The Year's Best Horror Stories 21 Read online

  That threw me for a moment. Either Gaunt had been a boy-genius when he illustrated the Grimm’s, or he was older than he looked. In any case I might have found a source of inside information on the Hallam ménage.

  Alphonsus Gaunts were not plentiful in the street directory. I traced him to a basement flat of a once-grand house in Deyton Street: not quite the residence I had expected of a distinguished artist! My ring was answered by an incredibly pale and shriveled old woman, who nodded at the mention of Gaunt’s name and gestured me to enter.

  The flickering radiance of a candle cupped in her hand gave enough light to show the way between stacks of magazines and newspapers smelling of damp. We passed through a kitchen with a huge sink and cold-stone flags underfoot, where an immense range lay, long ago choked on soot and fat. There was a sound of dripping water. Coming at last to a great door of oak, she threw open the carved panels and shrank away into the gloom. I stepped through and the door closed behind me.

  Many candles were burning in the room. I saw skulls of men and animals; distorted, elongated sculptures of stone and clay; the tattered spines of a thousand old books. And I saw a host of faces watching me.

  In the candlelight were faces benign and malevolent, beautiful and hideous. One I will never forget, bony and blotched, with a cruel, wet-lipped mouth and obliquely-slanting eye-pits, watery, yellow and alive with a vile intelligence. The head was crowned with a thatch of white, downy fur, and above it, as though unfurling from a hunched back, immensely powerful wings, serrated and membranous like those of a bat, but gnarled and shaggy at the joints like the forelegs of a dray horse.

  Then my eyes adjusted and I made out frames and easels. They were paintings, wonderful, living faces on canvas and wood, even on the sound boards of old radio sets. Then one face, a benign and monumental Greek head, let out a slow breath and moved.

  It was Gaunt, seated crossed-legged before an odd little altarlike table. He held a pencil, which was moving swiftly over a sheet of paper. It seemed the pencil lead was kindling a black fire on the page, tongues and billows of a sinuous burning that licked and swirled to engulf the virgin parchment. Out of the swiftly and perfectly formed flames and smoke, faces began to form, receding ranks and columns of profiles, sphinxlike and vigilant. Soon a half-formed monstrosity of a face emerged, growing under the moving pencil, a soft, twisted mask that watched me with living eyes. It was a shock to realize that, in order to produce an image that was the right way up for me, Gaunt had to be drawing it upside down. But not as great as the one I got when I looked closely at the artist, for his eyes were tightly closed.

  He was himself as singular as anything in that weirdly disturbing place. I could now put his age at around forty, but he had a honed, hawklike handsomeness of features and an unruly thatch of dark, curly hair that would give an impression of youth from a distance. He was dressed not in some garment of ritual, but in a threadbare jacket over a tattered, paint-spotted pullover and no shirt. He might have been a laborer hardened by hears of toil in the sun and wind. Yet there was about him the look of a magus.

  Laying down his pencil, he opened his eyes and looked on me without the slightest sign of surprise. The appearance of strangers in his room was apparently a common occurrence. Leaning forward, he touched my arm.

  “A flesh and blood visitor for a change,” he observed mildly. “Who are you, an emissary from the parasites and eaters of filth? Another sleepwalker from the dung heaps of society?”

  “I saw you at Diane’s party. You were with Rose Seaford—”

  “The whore of Hell,” he interjected. “Do you follow the cult of the Ku?”

  I hesitated, unsure of the answer that was most likely to win his confidence. The delay betrayed me.

  “No, you don’t, do you? What are you here for? My work is no longer for sale.”

  “I’m not here to buy—although I do find your work fascinating.”

  My choice of words seemed to please him. Encouraged, I poured out the whole story of Hallam’s activities. When I’d finished, he pondered a moment, then offered a tobacco tin full of roll-ups. When I refused he lit one up himself and proceeded to make a pot of tea. There was something incongruous about that figure, who looked, in the smoke of his cigarette like an alchemist crouched over his alembics, engaged in so domestic a task.

