She’s outside. She’s come calling again.
All part of the world, Thomas told himself. Just another part of the world. Nothing less, nothing more.
This time he would brave it. Endure it. Go out into the hall. Talk to this stoyen of the Hotel Dis as to any thing of the world with sense enough to understand.
He left his bed, dressed quickly and went to the door.
She could just as easily have been inside the room. She wants me to go to her. Wants the fear, the control. Her dark designs.
Thomas opened the door, but there was no one, nothing.
He stepped into the hall, made himself do it.
Lizzie was at the far end outside her room, just standing, watching, staring with her dark, too narrow eyes, her swept-up, I-know-something-you-don’t grin.
He actually took four, five steps towards her, needing to be sure of what he was seeing.
“Lizzie?”
The smile curved up. He shouldn’t have been able to see it, not the eyes or the grimace, not at this distance, not for a moment. There was just the one lamp giving light behind her on the stand near the top of the stairs. But he did, he could. There was light on her face, impossible light. She was bending light to show her eyes, the dreadful, overdone smile.
Here for you this time!
“Lizzie?” he said again, and fought not to blink. She’d be gone if he did and this mattered: Lizzie as Jeune Petite. Jeune Petite as Lizzie.
Why didn’t Stefan hear him calling? Were they in collusion? Let’s serve up the stranger!
Perspiration beaded his forehead, beaded and ran, fell, stinging his eyes, blurring his vision. He had to blink. Had to.
Resisted but couldn’t help it, did so quickly.
And she hadn’t gone.
She was closer, much closer, halfway down the hall now, arms at her sides, grin slashed and curving, just standing there.
He hadn’t seen her move.
“Lizzie?”
He began retreating, step by backward step, not daring to turn or look away, reached his room, found the door shut – shut! – fumbled for a knob that wasn’t there, glanced to find it.
It had been moved, was half a yard higher on the door!
He reached up and turned it, glanced back as the door swung in.
She was right there, four yards away now in the dark hallway, the light on her face all wrong.
Then – third reprieve! – he was through and had it shut and locked, stood giggling and shaking, sobbing, triumphant.
He’d left his bedside lamp lit, thank God. But when he looked, he saw Lizzie sitting on the end of his bed.
Got you!
He wished she’d say it, say something, anything. It was too quiet, just the jungle sounds, the night insects, the bump-bump of the eels on the roof.
And she raised her arms.
Come to me!
Her eyes held him. The smile cut, slashed, struck out, drew him forward. The eels kept circling, turning, thumping in the dark.
And it happened. Whatever it was. Everything it was. The cool mouth, the thrusting tongue. The slim body against his, atop his when the clothes were gone, the arms clamping, legs locking him hard, the mouth fixed, open, thrusting, breathing into his, giving, taking.
And, all the while, the eels kept turning.
Again there was the blazing day, the river bright with sunlight, the night terrors over and done with.
He told Stefan about it all over breakfast, owed him that, recorded everything this time too, trying to stay impartial: how confused he was, how uncertain about what had actually happened, just that it had, seemed to have.
Stefan nodded, accepted, then matched stories one for one, helping Thomas to feel better knowing that such similar, intimate encounters had been part of it for him too.
“But not Lizzie, you understand,” he kept saying. “She’s not.”
It was easy for Thomas to allow it. “Of course,” he said, then realized how that sounded. “Of course not.”
At 10:30, he went looking for Lizzie to say goodbye, found her in the conservatory, quietly reading in the big armchair.
“Back to normal soon,” he said, not mentioning the previous night.
“But you’ll be back.”
“I still have some things to do here.”
“I notice you don’t say my name now, Thomas.”
“You know what I told Stefan?”
“Enough. How does it concern me?”
“We require you to move on. Give Stefan and the others some peace.”
“Of course you do. But if I choose otherwise?”
“We bring in the research groups. Turn you into an on-site case study. I’ve made preliminary arrangements.”
“I can damage them. Bring their worst fears.”
“They’ll sign waivers. There’ll be constant observation. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”
“I can maim and kill. Do such lasting harm.”
