A Book of Horrors

by Stephen King

‘Checkmate,’ he said out loud, and the sound of his own voice in that lonely place frightened him a little. A cold breeze blew in from the open casement.

  In the Michaelmas of 1811, George St Maur, now heir apparent to the Baronetcy of St Maur, was entered for Eton at Hexter’s House. He was given his own room and seemed to the other boys a self-possessed creature, despite his comparative youth. It was not long, however, before his mettle was tried by a boy called Damer. Damer was by no means the most senior boy in the house, but was known as ‘the Cock of Hexter’s’ by virtue of his good looks, sporting prowess and general daring. One afternoon he wandered into George’s room.

  That morning George had received a packing case from Tankerton Abbey containing some books he had requested from its library. He was in the process of taking the volumes from the case and placing them neatly on his shelves. On the table by the window was a chessboard. There were five white pieces on the board and three black: white could checkmate in two moves. It was a child’s problem.

  ‘Hullo, St Maur,’ said Damer. ‘I’ve decided that you’re to be my slave this half.’

  ‘Oh, have you indeed, Damer?’ said George, continuing to arrange his books.

  Damer came up and stood over the younger boy. ‘Well, you’re a cool customer, I’ll say that, young ’un, but you won’t be so damned cool when I’ve finished with you.’

  He made a grab for George’s left arm and twisted it round behind his back in a half-nelson. George dropped the books he had been carrying, stepped back and stamped hard with his heel on Damer’s foot. Damer was so startled that he let go of George’s arm, crying out with pain as he did so.

  ‘By God, you’ll pay for this, you young jackanapes!’

  ‘No doubt,’ said George, calmly picking up his books from the floor as Damer sat down heavily in a chair to nurse his bruised foot. ‘I’ll tell you what, Damer. You see that chessboard there by the window. There’s a problem on it, a simple one. White mates in two moves. Solve it and I will be your slave – at least until the end of the half.’

  Damer stared at him for a while in silent astonishment, then he burst out: ‘You dare to play games with me, boy? Do you think I can’t torment you to within an inch of your life, you little devil?’

  ‘You may of course hurt me, Damer, though not without hurting yourself in the course of so doing. I have learned to disregard pain to a very large extent. I suggest that you address yourself to the chess problem – it really is quite elementary – rather than indulge in any further bluster. I gave you fair terms.’

  Damer stared at George for a full fifteen seconds. Once again he had been baffled by the younger boy’s unexpected behaviour. Finally he said, ‘You’re mad, St Maur. You’re crackbrained. They ought to have sent you to Bedlam, not Eton.’ Then he left the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Almost before he had gone, George St Maur had turned his attention once again to his packing case and had begun to take out the set of Diderot which he had particularly requested from the Tankerton library. With deliberation, he began to place the gilded calf volumes in the glass-fronted bookcase above his bureau.

  REGGIE OLIVER has been a professional playwright, actor and theatre director since 1975. His biography of Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed, was published by Bloomsbury in 1998.

  Besides plays, his publications include four volumes of horror stories, with a fifth collection, Dances in the Dark, due from Tartarus Press. An omnibus edition of his stories entitled Dramas from the Depths is published by Centipede, as part of its ‘Masters of the Weird Tale’ series.

  The author’s novel, The Dracula Papers I – The Scholar’s Tale, the first of a projected four, was published in January 2011 – the same time as his farce, Once Bitten, was a Christmas season sellout hit at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond.

  ‘The painter Richard Dadd has long fascinated me,’ Oliver explains, ‘and images from his work have been an inspiration for several stories of mine.

  ‘One picture of his in particular, “The Child’s Problem”, with its strange atmosphere of enigmatic menace, haunted me. It took me many years before I worked out the story behind it – a tale of guilt, power games, childhood and the loss of innocence.’

