Haunts

by Stephen Jones

  ”The road is very bad, father,” Serafina said, indicating the priest’s flowing robe, his gleaming Shoes.

  He grinned broadly. “No problem,” he said, and winked. Sexy, yes. Gardiner could see that. “I will be right back.” He went up to his room and returned quickly in khaki trousers, a light windbreaker over a T-shirt, and sturdy boots. All that remained of his clerical garb was the cross and the black cylindrical hat.

  When they reached the church, Gardiner made as though to enter first, but Father Demetrios asked for the flashlight and waved him aside. Entering the building a step behind Father Demetrios, Gardiner saw that the mosaics had reverted to their original innocuous form: shepherds and patriarchs, Abraham and Isaac, the Nativity, the journey to Bethlehem.

  ”Quite remarkable,” said Father Demetrios. “You have photographs of the other state?”

  ”I tried. The camera flash wouldn’t go off.”

  ”That is to be expected. Let us go outside and wait a little while.”

  For ten minutes they stood in the clearing; then the priest sent Gardiner into the church alone. This time the walls were covered with a wild conglomeration of diabolic filth: a gory massacre, a bestial orgy, a witches’ Sabbath, and more. He ran to the doorway. “Father! Father! Come and see!” The priest hurried in, followed by Serafina. When Gardiner turned to illuminate the mosaics again, they were as they had been before, pure, holy.

  He felt his face flaming. “I swear to you, father—”

  “Yes. I understand. They are great masters of roguery. We will wait once again.” But, though they went in and out of the church several times over the next hour, the mosaics were unchanged. They would not revert to the hideous apocalyptic form. Gardiner found that maddening. He wanted to see the demons again, with the priest as witness. He needed to see the demons again.

  But the demons would not appear, and finally they gave up. On the way back to town Gardiner studied the priest carefully, wondering if the man suspected him of being some kind of lunatic. But Serafina had seen the distorted mosaics too. Thank God for that, he thought. He would be just about ready to sign up with a shrink by now, otherwise.

  “I must think profoundly about this,” said Father Demetrios, and went to his room. Serafina said she had to go to her grandmother: she told Gardiner she would join him for dinner. Gardiner stood by himself in the empty piazza, watching solid-looking heat-shimmers go spiraling upward. This was the hottest day yet. The town was like an oven.

  In late afternoon, unable to bear any of this any longer, Gardiner went back across to the church yet again, and found its walls once more bright with capering loathsomenesses. They no longer frightened him; they simply made him sad. He could weep with the sadness of it all. He had found such lovely sweet mosaics in this unexpected place, such marvels of na’ive medieval art. Why wouldn’t they stay that way? Why did they have to assail him like this, striking at the foundations of his sanity? For a long time he stood swaying in the midst of this den of horrors, looking with distaste and disbelief from scene to scene. The chapel seemed airless in the pounding heat, as though every atom of oxygen had fled from it into the sky.

  The figures appeared to be moving. That was a new phenomenon, and an awful one. He blinked at them. His hand quivered as he moved the flashlight beam from place to place. The leering dancers—the unthinkable shapes—

  Somehow the flashlight fell from his hand, and went out as it hit the ground. Gardiner knelt, groping for it in the stifling darkness. He was unable to find it, nor did he have the strength to make his way out of the church. He simply crouched where he was, kneeling, head downward, wearily resting both his palms on the sandy soil.

  He felt a hand on his shoulder. A calm voice: “Let us go outside, my friend.” Father Demetrios.

  “I fell asleep, I guess,” said Gardiner.

  “No,” said the priest. “Not really.”

  Father Demetrios had a flashlight of his own, a dim one. Gardiner pointed at the walls. They were still covered with monsters.

  “Do you see them?” Gardiner asked raggedly.

  “I see them, yes. You wanted to find mosaics here, and you found them, eh? But I think you wanted it a little too hard. This is what happens, when they know you want something too hard.”

  “When they know? What they! Who?”

  “Come,” the priest said. “Outside.”

