The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 2002, Volume 13

by Stephen Jones

  Of everything that had been there, of nature or contrivance, the house alone stood – but not intact. Its roof had come away in broad segments: one could see the gaping joists and beams, which were in turn collapsing. Both chimneys were down, crashed inwards. On the lower floors not one window had kept its antique glass or its boxed decorations. The creepers had slipped from the exterior walls and after them the bricks had tried and were still trying to come out. Yet the shell of the building, what there was of it, still jutted upright. And in that spot, this made it a thing of unbelievable terror. Ruined and distorted and every moment increasingly giving way, nevertheless it had so far stayed, where nothing else remained.

  I perceived all this before I had raised my gaze beyond the lower floors. When I did raise it, I selected its targets with much care. But in the end, I knew I would have to do it, would have to look full-on at the upper window under the roof.

  I had been in Rome, I had been in Siena and Venice. Among the hills and waters, among the bronzes, surely I had somehow understood that she still stood here, on and on, stood here looking out, eating with her eyes first the bricks and mortar, then the pins that sealed her up, patient as only a hopeless thing can be, taking a century over it; next eating out the glass, and next what lay beyond the glass – the trees, the air, the Lane, the countryside.

  They must have known, the people of Steepleford town, in 1788, when they passed by on the Lane, hearing her weeping and shrieking in agony and fear, all those endless days and nights. They must have known what he had done to her. What then did they do, but cross themselves, perhaps, or use some older, less acceptable mark. But they knew, they knew.

  She had loved too well, that was her sole crime. She had seen too much in mankind that was beautiful and good, and for sure too much in him, in Josebaar Hawkins, and for this they had condemned her and killed her. How she must then have hated them. How she must have looked, fixing despairingly her mad eyes upon the impenetrable dark. And if she had not survived her death, something that came of her, and of her hatred, and of those eyes – and which learned too, new skills whereby to use those eyes – that did survive, and lived still, and saw and looked – and fed. And it was there, there in that window, drawing up the whole world in its slow and bottomless net.

  ‘Oh, God, Amber Maria, poor lost pitiable hideous residue—’

  My gaze was fixed on her window, her death’s window. My gaze was stuck there and now could not pull away. I felt my heart turn to water inside me and the occluded atmosphere blackened over.

  I did not quite lose my senses. Instead I found myself leaning on my hands, kneeling in the desert of dust among the slaughter of the trees.

  To myself I said, But what did I see this time?

  For I had not seen a single thing. The window – her window – was empty of everything. Of creeper and of bricks, pins and glass. Of light and shadow, and of any shape. As with the rest, nothing was there. And yet . . . the nothing that was in that window was not empty. No. She was there in it, there in the core of it, as things hide in darkness. Or her eyes were there, those pits of seeing, her looking was there, her looking looked out. It had looked even into me, and through me, and away, to have all else.

  Presently I got up. And, as before, I ran.

  The town – I wondered afterwards why the stationmaster had not warned me. I wondered too why the newspapers and journals in London had not carried some mention of it, why no sensational word seemed to have escaped from it. Perhaps there had been some news which was not believed – or believed too well and suppressed. Besides, events had raced to their final act as swiftly as a wave.

  I have read of times of siege and plague in medieval Germany, Italy, France. In certain of those occult little towns, crouched in the profundities of deep valleys, hung like baskets from the sides of cliffs, the dim and winding alleys make such images still all too credible. But Steepleford was a slow, flat, gentle settlement, prosperous and mild, where the horse, casting its shoe, caused a stir, and they had longed for a foreign theatrical gentleman to liven them up.

  Getting near the outskirts, I saw a cloud hanging over the fields and town. It was a wreath of smoke. The dead gardens along the approach I had scarcely noticed, nor the untended houses, which seemed to have been afflicted too by a kind of partial hurricane, ripping the tiles from roofs and setting askew anything that had been in the slightest way vulnerable. There was a dearth of people going about their trades or gossip. Instead, there hung in the atmosphere a presence of incredible raw heat and turgid staleness. I have never smelled such air, even in the sinks of greater Europe.

