11 We are presently working on a companion volume to the present one, to include a selection of horror stories from minority and endangered languages.
Acknowledgments
The editors would like to thank first and foremost all the authors who submitted stories for our consideration, both those we ultimately selected for this volume and those we didn’t have room to include. It was a delight reading each and every one of them.
We acknowledge our debt to editors who preceded us and whose work made our own easier, including but not limited to Teresa López-Pelliza and Ricard Ruiz Garzón’s anthology of fantastic literature in Spanish by women writers, Insólitas (2019); Antonio Rómar and Pablo Mazo Agüero’s compilation of contemporary horror stories from Spain, Aquelarre (2010); Martijn Lindeboom’s anthology of new Dutch horror tales, Halloween Horror Verhalen (2016); André Bjerke’s excellent Norwegian anthology Drømmen, draugen og dauingen (1978); and Lelani Fourie’s anthology of contemporary Afrikaans horror stories, Skadustemme (2016).
We are particularly grateful to Ramon Mas and Ricard Planas at Editorial Males Herbes for having shared with us a number of Catalan texts, including the one selected for this volume; to Laura Sestri for kindly sharing a variety of Italian horror stories with us and taking the time to respond to our questions; to Erica Couto for her kind suggestions and information on Spanish and Galician horror; to Jette Holst for her invaluable information on modern Danish horror fiction; to Luis Pérez Ochando for his help with translation questions; and to everyone else who provided guidance, suggestions, or feedback on the volume. Thank you!
‘Uironda’ © 2018 by Luigi Musolino. Originally published in Uironda (Torriglia: Kipple, 2018). Published by arrangement with the author.
‘Mater Tenebrarum’ © 2000 by Pilar Pedraza. Originally published in Arcano trece: Cuentos crueles (Madrid: Valdemar, 2000). Published by arrangement with the author.
‘The Time Remaining’ © 2019 by Attila Veres. Originally published as ‘Méltósággal viselt’ in Aether Atrox, edited by József Tomasics (Nagykanizsa: TBA Könyvek, 2019). Published by arrangement with the author.
‘The Angle of Horror’ © 1996 by Cristina Fernández Cubas. Originally published as ‘El ángulo del horror’ in El ángulo del horror (Barcelona: Tusquets, 1996). Published by permission of Casanovas Lynch.
‘Down, in Their World’ © 2013 by Flavius Ardelean. Originally published as ‘Jos, în lumea lor’ in Acluofobia. Zece povestiri macabre (Bucureşti: Herg Benet, 2013). Published by arrangement with the author.
‘The Collector’ © 2017 by Tanja Tynjälä. Originally published as ‘La coleccionista’ in (Ir)Realidades (Lima: El Gato Descalzo, 2017). Published by arrangement with the author.
‘Señor Ligotti’ © 2020 by Bernardo Esquinca. Forthcoming in El libro de los dioses. Published by arrangement with the author.
‘The Illogical Investigations of Inspector André Despérine’ © 2012 by Michael Roch. Originally published in La Boîte de Schrödinger (Editions Walrus, 2012). Published by arrangement with the author.
‘Menopause’ © 1994 by Flore Hazoumé. Originally published as ‘Ménopause’ in Cauchemars (Abidjan: Edilis, 1994). Published by arrangement with the author.
‘The Bones in Her Eyes’ © 2016 by Christien Boomsma. Originally published as ‘De beenderen in haar ogen’ in Halloween Horror Verhalen, edited by Martijn Lindeboom (Amsterdam: Luitingh Sijthoff, 2016). Published by arrangement with the author.
‘Twin Shadows’ © 2013 by Ariane Gélinas. Originally published as ‘Ombres jumelles’ in Le sabbat des éphémères (Montréal: Six Brumes, 2013). Published by arrangement with the author.
‘Backstairs’ © 2011 by Anders Fager. Originally published as ‘Pigornas trappa’ in Samlade Svenska kulter (Stockholm: Wahlström & Widstrand, 2011). Published by arrangement with the author.
‘Pale Toes’ © 2015 by Marko Hautala. Originally published as ‘Varpaat’ in Valkoiset varpaat (Vaasa: Haamu, 2015). Published by arrangement with the author.
