The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  Luis knelt at the base of the stone, his hands tangled in his thick hair. He giggled and whispered in delirium at the dark rocks.

  “Are you okay?” Andrew asked, his voice drowning in the wind.

  Luis looked up and his frozen red cheeks cracked as he spit out more laughter.

  “I knew it! Even when I didn’t know I knew it was here!”

  He turned back to the rock and eyed it up and down, then mumbled something more to it. He ran his hands along its deep grooves as though he could read every word of the chiselled writing. The left side of Luis’ face was stained with dark red blood from his wound.

  “We have to go,” Andrew said.

  Luis only laughed, and the wind howled in unison. Andrew had to yell to be heard.

  “Have you seen Akiak?”

  Luis stopped laughing, and looked straight into Andrew’s eyes.

  “He’s here! He’s come back for us.”

  “Where?” Andrew said, and spun around, but the swirling snow beyond Okralruserk blurred everything, and Andrew couldn’t tell which shadows within the storm were real. He stumbled, as though something had moved beneath his feet.

  “He’s here,” Luis said, and he was crying. “He’s here to save us all.” Andrew realized then that Luis’ mind had gone, lost in the miles of white empty snow.

  And worse, Andrew felt another sudden and cold understanding deep within him.

  He had been abandoned.

  “He’s here,” Luis screamed with a manic joy into the wind, and he wept as he clutched at the tall black stone.

  The ground beneath Andrew then shifted, revealing something in the snow beyond the circle of Okralruserk.

  Snow drained into the newly-formed crevasse, filling a hole thousands of feet deep. Andrew approached it, his mind struggling to understand what he saw within the snow that remained, but the shape seemed beyond comprehension.

  Then, just as he was upon it, it reformed itself in his mind, and he gasped.

  It was a glove, and beneath it, trapped in the fissure, was Akiak.

  Andrew stood back, thoughts in his head crashing into one another. Then the ground began to shake, and all around him the dull cracking sound grew sharper, louder.

  “You see?” said Luis as he stared into the half-lit sky. “He’s back for us now. God is back for us now.”

  Andrew fell over, but his eyes would not leave the sight of the dead man’s hand as it slid further down into the ice.

  “Look!” Luis said, and pointed at the giant black rocks that circled them both. “They just moved again!”

  And Andrew did look. He looked at those five dark fingers sticking up from the snow, and then at the five black rocks that rose from the frozen ground, and, for a moment, they looked the same. Like a hand trying to break free of its frozen prison.

  But, as he watched the monoliths in the harsh arctic light, his eyes open wide, he did not see what Luis saw. He saw the land around them quake and open wide to swallow great pieces of ice and rock. He saw the arctic wind throw frozen chunks of snow into the air, and saw them swirl in a frenzy. But, as hard as he tried, Andrew did not see the five towering black stones move. They were as cold and as lifeless as the icy tundra that surrounded them.

  “See?” Luis said. “I told you we weren’t alone.”

  And Andrew cried, his unblinking eyes burning from the cold.

  M.R. JAMES and REGGIE OLIVER

  The Game of Bear

  THOUGH ROUGHLY A CENTURY divides them, both Montague Rhodes James and Reggie Oliver were educated at Eton and were Newcastle Scholars at that institution. Thereafter, their careers diverged slightly. James went on to Cambridge and an academic career; Oliver went to Oxford and then into the theatre.

  Both have published four acclaimed collections of “ghost stories”. James’ classic tales can be found in Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, More Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, A Thin Ghost and Others and A Warning to the Curious. For Oliver, recent publications include his novel Virtue in Danger, and a vast collected edition of his stories entitled Dramas from the Depths, published by Centipede Press, as part of its Masters of the Weird Tale series.

  About the posthumously published collaboration that follows, Oliver explains: “James left ‘The Game of Bear’ in manuscript unfinished at his death in 1936, stopping at the words: ‘No, she mayn’t.’ In completing this story, I have tried as far as possible to enter into James’ mind and style and provide the ending James himself might have produced had not death intervened.