  Father Demetrios led him from the building and sat him down in the clearing. Dusk had come. Serafina was not there. Gardiner noticed that the priest had placed a number of lighted candles on the ground all about the building. He was taking things from a backpack: a crucifix, a couple of small silver chalices, a Bible.

  “Are you going to do an exorcism?” Gardiner asked.

  “A reconsecration,” said Father Demetrios. “I have not the authority to do exorcisms. The effect will be the same, though. You will please say nothing of this to anyone, yes? There is some irregularity in my proceeding on my own this way.” He was going about the building now, anointing it with oil from one of the chalices. “This is all to be our little secret, do we agree?”

  Gardiner’s head was swimming. He heard the priest chanting in Greek and saw him raising and lowering candles and making the sign of the cross on the walls with the holy oil. It went on and on. Then he knelt a long time in prayer. “We are done,” Father Demetrios said at last. “Let us go back to the village, now.”

  “Shall we look inside the church, first?” Gardiner asked.

  “I think not. Let us simply go.”

  “No. I have to see,” said Gardiner. He took one of the candles out of the ground and used it to light his way.

  The walls were as blank as if Father Demetrios had whitewashed them. After a moment’s hesitation he put out his forefinger and rubbed. A rough stucco surface; no hint of the smoothness of mosaic tile anywhere. Even in this asphyxiating heat, Gardiner felt a chill spreading over him. This was the last straw, this newest mutation. He knew he had to flee, not just the church but the town itself. There was nothing solid here, only abysses beneath abysses.

  He went stumbling out. “There’s nothing there, father. An hour ago there were mosaics all over those walls!”

  “There were?” Father Demetrios said.

  *

  Serafina met him at the hotel and said, “Will we have dinner together tonight?”

  “I think not,” Gardiner said. “I’m going to leave.”

  “Leave? Now? But it is already dark, and you have not eaten!”

  “That’s all right. I think I should go.”

  “Ah. Do you?”

  “This is no place for me. You’ve got too many different kinds of reality here, I think. A little retreating is in order, a little regrouping. There are other places, other mosaics, elsewhere, you know. Best to try my luck at one of those. A place without any ghosts.”

  She considered that for a moment. “Yes. Maybe you’re right.” She gave him a sad smile. “Do you blame me for this, what happened here?”

  “You? Why should I blame you?”

  “Good,” she said. “I would like you to have at least one happy memory of my village.”

  He thought he saw an unstated appeal in her eyes. “Will I see you again somewhere?” he asked. “In Palermo, maybe? If I ask for you at the Hertz office?”

  “You could do that, yes,” she said. “Yes. Please do.”

  They stood a little while together, neither of them speaking. Then she leaned forward and kissed him lightly, a quick brush against his lips, and took his hand and squeezed it, and smiled, not so sadly this time; and then she was gone.

  Gardiner went to his room and packed, and found the padrone and settled his bill, and started off down the road, southward into the sultry night, heading for the coast, not daring to look back at dwindling Monte Saturno in his mirror, as though fearing that he would see some titanic winged figure standing with folded arms above the town, grinning at his departure. Was there any place on this island, he wondered, tha
t had no ghosts? Maybe not. But he knew that he needed a change of air. Different ghosts. Less volatile, less mischievous. Relicts of an older, cooler realm, one where reason had held sway at least for a little while. Monte Saturno’s mysteries had been too much for him—immense, unanswerable.

  He reached Agrigento on the southern shore just before dawn. The ancient Agrigentum, it was, where the clear-minded, logic-loving old Greeks had built a dozen elegant temples whose austere remains still could be seen. It was cooler, here. A fresh breeze was blowing from the sea. Gardiner felt a measure of steadiness returning. Amidst the clean, stark, tranquil ruins of the calm and rational classical era he watched, with tears of happiness and relief streaming down his face, the sun come up over the shattered columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus.

  <>

  *

  The Hidden Chamber

  NEIL GAIMAN

  NEIL GAIMAN is the author of many works, most recently a Doctor Who TV episode called “The Doctor’s Wife.”

