Best New Horror 27

by Stephen Jones

As Katarina spoke, the inhaled clouds escaped in lazy billows that poured up her face in a dark flood.

  Youlden had once done a painting called Gwragedd Annwn, of a vampiric water fairy deeply submerged, with the sucked blood of a drowned victim escaping from her smiling lips and streaming up her face. In that moment the painting lived.

  The words changed, though still in rhythm with the music. Familiar words—the painted radiogram’s rasping message from another world:

  “Nashtaraan ashgraak shamash ossaam reechmaak aakraamaa saamaaraa…“

  It sounded like many voices.

  And Katarina began to change. Before my eyes I swear the years fell from her, until her wrinkled face was smooth. Her body somehow became healthily fleshed, with the curves of a young woman, her tangled mane of hair gathered up into some kind of tall turban.

  She was, and yet was not, Eva Malas.

  Taking up that massive coiling shofar of mysterious origin, she blew it.

  The sound was of a depth and immensity that seemed to shake the whole room.

  She blew again.

  A silver glow blazed on the face of the doll’s house, as if the moon had come from behind a cloud. I turned to the source of the light and saw that the picture on the wall was no longer dark. It had actually become what Katarina had said it was: a silver screen.

  She laid her hand on my back, whispered in my ear. I felt a gentle but insistent pressure between my shoulder blades.

  That was all; nothing more, and then we were standing among an apparently endless succession of smooth, unnaturally steep hills topped with columns that seemed to have the texture of stone, but writhed as though alive. Our way wound between the hills through tall, feathery foliage that winnowed the breathless air. New stems erupted noiselessly from the ground, and in their rising they released luminous globes that floated like thistledown all around, giving off the rich vibration of distant bells and the light that had turned the whole landscape to quicksilver.

  A fine dust, or pollen, fell from them, too, and when I breathed it in, it intoxicated like sweet wine. My heart began to ache with a deep, unfocussed yearning.

  Katarina moved close alongside me, and I saw that she had changed again.

  She seemed now to be completely composed of opalescent light. Veins of fire ran like rivers through her body, overflowing from her head and body in wings of light. Just to look at her filled me with an exquisite feeling of joy.

  When she laid her hand on me I moved at her will, through the elongated, wispy foliage. It showered us with a thick, noxious-smelling syrup. Katarina offered her radiant face up to it, as if welcoming the cool touch of rain.

  The memory of what followed is fragmentary and confused. I was looking into a hollow like a great weeping ulcer, filled with a multitude in flux, a sea of living things that merged and separated. All over its surface shapes of flaccid softness would rise up, then fall back to an undifferentiated ocean of rottenness that lapped against a block of stone on which was squatting a figure more spider than human, its whole body a-swarm with glittering parasites. The crowd boiled and rolled in ecstatic adoration as the thing raised its forelegs and gestured with a weirdly sacerdotal grace. There was something Eucharistic in the gesture, and I knew that I was witnessing the enactment of some secret liturgy of sacred putrescence. The sea of bodies rose to devour the offering.

  Then I was peering down into immense depths, where gigantic domes blazed with strange light. There were living heads trailing luxuriant hair, floating, and their song was at once exquisite and agonising. And I remember a series of caves ablaze with a chill corpse-light, an icy labyrinth in whose walls creatures of various kinds were trapped, their limbs veined with glittering minerals, their flesh fused with the cold rock.

  One trapped body that was all but consumed, its chest facetted with ugly crystalline growths. The face, though mottled, veined and crazed with tiny radial fractures, was still recognisable as that of Phillip Youlden.

  The eyes looked deep into mine, and, locked as they were in agonising sockets of stone, they were alive.

  I found myself on the floor of the basement. Katarina was sitting on a cushion, strumming a fat-bellied lute.

  “You had better wash that off now,” she said, “unless you want to gradually become what the human race is pleased to call ‘insane’.”

  The thick, noxious syrup shaken from the trees by our passage was still spattered all over me.

  That harsh initiation into the faery realm had the effect that Katarina had intended all along. I would be haunted ever after by the memory of what I had seen, or more particularly by a deep, unfocussed yearning which would never leave me, ingested with the dust of a hundred singing moons.