  “Permission to do this was kindly granted by James’ great nephew, Mr Nicholas Rhodes James, whom I had the pleasure of meeting while attending one of Robert Lloyd-Parry’s famous theatrical renditions of James’ work.”

  TWO ELDERLY PERSONS sat reading and smoking in the library of a country house after tea on an afternoon in the Christmas holidays, and outside a number of the children of the house were playing about. They had turned out all the lights and were engaged in the dreadful game of “Bear” which entails stealthy creepings up and down staircases and along passages, and being leapt upon from doorways with loud and hideous cries. Such a cry and an answering scream of great poignancy were heard just outside the library door. One of the two readers – an uncle of the young things who were disporting themselves there - leapt from his chair and dashed the door open. “I will not have you doing that!” he shouted (and his voice was vibrant with real anger); “Do you hear? Stop it at once. I can’t stand it. You – you – why can’t you find something else? What? . . . Well, I don’t care, I can’t put up with it . . .Yes, very well, go and do it somewhere where I can’t hear it.” He subsided into a growl and came back to his chair but his friend saw that his nerves were really on edge, and ventured something sympathetic. “It’s all very well,” said the uncle, “but I cannot bear that jumping out and screaming. Stupid of me to fly out like that, but I couldn’t help it. It reminded me of all that business – you know.”

  “Well,” said the friend after a short pause, “I’m really not sure that I do. Oh!” he added, in a more concerned tone, “unless you mean Purdue.”

  “That’s it,” said the uncle.

  There was another silence, and then the friend said, “Really, I’m not sorry that happened just now, for I never did hear the rights of the Purdue business. Will you tell me exactly what happened?”

  “I don’t know,” said the uncle. “I really don’t know if I ought. But I think I will. Not just now, though. I’ll tell you what: if it’s fine tomorrow we’ll take a walk in the morning and tonight I’ll think over the whole affair and get it straight in my mind. I have often felt somebody besides me ought to know about it, and all his people are out of the way now.”

  The next day was fine, and the two men walked out to a hill at no real distance, which was known as Windmill Hill. The mill that had topped it was gone but a bit of the brick foundation remained and afforded a seat from which a good stretch of pleasant wild country could be seen. Here then Mr A and Mr B sat down on the short, dry grass with their backs against the warm brick wall, and Mr A produced a little bundle of folded paper and a pocket-book which he held up before Mr B as an indication that he was prepared not only to tell the story to which he stood pledged, but to back it with documentary evidence.

  “I brought you here,” he said, “partly because you can see Purdue’s place. There!” He pointed with his stick to a wooded slope, which might be three or four miles off. In the wood was a large clearing and in the clearing stood a mansion of yellow stone with a portico, upon which, as it chanced, the sun was shining very brilliantly, so that the house stood out brightly against the background of dark trees.

  “Where shall I begin?” said Mr A.

  “Why,” said Mr B, “I’ll tell you exactly how little I know, and then you can judge. You and Purdue, you remember, were senior to me at school and at Cambridge. He went down after his three years; you stayed up for part of a fourth, and then I began to see more of you. Before that, I w
as more with people of my own year, and, beyond a fair number of meetings with Purdue at breakfast and lunch and so on, I never saw much of him – not nearly as much as I should have liked, in fact. Then I remember your going to stay with him – there, I suppose” (pointing with his stick) – “in the Easter Vac, and – well, that was the last of it.”

  “Just so,” said Mr A. “I didn’t come up again, and you and I practically didn’t meet till a year or two back, did we? Though you were a better correspondent than any of my other Cambridge friends. Very well, then, there it is. I was never inclined to write the story down in a letter, and the long and short of it is that you have never heard it: but you do know what sort of man Purdue was, and how fond I was of him.

