The Mammoth Book of Terror

by Stephen Jones

  “There,” she said. “I reckon we can have it all cleaned up by tomorrow.”

  “I’ll give my friend a call,” said Mark. “Maybe he can send somebody down to look at it.”

  “It’s amazing, isn’t it, to think that the last person to look into this mirror could have been the Lady of Shalott?”

  “You blithering idiot,” said Nigel.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Nigel waved his can of lager at the television screen. “Not you. Him. He thinks that single mothers should get two votes.”

  They didn’t go to bed until well past 1:00 a.m. Mark had the main bedroom because he was the boss, even though it wasn’t exactly luxurious. The double bed was lumpy and the white Regency-style wardrobe was crowded with wire hangers. Katie had the smaller bedroom at the back, with teddy-bear wallpaper, while Nigel had to sleep on the sofa in the living-room.

  Mark slept badly that night. He dreamed that he was walking at the rear of a long funeral procession, with a horse-drawn hearse, and black-dyed ostrich plumes nodding in the wind. A woman’s voice was calling him from very far away, and he stopped, while the funeral procession carried on. For some reason he felt infinitely sad and lonely, the same way that he had felt when he was five, when his mother died.

  “Mark!” she kept calling him. “Mark!”

  He woke up with a harsh intake of breath. It was still dark, although his travel clock said 07:26.

  “Mark!” she repeated, and it wasn’t his mother, but Katie, and she was calling him from downstairs.

  He climbed out of bed, still stunned from sleeping. He dragged his towelling bathrobe from the hook on the back of the door and stumbled down the narrow staircase. In the living-room the curtains were drawn back, although the grey November day was still dismal and dark, and it was raining. Katie was standing in the middle of the room in a pink cotton nightshirt, her hair all messed up, her forearms raised like the figure in The Scream.

  “Katie! What the hell’s going on?”

  “It’s Nigel. Look at him, Mark, he’s dead.”

  “What?” Mark switched the ceiling-light on. Nigel was lying on his back on the chintz-upholstered couch, wearing nothing but green woollen socks and a brown plaid shirt, which was pulled right up to his chin. His bony white chest had a crucifix of dark hair across it. His penis looked like a dead fledgling.

  But it was the expression on his face that horrified Mark the most. He was staring up at the ceiling, wide-eyed, his mouth stretched wide open, as if he were shouting at somebody. There was no doubt that he was dead. His throat had been torn open, in a stringy red mess of tendons and cartilage, and the cushion beneath his head was soaked black with blood.

  “Jesus,” said Mark. He took three or four very deep breaths. “Jesus.”

  Katie was almost as white as Nigel. “What could have done that? It looks like he was bitten by a dog.”

  Mark went through to the kitchen and rattled the back door handle. “Locked,” he said, coming back into the living-room. “There’s no dog anywhere.”

  “Then what—?” Katie promptly sat down, and lowered her head. “Oh God, I think I’m going to faint.”

  “I’ll have to call the police,” said Mark. He couldn’t stop staring at Nigel’s face. Nigel didn’t look terrified. In fact, he looked almost exultant, as if having his throat ripped out had been the most thrilling experience of his whole life.

  “But what did it?” asked Katie. “We didn’t do it, and Nigel couldn’t have done it himself.”

  Mark frowned down at the yellow swirly carpet. He could make out a blotchy trail of footprints leading from the side of the couch to the centre of the room. He thought at first that they must be Nigel’s, but on closer examination they seemed to be far too small, and there was no blood on Nigel’s socks. Close to the coffee-table the footprints formed a pattern like a huge, petal-shedding rose, and then, much fainter, they made their toward the mirror. Where they stopped.

  “Look,” he said. “What do you make of that?”

  Katie approached the mirror and peered into the shiny circle that she had cleaned yesterday evening. “It’s almost as if . . . no.”

  “It’s almost as if what?”

  “It’s almost as if somebody killed Nigel and then walked straight into the mirror.”

  “That’s insane. People can’t walk into mirrors.”

  “But these footprints . . . they don’t go anywhere else.”

  “It’s impossible. Whoever it was, they must have done it to trick us.”

