The Valancourt Book of World Horror Stories

by James D. Jenkins

  A mason took care of covering the hole in the fireplace. He laid bricks and mortar and afterwards added a coat of paint. Meanwhile, Esteban decided to go over the house inch by inch in search of more passages. He checked closets, the flooring, under the sink. Also doors and windows: he wanted to close off any possibility whatsoever of intrusion. Adela waited patiently while he did all this and then said they needed to talk. She didn’t want to fight or argue, she told him. Things had gotten out of control. She wanted to get out of there as soon as possible . . .

  A sound coming from the door interrupted them. With a gesture of his hand, Esteban asked his wife to wait. He went towards the entrance armed with a kitchen knife. On the floor he saw an envelope. He bent down to pick it up and opened it with trembling hands.

  It was an eviction order.

  Esteban had a moment of clarity. One where the events of the past few days fit perfectly, where his stupidity and indolence played a central role. In the desk drawers he found the contract that he had signed with Señor Ligotti. He tried to read it, but he couldn’t: the letters became blurry, wobbly. He scanned it, emailed it to Clemente and urgently asked him to review it. You’re the expert in legal questions, he told him in the message.

  The telephone rang minutes later. His friend’s first sentence disturbed him even more:

  ‘You sent the wrong document.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The purchase contract you sent me is incomplete and therefore invalid. The last sheet is a different contract, to publish a book.’

  Esteban took the document he had scanned: it was that one, there was no question. In the first paragraph he could read: ‘Ligotti Industries declares that . . .’ He felt nauseous, on the verge of fainting.

  ‘It’s the one I signed.’

  ‘The old man screwed you. For legal purposes, you didn’t acquire an apartment: you promised to write a book within one year.’

  ‘He’s very clever. He got me to sign without my noticing the trick . . .’

  Esteban summarized the recent happenings for his friend.

  ‘What am I going to do? I’m ruined.’

  Clemente tried to calm him:

  ‘I’ll investigate Ligotti with my court contacts. I’m sure we’ll find something shady in his past, something that could help you. Meanwhile, don’t leave your home or you’ll lose it.’

  When he hung up, Adela already had her suitcase ready. She was going to her mother’s house. Esteban agreed: it was the best thing to do. For her to be safe while he sorted out the serious mistake he had made. He would barricade himself in the apartment. It was his home. He had poured all the money he had into it.

  To take it away from him, they would have to kill him.

  When he was young, Esteban lived through something similar. His parents spent years saving with the goal of buying a house. After great sacrifices they collected enough for the down payment. The family moved from the small apartment where they were living to a two story house with a garage and a yard. To celebrate, they organized a meal attended by relatives and friends: everyone hugged them, congratulating them on their new lifestyle. Esteban met the neighbor kids his own age, soon he was playing football and hide and seek with them.

  That phase didn’t last. The expenses smothered his parents; they stopped making the monthly payments on the house, they ended up losing it. Esteban never forgot the day they moved out: the neighbors looking out their doors and windows with sympathetic faces, the feeling of profound shame at the public exhibition, the defeat in his father’s tired expression, his mother’s tears, his older brothers’ silence.

  Now the story was repeating itself. The family curse that condemned them to be eternal renters. However, there was a difference: with his parents it had been a poor financial calculation. On the other hand, he had let himself be tricked like a child. And what was at risk wasn’t only the apartment.

  He could lose Adela. He could lose his sanity.

  He remained sitting on the living room sofa for hours, watching the closed hole in the fireplace as if he expected to see Señor Ligotti come out of it, until night fell. He put his thoughts aside, got up, and flipped the light switch.

  It didn’t work.

  He went through the house pressing the other switches, with the same result. Just what he needed: the power had gone out. He didn’t have a flashlight, nor candles. The time had come to ask the neighbors for a favor. Maybe he could even get some information out of them about Señor Ligotti.

  He went out to the hall. It was illuminated by a milky white bulb, the outage had occurred only in his apartment. He knocked on the door next to his and realized it was half open. He didn’t want to be taken for an intruder, so he said loudly:

  ‘Hello . . .’

  There was no response. He knocked again, this time louder, and then added:

  ‘I’m your neighbor, my power’s out.’

  As no one responded, he pushed the door a little and stuck his head in. The hall light allowed him to see that the apartment was empty. It smelled damp, musty. The floor was bulging, rotten. It was obvious it had been abandoned for a long time.

  He headed for the adjacent apartment. Its door was also ajar; he knocked and waited several seconds, then opened it slowly, as if he wanted to delay the moment of revelation.

  There was nothing inside except for a forgotten paint can.

  Was it a coincidence? There was only one more apartment, at the end of the hallway. If he found it empty he would go up to the next floor and the next, until he found someone.

  He walked, listening to the amplified echo of his steps. He felt like the ghost of a lonely castle. A lost soul in eternal search of companionship.

  The door was closed. He put his ear against it: silence. Nothing seemed to be moving inside. He put his hand on the knob; it wasn’t locked, so he could turn it, producing the grinding sound made by rusty objects. He was going to enter, but he was stopped by the ringing of a telephone behind him. He remained frozen for a few seconds until he realized it was his. He ran to his apartment and answered it, panting.