  I came into Market Gate Street before I properly knew it, and there, as in some canvas by Hieronymus Bosch, I saw what I took at once for plague fires burning in archways and at the corners of houses, reeking of sulphur and other purgatives.

  The fumes by now were nearly as thick as a London fog, and in them, as I moved on, persons came and went anonymously, their heads down and swathed in scarves, none looking at another. They were creatures from the selfsame painting, at large between torments.

  Then came the River Styx, for the street was awash with a black, stinking body of fluid. I had splashed into it before I could prevent myself, but in any case, there was no other way across.

  Up toward my aunt’s part of the town, a pony and trap leapt rattling by, the unhappy animal tossing its head and red-eyed as the horses of Pluto from the smoke. A man hailed me and pulled the horse in. Amazed to be recognized in the Inferno, I stopped. There was my aunt’s doctor, peering down.

  ‘Thank God you’ve arrived, young man. We sent off a wire this very morning.’

  My heart clenched inside me. ‘It must have missed me by an instant. Is she so bad, then?’

  ‘I fear she is, now. It’s the same all over the town. The deuce knows what the illness is. We have three specialists down from London, and one from the Low Countries, and they have drawn a blank on it. My own sister, who has never taken sick in her life – well. But besides all this business of burst pipes and subsiding walls across the entire town— But I won’t trouble you with that, either.’ The pony shook its head violently. The doctor raised his voice to curse. ‘Be damned to these confounded fires! What do the fools think they’re doing? Have they heard nothing of modern hygiene – our only reliable ally against disease – to fill up the air with such muck? Superstition, ignorance— Make haste to get on!’ And with this baleful cry, whether to me or to the pony I was unsure, the doctor whipped the beast on, and like King Death himself flung off into the smother.

  But I ran again, and so reached my aunt’s house. And ten minutes later I was in her bedroom, by the side of her bed. But she, although living yet, did not see or hear me.

  When I was a small boy, and my youthful mother died suddenly and without warning, this aunt of mine, then an elegant and pretty fashion plate of an Alice, herself not much above thirty-five, sheathed in softest clothes and scented by vanilla, took me in her arms and let me sob out my soul. And now again I stood beside her, and again I wept. But she never knew it, now. And oh, any pity I had felt for that other, for that thing once known as Amber Maria Hawkins, you can be sure I had given it up.

  So now I must come to the strangest part of my abnormal tale. To a conclusion, indeed, that any writer of fiction would be ashamed to set before his audience, having brought them thus far, and by such a fearful road. Therefore, prior to the last scenes of the drama, I will say this: One piece evidently missing from my narrative has since been supplied, and only the discovery of that unique absentee has brought me, at this time, and so many years after these events took place, to write them down at all.

  My aunt, where she lay on the bed, did not stir. Only the faintest movement indicated that she still breathed. I looked ardently for this proof, and once or twice it seemed to me that it faltered, and then I too held my breath. But always the slight rise and fall of her breast resumed. At least she was not in pain or distress. That was all, at this time, that I
might be thankful for.

  Near midnight the doctor called again. He was worn out, as I could see, by his conscientious tours up and down the stricken town, through the acrid fumes of the fires, the stenchful spilled waters, and the furnace heat, which even nightfall had not lessened. When he was done with his examination, a frighteningly swift one, I had them bring him some brandy, and he thanked me, then solemnly announced that he ‘did not think it would be long’.

  ‘Is there nothing that can be done?’ I asked like a child.

  The doctor shook his head. He was doubtless exhausted too by this question, which must have been asked of him everywhere that night, by tearful wives and white-faced husbands, by daughters, by fathers, by one-third of the folk of Steepleford. In that hour they had become the people of Egypt when the Angel of Death did not pass over them but took from them, across all the boundaries of age and condition, their first-born.

  After the doctor had gone, I sat down again, and drank some of the wine that had been brought to me on an untouched dinner tray. Then I think I must have slipped into a doze.

