The Mammoth Book of Terror

by Stephen Jones

  “One of the first.” The author folded his tiny hands. “It’s about an epidemic that’s sweeping the country – I don’t have the details yet. I’m still roughing it out. All I gave my editor was a two-page outline.”

  “And he bought it?”

  Rex Christian grinned.

  “What kind of epidemic?”

  “That’s where you can help, Vic.”

  “If it’s research you want, well, just tell me what you need. I used to do a lot of that in school. I was in premed and . . .”

  “I want to make this as easy as possible for you.”

  “I know. I mean, I’m sure you do. But it’s no sweat. I’ll collect the data, Xerox articles, send you copies of everything that’s ever been written on the subject, as soon as you tell me . . .”

  Rex Christian frowned, his face wrinkling like a deflating balloon. “I’m afraid that would involve too many legalities. Copyrights, fees, that sort of thing. Sources that might be traced.”

  “We could get permission, couldn’t we? You wouldn’t have to pay me. It would be an honor to . . .”

  “I know.” Rex Christian’s miniature fingers flexed impatiently. “But that’s the long way around, my friend.”

  “However you want to do it. Say the word and I’ll get started, first thing in the morning. Monday morning. Tomorrow’s Sunday and . . .”

  “Monday’s too late. It starts now. In fact it’s already started. You didn’t know that, did you?” Rex’s face flushed eagerly, his cheeks red as a newborn infant’s. “I want to know pwrfeelings on the subject. All of them.” He pumped his legs and crept forward on the cushion. “Open yourself up. It won’t hurt. I promise.”

  Victor’s eyes stung and his throat ached. It starts here, he thought, awe-struck. The last thirty-three years were the introduction to my life. Now it really starts.

  “You wouldn’t want to know my feelings,” he said. “They . . . I’ve been pretty mixed up. For a long time.”

  “I don’t care about what you felt before. I want to know what you feel tonight. It’s only you, Vic. You’re perfect. I can’t get that in any library. Do you know how valuable you are to me?”

  “But why? Your characters, they’re so much more real, more alive . . .”

  Rex waved his words aside. “An illusion. Art isn’t life, you know. If it were, the world would go up in flames. It’s artifice. By definition.” He slid closer, his toes finally dropping below the coffee table. “Though naturally I try to make it echo real life as closely as I can. That’s what turns my readers on. That’s part of my mission. Don’t you understand?”

  Victor’s eyes filled with tears.

  Other people, the people he saw and heard on the screen, on TV, in books and magazines, voices on the telephone, all had lives which were so much more vital than his own wretched existence. The closest he had ever come to peak experiences, the moments he found himself returning to again and again in his memory, added up to nothing more significant than chance meetings on the road, like the time he hitchhiked to San Francisco in the summer of ‘67, a party in college where no one knew his name, the face of a girl in the window of a passing bus that he had never been able to forget.

  And now?

  He lowered his head to his knees and wept.

  And in a blinding flash, as if the scales had been lifted from his eyes, he knew that nothing would ever be the same for him again. The time to hesitate was over. The time had come at last to make it real.

  He thought: I am entitled to a place on the planet, after all.

  He lifted his eyes to the light.

  The dwarf’s face was inches away. The diminutive features, the taut lips, the narrow brow, the close, lidded eyes, wise and all-forgiving. The sweet scent of an unknown after-shave lotion wafted from his skin.

  “The past doesn’t matter,” said the dwarf. He placed the short fingers of one hand on Victor’s head. “To hell with it all.”

  “Yes,” said Victor. For so long he had thought just the opposite. But now he saw a way out. “Oh, yes.”

  “Tell me what you feel from this moment on,” said the dwarf. “I need to know.”

  “I don’t know how,” said Victor.

  “Try.”

  Victor stared into the dark, polished eyes, shiny as a doll’s eyes.

  “I want to. I . . . I don’t know if I can.”

  “Of course you can. We’re alone now. You didn’t tell anyone I was coming, did you, Vic?”

  Victor shook his head.