  “When I stayed with him over there, the place was his only home, and yet it wasn’t his. He was an orphan and practically adopted by his uncle and aunt who were quite old childless people. There had been another uncle who had married a village woman, and had one daughter. That couple were very odd squalid creatures, and died, I think from drink, but the daughter survived and went on living in a cottage in the next parish. She wasn’t left destitute by any means in the way of money but she lived all by herself, and I think always with a sense of injury upon her that she wasn’t noticed by the county families and such. The remaining uncle and aunt had been kind enough to her and at one time used to invite her over to their place, but she had a very difficult temper and was always on the look-out for slights and injuries, and at last they gave up the effort to be cordial, and saw no more of her. It wasn’t to be expected after that that they would pass on the property to her (it was entirely at their disposition, to do what they liked with it) and no more they did. When they died it went to Purdue, about a year before his own death, that was. “So there he was, settled, you would say, into a happy life. He’d been brought up in the country and knew all the neighbourhood, places and people, very well; and was interested in farming and forestry and prepared to make himself useful. That last visit I paid him was particularly delightful. He was on such excellent terms with everybody in the village, ‘Master Henry’ to all of them, and just as well liked by the neighbours in the larger houses. I think the only fly in the ointment was that woman Caroline Purdue. She took to attending our parish church and we used to find her in our pew every Sunday morning. She didn’t say much to Henry, but all the service time she sat and looked at him through her veil. A short stout red-faced woman she was, with black hair and snappy black eyes. She used to wait in the churchyard till we had gone out and then set off on her threemile walk home. She gave me the creeps, I couldn’t say why; I suppose there was a flavour of concentrated hostility about her. “Henry was anxious of something of the same kind. His lawyer told me after his death that he had tried through them to get her to accept a handsome addition to her income and the gift of a suitable house wherever she liked in some other part of the county. They said she was as impracticable a woman as they had ever come across: she just sat and smiled broadly at them and said she was quite comfortable where she was, and didn’t want to move out of reach of her cousin Henry. ‘But wouldn’t it be more lively and amusing for you to be in some place where there’s more to be seen – theatres, and that sort of thing?’ No, oh no, she had plenty of things to occupy herself with, and – again – she didn’t want to move out of reach of her cousin Henry.

  “‘But, but – your cousin Henry, you know; he’s likely to be a busy man – travelling about a good deal, and occupied with his men friends; it isn’t probable that he’ll be able to see much of you.’ Oh, she was quite content to take her chance of that: they would often be meeting when he was riding about, and no doubt there would be times when he was alone at the Court, and she could look in on him. ‘Ah well, that’s just the point. Are you sure that Mr Purdue will welcome that?’ ‘Yes, to be sure, why not?’ ‘Well, we have reason to think that he doesn’t wish it.’ Oh indeed! and pray had he commissioned these gentlemen to tell his own cousin that he had cast her off? A nice thing for a relative to hear, that her own flesh and blood preferred not to have anything to do with her. What had she done, she should like to know, to be treated in that way?

  “There was more to the same effect, and the storm rose quickly, culminating in a short burst of tears, and a rapid stumping out of the room. The gentlemen who had been conducting the interview were left looking at each other and feeling they had not done much to advance their client’s wishes. But at least Miss Purdue left off her attendance at our church and, we gathered, did not favour any other place of worship in its stead.

  “She was not more popular with the rest of the community than with Henry.

  “How is the rest of this to be told? I have here some papers which bear on it, but they are fragmentary, of course. When Henry Purdue was alone in that big house he did what at other times was rather foreign to his habits – confided his feelings to paper. Here are some entries.

  “ ‘Letter from CP’ (Caroline Purdue, of course). ‘Infernal woman. May she come and see me and talk over this painful matter. No, she mayn’t.’

  “That one is dated fifth December 1883, a year to the day before his death, as it happens. You can see he wrote on loose sheets of paper, sometimes putting in the date in full, sometimes merely the day of the week. I had the devil of a job arranging them in some sort of order, but I felt, as his sole executor, under an obligation to do so. There is a pocket diary for the year of his death that contains a few terse jottings. That helped me to establish a chronology of events. Here is the next relevant entry.’

