Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  Mark made a show of bending over the parchment. Lycus leaned closer, his lips slightly parted in anticipation. Mark prepared to place the nib against the sheet of flesh.

  And, with the flick of his wrist, he sent the bone-pen curving behind him, towards the heat of the fireplace.

  “No!” Lycus dived for it but Mark met him, punching him hard in the stomach. As they fought, the pen fell into the hottest part of the charcoal and began to burn. “Get it out!” Lycus screamed, “you don’t understand!” But Mark slammed the lawyer onto his back and held his boot on Lycus’s throat.

  “If the will’s agenda is not completely fulfilled, my soul will have to be surrendered in Andrew’s place!”

  “You shouldn’t have let your passions get in the way of a deal.” Mark kept the terrified lawyer pinned down as the pen spat and cracked in the fire, which now glowed crimson. Lycus bucked sharply and threw him aside, diving into the fireplace, yelling as the flames attacked his hands. But no matter how hard he tried to grip the pen it kept slipping from his grasp, luring him deeper into the fire.

  Wedged in the roaring fireplace, he turned back to Mark, the crimson inferno roiling over his arms, engulfing his head, tearing at his face, causing his eyes to burst apart. The flames swirled around him in a fiery tornado, sucking the flesh from his charring bones. There was an immense explosion of blood-red flame and his body was lost inside the pulsing orange logs of the fire.

  Mark threw the will in after Lycus, watching as the flesh smoked and burned with a strange green flame.

  Then he put on his jacket and left the house.

  The rain was easing up. He had almost reached the station at the bottom of the hill when his cell phone started to vibrate in his pocket. He checked the caller ID: Ben Bayer.

  “I’m really sorry, Mark,” his brother began. “I was broke. I just spent a tiny amount of the money.”

  “How much?” Mark demanded to know.

  “Just a hundred pounds. I was going to be thrown out of the flat if I didn’t pay the rent.”

  “Lock the doors, Ben. Don’t move a muscle until I get there.” He closed the phone and set off with a renewed sense of purpose. The will had been destroyed. He prayed that he had acted in time.

  Glancing up at the leaden storm clouds, Mark thought he saw his uncle’s face, smiling down benignly.

  <>

  *

  Return Journey

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL

  RAMSEY CAMPBELL was born in Liverpool, England, where he still lives with his wife, Jenny. His first book, a collection of stories entitled The Inhabitant of the Lake and Less Welcome Tenants, was published by August Derleth’s legendary Arkham House imprint in 1964. Since then, his novels have included The Doll Who Ate His Mother, The Face That Must Die, The Nameless, Incarnate, The Hungry Moon, Ancient Images, The Count of Eleven, The Long Lost, Pact of the Fathers, The Darkest Part of the Woods, The Grin of the Dark, Thieving Fear, Creatures of the Pool, and The Seven Days of Cain, as well as the movie tie-in Solomon Kane.

  His short fiction has been collected in such volumes as Demons by Daylight, The Height of the Scream, Dark Companions, Scared Stiff, Waking Nightmares, Cold Print, Alone with the Horrors, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, and Just Behind You. He has also edited a number of anthologies, including New Terrors, New Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Fine Frights: Stories That Scared Me, Uncanny Banquet, Meddling with Ghosts, and Gathering the Bones: Original Stories from the World’s Masters of Horror (with Dennis Etchison and Jack Dann).

  PS Publishing recently issued the novel Ghosts Know, and the definitive edition of Inhabitant of the Lake, which included all the first drafts of the stories. Forthcoming is another novel, The Black Pilgrimage.

  Campbell has won multiple World Fantasy Awards, British Fantasy Awards and Bram Stoker Awards, and he is a recipient of the World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award, the Howie Award of the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival for Lifetime Achievement, and the International Horror Guild’s Living Legend Award. He is president of both the British Fantasy Society and the Society of Fantastic Films, and for many years he reviewed films for BBC Radio Merseyside.

