The Mammoth Book of Terror Read online

  “About what?” I answered. “It’s just a child’s coffin.”

  “Just a little ‘un, aye,” he nodded. “And his little coffin looks intact, doesn’t it? But is it?” Before I could reply he reached down and rapped with his horny knuckles on the wooden lid.

  And despite the fact that the sun was shining down on us, and for all that the seagulls cried and the world seemed at peace, still my hair stood on end at what happened next. For the coffin lid collapsed like a puff-ball and fell into dusty debris, and – God help me – something in the box gave a grunt and puffed itself up into view!

  I’m not a coward, but there are times when my limbs have a will of their own. Once when a drunk insulted my wife, I struck him without consciously knowing I’d done it. It was that fast, the reaction that instinctive. And the same now. I didn’t pause to draw breath until I’d cleared the wall and was half-way up the field to the paved path; and even then I probably wouldn’t have stopped, except I tripped and fell flat, and knocked all the wind out of myself.

  By the time I stopped shaking and sat up, Garth was puffing and panting up the slope towards me. “It’s all right,” he was gasping. “It was nothing. Just the rot. It had grown in there and crammed itself so tight, so confined, that when the coffin caved in . . .”

  He was right and I knew it. I had known it even with my flesh crawling, my legs, heart and lungs pumping. But even so: “There were . . . bones in it!” I said, contrary to common sense. “A skull.”

  He drew close, sank down beside me gulping at the air. “The little ‘un’s bones,” he panted, “caught up in the fibres. I just wanted to showyou the extent of the thing. Didn’t want to scare you to death!”

  “I know, I know,” I patted his hand. “But when it moved –”

  “It was just the effect of the box collapsing,” he explained, logically. “Natural expansion. Set free, it unwound like a jack-in-the-box. And the noise it made –”

  “That was the sound of its scraping against the rotten timber, amplified by the sarcophagus,” I nodded. “I know all that. It shocked me, that’s all. In fact, two hours in your bloody Easingham have given me enough shocks to last a lifetime!”

  “But you see what I mean about the rot?” We stood up, both of us still a little shaky.

  “Oh, yes, I see what you mean. I don’t understand your obsession, that’s all. Why don’t you just leave the damned stuff alone?”

  He shrugged but made no answer, and so we made our way back towards his home. On our way the silence between us was broken only once. “There!” said Garth, looking back towards the brow of the hill. “You see him?”

  I looked back, saw the dark outline of an Alsatian dog silhouetted against the rise. “Ben?” Even as I spoke the name, so the dog disappeared into the long grass beside the path.

  “Ben!” Garth called, and blew his piercing whistle. But with no result. The old man worriedly shook his head. “Can’t think what’s come over him,” he said. “Then again, I’m more his friend than his master. We’ve always pretty much looked after ourselves. At least I know that he hasn’t run off . . .”

  Then we were back at Garth’s house, but I didn’t go in. His offer of another coffee couldn’t tempt me. It was time I was on my way again. “If ever you’re back this way –” he said as I got into the car.

  I nodded, leaned out of my window. “Garth, why the hell don’tyou get out of here? I mean, there’s nothing here for you now. Why don’t you take Ben and just clear out?”

  He smiled, shook his head, then shook my hand. “Where’d we go?” he asked. “And anyway, Lily-Anne’s still here. Sometimes in the night, when it’s hot and I have trouble sleeping, I can feel she’s very close to me. Anyway, I know you mean well.”

  That was that. I turned the car round and drove off, acknowledged his final wave by lifting my hand briefly, so that he’d see it.

  Then, driving round a gentle bend and as the old man sideslipped out of my rear-view mirror, I saw Ben. He was crossing the road in front of me. I applied my brakes, let him get out of the way. It could only be Ben, I supposed: a big Alsatian, shaggy, yellow-eyed. And yet I caught only a glimpse; I was more interested in controlling the car, in being sure that he was safely out of the way.

  It was only after he’d gone through the hedge and out of sight into a field that an after-image of the dog surfaced in my mind: the way he’d seemed to limp – his belly hairs, so long as to hang down and trail on the ground, even though he wasn’t slinking – a bright splash of yellow on his side, as if he’d brushed up against something freshly painted.

