The Mammoth Book of Nightmare Stories Read online

  Then, over the crossroads and down past the site where the big Sainsbury’s used to be. I remember the first time we shopped there together—Christ, must be twenty-five years ago—both of us discovering what the other liked to eat, giggling over the frozen goods, and getting home to discover that despite spending forty pounds we hadn’t really bought a single proper meal. It’s become a nest of bijou little shops now, of course, but we never really took to them: we’d liked the way things were when we started seeing each other, and there’s a limit to how many little ceramic pots anyone can buy.

  By a coincidence I ate my first new meal just round the back of Sainsbury’s, a week after the party. It was gone midnight, and I knew you’d be wondering where I was, but I was desperate. Four days of the chills, of half-delirious hungers. Of feeling nauseous every time I looked at food, yet knowing I needed something. A young girl in her early twenties, staggering slightly, having reeled out of the Electric Ballroom still baked on e. I know that because I could taste it in her blood. She noticed me in the empty street, and giggled, and I suddenly knew what I needed. She didn’t run away as I walked toward her.

  I only took a little.

  You and I went to Kentish Town Library one morning, quite soon after we’d got the first flat together. You were interested in finding out a little more about the area, and found a couple of books by the Camden Historical Society. We discovered that no one was very interested in Kentish Town, despite the fact it’s actually older than Camden, and you were grumpy about that because we liked where we lived. But we found out some interesting snippets—like the fact that the area in front of Camden Town tube station, the part which juts out into the crossroads, had once housed a tiny jail and a stocks. Today the derelicts and drunks still collect there, as if there is something in that patch of ground which draws society’s misfits and miscreants even now.

  I’ll cross that area on my way down, avoiding one of those tramps—who I think recognizes something in me, and may be one of us—and head off down Camden Road toward Mornington Crescent.

  I don’t understand why it happened. You and I loved each other, we had the kids, and had just finished redecorating. We were happy. There was no reason for what I did. No sense to it. No excuse, unless there was something about her which simply drew me. But why me, and not somebody else?

  She was very tall, and extremely slim. She had short blonde hair and nothing in her head except cheekbones. She came into the room alone, and John immediately signaled to her. Drunkenly he introduced her to Howard and I, telling us her name was Vanessa, and that she worked in publishing. I caught you glancing over, and then looking away again, unconcerned. John burbled on at us for a while about some project or other he was working on, and then set off for more drinks, pulling Howard in his wake.

  By then I was pretty drunk, but still able to function on the level of “What do you do, blah, this is what I do, blah.” I talked with Vanessa for a while. She had very blue eyes, a little curl of hair in front of each ear, and the way her neck met her shoulders was pleasing. That was all I noticed. She wasn’t really my type.

  After ten minutes she darted to one side to greet someone else, a noisy drama of squeals and cheek-kisses. No great loss: I’ve never found publishing interesting. I revolved slowly about the vertical plane until I saw someone I knew, and then went and talked to them.

  This person was an old friend I hadn’t seen in some time—Roger, the one who got divorced last year—and the conversation took a while and involved several drinks. As I was returning from fetching one of these I noticed the Vanessa woman standing in the corner, holding a bottle of wine by the neck and listening patiently to someone complaining about babysitters. I suffered a brief moment of disquiet about ours—we suspected her of knowing where our stash of elderly dope was—and then made myself forget about it. When you’re thirty all your friends can talk about are houses and marriage; by a few years later babies and their sitters become the talk of the town. It’s as if everyone collectively forgets that there’s a real world out there with interesting things in it, and becomes progressively more obsessed with what happens behind their own front doors.

  I muttered something to this effect to Roger, glancing back across at the corner as I did so. The woman was swigging wine straight from the bottle, her body curved into a swan’s neck of relaxed poise. I couldn’t help wondering why she was here alone. Someone like that had to have a boyfriend.

  Then I noticed that she was looking at me, the mouth of the bottle an inch from her wet lips. I smiled, uncertainly.

  We never really spent much time in Mornington Crescent. Nothing to take us there, I suppose. Not even really a proper district as such, more a blur between Camden and the top of Tottenham Court Road. I remember once, when Maddy was small, telling her that the red two-story building we were driving past had once been a station like Kentish Town’s, and that in fact there were many other disused stations dotted over London. Mornington Crescent tube was shut and supposed to be being renovated, but I told Maddy I didn’t believe them. She didn’t believe me at first, but I showed her an old map, and after that she was always fascinated by the idea of abandoned stations. York Road, Down Street, and South Kentish Town—which you can see when you pass it underground, if you know when to look. Places which had once meant something to the people who lived there, and which were now nothing but scar tissue in a city that had moved forward in time. Mornington Crescent opened again, in time, proving me wrong and providing both of us with a lesson in parental fallibility.

  Then down toward the Euston Road, the part of the walk you never liked. It’s a bit boring, I’ll admit. Nothing but towering council blocks and busy roads, and by then you’d be complaining about your feet. But I’ll walk it anyway. It’s part of the trip, and by the time I come back it will all have changed. Maybe it’ll be less boring. But it won’t be the same.