  They both looked up at the face of Lamia. She looked back at them, secret and serene. Her smile seemed to say wouldn’t you like to know?

  “They built a tower, didn’t they?” said Katie. She was trembling with shock. “They built a tower for the express purpose of keeping the Lady of Shalott locked up. If she was Lamia, then they locked her up because she seduced men and drank their blood.”

  “Katie, for Christ’s sake. That was seven hundred years ago. That’s if it really happened at all.”

  Katie pointed to Nigel’s body on the couch. “Nigel’s dead, Mark! That really happened! But nobody could have entered this room last night, could they? Not without breaking the door down and waking us up. Nobody could have entered this room unless they stepped right out of this mirror!”

  “So what do you suggest? We call the police?”

  “We have to!”

  “Oh, yes? And what do we tell them? ‘Well, officer, it was like this. We took a thirteenth-century mirror that didn’t belong to us and The Lady of Shalott came out of it in the middle of the night and tore Nigel’s throat out?’ They’ll send us to Broadmoor, Katie! They’ll put us in the funny farm for life!”

  “Mark, listen, this is real.”

  “It’s only a story, Katie. It’s only a legend.”

  “But think of the poem, The Lady of Shalott. Think of what it says. ‘Moving thro’ a mirror char, that hangs before her all the year, shadows of the world appear’ Don’t you get it? Tennyson specifically wrote through a mirror, not in it. The Lady of Shalott wasn’t looking at her mirror, she was inside it, looking out!”

  “This gets better.”

  “But it all fits together. She was Lamia. A blood-sucker, a vampire! Like all vampires, she could only come out at night. But she didn’t hide inside a coffin all day . . . she hid inside a mirror! Daylight can’t penetrate a mirror, any more than it can penetrate a closed coffin!”

  “I don’t know much about vampires, Katie, but I do know that you can’t see them in mirrors.”

  “Of course not. And this is the reason why! Lamia and her reflection are one and the same. When she steps out of the mirror, she’s no longer inside it, so she doesn’t appear to have a reflection. And the curse on her must be that she can only come out of the mirror at night, like all vampires.”

  “Katie, for Christ’s sake . . . you’re getting completely carried away.”

  “But it’s the only answer that makes any sense! Why did they lock up the Lady of Shalott on an island, in a stream? Because vampires can’t cross running water. Why did they carve a crucifix and a skull on the stones outside? The words said, God save us from the pestilence within these walls. They didn’t mean the Black Death . . . they meant her! The Lady of Shalott, Lamia, she was the pestilence!”

  Mark sat down. He looked at Nigel and then he looked away again. He had never seen a dead body before, but the dead were so totally dead that you could quickly lose interest in them, after a while. They didn’t talk. They didn’t even breathe. He could understand why morticians were so blasé.

  “So?” he asked Katie, at last. “What do you think we ought to do?”

  “Let’s draw the curtains,” she said. “Let’s shut out all the daylight. If you sit here, perhaps she’ll be tempted to come out again. After all, she’s been seven hundred years without fresh blood, hasn’t she? She must be thirsty.”

  Mark stared at her. “You’re having a laugh, aren’t you? You wa
nt me to sit here in the dark, hoping that some mythical woman is going to step out of a dirty old mirror and try to suck all the blood out of me?”

  He was trying to show Katie that wasn’t afraid, and that her vampire idea was nonsense, but all the time Nigel was lying on the couch, silently shouting at the ceiling. And there was so much blood, and so many footprints. What else could have happened in this room last night?

  Katie said, “It’s up to you. If you think I’m being ridiculous, let’s forget it. Let’s call the police and tell them exactly what happened. I’m sure that forensics will prove that we didn’t kill him.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it, myself.”

  Mark stood up again and went over to the mirror. He peered into the polished circle, but all he could see was his own face, dimly haloed.

  “All right, then,” he said. “Let’s give it a try, just to put your mind at rest. Then we call the police.”

  Katie drew the brown velvet curtains and tucked them in at the bottom to keep out the tiniest chink of daylight. It was well past eight o’clock now, but it was still pouring with rain outside and the morning was so gloomy that she need hardly have bothered. Mark pulled one of the armchairs up in front of the mirror and sat facing it.