‘Kira’ © 2016 by Martin Steyn. Originally published in Skadustemme: kortverhale, edited by Lelani Fourie (Crystal Lake Publishing, 2016). Published by arrangement with the author.
‘Donation’ © 2017 by Lars Ahn. Originally published in Den nat, vi skulle have set Vampyros Lesbos (Aarhus: Kandor, 2017). Published by arrangement with the author.
‘Tiny Women’ © 2018 by Solange Rodríguez Pappe. Originally published as ‘Pequeñas mujercitas’ in La primera vez que vi un fantasma (Barcelona: Candaya, 2018). Published by arrangement with the author.
‘Mechanisms’ © 2019 by Elisenda Solsona. Originally published as ‘Engranatges’ in Satel·lits (Barcelona: Males Herbes, 2019). Published by kind permission of Editorial Males Herbes, Barcelona.
‘The House of Leuk Dawour’ © 2005 by Editions L’Harmattan. Originally published as ‘La maison de Leuk Dawour’ in Nouvelles fantastiques sénégalaises. (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005). Published by arrangement with the author and Éditions L’Harmattan.
‘The White Cormorant’ © 1971 by Frithjof Spalder. Originally published as ‘Den hvite skarven’ in Jernjomfruen: noveller (Oslo: Grøndahl & Søns, 1971). Published by arrangement with the author.
‘All the Birds’ © 2009 by Yvette Tan. Originally published in All that Darkness Allows: 13 Tales of Horror and Dread (Manila: Summit, 2016). Reprinted by arrangement with the author.
‘Snapshots’ © 2016 by Jose María Latorre. Originally published as ‘Instantáneas’ in La noche de Cagliostro y otros relatos de terror (Madrid: Valdemar, 2006). Published by kind permission of Valdemar Ediciones, S.A.
THE VALANCOURT BOOK OF
WORLD HORROR STORIES
Luigi Musolino
Uironda
Horror literature is nothing new in Italy: it dates back at least to the first half of the 19th century. And the contemporary horror scene in Italy is particularly robust, including a number of authors whose works have appeared in English translations, like Samuel Marolla and Nicola Lombardi, and others still awaiting international discovery, such as Eraldo Baldini, Claudio Vergnani, and Danilo Arona. But our favorite current Italian horror writer – and in our opinion one of the best young horror writers in the world right now – is Luigi Musolino (b. 1982), a native of Turin. In his masterful two-volume collection Oscure Regioni [Dark Regions] (2014-15), which still lacks a complete English translation, Musolino presents twenty horror tales – one for each of Italy’s regions – all inspired by local folklore. In his stories, the idea of Italy as a country of sun and sea is merely a façade for tourists: in reality, it is a country filled with witches, monstrous creatures, and dark caverns, where madness and unease lurk behind the veil of everyday normality. We’re pleased to kick this volume off with the title story from his most recent collection, Uironda (2018). We think you’ll agree with us that Musolino is an author we’ll be hearing much more from in the future.
Ermes Lenzi couldn’t take it anymore.
After fifteen years as a truck driver, after hundreds of thousands of kilometers traveled, he felt like a needle that was always running over the same vinyl record. A disc of tar, whose grooves were the highways devoured by the old Scania, the only songs the roar of the motor and the dull throbbing of his back pain.
Whose sad, bleary eyes were studying him from the rearview mirror? No, they couldn’t be his.
When you no longer recognize your own reflection, you’d better start worrying, my friend, he mused, noticing a movement in his lower abdomen, as if someone were stirring his bowels and his conscience with a red-hot ladle.
‘Fuck,’ he murmured, his voice weary from an eternity of truck stop sandwiches, burnt coffee, and smog. ‘Fuck these streets that are always the same. This goddamn backache. Daniela. Everything.’
From the sun visor on the passenger side his seven-year-old son Simone looked on, hugging a
headless woman. The photo had been taken one sunny morning, one of those days when the sky is so blue it hurts your eyes. Ermes remembered that moment well, a piece from a period in which he had been happy and which now seemed to belong to another life, another puzzle.
