The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  ‘There is perhaps one item of interest. It is a small volume, quarter octavo, entitled: The Child’s Keepsake. Improving Rhymes Composed Expressly for Young Persons by A Lady. There is no date, but from the style of printing and the crude woodcuts which adorn the text I would guess it to be very late eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century, and I have no doubt that the ‘Lady’ in question was some member of an Evangelical sect, an Enthusiast at any rate, perhaps one of Hannah More’s circle. My bibliophilic tastes do not extend to early literature for children, but I can recognize a rarity when I see one. The condition is excellent too, with the original boards, bound no doubt by a provincial bookseller, but a competent one.

  ‘The text is addressed to the young and consists of tales told in verse of an improving and moral character. At the head of each poem is a rectangular woodcut depicting an incident from the story. Here is a fair example. Its title is, ‘‘Reverence For the Aged Advised’’, and it begins:

  Mock not the old in youth, young friend

  Lest you should meet a bitter end . . .

  ‘It then goes on to tell the biblical story from Kings [II Kings ii, verses 23-24] about the children who derided Elisha for his baldness. He put a curse on his tormentors whereupon two she-bears came out of the wood to destroy them. The cut which accompanies this rhyme depicts the offending children being torn to pieces in a most savage manner. One of the she-bears has a small child’s head clamped between its merciless jaws.

  ‘I was not very favourably struck. That biblical tale has always exemplified for me the savagery – dare I say it, the inhumanity? – of the Old Testament, and it seems to me a cruel legend to tell to a child. Perhaps I am something of a sentimentalist in these matters, not having any children of my own.

  ‘Most of the verses are of the same punitive character, dwelling more on sin and retribution than virtue and reward. One in particular impresses me with its horrid severity. It is entitled: ‘‘The Dreadful Fate of Young Master Henry Who Stole an Apple From An Old Woman’’.’ (My name happens to be Henry!) In it a young boy steals an apple from a poor old woman and runs away home. Once there he secretes himself in a cupboard under the stairs in order to devour the purloined fruit in peace. He hears his mother calling for him but does not dare come out until he has finished eating. When he does, he encounters a woman whom he takes to be his mother, but she has a veil over her face.

  . . . And when he drew aside the veil

  The wicked child let out a wail,

  Transported by a sudden fear

  For it was not his mother dear.

  The face he met was quite unknown,

  A pale and hollow mask of bone

  For Death Itself had found him there

  In cupboard dark beneath the stair.

  ‘I cannot say much for the Lady’s versifying abilities, but I must reluctantly admit that that I found the tale rather hard to put out of my mind. Added to which, the accompanying woodcut is quite dreadful. If I were not so absurdly reverential of all books I would have torn it out on the spot lest some young friend of mine accidentally encountered it. It depicts, crudely of course, but with considerable vividness, a dark corridor with a staircase going up on the right hand side. You can just see the door of the cupboard under the stairs lying open and a slice of blackness within.

  ‘In the corridor stands a strikingly disagreeable female figure. She is thin and wears the high-waisted gown of a woman of Jane Austen’s period. The head is covered by what appears to be a dark muslin veil through which the engraver’s cunning has allowed the more horrible features of her face to be seen. There is a hollow-eyed skull with just a few rags of skin clinging to the cheeks, and a gaping mouth full of horridly sharp teeth. Although common sense dictates that the eye-sockets must be empty the viewer forms the distinct impression that he is being watched by the ghastly figure on the page.

  ‘After that, I must say I leafed through the book rather rapidly, but encountered nothing so terrible. However there is something of interest at the very end of the book.

  ‘On the flyleaf, after the last printed page, another verse has been copied out by hand in a fair but childish copperplate. (Could it have been CP’s handwriting? Possibly, but the orthography looks older, around 1800, perhaps contemporaneous with the book’s publication.) It has no title and is in the same moralizing vein as the printed verses; yet it is different, more enigmatic. I note it down simply as a curiosity because it may represent quite an early reference to a particular children’s game, now popular. It runs as follows.

  Let us play the Game of Bear

  Let us find out who is there.

  Let us find out where you are:

  Be you near, or be you far?

  Are you in a state of Grace,

  Pure of soul, and clean of face?

  Are you in the mire of Sin,

  Sinking deeper, deeper in?

  Do not be in any doubt

  That your sins will find you out.

  Let the wicked child beware

  When he plays the Game of Bear

  ‘Having now sorted through my Uncle’s books I have extracted a good few which, though of some antiquarian value, are of no interest to me. I intend to send them up to London to be sold or exchanged for more congenial volumes. I shall add The Child’s Keepsake to this pile. Or perhaps family pietas will forbid me.

  ‘10th April. Lovely spring day. Rode over to Aylsham to see M. In the evening after dinner I was just crossing the hall to go to the library and was by the main staircase when I heard a voice, so close to me it was almost in my ear. It said:

  Let us play the Game of Bear

  Let us find out who is there.

