Dark World Read online

  Contents

  Title Page Copyright Information Quote

  Introduction by Timothy Parker Russell

  Come Into My Parlour by Reggie Oliver

  Mistake at the Monsoon Palace by Christopher Fowler

  The Swinger by Rhys Hughes

  An Incomplete Apocalypse by Mark Valentine

  First Night by Anna Taborska

  Wolvershiel by John Gaskin

  The Arndale Pass by Corinna Underwood

  Oracle by Rosalie Parker

  The House on North Congress Street by Jason A. Wyckoff

  Nothing but the Waves by Mark J. Saxton

  The Old Brick House by Jayaprakash Satyamurthy

  The Paschal Candlestick by R.B. Russell

  Ninth Rotation by Stephen Holman

  Wheatfield with Crows by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Notes on Contributors

  Title Page

  DARK WORLD

  Ghost Stories

  Edited by

  Timothy Parker Russell

  With Stories by

  Reggie Oliver, Christopher Fowler, Rhys Hughes,

  Mark Valentine, Anna Taborska, John Gaskin,

  Corinna Underwood, Rosalie Parker, Jason A. Wyckoff,

  Mark J. Saxton, Jayaprakash Satyamurthy, R.B. Russell,

  Stephen Holman and Steve Rasnic Tem

  Tartarus Press

  Copyright Information

  Dark World

  Edited by Timothy Parker Russell

  First published by Tartarus Press, 2013 at

  Coverley House, Carlton-in-Coverdale, Leyburn,

  North Yorkshire, DL8 4AY, UK

  www.tartaruspress.com

  All stories © the respective authors, 2013

  Cover artwork © Stephen J. Clark/The Singing Garden, 2013

  The editor and publishers would like to thank Barry and Susan Russell, Janice Campbell, Stephen J. Clark, The Wensleydale School

  and the authors for their support

  ‘Mistake at the Monsoon Palace’ by Christopher Fowler was first published in Red Gloves, PS Publishing, 2011

  All profits from the sale of this book go to

  Amala Children’s Home, India

  www.amalatrust.org

  Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818)

  INTRODUCTION

  Timothy Parker Russell

  All profits from this book will be used to help the Amala Children’s Home, funding a three-week working trip in July 2013, and being donated directly to the cause. Located in the Tamil Nadu region of India, the home provides accommodation, food, safety and schooling for orphans and severely disadvantaged children. Without it, these children would be living on the streets of India, with all the immense hardships and dangers that brings.

  I started thinking seriously about fundraising for Amala last September. A book seemed an excellent way of both raising money and producing something that those kind enough to donate could receive in return. I chose the ghost story theme primarily because I wanted this anthology to cross cultures—it is a genre that has been around since tales were first told, and is recognisable anywhere.

  As evidence for that, I have had submissions from all over the world, and set all over the world. Included is an intriguing story from Jayaprakash Satyamurthy set in Bangalore and Dubai, and a beautiful tale from Christopher Fowler about an Indian palace. In Reggie Oliver’s ‘Come into My Parlour’, horrors are closer to home, while Stephen Holman locates his unsettling story in a Los Angeles arts academy. Anna Taborska mixes old legends and the present day in Eastern Europe, and Mark Valentine sets his well-woven mystery somewhere in Northamptonshire. Rosalie Parker’s ‘Oracle’ takes place in the Yorkshire Dales, for me much closer to home. It captures well the feel of the countryside—and how it can affect you.

  I consider the term ‘ghost story’ to be a loose one. Ghosts come in many forms and very few of these stories could be considered ‘conventional’—another reason for choosing this genre, and for why I love it. This has led to a very varied collection of haunted stories.

  It only remains for me to thank you for buying this book, and I hope you enjoy it. I am very grateful, but more importantly so are the many children that benefit from the Amala Children’s Home. If you want to know more about the project or help further, please visit www.amalatrust.org

  .

  COME INTO MY PARLOUR

  Reggie Oliver

  ‘Will you walk into my parlour?’ said the Spider to the Fly,

  ‘ ’Tis the prettiest little parlour that ever you did spy;

  The way into my parlour is up a winding stair,

  And I’ve a many curious things to shew when you are there.’

  From The Spider and the Fly by

  Mary Howitt (1799-1888)

  Somehow I always knew that there was a problem with Aunt Harriet.

  She was my father’s only sister—step-sister, as it happens—and older than he was by eleven years. She was unmarried and her work was something to do with libraries: that much was clear, but the rest was rather a mystery. She lived in a small flat near Victoria Station in London which we heard about but never saw, but she often used to come to stay with us—rather too often for my mother’s taste. In fact, the only time I ever remember my parents ‘having words’, as we used to say, was over Aunt Harriet yet again coming down for the weekend.

  ‘Yes, I know, I know, dear,’ I heard my father say. ‘But I can’t exactly refuse her. She is my sister.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said my mother. ‘She’s only your sister. You can say no to her occasionally.’

  But apparently my father couldn’t. Fortunately she did only stay for weekends, that is apart from Christmas, but I’ll come to that later.

