouth was tight and dry. He began to walk across the living room, the mushrooms pulling against his shoes, his pants, the air alive with spores. He blinked, sneezed, stopped just short of the balcony. Rebecca had still not looked up. Rain splattered against his boots.

“Rebecca,” he said, afraid that she would not hear him, that the distance between them was somehow too great. “Come away from there. It isn’t safe.” She was shivering. He could see her shivering.

Rebecca turned toward him and smiled. “Isn’t safe? You did this yourself, didn’t you? Opened the balcony for me before you left this morning?” She frowned. “But then I was puzzled. You had the cage sent back even though Mrs Willis said we couldn’t keep pets.”

“I didn’t open the balcony. I didn’t send back the cage.” His boots were tinged green. His shoulders ached.

“Well, someone brought it here – and I opened it. I was bored. The flower vendor was supposed to come and take me to the market, but he didn’t.”

“Rebecca – it isn’t safe. Come away from the balcony.” Hoegbotton’s words were dull, unconvincing. A lethargy had begun to envelop his body.

“I wish I knew what it was,” she said. “Can you see it? It’s right here – in front of me.”

He started to say no, he couldn’t see it, but then he realized that he could see it. He was gasping from the sight of it. He was choking from the sight of it. Blood trickled down his chin where he had bitten into his lip. All the courage he had built up for Rebecca’s sake melted away.

“Come here, Rebecca,” he managed to say.

“Yes. Okay,” she said in a small, broken voice.

Tripping over fungi, she walked into the apartment. Hoegbotton met her at the coffee table, drew her against him, whispered into her ear, “You need to get out of here, Rebecca. I need you to go downstairs. Find Mrs Willis. Have her send for the Cappan’s men.” Her hair was wet against his face. He stroked it gently.

“I’m scared,” she whispered back, arms thrown around him. “Come with me.”

“I will, Rebecca. Rebecca, I will. In just a minute. But now, I need you to leave.” He was trembling from mixed horror at the thought that he might never say her name again and relief, because now he knew why he loved her.

Then her weight was gone as she moved past him to the door and, perversely, his burden returned to him.

The thing had not moved from the balcony. It was not truly invisible but camouflaged itself by perfectly matching its background. The bars of a cage. The spaces between the bars. A perch. He could only glimpse it now because it could not mimic the rain that fell upon it fast enough.

Hoegbotton walked out onto the balcony. The rain felt good on his face. His legs were numb so he lowered himself into an old rotting chair that they had never bothered to take off the balcony. While the thing watched, he sat there, staring between the bars of the balcony railing, out into the city. The rain trickled through his hair. He tried not to look at his hands, which were tinged green. He tried to laugh, but it came out as a rasping gurgle. The thought came to him that he must still be back in the mansion with the woman and the boy – that he had never really left – because, honestly, how could you escape such horror? How could anyone escape something like that?

The thing padded up to him on its quiet feet and sang to him. Because it no longer mattered, Hoegbotton turned to look at it. He choked back a sob. He had not expected this. It was beautiful. Its single eye, so like Rebecca’s eyes, shone with an unearthly light, phosphorescent flashes darting across it. Its mirror skin shimmered with the rain. Its mouth, full of knives, smiled in a way that did not mean the same thing as a human smile. This was as close as he could get, he knew now, staring into that single, beautiful eye. This was as close. Maybe there was something else, something beyond. Maybe there was a knowledge still more secret than this knowledge, but he would never experience it.

The thing held out a clawed hand and, after a time, Hoegbotton took it in his own.

PAUL McAULEY

Dr Pretorius and
the Lost Temple

PAUL McAULEY HAS WON the Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, John W. Campbell, Sidewise and British Fantasy awards for his novels and short stories. A former university researcher and lecturer in biology, his books include White Devils, Whole Wide World, Four Hundred Billion Stars, Pasquale’s Angel, Fairyland, The Secret of Life and his acclaimed “The Book of Confluence” trilogy, comprising Child of the River, Ancients of Days and Shrine of Stars. Forthcoming are The Eye of the Tyger, a Dr Who novella from Telos, and Little Machines, a short story collection from PS Publishing.

“ ‘Dr Pretorius and the Lost Temple’ is the third in an irregular series about Mr Carlyle,” reveals McAuley, “who wouldn’t be at all pleased if you called him a ghost-hunter. The others, ‘Naming the Dead’ and ‘Bone Orchards’, were set in the fag-end of the twentieth century; this adventure is at the beginning of Mr Carlyle’s long career in London, just before Victoria gained the throne.

“The Rotherhithe tunnel that Isambard Kingdom Brunel helped his father build is still in use, although you’ll have to ride a Tube train to enjoy it, and the stories Brunel tells about the troubled construction of what was then a cutting-edge project are all true. You can see the London Stone just where Mr Carlyle inspected it, and the reconstructed stones of the Temple of Mithras sit aslant Queen Victoria Street. The Great Eastern, which was at last launched from its Millwall slipway, is, alas, no more, but the house where Mr Carlyle had his lodgings still exists; I live there.”

August 1832

I FIRST MET THE YOUNG ENGINEER, and became entangled in the machinations of Dr Pretorius and the affair of the lost temple, at a seance. For three weeks, fantastic stories of the psychic powers of a young Romanian gypsy woman had been circulating throughout London. It was said that she could relay messages from the dead and speak directly to the hearts and minds of the living, that her revelations and admonitions made women faint and strong men weep. Rank and fashion flocked to witness this latest curiosity; there had been numerous articles and sketches about her in newspapers and magazines, and skits parodying her seances put on in music halls and theatres.

I was newly arrived from Edinburgh, and still wore a black band for my mother and father, but I was also young and full of misplaced confidence. I believed that I knew more about the matter of the dead than anyone living, and was both jealous of and intrigued by this young gypsy’s fame; I knew that I must find out if she was a fraud, a rival, or a potential ally and friend.

Her family had rented out the ground floor of a house on the northern edge of the Holborn Rookery, and a large crowd had gathered outside to watch the arrival of visitors to the new phenomenon. The unending procession of wonders that passes through the great metropolis never seems to exhaust the curiosity of its inhabitants; if the city were a theatre, it would never want for an audience, and its angels would see their investments multiply without any of the usual risk. Young women carrying babies or with small children clutching their skirts were begging for alms; unshaven ruffians in battered caps and canvas waistcoats were swigging from bottles; an old woman with greasy unbound hair and a shrewd gaze stood in a doorway, smoking a short clay pipe. There were pamphlet and ballad-sheet sellers, orange sellers (the road was littered with the bits of tissue paper in which the fruit was wrapped), and sellers of ginger beer and fried fish and pies. A crew of beggars lacking an assortment of limbs were got up as sailors in front of a sheet crudely painted with a ship foundering in a tempest. A street preacher stood on a box under a banner held up by his supporters, sweating into the serge of his black coat, his face shining and his fists shaking above his head as he tried in vain to make himself heard above the din. In short, every beastly aspect of humanity was on display, and most of them were in some way haunted, mostly by imps of delirium or the ghosts of dead children with faces like shrivelled apples; one old woman, bent double over a stick, carried a dozen half-formed ghost babies on her back, squirming over each other like blind newborn kittens trying to get their turn at their mother’s teats.

It was terribly hot, the close, heavy air laden with the miasma of every taper, candle, whale-oil lantern and gas mantle burning in London’s teeming night. Carriages were lined up along one side of the road, their horses waiting patiently in their traces, grazing from the nosebags strapped over their muzzles; the oaty reek of horse piss was the cleanest smell in the crowded thoroughfare. A pair of constables in black top hats and blue swallow-tail coats stood near a coffee stall, watching the burlesque with a kind of baffled approval, as if it had been unexpectedly staged for their benefit. I joined the knot of well-dressed men and women waiting to gain admittance, paid my florin to a whiskery old rogue who reeked of cheap gin (the grey hair tangled around his face swarmed with flea-sized imps), and followed the others through a dark corridor, hung with cobwebby threads and damp rags that brushed unpleasantly against my face, into a hot airless room not much illuminated by the half-dozen candles spiked to the walls. There was a filthy piece of red velvet stretched across the rear wall, a sagging armchair set in front of it, nothing else.

The audience was much as I had expected: a party of young swells in bright waistcoats given to laughter and loud remarks that were far less amusing and original than they supposed; several dignified old women in widows’ weeds; a variety of the pale, anxious, recently bereaved. The only person of immediate interest was a white-haired man in an antique jacket and high-collared shirt, with a faint ineradicable sneer on his face and a bright, birdlike gaze that roved around the room. It settled on me for a moment, took note, and moved on. I was pinched toward the back, between a slight young man with the black hair and olive complexion of a native of Southern France or Spain, and a married couple, the woman in black with a veil across her face, her straight-backed husband attempting to seem dignified, but trembling with barely suppressed emotion; it was to his leg that the dead child clung, a stout but wan little thing no more than six years old.

There were other presences in the room – blurred partial shells of the kind cast off in moments of intense emotion, and a foggy, bloated imp that peered out of the black shawl of a sharp-nosed old woman whom I took for one too fond of laudanum – but the little girl was the only true ghost. She looked at me with a kind of wonder, her eyes dark smudges, and asked in a tiny voice that only I could hear if I would help her sleep.

I smiled down at her. Like her father, I was also possessed by emotion; a sick anticipation revolved like a ball of hot tar in my stomach.

“I’m so tired,” the poor creature said. “I want to sleep and I can’t. I’m so tired.”

She was too young to know what had happened to her. Like most ghosts, she was frightened and pathetic.

I had an idea that she might prove useful, and said quietly, “Be patient, my dear, and I’ll help you sleep for as long as you like. But first, will you help me?”

She gave me a wan smile, and nodded warily. The young man beside me must have heard me talking to her, for he frowned and seemed to be about to ask me a question, but at that moment the grey-haired, imp-infested old man who had taken the admission money limped around the edge of the room, leaning on a stout stick and pinching out all but one of the candles. He took up station in front of the chair, stamped his stick on the floor for silence, and made a long meretricious speech that I won’t trouble to repeat in any detail, explaining at the end that all questions must be directed through him, and that if anyone would like to contact “the other side” for the modest fee of just half a guinea, then they should now step forward, and tell him the name of their dear departed.

Since most in the room had come there for that purpose, this took some time. The old man wrote down their requests on a scrap of paper, licking the point of his “permanent” pencil at every other letter, so that his lips were soon stained quite blue. I watched with growing impatience and dissatisfaction, already suspecting that I had squandered a florin to no good purpose. There was nothing of the matter of the dead here; only shabby showmanship and cheap spectacle. The swells passed around a silver flask and nudged each other; the olive-complexioned young man impatiently consulted a pocket watch; the white-haired man and I exchanged a glance, and his smirk grew a fraction, as if he had detected in me some impropriety.

The married couple with the ghost child were the last to murmur into the old man’s ear. He licked and wrote, then tucked the pencil behind his ear and struck the floor with his stick. A corner of the red drapery was lifted to admit, with a great swirl of sweet-smelling white smoke, two burly men in collarless shirts and braces, escorting a plump girl of fourteen or fifteen in a plain black dress. She was endeavouring to seem calm, but I saw how her gaze darted around the room, and how she flinched when one of the men took her arm and led her to the chair.

I told the little ghost to go and stand in front of the lady, and when she showed reluctance to let go of her father said, “Be brave now,” and gave her the tiniest pinch of compulsion to thrust her through the crowd.

The remaining candle went out as soon as the plump girl sat down. A woman gasped; the swells tittered. Then someone uncovered a lantern and a ray of light shot across the room, transfixing the gypsy girl’s face. Her eyes were rolled back, showing only crescents of white behind flickering eyelashes, but I did not for a moment believe that was why she did not see the little ghost who stood in front of her. Bells rang here and there in the darkness and pale shapes flew through the air. The swells cheered; several of the women emitted muffled shrieks. The gypsy girl’s arms and then her whole upper body began to quake. Foam dripped from a corner of her mouth and she suddenly bent double, as if punched in the stomach, and began to chokingly regurgitate into her lap yards of white stuff. The little ghost watched this calmly, once or twice glancing back at me. The smoke grew thicker, defining the angled beam of the lantern. When she had spat out the last of what was clearly meant to be ectoplasm, the girl raised her face to the smoky light, like a burlesque of a blind Pietà, and asked in a croaking, thickly accented voice if there was any spirit who would speak with the living.

I could no longer contain my impatience and disgust, and said loudly, “There is a ghost already here, madam. Perhaps you could point it out.”

The audience stirred, trying to discover who amongst them had spoken. The girl repeated her question, like an actor insisting on the script after someone else botches a line or a piece of scenery falls over, and the old man said, “Let the unbeliever leave now, for the sake of those who want to speak with the dead.”

My anger was a hot pulse behind my eyes. I said, “If you know anything about the matter of the dead, sir, you would have your daughter describe the poor shade who stands before her.”

My eyes were adapting to the darkness. I could see that the two toughs on either side of the girl were looking this way and that, trying to locate me. The little ghost was looking at me too, plainly uncertain that she had done all I had asked of her. The olive-skinned young man stepped close and dug a sharp elbow in my ribs and whispered, more with delight than anger, “What the devil are you about, sir?”

The old man thumped his stick three times on the floor, and said, “There are many spirits here. Let them show themselves.”

The bells rang again; again, pale shapes shot through the near-dark, crossing the room in one direction and then the other. I whipped the blade from my cane and swiped at one of the filmy shapes; the two toughs must have seen the blade catch the lantern’s light, for they began to move toward me.

I said, as loudly as I could, “This is a fraud, sir! A shameful sham! If she cannot even see the ghost that stands plainly before her, how can she raise any spirits?”

The swells cheered; the toughs pushed through the crowd and took hold of my arms; there was a brief and undignified struggle as they wrestled me toward the door. For an instant, I managed to turn back and catch the gaze of the little ghost and give her the oblivion she so badly desired. One of the toughs tried to wrench my blade from my hand, but I would not let it go, and carried it high before me, with the captured scrap raised above my head like a battle flag. Behind me, the old man was thumping his stick on the floor and saying loudly that his daughter’s trance was broken and the session was ended. I shouted again that she was a fraud, that she could not even rid him of his infestation, and then I was borne out of the room.

I suppose that the toughs would have found a quiet spot where they would have taught me a short, sharp lesson, but the young man followed on their heels, loudly protesting at my treatment, and got the attention of the two constables as we all tumbled out into the street. The blue-coats started toward us, and the two toughs, suddenly uncertain, loosened their grip. I shook myself free, and the young man took hold of my elbow and pulled me through the crowd of onlookers. A police whistle squealed hoarsely, people cheered, a flung bottle turned twice in the air and smashed against a wall, and we both ran.

We did not stop until we had put two or three turns of the narrow lanes behind us, and leaned against a wall, out of breath and helpless with laughter.

“I hope, sir,” the young man said, when he was able to speak, “that you have good evidence that those people are charlatans.”

I showed him the scrap of muslin caught on the end of my blade. “Pulled through the air on wires,” I said. “Likewise, wires worked the bells concealed in the ceiling.”

“And the stuff she choked up?”

“Muslin also. Performers learn to swallow stuff and bring it back up again. The whole thing was no more than a theatrical trick, got up to gull the desperate and the unwary.”

The young man studied me. He was a good foot shorter than me, and slightly built, but was possessed by a restless, barely contained energy. His eyes were very dark, almost black, and his gaze burned with purposeful intelligence. “If it is a charade, then what of you, sir? Are you a journalist from one of the newspapers, sent out to expose it? And if so, are you truly in mourning, or is that armband as much a sham as the show that you so effectively wrecked?”

“I know something of these matters, that’s all. And I can assure you that I am genuinely in mourning: for my parents.”

My anger had quite gone, although a few imps clung to me still. I brushed my hand through my hair, dismissing them, and felt foolish and ashamed. One of the most important disciplines in the matter of the dead is to learn to control the baser emotions, and in my disappointment and frustration I had let them master me.

“I am sorry to hear of your loss,” the young man said, “but I think that you did not come here to contact your mother and father, for you did not step forward and pay the half-guinea.”

“Neither did you, sir.”

“I was cursing myself for a fool as soon as I entered that room. I imagine that anyone who can truly speak with the dead, if there is such a person, needs no theatricality.”

“That’s very true.”

“You mentioned a ghost.”

“The couple who stood next to us had lost their first child. I should not have spoken of it. I really should not have spoken at all. Most of the people there were so undone by the loss of a loved one that they were willing to believe in anything, as long as it gave them a little comfort. I took away even that.”

The young man studied me for a moment more, and then, as if coming to a decision, suddenly thrust out his hand. “My name is Brunel, sir. Isambard Kingdom Brunel.” He paused, head cocked, as if expecting me to recognize the name, then said, “I suppose that I came here because I too am desperate.”

I took his hand and told him my name, and thanked him again for his help. “You risked your life in saving mine,” I said, “and I will be more than happy to give you any help I can. But I must say that you do not appear to be haunted, or troubled in any way that I can detect.”

“I have lost no relation, Mr Carlyle,” Brunel said. “What I have lost is my reputation, such as it is. I came here because of a murder. I hoped—”

A police whistle shrilled, far off; another answered, much closer.

Brunel took my arm. “We’ll get out of this,” he said. “I will tell you why I came here, and then we’ll see if you can’t be of some help to at least one poor foolish supplicant.”

He hailed a cab under the flaring gas lamps at the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, and after a brief argument with the driver, who swore that he could not travel south of the river because he would find no fare to get him back again, we climbed aboard and rattled away toward Waterloo Bridge.

My new friend was not only an engineer; he was also the son of an engineer. His father, Marc Brunel, had devised an apparatus for tunnelling through soft ground or beneath water, and had won authorization from Parliament and backing from a group of wealthy subscribers to drive a tunnel beneath the Thames from Rotherhithe to Wapping.

“It was an engineering wonder that excited the imagination of Europe,” Brunel said, “but it has been blocked up for three years now, owing to the pusillanimity of the damned directors, who took fright after it flooded and let all offers of help slip by them.”

The project had got into difficulty from the beginning. Instead of the continuous stratum of strong blue clay promised by the geologists, the Brunels had encountered fissures and fractures where only gravel separated them from the bed of the river. In addition to the fetid conditions, and the consequent toll of “tunnel sickness” amongst the workers, the excavation suffered from two major inundations. After the first, it had taken six months to seal the cavity in the river bed with thousands of bags of clay, pump the water out of the shaft and twin bores of the tunnel, and remove the vast mound of silt that had been washed into the tunnel when it had been breached. Three months later, the river broke through again, and nearly claimed the younger Brunel’s life. He grew very animated as he told me every detail of this disaster. He had been working at the face of the tunnel, and was quickly up to his waist in water. A shifting baulk of timber trapped his leg, and by the time he had freed himself and reached the stair at the end of the east arch, his way was blocked by men fleeing from the flood. He was trying to reach the visitors’ stair in the west arch when a great wave broke upon him and, amazingly, bore him up to safety.

The rush of the water was, he said, a very grand effect; he would have paid fifty pounds toward the expenses of such a spectacle, and instead had got it gratis. He was laid up for several months after his adventure, and by the time he had recovered his health, work on the tunnel had stalled for lack of funds.

By now we had crossed the river and were rattling through narrow streets lined with grim, shuttered warehouses, and my companion broke off from his story and leaned at the open window, shouting up instructions to the cab driver. We had been travelling for almost an hour – such was the amazing size of the city – and I was beginning to wonder how I would ever find my way back to my lodging house when the cab drew up by a gate in a tall fence of tarred planks. Brunel paid the driver (who twitched the reins of his horse and clattered off in his boneshaker without a backward glance) and hammered on the gate until he woke the watchman.

The gate opened onto a wide square waste, where heaps of bricks and sand and gravel and timbers lay in a great confusion of shadows and moonlight. There was a long low shed beside a rutted road, a tall narrow building of yellow brick with an even taller chimney at one end, and a timber-framed office beside a kind of open-sided byre one might expect to find in some remote Highland field; this rude construction sheltered the opening of the shaft that led down to the tunnel. Brunel unlocked the office and brought out and lit a lantern, sharpening the focus of its lens so that its beam shone inside the rim of the shaft. One half was boarded over; in the other, a cast-iron stair screwed down into darkness.

I said, “You would like me to examine the tunnel now?”

“It’s all the same down there, day or night,” Brunel said, and treated me again to his sharp gaze, and smiled. “I must seem an impatient man, Mr Carlyle, but once I’ve set my mind to a plan, I like to strike fast and sure.”

“And I am not a man to go back on my word. I said that I would help you, and so I will.”

Brunel led the way down the long spiral staircase, and held up his lantern as we came out on a platform of pine planking. The tunnel was much grander than I had expected: a brick floor sloping away into darkness, brick walls leaning back and meeting more than twenty feet overhead in a grand arch, with buttresses at regular intervals, and side arches through to the parallel bore. We scrambled down a ladder and walked along the gentle slope, our footsteps echoing dully on wet, slimy bricks, to the edge of a great wedge of black water that stretched away to a blank brick wall.

Brunel explained that the tunnelling shield his father had invented was bricked up behind the wall, to prevent further inundations. It was, he said, a set of massive cast-iron frames, six frames to each arch of the tunnel, each frame divided into three storeys to form thirty-six working cells. Experienced miners had worked in each of the cells, taking away one of the wooden boards that formed the working face, excavating a hand’s-width of soil, replacing the board flush against the new face, and moving on to the next. When all the boards of a cell had been extended, the cell was jacked forward; when all the cells had been extended, the shield itself was moved forward. Thus the excavation had proceeded a few inches at a time, with bricklayers extending the arches behind so that only the very edge of the excavation was unsupported.

“It was the narrowest of gaps,” Brunel said, “but it was still hazardous, and it was made worse because the directors, damn them, grew impatient and ordered that it should be doubled, to speed up the work. My father and I knew that the ground was treacherous, but the directors insisted on it, and insisted on admitting sightseers too, despite the risk. It was only by great good fortune that the waters broke through when the arch was not full of visitors.”

Brunel had been watching me narrowly as he talked. Now he broke off from his discourse and asked if I was feeling quite well.

“There are no ghosts here, sir, if that’s why you ask.”

“Yet men have died here. Poor Richardson, and Ball and Collins, and the others . . .”

“The matter of death is not as simple as the penny dreadfuls would have it, Mr Brunel. You mentioned a murder. Who was it that was killed here?”

“He was not murdered here at all, although I thought . . . Are you all right, Mr Carlyle?”

“A curious singing in my ears, and a sense of oppression.”

Brunel looked disappointed. “I feel it myself. I have calculated that when the Thames is in full flood, the tunnelling shield had to support upwards of six hundred tons.”

A strange compulsion made me walk forward. My boots splashed into shallow water and I was suddenly as thirsty as a Bedouin, and knelt and scooped up a palmful of water and sucked it down. I felt it writhe like a worm in my throat and tasted thick warm blood; at the same moment, the arch of brick above groaned, and I felt, distinctly, that I was in two places at once. I was kneeling in the black water, and I was pressed flat by a great suffocating weight, as in one of those nightmares in which we cannot flee the frightful horror advancing upon us.

Then Brunel was hauling me up by the armpits, and the spell was broken. My right hand hurt like the devil, the taste of blood was thick and foul in my mouth, and the little lake was as choppy as a storm-tossed sea. The arch of the bore groaned again, and Brunel said, “Sometimes the ground above shifts with the tide.”

“Something is lost,” I said, although I did not know why.

Brunel held up the lantern by his face and studied me and said, “If there are no ghosts, you would make a passable substitute for one, Mr Carlyle. Let’s get above ground, and find something to warm our blood.”

Inside the long shed, he poked around in the drawers of a huge desk, pulled out a bottle of brandy, poured generous libations into two tin mugs, fastened my fingers around one, and settled a blanket around my shoulders. The brandy burned through the thick foul taste that coated my mouth and tongue, but my hand still ached – it was as if someone had wrapped a hot wire around the base of the forefinger. Brunel sat in a chair opposite, his hands on his knees and his elbows square, and sipped his brandy and watched me take in my surroundings. The space where we sat had been made over into an office, with the desk at one end of a big, square carpet, and a table and chests with ladders of narrow drawers below racks of pigeon-holes at the other. Beyond was a gloomy workshop, with work benches, a lathe and a drill press and other machinery, glass and glazed ceramic carboys in wicker baskets, racks of copper piping and sheet metal, and half-finished or half-dismantled machinery.

I said, “I must apologize once more, it seems.”

“You said that something was lost, Mr Carlyle. Can you tell me what it was?”

“I don’t know why I said it. Perhaps you should tell me the rest of the story. Someone was murdered, I believe.”

Brunel got up and walked about around the perimeter of the carpet for a few moments, fingering a silver circular slide rule that he had pulled from one of the pockets of his waistcoat. I was to learn that he was always too full of energy to sit still for long. He had to be up and doing things even while he thought.

“We employed two sorts of labourers,” he said. “The men at the face of the tunnel, working on the frames, were skilled miners, my corps d’élite. I would trust them with my life. The rest were mostly Irish navigators, who worked the hand pumps and transported the soil from the excavation. They were good enough fellows, and worked hard and for the most part uncomplainingly, but they were men released from the useful influence of domestic ties, and as a consequence were easily led into temptation, particularly on pay day. They were much given to drinking their pay as quickly as they could, even though we provided beer at the end of every shift, to ease their suffering after working in such difficult conditions.”

He was still walking to and fro, his hands shaping expressive gestures in the air.

“On the whole, I found them very manageable, but there were one or two rogues, and one or two frank criminals to boot. One of these was a man by the name of Coffee Joe, so called not for his liking of the reviving bean but because he was so often in drink that he deserved the soubriquet less than anyone else. I’ve told you how close we dug to the river bed. Quite often, small objects dropped long ago into the river would be washed through by small runs of water. Leather shoes, the square nails used by shipwrights, buckles, glass bottles, even a coin or two. Any other man finding such an object would present it to one of the foremen, but Coffee Joe was known to keep his finds. I heard a rumour that he had sold an enamelled dagger handle to an antiquarian for ten shillings, but put it down to envy, and did not dismiss him. He was a hard worker, despite his liking of drink.”

“But he found something else,” I said. Despite the warm fug of the brandy, the forefinger of my right hand still felt as if it was being slowly amputated.

“That’s how the story went,” Brunel said, “although I heard about it only after the last, fatal flood. Some of the men cursed Coffee Joe, even though by then he had quit the site – he had, in fact, been arrested for his part in inciting a drunken riot in a tavern. The story was that he had taken something which he blamed for a change in his luck. He claimed to be haunted by water. It would bubble up between the flags of the wretched cellar where he had a bed, the spray of public fountains would drench him, pumps would spit mud at him, and so on and so forth. And he had bad dreams, he said, of floods, not just of water—”

“But blood,” I said, and for a moment the taste of that substance was so thick in my mouth that I thought I might choke on it.

Brunel had stopped at the far end of the carpet, and was watching me closely. He said, “When you took that draught of water, and the flood pool grew so agitated, I knew that it was something of the same matter. Is it a ghost?”

“If it is, it is the most potent and undetectable ghost I’ve ever known.”

“And you have known some, in your time.”

“I will admit to the acquaintance of a few, Mr Brunel. What happened to Coffee Joe after he was arrested?”

“He was sentenced to transportation to Tasmania and three years’ hard labour, and at the end of it he found his way back to London.”

“A navigator indeed.”

Brunel agreed. “He was found dead just five days ago. One of his former fellows heard of it, and communicated it to me.”

“He was, perhaps, drowned?”

“He was found with his throat cut. I spoke to the Inspector who investigated the murder. He said that the cellar in which Coffee Joe’s body was found was drenched with blood, and the fatal wound had been so savagely inflicted that the head was almost completely severed.”

“This was the same cellar in which Coffee Joe had nightmares of drowning, years ago.”

Brunel looked at me, and raised one of his vigorous black eyebrows.

“He travelled halfway around the world,” I said. “I must assume that it was because he wanted to find something he had left behind – and where else might a man like him leave it, except in the one place in the world where he could lay his head of a night? And he must have been desperate to find it, because it is against the law for a transportee to return to this country.”

“I’ve thought long and hard about that,” Brunel said, “and I must admit that it still puzzles me. I agree that it must have been something that he was desperate to find, yet it must also have been of little intrinsic value. He had not sold it, you see, and he was the kind of man who would sell his shoes if he was in need of a drink. But someone else wanted it, badly enough to kill him for it.”

“That is why you wished to interrogate his ghost.”

Brunel began to walk to and fro again. “The men said that Coffee Joe had put a curse on the whole endeavour, Mr Carlyle. And the whole thing did indeed go smash and all to blazes after he left. The affair has reduced my father to working catch-as-catch can – he is away at this very moment, surveying the route of a canal near Oxford. And I am in much the same situation. We have never shirked hard work, and we have always faced up to disaster, done what we can to overcome it, and put it behind us. I have done my share of odd jobs, too, and I have my gaz project,” he said, gesturing towards the machinery heaped beyond the office space, “although I fear now that all the work I have done on that is no more than the building of a castle in the air. Perhaps our bad fortune was no more than unlucky geology and bad faith on the part of the damned directors. But perhaps there is more to the matter than that.”

“What prompted you on this track, Mr Brunel? You’re an engineer. You are not the kind of man who usually becomes involved in the matter of the dead.”

“You have a sharp mind, Mr Carlyle. Yes, I’m sure that I would have dismissed the rumours about Coffee Joe and the matter of his murder if not for one other thing – my own dreams. The work on the tunnel proceeded day and night, and I often caught a few hours’ sleep in a cot in the office. Toward the end of it, I often had nightmares of floods and collapses, but I paid no attention to them because we all had such nightmares after the first inundation. But a few days ago, the day that Coffee Joe was horribly murdered, the same dreams returned, and have done so every night since.” He looked straight at me, with a defiant glare. “There. Now I have told all, and you can believe it, or call me a fool.”

“Before I do anything else, I think I must look at Coffee Joe’s cellar, and see what I can find there. And for your part, perhaps you should consider dredging the river above the tunnel. I believe that something lying there may provide the key to the affair.”

We drank brandy and talked into the small hours of the night. We set our plans straight. I described several of the cases I had worked on in Edinburgh, and Brunel politely pretended to believe every detail. Despite what he had seen in the tunnel, he was still greatly sceptical of the matters to which I had dedicated my life. He talked a little of his own plans, and I quickly learned that although he was hard-headed and pragmatic, he was no utilitarian Benthamite. He was, in fact, as brimful of imaginative sympathy as any poet or painter, realizing his dreams in bricks and iron rather than in words or paint. Artists seek to move the minds of men; Brunel had enough energy and ambition to move the world itself, if he could but manufacture a lever large enough, and discover a suitable fulcrum. He had been working on the gaz-engine experiments for two years, or, as he put it, one tenth of the remainder of his life, but with no great success. “And now I fear that I am coming to the conclusion that no sufficient advantage over steam power can be obtained,” he said. “I have spent all my time and considerable money building a chateau d’Espagne, and now all my fine hopes have fallen into ruin. But there it is, and it can’t be helped. I had hoped by now, Mr Carlyle, to have laid the foundations for my fame and fortune, but the tunnel is dead, the gaz experiments are as good as dead . . . Well, well. If I can make no other living I will do so by the example of my father, working where I can for whom I can.”

