Year's Best Horror Stories XVIII Part 26

The animation in and around her eyes was flickering, as though corroded contacts were sparking and smoking, pa.s.sing power only intermittently. "Did you know I have an inoperable brain tumor?" she said.

Peter blinked, not knowing what to say but reading it as true.

"They tell me I'm just getting old, but I know. Look at me." Her head rocked on the pillow; perhaps she was trying to shake it. "Ah. Quinn was an evil man.

Wickedness and corruption, of a sort."

Cautiously, "Then you know why he was... killed?"

She knows something. She really does.

"A brain tumor," Dr. Barry said with satisfaction, or so it seemed. The light in her eyes came on more fully. "Oh yes, the police wanted to know all about that, asked me many a time about surgical training and whether I thought anyone but a doctor could have... But I was a woman, you see. You can't believe what I say." And he couldn't unravel the complex knot of feelings he was reading in her.

"They thought a woman couldn't have done what was done, is that it?" he said, wondering if the old dear really were delirious.

"No more she could, I said, I told them, unless she had, oh, crowds of helpers. They believed that... Quinn was a vile man, you know. That's all I know, officer. I really cannot a.s.sist you any further. Those poor children. They must never know. It was a work of art... Do you play rugby? My brother was very fond of rugby once."

The room seemed to be growing colder, full of harsh, ragged breathing.

Peter remembered his own great-aunt, so vague in the present decade, so diamond- sharp when speaking of the past. He felt so close; he leaned closer still. "Why was it done? What had Quinn done?"

"He must be wicked to deserve such pain... did you read that book? A very silly book." She breathed again, deeply, and exhaled with a long shudder. "My diagnosis is certain, I'm afraid. Prognosis negative. NTBR... I can feel it pressing.

It presses in different colors. Why, officer, I don't know anything at all about Mr.

Quinn except that he wasn't much liked in the village...No. The things he did. They were very shameful. The things he wanted to do. His name shall be blackened forever and ever amen." It was a long speech, and took a long time.

"Dr. Barry, it is blackened -- somehow. It is. People called Quinn changed their names. You remember, because of the whispering. Did you -- ?" It was there, so close, he could read it but couldn't understand it: a foreign language of emotion.

She was speaking again, more feebly now. The faulty contacts might be pa.s.sing current, but the power-source itself was failing. "You are all... so... silly. If I wanted to I could tell you half. I shouldn't tease you like this. Did you ever hear tell of the Mary Celeste?"

Peter couldn't decide whether that was relevant, or mere wandering. If only he'd brought a ca.s.sette recorder. "Yes?"

"They remember it to this day because n.o.body knows the how or why. They can't forget it, poor dears. So many of us, if you believe that. And if there's never a word about what Quinn... just, you see, just the hints, if everything is handled just so... Forever. You're not the doctor."

"Please," he whispered, as the feelings he couldn't read faded with her voice.

"Please tell me." For the sake of my brilliant future career.

She giggled, protected from the entire world by her inoperable brain tumor.

(NTBR she had said -- not to be resuscitated -- was that already written in some folder here?) For a moment her fading eyes were those of a little girl.

"Shan't," she whispered. "You wouldn't want to spoil it all?" And began to laugh, a small weak laugh that hardened into a sort of spasm, a glistening line of saliva running from the corner of her mouth as the shriveled body trembled in private glee.

His final attempt to spy on her secrets read nothing that made sense: a fading Rorschach pattern of feelings, a meaningless bright symmetry like a Christmas tree. Peter pressed the bell-push. The nurse appeared and dismissed him from the bedside with a flick of her eyes.

"You can't believe anything poor Miss Barry says," she warned in a low voice as he left the room. Now, perhaps, was the moment for shrewd questions and even a small bribe -- anything to learn more of those so-called wanderings and ravings. But, studying the nurse's stern competence and impatient eyes, reading the professional hardness, which made Treetops endurable, he quailed at last.

"Goodbye," he mumbled, and felt as the big door closed behind him that he was leaving under a faint cloud.

And so I left the dying Dr. Barry, who will surely take the monstrous secret of Lambertstow with her on her painful descent toward the solution of that other, final question which remains eternally tantalizing until it is answered.

Peter leant back from the typewriter, unsatisfied but with a sense of having partly avenged his frustration. He had at least had the last word.

"Quinny's all right," the Lambertstow school kids had told him in the long ago. "He's a fantastic guy, gives you things and all. You know. You ought to meet him." Had he been able to read people back then? Kids were so boring, self- centered, anyway.