  At that time we lived in Kent and my father commuted into London by train every weekday morning. Where we lived was semi-rural; there were places to walk and wander: there were woods and fields nearby. I like to think that my younger sister and I had a rather wonderful childhood; if it were not for Aunt Harriet.

  Am I exaggerating her importance? It is a long time ago now, but I rather think I’m not. I suspect that she loomed even larger then than she does in my memory.

  She was a big, shapeless woman who always seemed to be wearing several layers of clothing, whatever the weather. She dyed her hair a sort of reddish colour and rattled a little from the various bits of jewellery she had about her. (She was particularly fond of amber.) Her nose was beaky and she carried with her everywhere an enormous handbag, the contents of which remained unknown.

  When she came she brought with her an atmosphere of unease and discontent. She never allowed herself to fit in with us. If we wanted to go for a walk, she would stay behind. If we decided to stay indoors, she would feel like going out. She rarely took part in any game or expedition we had planned, and when she did there was always a fault to find with the arrangements. On the other hand, almost invariably she wanted, often at the most inconvenient times, to ‘have a talk’ as she put it, with my father. He never refused her demands and so they would go into his study, often for several hours, to have their talk.

  I once asked my mother what it was all about.

  ‘They’re probably discussing the Trust,’ she said.

  I never really understood this Trust. I once asked my father about it but he refused to reveal anything. Many years later, after my father’s death, I searched among his papers for evidence of it and could find nothing. The little I knew came at secondhand from my mother. She said that some distant relation had left a sum of money jointly to my
father and Aunt Harriet, and Aunt Harriet was always trying to get more income from it, or do something mysterious called ‘breaking the Trust’ so that she could extract a lump sum for her personal use.

  I don’t think my aunt ever really cared about my sister and me as people, but she would ask us the kind of questions that grown-ups tend to ask: questions that are almost impossible to answer. ‘How are you getting on at school?’ ‘Have you made any nice friends there?’ I don’t think she would have been interested in our answers even if they had been less boring and evasive than the ones we gave her.

  Mealtimes were especially grim. In the first place Aunt Harriet was a vegetarian and my mother, out of courtesy I suppose, insisted that we were also vegetarian during her stays. That meant doing without a Sunday roast, which we resented. My mother was not a great cook at the best of times, but she was particularly uninspired in her meatless dishes. Then, during the meal, Aunt Harriet would either be silent in such a way as to discourage conversation from us, or indulge in long monologues about office politics in the library service. This always struck us—that is, my sister and me, and probably my parents too—as horribly boring. We gathered from her talk that work colleagues were always trying, as she said, ‘to put one over’ on her, and she was always defeating them.

  In spite of this, you may be surprised to know, I came to be fascinated by her. I suppose it was because she was, at the same time, such a big part of our lives, and yet so remote. Her life in London, apart from those dreary office politics, was a closed book. She never talked about going to theatres or concerts or exhibitions or watching sport. She didn’t even really talk about books. She never mentioned any friends. It was this mystery about her that started all the trouble.

  It began, I suppose, one Sunday in September when I was nine, and Aunt Harriet was then approaching sixty. We had just finished lunch and the meal had not pleased Aunt Harriet. It had been, if I remember rightly, cauliflower cheese, not one of my mother’s cooking triumphs admittedly, but perfectly edible. My Aunt’s complaint had been that my mother should have made an effort to supply something more original from the vegetarian repertoire.

  She began: ‘I’m not complaining, but—’ a disclaimer which, paradoxically, often prefaced her complaints ‘—I’m just saying. You might occasionally like to take a look in a vegetarian cook book for your own benefit. Of course I don’t mind; I’m just your sister-in-law, but if you were to have guests here, important guests—of course I know I’m not important—and they happened to be vegetarian—’

  At this point my father, usually the most patient of men, exploded. He could put up with a lot of things but this was not to be borne, especially as it involved my mother, whom he adored. Even so, it was a brief explosion, and fairly reasonably expressed.

  ‘Oh, for heavens sake, stop talking nonsense, Harriet!’ he said, not in his usual quiet voice.

  My aunt sniffed, rose from the table and announced that she had never been so insulted in her life and was going for a walk. She then quitted the dining room and a few seconds later we heard the door bang. We ate the rest of the meal in virtual silence.

  After lunch my curiosity got the better of me. It was a damp, dull sort of day, so the prospect of going out was not inviting, even without the possibility of meeting Aunt Harriet, sullen faced, tramping about the countryside. I decided that this was my moment for exploring her room and seeing if I could find any clues to her bizarre behaviour.

  There was one spare bedroom in the house for guests, and because few occupied it but she, it was known as Harriet’s Room. She stayed there most weekends in the year and, though the furnishings of the room were very impersonal she had somehow made the place her own.

  First of all, there was the smell. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell in itself, but because it was from the perfume she wore it had dark associations. It was musky, spicy, not exactly unclean but somehow not fresh. The atmosphere was heavy with it because, with typical disregard for my parents’ heating bills, she had left the bar of an electric fire on in her room.