  I left Plas Gwyllion the next day. Katarina made it clear she looked on my departure as some kind of betrayal, but then her reactions could be exaggerated.

  I readjusted, as much as I could, to normal life. My half-hearted book dealing proved less enjoyable now Rupert was gone. Rarely was there tea on offer, and the conversation was pretty poor. Many things that had given me pleasure now seemed stale and unprofitable.

  Katarina Garside died later that year. Her passing went unnoticed by the press, even by the music papers, who had long ago embraced a very different set of musical criteria. I heard about it from a fellow fan, weeks after her death. Her body, he said, was found in her basement recording studio, sprawled in front of a “big painting”.

  In the absence of any written details of her preference, and of any surviving relatives, her ex-husband, William Bentliff, had kindly supplied the information that it had been her wish to be cremated, and her ashes scattered on a certain wooded mound in the grounds of Plas Gwyllion. This was duly done.

  I may have been doing him a disservice, but I suspected this might be a last, spiteful act of revenge. It was certainly not the flamboyant Baroque ritual I would have expected her to choose.

  In one respect at least Katarina had thought ahead. A few months after, I received a letter from her solicitors, Embley and Yewbert, informing me that I had been named as permanent curator of the Youlden collection.

  Despite some inner turmoil, I knew before I finished reading the letter that I would accept the position. As I saw it, Bentliff’s past behaviour meant that if it wasn’t me it would very probably be him, and I wanted Youlden and Katarina’s works to be seen and remembered.

  Besides, don’t the fairy tales agree that the place you fear to enter holds the treasure you most ardently seek?

  So it was that I found myself returning, on a day no more clement than on my first journey, to Plas Gwyllion, where I found I would be residing alone, her faithful “staff” having long-since departed.

  On the first night in my customary sleeping place I was awakened by a weight on my feet. As I sat up it shifted, dropped to the floor and ran out. When I got a light on, the room was empty.

  I concluded that poor Cath Paluc was still in the house, living on god-knew-what.

  Watching for signs in the days that followed, I caught only those sounds and fleeting glimpses of dark movement. I put down bowls of food, but they were never touched.

  As I worked ceaselessly on the cataloguing which Katarina had never been disciplined enough to even attempt, my admiration for Youlden grew, convincing me that I should publish a volume of his oeuvre.

  I was aware, though, that much of the late work was of too unpleasant a nature to be popular, even among connoisseurs of the grotesque, for its subject matter had gradually narrowed to an obsessive focus: endless variations on The Marriage Beneath the Shade.

  Everywhere the intimate union of the human and the unhuman, and its unthinkable results.

  I was in danger of turning into a Bentliff sympathiser.

  Those columns on the mound that were the cause of Youlden’s terrible demise had somehow rooted themselves again, and had grown in all manner of fantastic ways, and the letters he had carved upon them were gone.

  In leisured moments, I developed
vague plans for the release of Katarina’s—that is Eva Malas’—unpublished music, much of it surviving on antiquated reel-to-reels and cassettes. In these works I could catch, deeply inter-fused with Celtic harmonies, the strains of raga, gamelan, Gnawas and the exorcisms of Aisha Kandisha.

  Some pieces— ‘Songs of the Frantic Lupanar’, for instance, and ‘Mystic Dances of the Aegypans’, both influenced by her Moroccan Jajouka experience—and the equally remarkable ‘Dol Chants’, were as weirdly haunting as anything from the 1960s. Others, like verses from The Secret Glory set to harpsichord accompaniment, and a brief tune entitled ‘Change Child’, were almost classically restrained. A lighter piece using themes from John Ireland’s Legend, with lyrics based around a Machen tale, was entitled ‘The Happy Child’.

  Either she was a remarkably versatile musician, or there had been distinguished visitors of a musical bent over the years.

  Out of the blue I received a letter from Katarina’s maid and the “old roadie”, explaining they had taken Cath Paluc with them when they left. They had grown to love him over the years, and hoped I would not mind.