  “How thoughtful,” said the dwarf. “How perfect. Like this house. A great setting. I could tell by your letter you were exactly what I need. Your kind always are. Those who live in out-of-the-way places, the quiet ones with no ties. That’s the way it has to be. Otherwise I couldn’t use you.”

  “Why do you care what I feel?” asked Victor.

  “I told you – research. It gives my work that extra edge. Won’t you tell me what’s happening inside you right now, Vic?”

  “I want to. I do.”

  “Then you can. You can if you really want it. Aren’t we all free to do whatever we want?”

  “I almost believed that, once,” said Victor.

  “Anything,” said the dwarf firmly. “You can have anything, including what you want most. Especially that. And what is it you want, Vic?”

  “I . . . I want to write, I guess.”

  The dwarf’s face crinkled with amusement.

  “But I don’t know what to write about,” said Victor.

  “Then why do you want to do it?”

  “Because I have no one to talk to. No one who could understand.”

  “And what would you talk to them about, if you could?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “Tell me, Vic. I’ll understand. I’ll put it down exactly the way you say it. You want me to relieve your fear? Well, in another minute I’m going to do that little thing. You will have nothing more to fear, ever again.”

  This is it, Victor thought, your chance. Don’t blow it. It’s happening just the way you had it planned. Don’t lose your nerve. Ask the question – now. Do it.

  “But where does it come from?” asked Victor. “The things you write about. How do you know what to say? Where do you get it? I try, but the things I know aren’t . . .”

  “You want to know,” said the dwarf, his face splitting in an uproarious grin, “where I get my ideas? Is that your question?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact . . .”

  “From you, Vic! I get my material from people like you! I get them from this cesspool you call life itself. And you know what? I’ll never run out of material, not as long as I go directly to the source, because I’ll never, ever finish paying you all back!”

  Victor saw then the large pores of the dwarfs face, the crooked bend to the nose, the sharpness of the teeth in the feral mouth, the steely glint deep within the black eyes. The hairs prickled on the back of his neck and he pulled away. Tried to pull away. But the dwarfs hand stayed on his head.

  “Take my new novel, for instance. It’s about an epidemic that’s going to sweep the nation, leaving a bloody trail from one end of this country to the other, to wash away all of your sins. At first the police may call it murder. But the experts will recognize it as suicide, a form of harakiri, to be precise, which is what it is. I know, because I’ve made a careful study of the methods. Perfect!”

  The underdeveloped features, the cretinous grin filled Victor with sudden loathing, and a terrible fear he could not name touched his scalp. He sat back, pulling farther away from the little man.

  But the dwarf followed him back, stepping onto the table, one hand still pressing Victor in a grotesque benediction. The lamp glared behind his oversized head, his eyes sparkling maniacally. He rose up and up, unbending his legs, knocking over the bottles, standing taller until he blocked out everything else.

  Victor braced against th
e table and kicked away, but the dwarf leaped onto his shoulders and rode him down. Victor reached out, found the bottle opener and swung it wildly.

  “No,” he screamed, “my God, no! You’re wrong! It’s a lie! You’re . . . !”

  He felt the point of the churchkey hook into something thick and cold and begin to rip.

  But too late. A malformed hand dug into his hair and forced his head back, exposing his throat and chest.

  “How does this feel, Vic? I have to know! Tell my readers!” The other claw darted into the briefcase and dragged forth a blade as long as a bayonet, its edge crusted and sticky but still razor-sharp. “How about this?” cried the dwarf. “And this?”

  As Victor raised his hands to cover his throat, he felt the first thrust directly below the ribcage, an almost painless impact as though he had been struck by a fist in the chest, followed by the long, sawing cut through his vital organs and then the warm pumping of his life’s blood down the short sword between them. His fingers tingled and went numb as his hands were wrapped into position around the handle. The ceiling grew bright and the world spun, hurling him free.

  “Tell me!” demanded the dwarf.

  A great whispering chorus was released within Victor at last, rushing out and rising like a tide to flood the earth, crimson as the rays of a hellishly blazing sun.