  Perhaps understandably, peculiar images bothered me all the way back to London; yes, and for quite a long time after . . .

  Before I knew it a year had gone by, then eighteen months, and memories of those strange hours spent in Easingham were fast receding. Faded with them was that promise I had made myself to visit my parents more frequently. Then I got a letter to say my mother hadn’t been feeling too well, and another right on its heels to say she was dead. She’d gone in her sleep, nice and easy. This last was from a neighbour of theirs: my father wasn’t much up to writing right now, or much up to anything else for that matter; the funeral would be on . . . at . . . etc., etc.

  God! – how guilty I felt driving up there, and more guilty with every mile that flashed by under my car’s wheels. And all I could do was choke the guilt and the tears back and drive, and feel the dull, empty ache in my heart that I knew my father would be feeling in his. And of course that was when I remembered old Garth Bentham in Easingham, and my “advice” that he should get out of that place. It had been a cold sort of thing to say to him. Even cruel. But I hadn’t known that then. I hadn’t thought.

  We laid Ma to rest and I stayed with the Old Man for a few days, but he really didn’t want me around. I thought about saying: “Why don’t you sell up, come and live with us in London?” We had plenty of room. But then I thought of Garth again and kept my mouth shut. Dad would work it out for himself in the fullness of time.

  It was late on a cold Wednesday afternoon when I started out for London again, and I kept thinking how lonely it must be in old Easingham. I found myself wondering if Garth ever took a belt or filled a pipe, if he could even afford to, and . . . I’d promised him that if I was ever back up this way I’d look him up, hadn’t I? I stopped at an off-licence, bought a bottle of half-decent whisky and some pipe and rolling baccy, and a carton of two hundred cigarettes and a few cigars. Whatever was his pleasure, I’d probably covered it. And if he didn’t smoke, well I could always give the tobacco goods to someone who did.

  My plan was to spend just an hour with Garth, then head for the motorway and drive to London in darkness. I don’t mind driving in the dark, when the weather and visibility are good and the driving lanes all but empty, and the night music comes sharp and clear out of the radio to keep me awake.

  But approaching Easingham down that neglected cul-de-sac of a road, I saw that I wasn’t going to have any such easy time of it. A storm was gathering out to sea, piling up the thunderheads like beetling black brows all along the twilight horizon. I could see continuous flashes of lightning out there, and even before I reached my destination I could hear the high seas thundering against the cliffs. When I did get there –

  Well, I held back from driving quite as far as the barrier, because only a little way beyond it my headlights had picked out black, empty space. Of the three houses which had stood closest to the cliffs only one was left, and that one slumped right on the rim. So I stopped directly opposite Garth’s place, gave a honk on my horn, then switched off and got out of the car with my carrier-bag full of gifts. Making my way to the house, the rush and roar of the sea was perfectly audible, transferring itself physically through the earth to my feet. Indeed the bleak, unforgiving ocean seemed to be working itself up into a real fury.

  Then, in a moment, the sky darkened over and the rain came on out of nowhere, bitter-cold and squally, and I found myself runn
ing up the overgrown garden path to Garth’s door. Which was when I began to feel really foolish. There was no sign of life behind the grimy windows; neither a glimmer of light showing, nor a puff of smoke from the chimney. Maybe Garth had taken my advice and got out of it after all.

  Calling his name over the rattle of distant thunder, I knocked on the door. After a long minute there was still no answer. But this was no good; I was getting wet and angry with myself; I tried the doorknob, and the door swung open. I stepped inside, into deep gloom, and groped on the wall near the door for a light switch. I found it, but the light wasn’t working. Of course it wasn’t: there was no electricity! This was a ghost town, derelict, forgotten. And the last time I was here it had been in broad daylight.

  But . . . Garth had made coffee for me. On a gas-ring? It must have been.