There was a considerable anguish hidden behind Brunel’s careless dismissal of his bad fortune and failure, and I saw now why he had hired me. Although he would never admit it, it was a last desperate attempt to revive the fortunes of the tunnel, and thence of himself and his father.

It was too late to make my way back to my lodgings when at last we ran dry of both brandy and conversation, and I slept for a few hours on a cot in Brunel’s office while he curled up, like a cat, under his own desk. I had no dreams worth remarking on, and neither did Brunel, who when he woke was as spry as if he had slept twelve hours straight through in a feather bed.

“Perhaps your intrusion somehow ended it,” he said.

“If only it was as simple as that,” I said.

“I know. You must make your inquiries, and I must make mine, and we’ll meet again as soon as we can.”

I bade farewell to my new friend, and walked west and then north through the wakening streets. The air was already close and warm. Streams of clerks, shop workers, labourers and porters were walking toward their workplaces, joining the great river of humanity that flowed across London Bridge into the City, the tramp of their feet shaking the ground quite as much as the carts and coaches rumbling along the main road. In the brightening morning light that shone along the ship-choked river, the thousands of people, all moving in the same direction, all clad in the costumes of their trade, seemed like a carnival parade, and the air was full of conversation and laughter, and cheerful greetings sung out to friends and workmates.

But here and there amongst the tide of the living, like spies and secret agents from some dolorous power, were the dead, walking with bowed heads and shuttered faces, drawn toward their former workplaces by ineradicable habit, unnoticed by any but me.

I escaped the crowds, and the annoying attention of certain of the dead, in a coffee shop, where I enjoyed a fine breakfast of muffins toasted on a sea-coal fire and spread with butter and white honey, a plate of chops and kidneys and pickled onions, and a pot of bitter, strong coffee. Refreshed, and provided with directions by the waiter, I walked through the City and against the slackening tide of people flowing toward it from the new suburbs of Islington and Holloway, to my lodging house in Barnsbury.

It was a fine terrace house of four storeys, built just ten years ago on a rise above the Caledonian Road, with iron railings in front and views north toward the fields and woods of Highgate. The lady of the house, Mrs Rolt, shot out of her parlour as I entered, and told me that I had missed a caller by just half an hour.

“A strange old gentleman,” she said, fixing me with a stern eye. “Perhaps I speak too frankly, but I’m not entirely sure, Mr Carlyle, if I approve of him.”

My visitor had not left a card, but he had made a great impression on the indomitable Mrs Rolt, a stout woman of middle years whose husband, a solicitor’s clerk in the City, was by contrast as meek a man as you could ever wish to meet. She told me that my visitor’s name was Dr Pretorius, and described him in enough detail for me to recognize immediately the haughty, white-haired gentleman who had attended the seance last night.

“He would not state his business,” Mrs Rolt said, “but he did tell me that he would call upon you again. I would prefer it, Mr Carlyle, that you did not make this house your place of business. Especially if your business involves men of his kind.”

“His kind, Mrs Rolt?”

I was wondering, of course, how this Dr Pretorius had discovered my lodgings, and wondered too what else he might know about me.

Mrs Rolt said, “He was polite enough, Mr Carlyle, and he spoke English exceedingly well – too well, if you follow me – but there was something sly and crafty about him. It was as if he was somehow playing a joke on me with his politeness.”

“Are you implying that he is a foreigner, Mrs Rolt? And am I to understand that you believe that any foreigner should not be trusted?”

“I get on well enough with anyone who is straightforward with me, Mr Carlyle, and I’m afraid to say that this gentleman had something crooked about him, for all his politeness. Pretorius – that’s no kind of name at all, not even for a foreigner. How can anyone trust a man without a proper name?”

I found myself apologizing for my visitor, and tried to escape up the stairs, but Mrs Rolt was not quite done with me, asking that I should take care to inform her the next time I was going to be out all night.

“I’m afraid it was unavoidable,” I said. “A sudden business engagement.”

As I said this, I realized with a sudden rush of happiness that I had taken on my first client since I had moved to London.

“Your boots are muddy, and there’s mud on the cuffs of your trousers, too,” Mrs Rolt said, not unkindly. “Bring them down when you are ready, and I’ll have Jenny clean them for you. I like a clean house, Mr Carlyle, and a quiet one, too.”

“And so do I, Mrs Rolt.”

I had chosen my lodgings precisely because the house was quiet – not in the way that Mrs Rolt meant, but because it was too new to have accumulated much in the way of ghosts. I had tucked moly and rue here and there, to keep out unwanted visitors, and I checked these precautions before I took to my bed and slept for a few hours – one of the disciplines in the matter of the dead is to take rest when one can. It was noon when I rose. I washed my face and hands and changed my clothes. I cleaned my boots myself, but took my muddy trousers down to the basement for the attention of the maid, Jenny. I informed Mrs Rolt that I had a great deal of business today, so that she should not trouble to lay my supper by if I was late returning, and went out.

Brunel had given me the name of the Inspector of Police who had attended the scene of Coffee Joe’s murder. After I had taken a lunch of salmon and shrimp sauce at a dining house, I found him in an airless, whitewashed office in the busy police station at Holborn. A stout, harassed man with thinning gingery hair and a red, sweating face, he read and reread the letter of introduction that Brunel had provided, and put me in the care of a blue-coated constable, who escorted me through the tangle of narrow alleys and lightless courts of St Giles Rookery to the cellar.

It was a bleak, mean place, filthier than any stable, with a ceiling that sagged so low the burly constable had to stoop, and barely lit by a narrow, barred window where a brace of urchins peeked in. A heap of dirty straw and dirtier blankets was piled up along one wall, and most of the flagstones of the floor had been pulled up and flung aside, and the dirt beneath them was greatly disturbed and dug over. It was damp, and stank horribly of unwashed bodies and of rotten blood. There were black bloodstains on the walls and the overturned flagstones. There was also an imp posted in one corner, a vile little thing with a bloated frog’s belly and a tiny head that was mostly a pair of pale, protuberant eyes. It squealed in the moment I pinched it out, and left a curious chemical reek in my nostrils.

The constable told me that this squalid cellar, which was not much bigger than the room I rented at Mrs Rolt’s, had been the home of some half-dozen people, who slept with the oranges and salt herring and the other wares that they hawked in the streets. He added that the inhabitants had all scattered, of course, and it was fortunate for me that the landlord had not yet been able to find anyone to set the place straight so that he could rent it again.

I thought that the imp’s malevolence probably had as much to do with the landlord’s problem as did Coffee Joe’s murder. I pointed to the urchins who were watching us through the bars of the little window, and expressed surprise that someone could have been murdered in a room where half a dozen people lived, in the middle of an area so crowded that everyone’s business must have been common knowledge.

“This is a hiding place for every kind of rogue,” the constable said. He was a saturnine man, with the weary air of someone who has seen entirely too much human rottenness, and he was not much interested in my business, nor in the murder. “Most of them are Irish, with no liking of English law. We call it the Rookery; they call it ‘Little Dublin’, or ‘The Holy Land’. We have no witnesses at all, only stories told by two of our informers. They both say it was a Savage that done it, but can’t agree to his particulars. One says that he was black; the other that he was more like one of the Indians from the South American jungles. The first claims that all his teeth were filed to points, the other that his teeth were mostly gold. And so on. All we know is that he murdered your man and chased everyone out of this room. Have you found something interesting, sir?”

I had been turning over flagstones with the tip of my cane. “I notice that the bloodstains there are only on the top sides of these stones,” I said, “no matter which way they ended up. It suggests that the excavations were made by the murderer, after he had killed poor Coffee Joe. He must have spent some time at his work.”

“No doubt people were watching at the door and window, and no doubt they saw which way he went when he had finished, but they’ll never tell us. Not that it matters, sir. Your man was on the run from the colonies, and this is a murder that saved the time of judge and jury and the hangman.”

The constable needed little encouragement on my part to quit the cellar for the slightly fresher air of the court outside. I vaguely heard him shout at the two urchins, but I was already setting out the saucer I had brought with me, and filling it with brandy from the bottle that I had bought in the dining house where I had lunched.

The brandy burned with a bright blue flame and a festive smell that sweetened the fetid air. I sat back and waited, sucking on a stick of barley sugar, and presently a pale face leaned, as it seemed, out of the shadows. It was gasping like a newly landed fish, and rivulets of blood poured from the gaping wound in its throat, splashing and smoking away on the floor, as it craned eagerly toward the fumes rising from the saucer of burning brandy.

“I ’as such a great thirst,” it said, over and over, in a wheedling whine. “Just wet my lips a little, mister, and I’ll tell you all you want.”

It told me anyway, of course, after I compelled it. Like most revenants, it was much confused, but it took only a few minutes to get its story straight. It seemed that Coffee Joe had made his way back to London as soon as he had completed his three years of hard labour, drawn by the thing that he had found in the muck in the Thames Tunnel. After he had returned to London, it had taken him several days and a great deal of drink to pluck up his courage, but at last he befriended one of the men who had a pallet in the cellar and came back with him, intent on disinterring his prize. The revenant had little memory of the man who had followed and attacked Coffee Joe, would only say that it was a powerful fellow who had frightened off everyone else.

“He threatened me very badly, but I fooled him, didn’t I? I told him it was under the floor.”

“How did he know that you had it?” I said.

“He said his master had heard the story of what I had found, and had seen that I was touched by it. And it’s true, mister. My hand has never been the same since I found it – it has hurt me terribly and given me no little trouble ever since. I should have stayed in the colonies, but it tormented me every night, and only gave me rest when I swore to return.”

There were more pleas for a little drink to dull its pain, and it grew very sulky when I compelled it to speak plainly and tell me where the thing was hidden. As soon as it gave up its secret, I relieved it of its suffering and found the loose stone in the wall, and the little parcel, wrapped in a filthy scrap of cloth, in the space behind it.

My right hand began to ache badly and the taste of blood grew thick in my mouth as I unwrapped what Coffee Joe had taken from the Thames Tunnel:

The two bones of a man’s finger, blackened by great age, yet still held together by a scrap of skin.

I was following the constable’s directions toward Islington when a two-wheeled carriage cut out of the thick traffic and jolted to a halt by the kerb. The driver, a dull-eyed man with an oddly shaped head much too small for his body, stared slackly ahead, taking no notice of the spirited oaths of a carter who had been forced to rein in his horse to avoid a smash. The carriage door sprang open and the passenger leaned forward like a half-opened jackknife and beckoned to me – it was the white-haired man from the seance, Dr Pretorius.

I was young then, and much less cautious than I am now, and I accepted Dr Pretorius’s invitation with the same confident curiosity that had spurred me to attend the seance. Dr Pretorius pulled sharply on a chain as soon as I had climbed inside the carriage, and it moved off with a sharp jerk that banged the door shut and threw me onto the narrow leather-covered bench facing him.

“I am delighted to meet you at last, Mr Carlyle,” he said. His accent was cultivated; his tone both mocking and amused. He wore the same black coat and high-collared shirt as at the seance, and a soft, shapeless hat perched on his vigorous mop of white hair. When I asked where we were going, he said, “You have not been long in the city, I believe. Allow me to show you something which will be of great interest to a man such as yourself. It’s just a little way beyond what was the valley of the Fleet, within the old wall.”

“I am flattered that you take an interest in me,” I said, and it was not entirely untrue. At that moment, I was not afraid of this devilish man; I was eager to learn more of him, and to discover just what he knew of the matter of the dead. That he knew something, I did not doubt at all.

“It wasn’t hard to track you down,” he said. “Men like us are rare enough, and growing rarer, but we have a natural affinity.”

“I must assume that the thing in the cellar was yours.”

Dr Pretorius’s smile was both cunning and mischievous. “Very remarkable, wasn’t it? I created it directly from seed by principles that I discovered many years ago, in another country. I had dreams of populating the world with a new race of creatures made entirely by men, but they were frustrated by the failure of a pupil I thought better than he was. Mrs Shelley wrote a popular romance which burlesques his downfall – perhaps you have read the revised edition that was recently reprinted? No? Well, no matter. It omitted my contribution to the affair completely, and had altogether too much sensation and not enough science. And besides, that was the past, and now we are at the dawn of a new age, and I have new plans: very powerful plans.

“Tell me,” he said, leaning close, “did you have any luck, in that horrible cellar?”

I felt a first pang of alarm, and was horribly aware of the fingerbones that I had recovered. They seemed to beat like a tell-tale heart in the breast pocket of my jacket, and I had to quash the impulse to put my hand over it, to hide my discovery from Dr Pretorius’s piercing scrutiny. Suppose he had set several imps to keep watch in the cellar, and I had not seen only one? Suppose one of the urchins peeking at the window had been in his employ?

I said, as casually as I could manage, “Is the murder of particular interest to you, Dr Pretorius, or are you merely interested in it for the sake of sensation?”

He was not at all put out by this, but sat back, saying, “Very good, very good,” as he pulled a flask from his jacket. He drank, shuddered as delicately as a cat, and offered it to me, explaining, “A little gin, to celebrate our meeting. It’s my only weakness.”

I declined, and he shrugged. “Were you searching that cellar out of ‘interest in sensation’, or could it be that you are in the employ of your new friend?”

“If I have business with him, that’s my business, and his.”

“Not if it interferes with the business of others,” Dr Pretorius said, with sudden sharpness. But then he smiled, and said, “But we should not be arguing, my dear Mr Carlyle! We are both interested in the same truths. We know things about the world that other men only dare dream about. We know how the world really works – the truth that underlies the petty reality which men like your engineer friend labour to master. They are like ants, building castles from crumbs of sand: mighty fortress to them, but to us mere heaps that we can crush in an instant. Yes, I saw how that young man took you up, Mr Carlyle, and I wish I had spoken to you then, but I confess that I was enjoying the scene you created, and was too slow to follow its creator. A very amusing diversion it was, too, far better than the silly bit of cheap theatre those gypsies put on. That, I must say, was very disappointing, but meeting you is more than enough compensation.”

“You know something of the matter of the dead?”

“I know much about the matter of life, my friend. More, dare I say, than your poor parents. Oh yes, I know about their experiments into the nature of the human soul, the ghastly business with the resurrection men, and the unfortunate accident that occurred when they tried to reanimate the dead with ghosts.

“I hope you don’t mind me mentioning it,” he added, with sly false sweetness. “By the band that you wear, I see that you are still in mourning.”

“As a matter of fact, doctor, I mind very much. It really is none of your business.”

“Oh, but I think it is,” Dr Pretorius said, tapping the side of his nose with a finger. “I mentioned a pupil of mine. He was in the resurrection trade too. He stitched new bodies from old, and infused them with electricity in place of the life force. Not so much different from your parents’ work, I think, and it came to an equally bad end. It was almost the death of me, in fact, but I escaped, and learned some valuable lessons, too. Our driver, for instance. Perhaps you noticed him? He has greatly benefited from my attentions. In his former life he was nothing but a common thief, who thought to break into my establishment one night and steal the day’s takings. I caught him, and I made a new man out of him. A little brain surgery, some cranial reconstruction . . . Ah, here we are.”

The carriage jerked to a halt – its driver was all stop or all go, and nothing in between – and Dr Pretorius opened the door and sprang out with surprising alacrity. He took my arm when I climbed out after him, and steered me across the pavement to a iron grille set in the base of the wall of a bank.

“The London Stone,” Dr Pretorius said grandly. “I can see that you are unimpressed, but I think that if you look closely, you’ll understand why I brought you here.”

It sat in a niche behind the grille, a blackened lump of stone about two feet across, quite undistinguished except for the pair of grooves worn in its rounded top. If it had been lying on a piece of waste ground, I would not have troubled it with a second glance, but as I stared at it I felt as if it was opening up like the mouth of a well or shaft that plumbed a dimension I had never before noticed. When Dr Pretorius pulled me away, the ordinary noise and bustle of the street reasserted itself with the suddenness of an explosion, leaving me so faint that I reeled back against the wall.

“You see its puissance,” Dr Pretorius said, like a teacher encouraging his best pupil. “I knew you would.”

I could still feel its black power in a corner of my mind, like the onset of a headache, or a thunderstorm. I said, the words coming so hard that they might have been the first I spoke after a year of silence, “What is it?”

“Some say that it is a Roman milestone, perhaps the pivot from which all measurements in the province of Britannia were taken. Others claim that it came from Troy, brought here by the great-grandson of Aeneas, who led the exodus of the defeated Trojans after the Greeks destroyed their city; they would have it that London is the New Troy.”

Dr Pretorius struck an attitude and declaimed with actorly vibrato, “ ‘And Kings be born of thee, whose dredded might shall aw the World, and Conquer Nations bold,’ ” then winked at me, and added, “Or perhaps it is no more than a bit of rubble from some forgotten building of old Roman London. It does not really matter what it was. What matters is what men think it is, as I’m sure you’ll agree. The Kentish rebel, Jack Cade, rode into the City and declared himself mayor by striking the stone with his sword. Many others have sworn similar oaths upon it.”

“Why have you brought me here?”

“This stone is on public display, on a public street. Do you not think, in a city as ancient as this, where the streets are raised a good twenty feet above the original ground by the rubble and trash of the ages, that there might be other stones, more puissant, more powerful, hidden away beneath our feet?”

“If there are such stones, Doctor, I believe that they should stay buried. I certainly understand why this one is caged – not to protect it from the public, but because, like a wild beast, the public must be protected from it.”

“I’m disappointed,” Dr Pretorius said, although he was still smiling his sly, feline smile. “I thought you a man of ambition and vision, like myself. Perhaps it is the shock. Perhaps,” he said, offering his flask, “a little gin will help you think more clearly.”

“I can think clearly enough,” I said. I was angry, stung by Dr Pretorius’s insinuations about my parents, and my anger made me very reckless. “I think that Coffee Joe was murdered because he had found something you need. I think you flatter me because poor Coffee Joe resisted your questioning, and now you need my help to find what you seek.”

“I do not need your help to look for what I already have,” Dr Pretorius said, and wagged a bony finger in my face when I started to speak. “We are equals, my dear Mr Carlyle, and we should not conceal anything from each other. The engineer has hired you, I suppose, to rid that ridiculous tunnel of a malign influence. Yes, I know that you went there with him last night. He heard of the murder, realized that the man’s boasts of finding something were true, swallowed his considerable pride, and attended the seance. He hoped to ask a question of a ghost, and found you instead. And what, I wonder, have you found?”

“I won’t help you.”

“I could take it from you. I could freeze your blood with one word and take it now.” Dr Pretorius studied me for a moment, then said, “The engineer does not know what he has stumbled upon. It is a far greater matter than removing a hex from a hole in the ground.”

“Nevertheless, he is my client.”

Dr Pretorius laughed. “You are a stubborn fellow, Carlyle, but not too stubborn, I hope, because I would not like to lose a talent like yours. Such wonders we could do together! When you are ready to talk with me, I can be found at the Museum of Natural Curiosities, on Farringdon Street. It is not far from here – just outside the old walls. Now, you will have to excuse me. Things are progressing very well, and I must be about my business.”

As soon as Dr Pretorius had climbed into his carriage, the horse bolted as if stung by a bee. Dr Pretorius waved from the window, and the carriage and its strange cargo were swallowed in the unending stream of traffic.

I recovered most of my poise and perhaps half of my strength by consuming two rounds of beef-and-horseradish sandwiches and a pint of strong coffee in a coffee house, and found my way to Farringdon Street, taking a circumambulatory route to avoid the killing grounds at Smithfield, where the air was still thick with the residue of witch-burning mobs. The street, jammed with slow-moving carts and carriages, ran through a narrow valley; I remembered that Dr Pretorius had said that we would cross the old course of the Fleet, and supposed that I had discovered it.

The Museum of Natural Curiosities was a double shop-front, its woodwork painted bright red and the glass of its windows gilded. Boards listed the wonders to be seen within (amongst others, a dog-headed boy, a two-headed sheep, the skeleton of a giant, a genuine mermaid from the Floridean shore, an exquisite miniature ballerina). A large black man stood in the doorway, his muscular arms crossed over the keg of his chest as he scrutinized every passer-by. He wore a kind of Arabian Nights costume of loose buttercup-yellow trousers, a broad cloth belt, a deeply slashed pink tunic, and a white turban. The sword sheathed in his belt seemed to be no more than painted wood, but he was of such a size that he would have needed no other weapon than his fists to deal with most troublemakers. I had no doubt that he was the man who had murdered poor Coffee Joe.

I watched the museum and its muscular guardian from the other side of the busy road, munching on roast hazelnuts purchased from a street vendor, but saw no sign of Dr Pretorius. At last, I took my chance and crossed the road when the heavy traffic came to a standstill (all around me, hundreds of horses, momentarily released from their work, snorted and tossed their heads), coolly walked past the Museum and its forbidding guard, and entered the tobacconist’s next door. For the price of a screw of snuff, I learned that the Museum had been open for just six months, and that the tobacconist, who lived above his shop, was thinking of bringing legal action against the owner because of the construction work that continued day and night, and which more than once had caused his cellars to flood.

After escaping from the tobacconist’s torrent of complaint, I walked north through the brawling streets toward my lodgings, pausing only to donate my screw of snuff to an indigent on a street corner, with the request that he stop torturing his set of bagpipes until I was out of earshot.

When I returned to Mrs Rolt’s house, I found on the hall table a folded slip of paper with my name written on it in slanting copperplate. It was a message from Brunel. All arrangements were in hand, and I should meet him at the yard in Rotherhithe at one o’clock tomorrow afternoon “for an unusual perambulation”.

I took supper with Mrs Rolt and Mr Rolt and their two daughters, and retired to my room as soon as I could decently disengage myself from the general round of conversation. The encounter with Dr Pretorius had exhausted me, and I was eager to examine the grisly remnant that had cost Coffee Joe his life. Yet although I studied them long and hard, I could find no power, not so much as an imp, in the conjoined stubs of blackened bone, and I could not imagine why Dr Pretorius needed them, and what they might signify in the matter of the tunnel.

At last, I wrapped the bones in a clean linen handkerchief, set them on the little table that served as my desk, and made a few notes about my adventures of that day before retiring.

I woke the next morning from a terrible dream, drenched in sweat, my heart pounding hard. I tottered to the window and drew in calming draughts of the warm morning air. All around, the ordinary world was getting on with its ordinary business. A blackbird, perched on a fence top with its tail cocked and yellow beak agape, was singing its heart out. Two gardens over, a woman was pinning white sheets to a line. The smell of grilling bacon drifted up from the kitchen window directly below me. The black, smothering mood of the dream faded, and I was able to think about breakfast, and getting dressed.

I was lacing up my boots when I noticed that the handkerchief had somehow become unwrapped, and that the two fingerbones had fallen to the floor, lying there in their scraps of black skin like the mummy of an exotic caterpillar.

When we met in the yard, I told Brunel of my discovery of the fingerbones, the encounter with Dr Pretorius, and the dream. He listened with close attention, absorbing the matter of the interrogation of Coffee Joe’s ghost as if it had been a description of some clever bit of lathe work, and asked at the end if he could inspect my prize. I had interred the bones in a tin which had lately contained Parma violet pastilles. Brunel stirred them with his forefinger, and said, “You think that this gave you your nightmare of drowning?”

“Not of drowning, Mr Brunel; of being drowned. Of being sunk deep in cold, lightless water, with water filling my nose and mouth and lungs, and such a great weight of water pressing down on me that I could not move.”

“My dreams were of being drowned when the tunnel flooded, instead of escaping,” Brunel said, looking sideways at me. An unlit cigar was stuck in his mouth. “Still, it’s not so very different. But if your dream was given to you by these little bones, what gave me mine?”

“In my limited experience of bones, Mr Brunel, where you find one, you are likely to find others to match.”

Brunel grinned around his cigar and handed the tin back to me. “You think that these little bones came from a body lodged above the tunnel. Well, it’s time to look for it, don’t you think?”

“You promised ‘an unusual perambulation’. What, precisely—”

“Let’s not spoil the surprise,” Brunel said, and took me by the arm and steered me across the yard.

It was a fine sunny day, and the masts of the ships anchored along the edge of the river were like so many black trees scratching the blue sky above the roofs of the warehouses, as if Birnam Wood had waded into the river to pause and cool its rooty feet before resuming its march on Dunsinane. A wharf stood up to its knees in the low tide. A small boat with some kind of cargo draped in oiled canvas was moored on one side; an ordinary skiff with a man waiting at the oars on the other. As soon as Brunel and I had settled into the skiff, the boatman cast off and with strong strokes hauled us aslant the river’s strong race, each dip of the oar blades releasing little packets of noxious stink that blew past us in the hot, heavy breeze. Brunel lit his cigar against the smell; I covered my mouth and nose with the handkerchief that had lately acted as a winding sheet. The bristling hedge of ships along the far bank, and the roofs and steeples rising beyond them, were shrouded in a thickening haze. A steam packet went by, dragging a thick tail of smoke behind it, its paddle wheel threshing up foamy waves that rocked and rerocked our little skiff as they chased each other toward the bank. Brunel grinned when I clutched at the damp wood of my seat, and pointed to a low dark barge anchored a little way off. There was a crane angled up from its mid-section, and on the deck below the crane’s beak, connected to it by a cradle of slack chains, was a bronze sphere that, with sharp highlights winking from it in the hot sunlight, could have been a bell taken from a cathedral tower. “There’s our destination,” he said.

“The barge is moored over the end of the tunnel, I take it.”

“Not at all. The tunnel extends more than fifty feet beyond. But that, so I calculate, is the place it reached when Coffee Joe quit his position. What is it, Mr Carlyle?”

The bones had begun to rattle inside their little coffin, which I had tucked in the breast pocket of my jacket. I took out the tin and placed it flat on my palm. As Brunel watched it shiver and shake, I said, “If they can produce bad dreams, I suppose we should not be so astonished that they are also able to move.”

“I don’t doubt that they are moving,” Brunel said. “The question is, why are they moving?”

“Perhaps these are animated by a desire to be reunited with their fellows, although I confess that I have never before seen such a thing.”

“They are altogether unique, aren’t they? With your permission, Mr Carlyle, I would like to try a little experiment.”

He had me pinch the tin between thumb and forefinger as, watched by a couple of men on the low deck, the boatman took us parallel to the barge’s black, wet side. The tin began to vibrate urgently and noisily when we cleared the bow, and Brunel told the boatman to let the current take us for a moment. The rattling grew less as we drifted backward; increased again as we rowed forward. Brunel took a sighting of either shore to mark the spot, and told the boatman to make for the ladder.

After we climbed aboard, Brunel introduced me to the captain and then strutted over to the gleaming bell (his reflection swimming up to its shining surface to meet him) and briskly rapped it with his knuckles. “I borrowed it from the West India Dock Company, Mr Carlyle. Are you much troubled by enclosed spaces, by the by? I clean forgot to ask.”

“No more than any other man,” I said. “What does a bell have to do with dredging up—”

“Dredging? No, sir, that’s far too chancy, as I think someone else has discovered. We’re going to dig it up.”

Brunel left me to wonder about that as he gave the captain instructions, pointing to the spot of water a few dozen yards off the bow of the barge where the fingerbones had become most agitated. The barge blew a cloud of black smoke from its tall chimney, raised its anchor, and moved against the current and dropped anchor again, all in a minute. Brunel satisfied himself as to the spot, and then two men started up the steam engine of the crane. Chains rattled as they were wound on a great drum, the frame of the barge creaked as the bronze bell was lifted a yard above the deck, and I tardily understood Brunel’s audacious plan.

A narrow wooden footboard ran around the inside of the bell, a foot or so above the rim, and there were leather straps riveted to the curved metal wall. Hatless and in our shirtsleeves, accompanied by a gruff labourer armed with a grappling hook and a wooden shovel, Brunel and I clung to these straps as the bell was swung out over the swiftly running brown water and lowered into it.

My ears sang and popped as we descended. The level of the circle of water beneath our boots crept toward the footboard, and Brunel explained that the eagerness of the air to escape the bell almost precisely countered the eagerness of the water to enter, but air was compressible while water was not.

“I used this apparatus before,” he said, “to inspect the aftereffects of the first inundation. I was able to step from the footboard onto the corner of number twelve frame of the tunnelling shield: a quite remarkable experience. What do the bones say? Are we close?”

The tin was tucked into the pocket of my trousers, and the fingerbones inside it were rattling like a demented castanet. “They are very excited,” I said.

The bell grounded with a solid thump. Beneath the rim of the footboard, a circle of black mud and gravel lay under about six inches of cloudy water. Brunel, the labourer and I scoured it with grappling hooks until, red-faced, our eyes starting from their sockets, we were forced to pull the communicating string, and were lifted to the surface and a brief respite in the fresh air before being submerged again.

And so it went for half a dozen attempts, until at last the labourer hooked the end of a long black bone. Brunel stepped down from the footboard and delved in the silt and pulled up the bone. I took it from him (it was a humerus), feeling the tin vibrate with a regular tarantella. We went up for air and came straight back down, and Brunel and the labourer began to excavate the two feet or so of silt above the brick arch of the tunnel, and at last uncovered a bundle as long as a man, wrapped in something like the casing of a giant beetle, black and slippery and stinking badly.

It took all three of us to haul it onto the footboard, and when we were done we were dizzy and gasping for breath. Brunel pulled the string, four long strong tugs, and we rose up for the last time and were swung above the deck of the barge; and never more grateful was I to feel sunlight on my face as I ducked under the dripping edge of the bell.

Brunel and I unwrapped the body on a bench in the long shed. The wrapping had once been the hide of some large animal; a few patches of coarse hairs still clung to it here and there. Although it had been cured by centuries in the river mud, it stank horribly, and was as stiff and brittle as if turned to wood. Brunel used his pocket knife to cut away the final leaf, and a slough of black mud slid out, thick as porridge, to reveal a human skeleton. It was missing its right arm, which might have fallen away through a ragged tear in the shroud, and its skull.

Brunel looked at me across the rack of wet bones. “How is your tin?”

“Curiously quiet.”

Brunel clapped his hands together in delight. “Then I think we have our prize. The question is, just what do we have?”

“I cannot raise the dead, Mr Brunel, and there’s no ghost or imp associated with these bones. It’s a skeleton, no more and no less, of a man who died a long while ago.”