  “I feel like one of those goats they tie up, to catch tigers.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t worry. I’m probably wrong.”

  Mark took out a crumpled Kleenex and blew his nose, and then sniffed. “God, what a terrible smell.”

  “That’s the blood,” said Katie. Adding, after a moment, “My uncle used to be a butcher. He always said that bad blood is the worst smell in the world.”

  They satin silence for awhile. The smell of blood seemed to be growing thicker, and riper, and it was all Mark could do not to gag. His throat was dry, too, and he wished he had drunk some orange juice before starting this vigil.

  “You couldn’t fetch me a drink, could you?” he asked Katie.

  “Ssh,” said Katie. “I think I can see something.”

  “What? Where?”

  “Look at the mirror, in the middle. Like a very faint light.”

  Mark stared toward the mirror in the darkness. At first he couldn’t see anything but overwhelming blackness. But then he saw a flicker, like somebody waving a white scarf, and then another.

  Very gradually, a face began to appear in the polished circle. Mark felt a slow crawling sensation down his back, and his lower jaw began to judder so much that he had to clench his teeth to stop it. The face was pale and bland but strangely beautiful, and it was staring straight at him, unblinking, and smiling. It looked more like the face of a marble statue than a human being. Mark tried to look away, but he couldn’t. Every time he turned his head toward Katie he was compelled to turn back again.

  The darkened living-room seemed to grow even more airless and suffocating, and when he said, “Katie . . . can you see what I see?” his voice sounded muffled, as if he had a pillow over his face.

  Soundlessly, the pale woman took one step out of the surface of the mirror. She was naked, and her skin was the color of the moon. The black tarnish clung to her for a moment, like oily cobwebs, but as she took another step forward they slid away from her, leaving her luminous and pristine.

  Mark could do nothing but stare at her. She came closer and closer, until he could have reached up and touched her. She had a high forehead, and her hair was braided in strange, elaborate loops. She had no eyebrows, which made her face expressionless. But her eyes were extraordinary. Her eyes were like looking at death.

  She raised her right hand and lightly kissed her fingertips. He could feel her aura, both electrical and freezing cold, as if somebody had left a fridge door wide open. She whispered something, but it sounded more French than English – very soft and elided – and he could only understand a few words of it.

  “My sweet love,” she said. “Come to me, give me your very life.”

  There were dried runnels of blood on her breasts and down her slightly-bulging stomach, and down her thighs. Her feet were spattered in blood, too. Mark looked up at her, and he couldn’t think what to say or what to do. He felt as if all of the energy had drained out of him, and he couldn’t even speak.

  We all have to die one day, he thought. But to die now, today, in this naked woman’s arms . . . what an adventure that would be.

  “Mark!” shouted Katie. “Grab her, Mark! Hold on to her!”

  The woman twisted around and hissed at Katie, as furiously as a snake. Mark heaved himself out of his chair and tried to seize the woman’s arm, but she was cold and slippery, like half-melted ice, and her wrist slithered out of his grasp.

  “Now, Katie!” he yelled at her.

  Katie threw herself at the curtains, and dragged them down, the curtain-hooks popping like firecrackers. The woman went for her, and she had almost reached the window when the last curtain-hook popped and the living-room was drowned with grey, drained daylight. She whipped around again and stared at Mark, and the expression on her face almost stopped his heart.

  “Of all men,” she whispered. “You have been the most faithless, and you will be punished.”

  Katie was on her knees, struggling to free herself from the curtains. The woman seized Katie’s curls, lifted her up, and bit into her neck, with an audible crunch. Katie didn’t even scream. She stared at Mark in mute desperation and fell sideways onto the carpet, with blood jetting out of her neck and spraying across the furniture.

  The woman came slowly toward him, and Mark took one step back, and then another, shifting the armchair so that it stood between them. But she stopped. Her skin was already shining, as if it were melting, and she closed her eyes. Mark waited, holding his breath. Katie was convulsing, one foot jerking against the leg of the coffee-table, so that the empty beer-cans rattled together.

