The Mammoth Book of Terror

by Stephen Jones

  By now I was wishing I was on my way again. But by that I mustn’t be misunderstood: I’m an able-bodied man and I wasn’t afraid of anything – and certainly not of Garth himself, who was just a lonely, canny old-timer – but all of this really was getting to be a waste of my time. I had just made my mind up to go back out through the window when he caught my arm.

  “Oh, yes!” he said. “This place is really ripe with it! Can’tyou smell it? Even with the window bust wide open like this, and the place nicely dried out in the summer heat, still it’s stinking the place out. Now just you come over here and you’ll see what you’ll see.”

  Despite myself, I was interested. And indeed I could smell . . . something. A cloying mustiness? A mushroomy taint? But not the nutty smell of fresh field mushrooms. More a sort of vile stagnation. Something dead might smell like this, long after the actual corruption has ceased . . .

  Our eyes had grown somewhat accustomed to the gloom. We looked about the room. “Careful how you go,” said Garth. “See the spores there? Try not to stir them up too much. They’re worse than snuff, believe me!” He was right: the red dust lay fairly thick on just about everything. By “everything” I mean a few old sticks of furniture, the worn carpet under our feet, the skirting-board and various shelves and ledges. Whichever family had moved out of here, they hadn’t left a deal of stuff behind them.

  The skirting was of the heavy, old-fashioned variety: an inch and a half thick, nine inches deep, with a fancy moulding along the top edge; they hadn’t spared the wood in those days. Garth peered suspiciously at the skirting-board, followed it away from the bay window and paused every pace to scrape the toe of his boot down its face. And eventually when he did this – suddenly the board crumbled to dust under the pressure of his toe!

  It was literally as dramatic as that: the white paint cracked away and the timber underneath fell into a heap of black, smoking dust. Another pace and Garth kicked again, with the same result. He quickly exposed a ten-foot length of naked wall, on which even the plaster was loose and flaky, and showed me where strands of the cottonwool mycelium had come up between the brick-work and the plaster from below. “It sucks the cellulose right out of wood,” he said. “Gets right into brickwork, too. Now look here,” and he pointed at the old carpet under his feet. The threadbare weave showed a sort of raised floral blossom or stain, like a blotch or blister, spreading outward away from the wall.

  Garth got down on his hands and knees. “Just look at this,” he said. He tore up the carpet and carefully laid it back. Underneath, the floorboards were warped, dark-stained, shrivelled so as to leave wide gaps between them. And up through the gaps came those white, etiolated threads, spreading themselves along the underside of the carpet.

  I wrinkled my nose in disgust. “It’s like a disease,” I said.

  “It is a disease!” he corrected me. “It’s a cancer, and houses die of it!” Then he inhaled noisily, pulled a face of his own, said: “Here. Right here.” He pointed at the warped, rotting floorboards. “The very heart of it. Give me a hand.” He got his fingers down between a pair of boards and gave a tug, and itwas at once apparent that he wouldn’t be needing any help from me. What had once been a stout wooden floorboard a full inch thick was now brittle as dry bark. It cracked upwards, flew apart, revealed the dark cavities between the floor joists. Garth tossed bits of crumbling wood aside, tore up more boards; and at last “the very heart of it” lay open to our inspection.

  “There!” said Garth with a sort of grim satisfaction. He stood back and wiped his hands down his trousers. “Now that is what you call a fruiting body!”

  It was roughly the size of a football, if not exactly that shape. Suspended between two joists in a cradle of fibres, and adhering to one of the joists as if partly flattened to it, the thing might have been a great, too-ripe tomato. It was bright yellow at its centre, banded in various shades of yellow from the middle out. It looked freakishly weird, like a bad joke: this lump of . . . of stuff – never a mushroom – just nestling there between the joists.

  Garth touched my arm and I jumped a foot. He said: “You want to know where all the moisture goes – out of this wood, I mean? Well, just touch it.”

  “Touch . . . that?”

  “Heck it can’t bite you! It’s just a fungus.”

  “All the same, I’d rather not,” I told him.