  He heard Clemente’s voice.

  ‘Get out of there right now!’

  Esteban caught his breath and asked:

  ‘What are you saying? Why?’

  ‘I found out some things about Ligotti. Get your things and get out! There’s no time for explanations.’

  Esteban had left his apartment door open. He saw that the hall light was going out. Then he heard someone unlocking the front door of the building.

  Before the line went dead, Clemente managed to say:

  ‘Ligotti owns the whole building.’

  That day in his childhood when Esteban and his family moved from the house they had lost to a minuscule apartment, something strange occurred. He woke up thirsty in the early morning hours, he felt feverish, claustrophobic. His older brothers snored in their bunks, resigned to the overcrowding. He went to the kitchen for a glass of water. He wanted a little air too, some space.

  A glow coming from the living room caught his attention. The television was on. The screen showed colored bars indicating the channel was off air. They had always seemed enigmatic to Esteban: a signal, the key to an encoded message. He saw his father’s silhouette outlined against the light. He had fallen asleep in the chair. He went up to him to wake him; he was surprised to discover his eyes open, fixed on the screen.

  ‘What are you doing, Daddy?’

  His father didn’t notice his presence. Esteban was going to talk to him again but something stopped him. In that moment he didn’t know it; now, as he held the telephone in his hand, as he listened to the emptiness of the line that had gone dead, taking Clemente’s voice along with it, he understood what it had been.

  Señor Ligotti’s figure appeared in the doorway. He recognized him despite the darkness: in one hand he gripped his wal
king stick.

  He hadn’t said anything more to his father because his empty gaze contained a warning. Something sinister was living inside him and if he broke the trance it would emerge with all its power. The bars on the television kept it at bay. It was better to leave it like that.

  Underneath people’s skin there were monsters, like the one he now had to face.

  Energized by the whiplash of adrenaline, Esteban looked around for things that could help him hurt his attacker. The darkness only let him make out the largest objects: a chair, a dresser, a plant, nothing he could use as a weapon. He weighed his chances. Señor Ligotti was crazy but he was an old man. It would be easy to subdue him. Various images passed through his head: he would knock him down with a shove, he would straddle him, he would humiliate him with slaps. He wanted to see him break, listen to him sob. The rage built up in recent days overflowed. Opening his mouth, Esteban let out a sharp, primitive, animal cry and sprang at his rival.

  He didn’t manage to topple him.

  Señor Ligotti easily sidestepped his attack, then struck his cane across his face, breaking his nose. Esteban fell to the ground, bleeding profusely. The old man bent down, grabbed him by one foot and began to drag him down the hallway.

  While he was being hauled like a sack, Esteban wondered: where did the old man draw such strength from? He saw a flash of lightning and heard the rain start to come down. Where was he taking him? He tried to escape, but his strength failed him. The darkness became thicker, he lost consciousness.

  The cold water of the rain woke him. The world had gone upside down, the buildings hung from an asphalt sky. It took him a moment to understand that he was upside down on the building’s rooftop terrace, that his body was hanging over the edge. He looked towards his feet and saw that Señor Ligotti was holding him by one leg. How had he gotten him all the way up there?

  The old man began to swing him. Slowly, from left to right, moving his body like a pendulum.

  Overcoming his fear, Esteban sought answers:

  ‘Why are you doing this to me? What do you want? Answer me!’

  A lightning flash illuminated the old man’s face. In that final moment, Esteban understood. Señor Ligotti looked at him with a mixture of curiosity and impatience, the same way a human observes the slow movements of a mollusk. He wasn’t a madman: he was a higher being. A god who was toying with him just like a boy playing with ants.

  The old man’s voice rose above the sound of the wind and rain:

  ‘Si non oscillas, noli tintinnare.’

  Esteban felt him let go, the vertigo of the fall, the abyss sucking him towards a certain death. He closed his eyes and hugged himself, anticipating the position of his body in its shroud.

  But he didn’t fall. Señor Ligotti held him once more by the leg and then dragged his body over the edge of the terrace until he placed him safely on the roof. Esteban remained curled up in a ball, trembling and crying like a newborn baby. The old man leaned over him. He brushed the wet hair back from his face and positioned it behind his ears. Then he kissed him on the forehead.

  Esteban closed his eyes, fearing the real denouement: his rival’s hands strangling him or disemboweling him with a knife.

  He opened them seconds later. Señor Ligotti had disappeared.

  When the police visited him in the hospital where he was recovering from an inevitable rhinoplasty, Esteban decided that he wouldn’t press charges against Señor Ligotti. He was terrified to face him again, to have a confrontation with him. He stated that because of the darkness he hadn’t been able to see his attacker’s face; that he had no enemies nor the slightest idea of who had been responsible for the assault.

  While this was going on, Clemente supervised the moving of everything from the apartment in Calle de Berlín to Adela’s mother’s house. Esteban didn’t want to set foot in that place again. He would await the imminent birth of his child sheltered under his mother-­in-­law’s roof. Afterwards, calmly, he would seek a new home for his family.