  “‘Return Journey’ was suggested by a trip to Llangollen, North Wales,” explains the author, “where the vintage railway had been dressed up to recall World War II, sandbags and all.

  “My imagination didn’t need much prompting after that, especially once the train went slowly into a tunnel…”

  AS THE OLD TRAIN PUFFED out of the station, past the sandbags on the platform and the men dressed up as soldiers and a wartime poster with its finger to its lips, the three children who were managing to occupy the whole compartment apart from Hilda’s seat began to demonstrate their knowledge of history. “I’m Hitteler,” announced the girl with orange turf for hair, and shot up an arm.

  “I’m Gobble,” said the girl whose bright pink lipstick didn’t quite fit her mouth.

  Hilda didn’t know if she was meant to be offended. When Hitler and Goebbels were alive they’d been just a couple of the many things her parents never discussed in front of her. It was left to the third girl to react, clicking all her ringed fingers at her friends and declaring “You’d get shot for that if we was in the war.”

  “We’re not.”

  “They don’t have wars any more.”

  “You’d get shot or you’d get hung,” the ringed girl insisted. “Hung by your neck till you was dead.”

  They must have learned some history to use phrases such as that. Perhaps they remembered only the unpleasant parts, the opposite of Hilda. She was turning to the window in search of nostalgia when the ringed girl appealed to her. “They would, wouldn’t they?”

  “Did you know anyone that was?”

  “Did you ever see any spies being hung?”

  “I don’t look that old, do I? I wasn’t in the war, just in the wars.”

  They regarded her as though she’d started speaking in a dead language, and then they crowned themselves with headphones and switched on the black boxes attached to them. If they intended to shut up so much of their awareness, Hilda wondered why they were on the train at all—but she wasn’t far from wondering that about herself.

  She’d seen the poster on the outside wall of the car park of the telephone exchange where she worked. Since none of her colleagues had seen it, she’d felt it was aimed just at her. OLD TIME LINE, it had said, with a train timetable and the name of a town pretty well as distant as her hot and bothered Mini could reach for one of her Sunday jaunts. If she hadn’t been aware of having settled into never driving anywhere that wasn’t already part of her past, she mightn’t have taken the chance.

  The town had proved to be even more Lancashire than hers: steep hills climbed by red concertina terraces, factories flourishing pennants of grey smoke, streets so narrow and entangled they might have been designed to exclude any relative of the shopping mall that had taken over the view from her floor of the small house she shared with two pensioners whose rooms always smelled of strong tea. She would have liked to explore, but by the time she’d found a car park where the Mini could recover from its labours she’d thought it best to head for the next train. When she’d stumbled panting into the two-platformed station she’d had to sprint for the train the moment she’d bought her ticket, scarcely noticing until she’d boarded that the railway preservation company had gone wartime for the weekend, and at a loss to understand why that should make her wish she’d been less eager to catch the train.

  She rather hoped she wouldn’t need to understand while she was on it. The station and whatever it contained that she hadn’t quite liked were gone now, and trees were accompanying the train, first strolling backwards and then trotting as a preamble to breaking into a run as the last houses stayed in town. The land sank beside the track, and a river streamed beneath to the horizon, where a glittering curve of water hooked the sun from behind frowning clouds to re
discover the colours of the grassy slopes. This was more like the journey she’d wanted: it even smelled of the past—sunlight on old upholstery, wafts of smoke that reminded her of her very first sight of a train, bursting out like a travelling bonfire from under a bridge. The tinny rhythmic whispers of the headphones were subsumed into the busy clicking of the wheels, and she was close to losing herself in reminiscences as large and gentle as the landscape when a guard in a peaked cap slid open the door to the corridor. “All tickets, please.”

  He frowned the children’s feet off the seats and scrutinised their tickets thoroughly before warning “Just behave yourselves in the tunnel.”

  That took Hilda off guard, as did her unexpectedly high voice. “When is there a tunnel?”

  “There has been ever since the line was built, madam.”

  “No, I mean when do we come to it? How long is it?”