  Sad, Dark Thing

  —MICHAEL MARSHALL SMITH—

  AIMLESS. A SHORT, simple word. It means ‘without aim’, where ‘aim’ derives from the idea of calculation with a view to action. Without purpose or direction, therefore, lacking a considered goal or future that you can see. People mainly use the word in a blunt, softened fashion. They walk ‘aimlessly’ down a street, not sure whether to have a coffee or if they should check out the new magazines in the bookstore or maybe sit on that bench and watch the world go by. It’s not a big deal, this aimlessness. It’s a temporary state and often comes with a side order of ease. An hour without something hanging over you, with no great need to do or achieve anything in particular? In this world of busy lives and do-this and do-that, it sounds pretty good.

  But being wholly without purpose? With no direction home? That is not such a good deal. Being truly aimless is like being dead. It may even be the same thing, or worse. It is the aimless who find the wrong roads, and drive down them, simply because they have nowhere else to go.

  Miller usually found himself driving on Saturday afternoons. He could make the morning go away by staying in bed an extra half-hour, tidying away stray emails, spending time on the deck, looking out over the forest with a magazine or the iPad and a succession of coffees. He made the coffees in a machine that sat on the kitchen counter and cost nearly eight hundred dollars. It made a very good cup of coffee. It should. It had cost nearly eight hundred dollars.

  By noon a combination of caffeine and other factors would mean that he wasn’t very hungry. He would go back indoors nonetheless, and put together a plate from the fridge. The ingredients would be things he’d gathered from delis up in San Francisco during the week, or else from the New Leaf markets in Santa Cruz or Felton as he returned home on Friday afternoon. The idea was that this would constitute a treat, and remind him of the good things in life. That was the idea. He would also pour some juice into one of the only two glasses in the cabinet that got any use. The other was his scotch glass, the one with the faded white logo on it, but that only came out in the evenings. He was very firm about that.

  He would bring the plate and glass back out and eat at the table which stood further along the deck from the chair in which he’d spent most of the morning. By then the sun would have moved around, and the table got shade, which he preferred when he was eating. The change in position was also supposed to make it feel like he was doing something different to what he’d done all morning, though it did not, especially. He was still a man sitting in silence on a raised deck, within view of many trees, eating expensive foods that tasted like cardboard.

  Afterward he took the plate indoors and washed it in the sink. He had a dishwasher, naturally. Dishwashers are there to save time. He washed the plate and silverware by hand, watching the water swirl away and then drying everything and putting it to one side. He was down a wife and a child, now living three hundred miles away. He was short on women and children, therefore, but in their place, from the hollows they had left behind, he had time. Time crawled in an endless parade of minutes from between those cracks, arriving like an army of little black ants, crawling up over his skin, up his face, and into his mouth, ears and eyes.

  So why not wash the plate. And the knife, and the fork, and the glass. Hold back the ants, for a few minutes, at least.

  He never left the house with a goal. On those afternoons he was, truly, aimless. From where the house stood, high in the Santa Cruz Mountains, he could have reached a number of diverting places within an hour or two. San Jose. Saratoga. Los Gatos. Santa Cruz itself, then south to Monterey, Carmel and Big Sur. Even way down to Los Angeles, if he felt like making a weekend of it.

  And then what?

  Instead he simply drove.

&
nbsp; There are only so many major routes you can take through the area’s mountains and redwood forests. Highways 17 and 9, or the road out over to Bonny Doon, Route 1 north or south. Of these, only 17 is of any real size. In between the main thoroughfares, however, there are other options. Roads that don’t do much except connect one minor two-lane highway to another. Roads that used to count for something before modern alternatives came along to supplant or supersede or negate them.

  Side roads, old roads, forgotten roads.

  Usually there wasn’t much to see down these. Stretches of forest, maybe a stream, eventually a house, well back from the road. Rural, mountainous backwoods where the tree and poison oak reigned supreme. Chains across tracks which led down or up into the woods, some gentle inclines, others pretty steep, meandering off towards some house which stood even further from the through-lines, back in a twenty-or fifty-acre lot. Every now and then you’d pass one of the area’s very few tourist traps, like the ‘Mystery Spot’, an old-fashioned affair which claimed to honour a site of ‘Unfathomable Weirdness’ but in fact paid cheerful homage to geometry, and to man’s willingness to be deceived.