“I know little about bones,” Brunel said, “but I don’t think that ordinary skeletons engender an anxious vitality in one of their stray components. And then there is the matter of the missing head.”

“It is a puzzle.”

“For every puzzle there is a practical solution. Even in the matters in which you are expert, I hope. We have a skeleton here, and a bit of bone that dances a jig, it is so anxious to be reunited with its fellows. We have the bad dreams of myself and Coffee Joe, and at least half a dozen others who were intimate with this site. We have the water that grew so agitated yesterday, and that exerted a certain power over you, Mr Carlyle.”

“And which also tasted of blood.”

Brunel levelled his bright gaze at me. “And blood, I might think, being a vital fluid, could have some importance in these occult matters.”

“It is not a matter of the occult, Mr Brunel. But I do agree that we may have stumbled on something deeper than ordinary ghosts. And there is one more fact that we must take into account. This was no ordinary death.”

I showed Brunel where the seventh cervical vertebra had been severed by some very sharp blade. “It was a downward stroke,” I said, “to judge by the angle of the cut.”

“Signifying?”

“He was kneeling, and the man who beheaded him struck from above.”

“As in an execution.”

“Precisely.”

We examined the bones closely. It was the skeleton of someone who had stood well over six feet in life. We found a ring of blackened metal loose on the bone of the forefinger of the left hand; a nick with the blade of Brunel’s pocket knife showed that it was gold, and when he polished it with a scrap of cloth, he revealed a name inscribed on the inner face: Ulpius Silvanus. We found the point of an arrow buried in an old, healed wound in the right thigh bone. We found a much-corroded buckle, decorated with a relief of a man wearing a kind of stocking cap and riding a bull.

Ulpius Silvanus had been a tall, strongly built man who, judging by the arrow wound, might once have been a soldier. He had been beheaded, but his corpse had not been looted, and he had been wrapped in a shroud of cowhide and tipped into the river, where the tides had at last washed his remains to the spot which, centuries later, the progress of Brunel’s tunnel had disturbed. His arm had become detached from the rest of his bones, and two fingerbones had washed into the tunnel through one of the innumerable small seeps at the working face. Coffee Joe had taken it, perhaps as a lucky piece, and caused all the trouble that had followed. Many questions remained, not least why the man had been executed, and when. The name inscribed on the ring suggested the Roman era, and Brunel said that he would call on the expertise of a curator at the British Museum, where many of the finds fallen into the excavations had been lodged.

I felt a profound satisfaction. Not only had I taken on my first client, but I had solved the case within two days. I told Brunel that I hoped that now the curse had been lifted the tunnel would soon be completed, so that I would be able to walk its length from one side of the Thames to the other, and assured him of my full attention should there be any problem concerning the interment of the remains.

Brunel solemnly shook his head from side to side, just once. “It is not the end of the matter,” he said. “You have forgotten Dr Pretorius.”

“Not at all. The man is dangerous, certainly, and although I have no proof that would satisfy the police I am convinced that he was responsible for the murder of Coffee Joe. But he is a mountebank, Mr Brunel, no better than the gypsy girl.”

“Nevertheless, he found Coffee Joe, and he found you, too.”

“I suppose there was the imp,” I said reluctantly, and had to explain to Brunel what Dr Pretorius had left behind in the cellar where Coffee Joe had been murdered.

“He is not entirely a mountebank, then,” Brunel said.

“I suppose not. What do you propose to do now?”

“I have strong evidence that someone else has been searching for these bones,” Brunel said. “I would very much like you to hear it, Mr Carlyle, and give me your opinion.”

We covered the bones of poor Ulpius Silvanus with an oilcloth, locked up the shed, and walked east along Rotherhithe Street, between the river and the Surrey Docks, to a little tavern by the name of The Porter’s Rest. Approached from an undistinguished back street, and entered through a tiny court, it revealed itself to be hanging half over the river, jammed between the higgledy-piggledy buildings on either side like some ancient galleon at its last anchorage. The timbers framing the plaster walls of the tap and parlour were black oak, and not one met its fellows at anything resembling a right angle, so that the little room seemed to be leaning in the teeth of a gale. There was a bench under the mullioned window and two settles fitted with faded red bolsters faced each other on either side of a fireplace of rough stones. A crooked door to one side of the fireplace let into a dark, crooked snug, where two crooked ancients were hunched over a ladder of dominoes on a crooked table, and a sliding window at the far end of the room opened onto the bar of the establishment, where a stout old man with a polished pate sat on a high-seated chair, the guardian of the row of beer-pulls set at the shelf by the window. He wore a pair of spectacles on the very tip of his nose, and was perusing a newspaper held only a few inches from his face, moving it, and not his eyes, as he read up and down its close-printed columns.

Brunel greeted the old man with no little respect, and asked after Jake. The man carefully folded the newspaper in half and laid it on the scrubbed pine table which took up most of the space of his little kingdom, looked at Brunel over the top of his spectacles, and told him that he would send the pot-boy for him directly, looked at me, looked at Brunel again, and asked what refreshment we would require while we waited.

Brunel said, “We’ll take two glasses of the Absolutely Stunning, Mr Welch, and I hope you’ll join us in a little something.”

The old man allowed that it was a little early for him, but he’d gladly set aside something to go with his supper, drew into pewter tankards two pints of dark ale, and said, as he handed them through the window, “Your company is always welcome here, Mr Brunel, but I’m sorry that you should choose to ask in a rogue like Jake Mullins.”

“I can promise you there’ll be no trouble, Mr Welch,” Brunel said, turning his hat around in his nimble white fingers like an admonished schoolboy.

“It’s not trouble I’m worried about,” the old man said. “If it was trouble I worried about, I would have closed up the Porter’s as soon as I inherited the care of it from my late father. Should trouble stick its nose around the door of my establishment, I deal with it sharply, so that it knows that it has no place here.” Here, he gave me a significant look. “My concern is that your invitation will give Jake Mullins the idea that the Porter’s is a house he can use regular, and that ain’t the case at all.”

“I could always find him in his own haunt,” Brunel said, with a glance and a smile at me. “The Black Bear, I believe, is his house of choice.”

“It’s his house of last chance, in my considered opinion, and I wouldn’t think of a gentleman such as yourself, and your friend here, troubling to go there.”

The old man gave me another significant look, and Brunel said, “I have been tardy in my introductions. My friend is Mr Carlyle, late of Edinburgh.”

“I can’t say I know him,” Mr Welch said, “but he’s welcome enough, I’m sure. Jake Mullins is another matter. I’ll be glad if you make it clear to him that a single pint is all he’s due here, today and tomorrow, and any other day for that matter.”

Brunel humbly assented to the condition and paid the price of that single pint in advance, and I bought a wedge of cheese and bread to fortify myself after my underwater adventure. We made ourselves comfortable at the window overlooking the river, its broad flood as red as blood in the lingering light of the summer sunset. Swallows and bats were swooping to and fro as they chased insects just above the calm surface of the reach of water between the bank and a file of ships anchored stern to bow.

Brunel told me that Mr Welch had run the establishment for more than forty years, and knew everything worth knowing about any business along this part of the river. “It was he who sent a message about what was seen in the river above my tunnel,” he said, “and told me how to contact the man who saw it.”

“And what was it he saw?”

“I think you should hear that from him,” Brunel said, looking past me and half rising, “for here he is now.”

I turned, and saw not a man at all, but an indistinct figure as hung with ghosts and imps as a battleship on review is hung with flags. The imps clung to his hair and shoulders like a congregation of tiny, spiky black monkeys; the ghosts swirled around him like rags of fog, their filmy faces set with despair and desperation. Several of the strongest glimpsed me, and set up such a fearsome agitation that the entire company promptly exploded all around the room. I jumped up in a hot panic, knocking over my pint pot, dispatched them all, and fell back into my seat in a swoon as Brunel crossed the room in three strides and grabbed hold of the collar of the grizzled wretch who had been their host.

While the pot-boy mopped up spilled beer, I sipped at the balloon of brandy that Brunel had thrust into my hands, and felt my blood begin to circulate again. Brunel was placating Mr Welch, and the man I had so summarily freed of his burden sat hunched on a stool, telling the frothy head of his pint of Absolutely Stunning that he felt as if all his bones had been taken out of him, that he might have had a stroke or a conniption fit, and that he should be attended to by a doctor at once, before he gave his soul up to the Other Side.

Brunel, when he was done with Mr Welch (or rather, when that good man was done with him), sat between us and looked from one to the other, and said, “I suppose you had better tell me what happened, Mr Carlyle, because I don’t believe that Jake here quite knows where he is.”

“I know,” the man said, “that I needs a doctor.”

He was a man in his late thirties, his face seamed and sunburnt, a cap set back on the grey, greasy curls of his head, the knot of the red handkerchief slung around his neck under his vigorous grey beard. His shirt was half-unbuttoned and its sleeves rolled up his muscular brown arms, and his corduroy trousers were so stiff with mud that they could have stood by themselves.

“You’ll make do with this for now,” Brunel said, handing him a wedge of cheese.

The man looked at it, sniffed it, and finally gnawed at it, looking sideways at me as if afraid that I would take it from him. Brunel was looking at me too.

“I removed his burden,” I said. “I can assure you that he will suffer no ill effects – quite the reverse, in fact.”

Brunel nodded, and said that he thought he understood.

The man, Jake Mullins, looked up from his gnawing, and said that he didn’t understand it at all. After some prompting from Brunel, he allowed that perhaps a doctor wasn’t required, at least not at the instant, and the young engineer told me that Jake Mullins was a fisher of men, and so was well matched to me, a fisher of an altogether different kind of intelligence.

“I wouldn’t call ’em intelligent,” Jake Mullins said. “Not when I finds ’em, anyways.”

He seemed much calmer now, and there was purpose in his gaze. He pressed a fist to the small of his back and straightened on his stool with a sigh, and took up his pint pot and drank a good deal of it down in a single draught, wiping his lips and beard with his forearm and sighing again, like a man sinking into the comforts of domesticity after a long day’s work.

Mr Welch, leaning at his little window, took note of that sigh, and said sharply, “Don’t you make yourself at home, Jake Mullins, and don’t think you’ll get more than that pint out of me, either. Whether your business is long or short with these gentlemen, that’s all you’ll get, so sip it with care.”

“Don’t you worry,” Jake Mullins said cheerfully. “I’m not going to cause you any trouble.”

Two regular customers came in just then, greeting Mr Welch by name, and saving him from making a reply.

Jake Mullins took another (much smaller) draught of beer, and said, “He’s all right, is Welchy, except that he is a bit too particular about who deserves his custom. It’s my trade that he doesn’t like, so it’s peculiar, ain’t it, that my trade brings me here to talk with you, Mr Brunel. And with your friend, whoever he may be.”

I introduced myself and shook Jake Mullins’s hand, which was as hard as any length of black oak in the room.

“A Scottish gentleman,” he said. “Perhaps you’re a doctor – I know they’re famous for their surgeons – which is why you’re able to tell me that I’ll be ‘quite all right’.”

“I see a man who has been labouring under a burden,” I said. “And I believe that he is beginning to realize that that burden has been lifted from him.”

“Then perhaps you’re a clergyman,” Jake Mullins said. “You dress like one, saving the backwards collar. If not a clergyman, perhaps a missionary, come to save us poor benighted river rats.”

“A clergyman is closer to the mark than a doctor,” I said.

“Mr Carlyle has volunteered to advise me,” Brunel said, and produced with a flourish a half-sovereign from one of the pockets of his waistcoat. “This is what was agreed, I think: twice your inquest money. And now, if you please, Mr Mullins, you will tell your story.”

Jake Mullins took the coin, rubbed it with a thumb, tasted it, rubbed it again, and shoved it into the pocket of his breeches. “I’m obliged,” he said. “There isn’t much to tell, but I’m sure you’ll think it worth it.”

“It was just three nights ago, I believe,” Brunel said, with a fair amount of impatience.

“It was. I was running along the Surrey shore in my little boat, past the wharf that used to service your diggings, when I seen it. A little boat like mine, standing seventy or eighty yards from the shore. I thought at first that Bullhead Harvey was in luck again. I was about to hail him, but then the moon peeped out from behind a cloud, and I saw two things. First, that Bullhead wasn’t alone, and second, the man I took for Bullhead weren’t him at all, but a man considerably thinner, with a bush, as it looked like, of white hair. The white-haired fellow was in the stern of the boat watching the other man work, and the other man was not someone I cared to make acquaintance of on the river; or any other place, for that matter.”

“He was a big man,” I said, “with dark skin.”

Brunel shot me a glance, and Jake Mullins said, “If you know him, then you know why I hung back. Almost too big for the boat, he was, and either a Nubian or a Lascar, with a shaved head, and a neck quite as thick. He’d been leaning over the water when I first spied the boat, but then he stood up, hauling on a kind of chain mounted with hooks. The white-haired gent was talking to him in some queer argot, sounding pretty impatient, and holding on to the thwarts because the boat was rocking from side to side, fit to capsize.

“Presently, all of the chain was in, and the big man took up the anchor and let the boat drift a ways. The white-haired gent leaned over the side, making little passes of his hands, and I thought I saw a blue light burning. It was as if he had set fire to something, except that the flames burned upside down, if you see what I mean – under the water, instead of on it. There was mist or smoke above, swirling about as if trying to make a shape, before it blew away. This operation was repeated two or three times, and at last the white-haired gent hissed some instruction to the big man, who cast the coils of chain over the side again, and let the boat drift again before hauling in the chain – again with no luck, which made the white-haired gent pretty unhappy, I think.”

“You had plenty of time to see all this,” Brunel said.

“I was safely in the shadow of a jetty, for it’s around about obstructions to the river’s currents that I most often find what I’m looking for, and I sat still and watched a good while. Not daring to move, you see, in case they spotted me. I’m a strong rower, but that big man, he could have out-pulled a frigate, to my reckoning. So all I could do was watch, until after an hour the white-haired gent slumped back, and the big man took up the sculls and rowed off.”

Brunel said, “In what direction?”

“He was rowing against the current, and going faster than any boat I’ve ever seen. If I had made a run for it, he would have caught me before I’d gone more than a few lengths.” Jake Mullins drained his pint. “Well, that’s my tale, gents, and I hope it was worth your time and your money.”

As we walked back through the dusky street toward the yard, Brunel said thoughtfully, “Where do they go?”

I understood him at once. “I do not send them anywhere. I simply give them rest.”

“You have no misgivings about what you do? Some would say that it is very like murder.”

“They are not souls, Mr Brunel; if they were, it would not be my place to send them on. What people commonly call ghosts are not souls with some unfinished business that delays their passing over, but shells cast off at moments of intense, concentrated emotion. It is true that many are cast off at death, but not all who die cast off a ghost, and not all ghosts are cast off by the dying. Most are not long-lived, and almost all are damaged or deformed representations of the people who produce them. There are very few with whom you could hold a sensible conversation, and even fewer which would not feel relief at the moment of dissolution. They are poor frightened creatures that cling to a familiar place or a familiar person. Most often they haunt the person or the body of the person who cast them off, and those last often become attached to whoever finds that body. I believe that I am able to make a guess at Mr Jake Mullins’s occupation, even without your mention of ‘inquest money’.”

“He is a river finder. He and his kind dredge for all kinds of things by day – coal, animal bones, pieces of metal. They ferry contraband from one place to another, too, usually items of cargo from ships waiting to be unloaded.”

“But at night, Mr Mullins and his fellows look for bodies of the drowned.”

“He gets the reward, if there is one, and in any case five shillings from the police. Was he much . . . inhabited?”

“I should say that he has been pretty successful in his searches.”

“I should have warned you. I did not think.”

“None of them were harmful. They were mostly pathetic scraps. It was the number that astonished me.”

Brunel laughed. “A few days ago, I would have thought myself mad if I had found myself in the middle of a conversation like this.”

“A few days ago, you would not have considered attending a seance.”

“Perhaps I am mad,” Brunel said thoughtfully. “The dreams were certainly bad enough to be the dreams of a mad man. I suppose it would be too simple to think that I am haunted by the ghost of Ulpius Silvanus?”

“There was no ghost that I could detect. Of course, there are lesser creatures than ghosts. Imps of delirium and madness, and the like . . .”

Brunel looked at me from beneath the brim of his stovepipe hat. “What is wrong, Carlyle?”

“I have been a fool. There are creatures lesser than ghosts, and there are greater creatures, too. Something has been awakened, I think. Something very old, and once possessed of great power. Think, Mr Brunel. What kind of stone commonly becomes the focus of human desires?”

Brunel had the quickest mind of any man I have ever met. After only a moment, he said, “You think that Dr Pretorius is searching for an altar.”

“I do indeed. And because the remains we found are almost certainly those of a Roman soldier, I believe that it is an altar that was dedicated to some pagan god long before Christianity enlightened these shores. Pretorius spoke of stones under the city. And is the city not built, layer upon layer, upon its own past, like one of the coral reefs in the warmer seas of the Antipodes?”

“But what use would Pretorius have for an ancient altar? And what does the skeleton have to with it? I confess that I find this business baffling. The more we know, the less clear it becomes.”

“I believe that the poor man whose bones we found was sacrificed on the stone Pretorius seeks. His head was chopped off, and no doubt his blood was used in some dreadful rite. Just as the fingerbones led us to the skeleton, so the skeleton could lead to the stone. It is, after all, still missing its skull.”

“But did not Pretorius say, as a parting shot, that he had already found—”

Brunel broke off because the old fellow who guarded the gate of the yard at night was running down the narrow street toward us, slinging his rattle around his head and yelling murder.

The door of the shed had been smashed to kindling; only a few splinters still clung to its bent hinges. Brunel quickly ascertained that nothing had been taken but the skeleton, and closely questioned the watchman before giving him an address and instructing him to tell someone called Withers to find the Dowling brothers and bring them straight here within the half-hour.

As the watchman hurried off, I asked Brunel what he was planning. He put a match to a lantern, closed the glass on the yellow flame, and said, as much to himself as to me, “The lock of the gate is untouched, so it’s quite plain how they came here, and how they left with their prize,” and strode off through heaps of construction material toward the riverside edge of the yard.

I caught up with him on the wharf, where the boat with the canvas-covered load rocked on the greasy swell. I said, picking up from his absent-minded remark, “Pretorius saw me enter the tunnel with you. I should have guessed his vantage point after hearing Jake Mullins’s tale.”

“We always come back to the river,” Brunel said. He gave me the lantern, climbed down into the boat and began to undo the rope which lashed the canvas over what was soon revealed to be some kind of boiler: a pair of upright, conjoined cylinders cast from heavy, dull metal. The summer twilight had quite faded from the sky now, and lamps on moored ships and along the far side of the river were twinkling in the dusky blue.

Brunel began to fold up the canvas. “There’s no question that he has some need of those bones,” he said. “He tried to find them and failed, and then waited for us to haul them up. I am grievously at fault, Carlyle. I should have had the bones taken to a safer place.”

“The Tower might have done it,” I said, “but anywhere else might not have withstood Dr Pretorius’s determination. Your watchman was lucky that the theft was accomplished before he started his shift; we already know that Pretorius will murder to get what he wants.”

Brunel looked up at me. “I am determined to see this affair through to the end, and quickly. I would be grateful of your help, but I will understand if you feel that you have discharged your obligation.”

“Would it not be better to go to the police?”

“What would I tell the police? The truth is too fantastic, and anything less would not stir them to any great haste. Yet speed is of the essence now that Pretorius has his prize. He seemed very anxious to get hold of those bones, did he not? I do not think that he will waste time, now that he has them.”

“Do you propose that we break into his museum, then?”

“That’s what he wants us to do. Or at least, that’s what he wants you to do. Why else would he have been so careful to tell you where it was? I think he needs you as much as the bones, Mr Carlyle, and I also think that his choice of the location of his establishment was quite deliberate. It must be somewhere above the grave of this famous stone, for his neighbour mentioned the noise of construction work, which was no doubt the noise of excavation work.”

“Dr Pretorius has been digging down toward the place where the stone is buried.”

“Exactly. And that is his Achilles heel. Ah, here they are at last.”

An eager young man in a brown suit, with a bowler hat perched on red curls, was leading two labourers down the wharf. The red-haired man, Roger Withers, was Brunel’s assistant in his gaz experiments; the labourers, Thomas and William Dowling, were from the corps d’élite of men who had worked in the frames of the tunnelling shield. Brunel climbed out of the boat and briefly told them what had been stolen from him, and why he thought it important that he get it back. He introduced me as an antiquarian, made no mention of the supernatural part of the story, and concluded by saying that this was dangerous work, and if anyone wanted to jack now he’d think no worse of him.

Thomas Dowling, his vigorous black hair pulled back in a sailor’s pigtail, said that it couldn’t be worse than working the shield; his brother, a stocky man with a broad, ruddy face framed by mutton-chop whiskers, added that nothing could be worse than that. I saw that these rough, uneducated men had a deep respect for Brunel, and would have made a good fist of digging to the centre of the earth if he had proposed it.

“We’ll use the Lady Sophia,” Brunel told Withers. “Have Thomas and William fetch carbonate of ammonia and sulphuric acid, and let them break out tools they feel most comfortable using. I’ll prime her, and if you’re not back in five minutes I’ll be gone without you. Oh, and bring my pistol, and a bottle of brandy.”

As Withers and the two labourers dashed toward the shed, Brunel clambered back into the stern of the boat and began tinkering with the valves and levers of its curious boiler. There was a sharp, distinct chemical smell, and water gurgled through copper pipes that groaned and cracked as they took up their burden.

“I must suppose,” I said, after I had climbed down, “that this is one of your gaz engines.”

“It is the only gaz engine we have,” Brunel said, laying a hand on its pipes. “No doubt you have noticed that it has two condensers. One is warmed by circulation of hot water, and the other is cooled by passing cold water through its tubes. I am running the engine on a closed, inefficient cycle to establish that important differential. At full power, gas expands in the heated condenser and is held in its condensed state in the other, giving a difference of some thirty-five atmospheres. That provides the motive force to drive a longitudinal paddle wheel beneath the stern. If we could but scale it up, we could get a man-of-war up to twenty knots.”

“As it is,” Withers said, appearing at the edge of the wharf above our heads, “it’s a miracle we haven’t blown ourselves to kingdom come, and most of Rotherhithe with us. Here are the carboys, Mr Brunel. I reckon we’re about as ready as we’ll ever be.”

“And my pistol?”

“I have it here, Mr Brunel. May I say that I am not happy to bring it along.”

“We may need the advantage of a little surprise,” Brunel said. “Get everything aboard, Mr Withers, as quickly as you can.”

The carboys, cradled in wicker baskets packed with straw, were carefully lowered to the boat. Brunel siphoned heavy, oily acid from one, while Withers scooped gritty white powder from the other into a hopper. The two brothers settled in the bow, packed in tight with an armoury of picks and crowbars, and a long-shanked maul. The pipe-bound double cylinder of the gaz engine began to emit an urgent rattle and a high-pitched whistle that quickly climbed beyond the range of human hearing. A red needle moved by distinct jerks across the calibrated face of a pressure valve. The oiled brass and steel elbow of the driveshaft crank lifted and jammed; Brunel whacked it smartly with a spanner and it began to pump smoothly up and down. He took a cigar from a waistcoat pocket and lit it from the lamp, watched the trembling needle creep toward zenith, and at last declared that we were ready to go.

Thomas Dowling cast off at the bow, and Withers cast off at the stern. The little boat thumped against the pilings of the wharf, and then Brunel engaged the driveshaft and the boat shook itself and shot forward into the main current of the river.

I shall always remember that short voyage upriver. Driven by the gaz engine, the brave little boat cut a fast and sure path against the current. Waves stood at right angles on either side of its bow, and a wide foamy wake beaten by the paddle wheel spread behind, glimmering on the river’s black flood. Brunel stood with his cigar jammed in the middle of a broad grin, one hand clapped to the brim of his stovepipe hat, the other on the wheel which was connected by a jointed shaft to the rudder. Darkness was thickening in the air, and long constellations of lights twinkled on either side of us. We passed through the central arch of the five white stone arches of London Bridge, passed beneath the span of Southwark Bridge’s ironwork causeway, and overtook a string of barges, quite startling the lighterman at the tiller, who stood up and shouted and waved his cap at us as we sped past. The necklace of gas lights strung along Blackfriars Bridge quickly drew near. At Brunel’s instructions, Withers opened a valve, exhausting pressure from the condensing cylinders in a series of sharp retorts, and the Lady Sophia’s speed dropped to less than a knot.

We cut in close to the embankment, puttered past two paddle wheel boats at their moorings, and turned into a wide recess in the slimy stone wall of the embankment, with the bridge’s first arch looming high above us and a great iron grating ahead, half-submerged in the slop of the river.

The two labourers grappled us tight to this portcullis. A dank fetid breeze blew from the darkness beyond it. I could hear, on the road thirty feet above, the sound of horses’ hooves and the clatter of cartwheels, and snatches of conversation that rose for a moment above the dull roar of the city. My heart was beating in my throat. I had the strange notion that at any moment a policeman would lean over the wall, and raise a hue and cry.

Brunel directed the light of a lantern over the ironwork. His face was flushed with exhilaration, his gaze sharp. He pointed to a joint, and William Dowling applied the tip of his pick and heaved smartly upward. A whole section of the iron grid swung forward, and Brunel and the labourers lifted it above their heads and Withers lashed it tight.

Brunel wiped his hands with a bit of oily cloth and said, “My guess is that this is how Pretorius came and went. He cut this through, bolted on hinges, and wired the whole thing shut beneath the waterline. You’ll notice the cuts are fresh, Mr Carlyle, and not yet rusted over.”

William Dowling was leaning over the side, probing the water with his pick. He reported that he thought we had enough clearance, and we grabbed hold of the sides of the opening and hauled our little boat through. As soon as we had passed beyond the grating, I felt an agitation in my breast pocket. It was the fingerbones, rattling inside their tin. Brunel looked at me when I took it out, his face a pale smear in the gloom, and said, “We must be on the right track.”

“Where does this lead?”

“To Hampstead, eventually,” Brunel said. “This is the Fleet River, although it is more sewer than river now. Break out the brandy, Mr Withers. We’ll all have a nip to hearten us before we go on.”

The brandy bottle was passed around, and we all took our nip, and wet our handkerchiefs and tied them over our noses and mouths against the stench. Adjustments were made to the gaz engine, and we puttered forward at walking pace. Thomas Dowling stood at the bow and held up a lantern, illuminating slimy brick walls that curved up on either side to a ceiling a good thirty feet overhead, heavy stone arches, and a kind of quay or raised path to our left. Water gushed from side channels cut at different heights in the walls, and dripped from the arched ceiling, where a forest of white stalactites clung. The stench thickened, palpable in the black air. The water was flecked with islands of filthy foam. The bloated carcass of a dog bumped against the side of the boat, dipped and whirled, and waltzed away.

Brunel told me that this stygian channel had once been the tidal inlet of a tributary of the Thames that rose in Hampstead and flowed south through Camden and King’s Cross. It had marked the western boundary of the city in Roman times – the line of the old wall was to our right. The lower reach, through which we were passing, had been widened and deepened after the Great Fire of London to make a canal with wharves thirty feet wide on either side, but it had quickly fallen into disuse, and a hundred years ago the river between Holborn and Fleet Bridges had been arched over and Fleet Market built on top. The rest of the lower reach had been channelled underground thirty years later, and only a few years ago Fleet Market had been moved, Farringdon Street had been laid out, and the buried river had become no more than a main channel for the area’s sewer system. So the living become transmuted, and diminish when translated to the realm of the dead, and yet still persist.

We passed between great stone bulwarks: the remains, according to Brunel, of the footings of Fleet Bridge. Farringdon Street was now directly above us. I was quite unable to match our underground thoroughfare with the living street thirty feet above our heads, but as we passed a channel cut through the high kerb on our left, the bones began to rattle even more furiously in their tin. Brunel swung the bow of the Lady Sophia about, and asked the two labourers to check the depth of the channel.

“There’s a breeze blowing out of it,” Withers said.

“I can feel it too,” Brunel said. “What do you feel, Mr Carlyle?”

“A certain oppression, from the close atmosphere.”

“But nothing else?”

“It is curious. This is a very ancient place, and yet—”

William Dowling, who had been leaning out at the bow, sinking his pick here and there in the water, suddenly reared back with a cry. “I saw a face,” he said. “Looking up at me out of the water.”

“You saw a reflection of this lantern light,” his brother said. “Don’t mind him, Mr Brunel. He had a little more than a nip of your fine brandy.”

“It was a man pale as snow,” William Dowling said. “Very handsome and very horrible at the same time.”

“Not your own reflection then,” his brother said, “unless you were mistaken about the handsome part.”

I insisted on looking, but saw only rippling lines of lantern light moving to and fro like yellow water snakes over the black surface of the thick current. Thomas Dowling retrieved his brother’s pick, the handle of which stood up from the surface like the hilt of Excalibur, and reported that there was a good three feet of draught.

“We’ll push on, boys,” Brunel said, and opened the throttle of the gaz engine. The boat glided through the channel into the arch of the low tunnel beyond. The dripping bricks of the ceiling were only five or six feet above the water, and we had to crouch low. Once, a pipe on top of the gaz engine snagged on something, but the boat shuddered and scraped free. Then the echo of the beat of its driveshaft dropped away, and cooler, slightly fresher air blew in our faces. Thomas Dowling raised his lantern above his head, and Withers held up another; by their double light I saw that we had entered a wide lake under a high ceiling of fan vaulting – the flooded cellar of some ancient building long buried by the accretion of centuries. A rushing stream dropped in a fall of white foam from a narrow channel at the far end, and there was a bank of tumbled stones and clay along the left-hand side. A rowing boat was tied up at the foot of a rough wooden staircase that dropped down to this narrow shore from a ragged opening in the ceiling.

As Brunel steered toward this, the fingerbones beat so strongly in their tin that it jumped from my grasp and fell into the puddle of water at my feet. As I bent to retrieve it, a breeze got up out of the darkness, and the boat began to rock. Little waves ran across the width of the lake and broke in white water on the stones of the banked shore. Spray flew up and dissolved into a thickening mist that rolled over the unrestful water. Brunel looked at me, one eyebrow raised, and I told him that as in the tunnel it was a phenomenon with no cause that I could discern.

The bow of the boat bumped against the shore, and the two labourers sprang out, thigh-deep in swirling mist, and made us fast. I drew the blade from my cane and clambered out after Brunel, who told Withers to stay with the boat and keep the engine pressured before leading the Dowling brothers and me up the rickety stair.