  ‘The voice was elderly, but whose it was, or even whether it was male or female, I could not tell. It had a breathy sort of tone, sotto voce, as the Italians say. There was no one in the hall. I rang for Marston and he came eventually, but I am sure it was not him. The verse reminded me of that book The Child’s Keepsake which my cousin left me and which I still have somewhere, but I could not find the thing when I searched for it just now in the library.

  ‘The voice must have been some kind of auditory hallucination. I think I should get away from this place and travel for a while. If it were not for the progress I am making with M, I would go at once.’

  “Incidentally,” said Mr A, “M was a Miss Mary Mills, daughter of a local landowner over at Aylsham. I will spare you the various eulogies he composes about her in these papers. Suffice it to say that it was a thoroughly suitable match for a young man of Henry Purdue’s station in life. Well, over the months of April and May there are a number of random jottings concerning the house: he mentions rats, odd whisperings and other inexplicable sounds such as those of heavy footsteps where none should have been, various minor domestic mishaps, that kind of thing. They all seem to weigh on him rather more than perhaps they should have done, and several times he writes ‘I must get away’ with the word ‘must’ underscored. Then under the heading ‘5th June’ comes the following:

  ‘When I went for my walk in the grounds after dinner it was rather close and oppressive. Must create more avenues in the trees that surround me. A curious thing: usually at this time of day the park is full of bird song and a nightingale often starts up in a nearby brake, but this evening there was not a sound to be heard. The air was thick and silent as if stuffed with cotton wool. I went indoors and just as I was about to mount the stairs in the hall I heard that voice again. It said:

  Let the wicked child beware

  When he plays the Game of Bear.

  ‘What the deuce does it mean? I think the words come from that book I can’t find. I must get away.’

  “Well,” said Mr A, “in July he did get away. The diary records his journeyings through France and Italy with nothing more enterprising than the name of a place written against a date. By September he was back in England and in October I met him in London. It was, as it happens, the last time I was to see my friend Henry Purdu
e. By this time Miss Mills had consented to be his bride and he seemed excessively pleased with life. It may be hindsight, but I do think that I detected a touch of feverishness in his high spirits. He was unusually excitable. I remember how he started violently in the smoking room of my club when an old member on a nearby sofa suddenly began to snore. He begged me to come to stay with him in the country which I agreed to do, but somehow, and to my everlasting regret, I never got round to it.

  “What happened next I have from various witnesses, including his old butler Marston who was dreadfully cut up about it all.

  “As winter approached Purdue went in for a round of gaiety and socializing. Doubtless his approaching nuptials – it was to be a spring wedding – added to his circle of friends and the goodwill everyone felt towards him. He opened up his own house to parties and festivities of various kinds, and it was at one of these that the tragedy occurred.

  “It was early in December and Purdue had a house full of guests, several of them being husbands and wives with children. As it was late in the year it got dark several hours before it was time to put the young people to bed and so indoor games were proposed. Among those suggested was the Game of Bear. Marston told me that Purdue had at first objected strenuously to the idea, until he was overborne by the importunings of adults and children alike.

  “The Game of Bear, as you know is like a conventional game of hide-and-seek except that if the hider can spring out and surprise the finder, he then ‘captures’ the finder and can draw the victim into the hiding place with him. Thus the game becomes a kind of battle between the hiders and the finders, but generally it descends into good-humoured chaos long before any clear result is discernible.

  “Well, on this occasion the game was unusually prolonged and boisterous, especially as Purdue’s house, as you may guess, being a rambling structure, was well stocked with places of concealment. When the game was over and the children had been dispatched exhausted to their beds it was suddenly realized that the host was still missing. What could have happened to him? Had he perhaps hidden himself too well and then fallen asleep in his fastness? A search of the house was instituted in which all the adult guests and the servants took part.

  “It was Marston who eventually found him in a cupboard under the stairs. Henry Purdue was huddled into a corner with his knees up to his chin, ‘like a whipped child’ as Marston put it. Of course poor Purdue was dead but the surprise was that he was cold and stiff. Fortunately, there were no children present but two of the ladies fainted when they caught a glimpse of him. The corpse had a dreadful look of fear on its face, and the eyes were open, fixed and staring. Marston also told me – although I rather I wish he hadn’t – that in his death throes my friend had bitten his thumb clean through to the bone.”

  “Did you find that book among poor Purdue’s things?” said Mr B who was by way of being a bibliophile. “The Child’s Keepsake, wasn’t it? I should rather like to see it.”

  “ I shouldn’t, and I’m very glad to say I found no such thing,” said Mr A severely.

  CHRIS BELL

  Shem-el-Nessim: An Inspiration in Perfume

  CHRIS BELL WAS BORN in Holyhead, Wales. He moved to Hamburg, via London, before arriving in New Zealand, where he worked as a magazine editor and writer. His short stories have appeared in The Third Alternative, Grotesque, The Heidelberg Review and Not One of Us, while his story “The Cruel Countess” was anthologized in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: 10th Annual Edition.

  The author’s short stories have been collected in The Bumper Book of Lies, while his first novel, Liquidambar, won the UKAuthors/PADB “Search For a Great Read” competition. In 2005 he was a contributing editor to a commemorative booklet marking Russell Hoban’s eightieth birthday, published by Bloomsbury Books.