  But his mouth was choked with his own blood and he could not speak, not a word of it. The vestiges of a final smile moved his glistening lips.

  “Tell me!” shrieked the dwarf, digging deeper, while the room turned red. “I must find the perfect method! Tell me!”

  SYDNEY JAMES BOUNDS BEGAN his career by contributing “spicy” stories to the monthly magazines produced by Utopia Press in the 1940s. He was soon writing hardboiled gangster novels for John Spencer under such house names as “Brett Diamond” and “Ricky Madison”, and he contributed short stories to their line of SF magazines which included Futuristic Science Stories, Tales of Tomorrow and Worlds of Fantasy.

  He became a regular contributor to such magazines as New Worlds Science Fiction, Science Fantasy, Authentic Science Fiction, Nebula Science Fiction, Other Worlds Science Stories and Fantastic Universe. However, as the science fiction magazine markets started to dry up during the 1960s, the author began to notice the growth of paperbacks. Although he continued to be published in such periodicals as London Mystery Magazine, Vision of Tomorrow, Fantasy Tales, Fantasy Booklet, Fantasy Annual and Fantasy Quarterly, he quickly became a prolific and reliable contributor to such anthology series as New Writings in SF, The Fontana Booh of Great Ghost Stories, TheFontana Booh of Great Horror Stories, the Armada Monster Book, the Armada Ghost Book and Fantasy Adventures.

  Bounds has also pursued parallel careers as a successful children’s writer and a Western novelist for Robert Hale, and in 2003 Cosmos Books issued the first-ever collections of the author’s work as two paperback volumes, The Best of Sydney J. Bounds: Strange Portrait and Other Stories and The Wayward Ship and Other Stories, both edited by Philip Harbottle.

  One of the author’s best-known stories, “The Circus” was adapted by George A. Romero for a 1986 episode of the syndicated television series Tales of the Darkside.

  “One of the tricks a writer has for producing a new story is to reverse a standard situation,” explains Bounds. “Back in the 1970s, werewolves and vampires were considered evil and words like horror and terror were applied to them. So why not devise a story based on the wonder of the differences in nature? Here it is . . .”

  BECAUSE HE HAD BEEN drinking, Arnold Bragg considered it a stroke of good fortune that the accident happened a long way from any main road and the chance of a patrolling police car. He had no exactidea of his locationjustthatitwas somewhere in the West Country.

  He was on his way back from Cornwall where he’d been covering a story, an expose of a witches’ coven, for the Sunday Herald. He drove an MG sports car and, as always with a few drinks inside him, drove too fast. With time to spare, he’d left the A30 at a whim. It was a summer evening, slowly cooling after the heat of the day. The countryside was what he called “pretty”, with lanes twisting between hedgerows. He took a corner at speed and rammed the trunk of a tree that jutted into the road around the bend.

  Shaken but unhurt, he climbed from his car and swore at a leaking radiator. Then he got back in and drove on, looking for a garage. He found one, a couple of miles further along, next to a pub with a scattering of cottages; there were not enough of them to justify calling them a village.

  A mechanic glanced at the bonnet and sniffed his breath. “At, I can fix it. Couple of hours, maybe.”

  Arnold Bragg nodded. “I’ll be next door when you’ve finished.”

  It was the kind of pub that exists only in out-of-the-way places, and then rarely: a house of local stone with a front room converted as a bar. The door stood open and he walked in past a stack of beer crates. The walls were thick and it was cool inside. On a polished counter rested two casks, one of cider and one of beer. A grey-haired woman sat knitting behind the counter, and two oldish men sat on a wooden bench by the window

  Bragg turned on a charm that rarely failed him. “I’ll try a pint of your local beer.”

  The woman laid her knitting aside, picked up a glass mug and held it under the tap; sediment hung in the rich brown liquid.

  Bragg tasted it, then drank deeply. “I didn’t know anyone still brewed beer like this.” He glanced around the room.

  “Perhaps you gentlemen will join me?”