Peter stared at the blank wall of his room and shrugged; the mystery was unyielding! Monolithic. Pulling the painfully typed sheet from the machine, he filed it carefully with all the other notes and outlines for articles he thoroughly intended to write, one day very soon. Perhaps when he could afford a word processor; that should solve his productivity problems. Perhaps. Meanwhile, there was always his private gallery of the emotions, where offbeat feelings and longings came to disport themselves for Peter Edgell's dispa.s.sionate amus.e.m.e.nt. There was always the shop.

The Guide.

by Ramsey Campbell.

The very busy Ramsey Campbell has once again managed to place two stories in the same volume of The Year's Best Horror Stories. While the influence of other authors on Campbell's work has often been noted -- that of H.P.

Lovecraft on his early writing, and later that of Robert Aickman -- the ghostly hand of M.R. James has not so often shown itself. When it has, Campbell has learned well from his master, as this story proves.

Of "The Guide" Campbell explains: "Part of the fragment at the center of 'The Guide' -- the sentence about the spider in human form -- presented itself to me in exactly those words while I was strolling with the family in Delamere Forest. When Paul Olsen asked me to contribute a traditional tale to Post Mortem, / decided to make it a somewhat didactic piece, because I'd been growing impatient with writers advising younger writers not to learn from the cla.s.sics of the field: since I'd learned so much from M.R. James, I decided that I'd try to write a tale which would seek to demonstrate that his structure is still vital - - with what success, the reader must judge."

With some success, it would appear. Noted British critic and reviewer, Mike Ashley, says of "The Guide": "It's a gem of a story and, to my mind, the best Jamesian pastiche I've ever read."

The used bookshops seemed to be just as useless. In the first, Kew felt as if he had committed a gaffe by asking for the wrong James or even by asking for a book. The woman who was minding the next bookshop, her lap draped in black knitting so voluminous that she appeared to be mending a skirt she had on, a.s.sured him that the bookseller would find him something in the storeroom. "He's got lots of books in the back," she confided to Kew, and as he leaned on his stick and leafed through an annual he'd read seventy years ago, she kept up a commentary: "Fond of books, are you? I've read some books, books I'd call books. Make you sneeze, though, some of these old books. Break your toes, some of these books, if you're not careful. I don't know what people want with such big books. It's like having a stone slab on top of you, reading one of those books..." As Kew sidled toward the door she said ominously, "He wouldn't want you going before he found you your books."

"My family will be wondering what's become of me," Kew offered, and fled. Holidaymakers were driving away from the beach, along the narrow street of shops and small houses encrusted with pebbles and seash.e.l.ls. Some of the shops were already closing. He made for the newsagent's, in the hope that though all the horror books had looked too disgusting to touch, something more like literature might have found its way unnoticed onto one of the shelves, and then he realized that what he'd taken for a booklover's front room, unusually full of books, was in fact a shop. The sill inside the window was crowded with potted plants and cacti.

Beyond them an antique till gleamed on a desk, and closer to the window, poking out of the end of a shelf, was a book by M. R. James.

The door admitted him readily and tunefully. He limped quickly to the shelf, and sighed. The book was indeed by James: Montague Rhodes James, O. M.. Litt.

D., F. B. A., F. S. A., Provost of Eton. It was a guide to Suffolk and Norfolk.

The shopkeeper appeared through the bead curtain of the doorway behind the desk. "That's a lovely book, my dear," she croaked smokily, pointing with her cigarette, "and cheap."

Kew glanced at the price penciled on the flyleaf. Not bad for a fiver, he had to admit, and only today he'd been complaining that although this was James country there wasn't a single book of his to be seen. He leafed through the guide, and the first page he came to bore a drawing of a bench end, carved with a doglike figure from whose grin a severed head dangled by the hair. "I'll chance it," he murmured, and dug his wallet out of the pocket of his purple cardigan.

The shopkeeper must have been too polite or too eager for a sale to mention that it was closing time, for as soon as he was on the pavement he heard her bolt the door. As he made his way to the path down to the beach, a wind from the sea fluttered the brightly striped paper in which she'd wrapped the volume. Laura and her husband Frank were shaking towels and rolling them up while their eight-year- olds kicked sand at each other. "Stop that, you two, or else," Laura cried.

"I did say you should drop me and go on somewhere," Kew said as he reached them.

"We wouldn't dream of leaving you by yourself, Teddy," Frank said, brus.h.i.+ng sand from his bristling gingery torso.