  “‘Shem-el-Nessim’ (subtitled ‘An Inspiration in Perfume’) was inspired by a real perfume of that name,” reveals Bell, “or at least by a framed advertisement for it that once hung in my girlfriend’s parents’ house. Now that we live together, it hangs above our bed.

  “The story took a year to write. I began making notes in England in 2005. When I discovered more advertisements and packaging by J. Grossmith & Son, Distillers of Perfumes (the firm fictionalized in the story) on the Internet, Stan Tooprig, the mystery woman and the Cairo Gazette journalist narrator came alive.

  “In a piece of synchronicity in the real world, Grossmith Ltd was recently resurrected and its managing director contacted me to ask how I came to write ‘Shem-el-Nessim’. ‘It was partly because of your description of Stan Tooprig in the story that I thought you had some special insight into the Grossmith family,’ said Simon Brooke, a Grossmith descendant himself.”

  THE MU’EZZIN OF THE Sultan al-Zahir Barquq mosque in the City of the Dead was calling for morning prayers when in one last rattling exhalation the Englishman opposite me expired. As his head fell forward, jangling our coffee cups and startling the clientele, his skin appeared translucent in the dust-dappled light. “Shem-el-Nessim!” were his final words. While the proprietor sent for a doctor from the Coptic Hospital on Ramses Street, I slipped the gold ring from the third finger of Stan Tooprig’s left hand on to my own.

  The Cairo of 1926 was the city of Moslem legend, seat of Saracen art, home of the Arabian Nights. The coffeehouse in the Khan el-Khalili bazaar on Gawhar el-Kaid Street was so far below the domes and minarets that it didn’t even merit a name. Five times a day the Mu’ezzin would summon the faithful, halting the hammerings from the silver smithy next door. But at all other times it was too noisy for us to sit outside with the pipe smokers if we wished to converse, so we were confined to the shadows within.

  Most of the coffee drinkers were fantasists. In their daydreams, they would be smuggling whisky, writing novels and returning home wealthy and triumphant. I had met plenty who had never left Cairo and would not – at least not alive. These star-crossed fools drifted here on inauspicious currents and were marooned by ancient history. Stan Tooprig was something else altogether, and I am still not sure what. He had come here from London in search of something, or merely to escape himself. As I had done with all the rest, I struck up a conversation with him over coffee.

  The unlikely surname resulted from an unusual ancestry: a Dutch trader who had made his fortune in London around the time of the Great Fire and whose descendants had been there ever since. Tooprig claimed he had always wanted to visit Egypt because his father had once produced a ring of yellow gold engraved with strange foreign symbols, and which he claimed had once belonged to a Pharaoh. He had won it in payment of a debt while on a trip to Venice, he assured the young Stan. After his father died, Stan inherited the ring, along with a considerable fortune. It was many years before he learned that what was engraved on the ring was a cartouche of Egyptian hieroglyphs.

  The Stan Tooprig I met in Cairo was no longer the well-to-do English gentleman he had once been. Behind everyday reality, there is a deeper reality so cruel that it condemns to death those whose crime is no greater than the pursuit of their own curiosity. I know this to be true because it happened to Stan Tooprig. And, as strange as it may sound, it was piqued by a woman’s perfume.

  Tooprig required something of women that was not physical but sensory. Although he claimed to be as partial to blondes as he was to brunettes, he had always favoured the civet cat-like scent of redheads; there was a certain astringency about them he said he found entirely libidinous. Unless she could tantalize his nose, her other charms would be of no consequence, and a fragrant woman invigorated all of his senses, not merely the olfactory.

  He lived just off Baker Street, on two floors, with modest living quarters for his valet. One might have described him as a gentleman of leisure; on most days, he took long walks through the city and sometimes, on a whim, would follow a particularly fragrant woman in the hope of a closer encounter. He had cultivated a succession of these, but he was fastidious and discarded his subject if she did not smell “right”. He even classif
ied them by type and aroma: Thyme and Basil (blondes); Sandalwood and Vetivert (brunettes); and Lemon and Petit Grain (redheads). But then came Shem-el-Nessim, the perfume worn by the raven-haired mystery woman. And it was in a London winter that he first crossed paths with the creature that was to be his downfall.

  Klinge & Schneider, the barbershop on Jermyn Street renowned for the closest shave in London, was a haven of sandalwood and Turkish soap; a darkly timbered respite from the rumble and clatter of the city. Tooprig particularly enjoyed cold mornings when there was a touch of frost; stepping out across the threshold, lightly powdered, with the frisson of cologne vibrant on cheeks met by the first chilled fingers of fresh air.

  On this morning, his barber had left him to strop the razor when a spicy, oriental perfume wafted deliciously between the hot towel and Tooprig’s nose. He didn’t recognize the scent, but by the time his barber had turned back to him with a keenly glinting cut-throat, Tooprig had cast off his towel and was at the door, which was still closing against its jamb as though someone had left the shop but a moment before.