  Standing there in the small cloakroom shaking rain off myself, my eyes were growing more accustomed to the gloom. The cloakroom seemed just as I remembered it: several pieces of tall, dark furniture, pine-panelled inner walls, the old grandfather clock standing in one corner. Except that this time . . . the clock wasn’t clucking. The pendulum was still, a vertical bar of brassy fire when lightning suddenly brought the room to life. Then it was dark again – if anything even darker than before – and the windows rattled as thunder came down in a rolling, receding drumbeat.

  “Garth!” I called again, my voice echoing through the old house. “It’s me, Greg Lane. I said I’d drop in some time . . . ?” No answer, just the hiss of the rain outside, the feel of my collar damp against my neck, and the thick, rising smell of . . . of what? And suddenly I remembered very clearly the details of my last visit here.

  “Garth!” I tried one last time, and I stepped to the door of his living-room and pushed it open. As I did so there came a lull in the beating rain. I heard the floorboards creak under my feet, but I also heard . . . a groan? My sensitivity at once rose by several degrees. Was that Garth? Was he hurt? My God! What had he said to me that time? “One of these days the postman will find me stretched out in here, and he’ll think: ‘Well, I needn’t come out here any more.’”

  I had to have light. There’d be matches in the kitchen, maybe even a torch. In the absence of a mains supply, Garth would surely have to have a torch. Making my way shufflingly, very cautiously across the dark room towards the kitchen, I was conscious that the smell was more concentrated here. Was it just the smell of an old, derelict house, or was it something worse? Then, outside, lightning flashed again, and briefly the room was lit up in a white glare. Before the darkness fell once more, I saw someone slumped on the old settee where Garth had served me coffee . . .

  “Garth?” the word came out half strangled. I hadn’t wanted to say it; it had just gurgled from my tongue. For though I’d seen only a silhouette, outlined by the split-second flash, it hadn’t looked like Garth at all. It had been much more like someone else I’d once seen – in a photograph. That drooping right shoulder.

  My skin prickled as I stepped on shivery feet through the open door into the kitchen. I forced myself to draw breath, to think clearly. If I’d seen anyone or anything at all back there (it could have been old boxes piled on the settee, or a roll of carpet leaning there), then it most probably had been Garth, which would explain that groan. It was him, of course it was. But in the storm, and remembering what I did of this place, my mind was playing morbid tricks with me. No, it was Garth, and he could well be in serious trouble. I got a grip of myself, quickly looked all around.

  A little light came into the kitchen through a high back window. There was a two-ring gas cooker, a sink and draining-board with a drawer under the sink. I pulled open the drawer and felt about inside it. My nervous hand struck what was unmistakably a large box of matches, and – yes, the smooth heavy cylinder of a hand torch!

  And all the time I was aware that someone was or might be slumped on a settee just a few swift paces away through the door to the living-room. With my hand still inside the drawer, I pressed the stud of the torch and was rewarded when a weak beam probed out to turn my fingers pink. Well, it wasn’t a powerful beam, but any sort of light had to be better than total darkness.

  Armed with the torch, which felt about as good as a weapon in my hand, I forced myself to move back into the living-room and directed my beam at the settee. But oh, Jesus – all that sat there was a monstrous grey mushroom! It was a great fibrous mass, growing out of and welded with mycelium strands to the settee, and in its centre an obscene yellow fruiting body. But for God’s sake, it had the shape and outline and look of an old woman, and it had Lily-Anne’s deflated chest and slumped shoulder!

  I don’t know how I held on to the torch, how I kept from screaming out loud, why I simply didn’t fall unconscious. That’s the sort of shock I experienced. But I did none of these things. Instead, on nerveless legs, I backed away, backed right into an old wardrobe or Welsh-dresser. At least, I backed into what had once been a piece of furniture. But now it was something else.

  Soft as sponge, the thing collapsed and sent me sprawling. Dust and (I imagined) dark red spores rose up everywhere, and I skidded on my back in shards of crumbling wood and matted webs of fibre. And lolling out of the darkness behind where the dresser had stood – bloating out like some loathsome puppet or dummy – a second fungoid figure leaned towards me. And this time it was a caricature of Ben!