"He means we'd rather stay with you," Laura said, yanking at her swimsuit top, which Kew could see she hadn't been wearing.

"Of course that's what I meant, old feller," Frank shouted as if Kew were deaf. They were trying to do their best for him, insisting that he come with them on this holiday -- the first he'd taken since Laura's mother had died -- but why couldn't they accept that he wanted to be by himself? "Grand-dad's bought a present," Bruno shouted.

"Is it for us?" Virginia demanded.

"I'm afraid it isn't the kind of book you would like."

"We would if it's horrible," she a.s.sured him. "Mum and dad don't mind."

"It's a book about this part of the country. I rather think you'd be bored."

She shook back her hair, making her earrings jangle, and screwed up her face. "I already am."

"If you make faces like that no boys will be wanting you tonight at the disco," Frank said, and gathered up the towels and the beach toys, trotted to the car which he'd parked six inches short of a garden fence near the top of the path, hoisted his armful with one hand while he unlocked the hatchback with the other, dumped his burden in and pushed the family one by one into the car. "Your granddad's got his leg," he rumbled when the children complained about having to sit in the back seat, and Kew felt more of a nuisance than ever.

They drove along the tortuous coast road to Cromer, and Kew went up to his room. Soon Laura knocked on his door to ask whether he was coming down for an aperitif. He would have invited her to sit with him so that they could reminisce about her mother, but Frank shouted "Come on, old feller, give yourself an appet.i.te. We don't want you fading away on us."

Kew would have had more of an appet.i.te if the children hadn't swapped horrific jokes throughout the meal. "That's enough, now," Laura kept saying.

Afterwards coffee was served in the lounge, and Kew tried to take refuge in his book.

It was more the M. R. James he remembered nostalgically than he would have dared hope. Comic and macabre images lay low amid the graceful sentences.

Here was "that mysterious being Sir John Shorne", Rector of North Marston, who "was invoked against ague; but his only known act was to conjure the devil into a boot, the occasion and sequelae of this being alike unknown." Here were the St.

Albans monks, who bought two of St. Margaret's fingers; but who, Kew wondered, were the Crouched Friars, who had "one little house, at Great Whelnetham"? Then there were "the three kings or young knights who are out hunting and pa.s.s a churchyard, where they meet three terrible corpses, hideous with the ravages of death, who say to them, 'As we are, so will you be' " -- a popular subject for decorating churches, apparently.

Other references were factual, or at least were presented as such: not only a rector named Blastus G.o.dly, but a merman caught at Orford in the thirteenth century, who "could not be induced to take an interest in the services of the church, nor indeed to speak." Kew's grunt of amus.e.m.e.nt at this attracted the children, who had finished reading the horror comics they'd persuaded their father to buy them.

"Can we see?" Virginia said.

Kew showed them the sketch of the bench-end with the severed head, and thought of ingratiating himself further with them by pointing out a pa.s.sage referring to the tradition that St. Erasmus had had his entrails wound out of him on a windla.s.s, the kind of thing their parents tried half-heartedly to prevent them from watching on videoca.s.sette. Rebuking himself silently, he leafed in search of more acceptably macabre anecdotes, and then he stared. "Granddad," Bruno said as if Kew needed to be told, "someone's been writing in your book."

A sentence at the end of the penultimate chapter -- "It is almost always worth while to halt and look into a Norfolk church" -- had been ringed in grayish ink, and a line as shaky as the circ.u.mscription led to a scribbled paragraph that filled the lower half of the page. "I hope they knocked a few quid off the price for that, old feller," Frank said. "If they didn't I'd take it back."

"Remember when you smacked me," Laura said to Kew, "for drawing in one of mummy's books?"

Frank gave him a conspiratorial look which Kew found so disturbing that he could feel himself losing control, unable to restrain himself from telling Laura that Virginia shouldn't be dressed so provocatively, that the children should be in bed instead of staying up for the disco, that he was glad Laura's mother wasn't here to see how they were developing... He made his excuses and rushed himself up to his room.

He should sleep before the dull sounds of the disco made that impossible, but he couldn't resist poring over the scribbled paragraph. After a few minutes he succeeded in deciphering the first phrase, which was underlined. "Best left out," it said.

If the annotation described something better than the book included, Kew would like to know what it was. Studying the phrase had given him a headache, which the disco was liable to worsen. He got ready for bed and lay in the dark, improvising a kind of silent lullaby out of the names of places he'd read in the guidebook:

"Great Snoring and Creeling St. Mary, Bradfield Combust and Breckles and Snape; Herringfleet, Rattlesden, Chipley and Weeting; Bungay and Blickling and Diss..."