  “At, likely we will, sir. And many thanks.”

  Bragg’s gaze moved on to a poster thumb-tacked to the wall. It had obviously been hand-printed, and read:

  CIRCUS

  Before your very eyes, werewolf into man!

  See the vampire rise from his coffin!

  Bring the children – invest in a sense of wonder

  As Arnold Bragg stared and wondered if beer had finally rotted his brain, sluggish memory stirred. In his job, he always listened to rumours; some he hunted down and obtained a story. There had been this crazy one, crazy but persistent, of a freak circus that never visited towns but stopped only for one night at isolated villages. He’d come across it first in the fens, then on the Yorkshire moors, and again in a Welsh valley.

  The knowledge that this circus was here, now, sobered him. He set down his glass on the counter, unfinished. When he scented a lead, he could stop drinking. And this one was likely to prove the apex of a career dedicated to discrediting fakes and phoneys of all kinds.

  He studied the poster carefully. No name was given to the circus. There was no indication of time or place of performance. Still, it shouldn’t be hard to find.

  He strolled outside, passed the garage where the mechanic worked on his car, and sauntered towards the cottages. A few families, young husbands and wives with their offspring, were walking down a lane, and he followed them. Presently he glimpsed, in the distance, the canvas top of a large tent showing above some trees.

  He kept to himself, observing the people on the way to the circus; there was no gaiety in them. With solemn faces and measured step they went, people who took their pleasure seriously.

  Beyond a screen of trees was a green field with the big top and a huddle of caravans and Land Rovers. People formed a small queue at an open flap of the tent, where a little old man sold tickets. He sported a fringe of white hair, nut-brown skin and the wizened appearance of a chimpanzee.

  Bragg dipped a hand into his pocket and brought out some loose change.

  “I don’t believe you’ll like our show, sir.” The accent was foreign. “It’s purely for the locals, you understand. Nothing sophisticated for a London gentleman.”

  “You’re wrong,” Bragg said, urging money on him. “This is just right for me.” He snatched a ticket and walked into the tent.

  Seats rose in tiers, wooden planks set on angle-irons. In the centre was a sawdust ring behind low planking; an aisle at the rear allowed performers to co
me and go. There was no provision for a high-wire act.

  Bragg found an empty seat away from the local people, high enough so that he commanded a clear view, but not so far from the ringside that he would miss any detail.

  Not many seats were occupied. He lit a cigarette and watched the crowd. Grave faces, little talk; the children showed none of that excitement normally associated with a visit to the circus. Occasionally eyes turned his way and were hastily averted. A few more families arrived, all with young children.

  The old man who sold tickets doubled as ringmaster. He shuffled across the sawdust and made his announcement in hardly more than a whisper. Bragg had to strain to catch the words.

  “I, Doctor Nis, welcome you to my circus. Tonight you will see true wonders. The natural world is full of prodigies for those who open their eyes and minds. We begin with the vampire.”

  Somewhere, pipe music played; notes rippled up and down a non-Western scale, effecting an eerie chant. Two labourers came down the aisle, carrying a coffin. The coffin was far from new and they placed it on the ground as if afraid it might fall to pieces.

  The pipes shrilled.

  Bragg found he was holding his breath and forced himself to relax. Tension came again as the lid of the coffin moved. It moved upwards, jerkily, an inch at a time. A thin hand with long fingernails appeared from inside. The lid was pushed higher, creaking in the silence of the tent, and the vampire rose and stepped out.

  Its face had the pallor of death, the canine teeth showed long and pointed, and a ragged cloak swirled about its human form.

  One of the labourers returned with a young lamb and tossed it to the vampire. Hungrily, teeth sank into the lamb’s throat, bit deep, and the lips sucked and sucked . . .

  Bragg stared, fascinated and disgusted. When, finally, the drained carcass was tossed aside, the vampire appeared swollen as a well-filled leech.

  The labourers carried the coffin out and the vampire walked behind. Jesus, Bragg thought – this is for kids?

  Dr Nis made a small bow.