The bones tick-tick-ticked in the tin, matching the pulse in the base of my throat. We climbed out into a clammy, stone-floored basement, and something toadlike stirred above the door on the far side. I dismissed it in a moment, but before I could raise my own warning the door burst open and half a dozen men crowded through, all of them with shrunken, misshapen heads, all of them armed with pistols.

Dr Pretorius stepped into the room behind them, his smile triumphant, and bade us welcome.

*   *   *

My cane was taken from me, William and Thomas Dowling were relieved of their pick and crowbar, and Brunel of his pistol and pocket knife. Dr Pretorius thrust a pale hand toward me, and I gave him the tin containing the fingerbones. He held it to his ear for a moment, and said, “Is this what led you to the remains of Ulpius Silvanus?”

“Where are his bones?” I said. “And for that matter, who is he, and what do you want with him?”

“All will become clear soon,” Dr Pretorius said, tapping the side of his nose.

The Dowling brothers were tied up and left in the care of two of the shrunken-headed men; Brunel and I were herded back down the stair. Withers was waiting for us at the bottom, sitting on the ground with his hands clasped on his head, the giant savage in his Arabian Nights finery standing watch over him, a pistol in each fist.

“Bring him along,” Dr Pretorius said. “We may be in need of fresh blood.” As we picked our way along a narrow path beaten through the rubble, he told me, “It has all worked out very nicely. You saved me the trouble of bringing up the bones, and then you delivered yourself into my hands. There is still time to recant, by the way. Come in with me now, and your reward will be of this world, and not the next. We will do such things as men have only dreamed of.”

“I believe you have already had my answer,” I said.

“You’ll help me anyway,” Dr Pretorius said. “But it would be so much more convenient, and I would be far more forgiving of your friends’ trespasses, if you were to give your help freely. Through here, if you please.”

A low, irregular opening had been hacked into the tightly mortared stones of the wall at the far end of the lake. Menaced by the pistols of Dr Pretorius’s servants, Brunel, Withers and I scrambled through a passage driven through the earth to a low-ceilinged, stone-floored grotto lit by lanterns that hung from a ceiling of overlapping boards propped up by a forest of stout beams. Shovels and picks lay in a heap in a corner; tall jars of black glass each as big as a hogshead barrel stood in a row along one wall; and something square and waist-high was shrouded in a red and gold Persian rug in the centre.

Withers, his upper arm gripped by the enormous hand of the savage, shivered at my side while Brunel coolly walked around the perimeter, tapping the supports and advising Dr Pretorius to have them wedged more tightly, before the whole enterprise collapsed upon him.

Dr Pretorius turned his greedy, exultant smile to me. “He doesn’t know anything important, does he? Numbers and angles, cosines and arcs and logarithms, pounds per square inch—” He snapped his long white fingers, dismissing them. “We know, don’t we, Mr Carlyle, that such trivial calculations are of as much use as smoke in manipulating the true nature of the world. It is not matter which is important, but the forms that underlie matter. By mastering those forms, we can master the world, and the world beyond the world too.”

He strutted across the grotto, his mop of white curls brushing the ceiling, and ran a hand over the top of one of the squat jars, like a proud mother tousling the hair of a favoured child. “This is a new race of the children of men,” he said, “formed by my own artifice and soon to be quickened by the life force that I have discovered. A race able to live in both worlds at once, and mediate them directly. You and I have trained long in the matter of the living and the dead, Mr Carlyle, but my creatures will be able to do all that we can, and much more, as easily as breathing. And I will be their god.”

“Monsters,” Withers said. His face was as pale as milk under his shock of red hair.

“Quite so,” Dr Pretorius said. “A new world of gods and monsters!”

He stepped up to the square form in the centre of the grotto and pulled the rug away, revealing a pediment constructed of heavy blocks of stained limestone and faced with a carving of a man riding a bull, with a familiar tangle of blackened bones draped across its dished top.

“The altar of the temple of the sun-god, Mithras,” he said. “Roman soldiers brought the cult to London, and sacrificed bulls to drive back the darkness of the forests around their fledgling city. They believed that the spilled blood of the bull killed by Mithras was the life force from which sprang every kind of plant and animal, and so the blood of their sacrifices has charged this altar with a special potency. At least one man was sacrificed too. His head was buried here, and his body was wrapped in a bull’s hide and thrown into the River Fleet. At last, washed to and fro on the tides of many centuries, it came to rest above the path of Mr Brunel’s pitiful little tunnel. You feel its potency, don’t you, Mr Carlyle? Do not deny it – I can see in your face that you do.”

The carving on the front of the altar was very similar to the design of the buckle that Brunel and I had found with Ulpius Silvanus’s skeleton. I saw now that the man was not merely riding the bull: watched by two robed and hooded figures, one holding its torch high, the other low, he was pulling back the bull’s head with his left hand while cutting its throat with a long narrow knife held in his right, all this within a ring in which dogs and scorpions and hares and fantastic chimeras chased each other’s tails.

As I stared at this carving, only half-hearing Dr Pretorius’s gloating speech, I saw a star kindle deep within the stone, and discovered that I could not look away. The star grew brighter and brighter until with a soundless explosion it burst open like a flower, shining beyond the limits of the stone. I cried out and clapped my hands over my eyes, but the light burned through everything. I could see, past the shadows of my own hand bones, the shadows of the bones within the flesh of the men around me; could see the misshapen homunculi stir in their black glass jars; could see at the heart of the light, like a pupa in its case, a ragged unformed figure jerking back and forth, as if trying to free itself. Then it stilled, and turned its terrible dark gaze toward me.

Brunel told me later that I bellowed like a wounded bull and staggered backward and dropped to my knees, the heels of my hands pressed tight to my eyes. As everyone turned to look at me, he planted his back against the wall and kicked as hard as he could at one of the timbers that supported the roof. It gave with a rending sound and he kicked again and it dropped free, thumping on the stone floor as gravel and stones, and then a cascade of water burst out of the widening hole in the low ceiling. Wherever the water splashed on the stone floor it burst into steam, filling the little grotto with twisting snakes of white vapour, but most of the flood hung in the air as if pouring into an invisible mould: a glassy column that spun faster and faster, with the form of a man becoming dimly visible within it.

I was jolted from my fugue by cold, filthy water washing over my knees, thighs and waist, and staggered to my feet as the flood continued to rise. For a moment, the glassy figure stared straight at me, and then the spinning column burst, drenching everyone and everything. Half the lanterns hung from the ceiling immediately went out; the rest swung crazily, sending shadows swarming around the flooded grotto. Dr Pretorius was knocked down, his pale hands clawing above swirling water as his servants rushed to his aid, and I grabbed a pick and swung it at the dazzling block of the altar.

I still do not know if the impulse was mine, or if it sprang from the knowledge that had been rammed into my brain.

Black bones smashed; metal rang on stone. Drenched, half-blinded by light that only I could see, I swung again and again. I was dimly aware that Withers was beside me, matching me stroke for stroke, and then one of the stones shattered and the burning flower burst like a soap bubble. The flood surged higher and we were all of us knocked down. Hardly aware of where I was, I breathed in a solid gush of water that seared all the way to the bottom of my lungs. Someone grabbed me and hauled me upright, and I saw, beyond a swarm of green and red after-images, that Dr Pretorius and his servants were battling an army of snakes made entirely of water. A glassy python surged around the trunk of the giant savage and bore him under; Dr Pretorius was clinging with one arm to one of the black jars and swiping at darting ropes of water with the other. Then Brunel and Withers dragged me backward, through the half-flooded tunnel.

The lake had risen too. Waves full of a milky light dashed over the bank, washing over our knees. The Lady Sophia swung back and forth at its mooring, banging against the stairway. At the far end of the lake, only the keystone of the arch showed above the restless water.

We had climbed to the top of the tottering stairs when Brunel suddenly damned himself for a fool and swung over the rail. Withers tried to pull him back, but Brunel shook off his assistant’s grip, shouted that he would put an end to this and we must save ourselves, and swarmed down the frame of the stairs toward the tossing boat. I was still half-blinded and dizzy; Withers got his shoulder under me and helped me into the basement, where the two brothers were struggling furiously to free themselves of their bonds, and the servants that Dr Pretorius had left to guard them lay in insensible heaps on the stone floor.

“They fell down like unstrung puppets just a moment ago,” Thomas Dowling said, as Withers sawed at his ropes with a knife he had found on one of the unconscious servants.

“I think they were intimately connected to Pretorius,” I said. “Perhaps he too is unconscious.”

Withers said, “Only unconscious? I hope the monster is drowned.”

He had cut through the rope binding Thomas Dowling’s arms, and had begun to free William, when Brunel appeared at the door, soaked through, wide-eyed, and breathless. “No time for that,” he said. “She’s set to blow!”

We fled up a flight of stairs and burst through heavy curtains into a big room cluttered with cases and glass jars on stands. Faintly lit by lamplight that filtered through the gold-painted windows, a two-headed baby drowned in oily liquid inside a tall cylindrical jar opened both pairs of eyes and stared at me; at the same moment, the polished wood floor heaved violently and the curtains billowed out and a great gush of black smoke filled the room. Jars tottered and fell and smashed, the windows all fell in, and the floor heaved again and with a great groaning crack split jaggedly down the centre.

Forty or fifty feet below us, the gaz engine of the Lady Sophia had exploded like a bomb.

Everything in the museum slid toward the crack, gaining speed, smashing together, and dropping into the smoking abyss. Thomas Dowling hauled his brother up the tilted floor by the scruff of his shirt; I clung to Withers as he helped Brunel knock shards of glass from a window frame. We piled through, sodden, smoke-begrimed, hatless and breathless. Roof tiles and broken glass smashed on the pavement all around. We picked ourselves up and ran, pursued by a great wave of smoke and plaster dust as the building dropped in on itself floor by floor, plummeting into the great cavity beneath.

June, 1954

No story is ever finished.

I decided to write this account of my adventure with the brilliant young engineer after I read in The Times that an excavation under the direction of Professor W.F. Grimes of the Museum of London had uncovered the remains of a small Roman temple. It had been built in the early part of the third century, and sculptures and a silver incense box buried under the stone floor suggested that it had been dedicated to the worship of the Persian god Mithras.

I paid a visit that afternoon. The site was not on Farringdon Street, but within the old walls of the City, near the buried course of the Walbrook River. Raw new buildings of red brick or steel and concrete were springing up everywhere, but the considerable scars left by the war were still much in evidence. New office buildings and brief rows of surviving Victorian buildings stood amidst the rubble fields of bomb-sites. Only a few months after the firestorms of the Blitz, these ruins had become fields of wild flowers as seeds buried for centuries woke in the ashes: lupins, poppies, pansies, violets and, most notably, the yellow flowers of London Rocket.

The site of the temple had been discovered while the foundations for an office block were being dug. The archaeologists worked in plain view, in an oblong terraced pit set at an oblique angle to the street. I confess to being gripped by considerable apprehension as I approached, but if there had ever been ghosts or other revenants at that place, they had long since departed. It was pleasant to lean on my cane in the warm sunlight and watch the crew of young men and women at work amongst a narrow maze of low stone walls set at different levels, uncovering the past inch by inch with trowels and paintbrushes, sifting spoil through wire-mesh pans, washing finds in rocking trays of water.

I knew, as they did not, that this temple was not the first in London to be dedicated to Mithras. Dr Pretorius had hunted out the original, and uncovered not only a source of power but the site of an ancient tragedy. The temple founded by Ulpius Silvanus had stood just outside the boundary of the new city, beyond the western bank of the Fleet river. As the city grew and became more settled and civilized, and more and more soldiers retired from duty at the borders of the Empire to become merchants and traders, the Mithraic cult had become more concerned with fostering the business concerns of its members than with sacrifice, and a sizeable faction had argued that the temple should be resited inside the city, within the safety of the newly built city wall. Ulpius Silvanus had refused to listen to them, and they had murdered him on the altar of the temple that he had built.

I had learned all this in the instant when I had confronted his ghost, and I had told the story to Brunel and the others as we warmed ourselves with brandy in the long shed at the site of the Thames Tunnel.

“The ghost was bound to the skull buried beneath the altar, mingling with the puissance of the accumulated charge of the sacrifices. But it retained a connection to the rest of the bones, too. It was able to follow the ways of water like a spider at the centre of its web. That is why, I think, I felt no presence in the tunnel.”

Brunel favoured me with his sharp, inquisitive gaze. “Did any of Pretorius’s boasts have substance, or was he a raving lunatic? I favour the latter explanation, of course.”

“Amen,” Withers said.

“You did not see what was inside the altar,” I said.

“I saw you fall to your knees and cry out,” Brunel said. “I saw the flood water behaving strangely, as if vibrating to some harmonic, and all the rest was smash and flood and every man for himself.”

“You freed something,” Withers said. He had a blanket draped over his shoulders, and although he was no longer shivering he was hunched into himself, clutching his glass of brandy in both hands. He said, “I felt it pass through me, like a wind.”

I said, “The ghost of Ulpius Silvanus has become something more than the ghost of a man, and something less than the ghost of a god.”

Brunel nodded, and for a moment we were all lost to each other in our own thoughts. Then he raised his glass and said, “Whatever we believe we saw – or did not see – we have defeated something evil. Let’s be content with that.”

You know the rest of his story, of course. Work on the Thames Tunnel eventually resumed, and it was completed eleven years later. At Brunel’s invitation I attended the opening ceremony and finally met his father; neither of us mentioned the skeleton that we had retrieved from the river, or anything of our adventures. By then, Isambard Kingdom Brunel had become the most famous engineer of an age in which engineers were feted as heroes. He built more than a thousand miles of railway. He built bridges and viaducts and tunnels; although he did not live to see it completed, he designed the beautiful suspension bridge over Clifton Gorge. He built three great ships, and the strain of finishing the last of these, the Great Eastern, brought on his early death.

It was at Napier Yard in the Isle of Dogs, in the shadow of his great, doomed ship, that I last saw him. It was a foul, rain-whipped night in late December, some twenty-five years after the affair of Dr Pretorius and the lost temple. For the last four weeks, Brunel and his men had laboured unsuccessfully to ease the Great Eastern down steel tracks into the river, and now, to almost universal derision, the project was stalled. He was prematurely aged and very weary. He walked with the aid of a stick, and his face was haggard and deeply lined, and spots of hectic colour burned on his cheeks. His former energy showed only in his fierce gaze.

He had engaged me to discover if the series of accidents and frustrations that had dogged the launch had been caused by some malign ghost or spirit. I walked the canted, half-finished deck with him, in gusty rain that a freezing wind harried across the dark marshes and muddy fields, and at the end told him that I could find nothing.

“It’s good to know,” he said, after we had repaired to the shelter of his office. He had a bad cough, and his voice rasped from an old injury to his throat. “The press is taunting me, I am plagued by idiotic suggestions from half the cranks in England, my shipbuilder is so bitterly jealous of me, and so bad at managing his business, that he tries to avoid his commitments while at the same time demanding advance payments for work that he has not done . . . So it is good to know that I must deal with a mere engineering problem. I have already ordered more hydraulic presses from the Tangye brothers. They are excellent men, and in the New Year I will have her afloat, I promise you. Unless, of course,” he added, with a wry smile, “you could invoke that ghost from our old adventure, and raise such a tide that would float her, cradle and all, straight off the slipway.”

“That is beyond such little power as I have, I fear,” I said.

Brunel insisted on paying my fee. “I would swear that you haven’t aged a day since I last saw you,” he said, as I drew on my Inverness cape.

“It is one of the few perks of my trade.”

“You should—” he said, and was seized by a coughing fit, and had to take a drink of water before he could speak again. “You should teach me that trick. I still have so much to do.”

“It would take up all of your life, as it has mine. You would have no time for your great works.”

“Pretorius was right, wasn’t he? There are two worlds, and you must choose which to inhabit.”

“He was wrong about most things,” I said. “But he was right about that.”

I did not see Brunel again. The Great Eastern was launched in the New Year, but Brunel was still embroiled in disputes with his shipbuilder, who against his advice had been given the contract to outfit the ship. He suffered a massive stroke a few days before the Great Eastern’s maiden voyage, and as he lay dying received news that two of the ship’s boilers had exploded, destroying a funnel and the grand saloon, and killing six of the crew. His ship was so strongly built that she easily survived the disaster, but for Brunel it was a fatal blow, and he died the same night.

As for Dr Pretorius, he somehow survived the destruction of the lost temple, and a few years later quit the country for the United States, ahead of a scandal involving a patent electric elixir. At the time I write, he is living in some great style on the Baja Coast in Mexico, having made a fortune treating movie stars at his clinic. Although I admit that I have a faint professional curiosity about how he has lived to such a great age (my own springs naturally from my familiarity with the matter of the dead though I suspect that there is nothing natural about Dr Pretorius’s longevity), nonetheless I have no desire to see him again, or to ever attempt to invoke the mingled ghost of Mithras and Ulpius Silvanus. As for myself, I have continued in my trade. I know no other.

Our stories have no proper endings, but are braided into a great unending tapestry, and each of us, living or dead, understands only a little of that grand design.

I was still standing in the sunlight at the edge of the excavation, thinking of the young engineer, and Dr Pretorius and the lost temple, when one of the archaeologists called to me. She was a slim, pretty young woman in dungarees and wellington boots, her hair tied up in a bright red scarf, her lively face further enlivened by a bold dash of lipstick, her hands on her hips as she looked up at me from the floor of the past. She had mistaken me for a visiting scholar, and wondered if I had business with Professor Grimes. He was away at a meeting, she said, and would not be back until tomorrow.

“It is quite all right,” I said. “I’m no more than an idle spectator. There is nothing to trouble me here.”

STEPHEN JONES & KIM NEWMAN

Necrology: 2002

MORE THAN EVER, WE ARE MARKING the passing of writers, artists, performers and technicians who, during their lifetimes, made significant contributions to the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres (or left their mark on popular culture and music in other, often fascinating, ways) . . .

AUTHORS/ARTISTS

60-year-old science fiction writer Jack (“Jay”) C. (Carroll) Haldeman II, the elder brother of author Joe Haldeman, died on January 1st of complications of kidney cancer after entering a hospice care centre. He produced nine novels and around 100 short stories since 1971, often writing in collaboration with his brother, his wife Barbara Delaplace, and fellow SF authors Harry Harrison, Andrew J. Offutt, Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. His books include Vector Analysis (1978), High Steel, Bill the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Zombie Vampires and the Star Trek novelization Perry’s Planet. He also contributed to the Spaceways series under the pseudonym “John Cleve”. In 1974 Haldeman chaired the World Science Fiction Convention in Washington, D.C.

Mexican composer Juan García Esquivel, whose credits include TV’s Battlestar Galactica, died on January 3rd, aged 83.

Comics artist John Buscema died of stomach cancer on January 10th, aged 74. After stints at Timely Comics and Dell (where he adapted the movie The 7th Voyage of Sinbad), he joined Marvel in 1966 where he worked on such titles as Conan the Barbarian, Silver Surfer, Howard the Duck, Ka-Zar, The Mighty Thor, Sub-Mariner, The Incredible Hulk, Fantastic Four, The Avengers and Raiders of the Lost Ark. He also designed She-Hulk and illustrated the daily Conan newspaper strip from 1978 onwards. He wrote the manual How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way with Stan Lee and, despite retiring in 1996, teamed up with Lee again in 2001 to radically reinvent Superman for a one-off publication from rival DC Comics.

Emmy Award-winning TV writer Mike [Merrill D.] Marmer, whose credits include the 1970–72 series Lancelot Link Secret Chimp (as co-creator) and episodes of Gilligan’s Island, F Troop and Get Smart, died of pancreatic cancer on January 12th, aged 76.

Cele Goldsmith [Lalli], the former editor of Amazing and Fantastic digest magazines from 1958 until 1965, was killed in an automobile accident on January 14th, aged 68. She apparently lost control of the vehicle and hit a tree near her Newtown, Connecticut, home. While an editor for Ziff-Davis, Goldsmith Lalli bought early stories by a number of authors, including Piers Anthony, Ben Bova, Thomas M. Disch, Harlan Ellison, Roger Zelazny and Ursula K. Le Guin. She won a Special Hugo Award in 1962. In 1998 she retired as editor-in-chief of Modern Bride magazine after thirty-three years.

TV writer Gene Wyckoff (Eugene Wyckoff Bilik) died of complications from cancer on January 15th, aged 76. He scripted the 1950 ABC-TV series Buck Rogers starring Kim Dibbs.

Film and TV character actor and singer Sheldon Allman died of heart failure on January 22nd, aged 77. As a songwriter, he worked on Mr. Ed and such cartoons as Super Chicken and George of the Jungle, and with Bobby “Boris” Pickett he co-wrote the 1967 stage musical I’m Sorry the Bridge is Out, You’ll Have to Spend the Night, which was filmed in 1994 as Frankenstein Sings (aka Monster Mash the Movie). His comedy LP Sing Along with Drac came out in 1960.

British theatre, film and TV writer, director and producer John McGrath, who scripted Ken Russell’s sci-spy movie Billion Dollar Brain, died of pneumonia the same day, aged 66.

Comic-book artist Kurt Schaffenberger, who worked on Captain Marvel for Fawcett in the 1940s and early 1950s, died of diabetes on January 24th, aged 81. He was also the artist on Lois Lane and other DC Comics titles.

Animator T.M. “Tom” Yakutis died of lymphoma on January 25th, aged 72. He began his career as a storyboard artist at Disney in 1956 and later worked as a story director for Hanna-Barbera’s The Jetsons series and designed the 1977 cartoon feature Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown.

Swedish fantasy and children’s writer Astrid Lindgren (Astrid Anna Amelia Ericsson) died in her sleep following a brief viral infection on January 28th, aged 94. Most famous for her 1941 book Pippi Longstocking and its various sequels, she also wrote the high fantasies The Brothers Lionhart and Ronja the Robber’s Daughter. Her 1954 novel Mio My Son was filmed in 1987 starring Christopher Lee. With total sales of Lindgren’s books exceeding 100 million, a Lindgren theme park opened in Sweden in 1989 and attracts 300,000 visitors each year. A stamp was issued in her honour in March 2002.

60-year-old Cathleen Jordan (Cathleen Gunn), the editor of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine for twenty years, died in her sleep in New York City on January 31st. She had been ill with flu-like symptoms which were not thought to be serious. A posthumous winner of the 2002 Ellery Queen Award, Jordan also edited twenty-one anthologies taken from the magazine.

Swiss-born mystery and young-adult author Isabelle Holland, whose novel Bump in the Night was filmed for TV in 1991, died on February 9th, aged 81. Her 1972 novel The Man Without a Face was made into a 1993 movie starring Mel Gibson.

Author and film buff Alan G. (Gregory) Barbour died on February 12th, aged 68. The editor and publisher of Screen Facts Magazine, his books about the movies include Days of Thrills and Adventure, The Thrill of It All, A Thousand and One Delights, Cliffhanger and Saturday Afternoon at the Movies.

Children’s author Virginia [Esther] Hamilton, whose second novel The House Dies Drear won an Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1968 and was filmed for TV in 1984, died of breast cancer on February 19th, aged 65. The Newbery Medal and National Book Award-winning author’s The Planet of Junior Brown was also filmed in 1997. Her other books include Zeely, M.C. Higgins the Great, Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush, and Willie Bea and the Time the Martians Landed.

British novelist A. (Audrey) L. (Lilian) Barker died on February 21st, aged 83. The author of eleven acclaimed novels, she appeared in the first Pan Book of Horror Stories (1959) and was also a regular contributor to William Kimber’s ghost anthologies from 1979 until 1987.

Innovative German musician and physicist Oskar Sala died in Berlin on February 26th, aged 91. An early pioneer in electronic music, he composed pieces for Snow White and Rose Red, The Strangler of Blackmoor Castle, The Secret of Dr Mabuse and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

British fan and amateur film-maker Harry Nadler died of a heart attack at work on March 1st, aged 61. In 1966 he co-edited the one-shot fanzine Alien Worlds with Charles Partington, and from 1969 until 1971 he edited five issues of L’Incroyable Cinema, one of Britain’s seminal and best small-press fantasy-film magazines. In 1990 he founded and organized the annual Festival of Fantastic Films in Manchester.

Disney animator and writer Bill Berg died of pneumonia on March 2nd, aged 84. He worked on the Donald Duck cartoon series and wrote for the TV shows Mickey Mouse Mouse Club and Wonderful World of Disney.

Soviet screenwriter Fridrikh Gorenstein died in Berlin, Germany, on March 3rd, aged 69. In 1972 he co-scripted Solaris with director Andrei Tarkovsky.

Country-music songwriter Harlan Howard died unexpectedly at his Nashville home the same day. He was 74 and had suffered from heart trouble for some time. Some of his biggest hits include “I Fall to Pieces”, “Busted”, “Heartaches by the Number” and “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail”. In 1961 he had fifteen songs on the country charts at the same time.

69-year-old Bennett Byron Sims, former president of Warner Publishing where he oversaw Warner Books and DC Comics, died of cancer on March 5th. A former Warner Bros. motion picture executive and scriptwriter, he also came up with the National Enquirer’s slogan “Inquiring Minds Want to Know”.

German-born surrealist painter Mati Klarwein (aka “Abdul Mati”), who designed psychedelic album covers for such musicians as Santana, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia and Earth Wind & Fire, died in Mallorca, Spain, on March 6th, aged 69. Klarwein also produced covers for various Ballantine books, including titles by Philip José Farmer, David Gerrold, John Wyndham and R.A. Lafferty.

New Zealand-born author Cherry Wilder (Cherry Barbara Lockett) died on March 14th in a nursing home in Wellington after a long battle with cancer. She was 71. Her first story was published in 1974 in New Writings in SF 24, since when she also published poetry and criticism, and her short fiction appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Interzone, Asimov’s Ghosts, Best SF 16, New Terrors, Dark Voices, Skin of the Soul, Phantoms of Venice, Gathering the Bones and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Her books include the Ditmar Award-winning “Torin” trilogy (The Luck of Brin’s Five, The Nearest Fire and The Tapestry Warriors), the “Rulers of Hylor” trilogy (A Princess of the Chameln, Yorath the Wolf and The Summer’s King), the “Rhomary” series (Second Nature and Signs of Life), and the horror novel Cruel Designs. Her collection Dealers in Light and Darkness was published in 1995 by Edgewood Press, and at the time of her death she left three unpublished novels and was working on a new “Hylor” trilogy for Tor books. In the late 1990s Wilder returned to her native New Zealand after living in West Germany with her late husband and two daughters since 1976.

87-year-old Irish-American author R. (Raphael) A. (Aloysius) Lafferty died on March 18th after a long illness which included two strokes and the onset of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. He did not start writing until he was in his forties, and his first SF story appeared in Science Fiction Stories in 1960. Over the next two decades he produced more than 200 short stories and over twenty novels, including Past Master (1968), Fourth Mansions, The Reefs of Earth, The Devil is Dead and Serpent’s Egg. Lafferty stopped writing in 1984, but his books continued to appear, many of them from small presses. He won the 1973 Hugo Award for his story “Eurema’s Dam” and the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1990.

British rock musician and novelist John B. (Barry) Spencer died of endocarditis on March 25th, aged 57. The founder of the influential Young Artists illustration agency, his eight genre books include the 1975 SF novel The Electronic Lullaby Meat Market and the “Charley Case” series.

British scriptwriter and broadcaster Barry Took died of cancer on March 31st, aged 73. During the late 1950s and 1960s he collaborated with writer-performer Marty Feldman (who died in 1983) on a number of TV and radio series and the movie Every Home Should Have One (aka Think Dirty). His books include an autobiography, A Point of View (1990), and Star Turns: The Life and Times of Benny Hill and Frankie Howerd.

Mystery and SF writer Henry Slesar died of complications from minor elective surgery on April 2nd, aged 74. The author of more than 500 short stories (under his own name and as “O.H. Leslie”, “Jay Street”, “John Murray” and others), fifty-five radio plays and six books, he won two Edgar Awards. His story “Bottle Baby” was filmed as Terror from the Year 5000, he scripted the movie Two on a Guillotine and co-scripted the 1971 Murders in the Rue Morgue. He novelized the Ray Harryhausen film 20 Million Miles to Earth, and around fifty of his scripts were produced for the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He also scripted episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Twilight Zone, Tales of the Unexpected and Batman, and from 1968 until 1983 he was head writer for the Emmy Award-winning daytime soap opera The Edge of Night. As an advertising copywriter he is credited with creating the term “coffee break” in an ad campaign.

Russian-born musical director David Chudnow, who began his career in the silent-movie era, died on April 8th, aged 99. His many low budget film credits include Torture Ship (1939), The Invisible Killer, The Mad Monster, The Devil Bat, Dead Men Walk, The Black Raven, Nabonga, The Chinese Cat, Charlie Chan in Black Magic, Lured, The Monster Maker, Siren of Atlantis and Red Planet Mars. He later became a producer for Herschell Gordon Lewis and for his son, film director Byron Chudnow.

SF art historian and author Jon [Martin] Gustafson died on April 13th, aged 56. He had been hospitalized in January after a stroke complicated by diabetes, and his family terminated life support on April 8th after he had been in a coma for several weeks. He wrote Chroma: The Art of Alex Schomburg (1986) and he was a contributor to such books as The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Starlog Science Fiction Yearbook 1979 and The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

Science fiction author, editor and critic Damon [Francis] Knight died after a long illness on April 15th, aged 79. After making his debut in the first issue of Stirring Science Stories in 1941, he published around seventeen novels, including Hell’s Pavement (aka Analogue Men), Masters of Evolution, The People Maker (aka A for Anything), The Rithian Terror and The World and Thorinn, and his more than 100 short stories include the 1950 classic “To Serve Man” (adapted for TV’s Twilight Zone in 1962). The Best of Damon Knight appeared in 1976. He briefly edited the SF magazines Worlds Beyond and If Science Fiction, as well as twenty-one volumes of the influential Orbit anthology series. His 1956 book of critical essays In Search of Wonder won the Hugo Award. The same year he co-created the Milford Science Fiction Writers’ Conference with James Blish and Judith Merril, and in 1965 he founded the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA). He was awarded the Grand Master Nebula Award in 1994, and his third and final wife was writer Kate Wilhelm.

Hugo-nominated SF writer, poet and costumer Betsy Curtis (Elizabeth McGee), whose stories appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Analog, Amazing, Galaxy, Infinity, Marvel Science Stories, Worlds of If and elsewhere during the 1950s-1970s, died in her sleep on April 17th, aged 84.

Former child actor Howard Merrill, who scripted radio’s Sherlock Holmes series during the 1940s, died on April 20th, aged 85. His TV writing credits include Get Smart, The Invaders and Gilligan’s Island.

Joan Harrison (Joan Marion Merkler) the wife for forty-eight years of SF writer Harry Harrison, died of cancer on April 21st, aged 72.