  “Just under a mile: madam. We’ll be through it in less than a minute, and not much more than that when we come back uphill. We’ll be there in a few puffs.”

  As he withdrew along the corridor the girls dropped their headphones round their necks so as to murmur together, and Hilda urged herself not to be nervous. She’d never been frightened of tunnels, and if the children misbehaved, she could deal with them. She heard the guard slide back a door at the far end of the carriage, and then darkness closed around the windows with a roar.

  Not only the noise made her flinch. The girls had jumped up as though the darkness had released them. She was about to remonstrate with them when they dodged into the next compartment, presumably in order to get up to mischief unobserved. Excerpts of their voices strayed from their window into hers, making her feel more alone than she found she wanted to be. The tunnel itself wasn’t the problem: the glow that spread itself dimmer than candlelight was, and the sense of going downwards into a place that threatened to grow darker, and something else—something possibly related to the shadow that loomed in the corridor as the girls fell abruptly silent. When the guard followed his shadow to Hilda’s door she gasped, mostly for breath. “Nearly out,” he said.

  As he spoke they were. Black clouds had sagged over the sun, and the hills were steeped in gloom. In the fields cows had sunk beneath its weight, and sheep that should be white were lumps of dust. It wouldn’t be night for hours yet; nobody was going to be able to stage a blackout, and so she was able to wonder if that was the root of her fear. “Thank you,” she called, but the guard had gone.

  She remembered little of the blackout. The war had been over before she started school. The few memories she could recall just now seemed close to flickering out—her parents leading her past the extinguished houses and deadened lamps of streets that had no longer been at all familiar, the bones of her father’s fingers silhouetted by the flashlight he was muffing, the insect humming of a distant swarm of bombers, the steps leading down to the bomb shelter, to the neighbours’ voices as muted as their lights. She’d been safe there—she had always been safe with her parents—so why did the idea of seeking refuge make her yearn to be in the open? It was no excuse for her to pull the communication cord, and so she did her best to sit still for ten minutes, only to be brought back to the war.

  The temporarily nameless station was even smaller than the one she’d started from. The closer of the pair of platforms was crowded with people in army uniform smoking cigarettes as though to celebrate an era when nobody had minded. The three girls were beating the few other passengers to a refreshment room that had labelled itself a NAAFI for the weekend, and Hilda might have considered staying on the train if the guard hadn’t reappeared, shouting “End of the line. All change for nowhere. Next train back in half an hour.”

  The carriage shook as the engine was uncoupled, and Hilda grabbed the doorway as she stepped down onto the platform, which displayed all it had to offer at a glance. Most of the female passengers were queuing for the grey stone hut behind the ticket office. The waiting room smelled of cigarette smoke harsh enough for Woodbines. The refreshment room had to be preferable, and she was bearing for it when a pig’s face turned to watch her through the window. For as long as it took her to confront it she had the grotesque notion that the building had become not a NAAFI but a pigsty, and then she saw the snout was on a human head.

  Of course it was a gas mask, modelled by one of the girls from the train. Three empty masks were rooting at the inside of the window. By the time Hilda grasped all this she was fleeing up the steps onto the bridge over the tracks, and the realisation by no means slowed her down. She walked very fast until she was out of sight of anything reminiscent of the war—out of sight of the station. She saw the smoke of the engine duck under the bridge and rear up on the other side, where the rails used to lead to the next county—presumably the engine would turn so as to manoeuvre to the far end of the train—and then she was around a bend of the narrow road bordered by sprawling grass, and the flank of the hill intervened between her and the railway. She didn’t stop until she came to a hollow in the side of the hill, where she not so much sat as huddled while she tried to breathe calmly enough to believe she might grow calm.

  Breezes and sunlight through a succession of shutters of cloud took turns to caress her face. The grass on the hills that crouched to the horizon hiding the town where she’d joined the train blazed green and dulled, shivered and subsided. She didn’t know whether she closed her eyes to shut out the spectacle of the agitated landscape or in an attempt to share the stillness it briefly achieved. While she gave herself up to the sensations on her face she was able not to think—was aware only of them, and then not of them either.