  One in the morning. The party was going strong—had, if anything, surged up to a new level. I saw that you were still okay, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the living room and happily arguing with Suzy about something.

  By then I was very drunk, and on something like my seven billionth trip to the toilet. I reached down with my hand as I passed you, and you squeezed it for a moment. Then I flailed up two flights to the nearest unoccupied bathroom, cursing John for having so many stairs. The top floor of the house was darker than the rest, but I’d worn a channel in the new carpet by then and found my way easily enough.

  Afterward I washed my hands with expensive soap for a while, standing weaving in front of the mirror, giggling at my reflection and chuntering cheerfully at myself.

  Back outside again and I seemed to have got more drunk. I tripped down the small flight of steps which led to the landing, and reached out to steady myself. Suddenly my mouth was filled with saliva and I had a horrible suspicion I was about to christen the house, but a minute of deep breathing and compulsive swallowing convinced me I’d survive to drink another drink.

  I heard a rustling sound, and turned to peer through a nearby doorway. I recognized the room—it was one John had shown us earlier, destined to become his study. “Where you’ll sit becoming more and more successful,” I’d thought churlishly to myself. At that stage it didn’t seem very likely he would commit suicide six years later.

  “Hello,” she said.

  The woman called Vanessa was standing in the empty room, over by the window. Cold moonlight made her features look as if they’d been molded in glass, but whoever’d done it must have been pretty good. Without really knowing why, I stumbled into the room, pulling the door shut behind me. As she walked toward me her dress rustled again, the sound like a shiver of leaves outside a window in the night.

  We met in the middle. I don’t remember her pulling her dress up, just the long white stretch of her thighs. I don’t remember undoing my trousers, but someone must have done. All I remember is saying, “But you must have a boyfriend,” and her just smiling at me.

&nbs
p; It was insane. Someone could have come in at any moment.

  But it happened.

  Tottenham Court Road. Home of cut-price technology, and recipient of many an impulse buy on my part. When we walked down it toward Oxford Street you used to grab my arm and try to pull me past the stores, or throw yourself in front of the window displays to hide them from me. Then later I’d end up standing in Marks & Spencer for hours, while you dithered over underwear. I moaned, and said it was unfair, but I didn’t really mind.

  Past the Time Out building, where Howard used to work, and then the walk will be over. At the junction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road I’ll turn around and look back the way I’ve come, and say goodbye to it all. Sentimental, perhaps: but that walk means a lot to me.

  Then I’ll go down into Oxford Street tube and sit on the Piccadilly Line to Heathrow.

  I have a ticket, my passport, and some dollars, but not very many. I’m going to have to find a way of earning more sooner or later, so it may as well be sooner. I’ve left the rest of our money for you. If you’re stuck for a present for Maddy’s birthday I’ve heard her mention the new Asylum Fields album a couple of times. Though probably she’ll have bought it herself, I suppose. I keep forgetting how old they’ve gotten.

  After those ten minutes in John’s study I came downstairs again, suddenly shocked into sobriety. You were sitting exactly where I had left you, but it felt like everything else in the world had changed. I was terrified that you’d read something from my face, realize what I had done, but you just reached up and yanked me down to sit next to you. Everybody smiled, apparently glad to see me. Howard passed a joint. My friends, and I felt like I didn’t deserve them. Or you.

  Especially not you.

  We left an hour later. I sat a little apart from you in the cab, convinced you’d smell Vanessa on me, but I clutched your hand and you seemed happy enough. We got home, and I had a shower while you clanked around in the kitchen making tea. Then we went to bed, and I held you tightly until you drifted off. I stared at the ceiling for an hour, chilled with self-loathing, and then surprised myself by falling asleep.

  Within a few days I was calmer. A drunken mistake: these things happen. I elected not to tell you about it—partly through self-serving cowardice, but more out of a genuine knowledge of how little it meant, and how much it would hurt you to know. The ratio between the two was too steep for me to say anything. After a fortnight it had sunk to the level of vague memory, the only lasting effect an increased realization of how much I wanted to be with you. That was the only time, in all our years together, that anything like that happened. I promise you.

  It should all have been okay, a cautionary lesson learned, but then the first hunger pangs came and everything changed for me. If anything, I feel lucky that we’ve had ten years, that I was able to hide it for that long. I developed the habit of occasional solitary walks in the evening, a cover that no one seemed to question. I started going to the gym and eating healthily, and maybe that also helped to hide what was happening. At first you didn’t notice, and then I think you were even a little proud that your husband was staying in such good shape.

  But a couple of years ago that pride faded, around about the time the kids started looking at me curiously. Not very often, and maybe not even consciously, but just as you started making unflattering remarks about your figure, how your body was not lasting out compared to mine, I think at some level the children noticed something, too. Maddy had always been daddy’s girl. You said so yourself. She isn’t any more, and I don’t think that’s just because she’s growing up and going out with that dickhead. She’s uncomfortable with me. Richard’s overly polite too, these days, and so are you. It’s like I’ve done something which none of us can remember, something small which nonetheless set me apart from you. As if we’re all tip-toeing carefully around something we don’t understand.