  He’d seen all of these long ago. The local attractions with his wife and child, the shadowed roads and tracks on his own solitary excursions over the last few months. At least, you might have thought he would have seen them all. Every Saturday he drove, however, and every time he found a road he had never seen before.

  Today the road was off Branciforte Drive, the long, old highway which heads off through largely uncolonised regions of the mountains and forests to the southeast of Scott’s Valley. As he drove north along it, mind elsewhere and nowhere, he noticed a turning. A glance in the rear-view mirror showed no one behind and so he slowed to peer along the turn.

  A two-lane road, overhung with tall trees, including some redwoods. It gave no indication of leading anywhere at all.

  Fine by him.

  He made the turn and drove on. The trees were tall and thick, cutting off much of the light from above. The road passed smoothly up and down, riding the natural contours, curving abruptly once in a while to avoid the trunk of an especially big tree or to skirt a small canyon carved out over millennia by some small and bloody-minded stream. There were no houses or other signs of habitation. Could be public land, he was beginning to think, though he didn’t recall there being any around here and hadn’t seen any indication of a park boundary, and then he saw a sign by the road up ahead.

  STOP

  That’s all it said. Despite himself, he found he was doing just that, pulling over towards it. When the car was stationary, he looked at the sign curiously. It had been hand-lettered, some time ago, in black marker on a panel cut from a cardboard box and nailed to a tree.

  He looked back the way he’d come, and then up the road once more. He saw no traffic in either direction, and also no indication of why the sign would be here. Sure, the road curved again about forty yards ahead, but no more markedly than it had ten or fifteen times since he’d left Branciforte Drive. There had been no warning signs on those bends. If you simply wanted people to observe the speed limit then you’d be more likely to advise them to ‘Slow’, and anyway, it didn’t look at all like an official sign.

  Then he realised that, further on, there was in fact a turning off the road.

  He took his foot off the brake and let the car roll forward down the slope, crunching over twigs and gravel. A driveway, it looked like, though a long one, bending off into the trees. Single lane, roughly made up. Maybe five yards down it was another sign, evidently the work of the same craftsman as the previous.

  TOURISTS WELCOME

  He grunted, in something like a laugh. If you had yourself some kind of attraction, of course tourists were welcome. What would be the point otherwise? It was a strange way of putting it.

  An odd way of advertising it, too. No indication of what was in store or why a busy family should turn off what was already a pretty minor road and head off into the woods. No lure except those two words.

  They were working on him, though, he had to admit. He eased his foot gently back on the gas and carefully directed the car along the track, between the trees.

  After about a quarter of a mile he saw a building ahead – a couple of them, in fact, arranged in a loose compound, one a ramshackle two-storey farmhouse, the other a disused barn. There was also something that was or had been a garage, with a broken-down truck/tractor parked diagonally in front of it. It was parked insofar as it was not moving, at least, not in the sense that whoever had last driven the thing had made any effort, when abandoning it, to align its form with anything. The surfaces of the vehicle were dusty and rusted and liberally covered in old leaves and specks of bark. A wooden crate, about four feet square, stood rotting in the back. The near-front tyre was flat.

  The track ended in a widened parking area, big enough for four or five cars. It was empty. There was no sign of life at all, in fact, but something – he wasn’t sure what – said this habitation was a going concern, rather than a collection of ruins that someone had walked away from at some point in the last few years.

  Nailed to a tree in front of the main house was another cardboard sign.

  WELCOME

  He parked, turned off the engine, and got out. It was very quiet. It usually is in those mountains, when you’re away from the road. Sometimes you’ll hear the faint roar of an airplane, way up above, but apart from that it’s just the occasional tweet of some winged creature or an indistinct rustle as something small and furry or scaly makes its way through the bushes.