  I was woken, as were countless others, by the most fearsome noise I have ever heard.

  Starting up, I gave a cry. As I did so, I heard below and above me in the house, and everywhere around, many other throats exercised in similar startled exclamation. I can only describe the sound as being like an exact representation of that well-known phrase: the Crack of Doom. It was as if a thunderbolt hurled from heaven had struck the town, cracking it open with one awful brazen clang.

  Finding myself unharmed, and the house still entire about me, I turned in fear to the bed. But a glance at my aunt showed her to be still insensible. Going to the window then I stared out, but the street was thick with smoke and darkness, its few lamps half blind. Worse for being inevitably unseen, vague noises of fright and panic had risen all around, and I made out windows lighting up here and there like red eyes. Then a man came running by. I opened the casement and called down to him. ‘What was that sound? Do you know?’

  But he only raised to me a face peeled by terror, and flew on.

  I truly believed some apocalyptic conclusion was about to rush upon us all. The most primal urge came on me, and going to my poor aunt I meant to lift her up in my arms, so that we might at least perish together. But as I reached the bedside, I stopped dead once more. For I saw her eyes were open and looking at me lucidly. And where the lamp shone on her face, her colour had come back, not feverish but soft, even attractive.

  ‘How nice to see you, Frederick,’ said my aunt. ‘I have had the most refreshing sleep and feel so much better now.’ Her voice was not weak, nor did she seem to be lying to console me. She added, nearly winsomely, ‘I hate to trouble cook – I know the hour is late – but perhaps Sally might boil me an egg? An egg with a little toast. And oh, a cup of tea. I’m so thirsty.’

  And then, before my astounded gaze, she was sitting herself up in the bed, and as I sprang to forestall and help her, she laughed. ‘You’re gallant, dear boy.’

  When accordingly I went out into the passage, I found the maid, Sally, standing there and looking at me with great round eyes. Before I could speak of the wonder concerning my aunt, Sally announced, ‘They say the new church bell has fallen right down the spire and landed in the chancel. The roof there is all damaged and come down, too. Did you hear the horrible noise, sir? We thought the End had come.’

  Distractedly I asked, ‘Was anyone hurt?’

  ‘They say not.’ (I learned later that ‘they’ was the carter’s boy, who had bustled in with the news.) ‘But the whole town has been woke up.’

  This was, it turned out, true in more than one way, if the process of waking may be associated with revival. For my aunt was not alone in her abrupt and miraculous feat of recovery. It transpired, as over succeeding days I learned in more detail, that of all the six hundred-odd persons lying sick that night, or even, it was thought, at the point of death, not one but did not rouse up an instant or so after the appalling clangour of the bell. And not one thereafter but did not take quickly a swift and easy path to full recovery. (Even, or so I was assured, a cat that had been failing grew suddenly well, and a canary that had sunk to the floor of its cage flew up on its perch and began to sing.)

  Shamelessly, it was spoken of as a miracle, this reversal of extreme illness to good health. And there were those who spoke religiously of the falling bell, some claiming that it had cast itself down in some curious form of sacrifice, which it achieved, having cracked and buckled itself beyond use. Others averred that it had been itself unlucky or impure in some sensational but mysterious way, and therefore fell like an evil angel, at God’s will, after which the town was freed from its curse.

  These notions, of course, were ludicrous, but everywhere for a while one heard them, and small suprise. For the saving of so many of the town’s lives, both young and old, affluent and poor, and in so abrupt and unheralded a form, did indeed smack of divine intervention. While I did not for a moment credit this, yet I thanked God with everyone else there. And as the days went on, and Steepleford hoisted itself slowly but surely from its own ashes, the streets cleared of water and debris, the baleful fires vanished, and the summer sun took pity and shone with greater brightness and less heat. The smell of furnaces and dungeons melted away.

  Ten days later, accompanying my aunt on her first walk up and down the thoroughfares, I saw fresh roses blooming in twenty gardens. Now and then, where a tree had come down or been axed, new growth could be seen rioting, shining green, from the stumps.