  The tea, however, was strong and good. Gaunt sized me up for a while, then said abruptly, “When I called her the whore of Hell just now—it wasn’t an insult. It was a title—” He took a sip of tea. “You really don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” His voice was heavy with contempt. “That silly little girl of yours—has she any idea what she’s involved in? I thought not. Sleepwalkers! She’s in real danger, boy!”

  “I know. Hallam uses drugs—”

  “I’m not talking about drugs, fool! Do you think a book like Hymns to the Nephilim can be made without a cost? They have to be lured to visible appearance and that takes energy. What is drained has to be replenished. The Kiss of the Shade, boy—the Mors Osculi. The soundless reverberation of silent gongs. Get your girl out of it now, right away. Tonight! Stay with her—keep them away!”

  Despite myself, I was letting him get through to me. I felt terrified. I must have looked it, too, because Gaunt shook his head and said, “Wait—I may have something that will help you.” I found myself thanking him.

  “I’m not doing it for you—or that stupid girl. I have a difference of opinion with Hallam over Rose.”

  He produced, of all things, a small plate or shallow dish painted with spirals of looping script and a symbol reminiscent of the outline of a bat. Holding it up before his face, he focused all his attention on it.

  As I sat waiting, my mind began to play strange tricks on me. It seemed to grow darker in the room, and much colder. I swear that some of the paintings seemed to move, so that I seemed to be sitting in the middle of a decidedly hostile crowd. Then Gaunt took up a piece of white linen and wrapped up the plate. As he handed the bundle to me he said: “Take this and place it in the girl’s room. Close to her as you can get it. She’ll be all right then.”

  I took the thing to humor him. By that time my only thought was to get out of the place before I ended up as mad as he was. Doubtful of my ability to find the way out, I asked if the old woman could show me back to the door. In the candlelight his expression became more than ever that of a malevolent satyr as he answered “There’s no old woman living in this house.”

  That did it. I got out of the room as quickly as I could and made my own way through the dark labyrinth of the house. If there were any light switches, I didn’t find them so I stumbled through the piles of papers in the passages, ridiculously afraid of coming upon that wizened old woman who, in Gaunt’s ambiguously stressed expression, did not live in the house at all. It was just an irrational fear of the dark, I told myself, but that didn’t help me one bit. By the time I found the door and let myself out into the deserted streets, my nerves were in a sorry state.

  Let me admit that my only thought was to go home and forget all the mumbo-jumbo. I actually got to my own front door, but I didn’t go in. Something told me that I was right about Diane being in danger, if only from the drugs that Hallam was so fond of. And if Gaunt was an example of the adherents of this Ku cult, Diane’s sanity was doubly in danger.

  So despite the lateness of the hour, I made my way to Diane’s house. I got no reply to my knock, and all the windows were in darkness, but when I looked through the letterbox, I glimpsed the distinctive fur lining of Hallam’s overcoat hanging in the hall.

  All the tension of the previous few hours came out in anger. I began pounding at the door and shouting through the letter box. Just as curtains were drawing back all over the street and shouts of complaint began, I heard a sound of bolts drawn, and Hallam’s face appeared in the doorway.

  At first he refused to let me in, but when I began to shout about the police he had a sudden change of heart. The house was unheated, but Hallam was b
athed in sweat. He was dressed in a black robe with wide sleeves and a thrown-back hood that gave him the look of a sensual and worldly monk, an impression compounded by the smell of some heavy incense that hung in the air. If Hallam intended to keep me talking in the hall, he was out of luck. A glance had shown that the living-room was in darkness, and that a light was glinting through the crack of the bedroom door. Before he had a chance to say, or do, anything, I had crossed the hall and thrown open the door.