  He took up a piece of floorboard and prodded the thing – and it squelched. The splintered point of the wood sank into it like jelly. Its heart was mainly liquid, porous as a sponge. “Like a huge egg yolk, isn’t it?” he said, his voice very quiet. He was plainly fascinated.

  Suddenly I felt nauseous. The heat, the oppressive closeness of the room, the spore-laden air. I stepped dizzily backwards and stumbled against an old armchair. The rot had been there, too, for the chair just fragmented into a dozen pieces that puffed red dust all over the place. My foot sank right down through the carpet and mushy boards into darkness and stench – and in another moment I’d panicked.

  Somehow I tumbled myself back out through the window, and ended up on my back in the brambles. Then Garth was standing over me, shaking his head and tut-tutting. “Told you not to stir up the dust,” he said. “It chokes your air and stifles you. Worse than being down a pit. Are you all right?”

  My heart stopped hammering and I was, of course, all right. I got up. “A touch of claustrophobia,” I told him. “I suffer from it at times. Anyway, I think I’ve taken up enough of your time, Garth. I should be getting on my way.”

  “What?” he protested. “A lovely day like this and you want to be driving off somewhere? And besides, there were things I wanted to tell you, and others I’d ask you – and we haven’t been down to Lily-Anne’s grave.” He looked disappointed. “Anyway, you shouldn’t be driving if you’re feeling all shaken up . . .”

  He was right about that part of it, anyway: I did feel shaky, not to mention foolish! And perhaps more importantly, I was still very much aware of the old man’s loneliness. What if it was my mother who’d died, and my father had been left on his own up in Durham? “Very well,” I said, at the same time damning myself for a weak fool, “let’s go and see Lily-Anne’s grave.”

  “Good!” Garth slapped my back. “And no more diversions – we go straight there.”

  Following the paved path as before and climbing a gentle rise, we started walking. We angled a little inland from the unseen cliffs where the green, rolling fields came to an abrupt end and fell down to the sea; and as we went I gave a little thought to the chain of incidents in which I’d found myself involved through the last hour or so.

  Now, I’d be a liar if I said that nothing had struck me as strange in Easingham, for quite a bit had. Not least the dry rot: its apparent profusion and migration through the place, and old Garth’s peculiar knowledge and understanding of the stuff. His – affinity? – with it. “You said there was a story attached,” I reminded him. “To that horrible fungus, I mean.”

  He looked at me sideways, and I sensed he was on the point of telling me something. But at that moment we crested the rise and the view just took my breath away. We could see for miles up and down the coast: to the slow, white breakers rolling in on some beach way to the north, and southwards to a distance-misted seaside town which might even be Whitby. And we paused to fill our lungs with good air blowing fresh off the sea.

  “There,” said Garth. “And how’s this for freedom? Just me and old Ben and the gulls for miles and miles, and I’m not so sure but that this is the way I like it. Now wasn’t it worth it to come up here? All this open space and the great curve of the horizon . . .” Then the look of satisfaction slipped from his face to be replaced by a more serious expression. “There’s old Easingham’s graveyard – what’s left of it.”

  He pointed down towards the cliffs, where a badly weathered stone wall formed part of a square whose sides would have been maybe fifty yards long in the old days. But in those days there’d also been a stubby promontor
y and a church. Now only one wall, running parallel with the path, stood complete – beyond which two thirds of the churchyard had been claimed by the sea. Its occupants, too, I supposed.

  “See that half-timbered shack,” said Garth, pointing, “at this end of the graveyard? That’s what’s left of Johnson’s Mill. Johnson’s sawmill, that is. That shack used to be Old Man Johnson’s office. A long line of Johnsons ran a couple of farms that enclosed all the fields round here right down to the cliffs. Pasture, mostly, with lots of fine animals grazing right here. But as the fields got eaten away and the buildings themselves started to be threatened, that’s when half the Johnsons moved out and the rest bought a big house in the village. They gave up farming and started the mill, working timber for the local building trade . . .