Almost asleep, too much so to be troubled by the draught that he could hear rustling paper near his bed, he wondered if the scribbled phrase could mean that the omission had been advisable. In that case, why note it at such length?

He slept, and dreamed of walking from church to church, the length and breadth of East Anglia, no longer needing his stick. He found the church he was looking for, though he couldn't have said what his criteria were, and lay down beneath the ribbed vault that somehow reminded him of himself. Laura and the children came to visit him, and he sat up. "As I am, so will you be," he said in a voice whose unfamiliarity dismayed him. They hadn't come to visit but to view him, he thought, terrified of doing so himself. It seemed he had no choice, for his body was audibly withering, a process which dragged his head down to show him what had become of him. Barely in time, his cry wakened him.

If the dream meant anything, it confirmed that he needed time by himself.

He lay willing his heartbeat to slacken its pace; his eardrums felt close to bursting.

He slept uneasily, and woke at dawn. When he limped to the toilet, his leg almost let him down. He hawked, splashed cold water on his face, ma.s.saged his hands for several minutes before opening the book. If he couldn't reread James's ghost stories, then viewing a location that had suggested one of them might be as much of an experience.

The book fell open at the scribbled page, and he saw that the line beneath the phrase he'd read last night wasn't underlining after all. It led from the next word, which was "map", across the page and onto the fore-edge. Rubbing together his fingers and thumb, which felt dusty, he opened the book where the line ended, at a map of Norfolk.

The line led like the first thread of a cobweb to a blotch on the Norfolk coast, where the map identified nothing in particular, showing only beach and fields for miles. The next scribbled phrase, however, was easily read: "churchyard on the cliff -- my old parish." It sounded irresistibly Jamesian, and not to his family's taste at all.

In the hotel lounge before breakfast he read on: "There was a man so versed in the black arts that he was able to bide his time until the elements should open his grave..." Either Kew was becoming used to the scrawl or it grew increasingly legible as it progressed. He might have read more if the family hadn't come looking for him. "We're going to give granddad a good day out today, aren't we?" Frank declared.

"We said so," Bruno muttered.

Virginia frowned reprovingly at him. "You have to say where we're going,"

she told her grandfather with a faintly martyred air.

"How about to breakfast?" At the table he said to the children "I expect you'd like to go to Hunstanton, wouldn't you? I understand there are dodgems and roller coasters and all sorts of other things to make you sick."

"Yes, yes, yes," the children began to chant, until Laura shushed them, "That doesn't sound like you, daddy," she said.

"You can drop me off on your way. I've found somewhere I want to walk to, that wouldn't have anything to offer you youngsters."

"I used to like walking with you and mummy," Laura said, and turned on her son. "That's disgusting, Bruno. Stop doing that with your egg."

Kew thought of inviting her to walk to the church with him, but he'd seen how intent Frank and the children had become when she'd hinted at accompanying him. "Maybe we'll have time for a stroll another day," he said.

He sat obediently in the front seat of the car, and clutched his book and his stick while Frank drove eastward along the coast road. Whenever he spoke, Frank and Laura answered him so compet.i.tively that before long he shut up. As the road swung away from the coast, the towns and villages grew fewer. A steam train paced the car for a few hundred yards as if it were ushering them into James's era.

A sea wind rustled across the flat land, under a sky from which gulls sailed down like flakes of the unbroken cloud. On the side of the road toward the coast, the stooped gra.s.s looked pale with salt and sand.

Apart from the occasional fishmonger's stall at the roadside, the miles between the dwindling villages were deserted. By the time the car arrived at the stretch of road that bordered the unnamed area, which the blotch of grayish ink marked on the map, Bruno and Virginia had begun to yawn at the monotonousness of the landscape. Where a signpost pointed inland along a road, an inn stood by itself, and beyond it Kew saw an unsignposted footpath that led toward the sea.

"This'll do me. Let me out here," he said.

"Thirsty, old feller? This one's on me."

Kew felt both dismayed by the idea of being distracted from the loneliness of the setting and ashamed of his feelings. "They'll be open in a few minutes,"

Laura said.

"Boring, boring," the children started chanting, and Kew took the opportunity to climb out and close the door firmly. "Don't spoil the children's day on my account," he said, "or mine will be spoiled as well."