  He lolled there, held up on four fibre legs, muzzle snarling soundlessly, for all the world tensed to spring – and all he was was a harmless fungous thing. And yet this time I did scream. Or I think I did, but the thunder came to drown me out.

  Then I was on my feet, and my feet were through the rotten floorboards, and I didn’t care except I had to get out of there, out of that choking, stinking, collapsing –

  I stumbled, crumbled my way into the tiny cloakroom, tripped and crashed into the clock where it stood in the corner. It was like a nightmare chain reaction which I’d started and couldn’t stop; the old grandfather just crumpled up on itself, its metal parts clanging together as the wood disintegrated around them. And all the furniture following suit, and the very wall panelling smoking into ruin where I fell against it.

  And there where that infected timber had been, there he stood – old Garth himself! He leaned half out of the wall like a great nodding manikin, his entire head a livid yellow blotch, his arm and hand making a noise like a huge puff-ball bursting underfoot where they separated from his side to point floppingly towards the open door. I needed no more urging.

  “God! Yes! I’m going!” I told him, as I plunged out into the storm . . .

  After that . . . nothing, not for some time. I came to in a hospital in Stokesley about noon the next day. Apparently I’d run off the road on the outskirts of some village or other, and they’d dragged me out of my car where it lay upside-down in a ditch. I was banged up and so couldn’t do much talking, which is probably as well.

  But in the newspapers I read how what was left of Easingham had gone into the sea in the night. The churchyard, Haitian timber, terrible dry rot fungus, the whole thing, sliding down into the sea and washed away for ever on the tides.

  And yet now I sometimes think: Where did all that wood go that Garth had been selling for years? And what of all those spores I’d breathed and touched and rolled around in? And sometimes when I think things like that it makes me feel quite ill.

  I suppose I shall just have to wait and see . . .

  CHARLES L. GRANT’S CAREER has spanned more than thirty-five years and during that time he has won, among other honours, three World Fantasy Awards and two Nebulas from the Science Fiction-Fantasy Writers Association. A recipient of the British Fantasy Society’s Special Award and the Horror Writers Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award, he was also named Grand Master at the 2002 World Horror Convention.

  A prolific short story writer and novelist, he has cultivated his unique style of “quiet horror” in many novels and collections, including The Curse, The Hour of the Oxr
un Dead, The Sound of Midnight, The Grave, The Bloodwind, The Soft Whisper of the Dead, The Nestling, The Tea Party, The Orchard, The Pet, For Fear of the Night, In a Dark Dream, Dialing the Wind, Stunts, Something Stirs, Jackals, The Black Carousel, Tales from the Nightside, A Glow of Candles and Nightmare Seasons. More recent titles include the first two X Files novelizations, Goblin and Whirlwind, the “Millennium Quartet” inspired by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the “Black Oak” series about a security team of paranormal investigators. Grant has also published a number of books under the pseudonyms “Geoffrey Marsh” and “Lionel Fenn”.

  As an editor he is responsible for two dozen anthologies, including the influential Shadows series (twelve volumes) along with Nightmares, Midnight, Greystone Bay, The Dodd Mead Gallery of Horror and Gothic Ghosts (with Wendy Webb).

  With his wife, editor and novelist Kathryn Ptacek, Grant lives in a century-old haunted Victorian house in Sussex County, New Jersey.

  “I also write and edit books like this one,” explains the author, “ones that if all goes well will give their readers a good dose of the chills, the shudders, and the outright shrieks now and then. After all, if the truth be known, we haven’t grown up all that much; the fears we have now aren’t the same as they were when we were children, but they’re fears just the same. They make our palms sweat, they give us nightmares, and they’re sometimes powerful enough to alter our characters.”

  IN A LIVING ROOM, sparse and battered furniture had been formed into a square so that, in her darkness, the old woman could find them, avoid them without the tap of her probing white-tipped cane. There were neither rugs on the floors nor pictures on the walls, and only a single shadeless lamp. No matter the day or the weather, she always wore the same dress, an oddly shapeless garment whose colors seemed dead for centuries. Her hair was decades long, braided and coikd into a silver basket round the top of her head, and her face and arms and thin-strong legs were shadowed with ancient wrinkles.