  The image frozen by my sudden entry will never fade from my mind. Diane lay on her bed, her face pale and slick as a mask of white silk. She was naked, and running with sweat, or some glistening unguent. A heavy gold plate, or plaque, lay over her groin. The air in the room was thick with incense and pulsed with a deep, throbbing that troubled the eardrums without creating a sensation of actual sound. Rose Seaford stood over Diane, her hands gesturing over the throat and breast regions with the movements of one warming her hands over a fire. Rose’s hair was disheveled, her yellow skin glinting with sweat. She wore a long, diaphanous garment of flame-colored silk, gathered at the waist with a single black cord. On her forehead was a disk of polished metal. A heavy choker at her throat held a second disk and suspended from it on a fine chain hung a variety of geometric shapes.

  There was nothing languid or sickly about the gaze she turned on me then. She radiated quite diabolic power. Hallam began to say something, but she silenced him with a venomous look, and returned her wide, white gaze to me. The gash of her mouth tightened hard, and the muscles of her jaw flexed spasmodically. I really thought she was about to launch herself on me like a great cat. Instead she straightened up and extended her arms in my direction. I felt a crawling over my flesh, and the atmosphere grew suffocating, as though the very pressure in the room had increased. Suddenly, I felt fear, a blind, unreasoning urge to run, to escape the stifling radiation that beat out from her like waves of intolerable heat. My brow felt as though it would burst. And then the face of Rose Seaford began to change.

  How can I describe what happened in the pulsing, smoky atmosphere of that room? If I say she grew old, you will not understand. She became ancient, as the visage of the Sphinx is ancient, as the colossi at Memnon are ancient. It was a face that might have gazed for eons upon desolation, or brooded through time in some jungle-draped ruin. And out of her body, coiling thickly down both arms, came a black flowing of serpents.

  But this was not the greatest horror. For she multiplied before my eyes, generated a host of identical snake goddesses on every side, until the spiraling black coils of her hatred filled the space between us, and the air became black with it.

  Against that onslaught a puny human could have done nothing. I was frozen with terror, and could only close my eyes and wait to be engulfed in the seething blackness.

  Then the pulsing on the air stopped, and the room became very still. I opened my eyes and saw that the blackness had dispersed. There was only one figure before me, one Rose Seaford staring with a look of puzzlement at the region of my chest. I felt a warm, bracing sensation radiating from that spot, like a gulp of brandy on a cold day. The source was the inside pocket of my coat, where I had placed Gaunt’s amulet.

  With trembling fingers I drew it out and tore off the linen wrapping. Holding it before me I moved toward the bed, and as I did so Rose Seaford drew back and skirted the room until she and Hallam stood between me and the door. Close to, I could see that the metal plate on Diane’s groin was engraved with animal-headed gods and snakes. I picked the thing up and shied it at the watching couple. It was probably just as well it missed them. The impact took a two-inch chunk out of the wall. Hallam scooped up the plate and took Rose’s arm.

  “Come on,” he said levelly. “You’ve got what you wanted. “Turning to me he added, “You wasted your time, Lenihan. We’d finished with her tonight in any case.”

  When they had gone I breathed for what seemed to the first time in minutes, and covered Diane with a sheet from the floor.

  Diane recovered in time, but she was never quite as vital again. She was devastated when Hallam would have nothing more to do with her, and, ironically, blamed me for driving him away. Hallam, she said, had done everything he could to cure her “loss of energy” and my interference with the rites had offended him! We were never as close after that, which was a pity.

  One bitter December night the following year, I made the short journey to the Everyman Theatre in Hampstead to see Coward’s The Vortex, which by only its second week had ensured a successful run in the West End, establishing once and for all the name of its already famous young author. I caught one of the last performances before the play left the confines of that “converted drill-hall” for the more salubrious setting of the Royalty. It seemed to me in my naiveté a tremendously powerful piece, and the wild response of the audience could not but have an unsettling effect on a ragged-arsed clerk a whole year older than the author whose hour of triumph he had just witnessed. I left the theater dizzy with fantasies of suddenly discovered talent and critical acclaim. It was with something of a shock that I glimpsed those two familiar faces in the buffeting crowd. Slipping behind a nearby stanchion, I paused to watch them.