  The dressing table was crowded with an assortment of bottles of unguents and medicines. Aunt Harriet was, in her quiet way, a hypochondriac, always suffering from some kind of affliction from heart palpitations to boils.

  On the dressing table were also a number of black lacquer boxes, some rather beautiful, either painted or decorated with inlaid mother-of-pearl. Tentatively, and knowing that now I was somehow crossing a line, I opened one box, then another, then another.

  They all contained jewellery or trinkets, the stones semiprecious and mostly made out of her beloved amber. Many were in the shape of animals or strange beasts of mythical origin. One in particular intrigued me. It sat on a bed of cotton wool in a small box of its own. The box was black like the others with a scene painted in gold on the top in the Japanese style of cranes flying over a lake bordered by waving reeds. The thing inside this box was carved out of amber, a dark, translucent reddish-brown, smooth and polished to perfection. It appeared to be an insect of some kind, perhaps a beetle or spider with a bloated body and eight strange little stumpy legs of the kind you see on caterpillars. The workmanship was extremely fine and, as I now think, Japanese, like the box. Its head was round and dome-like with two protruding eyes almost complete spheres emerging from the middle of the head. Into these amber eyes the carver had managed to insert two tiny black dots which gave them a kind of life and, somehow, malignity. He (or she?) had carved the mouth parts to give an impression of sharp, predatory teeth—or whatever it is that insects have instead of teeth. It was beautifully made, and horrible. I shut the box quickly.

  I turned my attention to the bedside table. It was piled high with books, mostly old and somewhat battered, but some finely bound. I noticed that many of the bindings had little square discolourations as if a label had been removed from their surfaces. I wondered if my aunt had brought them here to read because they were an odd selection. There was an early nineteenth-century treatise on metallurgy, a volume on alpine plants by a Victorian clergyman with some fine colour plates, a few modern novels in their original dust jackets and several children’s books. Besides these books I noticed a small plain wooden box, this time not containing trinkets but a neat set of small brushes, a needle-sharp scalpel knife, two pairs of tweezers and small square glass bottles containing fluids such as ink eradicator. I was puzzling over this mysterious collection when I heard someone behind me.

  ‘What are you doing in my room, little man?’

  I think I jumped several feet into the air in my fright. I had been sitting on the bed facing away from the door and Aunt Harriet had crept in unnoticed. The next moment she had me by the ear.

  ‘I asked you what you were doing. Well . . . ?’

  It was some moments before I was sufficiently in control to reply.

  ‘Just looking.’

  ‘Looking? Looking for what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you make a habit of snooping around the rooms of your parents’ guests?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Oh, so you think it’s all right to snoop around in my room. Is that it?’

  ‘No! Let me go!’ She had not released my ear.

  ‘What do you think your father would say if I said I found you in my room trying to steal my things? Mmm?’

  ‘I wasn’t stealing anything! You won’t tell him, will you?’ I was not afraid of my father as such—he was not a fierce man—but I was afraid of disappointing him. At last Aunt Harriet began to relax her grip on my ear, but she had left it throbbing and painful, full of the blood of embarrassment.

  ‘We shall have to see about that. I may not have to tell him,’ said Aunt Harriet in a softer, almost caressing voice which was, however, no more reassuring. ‘It all depends on whether you’re going to be a helpful boy to me. Are you going to be a helpful boy, or a nasty, spiteful, sneaking boy?’

  ‘Helpful,’ I said, instantly dreading the menial task she would almost certai
nly set me.

  ‘So I should think. All I’m going to ask is something really quite simple—’ Suddenly she looked alarmed and turned round. My six year old sister Louise had wandered in and was standing in the doorway, her wide blue eyes staring at us in amazement. She had pale golden curls in those days and looked the picture of innocence, but evidently not to my aunt.

  ‘Run away, little munchkin,’ she said. ‘Can’t you see I’m talking to your grown-up brother?’ Louise had never been called a ‘munchkin’ before. She probably didn’t know what it meant—neither did I, for that matter—but it sounded cruel from my aunt’s lips so she burst into tears. Aunt Harriet stared at her in astonishment. She obviously had no idea why she had provoked such a reaction. After Louise had run off, still wailing, to find my mother, my Aunt said: ‘That child has been dreadfully spoilt.’

  I felt that it was my turn to leave so I started to shuffle towards the door. Aunt Harriet hauled me back by the ear again.

  ‘Hold hard, young Lochinvar. Where do you think you’re going? I haven’t told you what I want you to do, yet, have I?’

  ‘You can do it later, Aunt Harriet.’

  ‘Later won’t do. Later will never do.’ Then she told me what she wanted. At some time during the week I was to go into my father’s study and from the second drawer down on the left hand side of my father’s kneehole desk I was to extract a blue folder labelled FAMILY TRUST. I was then to place it under the mattress in my Aunt’s room so that when she came the following weekend she might study it at her leisure.

  It was a simple task, but it terrified me. I didn’t know which was worse: to defy my aunt or to betray my father. I was going back to school shortly so I decided to postpone any decision and hope that Aunt Harriet would have forgotten all about it by the time she came next. That, of course, was a vain hope.