British comics artist Denis McLoughlin died on April 22nd, aged 84. He created the character of time-travelling spaceman Swift Morgan (1948-54) for publisher T.V. Boardman. His later strips include Saber Lord of the Jungle (1967–69) and The Green Lizard (1977).

Nebula and Hugo Award-winning SF writer George Alec Effinger was found dead in his New Orleans apartment on April 26th, aged 55. After suffering health problems for many years, he apparently died of internal bleeding, caused by an addiction to a common antacid which exacerbated his stomach ulcers. Effinger began writing in the early 1970s, and his books include What Entropy Means to Me, The Wolves of Memory, The Nick of Time, The Bird of Time, When Gravity Fails, A Fire in the Sun, The Exile Kiss, three Planet of the Apes television novelizations and two computer game tie-ins which pitted Sherlock Holmes against Fu Manchu. His third wife was writer Barbara Hambly.

79-year-old film and TV scriptwriter/producer Robert L. Joseph died the same day of injuries suffered after a fall. In the late 1950s he wrote several episodes of the unsold Boris Karloff anthology series The Veil, and his movie credits include Door-to-Door Maniac (1961) and the TV miniseries World War III.

British author John Middleton Murry, Jr., who wrote science fiction under the name “Richard Cowper”, died of a massive stroke on April 29th, aged 75. His best-known books include Breakthrough (1967), Kuldesak, Clone, The Twilight of Briareus, Time Out of Mind and the “Corlay” trilogy: The Road to Corlay, A Dream of Kinship and A Tapestry of Time. His short fiction was collected as The Web of the Magi and Other Stories and The Tithonian Factor and Other Stories, and he also wrote two autobiographies in the 1970s under the pen-name “Colin Middleton Murray”.

Comics artist Tom Sutton was found dead in his Massachusetts apartment on May 1st, aged 65. He began his career in the mid-1960s working for Warren Publishing’s Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella titles. At Marvel he was an inker on Conan the Barbarian and a penciller for Planet of the Apes, and he also drew Star Trek for DC Comics. Sutton wrote and illustrated Skywald’s Frankenstein comic under the pseudonym “Sean Todd”.

Comic-book writer and editor Robert Kanigher, who created the characters of Sgt Rock and the Metal Men, died on May 6th, aged 86. He began his career scripting the Blue Beetle for Fox Features Syndicate in the 1940s. He soon moved to All-American Comics, where he wrote Captain Marvel. When that company merged with DC Comics in 1946 he worked on such titles as The Atom, The Justice Society of America, Wonder Woman, Hawkman, The Flash and Green Lantern. Kanigher wrote the 1943 book How to Make Money Writing for Comics, and he retired in the 1980s.

70-year-old Otis Blackwell, who wrote such songs as “Don’t Be Cruel”, “All Shook Up” and “Return to Sender” for Elvis Presley (who he never met, despite sharing co-writing credits), died in obscurity in Nashville of a heart attack the same day. A stroke eleven years ago had left him paralysed. He also wrote “Great Balls of Fire” for Jerry Lee Lewis and more than 1,000 other songs.

Children’s book writer Albert Stoffel also died on May 6th, aged 92. He wrote the syndicated Bugs Bunny comic strip for many years.

Hugely influential Los Angeles SF fan Bruce E. (Edward) Pelz died of a massive pulmonary embolism on May 9th, aged 65. A co-chairman of the 1969 and 1972 World SF Conventions, he also founded BoucherCon and the California Loscon. The tireless Pelz invented the controversial Retro-Hugos and the Rotsler award for fan artwork, and at the time of his death had the biggest collection of fanzines in the world, with an estimated value of $750,000. The collection was subsequently donated to the University of California, Riverside Library.

75-year-old Austen Kark, who assisted his father Major Norman Kark (who died in 2000) in editing the London Mystery Magazine in the 1950s before joining the BBC World Service, was killed in the Potters Bar rail crash on May 10th. His wife, novelist Nina Bawden, was also injured in the same accident.

Veteran Disney animator and writer Bill Peet (William Bartlett Peet), who worked on Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and Sleeping Beauty, and scripted 101 Dalmatians and The Sword in the Stone, died of complications from pneumonia, cancer and heart problems on May 11th, aged 87. In his 1989 autobiography, he claimed that he drew Captain Hook to look like Walt Disney, with whom he did not get along. He left Disney in 1964 to become an award-winning writer of thirty-five children’s books, which he illustrated himself. Bill Peet: An Autobiography was published in 1989.

Mad magazine artist Dave Berg died of cancer on May 16th, aged 81. In the 1940s he inked Will Eisner’s comic strip The Spirit and, after working with Stan Lee at Timely Comics, he moved to Mad in 1956, where his series “The Lighter Side of . . .” began in 1961. He also wrote and illustrated seventeen paperback collections of his work.

American-born songwriter Sharon Sheeley, who was with her boyfriend Eddie Cochran in 1960 when he was killed in a car crash in England, died of a cerebral haemorrhage in Los Angeles on May 17th, aged 62. Her many hits include “Poor Little Fool” (written when she was just sixteen), “Something Else” for Cochran, “Hurry Up” for Ritchie Valens, “(He’s) The Great Impostor” for the Fleetwoods, and “Trouble” for the Kalin Twins.

Idiosyncratic British film writer and critic Raymond Durgnat died of cancer after a short illness on May 19th, aged 69. A regular contributor to Films and Filming during the 1960s, his books on the cinema include the critical analysis A Long Hard Look at Psycho (published posthumously) and volumes on Alfred Hitchcock, Georges Franju, Luis Buñuel and Jean Renoir.

Composer, arranger and orchestrator Sidney Fine, whose many credits include TV’s Thriller and Disney’s Lady and the Tramp, died of pneumonia on May 20th, aged 97.

American television personality David Yellen died of Parkinson’s disease on May 25th, aged 86. In the 1940s he scripted episodes of the Superman radio show and directed a revival of the stage play Arsenic and Old Lace starring Bela Lugosi in 1949.

96-year-old newspaper columnist Mildred “Millie” Wirt Benson, who wrote the first twenty-three Nancy Drew mystery books under the pseudonym “Carolyn Keene”, died of a heart attack on May 28th after falling ill at her desk. Paid only $125 per volume with no royalties for any of the spin-off books, movies, TV series or board games based on her creation, she was bound by an agreement with the publisher not to reveal her identity until it came out in a court trial in 1980 after the publisher’s daughter claimed to be the series’ author. Benson also wrote the Penny Parker mystery series.

Television scriptwriter Herbert Finn died the same day of respiratory failure, aged 89. His many credits include The Flintstones and Gilligan’s Island.

Publisher Noel Young, whose Capra Press published such authors as Ray Bradbury, Peter S. Beagle, Colin Wilson and Ursula K. Le Guin, died of Alzheimer’s disease in California on May 31st, aged 79.

Los Angeles SF writer and fan Donald L. (Lewis) Franson died of heart failure on June 5th, aged 85. His stories appeared in Science Fiction Stories, If and Analog, and he co-wrote A History of the Hugo, Nebula, and International Fantasy Awards (1978) with Howard Devore.

American literary critic and biographer R. (Richard) W. (Warrington) B. (Baldwin) Lewis died on June 13th, aged 84. His Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Edith Wharton was published in 1976.

Television scriptwriter Robert W. Lenski died of cancer in Los Angeles on June 19th, aged 75. His TV films include Maneaters Are Loose!, The Dain Curse and The Aliens Are Coming.

Italian film composer Carlo Savina died on June 21st, aged 83. His numerous credits include Hercules (1957), Hercules Unchained, The Wonders of Aladdin, Goliath and the Vampires, Son of Hercules in the Land of Fire, Crypt of Horror (aka Terror in the Crypt), Hercules, Samson and Ulysses, Castle of the Living Dead, Juliet of the Spirits, Malenka the Niece of the Vampire (aka Fangs of the Living Dead), Night of the Devils, Eye of the Spider, Night of the Damned, That Cursed House Close to the Mushroom Bed, The Legend of Blood Castle and Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil (aka The House of Exorcism).

Brazilian writer of magic realism Roberto Drummond died the same day, aged 68.

Science fiction poet Robert Randolph Medcalf, Jr. died in his sleep on July 3rd, aged 52. His poetry appeared in Amazing and Eldritch Tales, and in 1981 he founded Quixsilver Press, which published his collection Strange Things Happen.

English-born geologist and palaeontologist William A. (Anthony) S. (Swithin) Sarjeant who, as “Anthony Swithin”, published the lost-world quartet “Perilous Quest for Lyonesse” in the early 1990s, died in Canada on July 8th, aged 66. In 1989 he co-authored Ms Holmes of Baker Street.

American science fiction author Laurence M. Janifer (Laurence Mark Harris) died in his sleep of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease on July 10th, aged 69. His stories (often published under pseudonyms or in collaboration with other writers) appeared in Astounding, Analog and Cosmos, and as “Mark Phillips” he co-wrote the 1962 novel Brain Twister (aka That Sweet Little Old Lady) with Randall Garrett. In the 1970s he published three books about interplanetary detective “Gerald Knave”.

Television writer Alvin Sapinsley, who scripted such teleplays for Boris Karloff as Sting of Death and Even the Weariest River in the mid-1950s, died of pneumonia on July 13th, aged 80. He also wrote the TV movies Moon of the Wolf and Sherlock Holmes in New York, plus episodes of Tales of Tomorrow and Rod Serling’s Night Gallery (H.P. Lovecraft’s “Pickman’s Model”).

Author, editor and scientist Kathleen M. Massie-Ferch, who co-edited the DAW Books anthologies Ancient Enchantresses and Warrior Enchantresses with Martin H. Greenberg, died of breast cancer on July 15th, aged 47.

Clark Gesner, composer-lyricist of the Broadway musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, died of a heart attack in New York on July 23rd, aged 64. Based on Charles M. Schultz’s Peanuts comic strip, the show ran for nearly 1,600 performances in 1967.

White supremacist William L. (Luther) Pierce died of cancer the same day in West Virginia, aged 68. The former rocket scientist’s 1978 novel The Turtle Diaries, about a group of neo-Nazis overthrowing the US government, was credited by Timothy J. McVeigh as inspiration for the Oklahoma City bombing.

Screenwriter Robert J. Easter, whose credits include the early slasher film The Toolbox Murders, died of complications from melanoma on July 24th, aged 57.

Grammy-nominated Walt Disney composer Norman “Buddy” Baker died on July 26th, aged 84. He scored around forty feature films and 125 TV shows, including Zorro, The Monkey’s Uncle, The Gnome-Mobile, Charlie and The Angel, The Shaggy D.A., The Devil and Max Devlin and the Oscar-winning Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day. He also composed the music for a number of Disney theme park attractions, including the Haunted Mansion, Country Bears Jamboree and the hugely irritating It’s a Small World.

58-year-old American artist Ron(ald) [Bob] Walotsky died unexpectedly of complications from kidney failure and a ruptured colon on the night of July 29th following a brief illness. Best known for his 500-plus book covers (including Carrie by Stephen King, Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice and the Avon paperback editions of Roger Zelazny) and work for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Amazing Stories and Heavy Metal, his art was collected in Inner Visions: The Art of Ron Walotsky (2000). He was Artist Guest of Honour at the 1996 World Fantasy Convention.

Walt Disney animator Fred Rice died the same day, aged 85. He began his career working with Walter Lantz at Universal before joining Disney, where he contributed to Fantasia, Pinocchio and Dumbo. He left the studio in 1953 for Capital Records, where he designed album covers.

British books editor Lionel Trippett, who worked for such imprints as Arrow and Mayflower, died on July 31st, aged 66. In the early 1970s he published several horror anthologies edited by Michel Parry plus SF novels by David Garnett and Avram Davidson.

67-year-old Dave (David) [Gerald] Van Arnam, co-chairman of NYCon III in 1967, died of a heart attack on August 3rd. He co-wrote the TV novelisation Lost in Space (1967) with “Ron Archer” (aka Ted White). His other books include Sideslip (also with White), The Players of Hell, Star Gladiator, Star Barbarian, Star Mind, Wizard of Storms, Lord of Blood and Greyland.

49-year-old film journalist Randy Palmer died on August 8th in Virginia from injuries received in an automobile accident the previous week. Palmer began writing for Famous Monsters of Filmland and became an associate editor of the magazine in the early 1980s (he actually edited the final issue of the original run), along with other Warren titles such as Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella. His articles also turned up in Cinefantastique, Fangoria, Little Shoppe of Horrors and Filmfax, and he was the author of the books Paul Blaisdell, Monster Maker: A Biography of the B Movie Makeup and Special Effects Artist and Herschell Gordon Lewis, Godfather of Gore: The Films.

86-year-old television writer Norman Jolley died of cardiac arrest on August 13th, following surgery for pancreatic cancer. A former actor, he became the head writer for the live-action children’s TV series Space Patrol (1950–55), also playing the villainous Agent X in several episodes. His other scripting credits include The Monolith Monsters and TV’s Science Fiction Theater.

Film and TV scriptwriter Dean Riesner (aka “Dean Franklin”), the son of silent-film director Charles Riesner, died on August 18th, aged 83. Best known for his collaborations with Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood (including the first Dirty Harry movie), his credits include Play Misty for Me, John Carpenter’s Starman and TV’s The Outer Limits. A former silent child star (billed as “Dinky Dean”), he was married to Maila Nurmi, better known as TV horror host Vampira.

Nebula Award-winning American screenwriter Stanley R. Greenberg, who is credited with creating the “docudrama”, died on August 25th from a brain tumour, aged 74. His credits include the scripts for Skyjacked and Soylent Green.

TV writer and producer Robert E. Van Scoyk, whose credits include Wonder Woman and Murder She Wrote, died of complications from diabetes on August 26th, aged 74.

Dutch SF fan and editor/translator Jo Thomas died of kidney cancer on September 10th, aged 59. He was also Head of Programming at ConFiction, the 1990 World SF Convention in The Hague.

American SF and mystery author Lloyd Biggle, Jr. died after a twenty-year battle with leukaemia and cancer on September 12th, aged 79. He started publishing in 1955, and his books included the “Jan Darzek” sequence (All the Colors of Darkness, Watchers of the Dark, This Darkening Universe, Silence is Deadly and The Whirligig of Time), along with such space operas as The Angry Espers, The Still Small Voice of Trumpets, The World Menders, Monument, Alien Main and The Chronocide Mission. He was a founding member of the SFWA and also founded The Science Fiction Oral History Association in 1975.

Science fiction author and gravitational physicist Robert L. (Lull) Forward died of inoperable brain cancer on September 21st, aged 70. He began writing short stories under the name “Susan Lull” in 1979, and his first novel, Dragon’s Egg, appeared under his own name in 1980. His other books include a 1985 sequel, Starquake!, plus Flight of the Dragonfly (aka Rocheworld), Martian Rainbow, Timemaster, Camelot 30K and Saturn Rukh (which formed the basis of two episodes of the Dan Dare Pilot of the Future animated TV series).

Ivor A. Rogers who, with his wife Deborah Webster Rogers, wrote J.R.R. Tolkien: A Critical Biography (1980), died of a heart attack on September 25th, aged 72.

Australian SF author and journalist Wynne [Noel] Whiteford died on September 30th, aged 86. His publishing career stretched from 1934 up to his most recent novel, The Specialist, in 1990.

Walter H. Annenberg, who created TV Guide in 1953 and later became a multi-billionaire, died of complications from pneumonia on October 1st, aged 94. From 1969–75 he was the US ambassador to Britain and, according to Forbes, was the thirty-ninth wealthiest American.

Author, teacher and vampire expert Raymond T. (Thomas) McNally died of complications of cancer on October 3rd, aged 71. His most famous work was the controversial In Search of Dracula: A True History of Dracula and Vampire Legends (1972), written in collaboration with Radu Florescu. Updated in 1994, it was the first book to attempt to link the mythical vampire with the 15th century historical personality Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler. His other books include A Clutch of Vampires: Things Being Among the Best Vampire Stories from History and Literature, Dracula Was a Woman: In Search of the Blood Countess of Transylvania, and In Search of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: The True-Life Origins and Cultural Impact of the Classic Horror Story. In 1996, McNally also released a CD-ROM entitled Dracula: Truth or Terror.

British TV scriptwriter and novelist Wilfred Greatorex died on October 14th, aged 80. Among the shows he created scripts for were LWT’s The Frighteners (1972–73) and the BBC series 1990 (1977–78) starring Edward Woodward.

American author Craig [Allan] Mills, who had four fantasy novels published between 1982 and 1995, died of a heart attack on October 15th, aged 47. His debut novel was The Bane of Lord Caladon, followed by The Dreamer in Discord, Shadow of the Crown and the gaming novelization King’s Quest: The Floating Castle.

British-born physicist and SF novelist Charles Sheffield died on November 2nd, aged 67. He had undergone surgery for brain cancer three months earlier. A winner of both the Hugo and Nebula awards for his 1993 novella “Georgia on My Mind”, his more than two dozen novels include Sight of Proteus and its two sequels, The Web Between the Worlds, Between the Strokes of Night, Summertide, Brother to Dragons, Starfire and two collaborations with David F. Bischoff. His second wife was fellow SF author Nancy Kress.

SF novelist and scriptwriter Jerry Sohl (Gerald Allan Sohl, Sr.) died on November 4th, aged 88. He scripted episodes of Star Trek, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, The Invaders, The Man from Atlantis and The Next Step Beyond. His numerous books (many written under the pseudonyms “Nathan Butler”, “Sean Mei Sullivan” and “Roberta Jean Mountjoy”) include Costigan’s Needle, The Altered Ego, Point Ultimate, Night Slaves (filmed as a TV movie in 1970), Death Sleep and Kaheesh. Sohl also scripted the 1965 movie Monster of Terror (aka Die, Monster, Die!), starring Boris Karloff and based on H.P. Lovecraft’s “The Colour Out of Space”.

Comics and TV scriptwriter Hilary Bader, whose credits include episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, died of breast cancer on November 7th, aged 50. She wrote thirty-eight books for DC Comics, and also worked on such series as Xena Warrior Princess, Lois & Clark The New Adventures of Superman and Silk Stalkings. Bader won two daytime Emmy Awards for her scripts for the animated The New Superman/Batman Adventures and Batman Beyond.

Belgian comics publisher Charles Dupuis, who helped launch such titles as The Smurfs and Lucky Luke, died on November 14th, aged 84.

92-year-old TV writer and Desilu Studios producer Bert Granet, credited for saving CBS-TV’s The Twilight Zone after the advertising agency for the show’s sponsor initially refused to back the series, died on November 15th from injuries caused by a fall. Granet was also responsible for The Untouchables (1959–62).

Blacklisted American film and TV writer Alfred Levitt died of heart failure on November 16th, aged 87. Writing under the name “Tom August” for almost two decades, he co-scripted Disney’s The Misadventures of Merlin Jones and The Monkey’s Uncle with his wife, Helen Slotte Levitt (who died in 1993). He helped form the Hollywood Blacklist Writers Credits Committee, whose work has so far restored correct screen credits to more than eighty films.

Max Reinhart, the publisher and chairman of Reinhart Books since 1947, died in London on November 19th, aged 86. He published a number of Alfred Hitchcock anthologies.

American songwriter/lyricist “Buddy” (Jules Leonard) Kaye died on November 21st, aged 84. Among his more than 400 compositions are the theme for TV’s I Dream of Jeannie and the title songs for the Elvis movies Change of Habit and The Trouble With Girls. In 1975 he won a Grammy for his recording of The Little Prince narrated by Richard Burton.

American writer Thomas E. (Edward) Fuller died from a heart attack the same day, aged 54. The author of various fantasy and horror short stories since 1990, he collaborated with Brad Strick-land on several young-adult novels, most of them mysteries. Fuller also adapted a number of H.P. Lovecraft stories for radio.

British film composer-conductor Stanley Black died on November 26th, aged 89. Best known for his scores for the Cliff Richard movies The Young Ones and Summer Holiday, he worked on more than eighty films, including The Monkey’s Paw (1948), Blood of the Vampire, The Trollenberg Terror (aka The Crawling Eye), The Flesh and the Fiends, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Hammer’s Maniac and The City Under the Sea (aka War-Gods of the Deep).

British SF fan Mal Ashworth, whose fanzines include Bem (1954-59) and Rot (1955–63; 1984), died in a pub on November 27th, aged 69.

78-year-old artist and animator William [Erwin] “Tex” Henson, who started his career in 1944 at Disney, where he worked on such films as Song of the South, Mickey and the Beanstalk, Pecos Bill, Peter and the Wolf and a number of Chip ’n’ Dale cartoons, died of head injuries on December 5th after being hit by a pick-up truck in Texas three days earlier. After leaving Disney, he worked on TV’s Casper the Friendly Ghost, before moving to Mexico to supervise several series of the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons, Underdog and the Trix cereal rabbit.

Edgar Allan Poe Award-winning poet and painter Stan Rice, the husband of bestselling author Anne Rice, died after a four-month battle with brain cancer in New Orleans on December 9th, aged 60. He was the physical inspiration for his wife’s popular character, the vampire Lestat.

Russian-born engineer, heart surgeon and author Nicolai Mikhailovich Amosov died on December 12th, aged 89. His SF novel was translated in 1970 as Notes from the Future.

Prolific comedy scriptwriter Charles Isaacs, who created material for Bob Hope, Red Skelton, John Barrymore and the team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, died of cancer on December 13th, aged 88. Amongst his numerous credits, he wrote the original story for the 1973 movie Digby the Biggest Dog in the World.

British playwright and screenwriter Frederick Knott died in New York on December 17th, aged 86. Born in China to an English missionary family, he began his career as a script editor at Hammer Films in the early 1950s. He adapted his own play, Dial M for Murder, for Alfred Hitchcock in 1954, and his play Wait Until Dark was filmed in 1967.

British composer Roger Webb, whose film credits include Burke and Hare and The Godsend (1979), died on December 19th. He also composed the music for a stage production of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Film author Doug McClelland died of a heart attack on December 28th, aged 68. His books include The Golden Age of B Movies and Down the Yellow Brick Road: The Making of the Wizard of Oz.

British author Mary Wesley CBE (Mary Aline Siepmann, aka Mary Aline Mynors Farmar) whose young adult books include the 1969 post-apocalyptic novel The Sixth Seal, died on December 30th, aged 90.

ACTORS/ACTRESSES

American character actress Meg Wyllie died on January 1st, aged 84. She is best remembered for her role as the alien Talosian in the original Star Trek pilot “The Cage” (aka “The Menagerie”). She also appeared in the 1963 Beauty and the Beast, Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie, Lipstick, The Last Starfighter and Dragnet (1987).

33-year-old Cat (Catya) Sassoon, the daughter of celebrity hairstylist Vidal Sassoon and actress Beverly Adams, was found dead of a suspected drug overdose the same day at her home in Los Angeles following a New Year party. The model and actress had reportedly struggled with alcohol and drug addiction since the age of twelve, and at fourteen she dropped out of high school to pursue a modelling career. She made her film debut in Tuff Turf (1984) and after getting breast implants also appeared in such “B” films as Dance With Death, Secret Games, Bloodfist IV: Die Trying, Bloodfist VI, Angelfist and The Alien Within. Sassoon was also the lead singer of the all-girl band The Feline Force.

Character actor and comedian Avery Schreiber died of a heart attack on January 7th, aged 66. A member of Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe in the early 1960s, he appeared in The Monitors, Silent Scream, Galaxina, Caveman, Saturday the 14th Strikes Back, Dracula Dead and Loving It and the TV movies Escape, More Wild Wild West and Outlaws. He also starred as Captain Bernard Mancini in the fantasy TV series My Mother the Car (1965–66).

Jon Lee, the 33-year-old drummer with rock band Feeder, committed suicide the same day. The band’s biggest hit single was titled “Buck Rogers”.

Wendy’s founder and spokesman Dave Thomas (who did his own advertising on American TV in the longest-running campaign to feature a company leader) died of liver cancer on January 8th, aged 69. Founded in 1969, the hamburger chain was named after Thomas’ eight-year-old daughter, Melinda Lou, nicknamed “Wendy”. He also had a small part in the 1994 TV movie Bionic Ever After?

Tony-winning American character actor Bill McCutcheon died of pneumonia on January 9th, aged 77. He portrayed the inept Martian Dropo in the 1964 cult classic Santa Claus Conquers the Martians and was Uncle Wally on TV’s Sesame Street (1984–92). Other film credits include Vibes and Mr. Destiny.

Goodly bylode to South African-born comedian and former BBC sound engineer “Professor” Stanley Unwin, who died on January 12th, aged 90. Best known for bringing Deep Joy with his invented language, “Unwinese” – a mixture of malapropisms and gibberish – he appeared in several films, including Carry On Regardless and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. He also played Father Stanley Unwin in Gerry Anderson’s short-lived marionette and live-action TV series The Secret Service (1966). Unwin wrote the children’s book Fairly Stories and his autobiography, Deep Joy, appeared in 1984.

Canadian comedian Frank Shuster, one half of the Wayne and Shuster team with partner Johnny Wayne (who died in 1990), died of pneumonia on January 13th, aged 85. In 1965 the duo co-hosted an episode of their TV series entitled Wayne and Shuster Take an Affectionate Look At . . . The Monsters.

American blues singer Ron Taylor, who created the voice of Audrey II for the cult 1982 off-Broadway musical Little Shop of Horrors, died of heart failure on January 15th, aged 49. His film credits include Exterminator 2, Dead Heat and Ritual. The voice of saxophonist “Bleeding Gums” Murphy on several episodes of TV’s The Simpsons, in 1977 he portrayed the Cowardly Lion in the first national touring company of The Wiz.

British-born actress and cabaret singer Queenie Leonard (Pearl Walker) died in West Los Angeles on January 17th, aged 96. She made her film debut in the early 1930s, and during the following decade she appeared in Ladies in Retirement, The Uninvited, The Lodger and Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. She was also the voice of the Bird in the Tree in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951) and Princess in 101 Dalmatians (1961), and appeared on TV in episodes of One Step Beyond, Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie.

Carrie Hamilton, the eldest daughter of Carol Burnett, died of complications from lung and brain cancer treatment on January 20th, aged 38. After briefly living on the streets as a drug addict in the late 1970s, she became a singer and actress, appearing in two seasons of Fame (1986–87) as Reggie Higgins and guest-starring on such shows as The X Files and Touched by an Angel.

Singer Peggy Lee (Norma Delores Estrom) died of a heart attack on January 21st, aged 81. Originally a performer with Benny Goodman’s band, she collaborated on the songs for Disney’s The Lady and the Tramp.

Spanish actor Adolfo Marsillach, who appeared in El Cruz del Diablo, died of cancer the same day, aged 73.

86-year-old stuntman, actor and former circus trapeze artist Henry “Blackie” Escalante died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease in a Californian hospice on January 23rd. During the 1930s he doubled Johnny Weissmuller in the Tarzan films and he later appeared in the 1954 classic Creature from the Black Lagoon.

British character actor Harold Kasket, who played the Sultan in the 1958 fantasy film The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, died on January 24th, aged 75.

South African-born character actor [Alan] Stratford Johns, best known for his role as detective Charles Barlow in the 1960s BBC police series Z Cars and its various spin-offs, died of a heart condition on January 28th, aged 77. He was also in such films as The Night My Number Came Up, The Ladykillers, Who Done It?, Jules Verne’s Rocket to the Moon (aka Those Fantastic Flying Fools) and The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu. Later in his career he appeared in Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm and Salome’s Last Dance, as well as the 1996 BBC-TV adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Never Where.

Film and TV actress Evelyn Scott died on January 31st, aged 86. She was Los Angeles’s first female disc jockey (on station KMPC) and appeared in a handful of films, including Back from the Dead (1957). She played bartender Ada Jacks on Peyton Place (1965–69) and its TV movie sequels.

Actress and former model Irish McCalla (Elizabeth McCalla), best remembered for replacing Anita Ekberg (who failed to show up for filming) as the 1930s comic-strip heroine in the twenty-six-episode syndicated TV show Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (1955–56), died of complications from a brain tumour and stroke on February 1st, aged 72. She also appeared in the movies She Demons and Hands of a Stranger.

American character actor Earl Rowe died of Parkinson’s disease the same day, aged 81. He was best known for his role as small-town police chief Lt Dave in the 1958 cult classic The Blob starring Steve McQueen.

Also on February 1st, German actress, cabaret singer and former cartoonist Hildegarde Neff (aka “Hildegard Knef”) died in a Berlin hospital from a lung infection, aged 76. She began her career appearing in Nazi propaganda films before being captured by the Russians, and her later movies include the 1952 adaptation of Alraune (aka Unnatural) with Erich von Stroheim, Svengali (1954), Lulu, Hypnosis, Bluebeard (1962), Fedora, Witchery and Hammer’s The Lost Continent. Her autobiography, The Gift Horse, was published in 1971.

80-year-old “B” movie actor George Nader, who starred in the 3-D Robot Monster, died of pneumonia at the Motion Picture and Television Fund Country Home on February 4th. Outed by the studio system, the openly gay leading man also appeared in The Human Duplicators, House of 1,000 Dolls (with Vincent Price), Sumuru (aka The Million Eyes of Sumuru) and Beyond Atlantis. He also starred as Glen Barton in the 1959 TV series Man and the Challenge, and in 1978 he published the homoerotic science fiction novel Chrome. A co-beneficiary of the late Rock Hudson’s $27 million estate, Nader had a funeral identical to that of his close friend.

American actor Guy Stockwell, older brother of the more famous Dean, died on February 7th, aged 69. Before becoming an acting coach, he also appeared in The Sword of Zorro (as Zorro), The War Lord, The Monitors, It’s Alive, The Coming, Grotesque, Santa Sangre and the TV movie The Disappearance of Flight 412.

American actress Tracey Roberts (Blanche Goldstone) died of a cerebral haemorrhage on February 8th, aged 87. She left film and TV acting in the 1960s to teach drama and founded the Tracey Roberts Actors Studio, where she produced and directed such plays as Ray Bradbury’s The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit.

38-year-old New Zealand actor Kevin Smith, best known for his recurring roles as Ares the God of War and Bacchus in TV’s Hercules The Legendary Journeys, Xena Warrior Princess and Young Hercules, died of head injuries in a Beijing hospital on February 9th after losing his balance and falling from a prop tower while filming Warriors of Virtue II in China. One of his last appearances was in the pilot TV film based on Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld.

74-year-old British actor Barry Foster, who portrayed the psychotic killer in Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, died of a heart attack on February 11th while appearing on stage in London. Best remembered for his role as the Dutch detective in TV’s Van der Valk (1972–79), he also appeared in Twisted Nerve.