  So whatever had climbed onto my bed in the dark had not been the cat.

  I took to sleeping downstairs on a day bed in the library, with the lights on.

  Then, in Katarina’s bedroom, I came across a large Welsh Bible, on the flyleaf of which a family had recorded births, deaths and marriages through the years.

  In the 1920s, Owen Maddock had married Morwyn Howell, and had two children, a boy Arthur, who died early, and Gwen, who grew up to marry one John Garside. Katarina was their daughter, the granddaughter, then, of Owen and Morwyn, the woman credited with strange powers in his most heartfelt book: Cassap, wise in the faery ways, one of a partly-human species called an “Interpreter”.

  So Katarina Garside, weaver of the musical magic that had entranced me, had the blood of the Twlydd Teg in her veins.

  I also found what I thought was a beautiful old book bound in brown leather decorated in gold and bronze. It had a vaguely Byzantine look about it.

  Only it wasn’t actually a book at all. It was one of those boxes made to look like a book, and it was full of photographs. Plas Gwyllion, of course, in all seasons and weathers; Twmbarlwm, Mynydd Maen, and snow-shrouded hanging woods. Katarina with a younger, happy Bentliff, she much as I remembered her from old LP sleeves. Youlden was often to be seen brooding in the background, dark sorcerer from The Thief of Bagdad.

  One snap at the bottom of the pile had been taken in the basement, in front of that marvellous scale-model of Plas Gwyllion. Katarina was sitting upright, on a hard chair, face a frozen mask, with an unspeakably horrible doll sitting on her lap; it might have been autonomatonophobia personified.

  But even in an old Polaroid it was clear that it was no dummy, but a living thing, malformed, repellently cadaverous and utterly grotesque.

  Sin, according to Machen, is an esoteric, occult thing, an infernal miracle: an attempt to gain knowledge intended only for “the angels”, and it makes a man a demon. It is sorcery, the penetrating of other spheres in a “forbidden” manner, “a re-enactment of The Fall”. Yet even he was torn. The attempt might be a “powerful and deadly poison”, yet it could also be “a precious elixir” for those who had “fashioned the key”.

  The combined arts of Youlden and Katarina had undeniably fashioned a potent key, and released what Sir Thomas Browne once called “the hidden Pan in the ever-changing Proteus”.

  Sometimes, it seems, the very thing that gives purpose to your life can also be your curse.

  God alone knows what demons Katarina had struggled with through the subsequent years, but her sullen indifference on my arrival now seemed, in retrospect, a sort of quiet patience.

  I worked diligently in my new position, preparing a catalogue raisonné of the unseen works of Adam Midnight, and arranging theoretical collections of Eva Malas songs in expectation of a hoped-for future release.

  The latter was made harder by a growing reluctance on my part to spend time in the basement. I always had the feeling I was being watched, and never felt comfortable when my back was turned to the Silver Screen.

  Nicola Ottoway may have been right about Youlden’s former studios being haunted; this one certainly was. The most disconcerting manifestations were sounds, disturbing enough when I was close by, but increasingly audible even from other parts of the house, such as instruments being plucked, blown or knocked over, and slamming, like wood on wood. There was, too, the occasional shrieking, like a living thing in pain.

  One afternoon I was almost lifted from my seat by the distant blast of that strange shofar, and made up my mind that things had gone far enough. I had grown sick of perpetually living on my nerves.

  Even from the top of the stairs, I became aware of a pale radiance illuminating the basement, and knew at once it was the Silver Screen. As I stood there, plucking up my courage, I heard the sound of footfalls swiftly crossing the floor. That familiar glow was shut off abruptly, and by the time I switched on the light and got down the stairs, the basement was empty, offering only scattered instruments and a dark painting on slate.

  Out of the Picture.

  Yes, quite literally, out of the picture.

  There was an odd sound on the air, which I took only a second to identify as every stringed instrument in the basement, gently vibrating.

  It was then I noticed that the front of the massive Plas Gwyllion doll’s house had been left open, and saw inside it for the first time.