  She wouldn’t have expected to be capable of sleeping, but some kind of exhaustion had left her capable of nothing else. She didn’t dream, and she was grateful for it. Instead, as her mind began to struggle out of a black swamp of unconsciousness, she found herself remembering. Perhaps her stupor was helping her to do so, or perhaps, she thought as she strove to waken, it was leaving her unable not to remember.

  Her parents had kept her safe from everything about the war, but there had been just one occasion when she’d had to shelter without them. She’d spent a Saturday at her aunt’s and uncle’s across town, which meant her teenage cousin Ellen had been required to play with her. Long before it was time for Ellen to see her home the older girl had tired of her. Perhaps she’d intended to be more quickly rid of her, or perhaps she’d planned to scare Hilda as a sly revenge for all the trouble she’d been, by using the short cut through a graveyard.

  They hadn’t progressed halfway across it when it had begun to seem to Hilda as vast as the world. Crosses had tottered towards her, handless arms as white as maggots had reached for her, trees like tall thin cowled heads without faces had whispered about her as she’d scampered after Ellen into the massing darkness, and she’d been unable to see the end of any path. Ellen had to look after her, she’d reassured herself; Ellen was too old to be frightened—except that as the sirens had started to howl, a sound so all-encompassing Hilda had imagined a chorus of ghosts surrounding the graveyard, it had become apparent that Ellen was terrified. She’d run so fast she’d almost lost Hilda at the crossing of two paths dark as trenches, and when she’d halted, her voice had betrayed she’d done so largely out of panic. “Down here,” she’d cried. “Quick, and don’t fall.”

  At first Hilda hadn’t understood that the refuge itself was one source of her cousin’s distress. She’d thought it was a shelter for whoever worked in the graveyard, and she’d groped her way down the steps after her into the stone room. Then Ellen had unwrapped her flashlight, and as its muffled glow brightened with each layer of the scarf she removed from it, her breaths had begun to sound more like whimpers. The walls had been full of boxes collapsing out of their long holes and losing their hold on any of their lids that hadn’t caved in. For a moment Hilda had thought someone was looking at her out of the box with the loosest lid, and then she’d seen it was a gas mask resting on the gap between box a
nd lid. Gas masks were supposed to protect you, and so she’d run to pick it up in the hope that would make her braver. “Don’t touch it,” Ellen had not much less than screamed, but Hilda had pulled the mask off—

  She didn’t know if she had screamed then; certainly she did now. The cry rose to the surface of her sleep and carried her with it, and her eyes jerked open. The view that met them could have been more reassuring. The sun was considerably lower than last time she’d looked, and its rays streamed up like searchlights from behind black clouds above the town past the horizon. One beam spotlighted a solitary oval cloud, so regular she had to convince herself it wasn’t a barrage balloon. She hadn’t quite succeeded when she became aware not just of the lateness but of the silence. Had the last train departed? Long before she could walk back to town it would be dark, if she managed to find the right road.

  As she shoved herself to her feet her fingers dug into the soil, and she remembered thinking in the graveyard vault that when you went down so far you were beneath the earth. She did her best to gnaw her nails clean as she dashed to the bridge.

  The platforms were deserted. The ticket office and all the doors were shut. A train stood alongside the platform, the engine pointing towards the distant town. The train looked abandoned for the night, and she was about to despair when the stack gave vent to a smoky gasp. “Wait,” she cried, and clattered down the steps. She hadn’t reached the platform when the train moved off.

  “Please wait,” she tried to call at the top of her voice. Her dash had left her scarcely enough breath for one word. Nevertheless the rearmost door of the last of the three carriages swung ajar. She flung herself after it, overtook it, seized the inner handle and with a final effort launched herself into the corridor. Three gas masks pressed their snouts against the window of the refreshment room, their blank eyepieces watching her as though the darkness was. She shut them out with a violent slam and retreated into the nearest compartment, sliding the door closed with both hands and falling across a seat to fetch up by the window.