  “Folks round here said it was a sin, all that noise of sawing and planing, right next door to a churchyard. But . . . it was Old Man Johnson’s land after all. Well, the sawmill business kept going ‘til a time some seven years ago, when a really bad blow took a huge bite right out of the bay one night. The seaward wall of the graveyard went, and half of the timber yard, too, and that closed old Johnson down. He sold what machinery he had left, plus a few stacks of good oak that hadn’t suffered, and moved out lock, stock and barrel. Just as well, for the very next spring his big house and two others close to the edge of the cliffs got taken. The sea gets ‘em all in the end.

  “Before then, though – at a time when just about everybody else was moving out of Easingham – Lily-Anne and me had moved in! As I told you, we got our bungalow for a song, and of course we picked ourselves a house standing well back from the brink. We were getting on a bit; another twenty years or so should see us out; after that the sea could do its worst. But . . . well, it didn’t quite work out that way.”

  While he talked, Garth had led the way down across the open fields to the graveyard wall. The breeze was blustery here and fluttered his words back into my face: “So you see, within just a couple of years of our settling here, the village was derelict, and all that remained of people was us and a handful of Johnsons still working the mill. Then Lily-Anne came down with something and died, and I had her put down in the ground here in Easingham – so’s I’d be near her, you know?

  “That’s where the coincidences start to come in, for she went only a couple of months after the shipwreck. Now I don’t suppose you’d remember that; it wasn’t much, just an old Portuguese freighter that foundered in a storm. Lifeboats took the crew off, and she’d already unloaded her cargo somewhere up the coast, so the incident didn’t create much of a to-do in the newspapers. But she’d carried a fair bit of hardwood ballast, that old ship, and balks of the stuff would keep drifting ashore: great long twelve-by-twelves of it. Of course, Old Man Johnson wasn’t one to miss out on a bit of good timber like that, not when it was being washed up right on his doorstep, so to speak . . .

  “Anyway, when Lily-Anne died I made the proper arrangements, and I went down to see old Johnson who told me he’d make me a coffin out of this Haitian hardwood.”

  “Haitian?” Maybe my voice showed something of my surprise.

  “That’s right,” said Garth, more slowly. He looked at me wonderingly. “Anything wrong with that?”

  I shrugged, shook my head. “Rather romantic, I thought,” I said. “Timber from a tropical isle.”

  “I thought so, too,” he agreed. And after a while he continued: “Well, despite having been in the sea, the stuff could still be cut into fine, heavy panels, and it still French-polished to a beautiful finish. So that was that: Lily-Anne got a lovely coffin. Except –”

  “Yes?” I prompted him.

  He pursed his lips. “Except I got to thinking – later, you know – as to how maybe the rot came here in that wood. God knows it’s a damn funny variety of fungus after all. But then this Haiti – well, apparently it’s a damned funny place. They call it the Voodoo Island, you know?”

  “Black magic?” I smiled. “I think we’ve advanced a bit beyond thinking such as that, Garth.”

  “Maybe and maybe not,” he answered. “But voodoo or no voodoo, it’s still a funny place, that Haiti. Far away and exotic . . .”

  By now we’d found a gap in the old stone wall and climbed over the tumbled stones into the graveyard proper. From where we stood, another twenty paces would take us right to the raw edge of the cliff where it sheered dead straight through the overgrown, badly neglected plots and headstones. “So here it is,” said Garth, pointing. “Lily-Anne’s grave, secure for now in what little is left of Easingham’s old graveyard.” His voice fell a little, grew ragged: “But you know, the fact is I wish I’d never put her down here in the first place. And I’d give anything that I hadn’t buried her in that coffin built of Old Man Johnson’s ballast wood.”

  The plot was a neat oblong picked out in oval pebbles. It had been weeded round its border, and from its bottom edge to the foot of the simple headstone it was decked in flowers, some wild and others cut from Easingham’s deserted gardens. It was deep in flowers, and the ones underneath were withered and had been compressed by those on top. Obviously Garth came here more often than just “now and then”. It was the only plot in sight that had been paid any sort of attention, but in the circumstances that wasn’t surprising.