In the background of the image some trees stood out, an emerald-green field, and the gentle curves of two hills.
The woman’s fingernails were manicured, painted fluorescent yellow. Simone’s hair was so red that it recalled a violent sunset, his cerulean blue eyes seemed to rival the sky.
Ermes had torn his wife’s face off the snapshot in a fit of rage, crying and swearing. A year had already passed since she left him, taking along with her the house, his son, and a good part of his dignity.
‘You’re never here, Ermes. I can’t raise Simone on my own. We’re not a family anymore . . . I don’t know what we are. I . . . don’t think I love you anymore.’
Daniela’s farewell could be summarized like that. A few words to tear out his heart, throw it on the ground and dance a jig on it.
His protests hadn’t done any good, his promise to reduce the hours spent in his truck, his tears, his excuses, their son who was drifting in a cloud of apathy as the days passed and the arguments grew more heated.
She wanted a divorce.
‘When a woman makes a decision, you’d better believe it’s hard to get her to change her mind. Always remember that,’ his father, a truck driver like him, had told him once. But Ermes had never given too much weight to the old man’s words, and the hope of winning Daniela back had become an obsession. Then he had discovered that she was seeing someone else, the elderly manager of a small firm in Turin.
It was like he went crazy.
In the course of a few weeks the pleas turned into telephone calls in the middle of the night, surveillance, scenes.
One evening he had intercepted the dandy who was screwing Daniela and had fractured two of his ribs and a cheekbone. If passers-by hadn’t intervened, he would have kept on punching and kicking him until he killed him.
At that point the stalking and assault charges had come simultaneously, and his wife’s top-notch attorney had massacred him, leaving him high and dry.
Basically he was working now so he could cover his legal expenses and pay support to Daniela and Simone, whom he could see only one weekend a month. He lived in the rear cabin of the truck: a bed, a fridge, a television the size of a postage stamp, and two electric burners. Like a vagabond, a gypsy.
There had been panic attacks, alcoholic blackouts, a long break from work. The situation had settled down little by little. He had stayed on his feet, but he could no longer see the point in anything.
Joyful images from the past attacked him like starving beasts, sucking the marrow from his bones and reducing him to a state of perpetual exhaustion. His existence had become a journey without a destination, a succession of streets leading nowhere. Stinking truck stops, packaged cookies, urinals, high-beam headlights, cigarettes, showers, anti-wart slip-on shoes, pitiful meals, dismal thoughts, Little Trees air freshener, rest areas. He was forty-two years old, had few friends, and the only things he managed to accumulate were debts, kilos on his waist, and X-rays that told him: ‘Well, you’ve spent the better part of the last twenty years with your ass on a seat, you’ll have to have surgery on that herniated disc sooner or later.’
He felt alone. A wanderer on life’s road. So fucking desperately alone.
More and more often when he shot across an overpass he would entertain the idea of pulling over to the shoulder, getting out of the truck, and throwing himself off. A simple leap to leave all his problems, his anxiety, behind him. If it weren’t for Simone, maybe . . . When had he seen him last? He didn’t remember. But he hadn’t been well. Gaunt, dark circles under his eyes, his spirit crushed by his parents’ separation.
A horn honking from somewhere brought him back to reality. The sound waned away, the cry of a dying person in a hospital ward.
Ermes struck the steering wheel with a weak, resigned fist, slipped a Camel between his lips and tried to concentrate on the road that would bring him to a warehouse located on the outskirts of Krakow for yet another delivery of Made in Italy furniture.
There were still too many hours left.
The digital tachograph, the contraption installed in the truck to monitor speed, length of stops, and kilometers traveled, informed him that in half an hour he would have to take his first break. The rules for road safety for commercial vehicles were ironclad: forty-five minutes of rest every four-and-a-half hours of driving, a maximum of nine hours a day, never more than fifty-six hours a week. He had colleagues who circumvented the system by attaching expensive devices to the tachograph, but Ermes had never yielded to the temptation. If he were discovered, he could kiss his driver’s license goodbye for a couple of months.