  He stood for a few minutes, flapping his hand to discourage a noisy fly which appeared from nowhere, bothered his face and then zipped chaotically off.

  Eventually he called out, ‘Hello?’

  You’d think that – on what was evidently a very slow day for this attraction, whatever it was – the sound of an arriving vehicle would have someone bustling into sight, eager to make a few bucks, to pitch their wares. He stood a few minutes more, however, without seeing or hearing any sign of life. It figured. Aimless people find aimless things, and it didn’t seem like much was going to happen here. You find what you’re looking for, and he hadn’t been looking for anything at all.

  He turned back towards the car, aware that he wasn’t even feeling disappointment. He hadn’t expected much, and that’s exactly what he’d got.

  As he held up his hand to press the button to unlock the doors, however, he heard a creaking sound.

  He turned back to see there was now a man on the tilting porch that ran along half of the front of the wooden house. He was dressed in canvas jeans and a vest that had probably once been white. The man had probably once been clean, too, though he looked now like he’d spent most of the morning trying to fix the underside of a car. Perhaps he had.

  ‘What you want?’ His voice was flat and unwelcoming. He looked to be in his mid-late fifties. Hair once black was now half grey, and also none too clean. He did not look like he’d been either expecting or desirous of company.

  ‘What have you got?’

  The man on the porch leant on the rail and kept looking at him, but said nothing.

  ‘It says “Tourists Welcome”,’ Miller said, when it became clear the local had nothing to offer. ‘I’m not feeling especially welcome, to be honest.’

  The man on the porch looked weary. ‘Christ. The boy was supposed to take down those damned signs. They still up?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Even the one out on the road, says “Stop”?’

  ‘Yes,’ Miller said. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have stopped.’

  The other man swore and shook his head. ‘Told the boy weeks ago. Told him I don’t know how many times.’

  Miller frowned. ‘You don’t notice, when you drive in and out? That the signs are still there?’

  ‘Haven’t been to town in a while.’

  ‘Well, look. I turned down your road because it looked like there was something to see.
’

  ‘Nope. Doesn’t say anything like that.’

  ‘It’s implied, though, wouldn’t you say?’

  The man lifted his chin a little. ‘You a lawyer?’

  ‘No. I’m a businessman. With time on my hands. Is there something to see here, or not?’

  After a moment the man on the porch straightened and came walking down the steps.

  ‘One dollar,’ he said. ‘As you’re here.’

  ‘For what? The parking?’

  The man stared at him as if he was crazy. ‘No. To see.’

  ‘One dollar?’ It seemed inconceivable that in this day and age there would be anything under the sun for a dollar, especially if it was trying to present as something worth experiencing. ‘Really?’

  ‘That’s cheap,’ the man said, misunderstanding.

  ‘It is what it is,’ Miller said, getting his wallet out and pulling a dollar bill from it.

  The other man laughed, a short, sour sound. ‘You got that right.’

  After he’d taken the dollar and stuffed it into one of the pockets of his jeans, the man walked away. Miller took this to mean that he should follow, and so he did. It looked for a moment as if they were headed towards the house, but then the path – such as it was – took an abrupt right onto a course that led them between the house and the tilting barn. The house was large and gabled and must once have been quite something. Lord knows what it was doing out here, lost by itself in a patch of forest that had never been near a major road or town or anyplace else that people with money might wish to be. Its glory days were long behind it anyway. Looking up at it, you’d give it about another five years standing, unless someone got onto rebuilding or at least shoring it right away.

  The man led the way through slender trunks into an area around the back of the barn. Though the land in front of the house and around the side had barely been what you’d think of as tamed, here the forest abruptly came into its own. Trees of significant size shot up all around, looking – as redwoods do – like they’d been there since the dawn of time. A sharp, rocky incline led down towards a stream about thirty yards away. The stream was perhaps eight feet across, with steep sides. A rickety bridge of old, grey wood lay across it. The man led him to the near side of this, and then stopped.