  “You’re wondering why there are so many flowers, eh?” Garth sat down on a raised slab close by.

  I shook my head, sat down beside him. “No, I know why. You must have thought the world of her.”

  “You don’t know why,” he answered. ‘I did think the world of her, but that’s not why. It’s not the only reason, anyway. I’ll show you.”

  He got down on his knees beside the grave, began laying aside the flowers. Right down to the marble chips he went, then scooped an amount of the polished gravel to one side. He made a small mound of it. Whatever I had expected to see in the small excavation, it wasn’t the cylindrical, fibrous surface – like the upper section of a lagged pipe – which came into view. I sucked in my breath sharply.

  There were tears in Garth’s eyes as he flattened the marble chips back into place. “The flowers are so I won’t see it if it ever breaks the surface,” he said. “See, I can’t bear the thought of that filthy stuff in her coffin. I mean, what if it’s like what you saw under the floorboards in that house back there?” He sat down again, and his hands trembled as he took out an old wallet, and removed a photograph to give it to me. “That’s Lily-Anne,” he said. “But God! – I don’t like the idea of that stuff fruiting on her . . .”

  Aghast at the thoughts his words conjured, I looked at the photograph. A homely woman in her late fifties, seated in a chair beside a fence in a garden I recognized as Garth’s. Except the garden had been well tended then. One shoulder seemed slumped a little, and though she smiled, still I could sense the pain in her face. “Just a few weeks before she died,” said Garth. “It was her lungs. Funny that I worked in the pit all those years, and it was her lungs gave out. And now she’s here, and so’s this stuff.”

  I had to say something. “But . . . where did it come from? I mean, how did it come, well, here? I don’t know much about dry rot, no, but I would have thought it confined itself to houses.”

  “That’s what I was telling you,” he said, taking back the photograph. “The British variety does. But not this stuff. It’s weird and different! That’s why I think it might have come here with that ballast wood. As to how it got into the churchyard: that’s easy. Come and see for yourself.”

  I followed him where he made his way between the weedy plots towards the leaning, half-timbered shack. “Is that the source? Johnson’s timber yard?”

  He nodded. “For sure. But look here.”

  I looked where he pointed. We were still in the graveyard, approaching the tumbledown end wall, beyond which stood the derelict shack. Running in a parallel series along the dry ground, from the mill and into the graveyard, deep cracks showed through the tangled brambles, briars and grasses. One of th
ese cracks, wider than the others, had actually split a heavy horizontal marble slab right down its length. Garth grunted. “That wasn’t done last time I was here,” he said.

  “The sea’s been at it again,” I nodded. “Undermining the cliffs. Maybe we’re not as safe here as you think.”

  He glanced at me. “Not the sea this time,” he said, very definitely. “Something else entirely. See, there’s been no rain for weeks. Everything’s dry. And it gets thirsty same as we do. Give me a hand.”

  He stood beside the broken slab and got his fingers into the crack. It was obvious that he intended to open up the tomb. “Garth,” I cautioned him. “Isn’t this a little ghoulish? Do you really intend to desecrate this grave?”

  “See the date?” he said. “1847. Heck, I don’t think he’d mind, whoever he is. Desecration? Why, he might even thank us for a little sweet sunlight! What are you afraid of? There can only be dust and bones down there now.”

  Full of guilt, I looked all about while Garth struggled with the fractured slab. It was a safe bet that there wasn’t a living soul for miles around, but I checked anyway. Opening graves isn’t my sort of thing. But having discovered him for a stubborn old man, I knew that if I didn’t help him he’d find a way to do it by himself anyway; and so I applied myself to the task. Between the two of us we wrestled one of the two halves to the edge of its base, finally toppled it over. A choking fungus reek at once rushed out to engulf us! Or maybe the smell was of something else and I’d simply smelled what I “expected” to.

  Garth pulled a sour face. “Ugh!” was his only comment.

  The air cleared and we looked into the tomb. In there, a coffin just a little over three feet long, and the broken sarcophagus around it filled with dust, cobwebs and a few leaves. Garth glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “So now you think I’m wrong, eh?”