  Hallam was deep in conversation with a young couple, smiling the smile of one who has no need of dreams to sustain him. He was wearing immaculate evening dress, and a cloak thrown back at the shoulders to reveal the crimson lining; all very Mephistophelean. In fact, with his elegant appearance and those bloody gashes at the shoulders like torn wings, he looked every inch the fallen angel. Rose stood beside him, her arm linked so lightly with his that her gray leather glove barely compressed his sleeve. There was no clinging with her, no sacrifice of her independence for anything as human as love. Her tawny hair was drawn tightly back into an elaborate knot at the nape of her neck, displaying the fine, strong line of her jaw. She was engulfed in a mist of gray furs piled pillow deep behind her head and tucked snugly under her chin like a winter blanket. She stood apart, even in the crowd, sweeping the passersby with her cold, heartless expression. As I watched, her other, unseen companion must have whispered something, because she smiled that nasty secret smile. And I knew that somewhere they had found another victim and completed the dreadful process of reparation. This knowledge did not come from the smile of Rose Seaford as she scanned the crowd flocking home through the December darkness. It was the healthy bloom of her skin, and her eyes, no longer blank and dead, but ablaze with replenished inner fire.

  THE OUTSIDER by Rick Kennett

  When the Earl of Woodthorpe cut down a gum tree in his Manor grounds and air-freighted it out to Australia, most people assumed his mind had thrown a rod. I knew otherwise.

  I’d always thought of doing the rounds of the haunts of England, so when the Antarctic winds of June hit town I decided to do more than just think about it. Stowing my bike in cold storage, I packed a few necessities like The Gazetteer of British Ghosts, Poltergeists Over England, Haunted Britain and such like items—along with a few clothes—before grabbing the first big silver bird heading north into Summer.

  I landed on my feet in London by finding a rent-a-bike place that had me thumping up the A 40 motorway toward Buckinghamshire on a 750 Norton that afternoon. Over the following week I toured sites of supernatural interest: hotels, cottages, stately homes, wishing wells. My camera clicked like a mad cicada, though never once getting a phantom in the view finder.

  Undeterred, I continued my tour, and somewhere between Devon and Dorset I ran into the Earl of Woodthorpe—at about 90 KPH.

  It was seven o’clock on a straight road. The sun was low in the west, and suddenly there was this long, silver car pulling out from a gateway to my right. There was no time for brakes, to throttle back, or to even have an articulate thought. The car’s bumper smacked my front wheel. The world twisted into a blur as the Norton and I went sprawling.

  Shock’s a crazy place.

  Somewhere in its shattered time sense a middle-aged woman said, “I’ll f
etch a blanket,” as I lay bundled on a couch, shivering. “I ... I swear, I didn’t see him, My Lord,” said a younger man’s voice as I lay facedown on the road.

  There was the smell of leather upholstery.

  The sound of tires.

  The feeling of movement.

  And somewhere in all of this the woman kept fluttering about, sounding apologetic, feeding me broth.

  “Best call Dr. Rutherford, Mrs. Winton,” said a tall bloke with an aristocratic look.

  “No, just let me rest,” I heard myself say. Nothing was broken or missing; and I hate fuss, especially when I’m dying, or think I am.

  I remembered being partly ushered, partly led, partly helped along corridors lined with paintings, and up an oak staircase as a clock somewhere chimed eight.

  I woke up in a bed the likes of which I’d only seen in period costume movies. The room, with its paneled walls, ornate ceiling, and heavy furniture of another time, had a beautiful view over the morning. Whoever owned this place had a backyard that wouldn’t stop. It was all lawns and trees and hedgerows, stone outbuildings, ponds, paths, hillocks and dips.

  A knock on the door. A voice I’d heard before said, “Breakfast, Mr. Pine.”

  Having already dressed, I opened the door to allow the broth pusher of the night before—Mrs. Winton—to enter with a clatter of cup, saucer, and tray, and with the welcome smell of bacon and eggs.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “Good morning, sir. How have you mended?”

  “I’ll survive. Look, er ... sorry if I asked this last night, but, ah, exactly where am I?”