  You’ll work out some consensus among you. An affair. Depression. Something. I know you all care for me, and that it won’t be easy, but it has to be this way. I’m not telling you where I’m going. It won’t be one of the places we’ve been on holiday together, that’s for sure. The memories would hurt too much.

  After a while, a new identity. And then a new life, for what it’s worth. New places, new things, new people: and none of them will be you.

  I’ve never seen Vanessa since that night, incidentally. If anything, what I feel for her is hate. Not even for what she did to me, for that little bite disguised as passion. More just because, on that night ten years ago, I did something small and normal and stupid which would have hurt you had you known. The kind of mistake anyone can make, not just people like me.

  I regret that more than anything: the last human mistake I made, on the last night I was still your husband and nothing else. That I was unfaithful to the only woman I’ve ever really loved, and with someone who didn’t matter to me, and who only did it because she had to.

  I knew she must have had a boyfriend—I just didn’t realize what kind of man he would be.

  I can’t send this letter, can I? Not now, and probably not even later. Perhaps it’s been nothing more than an attempt to make myself feel better; a selfish confession for my own peace of mind. But I’ve been thinking of you while I’ve been writing it, so in that sense at least it is written to you. Maybe I’ll find some way of keeping track of your lives, and send this when you’re near the end. When it won’t matter so much, and you may be asking yourself what exactly it was that happened.

  But probably that’s not fair either, and by then you won’t want to know. Perhaps if I’d told you earlier, when things were still good between us, we could have worked out a way of dealing with it. It’s too late now.

  It’s nearly four o’clock.

  I’ll come back some day, when it’s safe, when no one who could recognize me is still alive. It will be a long wait, but I will come. That day’s already planned.

  I’ll start walking at Oxford Street, and walk all the way back up, seeing what remains and what has changed. The distance at least will stay the same, and maybe I’ll be able to pretend you’re walking it with me, taking me home again. I could point out the differences, and we’d remember the way it was: and maybe, if I can recall it clearly enough, it will be like I never went away.

  But I’ll reach Falkland Road eventually, and stand outside looking up at this window; not knowing who lives here now, only that it isn’t us. Perhaps if I shut my eyes I’ll be able to hear your voice, imagine you sitting inside, conjure up the life that could have been.

  I hope so. And I will always love you.

  But it’s time to go.

  THE GOSSIPS

  BASIL COPPER

  Basil Copper (1924–2013) worked for thirty years as a journalist and editor of a local newspaper before becoming a full-time 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 then his short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies 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, Cold Hand on My Shoulder, and Knife in the Back.

  Besides publishing two nonfiction studies of the vampire and werewolf legends, his other books include the novels The Great White Space, Necropolis, House of the Wolf, and The Black Death. He also wrote more than fifty hardboiled thrillers about Los Angeles private detective Mike Faraday.

  More recently, PS Publishing collected all the author’s horror and supernatural fiction in the retrospective two-volume set Darkness, Mist & Shadow: The Collected Macabre Tales of Basil Copper; issued a restored version of Copper’s 1976 novel The Curse of the Fleers; and brought together his continuations of the adventures of August Derleth’s Holmes-like consulting detective Solar Pons in the definitive The Complete Adventures of Solar Pons. Basil Copper: A Life in Books is a nonfiction study from the same publisher.

  One of
the author’s most reprinted stories, “Camera Obscura,” was adapted for a 1971 episode of the NBC-TV series Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, and “The Recompensing of Albano Pizar” was dramatized for BBC Radio 4’s Fear on Four series in 1991 as “Invitation to the Vaults.”

  “Like most authors,” explained Copper, “one’s ideas seem to come naturally, by a strange process—rather like osmosis—whereby fragmentary images surface in one’s consciousness. Many years ago, during World War II, when I was on the communications staff on a huge depot ship in Alexandria harbor, I went ashore one day and met a chap I knew in the bar of the Fleet Club. He was a fellow radio operator and had been stationed on a wireless station in Sicily, after the war had passed on.

  “He mentioned that it was an extremely strange place away from the towns—baking heat, oppressive silences, hidden villages where no one seemed to stir, half-ruined palazzos in certain areas; the only sound the buzzing and chirping of insects where there was grass and foliage.

  “This, combined with the remembrance of Canova’s statue ‘The Three Graces,’ came back into my mind when I was compiling a collection of macabre tales years ago, which I intended to call The Gossips and Other Queer Tales. I thought it might be interesting if the narrator heard whispering going on, as though emanating from the statues, and things progressed from there.

  “Such stuff as dreams are made of, of course, but none the worse for that. Anyway, I hope the resurfacing of this story will give some pleasure to readers, along with the occasional chill …”

  I

  IT HAPPENED A long time ago, in Sicily—something like twenty-five years, in fact. Though many intervening events have grown dim, the extraordinary episodes which I myself witnessed and which I later pieced together through Arthur Jordan, are still present in my mind with unusual clarity.

  I was on holiday and had found my way to this wild and remote corner without anything special in mind. At Messina, I had fallen in with Grisson, an Englishman who had lived in Italy for many years. He was at that time Director of the Museum of Antiquities at Naples and was currently traveling on leave in pursuit of acquisitions for his foundation.