  He is the first author to win both the Carnegie and the Newbery Medals for the same work, The Graveyard Book. His other books include Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett); Neverwhere; Stardust; the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker Award-winning American Gods; Coraline; the British Fantasy Award-winning Anansi Boys; Interworld (with Michael Reeves); and Odd and the Frost Giants.

  Gaiman’s short fiction is collected in Angels and Visitations: A Miscellany, Smoke and Mirrors: Short Fictions and Illusions, Adventures in the Dream Trade, Fragile Things: Short Fictions & Wonders, M is for Magic, and The Book of Cthulhu (with Laird Barron and Caitlín R. Kiernan).

  Gaiman has also co-edited Ghastly Beyond Belief (with Kim Newman), Now We Are Sick: An Anthology of Nasty Verse (with Stephen Jones), and Stories (with Al Sarrantonio), while Prince of Stories: The Many Worlds of Neil Gaiman is a nonfiction study by Hank Wagner, Christopher Golden, and Stephen R. Bissette.

  He is not certain what he will do next.

  “I wrote ‘The Hidden Chamber’ in a big empty house in Ireland in mid-winter,” Gaiman recalls, “the day I found a butterfly in the house, woken by me turning on the central heating a few days earlier. It wanted to get out into the world outside, where it would die.

  “I thought about that, and about Bluebeard, and Neal Adams covers of early 1970s comics with beautiful women running away from dark mansions (one light is always on, in the attic), and I wrote this.”

  DO NOT FEAR the ghosts in this house; they are the least of your worries.

  Personally I find the noises they make reassuring,

  The creaks and footsteps in the night,

  their little tricks of hiding things, or moving them, I find

  endearing, not upsetting. It makes the place feel so much more like home.

  Inhabited.

  Apart from ghosts nothing lives here for long. No cats

  no mice, no flies, no dreams, no bats. Two days ago

  I saw a butterfly,

  a monarch I believe, which danced from room to room

  and perched on walls and waited near to me.

  There are no flowers in this? empty place,

  and, scared the butterfly would starve, I forced a window wide,

  cupped my two hands around her fluttering self,

  feeling her wings kiss my palms so gentle,

  and put her out, and watched her fly away.

  I’ve little patience with the seasons here, but

  your arrival eased this winter’s chill.

  Please, wander round. Explore it all you wish.

  I’ve broken with tradition on some points. If there is

  one locked room here, you’ll never know. You’ll not find

  in the cellar’s fireplace old bones or hair. You’ll find no blood.

  Regard:

  just tools, a washing machine, a drier, a water heater, and a chain of keys.

  Nothing that can alarm you. Nothing dark.

  I may be grim, perhaps, but only just as grim

  as any man who suffered such affairs. Misfortune,

  carelessness or pain, what matters is the loss. You’ll see

  the heartbreak linger in my eyes, and dream

  of making me forget what came before you walked

  into the hallway of this house. Bringing a little summer

  in your glance, and with your smile.

  While you are here, of course, you will hear the ghosts, always a room away,

  and you may wake beside me in the night,

  knowing that there’s a space without a door

  knowing that there’s a place that’s locked but isn’t there. Hearing

  them scuffle, echo, thump and pound.

  If you are wise you’ll run into the night, fluttering away into the cold

  wearing perhaps the laciest of shifts. The lane’s hard flints

  will cut your feet all bloody as you run,

  so, if I wished, I could just follow you,

  tasting the blood and oceans of your tears. I’ll wait instead,

  here in my private place, and soon I’ll put

  a candle

  in the window, love, to light your way back home.

  The world flutters like insects. I think this is how I shall remember you,

  my head between the white swell of your breasts,

  listening to the chambers of your heart.