  The furniture and miniature occupants of the rooms, if there at all, had been buried under mounds of strange detritus: oddly shaped stones, dried leaves, the desiccated remains of small birds. Plaited knots and balls of human hair, withered fruits and berries, some poisonous, and dead spiders pierced with thorns. A small sheet of lead rolled into a tight tube; a few painstakingly poured pyramids of sand and earth, each one topped with an ugly torpedo-shaped pellet of excreted bones and hair. A wasp nest, many odd gloves filled with earth, like a cluster of fat groping hands. Teeth, many and various.

  And little manikins and poppets crudely made either of wax, or of plaited straw, branches and fine red cord, some with their necks broken, or pierced through the chest and head with feathers.

  In that moment, I would have gladly filled the whole basement with St. John’s Wort, planted an impenetrable hedge of Prickly Furze around Plas Gwyllion, and never looked back.

  It was days before I could bear to go down there again, and much longer before I could look at the contents of the doll’s house with equanimity.

  But they have a strange fascination. It is tempting to see something poignant about the placing of them, though I know that is probably sentimentality. Does such a creature even know what a doll’s house is? It might just as well think it an altar for treasured offerings, or an elaborate pyx in which to keep its sacred relics.

  The contents change. Additions are made in my absence. Sometimes what is left is a concoction so strangely beautiful that I am tempted to remove it and keep it with me. I resist that temptation. If the present condition of Phillip Youlden is indeed a punishment for theft, I have no wish to even accidentally risk some similar fate. As there is no way of knowing if these objects are being given, lent, or displayed in some obscure ritual observance, I am scrupulous in leaving everything as I find it, with the exception of the small gift I occasionally add as a gesture of friendship.

  Some of the objects I leave are taken away, some show no signs of ever being touched. No pattern is discernible; no application of human logic could anticipate what does or does not please my unseen visitor.

  And unseen it has remained. Part of me longs to know what manner of creature it is that passes back and forth through the Silver Screen, but part of me dreads to.

  That faded Polaroid alone haunts my nights.

  Lately it has occurred to me that this placing and removal of small objects has assumed the nature of a kind of stilted conversation between two s
olitary creatures who share no other language, bound together by unfathomable devotions.

  KATE FARRELL

  ALMA MATER

  KATE FARRELL lives in Edinburgh. As she is pathologically indisposed to describe a happy ending, the former actress now principally writes contes cruels wherein bad things happen to bad people; sometimes the innocent suffer too. Her stories have appeared in the Black Books of Horror, Terror Tales, The Screaming Book of Horror and Best British Horror 2014.

  Kate’s debut novella, My Name is Mary Sutherland, appeared from PS Publishing in 2014. And Nobody Lived Happily Ever After, published by Parallel Universe Publications at the end of 2015, was her first collection of short stories.

  “I was a chubby schoolgirl,” recalls Farrell, “though not asthmatic; a day girl and not a boarder. Rubbish at sports and needlework (one of the teachers told me that I didn’t sew, I harpooned), my friends and I really did hide in a snug, dank hole known as the “Drying Room” at school on cold and wet days and make up horror stories.

  “We considered the Stationery Cupboard, but dismissed it as too bright, too cold, and it was often locked, for the nuns trusted no one. I wonder where Louise, Karen and the others are now…”

  NOW. THE GOTHIC pile has become a luxury development of lifestyle apartments with an on-site gym and a concierge; in the 1960s the convent of Stella Maris in Romsey was a boarding school for girls aged eleven to eighteen. A large picture of the Virgin Mary spreading her blue cloak like celestial wings dominated the entrance hall and gave the school its motto: Subtuum præsidium. Under Thy Protection.

  Converted from a vast Victorian house with a jumble of later additions, it was unwelcoming and unforgiving then, whereas now it is double-glazed and desirable. Halogen lights create intimate corners in the individual apartments; Apple computers glow seductively; granite worktops sleekly gleam, and antiqued leather sofas placed on floors of reclaimed burnished oak create a pleasing ambience for the residents.

  Commute over, the building is a haven from the workplace, a veritable sanctuary where the demons of the day are exorcised.