  ‘18th December. Letter from Hardacre (Lawyers) today saying CP quite impossible, and actually suggesting I talk to her! Am I not paying them handsomely to do this for me? I have no intention of conversing with the woman on any subject and intend to keep her at arm’s length. A figure of speech, of course, for I wish her to be at considerably more than an arm’s length from me. I have instructed my gamekeeper that if she is seen on my land she is to be turned off. (Politely of course.)

  ‘Wednesday. Yesterday evening I was in the library. Until recently I have not been at leisure to study my uncle’s collection of books, which turns out to contain some unexpected treasures. I have spent several delicious evenings of late slowly examining them, but that is by the by.

  ‘It was four o’clock; evening was already drawing in, and the light was clear, cloudless and wintry. The windows of my library face West. From them one sees a lawn, then the wooded slopes which surround – I might almost say hem in – my property. There is a gap in the trees on the library side through which I can see the sun descend below the brow of the hill. On this evening I noticed that upon this slope a solitary figure was standing in silhouette against the pallid evening sky.

  ‘Instinct told me at once who it was before reason confirmed that the squat, black-bombazined and bonneted figure must be my cousin CP. She was, of course, too far off for me to be certain of it, but I was nonetheless convinced that she was watching me. After trying in vain for some minutes to ignore her presence I rang for Marston.

  ‘I indicated the figure on the skyline and told him to go and send her about her business. Marston seemed reluctant to comply with my instructions and I am afraid I spoke to him rather sharply. He obeyed, but by the time he was walking across the lawn towards her, CP had turned tail and disappeared over the brow of the hill.’

  “The very first note in Henry’s pocket diary for 1884 are the words ‘CP again’ against the date of the 3rd January. By this time, evidently, his cousin’s visitations had become a regular irritant. Then comes this paper which is headed ‘20th January’.

  ‘My guests had left not half an hour since, when there comes a banging on my front door. I peep out of the little window that looks onto the porch and there is CP, looking more than ever like Mrs Gamp, complete with umbrella with which she is hammering on my door. I instruct Marston to go to see what she wants but on no account to let her in.

  ‘Marston returns to tell me – as I had ex
pected – that my cousin wishes to see me. I instruct him to inform her that I am indisposed and cannot. He conveys the message but she continues to hammer. It comes on to rain heavily, so I send out Marston to drive her home in the dogcart, but she will have none of it. She puts up her gamp and stumps off home by herself through the wet. Impossible woman!

  ‘Friday. I hear from the Rector’s wife that CP has caught a chill from her adventure in the rain. Feeling some small responsibility for her condition I sent Mrs Burns [his housekeeper] round to CP’s cottage with a bowl of broth and some calves’ foot jelly. Needless to say the offering is indignantly refused. I now wash my hands of her completely.

  ‘25th January. The chill, no doubt exacerbated by CP’s stubborn refusal of any assistance from myself and others, has finally done for her. A pulmonary infection had set in and the Rector found her dead in her bed when he paid a call on her this morning. Naturally I will see to all the proper funerary arrangements. God forgive me if I feel more than a little relieved that this dreadful incubus has now departed for good.’

  ‘In Purdue’s diary against the date 4th February are the words ‘CP Funeral, St Jude’s’. These words have been underlined three times in black ink. We now return again to the papers.

  ‘3rd March. Most unexpectedly and very much to my annoyance Hardacre informs me that my wretched cousin, CP has left me something in her will. It is only a parcel of books, but still, it is a nuisance. Perhaps she had heard tell of my bookish tastes, for I made no secret of them. Doubtless they are all so much valueless trash and barely worth sending to the church jumble sale.

  ‘Friday. The parcel of books that CP left me has arrived and, as I expected, there is little of value or interest. There are some religious tracts, a large old family Bible, which I suppose I must keep, and several volumes of eighteenth-century sermons of the dullest possible kind. Not even a Sherlock, let alone a Sterne, among them!