  <>

  *

  Good Grief

  ROBERT SHEARMAN

  ROBERT SHEARMAN is an award-winning writer for stage, television, and radio. He was resident playwright at the Northcott Theatre in Exeter, UK, and a regular writer for Alan Ayckbourn at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough. He is the winner of the Sunday Times Playwriting Award, the Sophie Winter Memorial Trust Award, and the Guinness Award for Ingenuity in association with the Royal National Theatre. Many of his plays are collected in Caustic Comedies, published by Big Finish Productions.

  For BBC Radio, he is a regular contributor to the Afternoon Play slot, produced by Martin Jarvis, and his series The Chain Gang has won two Sony Awards. However, he is probably best known for his work on Doctor Who. He helped bring the Daleks back to the screen with the BAFTA-winning first series of the revival, in an episode nominated for a Hugo Award.

  Shearman’s first collection of short stories, Tiny Deaths, was published by Comma Press in 2007; it won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection, and was short-listed for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Prize. His second collection, Love Songs for the Shy and Cynical, published by Big Finish, won the British Fantasy Award and the Edge Hill Readers’ Prize. A third collection, Everyone’s Just So So Special, appeared in 2011, again published by Big Finish.

  “I think sometimes we write stories in order to ward the horrors off,” says Shearman. “The darker the stuff I write, the more I believe that some karma will come into place—if I make my characters suffer, maybe I’ll have a series of terribly happy days of giddy sunshine and laughter in contrast. I’m superstitious.

  “So, when my wife one day in bed began talking (quite cheerfully, for she is nothing if not morbid) about what we should do if either of us were to die suddenly—what to do with funerals and coffins and catering and things—I felt the need to counteract this as soon as possible, and to write a tale which starts with a couple doing that exact same thing. Just so whatever happens to poor David and Janet never ever happens to me.

  “If karma is listening, please note—with this story, I’ve already paid. Thank you.”

  ONCE IN A WHILE, for a joke, they’d talk about what they’d do if the other died.

  They’d be lying in bed together, dozing, cuddling, they might even just have made love—and it was so warm in there, and death seemed so very far away.

  Janet would say, “I’m going to get you to scatter my ashes, somewhere really obscure,” and he’d ask her how obscure, and she’d laugh, and say, “I don’t know, the top of M
ount Everest.”

  And David would say, “I’m going to leave you everything in my will, but only on condition you stay the night in a haunted house,” and she’d ask where he might find this haunted house, and he’d tell her he’d Google one on the Internet—don’t you worry, missy, you’re not getting out of it that easily!

  She’d tell him that if he died she’d never marry again—and she’d keep his head in a box, or on display on the mantelpiece, to ward off potential suitors. And he told her that he would marry again, in unseemly haste that would shock the in-laws, someone young and pretty, and bring her to his wife’s own funeral. She kicked him for that. And then they’d doze some more, or cuddle some more—or maybe even make love again, there was plenty of lovemaking to be had back then.

  *

  What actually happened, when he found out his wife was dead, was that he went quite numb. He felt sorry for the policewoman who brought him the bad news; she was so upset; she was so young; she probably hadn’t done this much before.

  But only vaguely sorry, he wasn’t sure how to express himself. And when he thanked her for her time and wished her a nice day, he hoped it had come out right.

  And it was while numb that he accepted condolences, opened greetings cards telling him, “Sorry for your loss,” received flowers. That he phoned Janet’s parents, first to tell them their daughter was dead—the words slipped out more easily than he expected, too easily—and then on each night thereafter to see how they were, how they were holding up, whether they were doing okay, and he heard their numbness too, the way that the voices became ever softer, their words large and round and bland. And he thought, I’m doing this to them, I’m infecting them with numbness.

  It was while numbed that he had to take his sister’s phone calls, because she’d phone him every night too, “to see how you are, how you’re holding up, are you okay”—and she was crying, sometimes she’d be unable to speak through the tears, “Oh, God, I’ve lost a sister, I always wanted a proper sister of my own,” and he felt annoyed at that, that her grief was better than his. Especially when she hadn’t even known Janet that well, she had never once given a Christmas present Janet had wanted, Janet had never liked his sister much.