He was somewhere on the A4, around fifty kilometers from the Verona exit. Another eleven, twelve hours of driving awaited him. He had left at four from Turin and the rising sun, a fiery ball low on the horizon, cast a blinding glare on the guardrails. He weighed the idea of turning on the CB radio and talking with some fellow driver traveling the same stretch, but decided against it. The conversations were always the same. They wouldn’t help him.
The traffic began to intensify. Enclosed in their little metal boxes, hundreds of individuals rushed towards the usual tasks, factory, office, routine; expressionless faces behind the windshields, pale and rigid hands on the steering wheel like those of mannequins in a shopping center.
Lenzi first focused on the wheels of a truck identical to his that was passing him, then brought his eyes back to the road: about three hundred meters away, a little group of crows hopped around some roadkill on the shoulder, plunging their beaks into soft, yielding tissue, tearing strips of flesh with famished determination.
He eased up a little on the gas pedal, curious: there was something wrong about the upside-down shape on the ground over which the birds were going into a frenzy. It was too large to belong to a cat or a dog, and it seemed to still be moving.
‘What the hell . . . ?’
Coming up to where the crows were, Ermes stuck his head out the passenger’s side to see better, and the cigarette nearly slid out of his mouth.
In the flutter of black wings, in the disorderly plunging of heads and beaks, he glimpsed a hand lying on the asphalt, a hand covered in clotted blood which might have belonged to a small woman or a child. The rest of the figure was covered by the shapes of the large birds, their feathers glistening like tar.
It was a question of moments.
Having passed the scene, Ermes looked in the rearview mirror: there were only the crows, intently pecking the asphalt, then taking flight towards a sad rest area overgrown with weeds. No carcass. No hand. He rubbed his eyes, crushed out the cigarette in the ashtray.
Yes, he needed a break and some coffee. The umpteenth stop in those glistening non-places, the umpteenth espresso, the umpteenth heartburn.
Ten minutes later he got off the highway and parked the Scania in the area reserved for trucks.
He would have given anything to get rid of the back pain, to erase the image of the crows with their idiotic eyes scampering around that helpless little hand.
Too much butter. There was always too much butter in the truck stop croissants. Even so, he couldn’t stop eating them because they somehow gave him a sense of familiarity, of security. That mushy taste on the back of his tongue was always the same, it never changed.
He chugged the coffee, thanked the fat woman with the colorless eyes who was squeezing oranges behind the counter and dragged himself to the bathroom.
He was assaulted by the smell of stale urine and cleaning products. Without any particular reason, he thought of his ex-wife and his son; it took him a few seconds to be able to remember their facial features
, the way they laughed or pronounced his name.
Yellow-painted nails, carrot-colored hair.
In front of the mirror he rinsed his face with water and dry-swallowed some aspirin. His backache gave him no reprieve, extending in hot rays of pain a little above his buttocks.
There was no one in the restroom. Letting out a long hissing fart, he headed towards the nearest toilet without looking at his own reflection.
Eat, shit, sleep, suffer, die. What a strange, repulsive contraption a human being is, he mused, surprising himself with the gloominess of his thoughts.
After cleaning the toilet seat with a large handful of toilet paper, he made himself comfortable; while he defecated, he occupied his mind by reading the writing that dozens of travelers had scrawled on the bathroom walls. Another certainty in his uncertain life. However far he might go in his Scania, whichever truck stop he might choose to stop at, the bathrooms always contained those written testimonials of a passage. Absences made into presences through words, scratched into the particleboard panels or traced with permanent markers.
As usual, a good ninety percent of the writings were obscene, for the most part offers or requests for sexual services accompanied by a telephone number.
Ermes stopped on
YOUNG COUPLE SEEKS HAIRY TRUCK DRIVERS
FOR MEETUPS
and
GAIA THE WHORE, CALL/FUCK
He started to laugh, a bitter disgusted laugh. Then, as he let his eyes run along the door of the stall, the heartbroken mirth caught in his throat. In the riot of obscenity and stylized male members, his attention was captured by some angular writing in fluorescent yellow that stood out from the rest.
The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories Page 2