Country singer Waylon Jennings, who narrated and sang the theme song for TV’s The Dukes of Hazzard, died of complications from diabetes on February 13th, aged 64. A former member of Buddy Holly’s backing group, The Crickets, he escaped death in 1959 when he gave up his seat on the plane that crashed, killing Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper.

American actress and former model Eve Whitney died the same day, aged 79. A model for such illustrators as Albert Vargas and George Petty, she appeared in a number of movies during the 1940s and early 1950s, plus the serial Radar Patrol vs. Spy King.

American actress Lucille Lund, best remembered for her dual roles as the preserved wife and also daughter of Bela Lugosi’s character in The Black Cat (1934), died on February 15th, aged 89. She joined Universal in 1933 after winning a “most beautiful college co-ed’ contest and appeared in a number of films throughout the 1930s, including a couple of Three Stooges shorts.

Veteran American newscaster Howard K. Smith, who appeared as himself in the TV series V, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and other movies, died of congestive heart failure the same day, aged 87.

British actor John [Edward] Thaw CBE, best known for his portrayals of grumpy TV policemen in The Sweeney (1974–78) and Inspector Morse (1986–2000), died after a long battle against cancer of the oesophagus on February 21st, aged 60. His films include Dr Phibes Rises Again and the Sherlock Holmes TV movie The Sign of Four (1987). He was married for twenty-nine years to actress Sheila Hancock.

Former TV child actor Harold Pruett died of an accidental drug overdose in Los Angeles on the same day, aged 32. His film credits include Summer Camp Nightmare, Spellcaster, Mirror Mirror, Embrace of the Vampire and Precious Find.

Austrian actress Barbara Valentin (Uschi Ledersteger) died of a stroke in Munich, Germany, on February 22nd, aged 61. Known as the “German Jayne Mansfield”, her film credits include The Head, Horrors of Spider Island (aka It’s Hot in Paradise), Bite Me Darling and The Image of Dorian Gray in the Yellow Press. She lived for a while with singer Freddie Mercury until his death.

American character actor Mel Stewart, who was a regular on TV’s All in the Family (as Archie Bunker’s neighbour Henry Jefferson) and the 1977 Bewitched spin-off Tabitha (as Marvin Decker), died of Alzheimer’s disease on February 24th, aged 72. He also appeared in Dead Heat (with Vincent Price), Martians Go Home, Bride of Re-Animator and the TV movie The Invisible Woman (1983).

Tough-guy character actor Lawrence Tierney died in his sleep on February 26th, aged 82. He had suffered from strokes and pneumonia during the past few years. His many credits include Val Lewton’s The Ghost Ship (1943), The Falcon Out West, Monogram’s poverty-row Dillinger, Exorcism at Midnight, The Kirlian Witness, The Prowler (aka Rosemary’s Killer), Midnight (aka Backwoods Massacre), Stephen King’s Silver Bullet, From a Whisper to a Scream (aka The Offspring), The Horror Show, Wizards of the Demon Sword, The Runestone, Armageddon and Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (as crime boss Joe Cabot). Tierney was the elder brother of actors Scott Brady and Edward Tierney (aka “Ed Tracy”), and during the late 1950s and 1960s he was frequently arrested on charges of drunken driving and disorderly conduct.

Anarchic Indian-born British comedian and author Sir Spike Milligan (Terence Alan Patrick Sean Milligan) died of kidney failure after a long illness on February 27th, aged 83. The last surviving member of BBC Radio’s The Goon Show (1951–60), he also appeared in such movies as Down Among the Z Men, What a Whopper, The Bed-Sitting Room (co-written with John Antrobus), The Magic Christian, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1972), Digby The Biggest Dog in the World, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1977), Monty Python’s Life of Brian and the BBC-TV miniseries of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast (2000). He suffered from mental problems all his life and wanted his gravestone to read: “Here Lies Spike Milligan. I Told You I Was Ill”.

American-born stage and screen actress Irene Worth, who acted with Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud and Alec Guinness, died of a stroke on March 10th, aged 85. A winner of three Tony awards, her film credits include Deathtrap (1982).

Actress Iran Eory died the same day of a cerebral embolism, aged 65. Her films include The Blanchville Monster and many Spanish TV shows.

Randy Castillo, the drummer for Ozzy Osbourne and later Mötley Crüe (replacing Tommy Lee) died of cancer in Los Angeles on March 26th, aged 51.

66-year-old British-born comedian, jazz pianist and actor Dudley Moore CBE, best remembered for his TV collaborations with Peter Cook (who died in 1995), died in New Jersey of pneumonia resulting from complications from the degenerative brain disease supranuclear palsy on March 27th. In the late 1970s the once club-footed performer became an unlikely Hollywood star with box office hits such as 10 (replacing George Segal) and Arthur, and his other movies include Bedazzled (1968), The Bed-Sitting Room, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1972), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1977, as Dr Watson), Wholly Moses, Santa Claus, Like Father Like Son, Arthur 2: On the Rocks and The Mighty Kong. His last public appearance was to receive a CBE for services to entertainment from the Prince of Wales in November 2001. Moore was married to actresses Suzy Kendall and Tuesday Weld, and he gave instructions that his fourth wife should be barred from his funeral.

“Mr. Television” Milton Berle (Mendel Berlinger) died of colon cancer the same day, aged 93. The vaudevillian comedian appeared in such films as The Perils of Pauline (1914), Whispering Ghosts (with John Carradine), Over My Dead Body, It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, The Loved One, Can Hieronymous Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, Journey Back to Oz, Won Ton Ton the Dog Who Saved Hollywood, The Muppet Movie and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. His first television appearance was in 1929 on a closed-circuit experiment to an audience of ten people, and by the early 1950s he was earning $200,000 a year in the medium. He portrayed Louie the Lilac on two episodes of the 1960s Batman TV series and in 1949 became the first person to appear on the covers of both Time and Newsweek.

Canadian-born character actor Jack Kruschen died after a long illness on April 2nd, aged 80. His many credits include Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, War of the Worlds (as the first victim of the Martian war machines), Angry Red Planet, Cape Fear (1962), Satan’s Cheerleaders and the TV movie The Time Machine (1978).

German leading man Heinz Drache died of lung cancer on April 3rd, aged 79. His numerous credits include The Avenger, The Door With Seven Locks and many other German Edgar Wallace thrillers, Dummy of Death, Coast of Skeletons, Circus of Fear and Brides of Fu Manchu (both with Christopher Lee), The Mysterious Magician and The Hound of Blackwood Castle.

45-year-old stuntman Harry O’Connor was killed in a para-glider accident on the set of Vin Diesel’s XXX on April 4th.

Hollywood leading man John Agar, who was married to a teenage Shirley Temple from 1945–49, died of emphysema after a long illness on April 7th, aged 81. He appeared in a number of films for John Ford, before starring in The Magic Carpet, The Revenge of the Creature, Tarantula, The Mole People, Daughter of Dr Jekyll, Attack of the Puppet People, The Brain from Planet Arous, Invisible Invaders, The Hand of Death, Journey to the Seventh Planet, Curse of the Swamp Creatures, Women of the Prehistoric Planet, Zontar, the Thing from Venus and Night Fright (aka The ET Nastie). Several drunken-driving arrests interrupted his career, and after a stint as an insurance salesman he returned as a respected character actor in King Kong (1976), Miracle Mile, Fear, Clive Barker’s Nightbreed, TV’s Body Bags and the 2001 short The Vampire Hunters Club.

French actor Ivan Desny (Ivan Nikolai Desnitskij), who was born to Russian parents in Peking, China, died of pneumonia in Switzerland on April 13th, aged 79. Discovered by David Lean in 1949, his many film credits include Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace, The Invisible Terror, The Mystery of Thug Island, I Killed Rasputin, Who? and Virgin Terror.

Actress Amelia Batchelor (Francis Amelia Bachelor), who was the second model for Columbia Pictures’ Lady Liberty logo in the late 1930s, died on April 15th, aged 94. She also played an Emerald City resident in The Wizard of Oz (1939).

55-year-old Canadian-born leading man Robert Urich died after a six-year battle with rare synovial cell sarcoma cancer on April 16th. The likeable star of such TV series as S.W.A.T. (1975–76), Soap (1977), Tabitha (1977–78), Vega$ (1978–81) and Spenser: For Hire (1985–88), he also appeared in Endangered Species, The Ice Pirates (with John Carradine) and such TV movies as Killdozer, Invitation to Hell, Amerika and Invasion America. He was married to actress Heather Menzies.

British stuntman and stunt coordinator Terry Walsh died in his sleep on April 21st, aged 62. As well as working on Doctor Who for nearly twenty years, his other credits include Superman (1978), Dragonslayer, An American Werewolf in London, Superman III, Krull, 1984, Never Say Never Again, Biggles, Superman IV The Quest for Peace, Willow, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the TV movie Jekyll & Hyde (1990) and such series as Space: 1999 and Robin of Sherwood.

34-year-old Christopher Price, presenter of the BBC-TV entertainment show Liquid News, was found dead at his London home on April 22nd. A post-mortem examination revealed that he had died of the rare brain disease meningo-encephalitis, which may have spread from an ear infection.

Probably the world’s most famous porn actress, Linda Lovelace (Linda Susan Boreman), star of the 1972 film Deep Throat, died on April 22nd from massive trauma and internal injuries sustained in a car crash three weeks earlier. The 53-year-old was taken off life support at a Denver hospital. She claimed she was never paid for Deep Throat, despite the film making an estimated $600 million, and she went on to appear in Deep Throat Part II, The Confessions of Linda Lovelace, Sexual Ecstasy of the Macumba, Linda Lovelace Meets Miss Jones and Linda Lovelace for President. With Ordeal (1980), her third of four autobiographies, she became an outspoken critic of the adult sex industry and alleged that she was coerced into the adult film business by her manager, Chuck Traynor. Traynor himself died of a heart attack on July 22nd, three months to the day after Lovelace died. Tina Yothers was subsequently set to portray the actress on stage in Lovelace: The Musical.

British stage and screen actor Michael Bryant CBE died on April 25th, aged 74. His occasional film credits include The Mind Benders, Torture Garden, Mumsy Nanny Sonny & Girly, The Deep and The Ruling Class. He also starred in the 1972 BBC-TV adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape and the 1974 adaptation of M. R. James’s The Treasure of Abbott Thomas.

30-year-old Lisa “Left Eye’ Lopes, the rapper with hit R&B trio TLC, died of internal injuries the same day when the SUV she was driving flipped three times on a two-lane country road in Honduras, Central America. Her seven passengers were injured, some seriously. TLC’s most recent two albums had combined sales of seventeen million copies in the US. In 1994 Lopes was sentenced to five years’ probation for burning down the home of her footballer boyfriend and entered rehab to deal with an alcohol problem.

Former actor turned agent Howard Pays, the father of actress Amanda, died of cancer on May 12th, aged 74. His acting credits include Horrors of the Black Museum, A Night to Remember and the 1958 TV series The Invisible Man.

American leading man Ray Stricklyn died of emphysema on May 14th, aged 73. His films include The Return of Dracula (aka The Fantastic Disappearing Man) and The Lost World (1960). From the 1970s he worked as a Hollywood publicist to pay the rent, before successfully returning to the stage and TV as an actor in the mid-1980s.

Lugubrious British character actor Bryan Pringle died on May 15th, aged 67. His numerous film credits include The Brain, Berserk!, The Boy Friend, Jabberwocky, Haunted Honeymoon, Brazil and Snow White A Tale of Terror.

The “Curse of Our Gang” struck again when 72-year-old Darwood Kaye (Darwood K. Smith), who played Waldo the egghead in Hal Roach’s Our Gang comedy shorts, was killed the same day when he was knocked down by an unknown vehicle while he was taking a daily walk. Smith appeared in twenty-two films in the series (1937–40), alongside other child performers such as Robert Blake. After leaving acting, he turned to Christianity as a teenager and later became a pastor in the Seventh-Day Adventist Church.

1970s adult-film star Bobby Astyr also died on May 15th, from lung cancer. Known as “the clown prince of porno”, his many credits include Tarz and Jane and Boy and Cheeta, Sherlick Holmes, Erotic Dr. Jekyll, Dracula Exotica and The Devil in Miss Jones Part II.

Prolific British character actor Charles Simon died of pneumonia on May 16th, aged 93. In a career that spanned almost eighty years, he appeared in numerous stage, screen and radio productions, including Shadowlands opposite Anthony Hopkins, Disney’s 102 Dalmatians, Whatever Happened to Harold Smith?, the BBC-TV series The Singing Detective, The Sight and the 2002 pilot Strange.

39-year-old Davey Boy Smith (David Smith), who wrestled in the WWF and WCW as “The British Bulldog”, died of a heart attack on May 17th while on vacation in Canada.

Veteran Los Angeles newscaster Jerry Dunphy died of a heart attack on May 20th, aged 80. Known as “the Dean of Los Angeles Broadcasting’, Dunphy made cameo appearances in numerous films, including Night of the Lepus, Oh, God! and Independence Day.

Joe Cobb, the rotund beanie-capped child actor who played Fat Joe in the silent Our Gang comedies, died in his sleep at a California convalescent home on May 21st, aged 85. He made his debut in the series in The Big Show (1923) at the age of five and appeared in eighty-six shorts until he was replaced by Norman “Chubby” Chaney.

British film and TV character actress Pat [Doreen] Coombs died of complications from emphysema in a West London nursing home on May 25th, aged 75. Among her few film roles was Henrietta Salt in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971).

Serials stuntman and actor Robert Barron died of heart disease on May 28th, aged 80. His credits include The Green Hornet Strikes Again, Horror Island, Jungle Girl, Perils of Nyoka, Road to Morocco, Arabian Nights, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Cobra Woman, Spook Town, Raiders of Ghost City, The Master Key, Mr Hex, Tarzan and the Leopard Woman, Superman (1948, as Ro-Zan, Leader of Krypton) and Atom Man vs. Superman, amongst many other titles.

American actor Sam Whipple, who played Dr John Ballard on the TV series Seven Days (1998–2000), died of cancer on June 3rd, aged 41. His other credits include Jekyll & Hyde . . . Together Again and TV’s Lifepod.

49-year-old Dee Dee Ramone (Douglas Glenn Colvin), co-founder of rock band The Ramones in 1974 with Joey Ramone (who died of cancer in 2001), was found dead of an apparent drug overdose at his home in Los Angeles on June 5th. Ramone played bass with the band until 1989. They appeared in the cult 1979 movie Rock ’n’ Roll High School and recorded the theme for Pet Sematary.

Swedish-born actress Signe Hasso (Signe Larsson) died of cancer in a Los Angeles hospital on June 6th, aged 86 or 91 (her age was disputed). She began her acting career in 1933 and moved to Hollywood in 1940, where she mostly appeared in war films and noirs. She played a saucy French maid in Heaven Can Wait (1943) and was the object of Ronald Coleman’s psychotic jealousy in A Double Life. Her other credits include Bert I. Gordon’s Picture Mommy Dead, the TV movie Sherlock Holmes in New York, and various episodes of Lights Out, The Green Hornet, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., Ghost Story and Darkroom.

Robbin Crosby, guitarist for the 1980s heavy metal rock band Ratt, died of drugs-induced AIDS complications the same day, aged 42. The band’s first four albums sold more than one million copies before they disbanded in 1992. He was once married to a Playboy “Playmate”.

American actor James Luisi, best remembered as Lt Doug Chapman on The Rockford Files (1976–80), died of cancer on June 7th, aged 72. His many credits include Ben, I Escaped from Devil’s Island, Fade to Black, The Hidden and such TV movies as Future Cop and Beyond Witch Mountain.

Irish character actor Dermot Walsh died on June 26th, aged 77. Married to actress Hazel Court until they divorced in 1963, he appeared in Jassy, Ghost Ship (1952), The Flesh and the Fiends and The Tell-Tale Heart.

The Who bass guitarist and songwriter John [Alec] Entwistle was found dead of a cocaine-induced heart attack in a Las Vegas hotel room on June 27th, the day before the ageing rock ’n’ roll band was set to begin a three-month US tour. Entwistle, who had appeared as himself in the 1975 movie Tommy, was 57 and had spent the night with an erotic dancer.

French actor François Périer (François Pilu), who portrayed the angel of Death, Heurtebise, in both Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950) and The Testament of Orpheus (1959), died on June 28th, aged 82. His more than 100 film credits also include Sylvia and the Ghost (1946).

Australian-born British character actress Margaret Johnston died in a nursing home on June 29th, aged 87. Her films include Night of the Eagle (aka Burn Witch Burn) and The Psychopath.

American singer and actress Rosemary Clooney died of complications from lung cancer the same day, aged 74. Married twice to actor José Ferrer (one of their five children is Miguel Ferrer and she was the aunt of George Clooney), she appeared in the 1953 Bob Hope whodunnit Here Come the Girls and Radioland Murders, while her most famous film appearance was in White Christmas with Bing Crosby.

78-year-old Mexican-born actress Katy Jurado (Maria Cristina Jurado Garcia), who won a Golden Globe for her performance in High Noon, died on July 5th of complications from lung and heart ailments. She appeared in the 1979 episode of TV’s Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, “The Man from the South”, and her second husband (1959–64) was actor Ernest Borgnine.

Harpist Louise Klos [Stener Elian], who was married for a decade to composer Max Steiner and who performed on the soundtracks to King Kong (1933), Casablanca and The Jungle Book (1942), died on July 7th, aged 96.

Burly method actor Rod (Rodney) [Stephen] Steiger died of pneumonia and kidney failure in a Los Angeles hospital on July 9th, aged 77. He had been recovering from secret cancer surgery the week before. After appearing in such early TV shows as Lights Out, Out There, Tales of Tomorrow and Suspense, he starred opposite Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront (1954) and won an Oscar for his role in In the Heat of the Night (1967). Steiger also played Napoleon and Mussolini (twice) on screen. His more than 120 films include The Loved One, No Way to Treat a Lady, Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, The Amityville Horror, The Kindred, American Gothic, Out There, Mars Attacks, Revenant (aka Modern Vampires, as Van Helsing) and End of Days. He suffered from periods of clinical depression and was married five times, including to actress Claire Bloom from 1959–69.

British actor Gerald Campion, who starred as greedy schoolboy Billy Bunter in the BBC-TV series (1952–61), died of heart problems in southern France the same day, aged 81. He also appeared in such films as Miranda, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and opposite Boris Karloff in The Sorcerers.

Gene Moss, co-creator of the TV cartoon Roger Ramjet and the voice of Doodle in that series, died of cancer on July 15th, aged 75. In the mid-1960s he portrayed mad scientist Dr Von Schtick in the local Los Angeles television series Shrimpenstein and Moss was also the voice of Smokey Bear on TV and radio commercials during the 1980s.

Actor turned costume designer Keith Denny (aka “Simon Davis”) died of pneumonia on July 17th, aged 65. He played the lead female ape in 2001: A Space Odyssey before becoming a costume designer and wardrobe supervisor on such films as Clash of the Titans and American Gothic.

Australian-born character actor Leo McKern (Reginald McKern), who had worked in Britain since 1946, died in a nursing home on July 23rd, aged 82. He was being treated for diabetes and other health problems. Best known for his TV series Rumpole of the Bailey (1978–92) and as a recurring Number Two in the cult show The Prisoner (1968), his numerous film credits include Hammer’s X the Unknown, The Mouse That Roared, Scent of Mystery, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Help!, The Shoes of the Fisherman, The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (as Moriarty), The Omen, Damien Omen II and Ladyhawke. On TV he was in The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe (1977), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1981) and Space: 1999. McKern lost his left eye in an accident at the age of fifteen.

Veteran British character actor Maurice Denham OBE died on July 24th, aged 92. In 1955 he voiced every character in the animated Animal Farm, and his more than 100 other film credits include Miranda, Night of the Demon, The Night Caller (aka Blood Beast from Outer Space), Torture Garden, Some Girls Do, Hammer’s Paranoiac, Hysteria, The Nanny and Countess Dracula, plus TV’s Schalken the Painter and The Last Vampyre.

Singapore-born British stage and TV actor Tony Anholt, best known for his role as security chief Tony Verdeschi in the second season of Space: 1999 (1976–77), died of a brain tumour on July 26th, aged 61. His many other TV credits include The Protectors (1972), the British Thriller, Lexx, Relic Hunter and the Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense episode, The Late Nancy Irving.

Eccentric comedy actor Peter Bayliss died at his home in London on July 29th, aged 80. His credits include The Red Shoes, From Russia With Love, The Magic Christian and Vampira (aka Old Dracula, in which he played Maltravers, the Count’s faithful servant), plus Merlin, Alice in Wonderland and Arabian Nights on TV. He asked for his ashes to be put in a shoebox.

Tokyo-born child actor Peter Miles (Gerald Perreau-Saissine) died of cancer on August 3rd, aged 64. The brother of actresses Gigi Perreau and Janine Perreau, he appeared in such films as Abbott and Costello in Hollywood and Who Killed “Doc” Robbin? (aka Sinister House). Under the name “Richard Miles” he appeared on US TV in the 1950s, was the author of several novels, and scripted the 1963 movie They Saved Hitler’s Brain (aka Madmen of Mandoras).

Three-foot, two-inch actor Joshua Ryan Evans, who portrayed Timmy the living doll on the daily NBC-TV show Passions, died on August 5th of complications related to a congenital heart condition while undergoing a hospital procedure. Bizarrely, the 20-year-old actor’s evil character also died in that same day’s episode of the soap opera. The diminutive Evans, who suffered from achondroplasia, a genetic disorder which restricted his growth, had a recurring role in TV’s Ally McBeal, appeared in Poltergeist: The Legacy and played the young Grinch in Dr Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000).

Television actor Matthew Robinson, Jr. died of Parkinson’s disease the same day, aged 65. Best know for his recurring role as Gordon on TV’s Sesame Street from 1969–71, he also scripted the 1972 movie The Possession of Joel Delaney.

88-year-old veteran American character actor Jeff Corey, who became a top acting coach after he was blacklisted for ten years in 1951, died on August 16th due to complications from a fall at his Malibu home earlier in the week. He moved to Hollywood in the early 1940s, where he appeared in small roles in You’ll Find Out, The Reluctant Dragon, The Devil and Daniel Webster, The Man Who Wouldn’t Die and Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. After serving as a combat photographer in the Navy during World War II, he resumed his career in such films as Miracle on 34th Street, The Next Voice You Hear, Superman and the Mole Men, Lady in a Cage, Mickey One, Seconds, In Cold Blood, The Boston Strangler, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, The Premonition, Oh God!, Jennifer, Battle Beyond the Stars, The Sword and the Sorcerer, Conan the Destroyer, Creator and The Judas Project, along with the TV movies Something Evil, Curse of the Black Widow, Cry for the Strangers and The Lottery. He also voiced the character of Silvermane in the animated Spider-Man series. As a drama teacher, Corey’s students included Anthony Perkins, James Dean, Jane Fonda, Leonard Nimoy, Roger Corman, Rob Reiner and Jack Nicholson.

Mexican actress Alicia Montoya died of a bronchial infection on August 17th, aged 82. The daughter of actress Maria Tereza Montoya, her films include The Vampire (1957), The Vampire’s Coffin and Santo versus the Martians.

Prolific American character actor Dennis Fimple died on August 23rd, aged 61. His films include The Spectre of Edgar Allan Poe, King Kong (1976), Creature from Black Lake, The Shadow of Chikara, The Evictors, Bug Buster, Fangs and Rob Zombie’s long-delayed House of 1000 Corpses. On TV he appeared in Automan, Battlestar Galactica, Twilight Zone, Quantum Leap, Weird Science and Sabrina The Teenage Witch.

Massachusetts fisherman Craig Johnstone Kingsbury, who was hired to coach Robert Shaw in the local accent for Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), died in a nursing home on August 29th, aged 89. He had a small role in the film as fisherman Ben Gardner, whose severed head is discovered in the underwater wreckage of his boat.

68-year-old American stage, film and TV actor Ted Ross, who won a Tony Award in 1975 for his portrayal of the Cowardly Lion in the Broadway musical The Wiz, died in a nursing home on September 3rd, after suffering a stroke in 1998. His films include the 1978 version of The Wiz, plus Amityville II: The Possession, Arthur 2: On the Rocks and The Fisher King.

Mexican wrestler Nathaniel Leon (aka “Frankenstein”) died on September 5th, aged 85. Often cast as the villain, his many film credits include Locura de Terror, Samson vs the Vampire Women, Santo contra el Cerebro Diablico, Samson in the Wax Museum, Santo vs el Estranglador, Las Mujeres Panteras, Aranas Infernales, Madam Death, Dr Satan y la Magia Nera, Incredible Invasion (with Boris Karloff), Secret of Death, Santo contra el Jinetes del Terror, La Venganza de las Mujeres Vampiro, Chabelo y Pepito vs los Monstruos, Los Vampiros de Cocoyacan and Capulina vs los Monstruos.

Radio actor Jackie Kelk died of a lung infection on September 5th, aged 81. He starred in the title role in Terry and the Pirates, and was Jimmy Olsen on the Superman radio series for seven years.

American stage and film actor Cliff Gorman died of leukaemia the same day, aged 65. His movies include Justine, All That Jazz, Night of the Juggler and Angel.

British stage and screen actress Katrin Cartlidge, best known for her appearances in Mike Leigh’s films, died of complications from pneumonia and septicaemia on September 7th, aged 41. Her other credits include From Hell and the Channel Four TV production of Cinderella (2000).

55-year-old British film and TV character actor Michael [John] Elphick, who fought a long battle against alcoholism, died on September 8th after collapsing two days earlier. He appeared in such films as Hamlet (1969), Cry of the Banshee (with Vincent Price), Blind Terror (aka See No Evil), O Lucky Man!, The Elephant Man, Gorky Park and I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle.

Oscar-winning American actress Kim Hunter (Janet Cole), best remembered for her role as Dr Zira in Planet of the Apes and the sequels Beneath the Planet of the Apes and Escape from the Planet of the Apes, died of an apparent heart attack on September 10th, aged 79. A victim of the Communist blacklist in the 1950s, Hunter’s other films include Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim (her screen debut for David O. Selznick, who changed her name), A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven), Lilith, The Kindred, Two Evil Eyes and such TV movies as Bad Ronald, Dark August and The Golden Gate Murders. Early in her career she appeared on stage in Arsenic and Old Lace at the Pasadena Playhouse.

American character actor James Gregory died on September 16th, aged 90. A former stockbroker, he appeared in The Manchurian Candidate, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, $1,000,000 Duck, The Strongest Man in the World and the TV movie Miracle on 34th Street (1973). He also played Dean Martin’s boss, Macdonald, in the three 1960s Matt Helm sci-spy spoofs, The Silencers, Murderers Row and The Ambushers.

Hungarian-born actor Sandor Eles died of a heart attack in London in September, aged 66. His film and TV credits include And Soon the Darkness, Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady, Hammer’s The Evil of Frankenstein and Countess Dracula, and the Czech Mate episode of Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense.

American-born film actor Al Matthews died of cancer in Spain on October 6th. He appeared in The Final Conflict, The Sender, Superman III, Aliens, Riders of the Storm and the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies.

British stage and screen actress Phyllis Calvert (Phyllis Bickle) died in her sleep on October 8th, aged 87. A leading lady of the 1940s, her later films included Twisted Nerve (1968) and she starred on stage in adaptations of Peter Pan and Blithe Spirit.

54-year-old actress Teresa Graves, who starred as a jive-talking Countess Dracula opposite an embarrassed-looking David Niven in the 1974 film Vampira (aka Old Dracula), died on October 10th following a fire in her Los Angeles apartment. A regular on TV’s Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (1968–72), she also starred as an undercover cop on the police series Get Christie Love! (1974-75). Graves gave up acting in the early 1980s to become a Jehovah’s Witness.

American character actor Keene Curtis died of Alzheimer’s disease on October 13th, aged 79. A regular on the TV series The Magician (1973), he also appeared in such TV films as Stowaway to the Moon, Strange New World and Modesty Blaise (1982), plus the movies Heaven Can Wait and Sliver.

86-year-old Louisiana radio disc-jockey Horace Lee Logan, who gave Elvis Presley, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash their first big breaks, died the same day after battling pancreatitis and acute respiratory distress. He was the first person to announce “Elvis has left the building”.

October 13th also saw the death in a fire at his Hollywood Hills home of 84-year-old TV actor Dennis Patrick, who appeared in episodes of The Twilight Zone, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and was a regular in the 1960s Dark Shadows (plus the 1970 feature House of Dark Shadows). Among his other credits are Daddy’s Gone a-Hunting, Dear Dead Delilah and Nightmare Honeymoon. The actor had been battling cancer and kidney failure.

Former Honolulu police officer turned actor Kam Fong (Kam Fong Chun), who played Detective Chin Ho Kelly on TV’s Hawaii Five-O from 1968–78, died after a long battle with lung cancer on October 18th, aged 84.

Veteran French actor Bernard Fresson, whose credits include The Tenant and Brotherhood of the Wolf, died on October 20th, aged 71.

American TV soap opera actress Barbara Berjer died of pneumonia the same day, aged 82. Her character was so popular on Another World that, after she was killed off, viewer demand meant she came back as a ghost.

Canadian-born character actor George Hall died of complications from a stroke in New York City on October 21st, aged 85. Best known for his stage roles, he portrayed the 93-year-old Indy on the 1990s TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

A body found in the desert north of Las Vegas was identified seventeen days later on October 22nd as former Our Gang child actor, Jay R. Smith, who appeared as Freckles in the series of shorts between 1925 and 1929. 87-year-old Smith died of multiple stab wounds inflicted by a homeless person he had let stay in his house.

Hellraising Irish actor Richard Harris died on October 25th, aged 72. He had been undergoing chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s disease since the summer. The star of such films as The Bible . . . In the Beginning, the musical Camelot (as King Arthur), 99 and 44/100% Dead, Gulliver’s Travels (1976), Orca Killer Whale and Tarzan the Ape Man (1981), in recent years he appeared as Professor Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (in which he had to be doubled in some scenes). He had a pop hit in 1968 with Jimmy Webb’s ballad “MacArthur Park”, and his second wife from 1974–81 was actress Ann Turkel.

47-year-old American actress Cheryl “Rainbeaux” Smith, whose credits include The Phantom of the Paradise, The Legendary Curse of Lemora, Massacre at Central High, The Incredible Melting Man, Fantasm Comes Again, Laserblast, UFOria and Parasite, also died on October 25th, of complications from hepatitis exacerbated by long-time drug abuse.

84-year-old American actress Peggy Moran (Marie Jeanette Moran), who appeared in several horror and Western films in the 1930s and 1940s, died the same day of complications from injuries suffered in a car crash. Dubbed “The Shrieking Violet”, her credits include Universal’s The Mummy’s Hand, Horror Island and the serial Drums of the Congo. Moran’s movie career ended in 1943 after she married director Henry Koster (who died in 1988), and a bust of her head appeared in every movie he made after they were married.