“They’ll still come. We’ll choose carefully. A chance to survive Jeune Petite will be like a chance to pull the Sword from the Stone. Only the bravest, the most committed will come.”
“Probably the most ignorant, the most gullible.”
“Not this time. You will be known. Quantified like any other phenomenon in the world. Something with a process, a methodology. Re-natured.”
“Now there’s a word.”
“It fits.” He wouldn’t name her. “Nothing supernatural. Not really. If anything happens to Stefan, the hotel is bequeathed to a local university in Ho Chi Minh City for research projects. That or burnt to the ground. You can haunt the jungle again.”
“I must think about this.”
“Thang gets here around eleven.”
“Is that a farewell or an invitation?” Her dark eyes flashed.
Without another word, Thomas turned and left the room.
Forty minutes later the white runabout pulled in at the dock. Stefan and Long came as far as the ghost-light post, observing old proprieties just in case. They shook hands and waved Thomas on his way.
“Don’t forget us,” Stefan called after him, which Thomas suddenly realized was a more pointed request than it first seemed.
This is a short-term memory place. The way it sits in the mind.
“I won’t!” Thomas called back and tried to keep his thoughts straight. The Hotel Dis would stay in long-term memory. It would, though again he wondered if Jeune Petite would ever really leave, or even if there would be some final trick, a legacy, something. He had just stepped past the boundary post after all.
But he reached the jetty without incident. The glare on the river was terrible at this hour, leaching the sky of colour, filling the world. It made Thomas squint even through his sunglasses, made him look down at the boards through half-closed eyes as he carried his bag to the runabout, passed it down to the young boatman.
But it wasn’t Thang who took it. It wasn’t the young Vietnamese at all.
It was Deek grinning up at him, Deek beckoning, urging, the flashing, dazzling water at his back.
“Thought I’d get you myself,” his father said. Enough of his father. “Get you back to Saigon in no time. We might even drop by the Market Hotel on Cranbow Road and consider our options.”
And the old man smiled. And in all that light, his eyes were uncommonly fixed, as green as the darkest water lilies on the Mekong, and the smile, the inescapable smile, swept up to become one with the blazing heart of the river.
MARK VALENTINE
The Axholme Toll
MARK VALENTINE IS THE author of the acclaimed 1995 biography Arthur Machen. His short fiction has been collected in 14 Bellchamber Tower, In Violet Veils, Masques and Citadels, The Nightfarers, The Rite of Trebizond and Other Tales and The Collected Connoisseur (the latter two both with John Howard).
He has also edited the anthologies The Werewolf Pack and The Black Veil and Other Tales of Supernatural Sleuths for Wordsworth Edition’s budget “Tales of My
stery and the Supernatural” series, and is the editor of Wormwood, the journal of the literature of the fantastic, supernatural and decadent.
“In the following story, the book called The MS. in a Red Box really exists,” the author reveals. “All of the legends about the Isle, and about Beckett’s assassins, are also genuine, except (so far) that of the Toll, and their final place of rest – or unrest.”
IT WAS STEVENSON, I think, who most notably observed that there are some places that simply demand a story should be told of them.
Such was the case with the Isle of Erraid, a tidal islet off Mull, where he stayed as a young man while assisting his father with his profession as a lighthouse engineer. It led to his story, “The Merry Men”, full of the wild lore of the sea. There are many such tales told of islands, which seem always to draw the imagination of the mainlander, and to nourish their own myths too. Yet I wonder if there are not also enclaves within the solid land of the country, which are islands in a different sense. They are somehow set apart from the rest of the everyday world. We enter them, and a sense steals over us of being in a different domain. Some subtle change in the terrain tells us that we are not quite wholly in a reliable realm.
For me, the Isle of Axholme, in the far north-western marge of Lincolnshire, will always figure as exactly such a place, for it was indeed once an island, and it is still remote and peculiar.