  They had found by then that the bell rope had been eaten away. By rats, some said, as Steepleford moved, a rescued ship, back upon its even keel.

  ‘Such a nuisance,’ added my aunt, flighty as a girl. ‘Now the rector will want another one.’

  I said that this would mean more fund-raising bacchanals, and Aunt Alice remarked that the strange Mr Polleto at least would spare them all his disappointing presence. ‘Lady Constance, when she called, told me that he had left the town only last Monday. Generally such a thing would never have caught her attention, but it seems the cottage is now for sale, and she wishes to buy it for a young painter she has found.’

  But I had then no interest at all in Mr Polleto.

  My aunt, meanwhile, had more than become herself again. She seemed to me younger and more active than she had been for years. The doctor too assured me that he now thought her ‘good for three decades’. And when she said to me one evening, ‘Do you know, dear boy, I think being ill has done me good,’ I could only agree. And so, it must be confessed, once more at liberty to do so, I began to hanker after my own life.

  Of course, I was bemused too. I wanted time to myself to think over events. One instant I felt I had been the involuntary party to a delusion. At another, the unreal seemed actual. But we seldom trust ourselves upon such matters, I mean upon matters that may involve the supernatural. There is always some other explanation that surely must be the proper one.

  I am not unduly superstitious, and now, in the glow of returning normality, I began to prefer to think of myself as having been in the grasp of a wild obsession. In this state I had imagined some things and brooded upon others, until I could make them fit my vivid scenario.

  When finally I commenced my preparations to leave Steepleford, I was told, in passing, by a neighbour that no carriage could now be driven along Salter’s Lane.

  ‘Are the fallen trees still uncleared?’

  ‘No, no. It’s the new growth shooting out there. It’s become one great coppice, with trees bursting, they say, from the stumps. Those that have seen it say they’ve never known a sight like it. But there’s a deal going on with trees and other plants, after that drought we had.’ Here he gave me a long list of things, which I will not reproduce. Then, as I was tiring, he said this: ‘Perhaps you may have noticed the old beech at the station? A fine old tree, but it was twisting and due for the axe. But now it’s been spared, and they say the roots have dug
down again, if such a thing is to be believed, and the trunk is straight again too. And the leaves are coming out on it as if it were May, not August. A strange business and no mistake. Did you ever get a peep at that house in the Lane? The Witch House, some call it.’

  Sombrely I replied that I had.

  ‘Well, that’s all come down, like a house of cards. Not a wall of it standing, nor one stone on another. A great heap of rubble.’

  I had a dream, not while I remained in the town but a month later, when Nash had persuaded me back to France, in the south, in a little village among the chestnut woods. I dreamed I was on the roof of Steepleford church, and pale, glassy arrows flew by through the air. They were the looks of a woman who stood at a window in Salter’s Lane. These arrows severed the rope of the bell in the church spire. And when it fell there was no sound, only a great nothingness. But in the nothingness, I knew that woman was no more.

  ‘What’s up?’ said Nash, finding me out in the village street, smoking, at four in the morning, the dawn just lifting its silver lids beyond the trees.

  ‘Do you suppose,’ I said, ‘that something thought fully virtuous, if attacked, might rebound on the attacker, might destroy them?’

  ‘History and experience relate otherwise,’ said Nash.

  And so they do.

  IV

  That, then, was my story of Steepleford, all I had of it at the time, but which I gave to my companion, Jeffers, on the terrace of the Hotel Alpius as we waited for the Wassenhaur train.

  I was nevertheless moved to express to him my regret for the unsatisfactory lack of explanation concerning the final outcome of events.

  ‘I haven’t been back to the place for years now,’ I finished, ‘and so can add nothing. My aunt, you see, grew sprightly – she still is – and moved to London, where she has a fine town house.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said my companion. He drew upon his cigar, and looked covertly again at the instigator of my tale, that same quaint little shopkeeper Polleto, who still sat at his adjacent table.