  The woman opened her eyes, and gave Mark one last unreadable look. Then she turned back toward the mirror. She took three paces, and it swallowed her, like an oil-streaked pool of water.

  Mark waited, and waited, not moving. Outside the window, the rain began to clear, and he heard the whine of a milk-float going past.

  After a while, he sat down. He thought of calling the police, but what could he tell them? Then he thought of tying the bodies to the mirror, and dropping them into a rhyne, where they would never be found. But the police would come anyway, wouldn’t they, asking questions?

  The day slowly went by. Just after two o’clock the clouds cleared for a moment, and the naked apple-tree in the back garden sparkled with sunlight. At half-past three a loud clatter in the hallway made him jump, but it was only an old woman with a shopping-trolley pushing a copy of the Wincanton Advertiser through the letterbox.

  And so the darkness gradually gathered, and Mark sat in his armchair in front of the mirror, waiting.

  “I am half-sick of shadows, said

  The Lady of Shalott.”

  E.C. TUBB IS PROBABLY BEST known as a science fiction author. Since 1951, he has published more than 120 novels, plus 230 short stories in such magazines as Astounding, Analog, Authentic, Galaxy, Nebula, New Worlds, Science Fantasy, Vision of Tomorrow and, in more recent years, Fantasy Annual and Fantasy Adventures. His work has also been translated into more than a dozen languages.

  His long-running “Dumarest of Terra” series of science-fantasy novels ran to thirty-one volumes from DAW Books, and a further entry in the series was published by New York small press imprint Gryphon Books after first appearing in a French translation.

  Since then, he has published two supernatural swords and sorcery novels, Death God’s Doom and The Sleeping City, a new SF novel Footsteps of Angels, and an original Space: 1999 novelization, Earthbound. The Best Science Fiction of E.C. Tubb is a recent retrospective collection.

  Interspersed with Tubb’s many SF short stories of the 1950s and early ‘60s were a smaller number of supernatural stories, many of them written under pseudonyms. The best of these were reprinted in 2003 by Sarob Press i
n the hardcover collection Mirror of the Night. Originally published in 1998, the title story marked the author’s first return to horror fiction in more than twenty years.

  “You think and brood and odd things seem to come together to form a logical whole,” explains Tubb. “A strained marriage and an effort to make repairs. Ajourney into unfamiliar places. The emotive strain building and the biological facet enhanced as the man wants, desperately, to gain a measure of independence and respect. An illustration, perhaps, of the awesome power held by every woman over the man who adores her.

  “And then the all-too familiar compliment paid by almost every man to every attractive woman: ‘You look ravishing my dear. You look good enough to eat’

  “Sometimes, in the right circumstances, a man might mean exactly what he says . . .”

  THUNDER MADE A FITTING accompaniment; sonorous echoes rolling from the surrounding hills, the fitful glare of lightning dancing like silver ghosts on the shadowed peaks. Savage brilliance which threw into sharp detail the massed vegetation, the winding road, the branches which, almost meeting from side to side, made a laced canopy overhead and enhanced the Gothic mystery of the terrain.

  One Stephen Aldcock appreciated and would have used earlier in his career. It gave an added dimension to the trip he was making into the Appalachians following narrow, unmarked and near-forgotten roads, the wheels of the car bouncing into ruts, the sides lashed by hanging fronds.

  A journey Diane wasn’t enjoying. She hadn’t spoken since he’d switched off the radio. Trying to argue she had met defeat and now sulked in silence wreathed by a haze of smoke. Yet he had been right to insist; the region held an atmosphere of its own and the noise had been a distraction.

  Glancing at her he tried to explain.

  “We’re travelling back in time,” he said. “Into the pastwhen people lived close to nature. This region has hardly changed since the settlers first came. Try to imagine it,” he urged. “They had to move along narrow paths winding between scattered habitations. These woods would have sheltered all kinds of danger and travellers would have been attacked, ripped, clawed, shot, stabbed, left to lie bleeding on the ground. Think of being injured, lying out there in the woods with night closing in just as it is now. Hurt, knowing you’re alone with death very close. Knowing too that something could be watching you. Something inhuman.”