It was, as I say, until the seventeenth century, a real inland island, surrounded by three rivers at their widest span, traversable only by ferry. Even within the bounds these formed, much of the terrain was inhospitable marshland, whose narrow tracks only natives knew thoroughly. It was the practice for the isle folk to stalk these murky wastes on nimble stilts, and there was competition to be deftest at this unusual skill. Drainage by Dutch engineers under charter from Charles I ended its isolation a little, but it retained a distinctive character for quite a while afterwards.
Islonians, as they call themselves, are proud of their particular family names and still refer to “the Isle”, even though it is strictly not that any longer. In fact, it was always a series of islands: one long ridge in the middle, bearing four villages upon it, some outlying outcrops, and a cluster of ferry settlements by the riverbanks.
I found that its mysteries begin in the Dark Ages, when some astral catastrophe or other – a fireball, or so it is inferred – spread flame even through its wateriness, burning trees down to their roots deep underground, and denuding it for a while of vegetation. Modern conspiracists regard this as one sign among many of the cogency of the prophecies of Ezekiel. It has also been claimed as the true locality of Avalon – the fact of it being an island only accessible with difficulty, and the deceptive similarity of its name, being in its favour. Against that, however, is the sad absence of any other Arthurian links, or of orchards, for Avalon is generally held to mean “Isle of Apples”.
It has also had, through the ages, other reputations. Not surprisingly, its remoteness bred talk of magic, and it is said to have had a hermit-wizard in occupation for a century or so, on one of its lonelier knolls. The Templars, too, are naturally said to have had a priory here: although, in fact, it seems to have been Carthusian. There are astrological links, suggesting a lost zodiac, known now only by an old local saying, “’Tis Scorpio in Crowle” (the latter being the northernmost village on its spine), meaning a time of ill omen.
Then, it has its own literary mystery too. In April 1903, the publisher John Lane received a parcel through the post at his London offices in Vigo Street, under the sign of The Bodley Head. It contained the manuscript of a novel. There was nothing uncommon about that, of course, except that the manuscript had no sign of the author, and no title, and there was no accompanying letter. Nor was there any indication where it had come from. It arrived in a red box, and that was just about all that could be known about it.
The work was sent to the publisher’s reader in the usual way, and he reported favourably. As was his habit with anything out of the ordinary, John Lane then read it himself. He had made his name in the 1890s as the publisher of “daring” and “modern” books that came to epitomize the period as the “Naughty Nineties”, especially in his Keynotes series of novels.
He also issued his flagship periodical, The Yellow Book, which gave its name to the decade: the Yellow Nineties. It was, at first anyway, embellished with some of the audacious black-and-white drawings of Aubrey Beardsley. Their boldness, and the bright gold covers, soon made sure it was seen and hotly discussed.
But by 1903, John Lane had mellowed more into the role of a mainstream publisher. He was a shrewd businessman, who liked to be on good terms with his authors and to socialize with them: but still had a keen-eyed understanding of the exact commercial value of their work. The previous year, he had scored a success with Kenneth Grahame’s gentle pastoral pieces, Dream Days, with a verse play, Ulysses by Stephen Phillips (compared in his day to Shakespeare, Milton and Tennyson), and (rather more in the vein of the book before him), a rip-roaring historical study, King Monmouth by Allan Fea. Still, a strong seller in fiction had really eluded him. He was ready to find one.
When he looked at the untitled book, he agreed with his reader’s assessment. The mystery manuscript was a great historical romance in the tradition of Stevenson and Scott, about the seventeenth-century struggle between the proud and independent people of the Isle of Axholme in Lincolnshire and the Dutch drainage lords who had come to change their world forever, and drive them from their lands. It was a gripping, twisting and turning, swashbuckling, yet also thoughtful and sometimes eerie book, with the isolated marshlands of Axholme so strongly evoked that the reader almost felt they had lived there themselves.
Accordingly, Lane decided to publish the book. But how to do so, without even a title, and no author? No doubt with an eye to the publicity value, he placed an advertisement in the press:
TO AUTHORS
NOTICE – If the Writer of an Historical Novel without Title, Author’s Name or Address, sent some weeks ago to The Bodley Head in a Red Box, will communicate with the Publisher, he will hear something to his advantage.