  The birth and the first month of infancy kept his mind busy. However, it didn’t take long before he fell into a deep depression. He started therapy with a psychologist who, after hearing his terrifying story about Señor Ligotti, suggested he commit it to paper.

  ‘You could try writing a novel. It would help you. Isn’t that what you writers do all the time? Exorcize your traumas through literature . . .’

  Esteban was reluctant at first but wound up accepting the advice. After a slow, painful start, when he was on the verge of abandoning the project, he entered an inspired catharsis: the ideas flowed at a dizzying rhythm, the plot fit together with a coherency he had never before experienced. Four months later he finished the novel, which he entitled Señor Ligotti. He sent it to several publishers with the certainty that he had just written his best book.

  The first offer didn’t take long to arrive. To his delight, it came from Grau Press. The novel, retitled by some genius in the marketing department as Sinister Stalking, was an immediate success. His bank account grew with equal speed and he was able to get a modest apartment on the outskirts of the city. This time he hired a lawyer to deal with the contract.

  Fortune smiled on him. But by now Esteban wasn’t naive, he couldn’t be after recent events.

  Everything had a price. It was just a matter of waiting for the bill collector to show up.

  His son turned two. During all this time, Esteban didn’t write anything. Sinister Stalking continued to be reprinted; the royalties it generated were enough for them to live well and he preferred to devote himself to his family. He didn’t miss creative work and even stayed away from public events. He started to think of retiring, of the possibility of remaining connected to literature through teaching. A couple of universities showed interest in hiring him. Maybe, he sometimes mused in the early morning hours when suffering from insomnia, he had written everything he had to write.

  There was also another possibility: that he was paralyzed by the fear of not being able to surpass Sinister Stalking’s success.

  As if he divined his thoughts, the director of Grau Press called one morning to invite him to the office. We have to talk, he said. Esteban accepted out of politeness: they were his publisher, he lived off them, he couldn’t say no. He saw it as a courtesy visit.

  As he checked in at the lobby, he was relieved not to see Ligotti Industries in the directory. He relaxed even more when he got off the elevator on the top floor and discovered that his old enemy’s offices were for rent. Where had he gone? Had he died? What did it matter? The truth was that he was glad to avoid him.

  The director received him with forced enthusiasm. He was an executive who didn’t know much about books; on the other hand, he mastered numbers and accounts to perfection. They made small talk for a long while. Esteban’s discomfort was growing. He began to look for an excuse to get out of there.

  Suddenly, the director took his arm and led him down a hallway.

  ‘Actually, it’s the owner who wants to speak with you.’

  Esteban was surprised. He had never dealt with him.

  ‘And to what do I owe the honor?’

  ‘He’s concerned because you haven’t sent in anything new . . .’

  They arrived in front of an enormous wood door. It was old, with elegant carvings. On the upper part, in the middle, a phrase was inscribed:

  SI NON OSCILLAS, NOLI TINTINNARE

  Esteban’s back went stiff. His vision clouded and he felt the urge to vomit.

  The director put his hand on the doorknob.

  ‘. . . and when an author gets writer’s block, he likes to help. He knows different methods for stimulating the imagination.’

  The door opened, the director pushed him inside. Esteban was petrified, incapable of opening his eyes, until he heard a voice:

  ‘Welcome. Sit down.’

  It belo
nged to a young man. Esteban raised his eyelids. Behind the desk he saw a blond-­haired fellow, clean-­shaven, with horn-­rimmed glasses. He felt ridiculous. His paranoia had gotten carried away again. The answer was obvious: Señor Ligotti knew this office; surely this was where he’d gotten the phrase from.

  He approached the desk, still nauseous from the shock, and sat down.

  ‘Sorry, I don’t feel well.’

  He closed his eyes again. The air in the office was thick, hot; Esteban felt he was suffocating.

  With excessive familiarity, the owner asked him:

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  Then, changing the subject, he added:

  ‘I have something for you . . .’

  Esteban heard him open a drawer. Then he heard something that terrified him, a sound that confirmed what he already feared: that his nightmare was really just beginning.

  ‘ . . . it’s the contract for a new book.’

  Behind him, from some corner of the office, the sound continued to be heard.

  The jingling of a hand loaded with rings.

  Translated from the Spanish by James D. Jenkins

  Michael Roch

  The Illogical Investigations of Inspector André Despérine

  Supernatural sleuths and occult investigators might not be anything new in the horror genre, but we’ve never come across one quite like Michael Roch’s André Despérine. Posted to a remote region that no one, including he, has ever heard of, the incompetent and shamelessly opportunistic policeman Despérine somehow manages to find himself involved in one paranormal case after another. Roch (b. 1987), who lives in Martinique – a Caribbean island whose tropical forests and beautiful white sand beaches seem to make it an unlikely wellspring of horror fiction – primarily writes in the fields of science fiction and Afrofuturism, but fortunately for us also occasionally dabbles in horror. This trio of interlinked tales – you’ll have to read all three to see how they fit together – first appeared in 2012 and marks the author’s English-­language debut.