Veteran American character actor Lawrence (Larry) Dobkin died of heart failure on October 28th, aged 83. His films include Whirlpool, DOA, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Angels in the Outfield, Riders to the Stars, Them!, Sabaka, The Lost Missile, The Ten Commandments, The Cabinet of Caligari (1962) and Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time. He also appeared in episodes of TV’s Superman (1953), Space Patrol, Voyagers!, Knight Rider and Star Trek The Next Generation.

39-year-old skydiver Mike Barber was presumed dead on October 28th, two days after his parachute landed in the ocean instead of on the beach while shooting a stunt for the Bruce Willis film Tears of the Sun.

Run-DMC rapper Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell was shot dead in a Queens, New York, recording studio in an apparently drug-related killing on October 30th. He was 37.

86-year-old Italian leading man Raf (Raffaele) Vallone died on Hallowe’en. A former journalist, his credits include Kiss the Girls and Make Them Die, A Thousand and One Nights, and a 1960 Italian TV adaptation of Jane Eyre.

Indonesian-born Hong Kong martial arts star and director Lo Lieh (Wong Lap-Dat) died of a heart attack on November 2nd, aged 62. He appeared in more than 100 films, including Human Skin Lanterns, Black Magic II, Three Fantastic Supermen in the Orient, The Battle Wizard and Ghosts Galore.

Prissy American character actor Jonathan Harris (Jonathan Charasuchin), best known for his role as the cowardly yet nefarious Dr Zachary Smith on the CBS-TV series Lost in Space (1965–68), died of a blood clot in his heart while undergoing therapy for a chronic back problem in hospital on November 3rd, three days before his 88th birthday. On TV he was the voice of the evil Lucifer on Battlestar Galactica (1978–79), a regular on Space Academy (1977–79), and guest-starred in Lights Out, Twilight Zone, Land of the Giants, Bewitched, The Ghost and Mrs Muir, Get Smart and Night Gallery. Harris also voiced characters for Disney’s A Bug’s Life and Toy Story 2, plus the 2001 short Hubert’s Brain. He reprised his role as Dr Smith for the NBC-TV movie, Lost in Space: The Journey Home. “Never fear, Smith is here!”

The same day saw the death of 71-year-old Scottish-born “skiffle” singer-songwriter Lonnie Donegan (Anthony Donegan), whose music inspired the Beatles. Donegan, who collapsed while halfway through a British tour, is best remembered for such songs as “Rock Island Line”, “Cumberland Gap”, “My Old Man’s a Dustman” and “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavour (On the Bedpost Overnight)”.

Billy Mitchell, a singer with 1950s doo-wop group the Clovers, died of cancer on November 5th, aged 71. He was the lead singer on Lieber and Stoller’s “Love Potion No.9”. After leaving the group in 1962, Mitchell worked at a Washington, D.C., hospital until his retirement in 1992.

Norma Lee Clark, who starred in the TV series Captain Video and His Video Rangers, died of cancer on November 8th, aged around 75. For more than thirty years she was Woody Allen’s personal assistant and wrote fifteen Regency romance novels under her own name and the pseudonym “Megan O’Connor”.

26-year-old former child actor and rap singer Merlin Santana, who was a regular in TV’s The Cosby Show, was shot dead by a woman while sitting in the passenger seat of a car in South Los Angeles on November 9th.

American character actor Parley Baer, who portrayed Mayor Arthur J. Henson in TV’s The Addams Family (1964–66), died of complications from a stroke on November 11th, aged 88. A previous stroke in 1997 ended his more than sixty-year career in such films as The Brass Bottle, Two on a Guillotine, The Gnome-Mobile, Time Trackers and the TV movies Halloween with the New Addams Family, The Time Machine (1978) and Cry for the Strangers. He also appeared in episodes of Thriller, The Outer Limits, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, Land of the Giants, Project UFO, The Incredible Hulk, Shadow Chasers, Quantum Leap, The Flash and the revived Twilight Zone. Baer was also the voice of Ernie, the Keebler Elf, in the Keebler cookie commercials.

Baritone Billy Guy, who began his career with R&B group The Robins singing Leiber and Stoller’s “Riot in Cell Block No.9” and “Smokey Joe’s Café”, and later co-founded the Coasters, died of heart disease on November 12th, aged 66. His distinctive voice can be heard on such 1950s hits as “Searchin” and “Yakety Yak”.

57-year-old music producer and founding member of California folk-rock group We Five, Michael Stewart died on November 13th after a long illness. In the mid-1960s, We Five had hits with “You Were on My Mind” and “Let’s Get Together”, and Stewart later produced albums and singles for Billy Joel and Tom Jones, among others.

Hollywood musical-comedy star of the 1940s Eddie Bracken died from surgery complications on November 14th, aged 87. He voiced the role of Archy in the 1971 animated movie Shinbone Alley and late in his career he appeared in episodes of TV’s Tales from the Darkside (“A Case of the Stubbons”), Amazing Stories (“Boo”) and Monsters (“The Maker”).

Academy Award-winning Hollywood star James Coburn died unexpectedly of a heart attack on November 18th, aged 74. He portrayed super-cool secret agent Derek Flint in the 1960s sci-spy adventures Our Man Flint and In Like Flint. His other films include The Loved One, The President’s Analyst, Looker, Hudson Hawk, The Nutty Professor (1996) and Disney’s Monsters Inc. He also helped with the story for the martial arts fantasy The Silent Flute (aka Circle of Iron). On TV Coburn appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Men Into Space, The Twilight Zone, Noah’s Ark (1999) and the Dean Koontz adaptation Mr Murder, he hosted the ABC anthology series Darkroom (1981–82), was the voice of Looten Plunder in the animated series Captain Planet and the Planeteers, and executive produced the 2001 miniseries of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon.

American actress and World War II pin-up model Adele Jergens died on November 22nd, aged 84. Her film credits include Columbia’s Western serial Black Arrow, A Thousand and One Nights, Down to Earth, The Crime Doctor’s Diary, Radar Secret Service, Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man and The Day the World Ended (1955). From 1949 she was married to actor Glenn Langan (who died in 1991).

59-year-old actor and retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Richard C. Stilwell, Jr. was killed in a car crash in Los Angeles on November 23rd. After earning a Silver Star for gallantry in Vietnam, he became an actor, appearing in such films as Beneath Loch Ness, Mimic 2 and Bug.

German actor Wolfgang Preiss died on November 27th, aged 92. Best known for playing Nazis on screen, he also appeared as super-criminal Dr Mabuse in a series of films in the early 1960s – The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse, The Return of Dr Mabuse, The Invisible Dr Mabuse, The Testament of Dr Mabuse, Dr Mabuse vs Scotland Yard and The Secret of Dr Mabuse – plus Mill of the Stone Women, The Mad Executioners, The Cave of the Living Dead, The Boys from Brazil and Dr M.

British leading man John Justin (John Justinian de Ledesma) died on November 29th, aged 85. Best known for his stage roles, he appeared in the films The Thief of Bagdad (1940), The Sound Barrier and Lisztomania. Justin also portrayed the vampire father of Dorabella in a 1977 episode of the BBC-TV series Supernatural, and the living-dead villain in the 1979 BBC adaptation of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Schalcken the Painter. The second of his three wives was actress Barbara Murray.

French leading man Daniel Gelin died of kidney failure the same day, aged 81. His films include Torticola vs Frankensberg, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, Jean Cocteau’s The Testament of Orpheus, and Mr Frost.

32-year-old Irish-born TV actor and former musician Glenn [Martin] Quinn, who was best known for his role as the half-demon Doyle in the first season of Angel in 1999, was found dead at a friend’s home in North Hollywood on December 3rd. A coroner’s report confirmed that he died of a heroin overdose. When Quinn’s character was unexpectedly killed off, series co-creator Joss Whedon claimed that Doyle’s abrupt departure had been part of the show’s plan from the beginning, although autopsy documents confirmed that he lost his job because of substance abuse. Quinn, who moved to America in 1988, was also a regular on Roseanne from 1990–97, and appeared in the movies Dr Giggles, Live Nude Girls and Campfire Tales. A memorial fund was established to help cover the funeral expenses of the homeless actor.

Australian-born Mary Hansen, keyboard player and vocalist with cult 1990s band Stereolab, died on December 9th after the 36-year-old collided with a tipper truck while cycling in East London.

American actor Brad Dexter, the least magnificent of The Magnificent Seven, died of emphysema on December 12th, aged 85. His other films include Sinbad the Sailor and Winter Kills.

American actress turned Warner Bros. PR executive Shirley O’Hara Krims died of complications from diabetes on December 13th, aged 78. She appeared in Val Lewton’s The Ghost Ship (1943), The Falcon Out West, Tarzan and the Amazons, Duel and Future Cop.

Canadian-born Zal Yanovsky, guitarist with 1960s band The Lovin’ Spoonful, died of a heart attack the same day, aged 57. In later years he owned a restaurant in Canada.

55-year-old British character actor James (Anthony) Hazeldine died on December 17th after a short illness. Best known for his stage work, he also appeared in such movies as The Ruling Class and The Medusa Touch, and on TV as psychic journalist Tom Crane in The Omega Factor (1979).

American character actor Kenneth Tobey, best remembered as the stalwart hero of The Thing from Another World and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, died on December 22nd, aged 85. His other film credits include It Came from Beneath the Sea, The Vampire (1957), Ben, Homebodies, The Howling, The Creature Wasn’t Nice, The Lost Empire, Strange Invaders, InnerSpace, Big Top Pee-Wee, Freeway, Ghost Writer, Gremlins 2 The New Batch, Honey I Blew Up the Kid, Single White Female, Attack of the “B” Movie Monster and TV’s Terror in the Sky, while his reshoot role as a priest was cut from Hellraiser III Hell on Earth.

50-year-old Turkish-born Joe Strummer (John Graham Mellor), a former busker and founder of the influential British punk-rock band The Clash, died of an apparent heart attack after taking his dog for a walk the same day. The Clash had hits with such songs as “London Calling” and “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” before Strummer moved on to composing scores for films like Alex Cox’s Straight to Hell and Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train.

Reggie Rymal, who appeared as the 3-D bat-and-ball barker in House of Wax (1953), died of a heart attack on Christmas Day, aged 85.

Actress Susan Marx (Susan Fleming), who was married to comedian Harpo Marx (who died in 1964), died of a heart attack on December 28th, aged 93. She appeared in The Gold-Diggers of 1937 and Charlie Chan’s Courage and, as a publicity stunt for the W.C. Fields comedy Million-Dollar Legs, had her legs insured for $1 million.

Model Vivien Neves, the first woman to appear completely naked in a British newspaper, died in hospital of the MRSA superbug in December, aged 54. She took her clothes off for a Fisons chemicals advert in The Times in 1971 and went on to become a Page Three girl in The Sun. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the mid-1970s.

American character actress Mary Brian (Louise Byrdie Dantzler), whose career spanned the silent and sound eras, died on December 30th, aged 96. She made her debut as Wendy in the 1924 Peter Pan, and her other films include Charlie Chan in Paris and Killer at Large. She retired from the screen in 1947.

FILM/TV TECHNICIANS

Turkish-born French-Armenian director and former journalist Henri Verneuil (Achod Malakian), whose credits include the The Night Caller (1972), died on January 11th, aged 81. In 1996 he was awarded an honorary César, the French equivalent of the Oscar, for lifetime achievement in film.

70-year-old director and animator Ernest Pintoff died of complications from a stroke at the Motion Picture and Television Fund Hospital on January 12th. His animated short The Critic, written and directed by Mel Brooks, received an Academy Award in 1964. He also directed the 1973 horror/Western Blade, and Jaguar Lives starring Christopher Lee. Pintoff created the credit sequences for The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, and directed the 1978 TV movie Human Feelings.

38-year-old independent film-maker Ted Demme, the nephew of Jonathan Demme, died on January 14th of a heart attack attributed to drug use after collapsing during a celebrity-basketball game. His six films as a director include Beautiful Girls and Blow.

Radio and TV writer, producer and director Mende Brown died of a heart attack on February 2nd, aged 81. In the late 1940s he produced the half-hour NBC-TV show The Inner Sanctum, based on the popular radio series. After moving to Australia from 1970 until 1991, he produced and directed such series as Little Jungle Boy and The Evil Touch, as well as the movie And Millions Will Die.

48-year-old director Lawrence L. Simeone died on February 3rd of complications following open-heart surgery. His films include Eyes of the Beholder, Power Rangers: Turbo and The Gifted.

TV executive Jerome H. Stanley died on February 7th, aged 80. Beginning his career at Republic Studios in 1939, he moved to television in 1956 where he supervised the development of such series as Star Trek, Get Smart, I Spy, The Monkees and My World and Welcome to It. He also executive produced the TV movie Escape.

“Th-th-th-that’s all, folks!” Pioneering animator Chuck Jones (Charles M. [Martin] Jones) died of congestive heart failure on February 22nd, aged 89. In a career spanning over sixty years, he created more than 300 cartoon shorts featuring such immortal characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Pepe Le Pew, Wile E. Coyote, Road Runner and Marvin the Martian. He directed the 1966 short Dr Seuss’ How The Grinch Stole Christmas! (narrated by Boris Karloff), Horton Hears a Who! and the feature The Phantom Tollbooth (with Abe Levitow). Jones also worked on Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (uncredited), Gay Purr-ee, Richard Williams’s A Christmas Carol, 1941, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Gremlins 2 The New Batch and Stay Tuned, and he received three Oscars and an honorary Academy Award for Life Achievement in 1996. He made cameo appearances in Gremlins and InnerSpace, and his autobiographies, Chuck Amuk: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist and Chuck Reducks, appeared in 1989 and 1996 respectively.

Welsh-born stage and film costume designer Mary Grant Price, who was married to Vincent Price from 1949 until their divorce in 1973, died after a brief illness in Los Angeles on March 2nd, aged 85. The mother of Mary Victoria Price and Jody Price, during her marriage to the actor she worked with him as an art consultant to Sears, Roebuck & Co.

American exploitation producer and distributor Don Sonney died of heart failure on March 3rd, aged 87. As well as producing such titles as Trader Hornee and Space Thing, he distributed The Adult Version of Jekyll and Hide, She Freak, The Long Swift Sword of Siegfried and The Erotic Adventures of Zorro.

Costume designer Shirley [Kingdon] Russell, who was married to director Ken Russell from 1957 until 1977, died on March 4th, aged 66. Her many credits include Billion Dollar Brain, The Devils, Lisztomania, Tommy, The Little Prince, Greystoke, The Bride, Fairytale: A True Story and TV’s Gulliver’s Travels (1995).

Production executive Miriam “Mimi” Roth died of cancer on March 7th, aged 81. She started writing radio comedy for Art Carney and others before joining United Artists in 1958, becoming one of the first female executives at a major Hollywood studio. She moved into development at Playboy Productions and went on to teach screenwriting at USC’s film school. Her son Eric won an Academy Award for his screenplay Forrest Gump.

Veteran American film and TV director William [Nuelsen] Witney died after a series of strokes on March 17th, aged 86. He directed or co-directed (often with John English) more than sixty serials and feature films (many of them Westerns starring Roy Rogers, Rex Allen or Audie Murphy) in a career that spanned forty years, and he is credited as the first person to choreograph screen fights after watching Busby Berkeley filming dance scenes one step at a time. His many films include SOS Coast Guard (with Bela Lugosi), Hawk of the Wilderness, Dick Tracy Returns, Fighting Devil Dogs, Dick Tracy’s G-Men, Daredevils of the Red Circle, Drums of Fu Manchu, Mysterious Dr Satan, King of the Royal Mounted, Dick Tracy vs Crime Inc., Jungle Girl, Adventures of Captain Marvel, Spy Smasher, The Perils of Nyoka, King of the Mounties, G-Men vs the Black Dragon, The Crimson Ghost, Zorro’s Fighting Legion, The Cool and the Crazy, Master of the World (with Vincent Price), Tarzan’s Jungle Rebellion and Darktown Strutters (aka Get Down and Boogie). His autobiography, In a Door, Into a Fight, Out a Door, Into a Chase appeared in 1996.

Emmy Award-winning film and TV sound editor, Josef Erich von Stroheim, son of the silent-film director/actor Erich von Stroheim, died of complications from lung cancer on March 22nd, aged 79. A former still photographer, his many credits include The Amazing Colossal Man, Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, Assignment Outer Space, First Spaceship to Venus, Shock Corridor, Mutiny in Outer Space, Space Monster, Destination Inner Space, Day of the Dolphin, Lady in White and TV’s Mission: Impossible and Wonder Woman.

Film production designer Richard “Dick” Sylbert died of cancer on March 23rd, aged 73. A protégé of William Cameron Menzies, in 1954 he became art director for the syndicated TV series Inner Sanctum and went on to design such films as The Manchurian Candidate, Rosemary’s Baby, Catch-22, The Day of the Dolphin, 1990’s Dick Tracy (for which he received his second Oscar) and Mulholland Drive (in which he had a cameo as a coroner). He was vice-president in charge of production at Paramount from 1975 until 1978.

Austrian-Hungarian screenwriter and director Billy (Samuel) Wilder died of pneumonia at his home in Beverly Hills on March 27th, aged 95. In Hollywood since 1934 (he shared a room with Peter Lorre), his many films include Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, The Seven Year Itch, Some Like It Hot, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes and Fedora. The winner of six Oscars, in 1960 he was the first film-maker to win three Academy Awards in a year.

Special effects director Thomas “Glen” Robinson died the same day, aged 87. He received a special Academy Award for his work on Logan’s Run, and his other credits include The Bamboo Saucer, Earthquake, King Kong (1976), Meteor, Flash Gordon (1980), Island Claws and Amityville II The Possession. He retired in 1983.

Pioneering TV director Clark R. Jones, who re-staged Mary Martin’s Broadway hit Peter Pan for television in 1955, died of complications from emphysema on March 28th, aged 81.

Theatrical and entertainment attorney Albert E. Martin died on March 31st, aged 80. Although his clients included Errol Flynn, Harold Robbins and producer Edward R. Pressman, his favourite credit was having arranged the sale and distribution of Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Former AIP producer/scriptwriter Louis M. “Deke” Heyward died of pneumonia on April 3rd, aged 81. In the 1950s he was the first writer for the interactive TV cartoon show Winky-Dink and You before becoming vice-president of production at AIP from 1963 until 1973. He scripted such AIP releases as Pajama Party, Spy in Your Eye, Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, City Under the Sea (aka War-Gods of the Deep) and Mario Bava’s Dr Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs and Planet of the Vampires, and produced much of the studio’s European output, which included House of 1,000 Dolls, De Sade, Witchfinder General, Curse of the Crimson Altar (aka The Crimson Cult), Scream and Scream Again, The Oblong Box, The Haunted House of Horror (aka Horror House), Wuthering Heights, The Vampire Lovers, The Abominable Dr Phibes, Cry of the Banshee, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? and Dr Phibes Rises Again. In recent years Heyward’s autobiography, The Way it Happened, was serialized in Filmfax magazine. Heyward was a cousin of Irving Thalberg, and his son Andy created Inspector Gadget.

Pioneer TV creator-producer Roy Huggins (aka “John Thomas James”), whose shows include Maverick (1957–62), 77 Sunset Strip (1958–64), The Fugitive (1963–67) and The Rockford Files (1974–80), died the same day, aged 87. He is also credited with creating filmed television and the movie-of-the-week concept. A 1961 episode of his series Bus Stop dealt with a psychopathic killer. Huggins’s second wife was former actress Adele Mara.

French-born cinematographer Thierry Pathé (Thierry Christian Charles Franc), the grandson of film pioneer Charles Pathé, died in New York City of cancer on April 6th, aged 61. His credits include Cauldron of Blood (starring Boris Karloff) and the Batman TV series. He later became a teacher at NYU.

40-year-old Carla Fry, vice-chairman of physical production at New Line Cinema, died after a long illness on April 23rd. Her credits include The Mask, The Hidden II, Se7en, Dark City, Blade, Lost in Space, the Mortal Kombat franchise and The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Ruth Handler (Ruth Mosko), the co-founder of toy company Mattel and creator of Barbie, died of complications from colon cancer surgery in Los Angeles in April, aged 85. Handler designed the fashion-conscious doll in 1959, and although it spawned a billion-dollar industry, feminists complained that the toy was an undesirable role-model for girls. Barbie and boyfriend Ken were named, respectively, after their creator’s daughter and son (who died of a brain tumour in 1994). Handler, who also suffered from breast cancer, had a second lesser-known career designing prosthetic breasts for women who had undergone mastectomies.

Former BBC-TV producer John Nathan-Turner, who worked with six of the seven Time Lords on more than 130 episodes of Doctor Who from 1980–89, died of liver failure after a brief illness in a Brighton hospital on May 1st. He was 54. Blamed by fans for ultimately destroying the once-popular series, Nathan-Turner originally joined the show as a floor assistant in 1969. He also produced the short-lived spin-off series, K9 and Company (1981).

Pioneer British television special effects supervisor Bernard Wilkie died on May 2nd, aged 82. As co-founder of the Visual Effects Workshop at the BBC (where he worked from 1948 until his retirement in 1978), he contributed to such programmes as Nineteen Eighty–Four (1954), Quatermass 2 (1955), Quatermass and the Pit (1958-59) and Doctor Who.

American scriptwriter and producer John Kohn died of cancer on May 4th, aged 76. His credits include an Oscar nomination for his 1965 adaptation of John Fowles’s The Collector with longtime collaborator Stanley Mann, which he produced along with The Magus, The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie and Theatre of Blood (starring Vincent Price). He was head of production at EMI from 1979–83.

Set decorator and producer Jacques Mapes died the same day, aged 88. He began his career in 1939 as assistant art director on The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

American-born Michael Todd, Jr., the stepson of Elizabeth Taylor and producer of the only feature ever shot in “Smell-o-Vision”, also died on May 4th at his home in Ireland. The 72-year-old had been suffering from lung cancer. The son of legendary Hollywood producer Mike Todd (Avrom Goldbogen, who was killed in a plane crash in 1958), he made Scent of Mystery (aka Holiday in Spain) in 1960, starring Denholm Elliott, Peter Lorre and an uncredited Taylor as a corpse, which piped smells into the cinema through tiny tubes beneath the audience’s seats. Unfortunately, critics thought the film stank.

Film director and former child actor George Sidney died of complications of lymphoma in Las Vegas on May 5th, aged 85. The director of a number of Our Gang comedy shorts at MGM in the late 1930s, he also directed the 1941 Pete Smith Speciality 3-D short Third Dimensional Murder, which featured Ed Payson as the Frankenstein Monster. Sidney went on to direct many musicals, including Viva Las Vegas starring Elvis Presley. He also founded and financed Hanna-Barbera Productions in 1944.

Italian director/producer Edmond Amati died the same day, aged 82. Best known for his spaghetti Westerns, he also produced When Women Played Ding Dong, A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, The Crimes of the Black Cat, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (aka Don’t Open the Window), Strange Shadows in an Empty Room and Holocaust 2000 (aka The Chosen) amongst many other titles.

British TV producer and executive Stella Richman died on May 24th, aged 79. During her early career as an actress, she appeared as a hospital ward sister in the BBC-TV production of The Quatermass Experiment.

Martial arts director Chang Cheh died of pulmonary disease on May 22nd, aged 77. His numerous films include 5 Deadly Venoms, New One-Armed Swordsman, Ten Fingers of Steel and Girl With the Thunderbolt Kick.

Hollywood producer and screenwriter Herman Cohen died of throat cancer on June 2nd, aged 76. He is best known for launching the teenage-horror sub-genre at AIP in 1957 with I Was a Teenage Werewolf (in which he had a cameo and also co-scripted under the pseudonym “Ralph Thornton”). It cost less than $100,000 to make and grossed more than $2 million at the box office. Cohen’s other credits include Bride of the Gorilla, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla, The Ghost Ship (1952), Target Earth, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, Blood of Dracula, How to Make a Monster, The Headless Ghost, Circus of Horrors, Konga, Horrors of the Black Museum, Black Zoo, A Study in Terror, Berserk, Trog and Craze. In 1981 he formed Cobra Media, a domestic distribution company.

89-year-old Lew Wasserman, a media mogul who successfully ran Universal/MCA for four decades, died of complications from a stroke the same day. Wasserman was also president of Revue Productions, whose many TV shows include Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-62).

Television producer/director William P. D’Angelo, whose credits include Batman (1965–68) and The Monster Squad (1976–77), died of pancreatic cancer on June 8th, aged 70.

French-born producer, director and screenwriter Albert Band (Alfredo Antonini), the father of Full Moon producer Charles Band and composer Richard Band, died of complications from a stomach blockage and lung infection in Los Angeles on June 14th, aged 78. After collaborating with John Huston in the early 1950s, he went on to direct or produce Face of Fire, I Bury the Living, Hercules and the Princess of Troy, Mansion of the Doomed, Dracula’s Dog (aka Zoltan . . . Hound of Dracula), Metalstorm The Destruction of Jared-Syn, Troll, TerrorVision, Ghost Warrior, Ghoulies II, Robot Jox, The Pit and the Pendulum (1990), Honey I Blew Up the Kid, Pet Shop, Oblivion, Doctor Mordrid, Trancers III, Robot Wars, Prehysteria, Prehysteria 2, Castle Freak, Oblivion 2: Backlash and Dragonworld.

Veteran film director John Frankenheimer died of a massive stroke due to complications from spinal surgery on July 6th, aged 72. His nearly five-decade career began in live TV (and included a 1959 adaptation of The Turn of the Screw with Ingrid Bergman), and he later moved to films, where he directed The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May, Seconds, The Extraordinary Seaman, 99 & 44/100% Dead and Prophecy. In 1996 he replaced Richard Stanley on the troubled version of The Island of Dr Moreau. He also directed the 1992 Tales from the Crypt episode, “Maniac at Large”. At the time of his death he was preparing to direct a prequel to The Exorcist.

Ward Kimball, one of the legendary “Nine Old Men” at Disney, who helped modernize the look of Mickey Mouse in 1938 and created Jiminy Cricket for Pinocchio, died on July 8th, aged 88. While working at Walt Disney Studios from 1934 until his retirement in 1973, he was a directing animator on such classic cartoons as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Dumbo, Peter Pan, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and The Reluctant Dragon. Two shorts he created for Disney won Academy Awards, and in the 1950s he wrote and directed three influential Disney TV shows about space exploration: Man in Space, Man and the Moon and Mars and Beyond.

Disney’s camera department head and technical innovator Charles Richard Grills died on July 12th, aged 89. His many credits include Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Bambi, Sleeping Beauty and numerous others.

British costumier Monty Berman, who worked on the James Bond films amongst many other titles, died after a short illness on July 15th, aged 90.

Film editor Harry Donald Gerstad, who won a second Oscar for his work on High Noon, died on July 17th, aged 97. His many credits include The Spiral Staircase (1945), Unknown Island, Rocketship X-M, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T, The Alligator People, The Magic Sword, Batman (1966), Ben, plus the 1950s TV series The Adventures of Superman and its feature compilations.

Disney architect Carl Denney, who helped design Sleeping Beauty’s Castle and other theme-park attractions, died on July 20th, aged 95.

59-year-old veteran record producer Gus Dudgeon and his wife Sheila were killed when their £80,000 Jaguar XK8 careered off a British motorway and landed upside down in a drainage ditch on July 21st. Among the many acts Dudgeon produced were Elton John (“Rocket Man”), XTC, Chris Rea, The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, the Rolling Stones, the Beach Boys, Joan Armatrading and David Bowie’s Space Oddity album.

Hollywood animal trainer Frank Freeman (aka “Frank Inn”) died on July 27th, aged 86. He handled Astra the dog in The Thin Man movies as well as training Benji, Lassie, and Arnold the Pig in TV’s Green Acres. He also worked on the musical Doctor Doolittle (1968).

Australian writer and director Colin Eggleston died in Geneva, Switzerland, on August 10th, aged 61. After various TV work, he made his feature debut with Fantasm Comes Again (1977) under the pseudonym “Eric Ram”. His other films include the cult success Long Weekend, Innocent Prey, Sky Pirates and Outback Vampires (aka The Wicked).

Exploitation film producer/director Doris Wishman died of complications from lymphoma the same day, aged 82 or 90 (reports vary). Her numerous credits (often under various pseudonyms) include Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73, both starring the aptly named Chesty Morgan, Nude of the Moon, Each Time I Kill, Satan Was a Lady, and A Night to Dismember. She was the cousin of Amicus producer Max Rosenberg and, incredibly, she had a new film awaiting release at the time of her death.

British-born film editor and director Peter [Roger] Hunt, who cut the first five James Bond movies and who directed the 1969 entry On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, died of heart failure on August 14th in Santa Monica, aged 77. After starting as a clapper boy at Denham Studios in 1947, he was an assistant cutter on Stranger from Venus (1954) and other films before editing the first 007 outing, Dr No (1962). Hunt is also credited by some with suggesting Sean Connery for the starring role. He went on to edit From Russia with Love and Goldfinger, and was supervising editor on Thunderball and You Only Live Twice, serving as second-unit director on the latter. He also edited The Ipcress File and was production associate on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. His other directing credits include the live-action/animated Gulliver’s Travels (1977), Hyper Sapien, Twisted Nightmare and the TV movies The Beasts Are on the Streets, It Came Upon the Midnight Clear and The Last Days of Pompeii (1983).

American television director John Peyser, whose credits include episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Shazam!, Tales of the Unexpected and numerous other shows, died in his sleep on August 16th, aged 86.

88-year-old British-born film director J. (John) Lee Thompson died in British Columbia, Canada, on August 30th of congestive heart failure. A former boxer, actor and playwright, his numerous credits include Cape Fear (1961), What a Way to Go, Eye of the Devil (aka 13), The Chairman (aka The Most Dangerous Man in the World), Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, Battle for the Planet of the Apes, The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, The White Buffalo, Happy Birthday to Me, 10 to Midnight, King Solomon’s Mines (1985) and Firewalker. He made nine movies with Charles Bronson.

German film producer Horst Wendlandt (Horst Otto Gregor Gubanow) died of cancer the same day, aged 80. He joined Rialto Films in the 1960s, where he produced many of the Edgar Wallace mysteries. His many films include The Green Archer (1961), Dead Eyes of London (1961), The Devil’s Daffodil (with Christopher Lee), The Door With Seven Locks, The Black Abbott (1963), The Indian Scarf, The Sinister Monk, The Hunchback of Soho, Creature With the Blue Hand, The Hound of Blackwood Castle, The Gorilla of Soho, Seven Blood-Stained Orchids, What Have They Done to Solange? and Momo (again with Lee).