—John Lane, Vigo Street, London, W.2
“Hear something to his advantage”! It was the very phrase used by solicitors in mystery novels when a large or unusual legacy awaits the hero. The notice had the desired effect. It created what one newspaper called a “hullabaloo of excitement”. Yet no author came forward. The publisher tried again, with a further notice, saying he would publish the book at a certain date unless he heard from the author. This, of course, was very cleverly stoking up the interest in the book, and some acid commentators thought it was all just a stunt. But it was not.
John Lane went ahead and published the book as The MS. in a Red Box, and it has been known by this title ever since. After all the discussion leading up to its appearance, it was not surprising that it sold well. So much might be expected. But, gratifyingly for Lane’s and his reader’s judgment, critics and the public agreed about its qualities. It had an enthralling, well-devised plot, the right blend of adventure and love interest, the historical setting was just familiar enough but also original and unusual; the island scenes were strange and appealing to the reader. Indeed, the Axholme dimension may have had much to do with the book’s success: it was seen as a curious and inaccessible region still.
After the book came out, it is said Lane received many letters claiming authorship, but none of them were at all convincing. Two things, however, were tolerably clear about the author. He was a proficient, very capable prose writer and storyteller, and he knew the Isle of Axholme and its people and history intimately well.
Much of the book is a vivid, pretty brisk adventure story: the tale of Frank Vavasour, son of a local squire, who leads the revolt against the Dutch clearances, aided by loyal friends, betrayed by squinting villains, and never near enough to the arms of the vivacious woman he loves, who is inconveniently the daughter of a Dutch doctor – though a fair-minded and
moderate man.
But there is also a strangeness about the book, caused by its Axholme setting: there are weird visions and curses, and the sense of an inexorable working-out of fate. In one episode, young Vavasour, hotly pursued by the King’s men, takes to the green alleys of the marshes, where their horses cannot go because of the treacherous terrain. And yet, it still seems to him that he is pursued, for over the wastes there comes to him the drumming of hooves where no horses could possibly be; he wonders what riders these beasts must bear. No more is said of the matter; Vavasour evades his predators, but the reader is left to think that the phantom author is hinting here at more than he can tell.
A strong candidate for the authorship has been put forward in recent years, to the extent that some editions now definitely attribute it to him, and so does the catalogue of the British Library. This is the Reverend John Arthur Hamilton (1854– 1924), who was a minister of the Congregational Church at Crowle, in Axholme, from 1870 to 1878: only eight years, but perhaps important ones, for he was very young and it was his first pastorate. He later went on to hold office at Saltaire, Yorkshire from 1878 to 1896, and finally in Penzance from 1897 until his death. He gave his house in Cornwall the name “Axholme”. This suggests the Isle remained steadfast in his memory.
This John Hamilton was an author. He pioneered the idea of sermons written as stories for children. His books included A Mountain Path and Forty Three Other Talks for Young Children (Low & Co, 1894), The Life of John Milton, Partly In His Own Words (Congregational Union, 1908), The Giant and the Caterpillar and Other Addresses to Young People (Allenson, 1912) and The Wonderful River and Other Addresses to Young People (Allenson, 1913). Somewhat more to the point, he also wrote at least one historical romance – Captain John Lister: A Tale of Axholme (Hutchinson, 1906) – set in the time of the English Civil War. But to that he put his name.
Yet all – bar one – of these worthy titles are not in the least like The MS. in a Red Box. That book is full-blooded, vigorous, and very rarely pious. This could, of course, be the reason why the author wanted it only issued anonymously. But could a man who had already put his name to these other books resist claiming authorship in some way for a work that must have cost him many hours of work, hours diverted from his more sacred duties? And could a cleric who was so concerned to mix storytelling with an improving message completely resist the opportunity to do so in this work too? Certainly, he could have sent the book to Lane anonymously, in the red box, just as Lane recounted – or collaborated with him on an elaborate hoax.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Page 36