Film producer Henry Lange, whose credits include The Monk, Daughters of Darkness and Macbeth (1987), died on September 5th, aged 64.

Oscar-winning documentary film-maker Charles Guggenheim died of pancreatic cancer on October 9th, aged 78. Best known for his political media campaigns, he began his career in 1952 as the producer of the NBC-TV marionette show Fearless Fosdick, based on the comic-strip character created by Al Capp.

Independent producer, director and screenwriter Sidney Pink, whose credits include associate-producing the first feature-length 3-D film, Bwana Devil (1952), died after a long illness on October 12th, aged 86. A former theatre owner, he worked as a budget manager on Lost Horizon (1937) and produced burlesque shows in Los Angeles with Lili St Cyr, Joe de Rita and others. Among his more than fifty film credits (often shot outside the USA) are Five, The Twonky, Angry Red Planet, Reptilicus, Journey to the Seventh Planet, Pyro, Sweet Sound of Death, Operation Atlantis and Witch Without a Broom.

John Meredyth Lucas, best known for his involvement with the original Star Trek TV series, died of leukaemia on October 19th, aged 83. The adopted son of veteran Hollywood director Michael Curtiz, Lucas scripted a number of movies and TV shows and directed episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Invaders, Night Gallery, Planet of the Apes, The Six Million Dollar Man, Beyond Westworld and numerous others. He wrote and directed several first-season episodes of Star Trek before becoming a producer on the remaining two seasons. His other credits include the TV movie City Beneath the Sea, and he helped pioneer the behind-the-scenes documentary with The Making of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Disney.

Austrian-born art director turned film director Nathan [Hertz] Juran (aka “Nathan Hertz” and “Jerry Juran”) died at his home in California on October 23rd, aged 95. After sharing an Academy Award for his designs for How Green Was My Valley (1941), he worked on such films as I Wake Up Screaming, The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe, Dr Renault’s Secret and Harvey before turning to directing with such cult movies as The Black Castle (with Boris Karloff and Lon Chaney, Jr.) The Golden Blade, The Deadly Mantis, 20 Million Miles to Earth, The Brain from Planet Arous, Attack of the 50-Foot Woman (1958), The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, Jack the Giant Killer, First Men in the Moon, The Boy Who Cried Werewolf and episodes of TV’s Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space and Land of the Giants. Juran also scripted Doctor Blood’s Coffin. He retired from film-making in 1970 and returned to architecture.

Hungarian-born Hollywood screenwriter, producer and director André de Toth (Sásvrái Farkasfalvi Tóthfalusi-Tóth Endre Antai Mihály), best remembered for the 3-D horror classic House of Wax (1953), died of an aneurysm on October 27th, aged 89. Ironically, because he had just one eye, de Toth lacked the depth perception to see the 3-D effects he created. Fleeing the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, he escaped to England and later America, where he worked with the Hungarian Korda brothers on such films as The Thief of Bagdad and The Jungle Book. His other credits include Dark Waters starring Merle Oberon, Billion Dollar Brain (as executive producer), and six 1950s Westerns with star Randolph Scott. In later years he shot the background plates for the flying sequences on Superman (1978). The first of his seven wives was actress Veronica Lake, with whom he had three children between 1944–52. His autobiography, Fragments: Portraits from the Inside, was published in 1994.

Veteran film editor Margaret Booth died on October 28th, aged 104. After beginning her career in 1915 with D.W. Griffith, she moved to MGM in the late 1920s and stayed there for more than forty years, working on some of the studio’s most prestigious productions. She received an honorary Oscar in 1977.

Canadian-born computer animator Glenn John McQueen, whose work with Pixar includes Toy Story, Toy Story 2, A Bug’s Life and Monsters Inc., died of melanoma on October 29th, aged 41.

American film and TV director Lee H. Katzin died of cancer on October 30th, aged 67. His numerous credits include Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice?, The Phynx and World Gone Wild, the TV movies Visions . . ., The Man from Atlantis, Terror Out of the Sky, Death Ray 2000 and Automan, plus episodes of The Wild Wild West, Space: 1999, The Man from Atlantis and Automan.

62-year-old sound engineer Keith A. Wester, who received Oscar nominations for his work on Waterworld, Armageddon, and several other big-budget films, died of cancer on November 1st.

Prolific Italian film director Antonio Margheriti died of a heart attack on November 4th, aged 72. In a career that spanned more than fifty films and various genres, Margheriti (who was often credited as “Anthony M. Dawson”) made such movies as Assignment Outer Space, Battle of the Worlds (with Claude Rains), The Golden Arrow, Horror Castle (with Christopher Lee), Castle of Blood (with Barbara Steele), Hercules Prisoner of Evil, Long Hair of Death (with Steele again), Wild Wild Planet, War Between the Planets, Snow Devils, War of the Planets, Web of the Spider, Seven Dead in the Cat’s Eye, Cannibal Apocalypse, Killer Fish, Yor The Hunter from the Future, Hunters of the Golden Cobra, Ark of the Sun God, Treasure Island in Outer Space and Alien from the Deep.

American cinematographer Michael J.R. Dugan, whose credits include Beyond Atlantis, Space Probe and Jaws 2, died of a stroke and pneumonia on November 6th, aged 82.

Jack Solomon, one of the first two individuals to win an Oscar for sound in 1969, died of complications following heart surgery on November 8th, aged 78. His many credits include Phantom from Space, Kiss Me, Deadly, The Amazing Colossal Man, The Lost Missile, The Collector, The Other, Sleeper, the 1976 King Kong, Meteor and The Last Starfighter.

Production executive Marvin Mirisch who, with his brothers Walter and Harold (who died in 1968), ran Monogram Pictures/Allied Artists from 1953–57 and later formed one of Hollywood’s most prestigious independent film companies, died on November 17th, aged 84. He was credited as executive producer on Universal’s 1979 Dracula and the 1993 Pink Panther cartoon series.

Exploitation film distributor, producer and director Jerry Gross was found dead in Los Angeles on November 20th, aged 62. Investigators believe he died of natural causes four days earlier. Best known as the distributor of such movies as Son of Dracula (1973), Blood Beach, The Boogeyman and the infamous I Drink Your Blood/I Eat Your Skin double-bill, he also distributed Ralph Bakshi’s Fritz the Cat, Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun and Federico Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits.

Children’s-TV producer Nina Elias Bamberger, whose credits include Sesame Street for PBS and the cartoon Dragon Tales, died of ovarian cancer the same day, aged 48.

Following the death of Ray L. Wallace in November, it was revealed by his family that footage of the legendary Bigfoot was in fact his wife in fancy dress. In 1958, Wallace put down fake tracks and the local newspaper in Humboldt County, California, dubbed the beast “Bigfoot”. In 1967, a grainy film was released showing the creature in the woods. According to his son, Michael, “He made a lot of people laugh. It was a fun family”.

Czechoslovakian-born film director Karel Reisz died of a blood disorder in London on November 25th, aged 76. His credits include the 1964 remake of Night Must Fall starring Albert Finney and Morgan, a Suitable Case for Treatment. He was married to American actress Betsy Blair.

American film and television producer Edgar J. Scherick died of leukaemia on December 2nd, aged 78. While vice-president of programming at ABC-TV from 1963–66 he was responsible for such shows as Batman and Bewitched. As a movie producer and founder of Palomar Pictures, his credits include Sleuth, The Stepford Wives and such TV movies as When Michael Calls, The Phantom of the Opera (1990), Revenge of the Stepford Wives, The Stepford Children and The Stepford Husbands.

76-year-old British TV director Ian MacNaughton, who directed all but the first four episodes of BBC-TV’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–74), died in Germany on December 10th from injuries sustained in a 2001 car accident. A former actor (he appeared in Hammer’s X The Unknown), he also directed the first Python feature, And Now for Something Completely Different, and a German version of the series, Monty Python’s Fliegender Zirkus (1971–72).

Kay Rose, the first woman to win an Academy Award for sound editing, died of multiple organ system failure on December 11th, aged 80. In 1954, with her former husband Sherman Rose, she produced Target Earth. She was the sound effects editor on I Was a Teenage Frankenstein, and her other credits include Blood of Dracula, The Flame Barrier, Pit and the Pendulum (1961) and RoboCop 2.

Tony award-winning sets and costume designer Maria Bjornson, who in 1986 created the original designs for the London stage production of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, died on December 13th, aged 53.

72-year-old James Ferman, who retired in 1999 after twenty-four years as secretary of the British Board of Film Classification, died of pneumonia in December.

Oscar-winning Hollywood producer and director George Roy Hill died of complications from Parkinson’s disease on December 27th, aged 81. Best remembered for such box office hits as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, he also directed Slaughterhouse-Five and The World According to Garp.

German-born film distributor Kenneth Rive, best known for bringing foreign-language movies to post-war Britain through his Gala Films, died on December 30th, aged 84. A former child actor, appearing alongside Conrad Veidt in Rasputin, Dämon Der Frauen (1930), he championed such “art house” directors as François Truffaut, Jean Cocteau, Federico Fellini and Ingmar Bergman. Rive also executive-produced The Devil Doll (1963) and Curse of Simba (aka Curse of the Voodoo), both made by his production company Gala World Film and starring Bryant Halliday.

USEFUL ADDRESSES

THE FOLLOWING LISTING OF organizations, publications, dealers and individuals is designed to present readers with further avenues to explore. Although I can personally recommend all those listed on the following pages, neither myself nor the publisher can take any responsibility for the services they offer. Please also note that the information below is subject to change without notice.

ORGANIZATIONS

The British Fantasy Society <www.britishfantasysociety.org.uk> began in 1971 and publishes the quarterly newsletter Prism, produces other special booklets, and organizes the annual British FantasyCon and semi-regular meetings in London. Yearly membership is £25.00 (UK), £30.00 (Europe) and £35.00 (USA and the rest of the world). Cheques, money orders and the like should be made payable in sterling to “The British Fantasy Society” and sent to The BFS Secretary, c/o 201 Reddish Road, South Reddish, Stockport SK5 7HR, UK. E-mail: <faliol@yahoo.com>.

The Horror Writers Association <www.horror.org> is a worldwide organization of writers and publishing professionals dedicated to promoting the interests of writers of Horror and Dark Fantasy. It was formed in the early 1980s. Interested individuals may apply for Active, Affiliate or Associate membership. Active membership is limited to professional writers. HWA publishes a monthly Newsletter, and organizes an annual conference and the Bram Stoker Awards ceremony. Standard membership is $65.00 (USA), $75.00 (overseas); Corporate membership is $110.00 (USA), $130.00 (overseas), and Family Membership is $85.00 (USA), $95.00 (overseas). Apply online or send payment to HWA Membership, PO Box 50577, Palo Alto, CA 94303, USA. If paying by sterling cheque send to HWA, c/o Jo Fletcher, 24 Pearl Road, London E17 4QZ, UK.

The Lost Club was set up as an umbrella body to research and promote cult and collected authors in a variety of genres from horror, fantasy and SF to crime fiction and historical romance. A range of British, American and European fantasy authors are celebrated in The Lost Club Journal, dedicated to “Writers the World Forgot”. Edited by Roger Dobson and Mark Valentine, the Journal includes features on M.P. Shiel, Arthur Machen, James Branch Cabell, Count Stenbock, Rider Haggard, Montague Summers, Sax Rohmer, Sarban, Aleister Crowley, Dennis Wheatley plus others still more obscure whose names will be found in no reference work or study. Membership of The Lost Club is informal: all book lovers wishing to consider themselves part of the group are welcome to do so. The LCJ material is published at the Tartarus Press website <www.tartaruspress.com:> – click on “Links” and at <www.lost-club.co.uk>. For further details of The Lost Club contact Roger Dobson <rogeralandobson@hotmail.com> and at 182 Barns Road, Oxford OX4 3RG, UK or Mark Valentine <markl.valentine@btinternet.com> and <lostclub@btopenworld.com> and at Stable Cottage, Priest Bank Road, Kildwick, Keighley, North Yorkshire BD20 9BH, UK. The editors welcome news, views and articles on overlooked authors.

World Fantasy Convention <www.worldfantasy.org/> is an annual convention held in a different (usually American) city each year, oriented particularly towards serious readers and genre professionals.

SMALL PRESS PUBLISHERS

The Alchemy Press <www.alchemypress.co.uk>, 46 Oxford Road, Acocks Green, Birmingham B27 6DT, UK. E-mail: <info@alchemypress.demon.co.uk>.

American Fantasy Press <www.american-fantasy.com>, PO Box 1059, Woodstock, IL 60098, USA. E-mail: <garpubserv@aol.com>.

BBR <www.bbr-online.com/backbrainrecluse>, BBR, PO Box 625, Sheffield S1 3GY, UK. E-mail: <distribution@bbr-online.com>.

Dark Regions Press <www.darkregions.hypermart.net/>, PO Box 1558, Brentwood, CA 94513, USA. E-mail: <Isedmorey1@aol.com>.

DreamHaven Books <www.dreamhavenbooks.com>, 912 W. Lake Street, Minneapolis, MN 55408, USA. E-mail: <dream@dreamhavenbooks.com>.

Earthling Publications <www.earthlingpub.com>, 12 Pheasant Hill Drive, Shrewsbury, MA 01545, USA. E-mail: <earthlingpub@yahoo.com>.

Eden Studios Inc <www.excelsiorgames.info>, c/o Excelsior Entertainment, Clifton Industrial Center, 100 Mill Street #2, Clifton Heights, PA 19018, USA. E-mail: <thom@excelsiorgames.info>.

Flesh & Blood Press, 121 Joseph Street, Bayville, NJ 08721, USA. E-mail: <horrorjack@aol.com>.

MirrorDanse Books <www.tabula-rasa.info/MirrorDanse/>, PO Box 3542, Parramatta, NSW 2124, Australia. E-mail: <mirrordanse@optusnet.com.au>.

Mythos Books LLC <www.mythosbooks.com>, 351 Lake Ridge Road, Poplar Bluff, MO 63901-2177, USA. E-mail: <dwynn@LDD.net>.

Night Shade Books <www.nightshadebooks.com>, 3623 SW Baird St, Portland, OR 97219, USA. E-mail: <night@nightshadebooks.com>.

PS Publishing <www.pspublishing.co.uk>, Hamilton House, 4 Park Avenue, Harrogate HG2 9BQ, UK. E-mail: <crowth 1@attglobal.net>.

Sarob Press <www.home.freeuk.net/sarobpress>, “Ty Newydd”, Four Roads, Kidwelly, Carmarthenshire SA17 4SF, Wales, UK. E-mail: <sarobpress@freeuk.com>.

Savoy Books <www.savoy.abel.co.uk>, 446 Wilmslow Road, Withington, Manchester M20 3BW, UK. E-mail: <office@savoy.abel.co.uk>.

Shadow Publishing <www.shadowpublishing.com>, 194 Station Road, Kings Heath, Birmingham, B14 7TE, UK. E-mail: <darkness@shadowpublishing.com>.

Subterranean Press <www.subterraneanpress.com>, PO Box 190106, Burton, MI 48519, USA. E-mail: <subpress@earthlink.net>.

Telos Publishing <www.telos.co.uk>, 61 Elgar Avenue, Tolworth, Surrey KT5 9JP, UK. E-mail: <david@telos.co.uk>.

MAGAZINES

The Bulletin of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America <www.sfwa.org> is published quarterly by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc. You do not need to be a SFWA member to subscribe, and the magazine features many interesting and important articles aimed at professional genre authors and would-be writers, including market reports. Single copies are $4.99 and a Full Year subscription (four issues) is $18.00. Send cheque or money order (payable in US dollars) to “SFWA Bulletin”, PO Box 10126, Rochester, NY 14610, USA. Overseas subscriptions: add $10.00 per year for Canada and Mexico, and $17.00 for the rest of the world. E-mail: <bulletin@sfwa.org>.

Cemetery Dance Magazine <www.cemeterydance.com> is edited by Richard Chizmar and Robert Morrish and includes fiction up to 5,000 words, interviews, articles and columns by many of the biggest names in horror. Cover price is $5.00 and a one-year subscription (six issues) is $27.00 payable by cheque or credit card to “Cemetery Dance Publications”, 132-B Industry Lane, Unit 7, Forest Hill, MD 21050, USA. E-mail: <info@cemeterydance.com>.

Crypt of Cthulhu <www.mythosbooks.com>, is a long-running magazine of Lovecraftian stories and non-fiction. Fiction, poetry and letters editor is Joe S. Pulver <jspulver@albany.net> and non-fiction editor is Michael Cisco <mtc212@is8.nyu.edu>. Single issues are $6.00 (USA and Canada) and $7.50 (elsewhere, including airmail) to “Mythos Books LLC”, 351 Lake Ridge Road, Poplar Bluff, MO 63901-2177, USA. E-mail: <dwynn@LDD.net>.

Interzone <www.sfsite.com/interzone> is Britain’s leading magazine of science fiction and fantasy. Single copies are available for £3.50 (UK) or £4.00/$6.00 (overseas) or a 12-issue subscription is £38.00 (UK), $65.00 (USA) or £44.00 (overseas) payable by cheque or International Money Order. Payments can also be made by MasterCard or Visa to “Interzone”, 217 Preston Drove, Brighton, BN1 6FL, UK.

Locus <www.locusmag.com> is the monthly newspaper of the SF/fantasy/horror field. $5.95 a copy, a 12-issue subscription is $52.00 (USA periodical mail), $55.00 (Canada/Mexico periodical mail), international rates: $55.00 (surface mail), $88.00 (airmail) to “Locus Publications”, PO Box 13305, Oakland, CA 94661, USA. Subscription information with other rates and order forms are also available on the website. Sterling equivalent cheques can be sent to Fantast (Medway) Ltd, PO Box 23, Upwell Wisbech, Cambs PE14 9BU, UK. E-mail: <locus@locusmag.com>.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction <www.fsfmag.com> has been publishing some of the best imaginative fiction for more than fifty years, now under the capable editorship of new owner Gordon Van Gelder. Single copies are $3.99 (USA) or $5.99 (Canada) and an annual subscription (which includes the double October/November anniversary issue) is $32.97 (USA) and $42.97 (rest of the world). US cheques or credit card information to “Fantasy & Science Fiction”, PO Box 3447, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA., or subscribe online.

MonsterZine.com <www.monsterzine.com> onl-ine magazine that describes itself as “Cineaste meets Famous Monsters of Filmland”. E-mail: <editor@monsterzine.com>.

Rabbit Hole is published semi-regularly for members of The Harlan Ellison Recording Collection. Edited by Susan Ellison, each issue contains exclusive news and articles about Harlan Ellison, along with the occasional fiction. There is also the opportunity to purchase signed Ellison books and audio recordings at special discount prices to HERC members. A four-issue subscription is just $10.00 (USA) or $14.00 (overseas) and includes a bonus audio tape, to: “The Harlan Ellison Recording Collection”, PO Box 55548, Sherman Oaks, CA 91413-0548, USA.

Redsine <www.redsine.com> is a quarterly fiction magazine from Australia, published in trade paperback by Prime Books <www.primebooks.net>. It publishes dark fantasy and horror up to 5,000 words in length and buys first serial rights. PO Box 1287, Toowong, QLD 4066, Australia. E-mail: <garry@redsine.com> or <trent@redsine.com>.

SF Site <www.sfsite.com> has been posted twice each month since 1997. Presently, it publishes around thirty to fifty reviews of SF, fantasy and horror from mass-market publishers and some small-press imprints. They also maintain link pages for Author and Fan Tribute Sites and other facets include pages for Interviews, Fiction, Science Fact, Bookstores, Small Press, Publishers, E-Zines and Magazines, Artists, Audio, Art Galleries, Newsgroups and Writers’ Resources. Periodically, they add features such as author and publisher reading lists. Past examples include Jonathan Carroll, Charles de Lint, Philip K. Dick, Paul McAuley, Ian McDonald, Kim Stanley Robinson, Dan Simmons and Michelle West.

Space and Time <www.cith.org/space&time>, the magazine of fantasy, horror and science fiction is published twice a year by editor-in-chief Gordon Linzner. Single issues are $5.00 plus $1.50 shipping (USA). Subscriptions are two issues for $10.00 and four issues for $20.00 (USA), or two issues for $12.00 and four issues for $24.00 outside the USA. Please use US postal money order or cheque payable against any US bank. In the UK order from BBR Distributing, PO Box 625, Sheffield S1 3GY, UK for £3.50 per copy or four issues for £12.00.

Supernatural Tales is a small-press magazine of stories and non-fiction edited by David Longhorn. Individual copies are £2.50 (including p&p) and a two-year (four-issue) subscription is just £8.00 in the UK. Overseas subscriptions in sterling cheques, Euros or US dollars cash are £3.50/€6.00/$6.00 per copy or £10.00/€15.00/$15.00 per two-year subscription. Make cheques payable to “D. Longhorn” and send to Supernatural Tales, 291 Eastbourne Avenue, Gateshead NE8 4NN, UK.

Talebones <www.fairwoodpress.com> is a mostly quarterly digest magazine of science fiction and dark fantasy edited and published by Patrick and Honna Swenson. Cover price is $6.00 (USA)/$7.50 (Canada), and subscriptions are $20.00 (USA) for one year and $38.00 (USA) for two years. Canadian subscribers add $1.50 per issue and all other foreign subscribers add $4.50 per issue, US funds only. Send to: 5203 Quincy Avenue S.E., Auburn, WA 98092, USA. E-mail: <talebones@fairwoodpress.com>.

The 3rd Alternative <www.ttapress.com> is a quarterly magazine of new horror fiction, interviews, artwork, articles and reviews. Cover price is £3.95/$7.00, and a six-issue subscription is £21.00 (UK), £24.00 (Europe), $36.00 (USA) or £27.00 (rest of the world) to “TTA Press”, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK. US orders can be sent to “TTA Press’, 360 W. 76th Ave., #H, Anchorage, AK 99518, USA. Subscriptions by credit card via the secure website. E-mail: <ttapress@aol.com>. You can also visit the TTA Press message boards at: <www.ttapress.com/discus>.

Video Watchdog <www.videowatchdog.com> is a monthly review of horror, fantasy and cult cinema on tape and disc, now in its fourteenth year. $6.50 a copy, an annual 12-issue subscription is $48.00 bulk/$70.00 first class (USA), $66.00 surface/$88.00 airmail (overseas). US funds only or VISA/MasterCard to “Video Watchdog’, PO Box 5283, Cincinnati, OH 45205-0283, USA. E-mail: <Videowd@aol.com>.

Weird Tales <www.dnapublications.com> is now in its 79th year of publication. This latest large-size incarnation of “The Unique Magazine”, edited by George H. Scithers and Darrell Schweitzer, is published four times a year by DNA Publications, Inc. in association with Terminus Publishing Co., Inc. Single copies are $4.95 (USA), $6.00 (Canada) and $9.00 (elsewhere) in US funds. A four-issue subscription is $16.00 (USA), $22.00 (Canada) and $35.00 (elsewhere) in US funds and should be sent to “DNA Publications, Inc.”, PO Box 2988, Radford, VA 24143-2988, USA. Submissions should be addressed to Terminus Publishing Co., Inc., 123 Crooked Lane, King of Prussia, PA 19406-2570, USA. An e-mail version of the magazine’s writers’ guidelines (no electronic submissions) is available from <www.owlswick@netaxs.com>.

BOOK DEALERS

Borderlands Books <www.borderlands-books.com> is a nicely designed store with an impressive stock of new and used books and a friendly staff. 866 Valencia Street (at 19th), San Francisco, CA 94110, USA. Tel: (415) 824-8203. Credit cards accepted. E-mail: <office@borderlands-books.com>.

Cold Tonnage Books <www.coldtonnage.com> offers excellent mail-order new and used SF/fantasy/horror, art, reference, limited editions etc. Write to Andy & Angela Richards, Cold Tonnage Books, 22 Kings Lane, Windlesham, Surrey GU20 6JQ, UK. Credit cards accepted. Tel: +44 (0)1276-475388. E-mail: <andy@coldtonnage.com>.

Ken Cowley offers mostly used SF/fantasy/horror/crime/supernatural, collectables, pulps, videos etc. by mail order at very reasonable prices. Write to Trinity Cottage, 153 Old Church Road, Clevedon, North Somerset, BS21 7TU, UK. Tel: +44 (0)1275-872247. E-mail: <kencowley@blueyonder.co.uk>.

Richard Dalby issues semi-regular mail order lists of used ghost and supernatural volumes at very reasonable prices. Write to 4 Westbourne Park, Scarborough, North Yorkshire YO12 4AT, UK. Tel: +44 (0)1723 377049.

Dark Delicacies <www.darkdel.com> is a friendly Burbank, California, store specializing in horror books, vampire merchandise and signings. They also do mail order and run money-saving book club and membership discount deals. 4213 West Burbank Blvd., Burbank, CA 91505, USA. Tel: (818) 556-6660. Credit cards accepted. E-mail: <darkdel@darkdel.com>.

DreamHaven Books & Comics <www.dreamhavenbooks.com> store and mail order offers new and used SF/fantasy/horror/art and illustrated etc. with regular catalogues (both print and e-mail). Write to 912 West Lake Street, Minneapolis, MN 55408, USA. Credit cards accepted. Tel: (612) 823-6070. E-mail: <dream@dreamhavenbooks.com>.

Fantastic Literature <www.fantasticliterature.com> mail order offers the UK’s biggest online out-of-print SF/fantasy/horror genre bookshop. Fanzines, pulps and vintage paperbacks as well. 16,000 titles with regular catalogues. Write to Simon and Laraine Gosden, Fantastic Literature, 35 The Ramparts, Rayleigh, Essex SS6 8PY, UK. Credit cards and PayPal accepted. Tel/Fax: +44 (0)1268-747564. E-mail: <sgosden@netcomuk.co.uk>.

Fantasy Centre <www.fantasycentre.biz> shop and mail order has used SF/fantasy/horror, art, reference, pulps etc. at reasonable prices with regular bi-monthly catalogues. They also stock a wide range of new books from small, specialist publishers. Write to 157 Holloway Road, London N7 8LX, UK. Credit cards accepted. Tel/Fax: +44 (0)20-7607 9433. E-mail: <books@fantasycentre.biz>.

House of Monsters <www.visionvortex/houseofmonsters> is a small treasure-trove of a store only open at weekends from noon that specializes in horror-movie memorabilia, toys, posters, videos, books and magazines. 1579 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Gallery 218, Chicago, IL 60614, USA. Credit cards accepted. Tel: (773) 292-0980. E-mail: <Homonsters@aol.com>.

David Wynn’s Mythos Books LLC <www.mythosbooks.com> is a mail-order company presenting books and curiosities on Lovecraftiana, Cthulhu Mythos, horror and weird-fiction releases with regular e-mail and web site updates. Write to 351 Lake Ridge Road, Poplar Bluff, MO 63901-2160, USA. Major credit cards accepted. Tel/Fax: (573) 785-7710. E-mail: <dwynn@LDD.net>.

Porcupine Books offers regular catalogues and extensive mail order lists of used fantasy/horror/SF titles via e-mail <brian@porcupine.demon.co.uk> or write to 37 Coventry Road, Ilford, Essex IG1 4QR, UK. Tel: +44 (0)20 8554-3799.

Kirk Ruebotham <www.abebooks.com/home/kirk61/> is a mail-order only dealer, who sells out-of-print and used horror/SF/fantasy/crime and related non-fiction, with regular catalogues. Write to 16 Beaconsfield Road, Runcorn, Cheshire WA7 4BX, UK. Tel: +44 (0)1928 560540 (10:00am-8:00pm). E-mail: <kirk.ruebotham@ntlworld.com>.

Bob and Julie Wardzinski’s The Talking Dead offers reasonably priced paperbacks, pulps and hardcovers, with catalogues issued regularly. They accept wants lists and are also the exclusive supplier of back issues of Interzone. Credit cards accepted. Contact them at 12 Rosamund Avenue, Merley, Wimborne, Dorset BH21 1TE, UK. Tel: +44 (0)1202 849212. E-mail: <books@thetalkingdead.fsnet.co.uk>.

MARKET INFORMATION AND NEWS

Although the weekly DarkEcho <www.darkecho.com> newsletter for horror writers and others ceased publication more than two years ago, editor Paula Guran started sending out a periodic, personal e-mail whenever time and whim allowed. Now this, too, has changed. It’s more frequent, but it doesn’t cover horror news comprehensively or list markets, etc. It’s still worth subscribing to for free by e-mailing: <subscribe@darkecho.com>.

The Fix <www.ttapress.com> features in-depth reviews of all SF/fantasy/horror magazines publishing short fiction; interviews with editors, publishers and writers; stories; news and comment columns; artwork and much more. Six-issue subscriptions are £15.00 (UK), £18.00 (Europe), $29.00 (USA) and £21.00 (rest of the world). Cheques, etc. payable to “TTA Press”, 5 Martins Lane, Witcham, Ely, Cambs CB6 2LB, UK. US orders can be sent to “TTA Press’, 360 W. 76th Ave., #H, Anchorage, AK 99518, USA. You can also subscribe by credit card via the secure website. E-mail: <ttapress@aol.com>.

The Gila Queen’s Guide to Markets <www.GilaQueen.us> is an e-mail newsletter detailing markets for SF/fantasy/horror plus other genres, along with publishing news, contests, dead markets, anthologies, updates, etc. The newsletter comes out every three weeks. A sample copy is $3.00, while a twenty-issue subscription costs $25.00. Make cheques or money orders out to “Kathryn Ptacek”, US funds only, and send to Kathryn Ptacek, PO Box 97, Newton, NJ 07860-0097, USA. Subscriptions can also be paid via PayPal (and credit card) as well; the PayPal and e-mail address is <GilaQueen@worldnet.att.net>.

Hellnotes <www.hellnotes.com> is described as “The Insider’s Edge to Horror”. This weekly newsletter offers reviews, interviews, news, and commentaries, and is available in an e-mail edition for $21.00 per year or hardcopy subscriptions are available for $50.00 per year. Subscriptions available through PayPal (in US Funds) to <JRohrig@aol.com> or by mail (send US cheques or money order to: “Hellnotes”, 4212 Derby Lane, Evansville, IN 47715-1568, USA. E-mail: <hellnoteseditor@aol.com>.

You can talk with numerous horror writers and discover what they are up to by visiting Andy Fairclough’s Horror World message boards at <www.pluto.spaceports.com/~mot/main.htm> or <www.horrorworld.cjb.net>.

Kelly Laymon’s Jobs in Hell! is a weekly Internet guide to horror markets for professional horror writers and artists, A one-year, 52-issue subscription costs $20.00. E-mail: <jobsinhell@hotmail.com> for a complimentary issue.